Daily News Digest March 28, 2024
Images of the Day:
Latuff
CDC Reveals Scary Truth About Factory Farms and Superbugs The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information
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:
Factory Farms Cause Pandemics! From: The United States National Center for Biotechnology Information of the Institue of Health’s Essay Primary Pandemic Prevention: . . . Our last pandemic, swine flu in 2009, arose not from some backwater wet market in Asia, however. It was largely made-in-the-USA on pig production operations in the United States. In this new Age of Emerging Diseases, there are now billions of animals overcrowded and intensively confined in filthy factory farms for viruses to incubate and mutate within. Today’s industrial farming practices have given viruses billions more spins at pandemic roulette. How can we stop the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place? Whenever possible, treat the cause. The largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world, the American Public Health Association, has called for a moratorium on factory farming for nearly two decades. Indeed, factory farms are a public health menace. In addition to discontinuing the intensive confinement practices of animal agriculture, we should continue to research, develop, and invest in innovative plant-based and cultivated meat technologies to move away from raising billions of feathered and curly-tailed test tubes for viruses with pandemic potential to mutate within. …
Pocasts/Videos of the Day:
Scott Ritter: On the Brink of Nuclear War : CIA & Moscow Attack
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
The Chris Hedges Report: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange British courts for five years have dragged out Julian Assange’s show trial. He continues to be denied due process as his physical and mental health deteriorates. This is the point. Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S. The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically? If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years. The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty. 
War Spending: What Is It Good For? The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America’s foreign and military policies. The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.
U.S. Armed and Funded Palestinian Genocide:
Naked Hypocrisy: The US once cited UNSC Resolutions to Invade Iraq, now calls Gaza Ceasefire Demand “Non-Binding State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Tuesday characterized the United Nations Security Council resolution 2728 demanding an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza conflict as “non-binding,” a phrase also used by US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield. The US was rebuked by China, according to Akmal Dawi at VOA: “‘Security Council resolutions are binding,’ Lin Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday.” Beijing is correct on the law, and the Biden administration is being disingenuous. If President Biden did not want a ceasefire resolution to pass, he should have vetoed it. By abstaining and letting the world community vote on the matter, Biden has elicited a binding decision, and his officials should stop dancing around it.
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?
Calls for International Criminal Court to End ‘Impunity’ for Environmental Crimes Campaigners say activities leading to severe environmental harm usually also violate human rights The international criminal court (ICC) has been urged to start investigating and prosecuting individuals who harm the environment. Academics, lawyers and campaigners from around the world have sent expert opinions to the court outlining what they call its current regime of “impunity” for serious environmental crimes. The comments were made in response to an invitation by the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who announced in February that his office was developing a new policy paper on environmental crimes.
Capitalism’s New Age of Plagues, Part 3 Covid-19 was the least unexpected pandemic in history. Why were governments not prepared? Judging by the excuses we hear for governments’ failure to respond effectively to the pandemic, one might think that COVID-19 was an act of God, a natural event that no one could have anticipated. US President Donald Trump said that it “came out of nowhere,” “just surprised the whole world,” and “nobody had ever seen anything like this before.” Because it was unexpected and unpredictable, he could not be blamed for being unprepared. That is simply not true. As historian Kyle Harper writes, “the pandemic was a perfectly inevitable disaster.” “No one could have known that a novel coronavirus would jump from animals to humans in central China late in 2019 and instigate a global pandemic. Yet it was bound to happen that some new pathogen would emerge and evade our collective defense systems. It was a reasonable likelihood that the culprit would be a highly contagious RNA virus of zoonotic origins spread via the respiratory route. In short, a destabilizing pandemic was inescapable, its contours predictable, its details essentially random.”[2] That expectation was so widely shared by experts on infectious diseases that just two months before the real pandemic began, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic simulation workshop, attended by government and business executives from around the world, involving “a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic.” The fictional disease, which was based on SARS. killed 65 million people.[3]
From: The United States National Center for Biotechnology Information of the Institue of Health’s Essay Primary Pandemic Prevention: Factory Farms Cause Pandemics! Abstract: Over the last few decades, hundreds of human pathogens have emerged at a rate unprecedented in human history. Emerged from where? Mostly from animals. The AIDS virus is blamed on the butchering of primates in the African bushmeat trade, we created mad cow disease when we turned cows into carnivores and cannibals, and SARS and COVID-19 have been traced back to the exotic wild animal trade. Our last pandemic, swine flu in 2009, arose not from some backwater wet market in Asia, however. It was largely made-in-the-USA on pig production operations in the United States. In this new Age of Emerging Diseases, there are now billions of animals overcrowded and intensively confined in filthy factory farms for viruses to incubate and mutate within. Today’s industrial farming practices have given viruses billions more spins at pandemic roulette. How can we stop the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place? Whenever possible, treat the cause. The largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world, the American Public Health Association, has called for a moratorium on factory farming for nearly two decades. Indeed, factory farms are a public health menace. In addition to discontinuing the intensive confinement practices of animal agriculture, we should continue to research, develop, and invest in innovative plant-based and cultivated meat technologies to move away from raising billions of feathered and curly-tailed test tubes for viruses with pandemic potential to mutate within.
US-China Electric Vehicle Dispute Shows Old Trade Rules Imperil Climate Action “The climate crisis is too urgent for the U.S. or any country to allow outdated trade rules… to distract us from enacting bold climate policies,” argued one campaigner.
Baltimore Bridge Collapse Reignites Calls for Fixes to America’s Aging Bridges Bridge experts and U.S. presidents have decried the nation’s aging bridges and lack of maintenance for decades. Calls for sorely needed bridge infrastructure fixes resurfaced Tuesday after a Singapore-flagged cargo ship struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. And while the circumstances of Tuesday morning’s disaster – a massive cargo ship charging into a support beam for the bridge – is an unpredictable event, experts still say the nation’s maintenance and repair record on bridges is an important factor that needs to be addressed. The collision caused the bridge to collapse within seconds, sending six bridge construction workers who are now missing and presumed dead into the dark waters of the Patapsco River. The US Coast Guard called off its search for the men late Tuesday evening.
Experts Warn of Toxins in GM Corn Amid US-Mexico Trade Dispute “The U.S. is, in effect, asking Mexico to trust the completeness and accuracy of the initial GE corn safety assessments carried out 15 to 30 years ago by the companies working to bring GE corn events to market.” “The Mexican government is both wise and on solid ground in refusing to allow its people to participate in the experiment that the U.S. government is seeking to impose.” Friends of the Earth U.S. on Monday released a brief backing Mexico’s ban on genetically modified corn for human consumption, which the green group recently submitted to a dispute settlement panel charged with considering the U.S. government’s challenge to the policy. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced plans to phase out the herbicide glyphosate as well as genetically modified (GM) or genetically engineered (GE) corn in 2020. Last year he issued an updated decree making clear the ban does not apply to corn imports for livestock feed and industrial use. Still, the Biden administration objected and, after fruitless formal negotiations, requested the panel under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
From Israel to Atlanta, Ga: The New Modern-Day Militarized Fort! This week represents the first year anniversary of the State’s attack and arrest of Amin Chaoui and others who were challenging its attempt to build another kop city, this time within the Atlanta, Ga, area. It’s important to look at the creation of kop city within the larger context of State repression and the creation of an expanded police State of hyper surveillance, pushing ever greater intrusion into the private lives of the people. The repressive State relies upon the use of poor or working-class folks to police and dominate other poor, oppressed and marginalized folks. It is also interesting to note where a lot of these Kop Cities– modern day forts for the police, sheriff, modern day posse and local settler populations– are being built and their function to further impose minority rule. To monitor, control and secure the natives, the perceived threat population. In whose interest are they serving?
Labor:
From My Daily News Digest September 21, 2023: The Graph Here Is Shown on a Consistent Inflation Basis End the Tier Wage System! Equal Pay for Equal Work! Due the Labor Bureaucracy’s collaboration with the Boss, Real Wages Have Been Cut Over 100% Since1974! — Wages Have Not Kept Up With Inflation! Since the Neoliberal Labor Bureaucracy declared itself to be in a (Domestic) Partnership With the Boss’ (‘Bedding the Boss!’)! was fully institutionalized starting in the mid-1980s, this ‘partnership’ gave birth to the one, two, three, etc. .. wage tier system! Selling out the futures of future young workers entering the labor force. And, since the lowest union wage is immediately the highest non-union wage, this wage tier system cut the wages of the entire working class! When I was a union official, I called this system labors’ rush to the bottom! 
We Must Break the Oligarchy’s Grip to End Economic Anxiety for So Many Americans In our country, working-middle class and working-class people are feeling increasingly unsafe. We must face this fact, not hide from it. Our economic model generates and conflates two conditions that burden working people. The first is “economic adversity.” The second is “economic anxiety.’’ Economic Adversity. The data shows that our economic model produces chronic economic adversity for large numbers of working-class and working-middle class people every four to seven years. The corporate media often presents incomplete numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For example, functional unemployment numbers from the Ludwig Institute of Shared Prosperity (LISEP) tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week), but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes. In February 2024, the functional unemployment rate was 24.9 percent.
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