Daily News Digest January 30, 2024
Images of the Day:
Genocide In Gaza— Capitalsm’s Non-Action
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:
From Cuba’s Old American Cars and the Path Forward on Degrowth A move towards a sustainable, less disposable economy that eschews luxury will address inequity and push us towards a more habitable future.: In 2017 my wife and I went to Cuba for two weeks. We dropped off asthma inhalers at the only synagogue in Havana. Shelly had collected these from members of her physicians’ journal club. This shul runs a small pharmacy dispensing mostly common, over the counter medicines that, ironically, in the world’s most “medicalized” society, are in short supply. These are offered free to the public. The shul’s administrative director, a tall, middle aged Black man named Leonardo told us proudly that there is no anti-Semitism in Cuba. “The only place on earth,” he emphasized, “where we are safe. We don’t even have to lock the doors.” In Havana members of the small Jewish community resemble the people walking in the streets. A woman named Rosa told a story about Fidel Castro’s visit many years earlier. “He asked me how many Jews lived in Havana. The actual number is about 1,200 but I told him 1,500. It sounded so much more impressive.” This line provoked gales of laughter from people who overheard it. Cuba has more doctors per capita than any country on earth – and it isn’t even close. Medical expertise may well be Cuba’s outstanding export, with authorities leasing physicians to nations in every corner of the globe, and yet you may not find a bottle of acetaminophen at the critical moment when a migraine aura forecasts the imminent arrival of an unbearable headache. Such are the strange contradictions engendered by the eternal US embargo. The blockade has, for generations now, enforced greatly diminished material circumstances upon the Cuban people. (Today, Cuba is in an economic crises. We saw awful poverty six years ago, but healthy, well fed people. Obama had taken steps toward normalizing relations with Raul Castro’s regime. Fresh produce was cheap, and available everywhere – no longer. Trump and now Biden continue the American tradition of tormenting the Cuban people.)
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
Both Parties Have Turned the Border Wall Into a Death Trap Decades of bipartisan policies have turned the border into an ugly and dangerous laceration.
United States’/Israel’s Response, to the ICF’s Genocide Decision, it was Another Example of the US Trail of Broken Treaties!:
Patrick Lawrence: The Palestinians Won in The Hague: So Did the Rest of Us The non–West has spoken, it has raised its voice. Half a dozen years ago I sat in the lobby lounge at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan talking at length with Richard Falk, the scholar, lawyer, U.N. rapporteur, and advocate of Palestinian rights. Inevitably, the conversation turned for a time to international law, a topic on which Falk has long been a recognized authority. Here is a little of what he said as we took our afternoon tea: When international law is on the side of the geopolitical actors, then they are very serious about its relevance. When the American embassy was seized in Tehran after the Iranian Revolution, they talked about the flouting of international law as if that was the most sacred body of law that ever existed. International law is used very instrumentally. If you’re protecting private investment in Venezuela or Chile, then it’s barbaric not to uphold it. But if it’s blocking the pursuit of some kind of interventionist project, then it’s flaky or irrelevant to talk about it.
U.S. Funded Palestinian Genocide:
Western Moral Credibility is Dying Along With Thousands of Gaza Citizens The western world’s feeble response to Israel’s attack on Gaza has severely damaged the West’s already tenuous moral credibility in the Global South and undermined the foundations of the human rights regime and international law developed after the Second World War.
‘Dear Children of Gaza,’ Says Viral Letter, ‘I Am Sorry’ “You may ask the world why interests were at risk but deafening silence when 10,000 children were killed,” wrote a British lawmaker. “The world might not like your questions, but you deserve your answers.” In a viral video released Friday, British member of Parliament Naz Shah, who represents the Labour Party, issued an apology to the roughly 1 million children of Gaza on behalf of world leaders who—despite Palestinian journalists’ there was swift action when trade routes and economic live-streaming of Israel’s assault on the enclave and an international court’s finding that Israel is plausibly committing genocidal acts—refuse to see the impact the bombardment is having on civilians, including its youngest residents.
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’!
Global Warming can’t be healed by a green new deal, it can only be stopped by a Green Industrial Revolution!: As Climate Chaos Accelerates, Governments can’t Afford any Other Priority In December, the New York Times reported that “Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years and very likely the past 125,000.” (Though it’s not the Times’s style, that latter figure should have had a couple of exclamation points after it!) Furthermore, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chief scientist, “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far.” In fact, each of the six decades since 1960 saw a higher global average temperature than the 10 years that preceded it. In addition, every decade-to-decade increase has been larger than the previous one. In other words, the Earth’s not just steadily warming; it’s heating up at an ever-faster pace.
2024: a Hot Year for Climate Litigation There is something fundamentally wrong when young people have to sue their government for the right to a clean and healthful environment. It’s official: 2023 was the hottest year on record. There is surprisingly little about it in the news, but lawyers are gearing up for a hot new year in court to do what they can to protect a livable climate. Climate litigation is the new game in town. The first big case was won by Urgenda in the Netherlands in 2019. Formed out of the words urgent and agenda, the Urgenda foundation and 900 Dutch citizens demanded that their government act according to the science. It took six years to win. In 2021, Neubauer v. Germany resulted in the German government being forced to revise its 2019 climate law and tighten its targets for decarbonization. The German case was unique in that the highest court affirmed the government’s responsibility not only to its current citizens, but also to future generations. In the U.S., recent successes in climate litigation are encouraging. Early this year, a judge in Oregon denied the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss a complaint agains the federal government by 21 young plaintiffs.
Climate Justice Is Not on the Ballot in the 2024 Elections The climate justice movement must intervene to make it clear that whatever the outcome, the course towards chaos will not have been altered by any new political coloring. This year more than half of the world’s population will be able to vote in national or regional elections, in what will be the year with the most elections in history. These elections are taking place at a time of declining confidence in democracy and the institutions that emerge from electoral processes. The distrust is justified, as decades of popular support for social justice and even climate action have been rejected, disavowed, and thwarted by political parties and governments, and this will be repeated this time around. The climate justice movement must act. In 2023, the record for global greenhouse gas emissions was broken once again and the hottest year on record was recorded. In none of this year’s elections will the solutions to this catastrophic situation be on the ballot, either out of direct service to fossil capitalism or out of political fear. These facts turn today’s democracy into a theater exercise that leads to the election of simulacrum parliaments, prevented by their own will and the way they were designed from resolving the catastrophic situation in which we live, in the name of “stability.”
Building a Habitat for Profits: Proposed Road for Mining Project Could Have Devastating Impact on Alaska Habitat Native Alaskans and environmental groups fear damage to the habitat and interruption of wildlife migration if approved. Ambler Metals says the minerals it wants to extract in Alaska’s Brooks Range are necessary for the manufacture of clean energy technologies, including electric vehicles and wind turbines. But it will take cutting a road across salmon streams and caribou foraging and migration routes to access the areas where the minerals would be mined.
Constant Clouds Over US Great Lakes Area Could Hurt Residents’ Mental Health Grand Rapids saw just five minutes of sun in the first week of the year, while January was the cloudiest in Chicago in 129 years For the 34 million people who call the US’s Great Lakes region home, last winter was a particularly gloomy one due to a dearth of sunlight – a reality that could afflict residents’ mental health in years to come. Grand Rapids, Michigan, saw just five minutes of sun during the first eight days of January 2023. The same month was the cloudiest January in Chicago in 129 years. At one stage, the 6.3 million people living in the greater Toronto area didn’t see the sun for more than three weeks.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
No One’s Access to Abortion Is Guaranteed — No Matter Where You Live Living in a “blue state” does not guarantee the availability of abortion care to everyone who needs it. Last year, travelers to the Oakland airport were greeted by a billboard touting the availability of abortion in California paid for by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The billboard was one of many in a 2022 campaign highlighting the state government’s new website for people seeking abortions, with the majority of billboards erected on California’s dime in states that had banned abortion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Some of the billboards, like one in Texas, featured an image of a white woman wearing a white dress in handcuffs beside the words, “Texas doesn’t own your body. You do.” (The irony is that California does prosecute women for stillbirth and other pregnancy outcomes.)
Labor:
Economy:
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CPI no longer measures the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living.
- CPI no longer measures full inflation for out-of-pocket expenditures.
- With the misused cover of academic theory, politicians forced significant underreporting of official inflation, so as to cut annual cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security, etc.
- Politicians look to expand further the concept of artificially-suppressed cost-of-living adjustments in current budget-deficit negotiations, through the use of the Chained-CPI (see Special C-CPI Supplement at end of this document).
- Use of the CPI to adjust retirement benefits, private income or to set investment goals impairs the ability of retirees, income earners and investors to stay ahead of inflation.
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Understated inflation used in estimating inflation-adjusted growth has created the illusion of recovery in reported GDP.
The Fed Has a Dirty Little Secret: It’s Been Allowing the Wall Street Mega Banks to Calculate their Own Capital Requirements On July 27 of last year, the Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Michael Barr, made the following statement as part of the proposed new capital requirements for mega banks in the U.S. – revealing the stunning news that the serially-charged mega banks on Wall Street have been allowed to use their own internal risk models to tell the Fed how much risk-weighted assets they have and, thus, how much capital they need to hold. Barr stated: “For a firm’s lending activities, the proposed rules would end the practice of relying on a bank’s own individual estimates of their own risk and instead use a standardized, but risk-based measure of credit risk. Standardized credit risk approaches do a reasonably good job of approximating risks, while internal models are prone to underestimate such risks. Second, for a firm’s trading activities, the proposed rules would adjust the way that the firm is required to measure market risk, which is the risk of loss from movements in market prices. These changes are intended to correct for gaps in the current rules.”
World:
Tanzania Escalates Violence to Evict Indigenous People Tens of thousands are being driven off their land to make ‘conservation parks’ for tourists The Tanzanian government is escalating its campaign of evictions, violence, and restrictions on livelihoods against Indigenous People and local communities living near National Parks in the country. On 25 January 2024, the Oakland Institute put out an Urgent Alert about the situation in Tanzania.
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
‘Ignorance is Strength’: The Uber Rich Are Funding “National School Choice Week” to Attack Public Schools The school privatization PR stunt is a pet project of the Gleason family and Koch family fortunes. The last week of every January, right-wing groups like Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity promote “National School Choice Week” (NSCW). Unlike other commemorative national weeks or months — such as Black History Month or Pride Month — NSCW did not emerge from an organic grassroots movement. Though touting a misleading notion of equal access to education, its billionaire-backed policy agenda pulls money away from universal public schools.