Daily News Digest April 5, 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:
Bendib: ICC’s Inferno 
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:
Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is part of nature, and his war against nature is ultimately a war against himself…. We’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves. — Rachel Carson, 1963
With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. — Sylvia Earle
Biden Speech after forcing railworkers to go back to work, without addressing the railroad safety or rail worker safety, which was at the heart of union negoiations. He does mention HAZMAT, but when the EPA declared East Palestine ‘safe’, then HAZMAT rules do not apply!:
I applaud the bipartisan group of senators for proposing rail safety legislation that provides many of the solutions that my administration has been calling for. This legislation provides us with tools to hold companies accountable to prevent terrible tragedies like the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine and to make those communities whole. This legislation strengthens safety requirements for all trains carrying hazardous materials, and phases in newer, safer tank cars over the next two years, not over the next decade. It will increase safety by requiring hotbox detectors every 10 miles to prevent derailments like the one that we saw in East Palestine. It increases HAZMAT fees for railroads to pay for grants to train state and local firefighters and other first responders to respond to hazmat incidents. The legislation will also dramatically increase fines for safety violations from the current cap of $225,000 to the greater of $1 million or 1% of a railroad’s annual operating income, which for the largest carriers like Norfolk Southern could be more than $50 million. . . .— Statement from President Joe Biden on the Bipartisan Railway Safety Act of 2023
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Never Aired: Profile on James Baldwin ABC’s 20/20, 1979 “White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness,” Baldwin said. “They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it’s the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else, they’ll say, is a lie. They know they would not like to be Black here. They know that, and they’re telling me lies. They’re telling me and my children nothing but lies.”
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 Immediate Result of the Bipartisan Railway Safety Act of 2023 and Decades of Deregualations and Differed Maintainence: Upsurge of Derailments and this week a Derailment Spree Proves Railway Regulations Urgently Needed, Say Union Members “These companies siphon billions into share buybacks, dividends, and bonuses rather than into the vital maintenance and infrastructure growth we need to build a safe, modern, and thriving rail industry,” said one worker. After at least six major freight train derailments occurred across the United States over the past week, the need for stronger rail safety rules couldn’t be clearer, an interunion alliance of rail workers said Monday. “The recent uptick in derailments across the U.S. highlights the dire need for stricter regulations on the length and weight of trains, as well as a focus on preventing unsafe operational practices such as precision scheduled railroading (PSR) which prioritizes short-term financial gains for Wall Street over the safety of communities and railroad workers,” Jason Doering, a locomotive engineer and general secretary of Railroad Workers United (RWU), said in a statement. The past week “was not a good one” for the nation’s Class 1 rail carriers, RWU observed.
Adding to the human rights abuses. The United States refuses asylum f0r El Slavadorian refuges — the victims of the abuse!: Amnesty Accuses El Salvador of ‘Systematic’ Human Rights Abuses After Emergency Declaration “The deaths of 132 people in state custody, arbitrary detention, mass criminal prosecutions, and the indiscriminate imprisonment of tens of thousands of people are incompatible with an effective, fair, and lasting public security strategy,” said a regional director.
Ralph Nader: Boomerang – Big Business Style . . .A few years ago, during lunch with the formidable, creative Brian Lamb – founder of C-Span, I asked whether, after decades of blanket coverage of Congressional sessions, accessible to millions of people, Congress was an improved institution. After all, as Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” His reply: “No.” Such is the ever-growing grip of corporate lobbyists directly on and inside Congress, compared to the unorganized sovereign people back home. The massive government investment in developing important pharmaceuticals over the decades, followed by free giveaways of these discoveries to drug companies, was supposed to reduce the corporate cost of discovering and testing new medicines and thereby reduce what companies like Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly would charge patients. No way – Americans, who paid for these discoveries, are charged record-high prices for pharmaceuticals – higher than in any other country in the world. To add insult to injury, American drug firms exported production of many of these medicines to China and India for importing back to the U.S. for a greater profit than might come from U.S. production. One result – the national security nightmare of our country not producing any antibiotics here at home!
The Washington Post’s One-Sided Assessment of Disinformation Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union used covert methods of political intervention and conflict, and pursued proxy wars, election interference, and disinformation campaigns to advance their interests. Both powers relied on disinformation as a core tactic throughout the Cold War and the subsequent decades, competing in an arms race of fictions to cultivate ideological support internationally and domestically. Last week, an unusually long editorial in the Washington Post documented Soviet efforts to use disinformation against the United States without ever mentioning the activities of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency to blacken the image of the Kremlin. The article is part of a series that the Post calls “Annals of Autocracy.” It quotes the historian Thomas Rid, who wrote that “Disinformation operations, in essence, erode the very foundations of open societies.” Sadly, the worst example of a U.S. campaign of disinformation was self-inflicted featuring the joint efforts of the White House and CIA to create a case for war against Iraq out of whole cloth. Never forget CIA director George Tenet’s statement that it would be a “slam dunk” to provide intelligence to convince the American people, not the White House, of the necessity for war against Iraq in 2003
Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:
Global Warming is Systemic to Capitalism!:
IPCC Report Fails On Equity and Urgency Catastrophic climate change can’t be prevented without fundamental economic and social changes by Kevin Anderson (Professor of Energy and Climate Change, University of Manchester). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) synthesis report recently landed with an authoritative thump, giving voice to hundreds of scientists endeavoring to understand the unfolding calamity of global heating. What’s changed since the last one in 2014? Well, we’ve dumped an additional third of a trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, primarily from burning fossil fuels. While world leaders promised to cut global emissions, they have presided over a 5% rise. The new report evokes a mild sense of urgency, calling on governments to mobilize finance to accelerate the uptake of green technology. But its conclusions are far removed from a direct interpretation of the IPCC’s own carbon budgets (the total amount of CO₂ scientists estimate can be put into the atmosphere for a given temperature rise). The report claims that, to maintain a 50:50 chance of warming not exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, CO₂ emissions must be cut to “net-zero” by the “early 2050s.” Yet, updating the IPCC’s estimate of the 1.5°C carbon budget, from 2020 to 2023, and then drawing a straight line down from today’s total emissions to the point where all carbon emissions must cease, and without exceeding this budget, gives a zero CO₂ date of 2040. 
Is a Livable Future Still Possible? Chomsky and Pollin Discuss the IPCC Report. The report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows how capitalism undergirds the climate crisis. C.J. Polychroniou: The IPCC has just released a synthesis report which is based on the content of its Sixth Assessment Report, i.e., contributions from the Three Working Groups and the three Special Reports. In sum, we have a synthesis report of scientific assessments on climate change published since 2018, except that the new report paints an even more troubling picture: We are closer than ever before to reaching or surpassing a 1.5-degree Celsius temperature rise and “continued emissions will further affect all major climate system components.” Drawing on the findings of hundreds of scientists that have contributed to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), the IPCC’s synthesis report states that “in the near term, every region in the world is projected to face further increases in climate hazards (medium to high confidence, depending on region and hazard), increasing multiple risks to ecosystems and humans (very high confidence).” Accordingly, the authors of the synthesis report assert that limiting global warming requires “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions and that the window of opportunity “to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” is “rapidly closing” and call for urgent climate action on all fronts. Indeed, in the synthesis report, its authors contend that there are major opportunities “for scaling up climate action” and only lack of political will is holding us back. Noam Chomsky: IPCC reports are consensus documents. Hence, they tend to err on the side of understatement. This one strikes me as different. It seems that desperation within the scientific community has reached such a level that the gloves are off and they feel the time has come to be blunt. Time is brief. Decisive action is an urgent necessity. Opportunities exist. If they are not taken, vigorously, we might as well say: “Too bad, was nice knowing you.”
CHEJ’s “All In” – Spotlight of the Month Since February, CHEJ’s Science Director and toxicologist, Stephen Lester, has been participating in the community response to the Norfolk Southern train derailment that resulted in spilling five tanker cars of vinyl chloride on the side of the tracks and intentionally burning it in the town of East Palestine, OH. Stephen’s 40 plus years of scientific and environmental justice expertise has been covered by several leading news organizations. In summary, Stephen criticized the company’s “unconventional” approach to identifying where to sample for dioxins; asserted that Norfolk Southern is responsible for picking up the costs of the cleanup; offered insight into the EPA’s “lame excuse” for testing and their refusal to measure dioxin at the levels in soil that it can cause adverse health effects; and, provided a clear opinion on how citizens should take their next steps in regaining control of the narrative. Our senior organizer and Small-Grants Manager, Teresa Mills, has also been actively engaging with Ohio-based environmental groups who are working with the East Palestine residents. Stephen and Teresa’s work is a prime example of what CHEJ has been doing for the past 42 years: providing scientific and organizing support to grassroots community-based organizations.
Preventing the Latest Texas Two-Step by Koch Industries on Cancer Liability Bankruptcy was never meant as a panacea for profitable companies to shirk liability claims—especially on an issue as serious as this. A recent legal decision in a case involving Johnson & Johnson (J&J) may ultimately impact the massive profits Koch Industries and its Georgia-Pacific subsidiary have been raking in while sidestepping asbestos liability claims. At the end of January, a federal appeals court ruled that J&J could not shield itself from pending lawsuits arising from exposure to its now off-the-market baby powder by transferring them to a new subsidiary and then declaring that company bankrupt.
The Perfect Storm: The US City Where Rising Sea Levels and Racism Collide After spending four years visiting Charleston and interviewing more than a hundred people there, I have come to see the city as a place where the cross-currents of denialism, boosterism, a host of broken governance systems and deep-seated racism are about to meet with rapidly accelerating sea level rise. We barely have time to avoid widespread human misery in coastal cities, and my hope is that Charleston’s story will spur immediate action. We know that storms and floods in the US and around the world disproportionately harm Black and low-income communities whose residents are involuntarily permanently displaced, rendered homeless or ground more deeply into poverty. Of the people who lived in the neighborhood in Houston that sustained the worst damage during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, nearly half were people of color. Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans in 2005, hurt Black neighborhoods the most. Hurricane Ida in 2021 devastated low-income communities south of New Orleans. Affordable housing in the US, largely occupied by low-income Black people, is at very high risk of being damaged or destroyed by coastal flooding over the next few decades.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Majority-Black Town Fights to Stop Land Being Seized for Gravel Quarry Rail Link Residents of Sparta, Georgia, are trying to stop the Sandersville railroad and its influential owners from building a spur to a quarry.A majority-Black rural community in Georgia is battling to stop a railroad company from seizing private land for a new train line they say will cause environmental and economic harms. Residents of Sparta, a poor community of 1,300 people located a hundred miles south-east of Atlanta, are opposing the construction of a rail spur that would connect a local quarry to the main train line, enabling the gravel company to vastly expand mining that already causes dust, debris and noise pollution.
Missing Links in Textbook History: Women In the latest installment of the Missing Links series, Jim Mamer explores written history’s outlook on women and the disparity between men and women in textbooks. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.– Simone de Beauvoir “The Second Sex” (1949). I was brainwashed at a very young age to accept the unacceptable. In elementary school I was taught to accept the term “mankind” as a synonym for “humanity.” When we learned about the Declaration of Independence, I was told, and I believed, that when Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal,” he meant that all people were created equal. It was never true, but that fact should have been transparent — even to kids. Is it not clear that Thomas Jefferson meant men, not women, and that he didn’t even mean “all men?” Not enslaved African men, not any of the Indigenous men, not anybody but white men who owned property and paid taxes and who, in 1776, amounted to about 6% of the population.
Labor:
Economy:
Capitalist Crisis, Class Struggle, And Calls for Communism With the banks on the brink, a new global economic crisis looms. Workers are on the move, while young people are crying out for communism. But the left leaders are lagging behind. We must build the forces of Marxism and fight for revolution. While the queues at food banks grow longer and longer, the financial banks are terrified of another 2008-style meltdown. The world economy is in danger of suffering a lost decade of growth. This would be even more severe if the current financial turmoil sparks a global recession, as new research from the World Bank warns. This once again reveals the complete impasse of the capitalist system, which has lurched from one crisis to the next.
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update April 3rd to April 5th
BREAKING NEWS – Continuing and trending deepening annual and quarterly collapses, reflected in February 2023 Real Construction Spending, remained consistent with an ongoing, deepening Recession.
-
PREVIOUSLY – University of Michigan’s March 2023 Consumer Sentiment measure deteriorated in its latest surveying and revision, now 38.6% (-38.6%) below its February 2020 Pre-Pandemic peak level.
-
The third-estimate of 4q2022 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) revised lower to an inflation-adjusted real annualized quarterly gain of 2.6% [previously 3.2%], while the theoretically equivalent 4q2022 Gross Domestic Income (GDI) came in at an annualized 1.1% (-1.1%) quarterly contraction, in its first estimate. February 2023 Money Supply signaled mounting, ongoing inflation pressures.
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Gross Domestic Product Chart
After Pushing the Wall Street Scheme to Repeal Glass-Steagall, the New York Times Returns to Puff Pieces on Rodge Cohen and Jamie Dimon The New York Times has been able to fly below the radar in terms of its insufferable ability to muck up the financial system of the United States and then canonize its aiders and abettors with puff pieces. It was none other than the New York Times that repeatedly used its editorial page to advocate for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had protected the U.S. financial system from crisis for 66 years until its repeal under the Wall Street friendly Bill Clinton administration in 1999. It took only nine years after its repeal for the U.S. financial system to crash in 2008, requiring the largest public bailoutin U.S. history. We’re now in banking crisis and bailout 3.0.
World:
“Woman, Life, Freedom”: Syrian Women Are Rising Up Against Patriarchy Syrian women are building on the legacy of Kurdish feminism to lead a political and cultural transformation. “Woman, life, freedom” — the iconic slogan of Iran’s women’s revolution — has traveled far and wide. First chanted by Kurdish women on March 8, 2006, on the streets of Turkey, it came out of the Kurdish freedom movement’s longstanding feminist commitment. The rallying cry then spilled over across the border into Syria to accompany the Kurdish women’s heroic fight against ISIS (also known as Daesh). Last September, voiced in defiance after the brutal murder of the young Kurdish woman Jina (Mahsa) Amini, the slogsn reverberated beyond the Kurdish regions of Iran, eventually reaching the whole world. But Iran is not the first place where “woman, life, freedom” traversed ethnic boundaries, revealing its universal appeal. Less known — though not less profound — has been the spread of its philosophy in Syria, where women across the diverse ethno-religious landscape have found in it an inspiring model for radical transformation.
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