Daily News Digest March 29, 2024

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

New Dog, Same As the Old Dog

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:

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. —James Baldwin, The Nation (1979)

Pocasts/Videos of the Day:

Black Agenda Radio March 22, 2024

Dr. Gerald Horne Discusses the Crises of Imperialism

San Francisco Criminalized Poverty

2024 REVOLUTION In Haiti Against US Empire! The Full (Hi)Story Of The Uprising | Prof. Jemima Pierre

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 

State Department finding Israel not in Violation of Int’l Law Contradicted by Resigning Official US arms transfers are conditioned by federal law, as the Congressional Research office explains, which: “prohibits security assistance to ‘any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.’” (Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended in 1976 with Section 502B(a)(2) (22 U.S.C. 2304(a)(2)). The Biden administration’s arms transfers to Israel are therefore blatantly illegal.     But there is a difference between theoretical law and practical legality. The latter has to be adjudicated by some official body– a court, Congress, the State Department. As America’s chief diplomatic organ,the State Department would make a pretty good arbiter here.  Unfortunately, the State Department is in the hands of a genocide-denier and -enabler, Antony Blinken, whose boss, Joe Biden, is an even bigger genocide-denier and -enabler.

U.S. Armed and Funded Palestinian Genocide:

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?

Profits at the Expense of Safety!: Breakdown of Safety Is Not Unique to Boeing — It’s Endemic to Capitalist Society Heads are rolling at Boeing, but new leadership doesn’t alter the labor conditions and profit motives that erode safety. “Boeing’s leaders knew there were serious safety problems with their company’s 737 Max jet and other products, yet they failed to institute systemic changes, despite the fact that workers gave them such warnings.” 

US Leads Charge as Surge of Oil and Gas Projects Threaten Hope for Livable Planet “The science is clear: No new oil and gas fields, or the planet gets pushed past what it can handle,” said one analyst.     Fossil fuel-producing countries late last year pledged to “transition away from fossil fuels,” but a report on new energy projects shows that with the United States leading the way in continuing to extract oil and gas, governments’ true views on renewable energy is closer to a statement by a Saudi oil executive Amin Nasser earlier this month.     “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” the CEO of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, said at an energy conference in Houston. 

From Diesel Exhaust and Cancer Risk: …What Expert Agencies Say About Diesel Exhaust      Several national and international agencies study substances in the environment to determine if they can cause cancer. (A substance that causes cancer or helps cancer grow is called a tions to evaluate the risks based on evidence from lab, animal, and human research studies.     Some of these expert agencies have classified diesel exhaust as to whether it can cause cancer, based largely on the possible link to lung cancer.

  • The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)is part of the World Health Organization (WHO). One of its major goals is to identify causes of cancer. IARC classifies diesel engine exhaust as “carcinogenic to humans,” based on sufficient evidence that it is linked to an increased risk of lung cancer. IARC also notes that there is “some evidence of a positive association” between diesel exhaust and bladder cancer.

  • IARC also classifies outdoor air pollution, of which diesel exhaust is a part, as being “carcinogenic to humans,” based on sufficient evidence that it causes lung cancer.
  • The National Toxicology Program (NTP)is formed from parts of several US government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The NTP has classified exposure to diesel exhaust particulates as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” based on limited evidence from studies in humans (mainly linking it to lung cancer) and supporting evidence from lab studies.

·     The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), an electronic database that contains information on human health effects from exposure to various substances in the environment. The EPA classifies diesel exhaust as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” 

From As More Trucks Fill Our Roads, the EPA Must Act to Save Our Air: Pollution from vehicle emissions is a major cause of health issues in communities across America. The diesel exhaust from heavy-duty vehicles like trucks and buses is especially toxic. Beyond asthma and other respiratory illnesses, the pollution particles are so small that they penetrate tissue and get into the bloodstream. From there, these poisons attack the heart, kidneys, liver, and even the brain.     Decades of redlining and environmental racism have disproportionately placed Black and brown communities alongside the highways that serve as America’s major ground shipping routes. The rise of e-commerce has increased the traffic. And it has increased the number of warehouses and distribution centers, which have also sprung up disproportionately in Black and brown neighborhoods.

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Black Agenda Report

Labor:

Economy:

Enriching the Top 1%!:  CHIPS Ahoy for Stock Buybacks R Us! Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with 2023 revenues of $54 billion, has just been awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in favorable loans.     In addition to badly needed microchips, Intel produces totally useless stock buybacks. On its website the company proudly proclaims to have spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990. That’s not a typo — $152,000,000,000. Which is why I call it Stock Buybacks Я Us.     Intel took $152 billion of its revenues, some portion of which could have been used for R&D and building new microchip facilities in the U.S. as well as paying workers more, and instead funneled it to its largest Wall Street stockholders and corporate executives, enriching the top fraction of the top one percent.

Report: Five Banks Have a Combined Half Trillion Dollars in Commercial Real Estate Loans; Number 1 is JPMorgan Chase Yesterday, American Banker released a report showing that five banks in the U.S. hold a combined half trillion dollars in commercial real estate (CRE) loans. It came as a big surprise to a lot of folks that the bank holding the largest amount of CRE loans is JPMorgan Chase – whose bank holding company is also exposed to $49 trillion in derivatives as of December 31, 2023 according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. (See Table 14 at this link.)

Billionaire Larry Fink of BlackRock, Which Grabbed Fed Bailouts in 2020-2021, Lectures Struggling Seniors on Making More Sacrifices Yesterday, billionaire Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of the giant investment manager BlackRock, released his annual letter to shareholders. In it, Fink revives the same ole trope that billionaires Kenneth Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller were taking on a road show in 2013. Back then the billionaire propaganda was called: “Generational Theft: How Entitlement Spending is Stealing Opportunity from America’s Youth.”     Every time there is talk of raising taxes on the super-rich, some of whom pay less in taxes than plumbers and teachers through a tricked-up tax dodge known as “carried interest,” the billionaires launch a concerted effort to scapegoat struggling seniors living on an average monthly Social Security retirement benefit of $1772.51.    The inability of younger Americans to save enough for retirement couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Wall Street gobbling up two-thirds of lifetime retirement savings in fees, as Frontline documented back in 2013. The late John Bogle explained in the program that if a person works for 50 years and receives the typical long-term return of 7 percent on their 401(k) plan and Wall Street’s fees are 2 percent, almost two-thirds of their retirement account will go to Wall Street. Wall Street On Parade checked the math and documented it for our readers.

 World:

George Monbiot: Chemicals Warfare Outside the European Union, the UK is becoming a dumping ground for toxic substances.  Outside the European Union, the UK is becoming a dumping ground for toxic substances.     It’s a benefit of Brexit – but only if you’re a manufacturer or distributor of toxic chemicals. For the rest of us, it’s another load we have to carry on behalf of the shysters and corner-cutters who lobbied for the UK to leave the EU.     The government insisted on a separate regulatory system for chemicals. At first sight, it’s senseless: chemical regulation is extremely complicated and expensive. Why replicate an EU system that costs many millions of euros and employs a small army of scientists and administrators? Why not simply adopt as UK standards the decisions it makes? After all, common regulatory standards make trading with the rest of Europe easier. Well, now we know. A separate system allows the UK to become a dumping ground for the chemicals that Europe rules unsafe.

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  

Missing Links in Textbook History: War In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military- industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. — President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address  (1961).    In the late 1980s I had a student in an American history class who said that the United States won the war in Vietnam. I felt dizzy. Maybe I had misunderstood. So, I asked him to explain. “My father,” he told the class, “said that we had won the war because we won most of the battles and we killed more of them than they killed of us.”     My instinct was to attempt to impose logic on the discussion. American aircraft, I said, dropped millions of tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than twice what the U.S. dropped in all of World War II. That, of course, killed a lot of people, but it did not win the war.     That student was not convinced and I quickly realized that I would not change his mind. Not long after, I discovered that he and his father were not alone.