Daily News Digest December 22, 2023
Images of the Day:
Genocide is American as Apple Pie! Genocide has Always Been a Policy of United Staes Capitalism From the Genocide of Native Americans to Today’s Genocide in Gaza, to Defend Haliburton’s East Mediterranean Sea Oil Interests!
Manifest Destiny: Manifest destiny was a belief in the 19th-century United States that White American settlers were destined to expand across North America. It was an early expression of American imperialism in the United States of America.[3][4][5]
There were three basic tenets to the concept:[6][7]
- The inherent superiority of white Americansand their institutions
- The mission of the United Statesto redeem and remake the West in the image of the agrarian East
- An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
Pax Americana: This is a term that refers to “international peace” that is overseen by America. It’s a term that was widely used after World War II when the United States overcame Nazi forces. The term has also been used in reference to the UK and in that case is Pax Britannica. The term is Latin and translates literally to American peace or British peace, “after Pax Romana. During the 1940s, the United States constructed a system of international order that depended on preponderant US economic and military power and bipolar division of the postwar world, in the context of the Cold War.
Worldwide U.S. Military Bases 
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”
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: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, andThe 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:
Capitalism’s underlying economic base requires constant, cancer-like growth, thereby placing livable ecology at grave risk. In the era of fossil fuels, in which capitalism is deeply and indeed terminally invested, this requirement is turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. The combination of constant growth and fossil fuels has created an epic climate catastrophe that is pushing humanity and countess other species under thermal siege. Capitalism is a disorderly and amoral global economic and state system devoid of any real capacity to sustainably re-orient and de-toxify human relations with the natural environment. An ever more poisoned world dominated by capitalist imperialists and broken up into dozens and dozens of competing nation states is not rational. It is anarchic, competitive, and exterminist, so fundamentally socio-pathological that it sees the ecological destruction it generates as a source of new profit opportunities – new shipping lanes available in regions formerly covered by ice, for example. The long-term common good is perpetually trumped by the ruling investor class’s short-term bottom line under the reign of capital. And that class too invested in fossil fuels (both directly and indirectly) to permit governments under bourgeois control (whatever their democratic pretenses) to keep those resources in the ground before the extraction and burning of coal, oil, and gas pushes the planet past irreversible tipping points of runaway warming. — The Four Horsemen of the Capitalist-Imperialist Apocalypse
Videos of the Day:
Black Agenda Radio December 15, 2023
Congressional Candidate John Parker and the Gaza Relief Effort John Parker is Coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles and a candidate for a congressional seat in California’s 37th District on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. He recently returned from Egypt, where he joined the Global Conscience Convoy. The convoy was initiated by the Egyptian Syndicate of Journalists in an effort to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing. John returned home after he and three others were detained by Egyptian authorities for more than 30 hours. He joins us from Los Angeles.
Construction of the Ouanaminthe Canal in Haiti, Part 1 Dahoud Andre joins us from KOMOKODA, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti.
Fair Access to Victim Compensation in New York Fair Access to Victim Compensation in New York New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently signed the Fair Access to Victim Compensation Act, which will improve access to State victim compensation funding for Black, Brown, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers. Common Justice launched a state-wide campaign to make New York State’s victim compensation laws and policies more equitable by removing barriers victims and survivors face. Kira Shepherd, Common Justice Vice President of Organizing and Policy, and Tanvier Peart, Common Justice Director of Policy, join us from New York to explain the importance of this legislation.
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 ford 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
Biden: Remember He’s the Liberal
Patrick Lawrence: What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War? The Narrative Turns. Now What? This was the headline atop a Dec.9 commentary in The Telegraph, the farthest right of the major London dailies. The subhead elaborated the theme in yet graver terms: “Kyiv’s counteroffensive has ended in failure. This could be NATO’s Suez moment.” The piece that followed included all sorts of goodies in this line. It is not official, not yet, that Ukraine’s grand counteroffensive, the great Russophobic hope of the Zelensky and Biden regimes earlier this year, has proven a bust and that defeat is in the offing. The closest we have to such an admission came from Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this month, when the Ukrainian president declared that the counteroffensive “did not achieve the desired results.” I loved that moment, to be honest. It reminded me of Emperor Hirohito’s famous declaration on August 15, 1945, when he announced the surrender on Japanese radio. “The war,” he told his desperate subjects, “has not necessarily progressed to our advantage.”
The First Amendment Right ‘to petition the Government for a redress of grievances’ is Under Attack!: A Federal Court Will Decide Whether Atlanta Voters Could Have a Say on Cop City This could be a test case for citizen ballot initiatives in Atlanta, and possibly across the state. In Atlanta, for a citizen ballot initiative to be voted on in a general election, petition gatherers must collect signatures equivalent to 15 percent of active registered Atlanta voters within 60 days. On June 21, 2023, after delays imposed by the city, Atlanta residents could begin gathering signatures. But DeKalb County residents — where Cop City will be built — would not be able to gather signatures unless they were chaperoned by a Fulton County resident. DeKalb residents sued, and on July 27, 2023, a district court issued an injunction allowing them to collect signatures. Critically, the court also reset the clock, allowing collection of signatures beyond the original 60 days, adopting the Vote to Stop Cop City argument that the residency restriction significantly hampered constitutionally protected political expression. The City of Atlanta then appealed the injunction to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. On December 14, the Eleventh Circuit considered questions that could throw the entire referendum effort into jeopardy. Early next year, the court could issue a ruling altering which signatures — if any — can be counted.
U.S. Funded Palestinian Genocide:
Red Sea Attacks: Imperialists Protect Profits, and Permit Israel to Pulverise Palestine With the IDF continuing to blast Gaza into bloodied rubble, Houthi militants (who control the West of Yemen) have retaliated by launching missiles at Israel and targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea. In response, a coalition of 10 countries, led by the US, have pledged to use their naval might to protect vessels along this key trade route. We see how swiftly the ‘international community’ takes action when capitalist profits and proxies are threatened, and how little Palestinian lives factor into their cynical calculations.
‘Cashing in on Genocide’: Israeli Firm Pitches Beachfront Real Estate in Leveled Gaza “A house on the beach is not a dream,” reads an advertisement from a company notorious for building in the occupied West Bank. “A house on the beach is not a dream,” reads an advertisement from a company notorious for building in the occupied West Bank. Palestine defenders this week condemned a proposal by an Israeli real estate developer specializing in the construction of illegal settlements to build beachfront homes for Jewish colonists over the bombed-out ruins of Gaza. “A house on the beach is not a dream,” reads an advertisement published by Harey Zahav—an Israeli company notorious for building settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank—that drew international attention following last week’s Practical Preparation for Gaza Settlement Conference in Tel Aviv.
Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency As Israel excels in massacring civilians and destroying Gaza’s infrastructure, its ground offensive against Hamas is becoming a quagmire. Confronted with an endless list of well-documented Israeli war crimes, the Biden administration has responded with overwhelming support for a genocidal war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza. For more than two months, the White House has engaged in a public campaign of gaslighting as it has feigned concern over the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents while simultaneously maintaining the flow of weapons, intelligence, and political cover to an Israeli regime that has made clear its intent to “flatten” Gaza and force its intentionally dehumanized survivors into an ever-shrinking killing cage.
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’!
So long, and Thanks For All The Hamburgers It’s not true that humanity is committing suicide, as exemplified by the COP28 farce of a climate summit. The world’s industrialists and financiers are committing humanity to ecocide. More than ever, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Death by capitalism. That phrase has a certain catchy feeling to it. But it’s no joke, is it? No, no joke at all. No joke, and no vote. You didn’t get a vote on whether greenhouse gas emissions should continue at a pace to unleash catastrophically rising seas, unbearable heat, droughts, environmental destruction and an increasingly erratic climate in a cascade of cause and effect that will trigger still more climatic instability. The world’s capitalists — in particular, those who control and profit from fossil fuel corporations — have voted, did vote and will continue to vote for profits today and indifference to human and animal life tomorrow. Hurray! The financial industry mentality has always been to squeeze every dollar out of a stone today and the hell with tomorrow. The fossil fuel industry mentality is much the same. Tomorrow increasingly looks like it will be hell. Tomorrow may not come for a few more decades, perhaps, but it does seem that tomorrow will arrive and it won’t be a pleasant time.
How Big Oil is Taking us for a Fossil-Fuelized Ride: With the World the Hottest in 125,00 Years, we’re being Gaslighted A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn’t rank it first. Companies like ExxonMobil and countries like Saudi Arabia have tried since the 1990s to gaslight the public into thinking climate change was either a total fantasy or that the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum wasn’t causing it. Having lost that battle, the fossil-fuel lobbyists have now fallen back on Plan B. They want to convince you that Big Oil is itself swinging into action in a major way to transition to — yes! — green energy.
Would You Drink Toilet Water? California Approves Wastewater for Human Consumption Regulators approve rules to let agencies recycle wastewater into drinking water for homes, schools and businesses When a toilet is flushed in California, the water can end up in a lot of places: an ice-skating rink in Ontario, ski slopes around Lake Tahoe, farmland in the central valley. And – coming soon – kitchen faucets. California regulators on Tuesday approved rules to let water agencies recycle wastewater and put it into the pipes that carry drinking water to homes, schools and businesses.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
· Southern Human Rights Organizing and the Amazon Workers’ Struggle
· Climate Profiteers Exploit Somali Suffering
· From Attica to Gaza, Why the Settler Colony Kills its Own
· Teaching Hatred and Normalizing Violence Against Palestinians
· Murder Thy Neighbor A Recap of Mass Shootings in 2023: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective
· Africa’s role in Palestinian Liberation–an Interview with Salim Vally
· COP28 Summit Concludes with Contradictory Agreement
Labor:
Biden Is Paying Growers to Replace Farmworkers With Bracero Contract Labor Under the new visa pilot program, the administration is prioritizing growers’ profits over farmworkers’ rights. On September 22, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would begin paying growers to use the notorious H-2A contract foreign labor (or guestworker) program. Tapping into $65 million from the American Rescue Act, the USDA will pay between $25,000 and $2 million per application to defray the expenses of recruiting migrant workers from three Central American countries — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — transporting them to the U.S., housing and feeding them while they’re here, and even subsidizing part of their wages. Labor contractors, who compete with each other to sell migrant farm labor to growers at low wages, will be eligible as well as growers themselves.
Economy:
“Developing Countries” are Trapped in a New Debt Crisis : How Can This be Explained? The latest World Bank report on the debts of “developing countries”, published on December 13, 2023 [1], reveals an alarming fact: in 2022, developing countries as a whole spent a record US$ 443.5 billion to pay for their external public debt. The 75 low-income nations that are eligible for loans from the International Development Association (IDA), a World Bank organization that provides loans to the world’s poorest nations, paid a record US$ 88.9 billion to its creditors in the same year, 2022. These 75 nations have an unprecedented total external debt of US$ 1,100 billion, which is more than twice as much as it was in 2012. As per the press release from the World Bank, the nations in question experienced a 134% increase in their foreign debt between 2012 and 2022, which was greater than the 53% increase in their gross national income (GNI).
Since the 2008 Crash, The 1%’s Government has Bailled Out Wall Street! Not Main Street! The 1%’s Government is in the Process of Pauperizing Main Street! (R.S.)
These Are the Bank Bailout Charts the Fed Hopes You’ll Never See in One Place Jerome Powell became the Chairman of the Federal Reserve on February 5, 2018 after being nominated by then President Donald Trump and passing his Senate confirmation. Powell was sworn in again on May 23, 2022 for a second term as Chair. His second term runs until May 15, 2026. Unlike most Fed Chairs, Powell has no economics degree. He has a law degree from Georgetown University. For more background on Powell, see our May 18, 2020 article: The Fed’s Chair and Vice Chair Got Rich at Carlyle Group, a Private Equity Fund with a String of Bankruptcies and Job Losses.
World:
Argentina: The Movement Against Milei has Begun
The far-right president’s first economic measures, announced one week ago, have been to devalue the peso by over 100 percent and remove state subsidies from fuel, transport, water and electricity. This sent prices soaring overnight, by as much as double in the case of food and fuel. This was on top of almost 160 percent inflation year on year. He also announced layoffs of all public employees with less than a year of seniority, the cancelling of all pending public infrastructure works, and that the government would sign no new contracts for future public works. These measures unload the accumulated crisis of Argentine capitalism onto the shoulders of the working class and poor, and fall totally in favour of big business (with bailout of the debts for importing companies, for example). Milei’s security minister, Patricia Bullrich, announced an “anti-picketing” and anti-protest security protocol, empowering federal forces to repress protests that block traffic routes, and the persecution of the groups that organise them, without a judge’s order. This crackdown on basic democratic rights, including the right to strike, is meant to cow the movement that will inevitably follow Milei’s attacks on the working class. Yesterday, 20 December, came the first mass protests against Milei’s government, with left parties, social organisations, and militant sectors of the trade unions marching on the anniversary of the ‘Argentinazo’, the revolutionary social explosion of 2001, which at its peak forced out three successive presidents in a single week. The marches occurred across the country in defiance of Bullrich’s protocol and police repression.Health, Education, 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