Daily News Digest October 13, 2023
Images of the Day:
U.S. Imperialism Israel has the Rigkt to Self-Defense The Biden administration seems to have given Israel a green flag to continue this brutal set of attacks on Palestinians across Palestine, from Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza and elsewhere.
Carlos Latuff: This is a cartoon I made in 2008! Nothing has changed. Palestinians of Gaza continue to be massacred by Israel, with support of the US, the complicity of Arab rulers and the silence of the world.
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!
Qu0te of te Day:
Sequence: Hamas warned the Israeli government about such interventions on October 1. This was understood to be a Hamas red line. Three days later dozens of intentionally provocative settlers forced their way into the mosque complex—this while thousands more had been touring the complex since Hamas issued its October 1 warning. So far as I have been able to find, accounts of these events have appeared only in Al Jazeera and other non–Western. publica-tions. You will search long and fruitlessly in Western media to discover the “why” of the Hamas offensive, the motive. The al–Aqsa events may have lit the fuse, but if this is so, it is doubtful they alone explain the Hamas attacks. There are three-quarters of a century to take into account—the ad hoc persecutions and harassments, the confiscations of land, the raids on Palestinian towns, the arrests and murders—and altogether the punishing psychological humiliation of a people for 75 years. Gazans are as aware as anyone that Israel now has the most extreme-right government in its history. Even from a distance it looks as if the lines of the apartheid state will be drawn ever more sharply. You would not believe it, but against this indefensible record, the Hamas offensive is put down as “unprovoked”—this favored new term the U.S. and its Western allies deploy to explain themselves out of this or that picture. Russia was famously unprovoked when it intervened in Ukraine last year. China is unprovoked as it builds its military and braces for a conflict across the Taiwan Strait. And now Hamas joins the list. This may be ridiculous, but we cannot call it surprising. America has never acted abroad but in the name of the highest principles. It has, since 1776, always been the innocent party—the provoked, not the provoking. — Patrick Lawrence: ‘Innocent Israelis’
Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great staffs, both of the old parties have ganged aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them in martialling [sic] to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. Unhampered by tradition, uncorrupted by power, undismayed by the magnitude of the task, the new party offers itself as the instrument of the people, to sweep away old abuses, to build a new and nobler government. This declaration is our covenant with the people and we hereby bind the party and its candidates with this [signation?] to the pledges made there herein. With all my heart and soul, with every particle of high purpose that is within me, I pledge you my word to do everything I can to put every particle of courage, of common sense, and of strength that I have at your disposal, and to endeavor so far as strength has given me to live up to the obligations you have put upon me and to endeavor to carry out in te interest of our whole people the policies to which you have today solemnly dedicated yourselves in the name of the millions of men and women for whom you speak. — Theodore Roosevelt
Since 9/11, we’ve spent more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. The average American pays over $2300 a year in taxes to support the military, half of which goes to military contractors. Even with America’s military might spread thin, the war drums continue to sound as the Pentagon polices the rest of the world with counterterror activities in 85 countries. The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point. Aided and abetted by the U.S government, the American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. Although the U.S. constitutes barely 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 40% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 10 biggest spending nations combined. —Guns For Hire: America’s Crisis State Goes Global
Videos of the Day:
Report from Gaza: Two Palestinians Describe “Horror” on 6th Day of Israel Bombing Besieged Enclave
Environment:
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 is Ecoscialism or Ecocide!
How “Dumb Money” Nukes Boil & Bankrupt The Earth No new U.S. reactors, big or small, fission or fusion will be built here within at least the next five years…more like ten. Those that try will do nothing but divert resources away from the Solartopian technologies needed to save the Earth. They’ll also lose big money for their billionaire backers and the taxpayers who’ll be forced to bail them out. There are now 93 large uninsured light-water reactors licensed for operation in the US. One more– Georgia’s Vogtle #4– may open within the next year or so. All of them emit radioactive Carbon-14. They release additional greenhouse gasses through the process of mining, milling and enriching uranium-based fuel, as well as attempting to store it once it’s become radioactive waste. All commercial reactors burn at ~570 degrees Fahrenheit, warming the planet on their own.
How Not to Feed a Hungry Planet Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South. The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain exports, and fertilizer prices have surged because of trade sanctions on Russia, the world’s leading fertilizer exporter. Amid these challenges, some organizations are renewing calls for a second Green Revolution, echoing the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of supposedly high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice into developing countries, along with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold. But anyone concerned with food production should be careful what they wish for. In recent years, a wave of new analysis has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.
The Brockovich Report: One Of The Biggest Ways We Can Create A Future Free of Contamination Nothing could be more important to our future than our land, water, and air. Contamination of food and water threatens our health, our environment, and our well-being. Agricultural runoff is the leading cause of water pollution in the U.S, and the picture is bleak. A 2022 report from the Environmental Integrity Project portrays an agricultural industry that has polluted water and evaded accountability for the better part of half a century. Pollution sources include fertilizer runoff from cropland and manure runoff from factory farms, fouling waterways with pesticides, phosphorus, nitrogen, and fecal bacteria. The EPA’s Office of Inspector General concluded in a 2021 report that harmful algal blooms are a “major problem throughout the United States… that can sicken people and kill animals; create oxygen-poor zones in rivers and lakes, making them unsuited for aquatic life; raise treatment costs for drinking water; cause economic hardship for industries that depend on clean water; and negatively impact recreational activities,” But the EPA still lacks a strategy for addressing harmful algal blooms. Industrial agriculture surpassed backyard and small, family farming in the mid-20th century, as a means to feed millions of Americans. The average farm size in 2021 was about 445 acres and we have almost 900 million total acres of farmland nationwide.
Agribusiness/Factory Farms — Environmental Hazards! Over 90% of the food we eat are Factory Farmed! What are the Costs?
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By their very size, they enhase the global warming of the the Earth
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Lately, Facory Farms are Responsible for all of the plague of Pandemics. US Capitalism Ignores Its’ Own Science for Two Decades!
From: The United States National Center for Biotechnology Information of the Institue of Health’s Essay Primary Pandemic Prevention: Factory Farms Cause Pandemics!
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
Guns For Hire: America’s Crisis State Goes Global . . . From being a nation in a permanent state of emergency, America’s crisis state has gone global. The military industrial complex, which has established itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems (at taxpayer expense, of course), has mired the nation in endless wars abroad waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire. Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought—lock, stock and barrel—and made to dance to the tune of the police state, a.k.a. the Deep State, a.k.a. the military industrial complex, a.k.a. the surveillance state complex. . . . Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, the retired five-star Army general-turned-president who warned against the disastrous rise of misplaced power by the military industrial complex was complicit in contributing to the build-up of the military’s role in dictating national and international policy. The Biden Administration’s response to the latest carnage in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war merely plays into the hands of a salivating military industrial complex for whom war is merely a means to a larger profit margin. . . . The United States has been at war for all but 15 years in its 247-year history.
Corporate Media Outlets Are Obscuring Settler Colonialism in Their Gaza Coverage It is impossible to accurately grasp the current situation without discussing the concept of settler colonialism. Much of the mainstream U.S. coverage of the recent Hamas attacks in Israel and Israel’s escalating war on Gaza — such as former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Steven Erlanger’s October 9 analysis piece or NPR reporter Juliana Kim’s story of the same day — focused heavily on the Israeli security establishment’s alleged failures of anticipation or comprehension vis-á-vis Hamas. Other coverage highlighted the suffering of Palestinians living under bombardment in Gaza and Israelis attacked at a music festival in southern Israel, among many other angles. What all of this coverage lacked, however, was any engagement with a key concept that lies at the center of the analysis provided by many critical scholars and activists whose voices are often excluded from establishment media narratives: the concept of settler colonialism.
Black Liberation/Civile Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
Wall Street Banksters:
Janet Yellen’s Treasury Department Hires 5-Count Felon JPMorgan Chase to Look for Fraud Immediately upon departing her post as Chair of the Federal Reserve, but prior to getting the nod from the Biden administration to become U.S. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen engaged in what the courageous reporter at ProPublica, Jesse Eisinger, called a “two-fisted money grab from banks.” Yellen raked in more than $7 million in speaking fees with the bulk of that coming from Wall Street banks and trading houses, including JPMorgan Chase. In a Tweet, Eisinger said: “This is corruption, but isn’t called that because it’s so quotidian.” Now there is the appearance that a quid pro quo is coming full circle. According to a press release posted on JPMorgan Chase’s website, “it has been designated by the United States Treasury Department under a financial agency agreement to provide account validation services for federal government agencies” in order to ensure “Treasury’s commitment to payment integrity and the reduction of improper payments.”
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