Daily News Digest June 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:
The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History and How We Can Fight Back The Student Loan Scam is an exposé of the predatory nature of the $85-billion student loan industry. In this in-depth exploration, Collinge argues that student loans have become the most profitable, uncompetitive, and oppressive type of debt in American history.
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:
Contrast those who in the old days lynched for free with Kyle Rittenhouse, who raised 2 million for a defense fund. He killed two demonstrators. Daniel Penny, the killer of Jordan Neely, has broken that record. As of May 19, Penny had raised $2,668,372. He’s pleading self-defense even though he grabbed Jordan Neely from behind. Ron DeSantis, who has been poking about looking for something Black to run against, like a desperate Las Vegas gambler traveling from slot machine to slot machine hoping for an avalanche of quarters, raised two million for Daniel Penny, the right’s new matinee idol. — Is Killing Blacks a Growth Industry?
Secured financing of student loans resulted in a surge of students applying for college. This increase in demand was, in turn, met with an increase in price because university administrators would charge more if people were willing to pay it, just as any other business would (though to be fair, student loans do require more administration staff for processing). According to Forbes, the average price of tuition has increased eight times faster than wages since the 1980s. In 2018, the Federal Reserve estimated that there is currently $1.5 trillion in unpaid student debt. The Institute for College Access and Success estimates that in 2017, 65 percent of recent bachelor’s degree graduates have student loans, and the average is $28,650 per borrower. The government’s backing of student loans has caused the price of higher education to artificially rise; the demand would not be so high if college were not a financially viable option for some. Young people have been led to believe that a diploma is the ticket to the American dream, but that’s not the case for many Americans. Financially, it makes no sense to take out a $165,000 loan for a master’s degree that leads to a job where the average annual salary is $38,000—yet thousands of young people are making this choice. Only when they graduate do they understand the reality of their situation as they live paycheck-to-paycheck and find it next-to-impossible to save for a home, retirement, or even a rainy-day fund. Nor can student loans be discharged by filing for bankruptcy. Prior to 1976, student loans were treated like any other kind of debt with regard to bankruptcy laws, but as defaults increased, the federal government changed the laws. So student debt will hang above the borrower’s head until the debt is repaid. — How Government-Guaranteed Student Loans Killed the American Dream for Millions (2019)
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Debt Ceiling Deal Ends Freeze on Student Loan Payments for Millions “Biden Turning his Back on Studemt Debtors”
Armed Police Raid on Bail Fund for Cop City Opponents Is Attack on “Infrastructure of the Movement”
A Sweetheart Deal for the Sacklers: Billionaires Get Immunity from Civil Lawsuits over Opioid Crisis
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
Roaming Charges: The Shame of the Game “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.– Joseph Heller, Catch-22
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In the manufactured showdown over the debt ceiling, Biden didn’t just blink; he set a political speed record for rapid eye movement.
- Cutting future spending for poor people, sick people and children in order to pay the debts rung up by tax cuts for the rich and astronomical spending by the Pentagon. This is the gist of the deal Biden brokered with Kevin McCarthy, a deal that needed the support of Democrats to push through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. In the end 165 Democrats voted for the bill and only 149 Republicans.
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The deal is bad and probably only a harbinger of the coming bi-partisan austerity. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities the agreement will “increase hunger and poverty” among poor older Americans, a reference to new SNAP work requirements. What a thing to brag about when you go back to your state or district.
Was the Debt Ceiling Fight a Charade From the Start? Just Follow the (Big) Money! The dominating fact about American politics is its money-driven character. In our world, both major political parties are first of all bank accounts, which have to be filled for anything to happen. Voters can drive politics, but not easily. (Editor’s note: On Thursday evening, in a 63-36 final vote that included 46 members of the Democratic caucus in the yea column, the U.S. Senate approved the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, sending the bill—already approved by the U.S. House—to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.). For months the White House proclaimed that it would not negotiate with Republicans over spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. It insisted that it would accept only a clean lift of the borrowing limits. Then a few weeks ago, as prospects of default on the federal debt increasingly weighed on financial markets, the administration commenced negotiating. Reactions were all over the political map. Some observers, mostly Republicans and what the press keeps hailing as “moderate” Democrats, professed happy surprise. Others were wary. Far-right Republicans doubted the possibilities for any deal they could accept. Progressive Democrats, by contrast, recalled the many cases in which their leaders horse-traded with Republicans over spending programs while laying off tax cuts. They looked back in particular to President Obama’s famous attempt at a “grand bargain” with Republicans in 2011 – an episode in which then Vice President Joe Biden played a key role. That ratified major Bush-era tax cuts and severely impacted federal spending for years, likely contributing to the voter disaffection with Democrats that became dramatically evident in 2016.
GOP ‘Fealty to Megadonors on Full Display’: IRS Cuts Will Cost $40 Billion in Lost Revenue “After holding our entire economy hostage and threatening to trigger a global financial meltdown, Republicans protected wealthy tax cheats and creepy billionaires,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. A preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office released Thursday estimates that the $21.4 billion in IRS funding cuts that Republicans and the Biden White House agreed to enact as part of their debt ceiling agreement would result in $40.4 billion in lost tax revenue—adding to the federal budget deficit.
Best ‘Supreme Court’ That Money Can Buy!: Clarence “Private Jet” Thomas Is Getting People Killed Right-wing nuttiness has now been enshrined into the Constitution by Thomas and the five other extremist justices who signed onto his devastating ruling on guns. Clarence Thomas’s corruption has recently received attention from the mainstream media. As readers probably now know, he’s flown off on a half million dollar vacation to Indonesia luxuriating on a private jet and yacht paid for by Republican billionaire Harlan Crow, smoked cigars (smuggled Cubans?) at one of Crow’s private luxury resorts with Federalist Society guru Leonard Leo, allowed Leo to secretly pay his MAGA wife tens of thousands of dollars, sold a house he inherited to Crow who lets his mother live there rent free, and concealed Crow paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in elite boarding school tuition for his dependent nephew.
Planet Earth Is ‘Quite Sick’: 7 of 8 Boundaries for Safe and Just World Already Breached, Study Says “Nothing less than a just global transformation… is required to ensure human well-being,” researchers wrote. If Earth were to get an annual health checkup akin to a person’s physical exam, a doctor would say the planet is “really quite sick right now.” That’s how Joyeeta Gupta, professor of environment and development at the University of Amsterdam, put it at a Wednesday press conference accompanying the publication of new research in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. Co-authored by Gupta and 50 other scientists from around the world, it warns that nearly every threshold for a “safe and just” planet has already been breached and pleads for swift action to protect “the global commons for all people now and into the future.”
Revealed: The Secret Push to Bury a Weedkiller’s Link to Parkinson’s Disease Internal documents from chemical giant Syngenta reveal tactics to sponsor sympathetic scientific papers and mislead regulators about unfavorable research The global chemical giant Syngenta has sought to secretly influence scientific research regarding links between its top-selling weedkiller and Parkinson’s, internal corporate documents show. While numerous independent researchers have determined that the weedkiller, paraquat, can cause neurological changes that are hallmarks of Parkinson’s, Syngenta has always maintained that the evidence linking paraquat to Parkinson’s disease is “fragmentary” and “inconclusive”.
‘We Will Never Stop Fighting’: Pipeline Opponents Galvanized as Congress Clears Way for Dirty Project “By voting for a dirty deal that fast-tracks the Mountain Valley fracked gas pipeline and guts bedrock environmental laws, Congress betrayed people and the planet,” said one campaigner. After thwarting a last-minute bid to strip out language mandating approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the U.S. Senate late Thursday passed legislation that would raise the debt limit and avert a default. But congressional Republicans ensured that preventing an economic catastrophe would come at a significant cost for vulnerable people and communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis—and the Biden White House ultimately acceded to some of the GOP hostage-takers’ demands, declining to use its executive authority to continue paying the nation’s bills.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
CUNY Law Student Faces Bipartisan Attack for Criticizing Israel in Commencement Speech “Palestine can no longer be the exception to our pursuit of justice,” CUNY student Fatima Mohammed said during her May 12 remarks. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are attacking the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law over remarks made by one of its commencement speakers. During her speech on May 12, CUNY student Fatima Mohammed said the school had taught her how to implement the law for the cause of human rights. “I chose CUNY School of Law for its articulated mission [as one of the] few legal institutions… to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world,” she explained. “For years, Zionist organizations have been enacting targeted harassment campaigns against Palestinian and Muslim law students at the CUNY School of Law.”
If the Police Can Decide Who Qualifies as a Journalist, There Is No Free Press! Where’s the outcry? Mainstream media have been strangely silent following the arrest of two reporters in North Carolina. On a cold Christmas night in 2021 in the picturesque mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, The Asheville Blade journalist Veronica Coit sat in a police station waiting to be booked. A police officer motioned toward Coit and said, “She says she’s press.” The magistrate responded: “Is she real press?” “In that very moment, he could’ve decided that we were press, which we were,” I conducted recently for “The Project Censored Show” on Pacifica Radio. “The magistrate has the legal right to say ‘no’ [to booking someone].” But the magistrate didn’t exercise that right. Both Coit and their colleague Matilda Bliss were processed for trespassing while covering the eviction of unhoused people at Aston Park in Asheville. Although Aston Park is a public park, Coit explains that the City of Asheville recently instated a 10 pm curfew on all public parks to keep people from sleeping there. It’s a common if not vicious tool used by many other cities in the ongoing attack on unhoused folks, giving law enforcement the green light to forcibly remove and arrest those seeking shelter and sleeping in the city’s parks. It is apparently now also a tool that can be used against journalists who cover these attacks on the unhoused. As of this writing, both journalists are awaiting a jury trial after appealing the guilty verdict handed down by Judge James Calvin Hill on April 19. With that decision, Judge Hill stepped brazenly on the throat of a free press, potentially introducing a precedent that makes journalism illegal — if it’s the kind of journalism the ruling class doesn’t like.
Plutocracy Uses Technology to Clobber the Poor Technology wielded by oligarchic government is a nightmare. From killer police dog robots to facial recognition in public housing, it’s not just the poor who are targets, it’s everybody. But the poor and the left get smacked with it the worst. It’s open season on antifa, a season inaugurated by killer Kyle Rittenhouse shooting two Black Lives Matter protestors to death, getting off scott free and becoming the darling of far-right celebrities. As for how technology crushes the poor, just take the case of 33-year-old Tania Acabou, who found herself a victim of constant surveillance in her public housing project.
Labor:
Democracy?: Prosperity for the 1% — Depression for Workers!
Since June 2009 Americans have lived in the false reality of a recovering economy. Various fake news and manipulated statistics have been used to create this false impression. However, indicators that really count have not supported the false picture and were ignored. For example, it is normal in a recovering or expanding economy for the labor force participation rate to rise as people enter the workforce to take advantage of the job opportunities. During the decade of the long recovery, from June 2009 through May 2023, the labor force participation rate consistently fell from 65.7 to 62.6 percent. —Paul Craig Roberts, The Diminishing American Economy (Updated)
FRED Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate is 62.6% 
Shdow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment Charts The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
May 2023 ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment increased to 24.7% from 24.6% on top of U.6 increasing to 6.7% from 6.6%
Economy:
Disgraced Silvergate Bank Hints It May Not Be Able to Cover All of Its Deposits; Fed Slaps It with a Cease and Desist Consent Order Last week, on Tuesday, May 23, the Federal Reserve and California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (the state banking regulator) hit the collapsed federally-insured bank, Silvergate Bank, and its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation, with an enforcement action called a “Cease and Desist Consent Order.” The action was not announced to the public until yesterday. A Consent Order is meant to function along the lines of a legal settlement, with the bank agreeing to the detailed terms of the Consent Order and waiving its right to judicial review. The individual signing the Consent Order on behalf of the bank was its controversial CEO, Alan Lane, who had allowed his federally-insured bank to get in bed with Sam Bankman-Fried’s house of frauds, including the FTX crypto exchange and Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research. Lane also had allowed his deposit base to become heavily involved with other crypto-related companies.
World:
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