Daily News Digest February 17, 2023

Daily News Digest Archives

Capitalism is Now a Worldwide Threat to Humanity! It is on the Fast Track to Global Warming and Nuclear War Catastrophes!

Images of the Day: 

Photograph Taken Over East Palestine, Ohio 

Destroyed By the Truth!

Bendib February in Florida

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:

Predicting the coming catastrophe if the mode of production does not change, Rachel Carson wrote in The Sea Around Us: “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”

Since 1961, NASA has deployed “more than 25 missions carrying a nuclear power system.” Today, the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is making a nuclear fission reactor and rocket for NASA to test in 2027. The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations aims to replace chemical propellants with nuclear propulsion systems at least three times as efficient, enabling crewed flights to reach Mars.     Chemical propulsion isn’t totally passé. The demo rocket will be nuclear-powered in space, but chemically launched—to limit the potential for an accidental release of radioactive materials on the ground. — NASA Gets High on Its Nuclear Supply

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Erin Brockovich Reacts To EPA Response in Ohio Train Spills 
Erin Brockovich Warns Ohio Train Derailment is Transpiring Into a ‘Nightmare’: None Of This Makes Sense   Consumer advocate and whistleblower Erin Brockovich advised residents of East Palestine, Ohio, to “believe their own instincts” as state officials claim there’s no longer any air or water hazards.     “What a mismanaged disaster and lack of total communication,” she said. “And so that community is going to have to rely on themselves: what they know, what they feel and what their instincts are. Because at this point, I don’t think anyone’s trusting the information that’s coming out. In answering whether any of the released chemicals can become cumulative or more dangerous as time goes on, the whistleblower confirmed some, like benzene, “absolutely could be.”“Some of their symptoms are telltale signs of a benzene (carcinogneic) exposure, you would need to be doing immediate blood testing,” Brockovich signaled. “So in the absence of so much information, I don’t know how any agency could deem this all clear and safe for these people.”
[Podcast] James Webb and the Crisis of the Big Bang Theory

 MLK: The Other America (One of Martin Luther King’s last speeches, given over 50 years ago and one year before his assassination, at Stanford University in April 1967 and titled the ‘The Other America.’ Here he speaks not of a dream but of the nightmarish economic condition of Black people. When he talks about ‘work-starved men searching for jobs that do not exist’ and living on a ‘lonely island of poverty surrounded by an ocean of material prosperity,’ the speech remains timely in today’s world.)

 “Understanding Money And the Dollar System,” Geopolitical Hour Michael Hudson:  Well, President Putin and President Xi have both been talking about de-dollarization. So that has put it right in the center of the discussion. Basically, it’s a response to the fact that the United States has weaponized the dollar. It’s become a political tool in today’s Cold War. For one thing, the dollar is no longer a safe haven. The United States had Britain confiscate Venezuela’s gold supply in England, and the United States and Europe have confiscated all of Russia’s foreign exchange holdings in dollars and euros. So that has made countries realize: if the United States is going to say that it is the world banker, and the world banker is going to just take our money, we’ve got to find another banker. And that means finding another currency.

Black Agenda Radio February 10, 2023 With Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley

International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism

R.E.A.L. Youth Initiative Works for Prison Abolition

Biden’s Pardon and the Challenge of Changing Marijuana Laws

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 

‘Shameful’: Biden Admin Withdraws Human Rights Nomination Over Israel Apartheid Comments “When it comes to human rights in Israel/Palestine, the U.S. State Department is the outlier,” said one advocacy group.  Human rights advocates are warning that the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw its nomination of law professor James Cavallaro to serve on a human rights commission could be the latest incident that chills free speech regarding violent Israeli policies in Palestine, as Cavallaro said he was shut out of the position due to his condemnation of Israel’s apartheid regime.

50% Don’t Trust The Media Monopoly/Government ‘Spin’: Half of Americans Think National News Media Mislead, Misinform the Public New polling suggests “efforts by national news organizations to gain the trust of the public may need to focus on communicating more directly with audiences about how their reporting affects society at large.”     The report is the second in a series that began with a publication in October and builds on a body of research that Gallup and the Knight Foundation have conducted about Americans’ trust in the news media since 2017

Socialists, Beware! Congress has “Denounced the Horrors of Socialism”!Socialists around the globe, beware – the United States Congress has denounced your horrors! Earlier this month, that beacon of freedom and justice overwhelmingly passed H. Con. Res. 9 to denounce “the horrors of socialism.” The fateful resolution was introduced by Congresswoman Maria Salazar – of no relation to the reactionary former dictator of Portugal, except, well, for their identical class outlook and foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of all things “communism.”     The Trump-backed Congresswoman from Miami, daughter of Cuban gusano exiles, and longtime media figure on right-wing Spanish-language networks and Fox News shows, is an unsurprising source for a fanatical resolution such as this. Before she was even sworn into Congress, she had already joined the Republicans’s ‘Freedom Force’ – a Congressional bloc aimed at combating the “evils of socialism, Marxism, and the hard left,” and defending, by contrast, the belief in God, country, family, authority, and business ownership.

Merger Mania in the Military-Industrial Complex One of the biggest obstacles to reform is that so many lawmakers have vested interests in a hands-off approach to the Pentagon budget. As a start, striking numbers of them have instant conflicts of interest with respect to the defense industry, since they own stock in major weapons-making firms. Those companies make major campaign contributions to keep the lawmakers in their camp. Open Secrets.org, a group that tracks money in politics, reported, for instance, that, in the 2020 election cycle, the arms sector contributed $50 million to political candidates and their committees.     It’s early in the new Congress, but lawmakers are already hotly debating spending and debt levels. As they do so, they risk losing track of an important issue hiding in plain sight: massive Pentagon waste. At least in theory, combating such excess could offer members of both parties common ground as they start the new budget cycle. But there are many obstacles to pursuing such a commonsense agenda.     Pentagon waste is a longstanding issue in desperate need of meaningful action. Last November, the Department of Defense once again failed to pass even a basic audit, as it had several times before. In fact, independent auditors weren’t even able to assess the Pentagon’s full financial picture because they couldn’t gather all the necessary information to complete an evaluation. In some ways, that should have been devastating, the equivalent of a child receiving an incomplete on an end-of-year report card. No less alarming, the Pentagon couldn’t even account for about 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Yet the last Congress still approved $858 billion in defense programs for fiscal year 2023, a full $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.

Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!: 

Researchers Warn of Climate ‘Doom Loop’ as Impacts Forestall Green Energy Transition “It’s too late to avoid the climate storm altogether,” said a study co-author. “Our ability to steer out of the storm is frustrated by having to manage the impacts of the storm on the ship.”     A new study released Thursday warned that the planet has entered “a new chapter in the climate and ecological crisis,” in which communities are forced to direct massive resources to responding to the escalating impacts of the climate emergency, taking focus away from efforts to slash fossil fuel emissions—causing what the report authors called a “doom loop” that will make avoiding the worst effects of planetary heating increasingly difficult. 

Ominous News From Deep Beneath Doomsday Glacier What researchers found is that weird stuff is going on down there that could speed up the day when Thwaites takes a swim. The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica—the so-called “Doomsday Glacier”—is in the news again. We are fascinated with it because it is the Godzilla of glaciers, 80 miles across and as massive as Florida. If the ice sheet holding it back were to melt, and if Thwaites plopped into the ocean, it would all by itself raise sea level two feet. It functions, however, to hold back other glaciers and ice formations, which in its absence would themselves head for the sea. If that happened you would be talking about ten feet of sea level rise. The last time I discussed it, Alastair G.C. Graham had just shown that glaciers sometimes move very quickly. This finding has been widely accepted by scientists. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey3, if all of the ice caps melted, it is estimated that sea level could rise more than 80 meters or 262 feet. The potential catastrophic results of global warming and the threat to humanity’s future should become an immediate concern.

Table 1. Estimated potential maximum sea-level rise from the total melting of present-day glaciers. 

Rail Company Accused of Mishandling Toxic Ohio Train Derailment Response The response of the railroad company Norfolk Southern to the derailment of a train carrying toxic materials earlier this month near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border is under scrutiny, after the company carried out a “controlled burn” of a known carcinogen.

Ohio, Pennsylvania Senators Demand Federal Action Over Toxic Train Derailment In letters to the EPA and NTSB, the lawmakers expressed concern about the safety of East Palestine residents, given the release of hazardous materials, as well as efforts to prevent future derailments.     As residents of East Palestine, Ohio prepared for a Wednesday night town hall meeting about the recent derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials, U.S. senators from the state and neighboring Pennsylvania called for federal action. . .  . In their letters to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy, the senators wrote that “while we are grateful no injuries or fatalities resulted directly from the derailment, we are deeply concerned about the release of hazardous materials into the air and groundwater.”

US Attempt to Sabotage Mexico’s GMO Corn Ban Denounced as ’21st-Century Imperialism’ “Our government is working tirelessly to pad the multibillion-dollar profits of domestic agribusiness corporations by pushing GE corn,” said one U.S. environmental group. Environmental groups on Tuesday accused the Biden administration of putting the profits of big agribusiness over public health and critical pollinators by attempting to obstruct the Mexican government’s ongoing push to ban genetically engineered corn. “The U.S.’s shameful efforts to strong-arm Mexico into accepting GE corn it has rejected is nothing short of 21st-century imperialism,” Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity. “Our government is working tirelessly to pad the multibillion-dollar profits of domestic agribusiness corporations by pushing GE corn, even though our glyphosate-drenched GE cornfields are playing an outsized role in driving catastrophic declines in vital pollinator populations.”

Big Oil’s Been Secretly Validating Critics’ Concerns About Carbon Capture A DeSmog analysis of subpoenaed internal oil industry communications shows CCS as the strategic linchpin for more oil and gas development.Last February, ExxonMobil announced it would further expand its only active carbon capture and storage (CCS) operation in the United States, located at a gas processing facility in LaBarge, Wyoming. Shute Creek is the world’s largest CCS project and has been operational for over 30 years. Although the oil giant publicly touts carbon capture as a “proven” climate solution, its own early foray reveals just how flimsy of a fix the technology really is — and how expensive, both for taxpayers and the climate.      For starters, at Exxon’s Shute Creek, nearly all of the CO2 separated from the extracted fossil gas either has been sold, for a profit, to other drillers to use for squeezing out hard-to-recover oil elsewhere (a process called enhanced oil recovery) or vented back into the atmosphere. Only 3 percent of the Wyoming project’s CO2 has been geologically stored in the same formation from which the original gas was extracted, according to estimates from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). 

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

Forgotten: an African American Soldier Turned Rebel Leader in the Philippines   You won’t find this story anywhere else for Black History Month, but you should! By the mid-1900’s, a “Buffalo Soldier” named David Fagen was virtually a household name, particularly in the African American community. Fagen’s story makes myth of the false contention that African Americans offered little resistance to institutionalized racism from the Civil War until the end of WWII.     Was Fagen a hero or “a mad dog”?  The answer is rooted in whether you believe that fighting against U.S. colonialism/imperialism in 1899, in this case the U.S. war of Philippine conquest, is righteous and worthy of giving rise to a true hero, martyr and courageous Buffalo Soldier, who deserted the U.S. side and joined the Philippine Revolutionary Army. The PRA was fighting to establish their own independent republic after the Spanish were kicked out.

Armed Community Groups Are Defending Texas Drag Queens From Christian Fascists LGBTQ defenders in Texas are mobilizing to protect their communities amid sustained far right attacks on drag shows. On an overcast Saturday in the small North Texas suburb of Princeton, a tiny church-turned-community center became one of the latest fronts in the far right’s ongoing culture crusade against drag shows and the broader LGBTQ community. Masked members of the left-wing community defense group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, clad in black and toting handguns and radios, had already staked out positions around the perimeter of the Steve and Judy Deffibaugh Community Center before self-described “Christian fascist” Kelly Neidert pulled up with her own armed private security. About a half-dozen Princeton police officers stood watch. Neidert is the head of the so-called Protect Texas Kids (PTK) group, which baselessly claims to be defending children from “grooming.” In reality, advocates point out, the group is using false narratives to stoke hatred and violence against the LGBTQ community.

Black Agenda Report

Labor:

Economy:

World:

Ecuador Elections: Banker Lasso Bets Big and Loses Ecuadorians went to the polls last Sunday, 5 February, for municipal elections and to vote in an eight-question referendum called by the banker-president Guillermo Lasso. Lasso’s party came out of the municipal elections completely defeated, while ‘Yes’ – defended by Lasso – lost in all eight questions of the referendum. The elections were a hard blow to the capitalist oligarchy and its political representatives.    Lasso has now paid the price of the June 2022 national strike through the ballot box, and the extent of his demoralisation has become clear. The brutal repression, the nine deaths, and the inability to minimally address the demands of the streets left him completely isolated. Even his allies are abandoning him.

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!