Daily News Digest March 3, 2023
Capitalism is Now a Worldwide Threat to Humanity! It is on the Fast Track to Global Warming and/or Nuclear War Catastrophes!
Images of the Day:
Portugal: Social Peace is Over 
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:
Fracking Is Dangerous to Life!:
Since the 1970s energy crisis, the Democratic Party has consistently embraced the notion that “energy independence” could be secured through increasing domestic natural gas production. This is a throughline of the Democratic Party platform from Carter to Clinton, Kerry to Obama, from when fracking was “unconventional” to when it accounted for a majority of U.S. gas production. In the mid-2000s, the discovery that fracking and horizontal drilling could unlock massive new domestic reserves of gas from shale deposits changed the American energy landscape. Fracked shale gas went from accounting for only 1 percent of U.S. dry natural gas production in 2000 to 79 percent by 2021. In 2022, the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas. We haven’t known for very long about the damage fracking does to our bodies and environment. But today, as more gas is being fracked in the United States than ever before, the evidence is overwhelming. With fracking,’ the public health advocate Dr. Sandra Steingraber told Rolling Stone in 2018, ‘we had six peer reviewed articles in 2009 pointing to possible public health risks. By 2011 we had 42. Now there are more than 1,200.’ Steingraber is a co-author of a scientific and medical compendium published in April 2022 compiling available research on the risks and harms of fracking and associated gas and oil infrastructure. The compendium, now in its eighth edition, is 577 pages long. And its warning is stark: ‘Our examination uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends.’ — Biden Should Wed His Cancer Moonshot To The Energy Transition
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
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
Bandib: East Palestine
Norfolk Southern Used Sick Leave as Bargaining Chip to Erode Safety, Union Says The company wanted to withhold sick leave unless the union agreed to support an industry-favored inspection system. When Norfolk Southern, the railroad company behind the crash in East Palestine, Ohio, finally offered to give its workers paid sick leave, its proposal came with a major caveat: the company must be allowed to campaign to erode safety regulations without union opposition.
In a letter sent on Wednesday to government officials, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an official for a major rail union — representing roughly 3,000 Norfolk Southern workers — said that the company had recently said it would only agree to give workers paid sick leave if the union withdrew a letter of opposition to its new experimental inspection system that would make train operation more dangerous for workers and communities like East Palestine.
We Need ‘Democracy For All’ to Vanquish Dark Money Flood Unleashed by Citizens United Buffoon politicians from both parties have become shameless, beholden tools and lackeys of corporate America. In the United States government has been privatized by the Citizens United ruling of the SCOTUS. Government is now really up for sale and auctioned off to the highest campaign contributors. The Supreme Court ‘Citizen’s United’ decision opened the floodgates for big money in our politics, allowing giant corporations and a handful of the wealthiest families to spend obscene amounts of money in our elections. Citizens United is just one of a line of terrible Supreme Court decisions holding that money equals speech and corporations are people under the First Amendment — thereby allowing huge corporations and the super wealthy/oligarchs to buy undue access to members of Congress, and to effectively dictate legislative outcomes. This is significant in policy decisions reinforced by influence of corporate lobbies, now further enhanced by the Court’s decision which favors the very small 1% sector of the population that dominates the economy. Our society is run by a class-conscious 1% business community dedicated to reducing the political and economic power of the 99%.
Warren Report Exposes Insurance Industry Ploy to ‘Scam Millions of Seniors’ Private insurance giants are offering luxury vacations and other incentives for agents to “push seniors into the most expensive Medigap plans,” the Massachusetts senator found. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a report Wednesday highlighting the splashy incentives—from luxury vacations to cash bonuses—that private insurance companies offer agents and brokers for enrolling seniors in potentially higher-cost Medigap plans.
The Commies are Coming! According to Donald Trump, he was brilliantly accurate when he predicted in 2019 that “America will never be a socialist country.” Why? Because, as he stated a few weeks ago, “the train didn’t stop at the socialist station… We hit the Marxist station and the communist station.” Meanwhile, the House of Representatives recently passed a bipartisan resolution denouncing the “horrors of socialism.” Based on these latest absurdities from the political establishment, one might be forgiven for thinking that we are on the brink of an imminent and glorious communist revolution. This article is the editorial for issue 38 of Socialist Revolution, the magazine of the US section of the IMT. But wait a second—didn’t the collapse of the USSR mean the final victory of capitalism and confirm its superiority once and for all? Why keep beating a dead horse? The explanation is simple: Marx may have been placed in his grave 140 years ago, but far from being dead and buried, his ideas are more relevant than ever — and the serious bourgeois know it. Unable to resolve the system’s contradictions, their political lackeys must find a new bogeyman, or rather, attempt to revive an old one. In the absence of convincing political arguments — which is itself a function of the shattered objective basis for class peace — they must resort to utter inanity to sow fear and confusion.
Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:
By far, the major driver of rising global temperatures is burning fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas — to produce energy. Therefore, the first and most important task for fighting global warming must be, simply, to stop burning oil, coal and natural gas to produce energy. Forbes is correct that 2022 brought a series of devastating setbacks on this front. To begin with, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to oil and gas supply shortages, especially in Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russian supplies. These supply shortages enabled the oil giants to jack up prices and reap unprecedented profits. In fact, as has been widely reported, the six largest Western oil companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Equinor and Total — made $200 billion in profits in 2022, more than any previous year in the history of the industry. The oil companies, in other words, are feasting as the world burns. Should we be surprised that Wall Street has registered its strong approval? Thus, the Financial Times reported that, “U.S. giant ExxonMobil, which has resisted pressure to decarbonize more than any other energy major, increased production in 2022 and its shares rallied more than 50 percent in the year as it raked in a record $55.7 billion in profits.” Then there is the case of BP, the oil major that had previously gone the furthest in its commitments to decarbonize. But those commitments went out the window in the face of exploding profit opportunities. The Financial Times noted that this decision “stirred anger from environmentalists … yet the market approved. BP’s shares rallied more than 10 percent over the following 48 hours, reaching their highest level in 3 ½ years.” — We Face a Climate Abyss, But There Are Sparks of Hope, Robert Pollin Says
Erin Brockvich:The United States of Toxic Waste And Why The EPA Is Not Equipped To Handle Our Biggest Pollution Problems We live in toxic times. We live among petroleum refineries, coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturers, fertilizer plants, and wastewater treatment plants. Recent events in East Palestine, Ohio, has stirred something up in this country. People are asking all kinds of good questions…
- How could this happen?
- What companies make those chemicals?
- Is there a train track near me where something similar could happen?
- What protections do we have in place to prevent this kind of disaster?
- Is it safe? Is it not safe?
The First Factories: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Capitalism Historians of capitalism, including Marxists, have paid little attention to a critical event in the evolution of capitalism — the European discovery and expropriation of what Francis Bacon called “the Gold Mines of the Newfoundland Fishery, of which there is none so rich.”The success of the North Sea and Newfoundland fisheries depended on merchants who had capital to buy ships and other means of production, fish workers who had to sell their labor power in order to live, and a production system based on a planned division of labor. The long-distance fishing operations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were among the first examples, and very likely the largest examples, of what Marx called manufacture — mass production, without machinery, of commodities that were sold for profit — “a specifically capitalist form of the process of social production.”
Big Ag Exploiting Carbon Markets to Intensify Grip on Food System: Report “Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that’s exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do,” said one researcher. Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system. That’s according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab, a report published Wednesday by Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy group, and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.
Civil Rights Black Liberation:
Uncensored John Lewis’ Speech 1963 March on Washingon Speech
We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all. In good conscience, we cannot support wholeheartedly the administration’s civil rights bill, for it is too little and too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality. This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations: This bill will not protect the citizens in Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped up charges. What about the three young men in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest? The voting section of this bill will not help thousands of black citizens who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia, who are qualified to vote but lack a sixth-grade education. “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE” is the African cry. It is ours, too. It must be ours. People have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to register to vote. What is there in this bill to ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year? For the first time in one hundred years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action. We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles?” The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party? In some parts of the South we work in the fields from sunup to sundown for $12 a week. In Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted not by Dixiecrats but by the federal government for peaceful protest. But what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat attorney C. B. King and left him half dead? What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby? It seems to me that the Albany indictment is part of a conspiracy on the part of the federal govern-ment and local politicians in the interest of expediency. I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery. The nonviolent revolution is saying, “We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that “patience” is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now. We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence. We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about. In the struggle, we must seek more than civil rights; we must work for the community of love, peace and true brotherhood. Our minds, souls and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all people. The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts. Listen, Mr. Kennedy. Listen, Mr. Congressman. Listen, fellow citizens. The black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a “cooling-off” period. All of us must get in the revolution. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and every hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution is complete. In the Delta of Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in Alabama, Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation, the black masses are on the march! We won’t stop now. All of the forces of Eastland, Bamett, Wallace and Thurmond won’t stop this revolution. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, WAKE UP AMERICA! — The Militant 9/6/1963 Page Two
Labor:
For its part, UNITE HERE Local 11 joined with other organizations this past fall to support a successful city-wide ballot measure that will raise transfer taxes on real estate sales of $5 million and above, a measure expected to raise over $900 million for rent relief, low-cost housing, and programs to combat homelessness. And the union has taken another step, garnering enough signatures to place a city-wide initiative on the March, 2024 primary ballot that would require hotels with vacancies to rent rooms to homeless people, with the city’s housing department providing payment vouchers at market rates. The measure would also require that hotels must provide affordable replacement housing if they demolish or convert existing housing for new hotel construction. Hotel industry representatives strongly oppose the measure, claiming that hotels didn’t create the homelessness crisis, and they can’t be expected to provide a solution. But in testimony before LA’s City Council last year, hotel workers spoke of their own experiences with housing insecurity and homelessness, and they argued that the industry does indeed have a role to play. Currently, LA has the highest number of hotel rooms in the “construction pipeline” of any city in the country (19,815), with 22 hotels and 3630 rooms in construction. And the 2028 Olympics, to be held in the city, are certainly part of the equation. By demonstrating the unequivocal links between inadequate wages and insufficient housing, UNITE HERE Local 11 is seeking to make clearly visible the fraying of the social fabric and the diminishing quality of life in our cities. And it is showing that a union has a unique and significant role to play in making the connection. — A Union Takes on the Housing Crisis
Economy:
The Big Con Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington are authors of The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilises our Governments and Warps our Economies. They launched their book with big fanfare in London, charging £30 a person to attend the live event. Mazzucato has built up a big reputation, scanning from the left in the labour movement through to mainstream governments in Europe and Latin America for espousing the benefits of public investment and the public sector over the private. As a result, she has been called “the world’s scariest economist”. Her last book, Mission Impossible, called for public sector-led projects in partnership with the private sector. This could lead to a better management of the capitalist economy (not its replacement). Now in this new book, Mazzucato and Rosie Collington expose the scam that the management consultancy business is. The premise of Mazzucato and Collington is that consulting is really a confidence trick. “A consultant’s job is to convince anxious customers that they have the answers, whether or not that’s true”. With multiple evidence they show that consultancies have weakened businesses and hollowed out state capacity. “The more governments and businesses outsource,” they write, “the less they know how to do.” As the authors point out, why should “fresh-faced consultants airlifted in from one of the big firms know better than workers on the office floor or staff in the NHS, when they often seem to know very little.” Indeed as management consultant Bruce Henderson once sniggered: “Can you think of anything more improbable than taking the world’s most successful firms and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their businesses – and [getting them] to pay millions of pounds for this advice?” The authors cite, for example, Covid contracts. In the UK, ministers and civil servants relied on consultancies, more than £1m a day with some senior advisers billing more than £6,000 for a single day’s work. And was it successful? We now know that billions were wasted by these consultants, some of whom had no experience at all in healthcare and were just companies that sprang up to take advantage of public money, often owned and run by friends and even relatives of ministers. A parliamentary inquiry into England’s test-and-trace programme, for example, found that “consultants accounted for nearly half of [its] central staff”, and concluded that it had “not achieved its main objective to help break chains of Covid-19 transmission and enable people to return to a more normal way of life”.
Silvergate, a Federally Insured Bank, Just Blew Up from Ties to Crypto The one thing a depositor never wants to hear from a bank that is holding his or her life savings is that it has doubts about its “ability to continue as a going concern.” Unfortunately, those very words appeared in a filing made yesterday by Silvergate Capital with the Securities and Exchange Commission – which pretty much guarantees that the ongoing run on deposits at Silvergate will continue with an added sense of urgency.
World:
It’s important to remember that in the early 1990s Washington was fine (even overjoyed) with a capitalist Russia. Washington remained at the unchallenged top of the capitalist world order and could exploit Russia’s resources and markets. Indeed, US investors went hog wild in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise, championing their favorite apparatchik Yeltsin as he and a fair number of other Russians sold off the public’s property and services to the highest bidder. Similarly, Washington encouraged the creation of the European Union, with the one non-negotiable stipulation that the military element was Washington’s sole domain. After all, it needed a reason to keep its military alliance NATO intact. As long as Washington maintained its dominance, it was mostly okay with Germany and other European economies growing in leaps and bounds. However, it’s quite interesting to note that when cheap Russian fuel became a key part of the engine for those economies in the 2000s, Washington’s bellicosity towards Moscow ramped up. Meanwhile, while Europe’s elites feasted on profits, NATO was assimilating those governments in Europe’s eastern region that were once in the thrall of Moscow. In essence, NATO occupied those nations in a manner quite similar to how the Global North kept control of most of its former colonies after granting them independence after World War Two. That phenomenon was named and described by the evolutionary Kwame Nkrumah in his classic text Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. Although traditionally applied to the nations of the Global South, Nkrumah’s analysis is quite applicable to most if not all of the former socialist republics in Europe’s eastern regions. The manifestation of this, especially in today’s Ukraine, is succinctly expressed by this sentence near the end of Nkrumah’s text: “The general objective has been mentioned: to achieve colonialism in fact while preaching independence.” — Neo-Colonialism in Ukraine
Portugal: Social Peace is Over On Saturday 25 February, thousands took to the streets of Lisbon to protest against rising living costs. New demonstrations have been announced for the coming weeks. At the same time, the country is being shaken by a wave of industrial action, spearheaded by school teachers. Indeed, living standards are deteriorating dramatically amidst an unprecedented housing crisis. António Costa’s Social Democratic government, with an absolute majority in parliament since January 2021, is applying pro-capitalist policies, and bears full political responsibility for the crisis
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!