Daily News Digest April 25, 2024
Images of the Day:
Ted Rall: Silent Spring Has Arrived 
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 its origins until now, capitalism has exploited and plundered the poor nations!: In sum, what these new studies confirm is that imperialism can be quantified in economic terms: it is the persistent transfer of surplus value to the rich countries from the poorest countries of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and through net flows of profits, interest and rent from investments and wealth owned by the rich countries in the poor countries. This process developed some 150 years or so ago and remains. — Further Thoughts on the Economics of Imperialism
Pocasts/Videos of the Day:
Months Ago State Dept. Panel Exposed Israeli Units’ Rights Abuses, But U.S. Arms Keep Flowing
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
Whorulesamerica.Net Power, Politics, & Social Change by G. William Domhoff. Welcome to Who RulesAmerica.net, a site about how power is distributed and wielded in the United States. It both builds upon and greatly supplements the book Who Rules America?, now in its 8th edition. As of August 2023, the book also includes a lengthy new Prologue that covers the many events that have occurred since mid-2022 and includes a discussion of the key factors that will determine the outcome of the fateful 2024 elections. WRA‘s latest subtitle is “The Corporate Rich, White Nationalist Republicans, and Inclusionary Democrats in the 2020s”; the story of how we got here and where we’re going next is complicated, but most of the answers are in the book and/or this Web site; you can also watch some videos of Bill Domhoff giving invited lectures on the topic. Among the many things you’ll find in this Web site: supplementary information and updates for readers of Who Rules America?; an overview of the American power structure at the national level and an in-depth look at power at the local level; a look at the wealth and income distribution in the U.S.; and an overview of the Four Networks theory of power, which provides the best general theory of power and social change within which to situate the class-domination theory we’ve developed specifically for the United States.
United States Hypocrisy – Again The hypocrisy of the United States government knows no limits. On April 18, a proposal was submitted to the United Nations Security Council to admit Palestine as a full member, thus effectively recognizing the state of Palestine. Of the fifteen members of the Security Council, twelve voted in favor, two abstained, and the United States, using its veto power, opposed it. This, after frantic lobbying by the U.S. of the other nations on the Security Council to convince at least one of them to vote with the U.S., so the U.S. would not have to stand alone, again, in its support for the apartheid regime of Israel.
For Welfare, Not Warfare: Down With Imperialism! Down With the Warmongers! As the conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control, the warmongers in Westminster and Washington are ramping up their militarism: finding money for bombs, but never for workers’ wages and public services. Overthrow their system! Addressing Parliament recently, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the Iranian regime as ‘despotic’, following their launch of over 300 drones and missiles at Israel. These are sanctimonious words from a leader with no democratic mandate; from a man who is complicit in the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Gazans. Out of Control. The British establishment have become faithful servants to those with real power on the world stage; to the most reactionary force on the planet: US imperialism.
U.S. Funded Plestinian Genocide:
The Long History of Apartheid and Israel!: Brothers In Arms – Israel’s Secret Pact With Pretoria During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship – A-bomb technology. Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer survived the extermination camp, married soon after the war and moved to South Africa. Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler’s Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.
How Divestment Became a ‘Clarion Call’ in Anti-Fossil Fuel and Pro-Ceasefire Protests The divestment movement has a long history among US student activists, including in the overlapping movements of today Cameron Jones first learned about fossil fuel divestment as a 15-year-old climate organizer. When he enrolled at Columbia University in 2022, he joined the campus’s chapter of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement and began pushing the school in New York to sever financial ties with coal, oil and gas companies. “The time for institutions like Columbia to be in the pocket of fossil fuel corporations has passed,” Jones wrote in an October 2023 op-ed in the student newspaper directed toward the Columbia president, Minouche Shafik. Today, 19-year-old Jones, like many other student protesters and campus organizers, is just as focused on pushing the school to divest from another group of businesses: those profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza. He and others see the issues as firmly connected, with activists learning from tactics used in both of the often overlapping movements.
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?
South Korean High Court Hears First-Ever Youth Climate Case in Asia The lawsuit notes that the government is constitutionally obligated to protect Koreans from the climate emergency. One of South Korea’s two highest courts on Tuesday began hearing Asia’s first-ever youth-led climate lawsuit, which accuses the country’s government of failing to protect citizens from the effects of the worsening, human-caused planetary emergency.
More Than One-Third of People in the US Exposed to Harmful Air Pollution – Report American Lung Association’s State of the Air report states nearly 131 million people are exposed to ozone and particle pollution Nearly four in 10 people in the US are exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution, a new report has found. Four of the five most polluted cities are in California, where wildfires, drought and extreme heat are driving the rise in hazardous air quality. More than 131 million people are exposed to harmful ozone and particle (PM 2.5) pollution, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report. That figure, which incorporates new, more stringent (Economicaly Feasable-R.S.) federal standards for particle pollution, represents an 11.7 million increase from the previous year. 
Critics Blast ‘Reckless and Impossible’ Bid to Start Operating Mountain Valley Pipeline “The time to build more dirty and dangerous pipelines is over,” said one environmental campaigner. Environmental defenders on Tuesday ripped the company behind the Mountain Valley Pipeline for asking the federal government—on Earth Day—for permission to start sending methane gas through the 303-mile conduit despite a worsening climate emergency caused largely by burning fossil fuels.
US Seeing Rise In Climate-Related Power Outages, Report Says High winds, rains, winter storms and tropical cyclones accounted for 80% of power interruptions over the last 20 years Power outages in the US are rising, as climate-related extreme weather strain an already burdened energy grid.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
No President of a Major American University has Deplored the Israeli Destruction of all Gaza Universities American campuses are being roiled by student and faculty protests against the ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has found to be plausibly described as a genocide. These harmless student demonstrations, of a sort that have been normal throughout the past sixty years, have been met with a harsh police response and criminalization by university administrators unmatched since the Kent State University president called in the National Guard on May 4, 1970, when green troops panicked and killed four students.
Edward Said Warned Against Anti-Palestinian McCarthyism Said’s legacy reads today as a scathing condemnation of the hypocrisy of U.S. liberal institutions, their moral corruption, and the hollowness of the very values that they profess to teach. Students across the United States are rising up against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, bringing to memory the student movements of the 1960s. From Columbia to Brown, from Yale to Harvard, students are staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, class walkouts, and interfaith prayers, demanding an end to U.S. support for Israel and the complicity of their academic institutions in the ongoing genocide. While some U.S. institutions are treading a delicate path, the Columbia University administration, led by President Minouche Shafik, has violently cracked down on its own students, summoning the NYPD to mass arrest over 100 students, and suspending others with a 15-minute notice. In an unprecedented brutal crackdown on free speech on campus, the police destroyed solidarity encampments and student belongings, while charging arrested students with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged a whopping tuition of more than $60,000 a year to attend!
Labor:
Economy:
The Rising Inftation/ The Declining Dollar: Purchasing Power of the Consumer Dollar in U.S. City Average is $.32 (1989 Dollar = $1.00)
The Fed Tallies Up a Big Threat to Financial Stability in the U.S.: “Runnables” at $21.3 Trillion Last Friday, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report. In the prior five years, the spring edition of the Fed’s Financial Stability Report was released in May. This year, for reasons we can only guess at (nervously), the Fed released the spring edition early, in April. Given that last spring the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred, handing over $30 billion in losses to the federal Deposit Insurance Fund, and one of those banks (Silicon Valley Bank) experienced the fastest run on its deposits in U.S. history, one particular item in the new report that caught our attention was this: “Overall, estimated runnable money-like financial liabilities grew 8.8 percent to $21.3 trillion (75 percent of nominal GDP) over the past year, as a decline in uninsured deposits was more than offset by an increase in assets under management at MMFs [Money Market Mutual Funds]. As a share of GDP, runnable liabilities remained above their historical median.”
World:
Fuck the Parliamentary Vote! Build a Worker-Based Anti-War Movement! Over six months of mass protests have failed to compel policy makers to reject war. What is the alternative? Canada is a NATO nation governed by an alliance between the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP). They actively support the US-Israeli genocide with military exports and falsely target anti-war activists as antisemitic. Nevertheless, horrific images of mass slaughter and starvation have turned most Canadians against the U.S.-NATO-backed Israeli war. Responding to social pressure, the NDP introduced a non-binding resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, an embargo on arms exports to Israel, unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza, and recognition of the State of Palestine. Immensely encouraged, anti-war organizations sprang into action with a cross-country campaign to phone, email, and badger Members of Parliament to endorse this resolution. Bait and Switch. Behind the scenes, the NDP was making a deal with the Liberals to gut the resolution. The amended motion called on Hamas to lay down arms and release hostages, but not Israel. It granted Israel the right to self-defense but not Palestinians. It supported an Israeli State but not a Palestinian State. It allowed Canada to keep sending arms to Israel under current permits and placed no restriction on the continued export of military components. On March 18, Parliament approved this amended resolution.
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