Daily News Digest February 8, 2023

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

Ted Rall: When Does It end?!

Since World War I, ‘the war to end all wars’, there have been perpetual wars for perpetual peace, this Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, Under the Banner Headline: “There Is No Peace”, is Still True for Today’s World!Capitalism as a Failed  System: World Capitalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming  Over 5 Decades Ago and Did Nothing!:  Under Capitalism — Human Lives Don’t Matter  Capitalism Does Not, and Never Has, Worked for the Masses! In Its Death Agony, Capitalism Is Traveling About The World Like The Four Horsemen of the The Apocalypse, Spreading  Racism,  War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The very future of Humanity Is Now At stake!During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program: 1. Austerity,2. Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and 3.  The Iron Heel!    For Decades, Blacks Have Been Subjected to The Iron Heel!   Currently, the US Capitalist Class is Divided Over When — Not If, to Apply It to Everyone!

Due to Years of Austerity, Cuts to Public Health Care, And An Anti-Science and Profiteering President, The United States Now Leads the World In  Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World!

Always Remember:  That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember, That he Established, in writing,  the United States Capitalist Austerity Program. —  The Race to the Bottom/Pauperization of the 99%!

Democracy?: As the Capitalist Robber Barons Steal from the 99%,  Only the 1% Voted For Austerity!   The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1%, Who Profit From Austerity!!  Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico.!   Socialism Means True Democracy, that the 99% Will Rule, Not the Few! 

Quotes of the Day:

Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement Monday that “this grim assessment adds to the mountain of science showing that we’re creating an extinction crisis.” “It’s suicidal of us to pretend that business as usual is more important than safeguarding the natural world we all depend on,” Curry declared, spotlighting some potential solutions including the Extinction Prevention Act and Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. — ‘Grim’ Report Warns 40% of US Animals at Risk of Extinction

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

Scott Ritter: U.S. Needs Permanent War

United States:

The United States is not a Democracy (A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly)! Only the 1%, through their ownership of the Republicrats and who profit from war and the war budget, vote for War and the war budget — A policy, which Gore Vidal called a  Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. — The 99% Should Decide On War — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From War!  Under a Democracy, The 99% would have the right to vote on the policy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace! The United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich. Rax the Rich!  — They Can Afford To Pay! Both Parties Support U.S. Capitalism’s Wars! (The Only War the Democrats Opposed was the Civil War!)

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. — Louis D. Brandeis Quotes

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. MLK, Beyond Vietnam 

A Memo and Balloon Help Media Inflate China War Hype The shooting down of a Chinese balloon near Charleston (New York Times, 2/5/23) and an Air Force general’s prediction of a war with China (NBC, 1/27/23) have ignited media talk of the possibility of confrontation between the two nuclear powers. It’s scary stuff, indeed, but the media hype is dangerously overblown.

Freedom Battles – 1960s and 70s The sacrifice of World War II raised expectations for a better world. Yet the same oppressions continued: colonialism, exploitation, racism, sexism, and war. The result was a global explosion of revolt, as millions of people challenged the existing order and won important reforms. Prepare to be inspired! (As told in historical images: –R.S.)

Chris Hedges: Woke Imperialism Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state. The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.     The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scolds the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:

‘Grim’ Report Warns 40% of US Animals at Risk of Extinction “We are currently experiencing and causing the Sixth Extinction—the mass extinction of species across the planet,” said the head of NatureServe, which also found a third of plants nationwide are under threat. Underscoring the need for humanity to overhaul its relationship with nature, 34% of plants species and 40% of animal species across the United States are at risk of extinction while 41% of U.S. ecosystems could collapse, according to an analysis published Monday by the nonprofit NatureServe. “For 50 years, the NatureServe Network has been collecting the information necessary to understand biodiversity imperilment in the United States. This new analysis of that data, a first in 20 years, makes crystal clear the urgency of that work,” said the group’s vice president for data and methods, Regan Smyth.

This Is Criminal’: BP Cuts Climate Pledges While Reporting Record $28 Billion in Profit BP, a London-based oil giant that has attempted to style itself as a leader of the renewable energy transition, announced Tuesday that it is slashing its emission-reduction goals and planning more fossil fuel output than previously expected after reporting a record $28 billion in profits for 2022—more than double what it made the year before.     Compared to its earlier plan to curtail fossil fuel production by 40% below 2019 levels, the company said it now intends to cut output by just 25% by 2030.

Controlled Release of Toxic Chemicals Planned to Avoid Explosion of Derailed Train “You need to leave, you just need to leave,” Ohio’s governor warned nearby residents ahead of the release. “This is a matter of life and death.”     Authorities ordered Ohio and Pennsylvania residents in the vicinity of a derailed train to evacuate immediately or risk death prior to a planned release of toxic chemicals on Monday afternoon.     A train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio late Friday night, sparking a fire that has been smoldering ever since. In order to prevent five tanker cars carrying vinyl chloride from exploding and sending debris flying through the rural town, officials said they would begin releasing the material into a trench and burning it off into the air at 3:30 pm EST—though as of press time, it hadn’t started.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

Editorial: Black Community Control of the PoliceNo Justice, No Peace, Without Black Community Control of Police 

The uprisings of the Black Community in Baltimore, Ferguson, and the rest of the country are a direst result of the history of Police terrorism along with extra legal terrorism (lynchings) in this country — The Historic Role of Police Brutality in the Black Community and African American Oppression, in the United States.       The recent increase of this police terrorism is a direct result of the current worldwide crisis of capitalism.      Both the 1% political parties understand that there is no ‘New Deal’ way out of this capitalist crisis. That the ruling class must apply the Iron Heel throughout the world to create a ‘New World Order’.     The Iron Heel is now home to roost in the Black Community, in preparation for its application to 99% of the citizens of the United States.    For, in order for capitalism to maintain control, it must attack the rights of the entire 99% in order to carry through the 1%’s political program for ‘austerity’. T  hus, the bells that are now tolling in the Black Community are really also tolling for the 99%.       When the Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos states that: “The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importances of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.”     And yet, we don’t hear a similar ‘peep’ from the ‘leaders’ of the working class.   I support the right of the Black Community to begin to defend themselves, from police terrorism, and the demand for Community Control of the Police by the Black Community.      Community Control immediately raises the question of how to organize that control. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was an example of how to democratically organize the control of the Black Community. The 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott was controlled by the Black Community through the democratically organized Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) had regular weekly mass meetings of thousands to decide the strategy and tactics of the movement. The people, in the struggle, had the control and the final say — not the leaders from on high. This helped to insured the power of the movement, for the masses saw the MIA as their organization and were committed, by their votes, to implement their decisions.     The tactics of both mass civil disobedience (the boycott) and self-defense by the MIA were key to the success of the struggle. —April 2015

 Labor:

The Sepctre of Fascism is Due to the Current Economic Crisis of Capitalism and its Constant Attack Upon the Working Class Since 1948, and The Default/Treachnrous Roll of the Trade Union Bureaucracy The majority of the American people were opposed to both Biden and Trump. The Majority of the People are worse off since Obama’s austerity progam, during his stay in office.      Trump won because he filled a vacuum of leadership in opposition to the austerity program of the 1%’s United States. Hillary Clinton lost becuse she was a part of the austerity program.     Both the Republican and the Dencratic parties support austerity and cuts to sociery’s ‘safetynet’, social security, public education. unemploymnet insurace, etc., that was won by the rise of the CIO during the 1930s and 40s.The following quotes explain the default of the trade union bureaucracy:

If the organized workers become fully conscious of their combined power and learn to use it in their own interests, no power inside this country or outside could stand up against them. Instead of the bosses dictating terms to the workers, they could, as they should, dictate terms to the bosses. Even today, in scattered strike situations, detachments of workers demonstrate their invincibility. They sweep forward against the bosses, against administration “troubleshooters,” against military men, and even against their own top leaders, to win their demands. The employers feel the enormous power of the workers and often assess it more accurately than the workers or their leaders. The bosses know that, by themselves, they cannot curb labor nor deny its demands. From all sides now the employers are summoning allies to their aid: government officials, defense commissioners, arbitrators, preachers of patriotism, army officers and, most important of all today, their lieutenants in the ranks of labor itself: Green, Hillman, Murray, Tobin, Lewis, and their staffs. The function of these labor lieutenants and their policy of class collaboration ia to lower the self-confidence of organized labor, to underestimate its strength, to keep it from independent class action, and to weaken its will to struggle and to win.  — Fourth International, January 1941, American Labor and the War

One must accentuate especially the role which Jack London attributes to the labor bureaucracy and to the labor aristocracy in the further fate of mankind. Thanks to their support, the American plutocracy not only succeeds in defeating the workers’ insurrection but also in keeping its iron dictatorship during the following three centuries. We will not dispute with the poet the delay which can but seem to us too long. However, it is not a question of Jack London’s pessimism, but of his passionate effort to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches. The artist is audaciously utilizing the methods of hyperbole. He is bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism: of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal, to their extreme expression. He is operating with centuries in order to measure the tyrannical will of the exploiters and the treacherous role of the labor bureaucracy. — Trotsky and the Iron Heel His Observations on the Famous Novel

The majority of the American people were opposed to both Biden and Trump. The Majority of the People are worse off since Obama’s austerity program, during his stay in office.     Trump won because he filled a vacuum of leadership in opposition to the austerity program of the 1%’s United States. Hillary Clinton lost because she was a part of the austerity program.     Both the Republican and the Democratic parties support austerity and cuts to society’s ‘safetynet’(social security, public education. unemployment insurance, etc.), that was won by the rise of the CIO during the 1930s and 40s.

Economy:

Martin Wolf: The Case For s Land Value Tax is Overwhelming Natural resources are quite different from the capital stock created out of human effort Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and I have long been a supporter of taxing land value.      Such a tax would be economically efficient and morally just. But it has been politically impossible: the landowning interest, which now includes a large part of the population as owner-occupiers, has been too strong.      This is a tragedy. Now that western politicians are struggling with low growth, stressed public finances, high inequality, intergenerational tensions and an unstable financial system, they need to consider such a fundamental change in what is taxed.    The idea of taxing the rental value of land is most closely associated with the 19th-century American Henry George. But Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill, all shared the same view.      Thereafter, foolishly, economists began to incorporate land (which includes all non-produced natural assets) into produced capital. This then led to the neoclassical “two factor” models of the economy, which are grossly misleading. As a result, taxes on land were increasingly considered in the context of taxes on wealth, even though natural resources are quite different from the capital stock created out of effort and foregone consumption.

Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update  February 6th to 7^th

• LATEST ECONOMIC, INFLATION AND MONETARY NUMBERS: The Federal Reserve continued to reduce the January 2023 Monetary Base, albeit minimally, with declining Reserves more than offsetting a new record high level for Currency in Circulation [see the later FEDERAL RESERVE Section].

• Friday’s, February 3rd release of the January 2023 Payroll Employment benchmarking encompassed some large, although not particularly credible upside employment revisions, along with some series redefinitions tied to SIC vs. NAICS coding. The magnitude of these Establishment or Payroll Employment benchmark changes run counter to reporting in a number of better-quality government and private economic surveys, as will be reviewed extensively in pending Commentary No. 1461, which has been moved to likely publication over the February 11th/12th Weekend, as a result.

• The series redefinitions, however, hit the Retail Series numbers particularly hard, irrespective of the Payroll Survey Reporting games. Redefined and including annual benchmark revisions, December 2022 and January 2023 Retail Sales payroll levels held shy respectively by 0.4% (-0.4%) and 0.2% (-0.2%) of consistently recovering the comparable level of Pre-Pandemic Peak activity in February 2020. Before the revisions, however, the headline series had been recovered fully since January 2022, and was up by 1.2% against its comparable February 2020 Pre-Pandemic Peak in the pre-benchmarked, initial December 2022 reporting.

• Despite headline downside revisions to Retail Sales payrolls, which were shifted elsewhere, benchmarked and redefined aggregate Payroll Employment growth revised higher since mid-2021, now recovering the level of a downwardly revised February 2020 Pre-Pandemic Peak in June of 2022, instead of August 2022. Again, further discussion follows in the LATEST NUMBERS Section with an extended review in pending Commentary No. 1461.

• That said, although not exactly comparable with the December 2022 and annual Household Survey revisions of the time, headline January 2023 Unemployment U.3 moved lower, from 3.47% to 3.43%, yet the broader, headline U.6 moved higher from 6.53% to 6.64%, with the more comprehensive ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment measure rising from 24.4% to 24.5% on top of the U.6.

Bombshell Emails Raise Questions about What Sullivan & Cromwell Knew about Fraud at Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Firms Goldman Sachs’ online bank, Marcus, is offering an interest rate on its savings accounts that is 350 times the interest rate being offered by its competitors, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. That’s not normal. Not normal at all. (Above screen shots were taken this morning. Chase and Bank of America screen shots come from BankRate; Marcus screen shot comes from Marcus.).    Marcus is the online banking platform offered by Goldman Sachs Bank USA – a federally-insured bank backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer. But what 99 percent of Americans don’t know about Goldman Sachs Bank USA is that it is the unit of Goldman Sachs that holds trillions of dollars in derivatives, including the kind of credit derivatives that blew up the U.S. economy in 2008 and would have taken down Goldman Sachs were it not for sneaky bailouts.     

World:

Israel” Last March, the UN Special Rapporteur charged with assessing the situation in Palestinian issued a disturbing report detailing “a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system” and calling the international community to action. Less than two months before the UN report, Amnesty International had issued a report detailing the crimes of Israel’s apartheid regime and calling it a “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity,” founded upon key components of “territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; and denial of economic and social rights.” Not long after the release of these reports, the Israeli government launched a campaign of terror called Operation Breakwater (or “Break the Wave”), a focused torrent of violence that made 2022 one of the deadliest years on record in the West Bank. According to a report from the nonprofit Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, more than 200 Palestinians were killed in 2022, about 1 in 5 of whom were children. Most of these lost lives belonged to “civilians killed by Israel’s army in unjustified operations and contexts where they presented no imminent threat or danger to the lives of Israeli soldiers or settlers.”The new year is still young, but already it has seen levels of violence and death that, if sustained, will make 2023 even bloodier than 2022. January alone witnessed 35 Palestinian deaths, 8 of which belonged to children. The Palestinian people are in a desperate fight. — Do We Know Apartheid When We See It?

Denmark: Unions Organise Demo Against Social Democrat-Led Government On 5 February, the Danish Trade Union Confederation, consisting of 79 unions, organised a 50,000-strong demonstration in front of the Danish parliament in protest against the government’s plan to remove a public holiday. The newly-formed government – which consists of an alliance between the Social Democratic Party and two bourgeois parties – have planned to carry out major attacks on the Danish working class.     The plan to remove a bank holiday from workers stands out like a sore thumb in the government’s program.

Education. Health, and Welfare:

The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of Wall Street and the bankers. Yet, those who, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers to be,  a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let the People  Vote on Healthcare!