Daily News Digest May 3, 2024

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

How Capitalism Affects the Environment

Ted Rall: Last Supper

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, and The 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 Still Leads the World In  Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World!

The Iron Heel

The Majority of the World, Despite the Media Monopoly’s Lies, are Opposed to the Palestinian Genocide and Global Warming — The 1% Minority Funds Them! At, this Time in History, Capitalism is Exposing the Fact That it is Opposed to Majority Rule/Democracy!

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:

And then I thought of something else altogether. I thought of all those principled, clear-eyed students pitching tents, occupying buildings and holding placards across the U.S. in support of the Palestinian cause—which is to say the human cause. What is the difference, I came to wonder, between the demonstrating students and the journalists writing about laundry detergents and junk breakfast food or obscuring best they can the daily atrocities in Gaza? If the question implies the two are comparable, good. I think they are in some essential respects.     If we understand those who populate corporate media as painfully representative of the unconsciousness of our civilization—and I cannot see disputing this—we can stay with Saul’s terms and rotate our gaze to recognize those demonstrating in many American colleges and universities as, before they are anything else, highly conscious human beings. May the future lie with them.      They are riveted to reality, while the media class flinches from it. While corporate journalists hide in forests of frivolity, the students we read of daily take refuge in nothing unless we count all those tents they’ve pitched on campus quads and greens.    At writing, students at Columbia and other universities are besieged by police in riot gear—or, at UCLA, marauders, presumably students but maybe not, who swing sticks in defense of the Zionist cause.    Listen to the language of the demonstrators, not only for what they say but for how they say it. The diction, simplicity and clarity of their placards and public statements have the force of true conviction. Reconnecting language to reality lies at the core of our recovery into consciousness, Saul argued. Or there is Hannah Arendt’s variation on the thought: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.” So: As demonstrators speak, they make themselves humanizers. — Patrick Lawrence: Of Journalists, Students and Power

Podcasts’Videos of the Day:

Black Agenda RadioColumbia Students Mobilize in Solidarity with Palestine

Colleges and Universities Collaborate With The State To Silence Pro-Palestine Protests

New York State Fails to Meet Housing Needs

Gaza War Crimes Go Unpunished

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 

May Day Is About Confronting the Capitalist System That Governs Our Lives Let’s celebrate by coming together to imagine how workers’ collective power can transform the world. Each year, May Day invites us to revisit and rethink revolutionary traditions from the nineteenth century for the present and the future. The annual international holiday comes out of a trajectory from the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, when police attacked workers making demands for an eight-hour workday. At that time, the demand for an eight-hour workday was understood as a total opposition to the capitalist workplace, where employers extracted as much as possible from their exhausted workforce. The beginnings of May Day were not about better wages and working conditions but about an opposition to the whole system of life governed by capital and ruled by money. To insist on sixteen hours for play and rest every single day was understood as a real threat to capital, a fact corroborated by the hostile opposition to those making the demand. Take a look at the history of May Day, International Workers’ Day, and you will see that it comes from immigrants, anarchists, communists, socialists, revolutionaries of many varieties, and others disenchanted. I think one could argue that May Day is the holiday of imaginary power and real horizons. 

U.S. Funded Plestinian Genocide:

This is Why the Students are Protesting: Eyes on Israel’s Killing Fields in Gaza Lisa Hajjar has compared what is happening in Gaza to the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Yet where she argues that “Unlike the Khmer Rouge, the Israeli government’s exterminationist policy is not fueled by an ideological vision to remake Gaza anew. Total destruction is the goal.” As has been made evident by many Israeli social media posts and government officials, the goal is to remake Gaza minus the Palestinians. It is expansionist colonialism with religious overtones more akin to ISIL’s theoretical religious justification of their crimes or the Manifest Destiny that allowed the United States to break international law when it sought to subsume and delegitimize the nations of indigenous peoples.

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?

‘An Affront to the World’: Shell Posts Billions in Profits as Planet Burns “The grotesque wealth that this Earth-wrecking company continues to accumulate is something we cannot allow ourselves to accept as normal,” one campaigner said.  Oil major Shell announced $7.7 billion in profits during the first quarter of 2024 on Thursday, as well as a $3.5 billion share buyback program. he news comes as every month covered by the period was the hottest of its kind on record. The three-month period also saw the second-largest wildfire in Texas history, extreme heat in West Africa and the Sahel, and the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef’s fifth mass bleaching event in eight years. Scientists have clearly linked global heating, and the weather disasters it exacerbates, to the climate crisis driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels 

The Brockovich Report: Have You Had Your Tyson Today? The Chicken Giant’s Processing Plants Discharged Hundreds of Millions Of Pounds Of Pollutants Into U.S. Waterways, According To New Report Chicken is big business in our country. Americans eat more chicken than any other country in the world, according to the National Chicken Council. Each year, the chicken industry, which consists of more than 30 large companies, raises and slaughters almost 9.4 billion chickens for food.    At the top of that chicken chain is Tyson, an Arkansas-based multinational corporation, which processes and sells almost $13 billion worth of chickens each year and leads in the production of ready-to-cook poultry products.   Tyson Foods is one of the world’s largest food companies, and it also has a huge impact on our water.     A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists by. Omanjana Goswami, Stacy Woods details how Tyson-owned meat processing plants and slaughterhouses released more than 371.72 million pounds of pollutants directly into U.S. waterways between 2018 and 2022. We’re talking rivers, lakes, ponds, and other bodies of water.

11 Facts About Factory Farms and the Environment

  1. About 10 billion land animals in the United States are raised for dairy, meat, and eggs each year.[1]
  2. Factory farming accounts for 37% of methane (CH4) emissions, which has more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2.[2]
  3. Manure can also contain traces of salt and heavy metals, which can end up in bodies of water and accumulate in the sediment, concentrating as they move up the food chain.[3]
  4. When manure is repeatedly overapplied to farm land it causes dangerous levels of phosphorus and nitrogen in the water supply. In such excessive amounts, nitrogen robs water of oxygen and destroys aquatic life.[4]
  5. Burning fossil fuels to produce fertilizers for animal feed crops may emit 41 million metric tons of CO2 per year.[5]
  6. Globally, deforestation for animal grazing and feed crops is estimated to emit 2.4 billion tons of CO2 every year.[6]
  7. Corn, wheat, and rice, the fast-growing crops on which humanity depends for survival, are among the most nitrogen hungry of all plants.[7]
  8. Large-scale animal factories often give animals antibiotics to promote growth, or to compensate for illness resulting from crowded conditions. These antibiotics enter the environment and the food chain.[8]
  9. Factory farms contribute to air pollution by releasing compounds such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane.[9]
  10. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that confined farm animals generate more than 450 million tonnes of manure annually, 3 times more raw waste than generated by Americans.[10]
  11. The waste lagoons on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) not only pollute our groundwater, but deplete it as well. Many of the farms use the groundwater for cleaning, cooling, and drinking.[11]

The Government was forewarned about Factory Farms and Pandemics!”  From the 2001 Nation Institue of Health Document:  Primary Pandemic Prevention 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.

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.

Factory Farms Pollute: ‘It’s Getting Worse’: US Failing to Stem Tide of Harmful Farm Pollutants The EPA has called fertilizer runoff the “single greatest challenge” to water quality. Though they’ve never met, and live 1,100 miles apart, Arnesen and Porter share a troubling kinship — both of their communities are tied to a deepening water pollution crisis that is fouling the environment and putting public health in peril across multiple U.S. states.    Arnesen’s home lies near an oxygen-depleted expanse of the northern Gulf known as the “dead zone,” where dying algae blooms triggered by contaminants flowing out of the Mississippi River choke off oxygen, suffocating shrimp and other marine life.   Porter’s farm is positioned at the center of the Upper Mississippi River Basin where streams and other surface waters saturated with farm wastes flood into the big river, and contaminated groundwater permeates drinking water wells. Cancer incidence in Iowa is among the nation’s highest, and is rising.    Though they’ve never met, and live 1,100 miles apart, Arnesen and Porter share a troubling kinship — both of their communities are tied to a deepening water pollution crisis that is fouling the environment and putting public health in peril across multiple U.S. states.   Arnesen’s home lies near an oxygen-depleted expanse of the northern Gulf known as the “dead zone,” where dying algae blooms triggered by contaminants flowing out of the Mississippi River choke off oxygen, suffocating shrimp and other marine life.    Porter’s farm is positioned at the center of the Upper Mississippi River Basin where streams and other surface waters saturated with farm wastes flood into the big river, and contaminated groundwater permeates drinking water wells. Cancer incidence in Iowa is among the nation’s highest, and is rising.

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Black Agenda Report

Labor:

Economy:

Wall Street’s Megabanks Have Trillions of Dollars Off-Balance Sheet, in a Replay of Accounting Hubris that Led to the 2008 Wall Street Collapse The Washington Post Editorial Board appears to have sipped the same kool aid as Bloomberg News. As we’ve frequently reported in the past, Bloomberg News has spent the better part of the last decade attempting to brainwash the public into believing that the head of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is a respected statesman of Wall Street. (See here, here, and here.) In reality, JPMorgan Chase has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts with Dimon at the helm and paid fines in the tens of billions of dollars for an additional crime wave that rivals an organized crime family.     Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York, is the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the owner of Bloomberg News. In 2016, Michael Bloomberg even co-authored an opinion piece with Dimon. The same year, the New York Post reported that JPMorgan Chase was the second largest customer of Bloomberg’s data terminal business with 10,000 leases of Bloomberg’s terminals. At the time, the terminals cost approximately $21,000 each per lease, per year, or about $210 million being paid by JPMorgan Chase to Michael Bloomberg’s company annually. Bloomberg’s data terminals are the cash cow of the company.

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