Daily News Digest April 22, 2024
Images of the Day:
Happy Earth Day!
Latuff: America’s Overcapacity in Exporting Turmoil to the World 
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:
From: Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist International (I agree with the general line of this entire document.) … The Environmental Disaster:
In addition to the constant wars and economic crises, humanity is threatened by the rape of the planet. In its constant search for profit, the capitalist system has poisoned the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink. It is destroying the Amazon rainforest and the polar ice caps. The oceans are choked with plastic and polluted with chemical waste. Animal species are being rendered extinct at an alarming rate. And the future of entire nations is at risk. The poorest sections of society and the working class are the worst hit by the impact of pollution and climate change. On top of this, the ruling class is asking them to foot the bill for the crisis that capitalism has created. Marx explained that the choice before humanity was socialism or barbarism. The elements of barbarism already exist even in the most advanced capitalist countries, and threaten the very existence of civilisation. But now we are entitled to say that capitalism poses a threat to the very existence of the human race. All these things stir the conscience of millions, especially young people. But moral indignation and angry demonstrations are totally insufficient. If the environmental movement confines itself to the politics of empty gestures, it will condemn itself to impotence. The environmentalists are capable of pointing to the most obvious symptoms of the problem. But they do not give a correct diagnosis, and without that, it is impossible to offer a cure. The environmental movement can only succeed in its objectives if it takes up a clear and unambiguous anti-capitalist revolutionary position. We must endeavour to reach the best elements and convince them that the problem is capitalism itself. The environmental catastrophe is the result of the madness of the market economy and the profit motive. The so-called free market economy is impotent to solve any of the problems facing humanity. It is colossally wasteful, destructive and inhuman. No progress can be made on this basis. The case for a planned economy is unanswerable. It is necessary to expropriate the bankers and capitalists and replace the anarchy of the market with a harmonious and rational system of planning. The capitalist system now displays all the horrible features of a creature that has lost all reason to exist. But that does not mean that it recognises that it is facing extinction. Quite the contrary, in fact. This degenerate and diseased system resembles a sick and senile old man who clings tenaciously to life. It will continue to stagger on until it is overthrown by the conscious revolutionary movement of the working class. It is the task of the working class to put an end to this lengthy process of the death agony of capitalism through its revolutionary overthrow and the reconstruction of society from top to bottom. The existence of capitalism now represents a clear and present threat to the future of the planet Earth. In order that humanity may live, the capitalist system must die.
Pocasts/Videos of the Day:
Michael Jackson – Earth Song (Official Video)
The Julian Assange Speech They Didn’t Want You to See
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
Colonialists Have Long Used Starvation as a Tool of Oppression The Conversation and Vinita Srivastava, The Conversation — In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbool.
U.S. Funded Plestinian Genocide:
Red Lines and Rockets: Reframing the War on Gaza Madison, Wisconsin (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Barely a day after Iran fired drones, cruise, and ballistic missiles westward across the desert skies towards Israel, in response to Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Hossein Salami, issued the following statement: “From now on, if Israel attacks Iranian interests, figures, and citizens anywhere, Iran will retaliate from Iranian soil.” If Iran stands by this declaration, it has issued a new red line in the simmering regional war Israel has instigated with its brutal destruction of Gaza. Viewers accustomed to American media will likely blame Iran for any intensification of hostilities. In fact, however, virtually every act of aggression that has taken place in the region since October 8th is rooted in Israel’s ‘war’ on Gaza, which has deep roots not only in the European colonial past but in religious mythology and a Zionist ideology that is rigid, chauvinistic and exclusive. All three factors underscore the belief that Jews alone have a right to historic Palestine.
Marjorie Cohn: Under UN Charter, Iran’s Attack Was a Legal Response to Israel’s Illegal Attack Iran’s attack on Israel was lawful self-defense carried out in compliance with international humanitarian law.
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?
Capitalism’s New Age of Plagues, Part 4 Agribusiness assaults on tropical forests are driving the emergence of new diseases and epidemics In 1998, pigs in a farm in northern Malaysia developed a respiratory disease, marked by very loud coughing. Some of the animals had no other symptoms, others had fevers and muscle spasms, but most recovered. Then the previously unknown disease jumped to farmworkers and became more virulent — 265 people developed severe encephalitis, and 105 of those died, a death rate comparable to Ebola. Medical investigators found that the farm where the epidemic started kept some 30,000 pigs in open-air pens near mango trees. Fruit bats from the deep forests of nearby Borneo had recently migrated to those trees when their natural habitats were bulldozed to make way for palm plantations, and the pigs ate partially eaten fruit that the bats dropped. The bats’ saliva carried a then-unknown virus — later named Nipah after a nearby village — that was harmless to them but made pigs sick and killed people. The Malaysian outbreak was contained by killing over a million pigs, but, having escaped its forest origin, the virus moved on: Nipah is now endemic in Bangladesh and parts of India, where yearly outbreaks still kill 40% to 75% of those infected. There is no vaccine and no cure.
Revealed: How Development Banks Underwrote Fast Food’s Global Takeover From South Africa to Ukraine, five industrial chicken companies that supply KFC have benefited from financing from the World Bank Group and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. With its unparalleled purchasing power and exacting demands, fast food has long shaped agricultural systems in the United States, Europe, and China. But as major American fast food brands, like KFC, expand into so-called “frontier markets,” taxpayer-funded development banks have made their global expansion possible by underwriting the factory farms that supply them with chicken, a DeSmog investigation has found. In all, the investigation identified five factory-scale poultry companies in as many countries that have received financial support from the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank Group), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), or both since 2003, and that supply chicken to KFC. A sixth company has benefited from IFC advisory services but has not received financing.
Capitalism Is Acting Truly Suicidally on Climate If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century’s end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. A new study released today in Nature examines data from 1,600 regions of the earth for the last 40 years, and concludes that by 2050 climate change will be causing economic damage worth $38 trillion every single year. That seems like… a lot. The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year. $38 trillion is 150 Bezoses (which is sick in its own way). If those numbers seem impossible to comprehend, then let Bloombergbreak it down for you, “planetary warming will result in an income reduction of 19% globally by mid-century, compared to a global economy without climate change.”
Giant Food Corps Are Largely to Blame for Higher Grocery Prices The largest grocery retailers—which include Walmart, Kroger, and Amazon, which owns Whole Foods—used the pandemic as an excuse to raise prices across the board. In 2004, I was a single mom raising three daughters on my own. I worked three jobs, including an overnight shift as a translator at our local hospital, to make ends meet. Every time I stood in line at the supermarket, I worried about what I would have to put back on the shelf to stay within our weekly $100 food budget. My daughters are all grown now. But whenever I’m buying groceries, I still get that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach as I remember not knowing if we would have enough to eat, and how much—or how little—I could provide for my family with $100. Prices for all of us have gone way up since Covid-19, and $100 now buys about $65 worth of groceries compared to five years ago. This puts a huge bite on working families, because we spend most of our income every month—as much as 90%—on food and other necessities. So when prices rise, we hurt the most.
Why Most Americans Can’t Afford EVs The tax credits are too complicated and trade warriors are blocking cheaper Chinese models. It might seem like there’s never been a better time to buy an electric vehicle. If you go by the headlines, you might be forgiven for thinking you can afford to upgrade your old gas-guzzling sedan with a sleek new zero-emissions EV. And if you can’t, government rebates will knock thousands off the price tag, right? Well, not necessarily. To qualify for the ever-changing and complicated federal $7,500 rebate on EVs, you have to be rich enough to afford a new EV. (Some used models qualify, but good luck figuring out which ones — and better luck finding one that’s available). But to qualify for the rebate, you can’t be too rich. If you’re middle-income like me, you can lease an EV, but then you don’t qualify for the rebate — your leasing company does.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Whether It is Opposition, to Israel’s Palestine Genocide or Global Warming, Worldwide Capitalism is Applying the Iron Heal to Free Speech/or Protests!: Columbia Suspends Ilhan Omar’s Daughter Day After Omar Grills Its President Omar had grilled Shafik about her characterization of pro-Palestine protests as antisemitic. Isra Hirsi, pro-Palestine activist and daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), announced on Thursday that she was one of a handful of activists who have been suspended from Barnard College, a partner college of Columbia University, amid a mass student protest over Columbia and Barnard’s investments in companies that support Israel and its genocide of Gaza. “I’m an organizer with CU Apartheid Divest [with Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine], in my 3 years at [Barnard] I have never been reprimanded or received any disciplinary warnings. I just received notice that I am 1 of 3 students suspended for standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide,” Hirsi wrote on social media on Thursday morning.
Labor:
Economy:
World:
The Partition of India: A Crime of British Imperialism From the Middle East to Ireland, the historic crimes of British imperialism have left devastating scars. As elections get underway in India, Ravi Mistry examines one of the most heinous of these atrocities: partition of the Indian subcontinent. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” – Jawharalal Nehru, Tryst with Destiny Speech, 14 August 1947. These famous words of Jawaharlal Nehru could not have been further from the grim reality. India’s independence took place via partition with what became Pakistan, in which up to two million people were killed, and 80,000 women were abducted, many of whom were raped. 14.5 million refugees crossed the newly formed border, in what was the largest peacetime mass-migration of people in human history. Families were torn apart. People who had lived in their ancestral homes for centuries, were forced to leave based solely on their religious identity. Partition was not pre-planned, but was the product of many factors: British divide-and-rule policies; the inability of national-bourgeois parties to fight a genuine revolutionary struggle against colonialism; and the failure of the Indian Communist Party to play a decisive role in events.
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