Daily News Digest April 8, 2024
Images of the Day:
Never Again War, 1924 – Kathe Kollwitz
Deep Sea Mining A new destructive industry is in the starting blocks. Corporations worldwide have been given licences to extract metals and minerals from the seabed of our deepest oceans. This could be devastating for our most important ecosystems and worsen the climate crises by releasing carbon dioxide from the seafloor into the atmosphere. As always, these companies puts profit over protection. The good news is that we can stop this before it even starts!
My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of
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:
Mark Twain’s famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli), identifies three species of mendacity, each worse than the one before – lies, lies, and statistics. — Stephen Jay Gould, The Median Isn’t the Message
Pocasts/Videos of the Day:
4/2/24: Washington Journal: Cornel West on His 2024 Presidential Bid
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
Why Explore Space When You Can Wage War There Instead? America is hell-bent on a new arms race, far beyond the stratosphere.Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX recently secured a classified contract to build an extensive network of “spy satellites” for an undisclosed U.S. intelligence agency, with one source telling Reuters that “no one can hide” under the prospective network’s reach. While the deal suggests the space company, which currently operates over half the active satellites orbiting Earth, has warmed to U.S. national security agencies, it’s not the first Washington investment in conflict-forward space machinery. Rather, the U.S. is funding or otherwise supporting a range of defense contractors and startups working to create a new generation of space-bound weapons, surveillance systems, and adjacent technologies. In other words, America is hell-bent on a new arms race — in space.
The Mendacity of the Media Monopoly: Hypochondriacs Can Relax: Havana Syndrome Is Baloney Havana Syndrome, it turns out, is a figment of lots of overheated imaginations. There are no death-ray microwaves aimed at American heads in the U.S. embassies in nations Washington doesn’t like. In March, the National Institutes of Health said so. NIH studies found neither vocational harm, nor brain injury, nor blood biomarkers, pace 60 Minutes. The whole thing was a massive hoax that started eight years ago, after which the ball really got rolling in 2017, as U.S. military and intelligence officers reported symptoms from India and China. According to Wikipedia: “The most recent studies of over 1000 reported cases of Havana Syndrome have ruled out foreign involvement in all but a couple dozen cases.” Now the NIH has presumably dismissed even those. The nefarious furren conspiracy to scramble American brains was just, well, a hallucination, suggesting some of those brains had already been scrambled due to prolonged exposure to the madness called U.S. foreign policy. Still, the hoopla wasn’t as loony as it could have been – no Havana Syndrome sufferers claimed twinges in their teeth due to electromagnetic messages zapping their fillings, though conceivably that could come next. In fact, the NIH study didn’t stop 60 Minutes from airing a story about Havana Syndrome being caused by the Russians. So there may well be more insanity in the pipeline.
U.S. Funded Plestinian Genocide:
In Gaza and Beyond, War Itself Is the Problem Condemning “war crimes” is nothing more than a shrug; it’s war itself that must be not simply “condemned,” but transcended. Even the international condemnation of the Israeli devastation of Gaza often feels tepid. Consider, for instance, the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, in the wake of Israel’s April 1 drone strike on a convoy of cars from World Central Kitchen, a disaster relief organization bringing food to starving Gazans. The strike killed seven aid workers. Noting that a total of 196 aid workers have so far been killed in Gaza’s six months of bombardment and starvation, Guterres said: “This is unconscionable. But it is an inevitable result of the way the war is being conducted.”
Doctor at Israeli Detention Camp for Gazans Blows Whistle on War Crimes “Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.” A doctor at an Israeli field hospital inside a notorious detention center where hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are temporarily held is sounding the alarm about torture and horrific conditions at what some human rights defenders—including Israelis—are calling “Israel’s Guantánamo Bay” ad even a “concentration camp.”
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?
How Industry Coordinated to Deny Li
Capital Accumulation, Racialisation and the Politics of Ecocide In times of global warming and increasingly fragile ecosystems resulting from human activities, should there be a crime of ecocide in international law? Robert Knox addresses this question with his presentation at the Southernising Criminology Discussion Group. Drawing on Marxist analyses of international law, Knox develops a rigorous critique of current demands to introduce the crime of ecocide, in which he carves out their multi-facetted connections to the logics of capital accumulation as well as to practices of racialisation. Knox proceeds in three steps. First, he shows how capitalism – historically and still today – produces ecocidal social relations that rely on practices of racialisation and are mediated through legal provisions. Second, current demands to enshrine the crime of ecocide in international law are analysed against this backdrop and criticised for their failure to address ecocide as a social phenomenon. Last, Knox points to alternative, more promising ways to address ecocidal social relations. This blog post revisits Knox’s main arguments vis-à-vis the criminalisation of ecocide in global capitalism and concludes by offering some brief reflections on Knox’s critique.
The 1%’s Government — Profits Before the Environment!: SEC Pauses Climate Disclosure Rules Under Attack by Republican AGs “Investors need reliable, comparable information about risks that registered companies face and how they are managing those risks,” argued Democratic attorneys general who support the paused policy. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Thursday that it would pause the implementation of climate disclosure rules for U.S. companies while it awaits the rulings on legal challenges related to those rules. “The commission has determined to exercise its discretion to stay the final rules pending the completion of judicial review of the consolidated 8th Circuit petitions,” the agency said in its order. “The commission will continue vigorously defending the final rules’ validity in court and looks forward to expeditious resolution of the litigation.”
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Spiked Again in 2023 Atmospheric CO2 is Now More Than 50% Higher Than Pre-Industrial Levels Levels of the three most important human-caused greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide – continued their steady climb during 2023, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While the rise in the three heat-trapping gases recorded in air samples in 2023 was not quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years, they were in line with the steep increases observed during the past decade. The global surface concentration of CO2, averaged across all 12 months of 2023, was 419.3 parts per million (ppm), an increase of 2.8 ppm during the year. This was the 12th consecutive year CO2 increased by more than 2 ppm, extending the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases during the 65-year monitoring record. Three consecutive years of CO2 growth of 2 ppm or more had not been seen in NOAA’s monitoring records prior to 2014. Atmospheric CO2 is now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
The Court System as a Weapon of the 1%!: SLAPP This, MVP… If You Dare The Mountain Valley Pipeline uses pipe with illegal and unsafe corrosion-proof coating that’s “no longer fit for purpose.” The builders of the Mountain Valley Pipeline are bringing frivolous multi-million dollar SLAPP suits—or strategic lawsuits against public participation—against pipeline protesters in an attempt to bully them into being quiet.
Fed Chair Under Fire for Blocking Climate Risk Financial Rules “Millions of consumers, communities, and financial institutions are at the brink of a financial disaster due to climate change,” warned one campaigner. The chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, is facing scrutiny this week for pushing back against efforts incorporate climate risk in global financial rules. “European central bankers have been advocating for the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to agree on requiring lenders to disclose their strategies for meeting green commitments,” according to Bloomberg. “In closed-door meetings, U.S. officials have cited their narrow mandate and concerns that the Basel Committee was overstepping its purpose.”
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Alabama: Every Sperm Is Sacred But Human Rights are Profane There was a collective scream of anger when the Alabama Supreme Court declared that a frozen embryo — a tiny speck that fits in a test tube — has more rights than the owner of its future womb. Some fancy footwork by the Alabama legislature mitigated the problems this decision created for those seeking in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. However, lawmakers left in place the premise that an embryo is a person. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. The motive behind the so-called “right to life” is control, not compassion. This decision is the illogical conclusion of believing that every fertilized egg, whether viable or not, counts as a person.
Labor:
Michael Roberts Facebook Blog: Investors are excited by much stronger than expected net jobs rise in the US in March – up 303k. But this figure will probably be revised down next month. Most jobs gained were in healthcare and government. Little rise at all in other sectors, including manufacturing, information and finance. And the new jobs were all part-time; full-time jobs declined. So, yes, more jobs but at low pay with no security or benefits. 
Since June 2009 Americans have lived in the false reality of a recovering economy. Various fake news and manipulated statistics have been used to create this false impression. However, indicators that really count have not supported the false picture and were ignored. For example, it is normal in a recovering or expanding economy for the labor force participation rate to rise as people enter the workforce to take advantage of the job opportunities. During the decade of the long recovery, from June 2009 through March 2024, the labor force participation rate consistently fell from 65.7 to 62.7 percent. —Paul Craig Roberts, The Diminishing American Economy (Updated)
Labor Force Participation (Counting Part-Time Workers) Rate is 62.7%
Economy:
Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone Transcript: ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’ In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs—which Capitalism 101 says shouldn’t happen, because competing companies are supposed to step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Well, abject greed, abetted by policy and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back. We hear some of that conversation again this week.
World:
Severe Drought in Southern Africa Leaves Millions on the Brink of Starvation Millions across the region are facing severe hunger and livelihood losses, with smallholder farmers striving to cope with the climate crisis and colonial monoculture patterns of farming. The climate crisis has exacerbated the impacts of what is otherwise the naturally occuring El Niño weather phenomenon (a warming of the surface of the eastern Pacific ocean) — the result being the driest conditions in the region in over four decades and widespread crop failures in countries including Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana.
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
Hundreds of Thousands Face Being Denied Revolutionary New Dementia Drugs in England Exclusive: Treatments near approval but lack of diagnostic capacity means NHS unprepared for rollout, report says Hundreds of thousands of dementia patients in England face being denied access to revolutionary new drugs because the diagnostic capacity of the NHS lags behind every other G7 country, according to a damning report. After decades of research to find a cure for the condition projected to affect 153 million people worldwide by 2050, scientists have successfully developed the first treatments to tackle the underlying causes rather than only relieve the symptoms. Two new drugs could get the green light for use on the NHS within weeks.