Daily News Digest August 10, 2023
At this time, in the history of the planet, all life now threatened with extinction! To understand this moment, we have to recognise that there is an existential struggle on both sides. While environmental scientists and activists fight for the very survival of the habitable planet, the fossil fuel, meat and internal combustion industries are fighting for their economic survival. Either they are regulated out of existence or human society across much of the world will fail. We cannot all win: either these industries survive or we do. But we can all lose, because, eventually, they will go down with the rest of us. — George Monibot, Running Amoc
Global warming is demonstrating that capitalism is hell bent, in its death agongy, on taking all life with it! Goege Monibot has has made it clear! It’s Ceither capitaliam goes in the dustbin of history, or we all go! In the present world, the rights of the capitalists to make a profit are in direct conflict with our basic rights! In this sense, the capitalist system has become a threat to humanity! Jefferson’s words, from the Declaration of Independence, that human rights are unalienable, mean that these rights can never be superseded. At all points of conflict the rights of humanity to survive must supersede the right of the few to make a profit. The right to a safe environment is an unalienable human right! Since environmental illness and destruction are a global concern, it requires all of humanity to act collectively, in our overall interests for our survival as a species, to correct the problem and to remove the obstacle of capitalism. It requires a society where humanity has social, economic, and political control over the entire environment. Such a society, a socialist society, is needed to ensure that all decisions affecting the environment are under the democratic control of humankind so that the production of goods will be done for the needs and survival of humanity instead of the production and the destruction of humanity and other species for profit.With common ownership of the means of production, and common control and protection of all property and wealth, science and society will be in harmony with the ecosystem and humanity’s future. With these goals we can begin to build a more effective environmental movement. As we continue to organize against capitalism and its destructive course, we can and will transform the world! If socialist cannot unite to oppose capitalism and organize the working class of the world to protect life itself, Then who will? Then it is over! What is needed, in the words of Jeremy Corbyn, is a Green Industrial Revolution! Rosa Luxenburg, after WWI, raised the slogan: Socialism or Barbarism! The slogan for to today is Ecosocialism or Ecocide!
Images of the Day:
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:
The world’s biggest agribusiness corporations made more in billion-dollar profits since 2020 than the amount that the UN estimates could cover the basic needs of the world’s most vulnerable, a new report has found, exposing rampant profiteering from the war in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic. The 20 corporations – the biggest in the sectors of grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy – delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the financial years 2020 and 2021, while the UN estimates a smaller figure, $51.5 billion, would be enough to provide food, shelter —and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people.[1] — Unchecked, Unregulated, Unaccountable: How Big Agribusiness Corporations Get Rich Amid Crisis
“Today’s industrial farming practices have given viruses billions more spins at pandemic roulette. How can we stop the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place? Whenever possible, treat the cause. The largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world, the American Public Health Association, has called for a moratorium on factory farming for nearly two decades. Indeed, factory farms are a public health menace. In addition to discontinuing the intensive confinement practices of animal agriculture, we should continue to research, develop, and invest in innovative plant-based and cultivated meat technologies to move away from raising billions of feathered and curly-tailed test tubes for viruses with pandemic potential to mutate within.” — Return to Smal Farms!” “How can we stop the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place? If there is one concept to draw from my work on preventing and reversing chronic disease, it is to treat the cause whenever possible. We need to give these animals raised for meat and eggs, by the billions, more breathing room. They are the ones who could use some social distancing. To lower our risk of generating increasingly dangerous farmed animal flu viruses, the global meat and egg industries must reverse course away from greater intensification. But how? As suggested in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, by “replacing large industrial units with smaller [farms] with lower stocking densities,” 73 potentially resulting in less stress, less disease susceptibility, less intense infectious contact, and smaller infectious loads.” — Primary Pandemic Prevention: Factory Farms Cause Pandemics!
Jacques Yves Cousteau: The sea is the universal sewer. . . . Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. — Jacques Yves Cousteau
Podcasts/Vidoes of the Day:
One of Many Ways to Begin to End Global Warming: Expose ‘Greenwashing’ — Tax the Polluters 100%!
After World War II Rosa Luxenburg Coined the Slogan: ‘S0cialism or Barbaism’! Now the Slogan Should Be: ‘Ecosocialism or Ecocide’!
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%!
The Eco Collapse We Were Warned About Has Begun In 2023, different climatic anomalies have been recorded that set new historical records in the tragic progression of climate change at the global level. Thus, in June, the surface temperature in the North Atlantic reached the maximum increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius with respect to preindustrial values. In a similar direction – although in lower values – the average temperature of the seas at the global level increased. On the other hand, the retraction of Antarctic ice reached a new limit, reaching the historical decrease of 2016, but several months earlier in the middle of the cold season. The combination of these records has led scientists who follow these processes to warn of the danger of a profound change in the currents that regulate temperature and life in the oceans and globally. The heat waves recorded on the coasts of a large part of the world – in Ireland, Mexico, Ecuador, Japan, Mauritania, and Iceland – may, in turn, be proof of this.
A Record 15 Billion-Dollar Disasters Have Hit US So Far This Year: NOAA (And Counting) The United States has already endured 15 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this year, underscoring the dangers of and need for humanity to combat the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency. The record pace of pricey extreme weather was announced Tuesday as part of the findings in the latest monthly U.S. climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since recordkeeping began in 1980, the U.S. has experienced 363 weather and climate disasters with damages hitting $1 billion, with a consumer price index (CPI) adjustment to 023, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The total cost of those events topped $2.59 trillion.
Two Dead and Hundreds Of Thousands Without Power as Storm Hits Eastern US Across the US, more than 1,700 flights were canceled and nearly 9,000 were delayed, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. . . . Golf-ball sized hail was reported in Virginia, and a flash-flood warning was put out in Maryland, according to the National Weather Service. The Knoxville utilities board said damage across its service area in Tennessee was “widespread and extensive”. In all, more than 29 million people were under tornado watches Monday. But only one was reported – about 30 miles south of Syracuse, New York. “This does look to be one of the most impactful severe weather events across the mid-Atlantic that we have had in some time,” NWS meteorologist Chris Strong said in a briefing live-streamed on Facebook.
Fears Over Antarctic Sea Ice s Yearly Ozone Layer Hole Forms ‘Very Early’ Experts say larger-than-normal hole could cause further warming of Southern Ocean and heighten damaging effects of 2022 Tonga volcano eruption The hole in the ozone layer has begun to form early this year, prompting warnings that a larger-than-average hole may further warm the Southern Ocean while the level of Antarctic sea ice is at a record low.
United States:
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!
Partick Lawrence: The Media Monopoly: Book Review: Journalists and Their Shadows Part memoir, part social history, Journalists and Their Shadows captures the deplorable state of the American media in our time–recording its deterioration, its moments of crisis and ultimately, its transformation as seen through the eyes of a journalist engaged at its very heart through all its phases. The press had a bad Cold War, Patrick Lawrence contends, and never recovered from it, having never acknowledged its errors and so unable to learn from them. Its dysfunctional relationship with the national security state today is strikingly reminiscent of how it was in the Cold War’s earliest days. With remarkable fidelity, all the old errors are being repeated. As a result, the mainstream American media have entered into a period of profound transformation, in the course of which independent media are emerging as the profession’s most dynamic sector–and represent, indeed, the promise of a brilliant future. A weave of three elements, Lawrence’s book offers a searing cultural and political critique, punctuated by the kind of piquant detail only insiders can provide. He also makes the case for a way forward–an optimistic case based on the vitality now apparent among independent media. Here, too, he is at home, providing the book’s most original coverage of this brave new world. He draws upon many years in the profession, a multitude of mainstream outlets ranging from his decades as foreign correspondent for the venerable International Herald Tribune to his work now as a columnist for a similar wide range of alternative news outlets such as Counterpunch, Consortium News et al. Shadows probes the psychological dilemma that must be understood if we are to address the current crisis. Journalists in our time are divided within themselves–driven to meet thoroughly professional but ideologically conformist standards, but on the other, subliminally struggling to breach the barriers that preclude the truths they know should be conveyed. This latter, as Jung has put it, is the journalist’s shadow. Shadows’ case for the reintegration of the divided journalist is striking and original. This record of the American media’s increasingly shabby betrayal of the public trust sheds light on why the American public thought and thinks the way it does, how it has become aware that the truth it seeks is absent, and where and how it may yet be able to ferret it out. Here is a guide to the future, in fact, of journalism itself.
Civil Rights/Blackliberation:
Labor:
11,000 LA City Workers Strike After City Engaged in Bad Faith Bargaining LA city workers join hotel employees, Hollywood actors, and TV and movie writers in “hot labor summer” strikes. More than 11,000 workers for the city of Los Angeles are joining hotel employees, Hollywood actors, and TV and movie writers who have been striking this summer for higher wages and better working conditions. “When bosses refuse to listen to demands, workers WILL shut things down,” Mary Kay Henry, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said on Twitter. Los Angeles public employees, including sanitation workers, are participating in the one-day strike in hopes of “shut[ting]down the city of Los Angeles,” said David Green, SEIU Local 721 executive director and president. SEIU Local 721 represents more than 98,000 county and city workers across Southern California.
Economy:
Jamie Dimon Faces an Uphill Battle Convincing a Jury He Didn’t Know that Child Sex-Trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, Was Financing His Operation Out of JPMorgan Jamie Dimon is between a rock and a hard place. He is either going to have to convince a jury come October that he was left in the dark by the bank’s general counsel, his compliance and money laundering executives, and the heads of his investment bank and asset and wealth division about the fact that notorious child molester Jeffrey Epstein was a client at the bank for more than a decade – which would make Dimon sound so isolated as to be unfit to be running the bank – or Dimon is going to have to admit that he lied under oath in his federal court deposition. Neither is a comfortable proposition to be facing for a jury trial currently scheduled for October 23. JPMorgan Chase is currently facing off against three federal lawsuits before Judge Jed Rakoff in the Southern District of New York that charge the bank with facilitating Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, which included dozens of underage school girls. One lawsuit was brought by Epstein’s victims; another by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands where Epstein owned an island compound; and a third by shareholders of the bank, which name the bank, Dimon, another bank executive and specific Board Members as defendants.
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
Without National Health Care: More People Die Young in US Due to Health Care and Welfare Cuts, Study Finds By the time COVID-19 hit, about 600,000 more people in the U.S. were dying each year compared to its peer nations. . . . In other words, on average one out of every two deaths under the age of 65 in the U.S. would be averted in countries like Australia, Germany, Japan or Portugal. By the time COVID-19 hit, about 600,000 more people in the U.S. were dying each year than scientists would expect if mortality rates were equal to those of peer nations. COVID-19 then sent the number of “excess deaths” that exceed expected mortality rates skyrocketing. In other words, on average one out of every two deaths under the age of 65 in the U.S. would be averted in countries like Australia, Germany, Japan or Portugal. By the time COVID-19 hit, about 600,000 more people in the U.S. were dying each year than scientists would expect if mortality rates were equal to those of peer nations. COVID-19 then sent the number of “excess deaths” that exceed expected mortality rates skyrocketing.