Daily News Digest April 20, 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:
If the Pentagon Papers Were Leaked Today
Joe Lauria: Leaks Spelling the End for Ukraine Leaked U.S. intelligence documents have exposed Western disinformation about Ukraine winning the war. Now the heavy fighting moves to Washington, writes Joe Lauria. A Washington Post headline last week was a bombshell for someone who has only been reading about the Ukraine war in The Washington Post and other Western media: “U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says.”
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:
When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good. ― Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.” ― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Family of Lashawn Thompson Demands Justice After He Was “Eaten Alive” by Insects in Atlanta Jail
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
Trump Lawyer Tries to Get Access to Identities of Anonymous Jury The judge overseeing Trump’s trial ruled that the jury would be anonymous over the risk of harassment and retaliation.
East Palestine, OH – Repeating The Mistakes Of Love Canal Shortly after the horrific Norfolk Southern train derailment occurred in East Palestine, OH, I was invited to attend a town hall meeting organized by River Valley Organizing. The purpose of the meeting was to give people the opportunity to ask questions and hopefully, get some answers. This was about 3 weeks after the rail company made the decision to spill the contents and then burn 5 tanker cars holding vinyl chloride and other toxic chemicals into a ditch alongside the railroad tracks at the site of the 38-car derailment. This intentional burn unleashed a gigantic black cloud full of particulates that enveloped the surrounding neighborhoods and farms in both Ohio and Pennsylvania (the accident was just a few miles from the state border). It is well documented that burning chlorinated chemicals like vinyl chloride will generate dioxins. Dioxin is the name given to a group of persistent, very toxic chemicals that share similar chemical structures. The most toxic form of dioxin is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin or TCDD. TCDD is more commonly recognized as the toxic contaminant found in “Agent Orange” and at Love Canal, New York and Times Beach, Missouri. Dioxin is not deliberately manufactured. Rather, it is the unintended by-product of industrial processes that use or burn chlorine. It is also produced when chemicals like vinyl chloride are burned, such as what occurred in East Palestine.
Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:
Drilling Operations, Wildfires Emitting Far More Methane Than Previously Known: Studies One study found that methane pollution from gas and oil fields during a recent decade was 70% higher than EPA figures.
The Devastating Wildlife Effects of Deepwater Horizon — and the Next Catastrophic Oil Spill The BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010 spilled 205.8 million gallons of oil and 225,000 tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico. Only about 25 percent of the oil was recovered, leaving more than 154 million gallons of oil at sea. In addition to the oil, nearly 2 million gallons of toxic dispersants were sprayed into the Gulf’s waters. This did not actually reduce the amount of oil left in the ocean, but merely broke it into smaller particles that may actually make the oil more toxic for some ocean life and ease its entry into the food chain.
13 Years After BP Disaster, Oceana Urges Biden to Block New Offshore Drilling A report from the ocean conservation organization details how the president can still keep a key campaign promise. Thursday will mark the 13th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which a BP drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and hundreds of thousands of animals. The disaster, one of the worst environmental catastrophes in U.S. history, was an object lesson in the dangers of fossil fuels. Despite this, President Joe Biden has so far violated his campaign promise to stop further offshore oil and gas drilling, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—regardless of its status as the most important U.S. climate legislation to date—actually mandates its expansion.
Fossil Fuel Giants With Most Emissions Paid $1.18 Billion to CEOs in Last Decade The soaring CEO pay shows how “the profit motive is incompatible with solving the climate crisis,” an activist said. Over the past decade, the four U.S. oil and gas corporations that contributed most to industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from 1988 to 2015 showered their CEOs with nearly $1.2 billion in compensation, according to a Truthout analysis of corporate disclosures. Truthout analyzed CEO compensation disclosures of the eight U.S. corporations over the past decade (2013 to 2022) identified among the top 50 emitters of cumulative Scope 1 and Scope 3 industrial greenhouse gas emissions from 1988 to 2015, according to the 2017 Carbon Majors Database Report. We added up total CEO compensation as reported in company proxy statements, which includes base pay, stock awards and bonuses, as well as reported golden parachutes.
‘Damning Exposé’ Details Industry Push to Greenwash Fracked Gas as ‘Certified’ “We cannot afford to put support behind the next Theranos of climate solutions,” said one campaigner. The rapidly growing gas certification industry claims to accurately measure methane pollution and verify lower emissions from fracking operations. But according to Earthworks and Oil Change International, so-called “certified gas” programs—an emerging frontier in the effort to greenwash fossil fuel production—are “likely highly unreliable and ineffective, resulting in increased threats to health and climate.” Certified Disaster: How Project Canary & Gas Certification are Misleading Gas Markets & Governments, a report the two groups published Monday, exposes “on-the-ground failures” to detect methane pollution by Project Canary—one of the largest certifiers of fracked gas in the United States—and implores policymakers to “avoid these follies and shift their time and energy toward facilitating a safe, managed decline in the production, distribution, and use of fossil fuels.” Given that methane traps 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, emissions of the potent greenhouse gas must be slashed substantially this decade to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis. The fossil fuel industry is the leading source of global methane pollution.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
From Chapter 5, The New Jim Crow: Obama—the Promise and the Peril : So what is to be demanded in this moment in our nation’s racial history? If the answer is more power, more top jobs, more slots in fancy schools for “us”—a narrow, racially defined us that excludes many—we will continue the same power struggles and can expect to achieve many of the same results. Yes, we may still manage to persuade mainstream voters in the midst of an economic crisis that we have relied too heavily on incarceration, that prisons are too expensive, and that drug use is a public health problem, not a crime. But if the movement that emerges to end mass incarceration does not meaningfully address the racial divisions and resentments that gave rise to mass incarceration, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality — within our nation’s borders, including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color, the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice advocates today than ensuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last. Given what is at stake at this moment in history, bolder, more inspired action is required than we have seen to date. Piecemeal, top-down policy reform on criminal justice issues, combined with a racial justice discourse that revolves largely around the meaning of Barack Obama’s election and “post-racialism,” will not get us out of our nation’s racial quagmire. We must flip the script. Taking our cue from the courageous civil rights advocates who brazenly refused to defend themselves, marching unarmed past white mobs that threatened to kill them, we, too, must be the change we hope to create. If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration — if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America — we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.
Labor:
Capitalism’s Policy of Understaffing Is Dangerous!: Oil and Gas Worker Survey Sheds Light on Unstable and Unsafe Working Conditions The survey contradicts industry claims and indicates continued job cuts amid high profits. As a carpenter for a contractor company, Cullen Boudreaux worked in oil refineries throughout Louisiana. “I think a lot of regular people don’t realize how dangerous it really is,” he said of his experience in the oil and gas industry. Boudreaux described a time when he halted work on a project because he smelled a leak, but said that other times he was worried he would lose his job if he called out safety hazards. For five years, he chased after contract jobs at different plants. Some lasted a year and a half and others were two or three months long. Last year, Boudreaux was forced out of the industry after a back injury. “I was tired of the layoffs and the inconsistency of pay and looking for work and stuff like that,” he said. He recently took a job as a manager at a restaurant in New Orleans. Boudreaux’s experiences with dangerous working conditions and instability in the oil and gas industry are echoed in a survey of 1,635 oil and gas workers in the United States. Boudreaux did not take the survey but participated in a roundtable discussion about the survey in Thibodaux, Louisiana, last month. While fossil fuel firms claim that shifting to renewable energy would mean significantly shrinking their labor force, the survey by True Transition — a worker advocacy and public policy collaborative — found that fossil fuel firms have laid off workers and decreased their pay while raking in profits
Economy:
Liquor Sales Will Be Brisk on Wall Street Ahead of First Republic Bank’s Earnings Report on Monday When JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo announced on March 16 that they were plunking $5 billion each of their corporate funds as uninsured deposits into the sinking First Republic Bank, they tied their corporate brand and their own bank’s image of safety and soundness to that of a teetering lender.
World:
The United Kingdom, which has committed well over $2 billion in assistance to Ukraine, has so far refused to ship fighter jets there but has promised to supply more weaponry, including tank shells made with depleted uranium (DU), also known as “radioactive bullets.” A by-product of uranium enrichment, DU is a very dense and radioactive metal that, when housed in small torpedo-like munitions, can pierce thickly armored tanks and other vehicles. Reacting to the British announcement, Putin ominously said he would “respond accordingly” if the Ukrainians begin blasting off rounds of DU. — Will Ukraine Be Turned Into a Radioactive Battlefield? Why isn’t depleted uranium banned? That’s a question antinuclear activists have been asking for years.
Patrick Lawrence: Macron’s Europe France’s president has proven himself to be a well-oiled weathervane. What he says on Monday may not match what he says or does on Wednesday. But his remarks while visiting China are interesting in several ways. Emmanuel Macron got poor reviews in major media, and from a few notably stupid European leaders, on his return last week from his three-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. But are we going to content ourselves with reviews of the French president’s performance or consider the play? What do critics know, after all?
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
Policy Murder’: Research Shows Poverty Is 4th Leading Cause of Death in US Research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 15 or older, making inadequate income the nation’s fourth-leading mortality driver that year behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking. “Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes,” said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and the lead author of the new analysis. “Poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the U.S.,” argues a new analysis.