Daily News Digest June 29, 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:
Barack Obama: American Spy-in-Chief After Obama clinched the Democratic Party presidential nomination, he reversed himself and voted for granting immunity to telecom companies that betrayed their customers to Uncle Sam. This was a bellwether for Obama’s future constitutional depredations. After Obama took office, his appointees speedily expanded National Security Agency seizures of Americans’ personal data. The Washington Post characterized Obama’s first term as “a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.” The acid drip of revelations of illicit surveillance that began after 9/11 continued regardless of Obama’s “Hope and Change” mantra. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, former NSA analyst Russell Tice declared that the NSA was monitoring “all Americans’ communications. Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications.” Tice also revealed that the NSA had targeted journalists and news agencies for wiretaps. Tice’s revelations failed to hold the media’s attention. — Ten Years Later, Snowden’s Heroism Shines Ever Brighter
Where,” asks the British journalist and musician Andy Worthington, reflecting on the unfolding capitalogenic climate catastrophe, “is the panic? The response to [the] failure to stop rising [carbon] emissions,” Worthington writes: “ought to be blind panic, but…the only voices of undiluted alarm are, for the most part, climate scientists, who are largely ignored by politicians, and, shamefully, by the mainstream media, even though the results of this collective indifference are being spelled out to us on a daily basis — through Canada’s wildfires, through New York City’s orange skies, through the Sahara Desert marching northwards to the Southern Mediterranean, though an unprecedented and truly alarming increase in ocean temperatures, and through an equally alarming loss of ice in Antarctica, in the Arctic and in glaciers, with terrifying consequences, including rising sea levels.: — Look at Homo Sapiens on the Run in the 2020s
Podcasts/Vidoes of the Day:
Blocked by Youtube:The Chris Hedges Report: ‘Twitter Files’ Journalist Matt Taibbi Claims IRS and FBI Retaliation
A New Third World Debt Crisis? The Need for System Change
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Black Agenda Radio June 23, 2023
The US Refuses to Concede Defeat as the World Resists Domination
The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century
Environment:
After World War II Rosa Luxenburg Coined the Slogan: ‘S0cialism or Barbaism’! Now the Slogan Should Be: ‘Ecosocialism or Ecocide’!
One of Many Ways to Begin to End Global Warming: Expose ‘Greenwashing’ — Tax the Polluters 100%!
We Should Have Listened to Jim Hansen, Instead We’re Heading Toward Global Chaos Hansen’s Warning Today, June 23, is a significant date in history, when climate scientist James Hansen went up on Capitol Hill to warn us human-caused climate disruption had arrived. That was 1988. Fossil fuel executives, who knew it was true because their own scientists had told them so, instead swung into a full-scale disinformation campaign that blocked climate action on the scale that would have been required to avert climate catastrophe. (Inside Climate News Editor David Sassoon tells of how whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who just passed away, spurred the investigation that uncovered that story.) Thirty-five years later, the oceans are boiling, a heat dome is searing Mexico and Texas, a monster El Niño is growing in the Pacific, and floods and fires are breaking out all over the world. We should have listened to Hansen and not the oil company criminals.
Canadian Wildfires Send Carbon Offsets Up in Smoke These fires have brought to light yet another reason why attempts by fossil fuel companies to “carbon offset” do not work. Ask anyne on the East Coast of Canada or the U.S. recently about their air quality, and they will tell you the same story. They will say that the acrid choking air from Canada’s wildfires has made their lives miserable over the last few weeks, with residents experiencing the worse air quality in years.
UN Expert Demands Full Legal Protection for Climate Refugees “The human rights implications of climate change displacement, in particular across international borders, are significant and truly disturbing,” said the special rapporteur. The top expert on the climate crisis at the United Nations human rights office said Tuesday that the international community must recognize that climate-related disasters including drought and sea level rise have become one the biggest drivers of displacement and ensure that the rights of people forced to leave their homes for these reasons are protected. With 30.7 million people displaced in 2020 due to events related to weather and the climate—primarily drought, which was blamed for a famine in Madagascar and forced more than 1 million people to leave their homes in Somalia in 2021 and 2022—the global community “must realize its responsibility to protect people displaced across borders by climate change impacts,” said Ian Fry, special rapporteur on human rights in the context of climate change.
Hot Wars: The Coming Climate Conflicts Climate disasters are not only failing to goad governments into taking bold action but may be nudging societies toward increasing violence and cruelty. Several times in recent weeks I’ve heard people suggest that Mother Nature has been speaking to us through that smoke endlessly drifting south from the still-raging Canadian wildfires. She’s saying that she wants the coal, oil, and gas left in the ground, but I fear her message will have little more influence on climate policy than her previous ones did. After all, we essentially hit the “snooze” button on the wake-up call from Hurricane Katrina 18 years ago; ditto the disastrous Hurricane Sandy seven years later, as well as the East Coast heat waves and West Coast wildfires of more recent years; or the startling overheating of global waters and the sea level rise that goes with it. And that’s just to begin an ever longer list of horrors.
Biden’s Efforts to Clear Wildfire Fuel in US Forests are Falling Short Mixed early results from administration initiative as federal land managers skip at-risk communities for less threatened areas Using chainsaws, heavy machinery and controlled burns, the Biden administration is trying to turn the tide on worsening wildfires in the US west through a multibillion-dollar cleanup of forests choked with dead trees and undergrowth. Yet one year into what is envisioned as a decade-long effort, federal land managers are scrambling to catch up after falling behind on several of their priority forests for thinning even as they exceeded goals elsewhere. And they have skipped over some highly at-risk communities to work in less threatened areas, according to data obtained by the Associated Press, public records and congressional testimony.
Destruction of World’s Pristine Rainforests Soared in 2022 Despite Cop26 Pledge An area of primary rainforest the size of Switzerland was felled last year suggesting world leaders’ commitment to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030 is failing An area the size of Switzerland was cleared from Earth’s most pristine rainforests in 2022, despite promises by world leaders to halt their destruction, new figures show. From the Bolivian Amazon to Ghana, the equivalent of 11 football pitches of primary rainforest were destroyed every minute last year as the planet’s most carbon-dense and biodiverse ecosystems were cleared for cattle ranching, agriculture and mining, with Indigenous forest communities forced from their land by extractive industries in some countries.
Tuesday Briefing: From America to India, Record Heatwaves are Causing Chaos – And It’s Only June In today’s newsletter: Why temperatures are increasing so quickly and what that could mean for the future Even though summer has only just begun, record heatwaves are already being set. Last week Beijing logged its hottest June day since records began, at 41C. In Texas, a deadly heatwave is entering its third week – a number of records have already been broken across the state, including a blistering 115F (46.1C) reading in Del Rio and 116F (46.6C) in Cotulla. Canada had wildfires that burnt so furiously this month toxic smoke was felt across the United States. In India, morgues and hospitals became overwhelmed after temperatures hit 45C in some areas – at least 96 people reportedly died from heat-aggravated conditions. In the UK, a wildfire broke out in Scotland, burning an estimated 1,500 hectares of land and temperatures in some areas have already hit 32C. The accelerated high temperatures in the past month or so have astounded scientists, who are pointing to a number of parallel events, including the human-caused climate crisis and the naturally occurring weather event El Niño, to explain the cause. Even though the temperature has (temporarily) dropped in England, it looks as though things are only going to get hotter, as the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has forecast that global temperatures are likely to surge to record levels in the next five years. And those affected are often among the most marginalised groups in society – Human Rights Watch released a report that found that extreme heat disproportionally affects people with disabilities in Spain and other European countries. Ocean Rebellion Targets UN Maritime Agency With Demand for 50% Emissions Cut by 2030 The International Maritime Organization is currently aiming a 50% reduction only by 2050. Saying the International Maritime Organization is “unfit for purpose” due to its refusal to take far-reaching action to drastically draw down emissions from the shipping sector, the global campaign group Ocean Rebellion on Monday greeted delegates at the body’s four-day summit with a visual representation of the shipping pollution that harms both marine and human life. Outside the IMO’s headquarters in London, the group displayed a puppet of an oil tanker “belching a vile black carbon fog of heavy fuel oil (HFO),” the dense oil that is used to power ships around the world and is linked to respiratory diseases, particularly in children.
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
A Vote for Trump or Biden is a Vote for Ecocide!
‘Really Big’: US Supreme Court Ruling Against Norfolk Southern Seen as Rebuke to Corporate Impunity Big business lawyers are “going to be furious with this decision,” said one legal expert Opponents of unmitigated corporate power celebrated Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Norfolk Southern’s attempt to limit where companies can be sued. In a 5-4 opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonja Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the high court ruled that Pennsylvania’s “consent-by-registration” law “requiring an out-of-state firm to answer in the commonwealth any suits against it in exchange for status as a registered foreign corporation and the benefits that entails” does not violate the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.
Civil Rights/Blackliberation:
‘Decades of Racism’: Black Detroiters Face Foul Odor After Jeep Factory Expands East Canfield has seen decades of pollution and displacement due to carmakers’ expansion plans – and it’s threatened again. Bethany Howard’s neighborhood was dismantled to satisfy the US demand for automobiles. She grew up in Detroit, AKA Motor City, in the 1980s. For five generations, the Howards have lived, worked and attended school in East Canfield, a tight-knit, walkable community. She still lives in the same house her great-grandfather moved into when he left Mississippi. But the neighborhood she knew growing up no longer exists. Howard remembers the day when the bulldozers moved in. In the early 90s, when she was in fifth grade, churches and businesses and hundreds of homes were demolished, including that of her best friend
Labor:
Wabtec Train Manufacturing Workers Are on Strike Workers at the Wabtec locomotive manufacturing plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, have walked off the job. Their demands get to the heart of bigger questions about the nature of work and the role workers can play in fights like climate change. Around 6:00 p.m. on June 22, the verdict was in: this offer wasn’t good enough. Members of the UE locals overwhelmingly voted to reject the offer, and supplies were immediately taken out of Local 506’s union hall as members set up picket lines at the plant’s gates. With their rejection of Wabtec’s offer, the workers are now on strike
Economy:
Mergers and the Ever Increasing Consolidation of Wealth are Systemic to Captialism!: Warren to Regulators: Enough With Mergers Making ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’ Banks Even Bigger “The recent bank crisis underscores the urgency of strengthening the merger review process and reversing the dangerous trend of bank consolidation.” In the wake of three recent bank failures, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday urged financial regulators to promote competition rather than further consolidation in the industry and improve merger guidelines
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update June 25th to 27th
- May 2023 Existing Home Sales declined year-to-year by 20.4% (-20.4%).
- May Building Permits and Housing Starts both continued on track for their fourth consecutive quarters of year-to-year decline.
- University of Michigan’s Early-June 2023 Consumer Sentiment gained 7.9% in the month, still holding shy by 36.7% (-36.7%) of ever recovering its February 2020 Pre-Pandemic level.
- May Industrial Production declined 0.2% (-0.2%) in the month, gaining 0.2% year-to-year.
- May Real Retail Sales activity was on track for both quarterly and year-to-year contractions, consistent with patterns of contraction in the prior three quarters.
- The June FOMC paused in hiking Interest Rates, as promised, but Fed Chairman Powell indicated at least two more rate hikes are likely in coming months.
- Recent annual CPI and PPI inflation swings were tied to year-ago oil-price gyrations around the Russian Invasion of Ukraine –- May 2023 Producer Price Index (PPI) inflation dropped year-to-year to 1.09% from 11.09% in May 2022 thanks to collapsing gasoline prices.
- May 2023 Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) inflation slowed year-to-year to 4.05% from 8.58% in May 2022, with the ShadowStats Alternate CPI easing to 11.9% from 16.8% in the same period.
- Still hit by high Inflation and dropping Economic Activity, Non-Supervisory real average weekly earnings declined year—to-year by 0.9% (-0.9%) in May 2023, its 18th annual decline in the last 19 months.
- Not seasonally adjusted May 2023 Cass® Freight Index shipments declined year-to-year by a deepening 5.6% (-5.6%).
World:
Health. Welfare, and Education:
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