Daily News Digest February 2, 2024
Images of the Day:
South Africa to Take US and UK to Court 
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:
Increasingly economic historians can draw analogies between the development of the present crisis and the period between the two world wars, as well as the crisis of a century ago, which was associated with the so-called great depression of 1873-1895. The latter crisis resulted in the rise of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, but also the end of Pax Britannica, as Britain began its decline from world leadership in the face of challenges from Germany and the United States. The present world crisis seems to be spelling the beginning of the end of Pax Americana and may hold untold other major readjustments in the international division of labor and world power in store for the future. ― André Gunder Frank, Reflections on World Economic Crisis
Podcasta/Videos of the Day:
Will AI Warfare Usher in a Massive Expansion of the Surveillance State?
US and UK ‘Must Be Held Accountable’: South African Attorney The US and UK “must be held accountable for the conduct and what is happening within Gaza,” said Wikus van Rensburg (Rensburg), a South African attorney leading a group of nearly 50 lawyers in a class-action lawsuit against the two countries for their complicity in Israel’s actions in Gaza. In an interview with Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Wenwen on her I-Talk show, Rensburg talked about his plan. Despite the challenges ahead, he remains positive.
Black Agenda Radio January 26, 2024
Black Politics and Pennsylvania in the 2024 Election Cycle – Part 1
Kenyans Protest Their Government’s Participation in the Latest Haiti Occupation
Flint, Michigan Water Crisis Continues Without Repair or Justice Jordan Chariton is the founder of Status Coup news. He joins us from New York to discuss his reporting for Detroit Metro Times on the Flint, Michigan water crisis. The official investigation came to a mysterious end which absolved the governor and other officials of culpability in the case which sent poisoned water into residents’ homes ten years ago.
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
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
The Forever Wars Grind on Without Apology The Forever Wars Grind on Without Apology The U.S. has a long history of killing civilians in air strikes, failing to investigate the deaths, and ignoring pleas for apology and compensation. The U.S. has a long history of killing civilians in air strikes, failing to investigate the deaths, and ignoring pleas for apology and compensation.
Pax Americana: US Attacks on the ICJ Are a Declaration of Empire They should not be seen simply as “pro-Israel” sentiment, but instead as part of a broader effort to undermine international law in order to give the United States free rein in pursuing its policy objectives
Analyst Rips Biden Admin for Touting Record Arms Sales Amid Gaza Carnage Arms industry researcher William Hartung argued the U.S. should focus on “the human consequences” of its weapons transfers instead of bragging about them.
Marjorie Cohn: US Judge Admits Horror of Gaza Genocide, But Will He Dismiss Case Against Biden? he judge noted that the US government doesn’t dispute the uncontradicted evidence of a “genocide in progress.” Mere hours after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a historic hearing took place in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California. Several Palestinians who are suing President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for failure to prevent genocide and complicity in genocide testified before district court Judge Jeffrey White in a live-streamed session. “I have lost everything in this war,” plaintiff Omar Al-Najjar testified from a hospital in Gaza. “I have nothing but my grief. This is what Israel and its supporters have done to us.” Al-Najjar reported that conditions are so bad there is “widespread childbirth in the street.”
Is US’s Suspension of UNRWA Funding Retaliation for ICJ’s Interim Ruling? The decision to suspend funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency is deepening Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. At a time of dire need for humanitarian aid in Gaza and when Palestinian refugee assistance and support are needed more than ever before, the U.S. has decided to suspend funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in response to an Israeli allegation that 12 employees — of the 13,000 people whom the agency employs in Gaza — were involved with Hamas’s October 7 attack in southern Israel. UNRWA is the body largely responsible for distributing the aid ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). As a Palestinian American person reading this news, these questions immediately flooded my mind in response: Why didn’t the U.S. apply the same standard and withdraw its military aid and funding of Israeli war crimes after the World Court’s interim ruling determined the plausibility of genocide by the Israeli state?
Native American Genocide: Boarding Schools Played a Key Role in Spreading Disease in Native Populations As many as 40,000 Native kids died while attending boarding school, and thousands of others died after going home sick. George Little Wound was gravely ill when he was sent home to Pine Ridge from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1889, just three years after arriving at the notorious boarding school. Little Wound, the son of Chief Little Wound, was among a group of three Pine Ridge students shipped home together with what the school physician described as “incipient consumption” and “scrofula,” a disfiguring infection of the skin and lymph nodes caused by the same bacteria as tuberculosis, according to Carlisle records.
U.S. Funded Palestinian Genocide:
Chris Hedges: The Silence of the Damned Our leading humanitarian and civic institutions, including major medical institutions, refuse to denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This exposes their hypocrisy and complicity. There is no effective health care system left in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.” Clinics, along with ambulances – 79 in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank – have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.
Terrorism: Executed in Their Sleep: How Israeli Forces Assassinated Three Palestinians in a Raid on a West Bank Hospital Israeli forces disguised as hospital workers and civilians entered Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital and assassinated three Palestinians as they slept. The brazen killing marks an unprecedented escalation in Israel’s war on Palestinians in the West Bank.
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’!
For 70 Years They Knew, Lied, and Just Let the Lif/Planet Die!: Startling Confirmation’: Big Oil Funded Climate Research as Early as 1954 “This pushes back the fossil fuel industry’s knowledge of the climate crisis a full two decades,” one campaigner wrote. The fossil fuel and automotive industries knew that their products could destabilize the climate as early as 1954, new research published by DeSmog on Monday reveals. The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation, whose contributors included major oil and car companies, helped to fund the early climate research of Charles David Keeling, who went on to create the famous Keeling curve tracking the rise in global concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, DeSmog reported. The foundation was also informed of the potential implications of Keeling’s research.‘Grossly Irresponsible’: UK Hands Out 24 New North Sea Oil And Gas Licences The move to grant 17 companies the right to drill for fossil fuels is ‘a pipe dream’ that will do little for energy security, say environmentalists Britain has handed major oil companies the right to drill for fossil fuels in 24 new licence areas across the North Sea as part of the government’s mission to extend the life of the ageing oil and gas basin.
Solving Climate Change…or Else! 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.
‘Literally Off the Charts’: Global Coral Reef Heat Stress Monitor Forced to Add New Alerts As Temperatures Rise Three new levels added by US Coral Reef Watch after ‘extreme’ unprecedented heat, with highest alert warning of ‘near complete mortality’
How a US Mining Firm Sued Mexico For Billions – For Trying to Protect Its Own Seabed Local fishers helped halt underwater mining off Baja California’s coast in 2018. But then an obscure international legal process was put into motion
Environmenal Racism is Genocide!: Babies Born in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ Weigh Less At Birth, More Likely To Be Preterm – Report Researchers find that newborns in notorious industrial corridor experience low birth weight at three times the national average Newborns living in the worst-polluted areas of Louisiana, including an 85-mile industrial corridor known as “Cancer Alley”, experience low birth weights at more than three times the national average, according to data cited in a report released Thursday. The rate of preterm births there is also twice the national average, researchers found. In parts of Louisiana near fossil fuel and petrochemical plants, low birth weight rates reached 27% and preterm birth rates 25%, according to research from Tulane University that was published in a Human Rights Watch report on Thursday. The full paper linking pollution and reproductive health is currently under peer review for publication in the journal Environmental Research: Health.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
An Upcoming Supreme Court Case Threatens to Criminalize Homelessness The Supreme Court will soon decide if unhoused people can be issued jail time or fines for sleeping on the streets. Black people experiencing homelessness would be disproportionately impacted
U.S. Ramps Up War Crimes After ICJ Rules Against Israel The Biden administration colluded with Israel to slander the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine in anticipation of the ICJ ruling against Israel on the charge of genocide. Washington is attempting to cover up genocide by committing the war crime of collective punishment against the people of Gaza.
INTERVIEW: The Black Nation interviews Margaret Walker, 1982 Margaret Walker was an intellectual of the highest order. Her uncompromising critiques of Black art, Black leadership, and the US racist oligarchy are sorely needed today.
Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire Anya Parampil’s book tells the story of US hybrid warfare on Venezuela and of the tectonic social and economic shifts reshaping the world today.
Bayard Rustin, A Menace Not a Messiah The recent Obama-produced retelling of the life and work of Bayard Rustin is better judged by what it leaves out – his legacy of counterrevolutionary action designed to defang radical movements.
CPK Applauds High Court Ruling Against Kenyan Police Deployment in Haiti The recent Obama-produced retelling of the life and work of Bayard Rustin is better judged by what it leaves out – his legacy of counterrevolutionary action designed to defang radical movements.
Black Pastors Pressure Biden to Call for a Cease-Fire in Gaza Israel’s genocide in Gaza is now a litmus test for Black voters, and clergy are warning Joe Biden that he risks losing their support as his approval rating continues to fall in an election year. Black people are upholding their tradition of opposing U.S. violence around the world with the demand for a ceasefire and the Democratic Party is splitting apart over this issue. It is also significant that this story appears in the New York Times, the paper most committed to promoting Israeli and U.S. imperial propaganda. All of these developments are positive for this nation and for the world.
Dominican Republic Continues to Illegally Separate Haitian Children from Their Families The Dominican Republic continues the disturbing pattern of mass expulsions and arbitrary detentions of Haitian and Haitian descended Dominicans, including the illegal separation of infants and children from their families.
Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger withdraw from ECOWAS International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine Welcomes Today’s ICJ Order; Demands its Implementation The Supreme Court will soon decide if unhoused people can be issued jail time or fines for sleeping on the streets. Black people experiencing homelessness would be disproportionately impacted.
Labor:
Economy:
World:
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
US Has Highest Infant, Maternal Mortality Rates Despite the Most Health Care Spending The United States has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates out of any other high-income country and simultaneously spends the most on health care, according to a report released Tuesday by the Commonwealth Fund. The report evaluated US health spending, outcomes, status, and service use compared with Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In addition, US health system efficiency was compared with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of the 38 high-income countries that had available data from December 2022. Of all countries in 2020, the United States possessed the highest infant mortality rate at 5.4 deaths per 1000 live births, which is markedly higher than the 1.6 deaths per 1000 live births in Norway, which has the the lowest mortality rate.
Infant Mortality and African Americans What is Infant Mortality? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), infant mortality is the death of an infant before his or her first birthday. The infant mortality rate is the number of infant deaths for every 1,000 live births. In addition to giving us key information about maternal and infant health, the infant mortality rate is an important marker of the overall health of a society.
How Does Infant Mortality Affect African American Populations?
- Non-Hispanic blacks/African Americans have 2.4 times the infant mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites.
- Non-Hispanic black/African American infants are almost four times as likely to die from complications related to low birthweight as compared to non-Hispanic white infants.
- Non-Hispanic black/African American infants had 2.9 times the sudden infant death syndrome mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites, in 2020.
- In 2020, non-Hispanic black/African American mothers were twice as likely to receive late or no prenatal care as compared to no-Hispanic white mothers.