Daily News Digest May 30, 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:
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:
PFAS: Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of chemicals that have been used since the 1950s in firefighting foams and many consumer products that includes firefighting foams, stain- and water-resistant fabrics, nonstick cookware and food packaging. PFAS chemicals are highly stable, so when they are released, people can be exposed through air, dust, food, and water resulting in widespread exposure. Many types of PFAS are known to have adverse health effects on humans including increased cholesterol levels, changes in liver enzymes, decreased vaccine response in children, increased risk of high blood pressure in pregnant women, and decreased birth weight. Epidemiologic studies also suggest a link between exposure to certain types of PFAS and increased rates of kidney, prostate, and testicular cancer.
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. – Thomas Jefferson
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. – Thomas Jefferson
Once Weapons Were Manufactor to Fight War. Now Wars Are Fought o Sell Weapons. — Arundhatt Roy
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Memorial Day Massacre: Chicago Cops Killed 10 During 1937 Steel Strike, Then the Media Covered It Up
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
Chris Hedges: Bidding Farewell to the American Century It’s becoming clearer by the day that America is an empire in terminal decline, yet the myths of American exceptionalism persist. Like Cicero in the Roman Republic, there are always a handful of chroniclers who can see and articulate clearly the social, cultural, and political realities of empires in terminal decline. They call out the bankruptcy of an inept and corrupt ruling class, blinded by hubris, as well as a populace that has checked out of civic life and is entranced by bread and circus spectacles. In his trilogy Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chambers Johnson does a masterful job of showing how and why we are disintegrating. So does Andrew Bacevich, who, in his newest book of essays, On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, writes about the debacles that have beset the American empire since the Vietnam War, a conflict he fought in as a young army officer. Bacevich warns that Americans’ inability to be self-critical, to dissect and understand the litany of disasters that have followed on the heels of Vietnam, including decades of fruitless warfare in the Middle East, will have terrible consequences for us and much of the rest of the globe.
Biden Shows His Spots:‘Lessor Evil’ Deal proves the Failure of Social-Democratic Soicalist Lessor Evil Politics!: Biden-GOP Debt Ceiling Deal Slashes Assistance Programs and Protects the Wealthy The deal will impose new work requirements on benefits recipients while protecting the spiraling pentagon budget. The deal will impose new work requirements on benefits recipients while protecting the spiraling pentagon budget. The deal will impose new work requirements on benefits recipients while protecting the spiraling pentagon budget.
Chris Hedges: The Democratic Party’s Crucifixion of Matt Taibbi Extensive government blacklists, revealed by the Twitter Files, are used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. This censorship apparatus has been turned on the reporter who exposed them. the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco poring through reports sent to Twitter from an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). The FITF is an FBI-led interagency task force that forwards “moderation requests” from numerous government agencies, including Homeland Security, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department, to social media outlets. Taibbi was given access to the internal traffic by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk. It revealed how the FBI and other government agencies routinely suppressed news and commentary. He published a Twitter thread that night, Christmas Eve, with the headline “Twitter and Other Government Agencies”. “There would be a list of YouTube videos,” Taibbi said when I reached him by phone. “There would be a notation that would say ‘We assess that these are all created by the Internet Research Agency in Russia. We assess that they are promoting anti-Ukraine attitudes.’ I would see that all those videos were no longer on YouTube. You can make your own deduction from that, but that was the pattern. They would send Excel spreadsheets full of account names and either all or most of them would be gone.” The content that was suppressed included right-wing and left-wing reports critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, which has been folded into the Democratic Party. Threads from the Yellow Vests movement, activists from the Occupy movement, Global Revolution Live, negative stories about Joe Biden, reports on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year while his father was vice-president, positive stories about Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses and details of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were part of the plethora of accounts that were flagged and disappeared. I was a victim of this censorship. The six-year archive of my show On Contact, broadcast on RT America, was erased from YouTube, although not one show was about Russia and none violated YouTube’s content guidelines. Episodes were later reposted on The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel. The show gave a voice to those targeted by the FITF — anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, prison reform advocates, Black Lives Matter and Palestinian activists, anti-fracking activists and independent intellectuals, journalists and authors including David Harvey, Noam Chomsky, Sami Al-Arian, Glen Ford, Amira Hass, Mumia Abu Jamal, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Medea Benjamin, Nils Melzer, Pankaj Mishra, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Cornel West.
Let’s Have Work Requirements for the Super Rich and Their Massive Tax Breaks Current tax rules effectively subsidize investment income of the wealthy that far exceeds the income these individuals earn from work. Time to to put an end to that. As Congress and the President negotiate on the debt ceiling, one sticking point is the work requirements that GOP leaders want to apply to income assistance programs like Medicaid and SNAP. Instead of focusing on low-income people who are already mostly employed or facing significant barriers to employment, lawmakers who want to encourage labor force participation should revisit existing tax breaks subsidizing wealthy individuals who live off their assets rather than work. Along these lines, Congress could attach a new work requirement to the tax code’s lower rate for capital gains and stock dividends, which is a tax break that mostly benefits the richest 1 percent of taxpayers, including those who do not work at all and live off their investments. Even if this new work requirement is limited to millionaires, it would likely bring in more than the $120 billion that the House GOP proposes to raise over the next decade by imposing new work requirements on programs for low-income people.
Why We Need to Abandon Industrial Farming Many will argue that chemicals are needed to feed the population, but this is a false dilemma. Our world is being propelled into a techno tyranny where a small band of billionaires owns our information, our water, our energy, and increasingly—our food. The billionaire doing more than most to shape the future of what we eat is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Not content with being the largest private farmland owner in the U.S., Gates is hell-bent on creating a new green revolution for Africa. Just like the last green revolution in the 1960s, Gates aims to end world hunger by supercharging industrial farming through planting hectare after hectare of “magic seeds” in order to resist bugs and adapt to the climate crisis.
PFAS Levels an Ground and Air Could be Higher Than Expected, Research Suggests High levels of toxic ‘forever chemicals’ found in New Hampshire soil samples raise questions about food and water pollution Background levels of toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” in the ground and air may be much higher than previously thought, federal testing of spatially random soil samples from across New Hampshire suggests. The analysis found high levels of PFAS in all 100 shallow soil samples, which were taken from undisturbed land not close to known polluters. The chemicals are thought to largely have gotten there through the air, and the study, along with recent EU research, suggests similar levels of soil and air contamination throughout the world.
Colorado Frackers Doubled Freshwater Use During Megadrought, Even as Drilling and Oil Production Fell Oil and gas operators dramatically increased their reliance on high-quality water for fracking even though they produced enough wastewater to supply the operations.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Our Legal System Punishes Defendants and Their Relatives—Before They’re Found Guilty Many hardships are forced on defendants and their families pre-trial, including the heavy pre-trial financial burdens imposed by the bail system and attorneys. . . . Yet our judicial system often inadvertently creates other “victims” beyond those of the crime itself. Despite the call of our legal system to presume the innocence of a defendant until and unless found guilty, many hardships are forced on defendants and their families pre-trial, including the heavy pre-trial financial burdens imposed by the bail system and attorneys. Research has shown that, in comparison to costly attorneys paid for by the defendants themselves, free court-appointed attorneys obtain worse sentences for the accused, indicating that people who are poor may be unable to appropriately defend themselves, while the rich are able to overturn or significantly reduce their sentences.
‘Lesser Evil’ Evil Biden Strikes Again!: DOJ Intervention Didn’t Stop Seattle’s Police Violence. It Gave Cops More Money. Seattle learned the hard way that federal oversight via “consent decrees” mainly served to increase police budgets. After more than a decade, Seattle’s experiment with addressing police violence through federal intervention is winding down. In 2010, 35 community organizations wrote a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ), asking the agency to “promptly investigate whether the Seattle Police Department has engaged in a pattern or practice of violations of civil rights by unnecessary and excessive force against residents of Seattle in violation of federal law.” The feds complied, and after a nine-month investigation, found that the Seattle Police Department (SPD) engaged in excessive force and that discriminatory policing was a serious concern. As a result, in 2012, the DOJ and the City of Seattle entered a settlement agreement, and a decade-plus experiment in confronting local police violence through monitoring by a federal court began. As the harm endemic to policing tempts communities across the country to request DOJ intervention, Seattle’s consent decree experience (along with those of Oakland, New Orleans, Albuquerque and Baltimore) should serve as a lesson to other jurisdictions: No one is coming to save us from our local cops.
Labor:
Economy:
Michael Roberts Facebook Blog: In its recent review of the US economy, the IMF called for higher interest rates and higher taxes to control inflation and reduce the budget deficit. Re: IMF United States of America: Staff Concluding Statement of the 2023 Article IV Mission
World:
13 Canadian Fossils Linked to Massive Losses in Western Wildfires Thirteen oil and gas companies operating or based in Canada, including five of the six that make up the Pathways Alliance oil sands lobby group, are on the list of 88 big carbon polluters now being called out for a major share of the forested lands lost to wildfires in North America between 1986 and 2021, The Energy Mix has learned.
Education. Heal, 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
‘Enormous Policy Failure’: States Throw Hundreds of Thousands—Including Many Children—Off Medicaid “We knew this was coming,” wrote one policy expert. “But we still treat these burdens like they’re unavoidable natural disasters.” With a green light from the federal government, states across the U.S. have thrown hundreds of thousands of low-income people off Medicaid in recent weeks—and many have lost coverage because they failed to navigate bureaucratic mazes, not because they were no longer eligible.