Daily News Digest March 17, 2023

Daily News Digest Archives

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:

Silicon Valley Bank’s Bankruptcy Shakes the US Banking System

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:

Michael  Roberts: Major international Swiss bank, Credit Suisse is on the brink of bankruptcy.  If it was allowed to fall, it would be similar to Lehman Bros in the 2008 global financial crash.  So expect a big bailout of bank that is “too big to fail”. Re: Credit Suisse: Swiss National Bank Must Step In to Halt Three-Way Doom Loop
For working poor and uninsured people, however, health services are often difficult to come by or afford. Should you pay for a prescription or an ER visit or much-needed new glasses or buy the necessary food for the next two or three days? In Black and Brown communities, in particular, where racism, poverty, and under-employment continue to be realities of daily life, food deprivation regularly sends people into a cycle of illnesses that only make working more difficult and disability more likely.     Whether the term used is food insecurity or food inequity, the result is simple enough: hunger. And hunger has continued to be an all-American reality decade after decade, in good economies and bad, even though food should be a basic right. It’s a problem that, in possibly the world’s richest country, no one has been able to solve. Why is that?     Food is certainly plentiful in the United States. And yet enough of it never reaches the tables of those who struggle to make ends meet. Worse yet, by almost any measure, income inequality has only increased in the past 30 years. And as succinctly demonstrated by the all-too-long-ago protesters of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, high wages have been and continue to be concentrated among the top earners. In fact, as of 2019, three Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of American society and things have not gotten better since. — America’s Hidden Epidemic of Hunger

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

Black Agenda Radio March 10, 2023 Eith Margaret Kimberley
A Tribute to Kevin Alexander Gray
Biden and Congress Uphold Washington DC Colonial Status
Victory for Chicago Police District Councils

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. Tax 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  

The Biggest Lie The Rich Ever Told? That Money Can’t Buy You Happiness! News just in: money does buy you happiness. Duh, you might say. Anyone could have told you that; it’s hardly a Nobel-prize winning insight. Well, actually, it kinda is: in 2010, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel prize-winning economist and psychologist, came out with the theory that there was a monetary “happiness plateau”. Once you hit an annual household income of $75,000 (£62,000), earning more money didn’t make you any happier. In 2021, the happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth released a dissenting study, showing that happiness increased with income and there wasn’t evidence of a plateau. Now the pair have teamed up in a process known as “adversarial collaboration” and released a new study finding that they were both sort of right, but Killingsworth was more right: for most people, earning more money makes you happier.
Poverty & Hunger in the U.S. – Hunger Facts “Hunger” is an evocative word. Everyone understands what it feels like to be hungry. Our stomachs start rumbling. We get irritable. It becomes hard to think straight. To make those symptoms go away, we eat something. Our stomachs are full, and we are content.     Over 34 million Americans face hunger each and every day including 1 in 8 children. If we think about hunger as most of us experience it, as a temporary sensation, the solution to this problem is straightforward: we just need to get more food to people who don’t have enough
Patrick Lawrence: China’s Great Leap in the Middle East What Beijing just sponsored and got done, putting two millennia of diplomatic craft to work, is an exquisite example of what can be accomplished once this imperative is fully realized.     History’s wheel turned last Friday, when Iranian and Saudi Arabian officials agreed in Beijing to re-establish their bilateral diplomatic relations, which Riyadh severed seven years ago. Reflecting on this momentous development over the weekend, I’ll put it up there with the American defeat in Vietnam, April 1975, for its magnitude. The world we live in this week is not the same as the world we lived in last week.      With the stroke of a pen—three pens, actually—China, the Islamic Republic, and the Saudi kingdom have altered the fundamental dynamic of global politics. The two Middle Eastern powers have transcended the historic and often vicious divide between Sunni and Shi`a Islam. And in escorting the two sides to the mahogany table, the People’s Republic has made an entrance worthy of a Chinese opera onto the stage of world powers.

Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

Black Agenda Report

Labor:

 Economy:

The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finds herself in a very dubious position. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. This increase in power came in response to the 2008 financial crisis – the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The legislation made the Treasury Secretary the Chair of the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose meetings include the heads of all of the federal agencies that supervise banks and trading on Wall Street. The legislation also required the Treasury Secretary’s authorization before the Federal Reserve could create any more of those $29 trillion emergency bailout programs for the mega banks – which had tethered themselves to casino trading on Wall Street since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.     Yesterday, after the Swiss banking behemoth Credit Suisse had traded at an all-time low of less than two bucks; blown out its credit default swaps to unprecedented levels; and tanked the Dow Jones Industrial Average by more than 700 points intraday, Bloomberg News ran this headline at 12:54 p.m. – “US Treasury Reviewing US Banks’ Exposure to Credit Suisse.” By “exposure,” the Treasury really means how many billions of dollars of underwater derivatives are U.S. banks on the hook for as a counterparty to Credit Suisse. The Treasury also has to worry about U.S. banks’ exposure to Credit Suisse’s other major counterparties that U.S. banks do business with, even if the banks are not direct counterparties to Credit Suisse itself.

Derivitive Bubbles

World:

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  

How Canadians Lost Medicare Ontario’s Bill 60 has delivered a death blow to public medicare. The provincial medical system will no longer operate as a public service but as a profit-taking business managed by the private sector.     While defenders of public medicare blame Conservative Premier Doug Ford, British Columbia, Quebec, and Saskatchewan are going down the same road.     If we hope to reverse this disaster, we need to know how Canadians won medicare in the first place, and why we lost it. — Background — World War II saw a global upsurge of labor protest. Union membership more than doubled in Canada, and the number of strikes tripled. During the early1940s, one-third of all workers in Canada were on strike. To calm the rise in worker rebellion, governments agreed to fund social programs like medicare.