Daily News Digest June 14, 2024

Daily News Digest Archives 

End of the Ride?Notice Anything?

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 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:

Lying is practically the job description for politicians. Economist John Burnheim, in his 1985 book Is Democracy Possible?, observed of electoral campaigns: “Overwhelming pressures to lie, to pretend, to conceal, to denigrate or sanctify are always present when the object to be sold is intangible and its properties unverifiable until long after the time when the decision to buy can be reversed.”    A successful politician is often merely someone who bamboozled more voters than the other liar running for office. Dishonesty is the distinguishing trait of the political class. Thomas Jefferson observed in 1799, “Whenever a man casts a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” One carpetbagger Reconstruction-era Louisiana governor declared, “I don’t pretend to be honest. I only pretend to be as honest as anybody in politics.”    A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.  Legitimacy in contemporary democracy often consists merely of lying to get a license to steal. Candidates have almost unlimited prerogative to deceive the voters as long as they do not directly use force or violence during election campaigns. And once they capture office, they can use government power against those they deceived. — Politicians Will Always Be Shameless Liars

Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. — Rachael Carson 

Fracking entails cracking layers of earth with pressurized, chemical-laden liquid to access stores of oil and gas thousands of feet underground. Many of the chemicals used in that liquid, like benzene and formaldehyde, are carcinogenic, and the extraction itself can stir up radium and other heavy metals in the shale’s subsurface, creating radioactive waste that can contaminate watersheds. …   Some of the health risks associated with fracking, such as asthma, pre-term births and heart problems, have been established for years. However, cancer is both rare and slow to progress, which means that it can take many years to produce a meaningful study connecting it to relatively novel environmental hazards, like fracking, said Nicole Deziel, a researcher at the Yale School of Public Health. “In epidemiology, we need a certain number of cancer cases in order to statistically evaluate a link with confidence,” she said.    But research linking proximity to unconventional wells and developing certain types of cancer is gradually emerging.   In 2022, Deziel published a study that found Pennsylvania children between ages two and seven who lived within 1.2 miles of unconventional wells at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. — Rare Cancers, Full-Body Rashes, Death: Did Fracking Make Their Kids Sick?

Podcasts/Videos of the Day:

Black Agenda Radio June 7, 2024

South African Communist Party Navigates Coalition Building in the Wake of National Elections

Buffalo’s Black Mayor Targets Communities of Color to Raise Revenue

Trump Derangement and the Phony Rule of Law

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

Intruder at Large: The United States in the Middle East After Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh (1951-53), was overthrown in a U.S.-British coup, he stated: “I am aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.” Right now, his words have special meaning and importance.     Mossadegh understood that the United States could not dominate the Middle East on its own.       It needed accomplices, meretricious regional proxies to sustain control.  Washington has spent enormous sums, waged wars, forfeited American principles and aligned itself with authoritarian dictators to increase and deepen regional dependency.

Millennial Wealth Is Booming — and So Is Inequality The relatively decent financial state of Millennials as a whole is buoyed by the few that are wildly wealthy while the majority struggle The question of whether Millennials — individuals born between the early 1980s to mid-1990s — are doing economically better or worse than previous generations remains a highly debated subject. Millennials are widely seen as the “precarious generation,” bearing the brunt of increasing inequality and instability in American society. In 2017, the Financial Times described them as “the first generation that is worse off than their parents.”

Biden’s Death Sentence for Migrants!: Biden’s Asylum Ban Makes Migrants More Vulneble Amid Extreme Heat The promise of a hotter than average summer has raised fears of a surge in heat-related illnesses and possibly deaths. With much of the southwest baking under record temperatures, immigrants’ rights advocates worry President Joe Biden’s decision to effectively close the border to asylum seekers for the foreseeable future will endanger lives and further marginalize climate-displaced people seeking refuge in the U.S.    Their concerns come as a heat dome lingering over Mexico and the southwestern United States has obliterated temperature records from Phoenix to Sacramento, California. The searing conditions had health officials urging people to limit their time outdoors and take other steps to protect themselves from a climate-charged high pressure system that has killed dozens of people across several states in Mexico. The promise of a hotter-than-average summer has raised fears that Biden’s directive, which allows the government to suspend border crossings when they surpass 2,500 daily, will lead to a surge in heat-related illnesses and possibly deaths

Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Seek Justice On June 8th, 2024, in Hiroshima, Japan, The International People’s Tribunal On The 1945 Atomic Bombings met with the goal of holding the United States accountable for the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This People’s Tribunal focuses on the Korean bomb victims, 100,000 of whom were forcibly taken from their homeland by the Japanese to work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the war and were subsequently exposed to the A-bomb blasts.    The recent Tribunal gathering in Hiroshima consisted of legal scholars from Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, discussing legal theories to hold the United States accountable for violating international law for the 1945 atomic bombings, and attempting to establish the illegality of current nuclear threats and nuclear weapon states.

U.S. Funded Palestinian Genocide:

Patrick Lawrence: The Afterlives of Lies The hoax of “weaponized rape” in Gaza takes what seems a fatal hit. Last Friday, while President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and other Western leaders, along with the reporters who clerk for them, were in Normandy busily airbrushing out the Red Army’s heroism in defeating the Reich 80 years ago, something truer to history occurred in the pages of The Times of London.    Under the headline, “Israel says Hamas weaponized rape. Does the evidence add up?” two investigative reporters, Catherine Philp and Gabrielle Weiniger, decisively shredded the dense fabric of lies on this topic, woven these past eight months by the Israelis, Western media, freakishly obsessed Zionist sympathizers and various feminist poseurs. 

Israel’s New Air War In the West Bank: Nearly Half of the Dead are Children “The Israeli military is far more concerned about protecting the lives of its soldiers than it is with protecting the lives of civilians.” Nearly 20 years after the Second Intifada, the Israeli military has resumed airstrikes in the West Bank — and killed 24 children.

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?

Environmentalists Slam FERC Decision to Green Light Mountain Valley Pipeline A segment of the pipeline recently ruptured during testing, amplifying opponents’ concerns about future gas leaks. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Tuesday gave the primary owner of the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline a green light to begin operating the project after years of litigation and local opposition to the costly and destructive fracked gas infrastructure, a top priority of lawmakers bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry.

As Oceans Heat up, American Coastal Economies find Themselves in Hot Water Ocean-related tourism and recreation supports more than 320,000 jobs and US$13.5 billion in goods and services in Florida. But a swim in the ocean became much less attractive in the summer of 2023, when the water temperatures off Miami reached as high as 101 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).    The future of some jobs and businesses across the ocean economy have also become less secure as the ocean warms and damage from storms, sea-level rise and marine heat waves increases.    Ocean temperatures have been heating up over the past century, and hitting record highs for much of the past year, driven primarily by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Scientists estimate that more than 90% of the excess heat produced by human activities has been taken up by the ocean. 

The Brockovich Report:Fish Out Of Water Alaska Asked ro Revise Its Limits On Toxic Pollutants In The State’s Waters To Ensure Those Who Eat Fish Are Safe, But Fishing Across The Country Can Be Risky.   Imagine a world where the water is so polluted that even the fish contain unhealthy levels of toxins.    It’s not that far-fetched in Alaska, where just last week the U.S. EPA announced that the state needs to update its water quality standards because Alaskans eat a lot of fish.    The EPA is giving the state Department of Environmental Conservation 6 to 12 months to create new or revised standards for more than 100 pollutants in state waters. That’s based on data showing that Alaskans eat 30 to 60 times more fish than the state’s water quality rules currently assume.     “EPA continues to engage closely with the state of Alaska to ensure its communities, many of which rely on fish and shellfish for subsistence, are safer from pollution,” said EPA Acting Assistant Administrator for Water Bruno Pigott in a statement.      “Alaskans eat more salmon and other fish and shellfish than the average American. That’s why it’s important to update the science and analyses that underpin federal and state standards that protect water quality and ensure that it’s safe to eat  fish.”

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Black Agenda Report

 Labor:

Economy:

Money for Nothing —’Cash Profits Without the Risk or Costs of Production of Wealth:

‘We Should All Be Angry’ That Corporations Spent Trump Tax Windfall on Buybacks: Expert An economic policy expert told the Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday that Americans should be outraged that large corporations funneled their massive gains from the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law into stock buybacks, further enriching executives and wealthy shareholders while skimping on worker pay.     “Whether you were for or against the 2017 tax cuts, I think we should all be angry that corporations took their tax windfalls and spent a trillion dollars of it in 2018 on stock buybacks instead of on worker wages or innovation,” Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said during a Senate Budget Committee hearing titled, “Making Wall Street Pay Its Fair Share: Raising Revenue, Strengthening Our Economy.”    “Corporations took their tax windfalls and spent a trillion dollars of it in 2018 on stock buybacks instead of on worker wages or innovation,” said Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined As meticulously chronicled by Jane Mayer and numerous others, the billionaire owners of fossil fuels giant Koch Industries — Charles Koch and his late brother, David Koch – spent decades building the tentacles of what became known as the Kochtopus. It was, and remains, a sprawling network of Super Pacs, nonprofits, dark money groups, activist groups and think tanks deployed to push an anti-regulatory agenda in Congress – particularly when it comes to fossil fuels and climate change. Koch’s latest addition is an Orwellian voter-mining database and its dangerous appendages.

World:

Education, Health, 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     

Creating Homelessness is Profitable:  Corporate Landlords’ Profits Soar as Tenants Drown in Rent Hikes and Fees  “Through-the-roof rent hikes based on greed—not need—have kept many Americans from getting ahead,” said one advocate at Accountable.US.    With monthly inflation down to its lowest point in more than two years and heading toward the Federal Reserve’s target, the Biden administration on Wednesday celebrated “welcome progress.”     But an analysis from Accountable.US showed how more than 100 million people who rent their homes in the U.S. are not seeing the benefits of what one Biden spokesperson called “the great American comeback” in their housing costs, particularly millions of people whose homes are owned by corporate landlords.    The government watchdog found that the six largest corporate landlord companies brought in close to a combined $300 million in increased profits in the first quarter of 2024, with the profits mostly stemming from rent hikes.