Daily News Digest March 13, 2024
Images of the Day:
Mixed Messages? (Pass the Ammunition)
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! Globaly, With the Current Gaza War, The Right of Assembly is Under Attack! 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:
By the start of the 2020s, a light tax touch on America’s most financially favored had left America’s richest 0.01% with 10% of the nation’s wealth—over 10% above the top 0.01%’s share of the nation’s treasure in 1913. — Out-Gilding the Gilded Age
Pocasts/Videos of the Day:
U.N. Rapporteur Francesca Albanese Urges Arms Embargo & Sanctions on Israel over War Crimes in Gaza
Immigrants Held in Private Northwest Detention Center Report Death, Suicide Attempts Amid Crackdown
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
Patrick Lawrence: Old Man Shouting, The American Empire is Doing Great! But It Isn’t Democratic elites and the reporters who clerk for them were effusively approving of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last Thursday evening—not so much for what he said, which came nothing new, as for the demeanor of our enfeebled president. Never mind that Biden reduced an occasion intended to address all Americans as to the condition of their nation to a cheap stump speech. He avoided falling down for his hour at the podium while stringing coherent sentences (mostly) together in the cause of his political survival. That is what counted. “This was not Old Man Joe,” Peter Baker fairly ejaculated in Friday morning’s New York Times. “This was Forceful Joe. This was Angry Joe. This was Loud Joe. This was Game–On Joe.” Wow. I seemed to have missed that, Joe. I saw Joe who trades in hollow appearances. This was Joe urging both houses of Congress and 32 million television viewers to join in making believe we still live in the 20th century. This was Joe pretending America’s global primacy is intact. This was Joe refusing to recognize the emergence of new poles of power and the high cost this refusal exacts.
The Atom Bomb Was First Tested on US Citizens!: “Oppenheimer” Brings Painful Memories For New Mexico Hispanics As cinephiles gear up for Friday’s release of “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster biopic about the “father of the atomic bomb,” some residents in southern New Mexico where the bomb was first tested say they’ve been largely erased from the narrative. The big picture: Those residents say their families have battled rare cancers for generations and have been ignored while Manhattan Project scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer are celebrated. Details: “Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt, follows the American scientist as his team races to create the bomb and deals with the aftermath of its creation. Th The movie is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Flashback: Oppenheimer led a group of scientists during World War II to build the bomb first tested in New Mexico near the homes of Hispanic and Native American residents.
A Critique of Oppenheimer: How the Bomb Spawned the Pandemic and Facilitates Another One Beyond Oppenheimer: The Russell-Einstein Manifesto and roots of Fauci’s betrayal of science. How Kai Bird gets the lessons exactly wrong.
U.S. Armed and Funded Palestinian Genocide:
Palestine is the World (2002) The Israeli invasion of Palestine is an act of aggression of such gravity that it is almost impossible for me to speak of anything else. When the population of six cities and many villages is tortured daily in front of the whole world, and when those perpetrating these crimes are granted total immunity, then we have to stop and speak up because new standards are being established as to what is permissible internationally, which put us all in danger. My first point, then, is that we have to oppose this aggression, these Israeli war crimes, in any way we can and there is a lot we can do since it is our money that pays for them. Without the United States Israel could not even function as an economy, much less have tanks to occupy every street in Palestine.
QZionism Hits Peak Conspiracy Theory with Smears of Oscar-Winning Jonathan Glazer The brave and highly ethical Oscar-award-winning director, Jonathan Glazer, has been targeted by the crazies on the Zionist (Israeli-nationalist) right wing, as were all the actors and film people who expressed horror at the genocide in Gaza. Their allegations on social media are so bizarre and crazed that they are being compared to the QAnon conspiracy theories of the Trumpists. They are, in short, QZionism.
The Stones Cry Out Delegation: From the Ground in Palestine to the US Government and Churches “Nothing has changed, and everything has changed.” These are the words of Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman and activist who spoke to our delegation. Nothing has changed because the deadly oppression of the Palestinian people has been ongoing for 76 years. Everything has changed since October 7, the day Hamas fighters pierced the walls of the concentration camp called Gaza. As followers of Jesus, we embrace non-violence and so grieve for all who have died, including the victims of the Hamas attack. Nevertheless, as our Palestinian friends reminded us, the violence did not begin on October 7; it must be understood in the broader context of at least 17 years of Israel’s inhuman strangulation of Gaza by land, air, and sea, 76 years of a continuing Nakba (since 1948), and over a century since the rise of Zionism. In the past 150 days, Gaza has become a killing field. Israel’s response against the Palestinian people is disproportionate by orders of magnitude. The atrocities perpetrated by the IDF on Gaza by land, sea, and air are broadcast before our eyes, on our phones, in real-time. We watch in horror. Entire families die in their beds under Israel’s bombs. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques, markets are leveled. Relief and food convoys are denied entry at the Egypt border.
Instead of Holocaust Museum, Detour Signs Direct Israel’s Herzog to The Hague “How is it possible that such a sacred space is being used to normalize genocide today?” asked one Dutch Jewish organizer behind the protest. Human rights activists in The Netherlands greeted Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday with large protests and directed him towards the International Criminal Court at The Hague over his nation’s alleged war crimes against the Palestinian people in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza. Herzog was in Amsterdam to attend the opening of the new National Holocaust Museum, but demonstrators said Herzog’s presence needed to be challenged given the large scale death and destruction that Israel’s military has unleashed in Gaza over the last five months.
Environment:
Fund Climate! — Not Genocide! 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’!
Capitalism’s Wars for Oil: When Bodies Start Stacking Up From Climate Change-Related Disasters, Will These Monsters be Held to Account?
George Monbiot: Dry Run The mega-droughts in Spain and the US are a portent of a gathering global water crisis. There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change. Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water. A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out.
The Plasticizing of Humanity: Microplastics Found In Every Human Placenta Tested in Study Scientists express concern over health impacts, with another study finding particles in arteries Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing foetuses. The scientists analysed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels.
Study: Patients With Cardiovascular Disease Had Higher Rates of Microplastics Those with high rates of microplastics in their arteries were 4.5 times more likely to have a heart-related incident. Anew study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that there may be a strong link between microplastics and cardiovascular disease. The study, which examined 257 patients in Italy who had cardiovascular disease and surgery to remove plaque within their arteries, discovered that more than half of those who were looked at had measurable amounts of microplastics and nanoplastics (MNPs) within them — specifically, polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride.
Related Articles:
- Tiny Particles of Plastic Now Pollute Our Food, Water and Even the Clouds
- Plastics Are Fossil Fuel Industry’s Plan B. Fenceline Communities Pay the Price.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
30 Political Prisoners’ Oral Histories Collected in An Unprecedented New Book Former political prisoner Eric King and abolitionist Josh Davidson have amassed the collective wisdom of dozens of political prisoners in ‘Rattling the Cages.’ From Assata Shakur to Leonard Peltier, social movements have lifted up political prisoners as revolutionary examples and fought protracted, often decades-long campaigns to secure their release. Now, a new collection from AK Press, Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, gathers the experience and wisdom of some 30 political prisoners in one place for the first time. Eric King and Josh Davidson, the editors of the project, join Rattling the Bars to discuss their new book and the urgency of the fight to free political prisoners. Josh Davidson is an abolitionist who is involved in numerous projects, including the Certain Days Collective, which publishes the annual Freedom for Political Prisoners calendar, and the Children’s Art Project with political prisoner Oso Blanco. Josh also works in communications with the Zinn Education Project.
Labor:
Economy:
Debt Forgiveness in the Bronze Age When interest-bearing commercial and agrarian debt came to be incorporated into civilization’s economic structure in the third millennium BC, it was accompanied by clean slates that liberated bondservants and restored to debtors the rights to the crops and land that creditors had taken. By the second millennium BC in Babylonia these royal “restorations of order” became customary proclamations rescuing debtors whose family members had been reduced to bondage or who had lost their land to foreclosing creditors.
A Financial Writer at New York Times Admits He’s Been Misrepresenting Bank Capital for 14 Years Yesterday, in an emailed newsletter to readers of the New York Times, financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin effectively admitted that he has had no clue what bank capital actually is for the past 14 years so he just grabbed the phrase “rainy day fund” to describe it – notwithstanding that the phrase has no relationship to the factual definition of bank capital and serves only the interests of the banking lobby.
World:
Pakistani Communists Prepare For Revolution “The darkness will pass, the red dawn is coming!” This fiery chant in Urdu rang out repeatedly from the hundreds of voices of Pakistani communists who assembled in Lahore on 2-3 March to participate in the congress of Lal Salaam. It was a weekend that combined joyous revolutionary optimism with intense fervour and solemn preparation for a new stage in the class war. Given the catastrophic predicament facing the international ruling class, and the dire state of crumbling Pakistani capitalism in particular, the need to prepare our forces for the historic tasks ahead has taken on a new level of urgency. For this reason, over 350 comrades travelled from every corner of the country, from the mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan bordering China to the north, to Karachi on the southernmost coast of the Arabian sea. Comrades travelled from the remote western territories bordering Afghanistan, where the Taliban vie for power with local state authorities, and a delegation of over 100 comrades came from the far reaches of Kashmir to the east. Not a single region of the country was without representation.
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
Poverty and Poor Health: It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way! Sadly, closing down hospitals or reducing their services in poorer neighborhoods is becoming all too typical of this nation. We can this entire thing better. We must. The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs — a topic that, for the millions of people now without healthcare insurance, is anything but relaxing. Imagine this: since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years. Worse yet, the nation is only halfway through the largest purge ever of Medicaid as the expansion and extension of healthcare to millions, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, have ended, leaving some families no longer eligible, while others need to reapply through a new process in their state.