Daily News Digest May 30, 2024
Images of the Day:
Rafah Is Burning The Israeli invasion of Rafah is as destructive as its previous campaigns; it’s just better hidden. 
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”
The Rise of Capitalism was Under the Banner of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity! Now There is Less Liberty, More Inequality, and Less Fraternity of Humanity! Every Day, From Global Warming to Global War There is a New Example of Capitalism in Imperialist Decay!
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 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:
Capitalist society is and has always been horror without end. If this most reactionary of all wars is now preparing for that society an end to horror, we have no reason to fall into despair. — The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution II (December 1906)
Podcasts/Videos of the Day:
US Empire s Discrediting All of Its Own Argumnts for Why It Should Lead the World.
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 Trail of Campus Repression of Palestine Solidarity Leads Back to DC Spanning the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, such repression has been decades in the making. The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air. In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps. What’s more, alongside such brute displays of force, there have been congressional inquisitions into constitutionally protected speech; federal investigations into the movement for divestment; and students suspended, evicted, and expelled, not to speak of faculty disciplined or simply dismissed. Welcome to Repress U., class of 2024: a homeland security campus for the ages. But don’t think it all only happened this spring. It’s an edifice that’s been decades in the making, spanning the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden administrations. Some years ago, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, I wrote a step-by-step guide to how the original homeland security campus was created. Let me now offer an updated manual on the workings of Repress U. in a newly oppressive era. But don’t think it all only happened this spring.
U.S. Funded Palestinian Genocide:
Israeli Terrorism: Mass Slaughtering Civilians To Stop Terrorism Remember kids, Israel has to bomb hospitals and starve Gaza and incinerate children and shoot people waving white flags and assassinate doctors and journalists and commit daily massacres of civilians, because if it doesn’t do this the region will be dominated by evil terrorists.
- Experts: If Israel attacks Rafah it will result in the mass slaughter of civilians.
- US government: Relax, it’ll be a limited attack. If it’s real bad we’ll stop supporting them.
- Experts: Israel has attacked Rafah and is mass slaughtering civilians.
- US government: Eh, what are ya gonna do?
- It’s simply mindblowing that Israel is routinely massacring civilians in front of the whole world for openly racist reasons and the west is still chock full of liberals who act like this thing is just too complicated for their poor widdle minds to take a stand on, goo goo ga ga.
“Rafah is Burning”: Civilians Massacred as IDF Bombs Refugee Camp Millions of people around the globe collectively reeled in horror on Sunday after an IDF airstrike laid waste to a tent camp for displaced civilians in Rafah, killing at least 45 people. Social media is filled with images of charred and dismembered men, women and children, murdered while they slept. Lenin once wrote that capitalism is horror without end: in Gaza, those words are being spelt out in the language of fire and blood for all the world to see. As we have reported in previous weeks, the southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a refuge for Palestinians displaced by Israel’s relentless war on the Gaza Strip, which has already reduced Gaza City to rubble, as well as killing and maiming at least 100,000 people. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long threatened an invasion of the southern city, claiming this is necessary to achieve Israel’s war aim of destroying Hamas.
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?
IPCC Chair Jim Sikea at Copenhagen Climate Ministerial: Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. First, a thank you to our Danish hosts for their welcome and for inviting a scientific contribution to the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC – approved the final report of its Sixth Cycle, the Synthesis Report, almost exactly a year ago in Interlaken Switzerland. As IPCC Chair for the seventh assessment cycle I must stress that while the findings of that report stand the test of time, our climate has moved on. As confirmed by WMO, 2023 was the hottest year on record, with particularly startling extremes in ocean temperatures. Extreme weather events and wildfires ceased to be just part of future projections. They were evident on our television screens and, for far too many of us, were a present reality. And sea levels continue to rise relentlessly with consequences for small island states and low-lying coastal communities. And all this, as we have demonstrated, is down to more than a century of human activities, including burning fossil fuels, and unequal and unsustainable patterns of energy and land use. Our latest report showed that with every increment of warming the world will become more and more dangerous. Beyond 1.5°C warming, we will see new risks will emerge associated with sea level rise, permafrost degradation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, more extreme weather, food insecurity. But, on the policy front, obviously there are encouraging signs of progress. COP28 and the UAE consensus made a start on the challenge of transitioning away from fossil fuels, established a new framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation and operationalized the loss and damage fund. IPCC findings need to be interpreted in the light of all that’s happened in the last 12 months. And that is what I’ll do in the next few minutes. I’ll do so with reference to the three goals of the Paris Agreement and, indeed, the sessions at this Ministerial event. First, on mitigation ambition and warming of 1.5°C. In IPCC we have been saying for more than five years now that only immediate and deep emission reductions will allow global warming to be limited to 1.5°C. We can’t go on saying that forever. Indeed, the last UNEP Gap Report was entitled “broken record”. I looked back at the media release on the Special Report on 1.5°C five years ago, I said that “Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics “. I stand by that, noting that this refers to a long-run average level of warming, not a single year like the one we have just seen.
Majority of US Voters Support Climate Litigation Against Big Oilpoll Shows And almost half of respondents back the filing of criminal charges against oil companies that have contributed to the climate crisis As US communities take big oil to court for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis, polling shared with the Guardian shows that a majority of voters support the litigation, while almost half would back an even more aggressive legal strategy of filing criminal charges. As US communities take big oil to court for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis, polling shared with the Guardian shows that a majority of voters support the litigation, while almost half would back an even more aggressive legal strategy of filing criminal charges. The poll, which comes as the world’s first-ever criminal climate lawsuit was brought in France last week, could shed light on how, if filed, similar US cases might be viewed by a jury.
Watchdog Group Accuses EPA of Misconduct in PFAS Testing of Pesticides The agency found PFAS in pesticides but failed to disclose those results, alleges a former EPA research fellow.
Global Sales of Polluting SUVs Hit Record High in 2023, Data Shows Half of all new cars are now SUVs, making them a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis, say experts Sales of SUVs hit a new record in 2023, making up half of all new cars sold globally, data has revealed. Experts warned that the rising sales of the large, heavy vehicles is pushing up the carbon emissions that drive global heating. The analysis, by the International Energy Agency, found that the rising emissions from SUVs in 2023 made up 20% of the global increase in CO2, making the vehicles a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis. If SUVs were a country, the IEA said, they would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter of CO2, ahead of the national emissions of both Japan and Germany.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
From My Essay The Fall of the Trade Unions: Trotsky in his essay, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, wrote that: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.” He observed this trend when he stated: “ In the United States, the Department of Labor with its leftist bureaucracy has as its task the subordination of the trade union movement to the democratic state and it must be said that this task has up to now been solved with some success.” In today’s world. Every union has adopted and implemented the slogan of a “partnership with the boss.” (When I was working the worst epithet that one could say about a union official was that he/she “was in bed with the boss.” Now it is their slogan! And they are doing their best to stay in the boss’s bed as the boss threatens to toss them out to cut costs.) In essence, today’s unions have adopted the slogan of what is good for the boss is good for the union, or as Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Motors and Secretary of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower infamously stated to a congress committee: “What is good for the country is good for General Motorsand what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”
Economy:
$244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply When Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell held his press conference on May 1 to explain the Fed’s latest policy actions, more than a dozen reporters showed up to ask questions. Those reporters came from every major business news outlet. (See transcript here.) But on the same date, when the U.S. Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets, Josh Frost, conducted a press conference to announce the details of the Treasury’s plans to issue $125 billion in Treasury debt securities (quarterly refunding), only one reporter from Bloomberg News showed up to ask questions. (See the awkward video at this link.)
CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years How does a Wall Street trading firm gain competitive advantage to entice spoofers and high-frequency trading firms to use its trading platforms instead of those of its competitors? How about having its trading compliance personnel wear a blindfold as billions of trades occur over the span of 8 or 9 years? That is essentially what three of JPMorgan Chase’s federal regulators have suggested is behind the $448 million in fines they’ve leveled against three separate units of the largest bank in the United States.
World:
Britain: Vote For Fiona Lali – Kick Out the War Criminals! Following her takedown of British MP Suella Braverman, and with a surge of grassroots support, Fiona Lali is standing as a revolutionary communist candidate for Stratford and Bow in the upcoming British general election. Vote for Fiona! Bring down the warmongers!
Climate-Displaced Communities Demand Justice During International Court Hearings The Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Monday continued hearings in Brazil for a requested advisory opinion on countries’ obligations related to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency. After Chile and Colombia sought an advisory opinion from the IACtHR, hearings began in Barbados last month and kicked off in Brazil last week, as climate and humanitarian experts sounded the alarm about recent extreme flooding in the South American nation that killed at least 169 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. The people of El Bosque, the first Mexican community to be officially recognized by authorities as climate-displaced, are among the groups demanding climate justice before the court, with support from Greenpeace Mexico, Nuestro Futuro Mexico, and Conexiones Climáticas.
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