Daily News Digest July 13, 2023
Image of the Day:
Bendib:Affirmative Reaction
Capitalism is Now a Worldwide Threat to Humanity! It is on the Fast Track to Global Warming and/or Nuclear War Catastrophes!
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:
A vote for the Defense Budget is a vote for Ecocide!: Why the Pentagon Is the World’s Biggest Single Greenhouse Gas Emitter A new book explains how the US military came to consume more fossil fuels than most countries—and what we can do about it.
Thousands of years ago, southern Italy experienced a shift in climate, becoming increasingly open and arid, said Riel-Salvatore. Neanderthals living there faced a stark choice of adapting or dying out. The evidence suggests they began using darts or arrows to hunt smaller game to supplement the increasingly scarce larger mammals they traditionally hunted. “The fact that Neanderthals could adapt to new conditions and innovate shows they are culturally similar to us,” he said. “Biologically they are also similar. I believe they were a subspecies of human but not a different species.” The powerfully built Neanderthals were first discovered in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856. Exactly who they were, how they lived and why they vanished remains unclear. Research shows they contributed between 1 and 4 percent of their genetic material to the people of Asia and Europe. Riel-Salvatore rejects the theory that they were exterminated by modern humans. Homo sapiens might simply have existed in larger groups and had slightly higher birthrates, he said. “It is likely that Neanderthals were absorbed by modern humans,” he said. “My research suggests that they were a different kind of human, but humans nonetheless. We are more brothers than distant cousins.” — Neanderthals More Advanced Than Previously Thought: They Innovated, Adapted Like Modern Humans, Research Shows
The Black Hole of the Pentagon Budget: The Pentagon failed its fifth budget audit in 2022 and was unable to account for more than half of its assets, or more than $3 trillion. According to a CBS News report, defense contractors overcharged the Defense Department by nearly 40-50%; and according to the Office of the Inspector General for the Defense Department, overcharging sometimes reached more than 4,000%. The $886 billion budget request for FY2024 is the highest ever sought. — Ellen Brown: The Federal Debt Trap: Issues and Possible Solutions
Podcasts/Vidoes of the Day:
[Podcast] Marx or Graeber? A reply to ‘The Dawn of Everything’
Black Agenda Radio July 7, 2023 with Margaret Kimberley
Glen Ford on the End of Affirmative Action
New Documents Link CIA to Medical Torture of Indigenous Children and Black Prisoners
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%!
World’s Oceans Changing Colour Due to Climate Breakdown, Study Suggests The sea is becoming greener due to changes in plankton populations, analysis of Nasa images finds Earth’s oceans are changing colour and climate breakdown is probably to blame, according to research. The deep blue sea is actually becoming steadily greener over time, according to the study, with areas in the low latitudes near the equator especially affected. “The reason we care about this is not because we care about the colour, but because the colour is a reflection of the changes in the state of the ecosystem,” said BB Cael, a scientist at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton and author of the study published in Nature.
Pesticides From Farming Leach Into World’s Waterways at Rate of 710 Tonnes A Year, UN Research Shows Safe levels exceeded in 13,000km of rivers globally with ingredients potentially degrading into more persistent substances
Vermont Capital Cut Off by Floodwaters As Dam Threatens to Overflow Deadly deluge has saturated parts of New England and New York, while the south and west are under worsening heatwave A Vermont reservoir on Tuesday risked overwhelming a dam protecting the state’s capital and exacerbating “catastrophic” flooding that has already shut roadways leading out of town and trapped some residents in their homes.
Global Trade Protections Don’t Cover 900+ At-Risk Plant, Animal Species “Our work identifies hundreds of species—including 370 critically endangered and endangered species—in need of protections, and we also know data gaps mean the true figure could be much higher,” said a study co-author. New research identifying the hundreds of at-risk plant and animal species that lack international trade protections under a decades-old treaty led experts to call for key biodiversity-saving reforms on Tuesday. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) entered into force in 1975 and there are now 184 parties to the agreement, which currently protects nearly 41,000 species—including over 6,600 animals and 34,300 plants—from overexploitation.
Manchin Fumes as Federal Court Halts Mountain Valley Pipeline Construction One climate advocate applauded the court for giving communities “a measure of reprieve” by stopping construction of the pipeline in Jefferson National Forest. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Monday temporarily blocked the construction of a section of the Mountain Valley Pipeline that runs through Jefferson National Forest, pending a conservation group’s petition to review the federal government’s authorization of the fossil fuel infrastructure development. “Time and time again, Mountain Valley has tried to force its dangerous pipeline through the Jefferson National Forest, devastating communities in its wake and racking up violations,” Ben Tettlebaum, director and senior staff attorney at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement. “We’re grateful that the court has given those communities a measure of reprieve by hitting the brakes on construction across our public lands, sparing them from further irreversible damage while this important case proceeds.”
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!
Ellen Brown: The Federal Debt Trap: Issues and Possible Solutions “Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy,” wrote the New York Times Editorial Board in a July 7 opinion piece, “the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.” Titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” the editorial observes that over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), annual federal budget deficits will average around $2 trillion per year. By 2029, just the interest on the debt is projected to exceed the national defense budget, which currently eats up over half of the federal discretionary budget. In 2029, net interest on the debt is projected to total $1.07 trillion, while defense spending is projected at $1.04 trillion. By 2033, says the CBO, interest payments will reach a sum equal to 3.6 percent of the nation’s economic output.
U.S. Cluster Bombs to Ukraine: An Act of Desperation Following months of debate, the Biden administration has decided to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions, weapons that more than 120 countries have pledged not to use because of the threat to innocent civilians. Most NATO members favor the banning of cluster munitions. A huge area of Ukraine is already contaminated with explosive objects. The United Nations convention that banned the use of cluster munitions was signed in 2008, but three of the most militarized nations in the world refused to sign: the United States, Russia, and Israel. The United States used these munitions against Iraq in 2003, and supplied them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Israel violated understandings with the United States and used cluster munitions against Palestinians. Russia has used them extensively in Ukraine with substantial civilian fatalities and casualties.
Dwight Was Right: Congress Must Say No to Military Contractors The world Eisenhower warned about has materialized. We need more members of Congress to stand up to the arms industry and fight for social investments instead. Last month, a lone member of Congress took a stand against a powerful industry that shamelessly extracts billions of tax dollars from the U.S. government.
Kids Awaiting Foster Care Placement Are Being “Housed” in Jails and Offices More than half the states in the U.S. have seen a decline in the number of licensed foster homes since 2021. By age 17, more than half of youth who are removed from their homes will have an encounter with the legal system through arrest, conviction or detention. Critics describe this process as the foster-care-to-prison-pipeline. But for many foster children, the pipeline is activated the moment they enter care. This is because child welfare authorities in several states are placing kids in juvenile detention facilities — as well as in hotels, casinos and offices — due to a shortage of foster homes. They literally have not found other places to send them.
Civil Rights/Blackliberation:
Labor:
The SAG-AFTRA Strike and the Path Of Global Class Struggle The shutdown of major portions of the entertainment industry in the US, in the first “double strike” by writers and actors since 1960, has enormous implications. If a strike by the 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) proceeds Wednesday night, it will be one of the largest strikes in the US in decades, and further deepen the resurgent global class struggle. Workers must reject the desperate, last-minute efforts of the corporations to bring in federal mediators and strangle strike action, and any attempt by the union to announce another delay or sell-out.
Economy:
The Cost Of Living and Profits The latest employment report from the OECD is a real eye-opener on the cost of living crisis and whether wage rises or profit rises have been the biggest contributor to the rise in inflation. On wages, the OECD finds that real wages have fallen an average 3.8% in the last year in the OECD. “Labour markets have pushed up nominal wages, but less so than inflation, leading to a fall in real wages in almost all industries and OECD countries.” The falls vary considerably for each OECD country. The biggest falls have been in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, where energy prices rose the most from the loss of Russian oil and gas, while the US fall is one of the lowest as energy prices, although rising, have not shot up as much. Europe has had to switch from pipeline energy from Russia to much more expensive liquid natural gas (LNG) deliveries by shipping.
Patrick Lawrence: A Yellen in the China Shop Given where the Biden regime sets the bar for its trans–Pacific statecraft these days, you have to wonder whether they chant “Limbo lower now!” as they send off the next official on one of these pointless demarches. Janet Yellen did an excellent job during her just-completed four-day visit to Beijing, we are now able to read in the corporate press. The Treasury secretary managed not to break any more China in the China shop. This counts as a diplomatic success for Americans. Given where the Biden regime sets the bar for its trans–Pacific statecraft these days, you have to wonder whether they chant “Limbo lower now!” as they send off the next official on one of these pointless demarches. Yellen’s trans–Pacific overture was another in a long line of such journeys the Biden regime’s top officials have made since they made a mess of Sino–American relations as soon as they took office. There seem to be only two ways these adventures can come out: Either it ends in disaster or nothing gets done. Yellen chose the latter course, and let us be satisfied: Avoiding another diplomatic breach is the best we can hope for from these people.
World:
Britain: Rising Discontent and Social Explosions — Riots or Revolution? Riots in France, and previously in Ely, Wales, reveal the explosive situation building up internationally and in Britain. Society is a tinderbox, ready to go up in flames. Marxist leadership is needed to channel this anger towards revolution. Lenin once wrote an article entitled ‘inflammable material in world politics’. This description accurately applies everywhere today, including in Britain. Last month was the hottest June on record for the country. These high temperatures are not confined to the UK’s weather system, however, but are equally applicable to the social climate. France has witnessed massive upheavals recently, following the murder of a 17-year-old youth of Algerian background at the hands of the police.
‘Day of Disruption’: Tens of Thousands of Israelis Protest Imminent ‘Judicial Coup’ “We are going to show them that the power of the people is stronger than that of the people in power,” said one demonstrator. At least tens of thousands of Israelis on Tuesday took to the streets, shutting down highways, and marching through the country’s main international airport in a “day of disruption” after the nation’s far-right governing coalition advanced a deeply controversial overhaul of the legal system critics condemn as a “judicial coup.” Demonstrators thronged the highways leading to cities including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, pitching tents, blocking roadways, and hanging banners from overpasses.
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