Daily News Digest March 20, 2024

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

History of Israel’s Genocide of Palestinians Bendib: Colored-Coded Empathy

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:

The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes: ‘Contrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues. — The Chris Hedges Report: Israel’s Trojan Horse 

Pocasts/Videos of the Day: 

“Anarchy & Chaos”: U.S. Special Envoy for Haiti Who Resigned Protesting U.S. Meddling & Deportations

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 

Defense Jobs Make Up 10 Percent of U.S. Manufacturing Demand Leaders from the aerospace and defense industry recently came together to promote the impact of their business on the economy at a summit in Washington, Reuters reports. For the nation’s military contractors, the event was an important public relations push as Congress looks to reduce the budget deficit by cutting spending in many avenues, including to defense spending.     Industry experts highlighted that approximately 800,000 defense jobs, intelligence jobs and other occupations are tied to the defense industry. In addition, more than 10 percent of U.S. manufacturing demand in the U.S. is dependent on aerospace and defense spending with contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.     According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, wage and salary employment in the federal government is expected to increase by 10 percent through 2018 and demand is projected to be particularly strong for workers with skills in specialized areas that require security clearance, including financial services, scientific research and information security. Job growth is also expected in employment through defense contractors as long as government spending remains consistent.

The Rich Get Richer the Poor Get Poorer, as the World Get Warmer:

Wealth of US Billionaires Hits $5.5 Trillion—Up 88% Since Pandemic Hit It’s been a rough few years for most people around the world—but not these folks. Four years ago, the United States entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion. Four years later, on March 18, 2024, the country has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to Institute for Policy Studies calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data. (Thank you, Forbes!)

How Many Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck? A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.    Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).

A Real Social Security Office Gave Me a Flyer With a Scam Phone Number On It Scammers have infiltrated a Social Security Administration building in New York, imperiling your personal information. “We need to let you know you have been selected for $100 in rewards.”     It was a cheery automated message, not what I expected when I called the number for the Social Security Administration’s primary office in Manhattan. The message went on: “Simply press 1 now to be connected to a live agent and claim your gift today.”

U.S. Armed and Funded Palestinian Genocide:

The Chris Hedges Report: Israel’s Trojan Horse The “temporary pier” being built on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza is not there to alleviate the famine, but to herd Palestinians onto ships and into permanent exile. Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians.    If the Arab world will not take them, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed during his first round of visits after Oct. 7, the Palestinians will be cast adrift on ships. It worked in Beirut in 1982 when some eight and a half thousand Palestine Liberation Organization members were sent by sea to Tunisia and another two and a half thousand ended up in other Arab states. Israel expects that the same forced deportation by sea will work in Gaza.    Israel, for this reason, supports the “temporary pier” the Biden administration is building, to ostensibly deliver food and aid to Gaza – food and aid whose “distribution” will be overseen by the Israeli military.      “You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration, and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group told The Guardian.

UN and EU slam Israel: Imposing on Palestinians ‘Levels of Food Insecurity never Recorded anywhere in the World’ The European Union’s Vice-President of the European Commission, Josep Borell and the European Commissioner for Crisis management and Janez Lenarčič, issued a statement on Monday on the findings of a UN-backed report that found that Israel’s total war on Gaza has put the remaining Palestinian population in imminent risk of starving to death.    They said of the just-realeased Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessment, “This is unprecedented. No IPC analysis has ever recorded such levels of food insecurity anywhere in the world.” [Emphasis added.]

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?

‘Sirens Are Blaring’: WMO Says 2023 Shattered Key Climate Metrics “Fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said. Last year broke records for several key climate indicators, including surface temperatures, ocean heat, sea-level rise, and the loss of Antarctic sea ice, the World Meteorological Organization found in its State of the Global Climate 2023 report, released Tuesday.     The agency confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record and said it gave an “ominous” new meaning to the phrase “off the charts.”     “Earth is issuing a distress call,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video statement. “The latest State of the Global Climate report shows a planet on the brink. Fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts. Sirens are blaring across all major indicators.”

 From Fossil Fuels To Plastic Addiction: Unveiling The Hidden Link Impacting Our World . . . Fossil Fuels & Plastic So how exactly does this connect to fossil fuels? A report by the world economic forum noted 98% of single use plastics are made from fossil fuels. According to an article for Science Advances Magazine “The vast majority of monomers used to make plastics, such as ethylene and propylene, are derived from fossil hydrocarbons. None of the commonly used plastics are biodegradable.”     Currently the world’s top 7 plastic producing companies by volume are all fossil fuel companies. Furthermore, fossil fuel corporations have a large financial incentive to continue producing plastics. Globally fossil fuels are most commonly used to generate electricity and fuel transportation. However, in recent years the world has begun a clean energy transition, encouraging many people to abandon fossil fuels for more eco-friendly power sources such as solar and wind power.      As fossil fuel industries reckon with changes in consumer demands, they will continue to lean heavily on the development of fossil fuels into petrochemicals and fossil hydrocarbons for plastic manufacturing. Currently plastic manufacturing accounts for 12% of global oil consumption, a figure which is likely to increase as plastic consumption does.

How $9 Billion From Taxpayers Fueled Plastics Production – and Illegal Pollution A new report estimates the public cost of underwriting U.S. plastics industry growth and the environmental violations that followed.    Through billions in tax breaks and subsidies, taxpayers in Louisiana, Texas, and other states have supported the construction or expansion of dozens of facilities manufacturing plastics in the United States since 2012. However, many of these plants have also repeatedly exceeded legal limits on the air pollution they release into surrounding communities, disproportionately affecting people of color. That’s according to an Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) report published on Thursday.     Shell’s sprawling Monaca plastics plant, also known as an “ethane cracker,” under construction in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. According to an Environmental Integrity Project report, this plant received $1.65 billion in public subsidies since 2013 and has been fined $4.9 million in Clean Air Act penalties between 2020 and 2023. Credit: Julie Dermansky

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Environmental Racism: Nearly 130,000 Children Exposed To Lead-Tainted Drinking Water in Chicago Study says the 19% of kids using unfiltered tap water have about twice as much lead in their blood as they would otherwise About 129,000 Chicago children under the age of six are exposed to poisonous lead in their household drinking water because of lead pipes, according to a study published on Monday.     The study used artificial intelligence to analyse 38,000 home water tests conducted for the city of Chicago, along with neighborhood demographics, state blood samples and numerous other factors.      It found that Black and Latino residents are more likely to have lead-contaminated water because of lead pipes. And it estimated that the 19% of Chicago children who use unfiltered tap water as their primary drinking source have about twice as much lead in their blood as they would otherwise.

Labor:

Economy:

Shadow Government Statistics Public Comment on Inflation Measurement Consumer Price Index Has Been Reconfigured Since Early-1980s.    So as to Understate Inflation versus Common Experience

• CPI no longer measures full inflation for out-of-pocket expenditure. The Way It Was: Measurement of consumer inflation traditionally reflected measuring the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living, as measured by a fixed-basket of goods. 
• Maintaining a constant standard of living, however, is a concept not popular in current economic literature, and certainly not within the thinking or the lexicon of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the government’s statistical agency that estimates and reports on consumer inflation.
• The changing costs of maintaining a constant standard of living were measured by pricing out a fixed-basket of goods and services—same components, same weighting—period after period.     
• Whatever the percentage change was in the cost of that basket of goods, that is how much income would have to rise in order for someone to maintain a fixed- or constant-standard of living over the given period.    At least it was a reasonably consistent approximation of same.   
• Tracking changes in the cost of a fixed-basket of goods was the approach to estimating inflation, going back to at least the 1700s,[i] and prior to 1945, the fixed-basket CPI tracked by the U.S. government actually was known as the Cost of Living Index.
• 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.
• 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.
• Understated inflation used in estimating inflation-adjusted growth has created the illusion of recovery in reported GDP.

During Spring Bank Panic of 2023, Liquidity Advances from FHLBs Topped Those of Q4 2008, when Wall Street Was in Collapse According to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and using a graph from the St. Louis Fed above, the liquidity crisis among banks in the spring of last year was far more dramatic than has been acknowledged by banking regulators. According to the data, during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression (at the end of the fourth quarter of 2008 when Wall Street was in a state of collapse), banks had borrowed a total of $790 billion in advances from Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs). But during the bank panic in the spring of last year, those FHLB advances topped the Q4 2008 number, registering $804 billion as of March 31, 2023.

World:

Share Widely – Èzili’s #FreeHaiti Solutions Èzili Dantò’s Three Points for a “New World” beginning:

1. One Western Hemispheric minimum wage;
2. One Western Hemispheric passport;
3. Hayti shall be a World Heritage site, a sacred trust.

It’s lands belong only to descendants of Desalin-Toya, all who fought at Vertieres to abolish slavery and create a Black-ruled independent culture …. Hayti land for Haytians to live in Viv, Lakou, Konbit, Jarden, and without the Colonizers’ gaze or interference.     Like Monte Carlo you may visit, rent, lease. But Hayti lands is for Black-Haytians like the Vatican is for Catholic Popes/priests and their Jesuits…Like Sierra Leone Blacks is to Sierra Leone.     Haytians have paid and paid and paid for the land and resources in Hayti with: 300-years of terrorizing European enslavement; a 13-year war of liberation(1791-1804) where half (250,000) the Black population was slaughtered by three European armies (France, Spain, England) who came to re-enslave them and who were beaten, in combat, by the Afrikan warriors; paid, for by 122-years, an unjust $22billion Independence Debt; the Black Haytian masses were forced to pay the slavers reparation for losing the Haytian people as “property”; paid for over and over again in the David vs Goliath neocolonial war that’s reigned in Hayti since the assassination of Hayti’s founding father and all the Black generals; paid for by the descendants who today must face the effects of centuries of U.S.-Euro ruthless and relentless persecution against their kind – the inventors of human rights for all.    White terror continues today as fake charity, and “bringing democracy” that’s always dictatorship to depopulate, seed death and steal Hayti natural wealth while hiding Hayti’s great strategic importance to the warmongering white settler nations and Eurasians cultures…     Èzili Dantò of HLLN/#FreeHaiti’s three solutions begins the process of a New World for all in the Western Hemisphere and provides a modicum of justice for a persecuted people and a path for Hayti to fulfill its earth legacy of Liberty-For-All. #FreeHaiti #FreeHaitiMovement.

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