Daily News Digest August 9, 2024

Daily News Digest Archives 

Images of the Day:Images of the Day:

Robber Baron Government: New Robes for the ‘Supremes’

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”There is No Democracy! When Less Than 1% Control the Wealth, Production, and Price of Everything Produced and Consumed in the World!      In the present period of unfettered Capitalism, the pretense of democratic rule does not exist, except in the minds of ‘socialists’ like Bernie Sanders and the Labor Bureaucracy!   Capitalists view all struggles as struggles against capitalist rule! Transition demands immediately become revolutionary demands!    Therefore, any resistence to the attack of capitalists has to be organized by those that understand this!

Today, the United States Capitalists are Consolidating Themselves as the Supreme Capitalists!      Capitalism’s Gluttony is Demonstrated by It’s Quest for More and More Profits at the Expense of Humanity!     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 6 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 Five Horsemen of the the Apocalypse, Spreading  Racism,  War, Famine, Pestilence, Death, and Misinformation! 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:

The saddest part of this is that all judges are supposed to put their biases aside and rule by laws. Supreme Court judges are held to the highest level to do exactly this and they are failing miserably, especially the ultra conservative justices. The Bible is not a book of law! — Shelly Kafka

Indeed, the DOD is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.5 From FY1975 to FY2018, total DOD greenhouse gas emissions were more than 3,685 Million Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent. While only a portion of US total emissions, US military emissions are, in any one year, larger than the emissions of many countries. In 2017, for example, the Pentagon’s total greenhouse gas emissions (installations and operations) were greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of entire industrialized countries, such as Sweden, Denmark and Portugal and also greater than all CO2 emissions from US production of iron and steel. — Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War! —

Podcasts/Vide0s of the Day:

 Israel’s Mask Is Slipping w/ David Hearst | The Chris Hedges Report

Black Agenda RadioGerald Horne Discusses His New Book on Armed Struggle in California in the 1960s and 1970s

The Abandon Biden Campaign Continues 

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 : My own Government, I cannot be Silent. ― Martin Luther King Jr.

To this day, we have a government and state apparatus that is designed to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Democracy for white and wealthy men only! — Roland Sheppard, My Forefathers and The 1%’s Forefathers.

 12 Aircraft Carriers in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean – $2 BILLION a Month – But You Can’t Have Universal Healthcare.The average daily operating cost for a US Navy aircraft carrier is around $6 million. This covers the expenses for fuel, maintenance, crew salaries, and other necessary expenditures to keep the carrier operational. The specific costs can vary depending on factors like the size of the carrier, deployment schedules, and the intensity of operations, but $6 million per day is a commonly cited estimate for the overall daily expenditure to run one of these large naval vessels. Question on Quora: How much does it cost per day to operate a US Navy aircraft carrier?    $72 million per day to support the regime. $2,160 million a month, or over $2 billion. And that’s just for the 12 carriers! Can easily see how we’ve gone past broke in a jiffy.

 The Pentagon Wide Open for Graft!: The Pentagon Just Can’t Pass An Audit! Conservative lawmakers calling for cuts should start with the agency that can’t account for $1.9 trillion — not the programs Americans rely on. The Pentagon just failed its audit — again. For the sixth time in a row, the agency that accounts for half the money Congress approves each year can’t figure out what it did with all that money.   For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed one. 

‘War is Peace’: Inside the Nuclear-Weapons Lobby Today The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future

Majority of Americans Oppose Using US Troops To Defend Israel The majority of Americans oppose the idea of US troops being used to defend Israel if it comes under attack by Iran, according to a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that was released on Tuesday.    The poll, conducted from June 21–July 1, 2024, found that 56% of Americans oppose US troops defending Israel, while 42% support the idea. Support for defending Israel is stronger among Republicans, with 53% in favor and only 32% of Democrats in favor.     The survey also found that 55% of Americans oppose US troops defending Israel if it comes under attack by a neighboring country.    The results come as the Biden administration is vowing to defend Israel from an expected Iranian reprisal attack for the killing of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. A major coordinated attack launched by Iran and its allies could result in American casualties, and the US support for Israel risks a major regional war.     The US defended Israel from an Iranian attack in April, which came in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria. The Biden administration intervened directly to protect Israel and is pledging to do so again without any authorization from Congress or any debate on the matter. 

The Social-Democrats/Democratic PartyVersion: The ‘New Economic Bill of Rights’ Comic Strip: A Vision for 2024 and Beyond After 50 years of class war from above and concerted efforts to suppress the working class, the great majority of Americans still crave—and deserve—an economy built for working people.   Now we have to fight for it. With Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, we now have the 2024 Democratic Party ticket—and we clearly recognize that more than that ticket is on the November ballot. But where is the vision to inspire and propel our energies and actions? It’s in our history and our deepest yearnings—and now is the time to make it manifest.  You wouldn’t know it from listening to the corporate media or, for that matter, to Democratic politicians’ campaign speeches and ads, but this year marks the 80th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union message calling for an Economic Bill of Rights for All Americans.     This was a speech that inspired the labor movement and progressive organizations to launch major campaigns to try to secure it.

THE WORKING CLASS VERSION: A Historic Document: A Bill of Rights for Working People: Today we are ruled by a new tyranny. Industrial and financial barons govern by the rule of profits, denying us the basic democratic and social rights we need for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:” (1976)

A Bill Of Rights For Working People (1976)   Today we are ruled by a new tyranny. Industrial and financial barons govern by the rule of profits, denying us the basic democratic and social rights we need for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:”

• America is in a developing crisis. The quality of life for most people is going from bad to worse. And the present system offers no hope for the better.
• There is no end to wars—one after another since the end of World War If. After Korea came Vietnam; now the Middle East is like a powder keg.
• Huge stockpiles of atomic weapons are a constant reminder of the threat of nuclear war.
• Pollution is destroying our environment—from the water we drink to the air we breathe.
• The economic crisis is worsening. Breakdowns, shortages, layoffs, soaring prices—each week it’s harder to get by. Suffering the most are those at the bottom of the ladder—Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other doubly oppressed people.

Neither the Republican administration nor the Democratic Congress offers a solution. They are only interested in shifting the responsibility and escaping the blame.     They pit white workers against Blacks in a struggle for jobs, housing, and education.     They blame all working people, claiming we eat too much and live too well. They say that inflation will slow down if we live in colder rooms and stop demanding higher wages.    They blame people in other countries. They point to a “population explosion” in poor countries as a burden on the American economy, while the corporations they represent plunder the resources of these same countries.     They say Arabs cause the energy crisis, as if the skyrocketing profits of U.S. oil monopolies weren’t responsible.    The Democratic and Republican proposals are clear: Don’t struggle to defend your living standards; pay the costs of foreign wars; eat less and pay more; deport foreign-born workers; use less electricity and gasoline, forget about safety, Social Security, and jobs.    This way of handling the economic crisis can be stated in nine words: “What’s good for big business is good for America.”   The Rockefellers, DuPonts, Mellons, Morgans, and other families like them who run the country think they were born with rights that come first no matter what happens to the welfare and security of the rest of us. For the sake of profits they think ifs perfectly justifiable to lay off tens of thousands of workers, to destroy our environment, or to plunge the country into war.  They are a tiny minority who brush aside the rights of the American people.     Defend the Democratic Rights of the Majority!

United States Funded Genocide in Israel:

Overwriting Palestine The most intense bombardment of a concentrated urban space in recent memory, the fastest deliberate starvation of any population in recorded history, the greatest number of journalists killed in any conflict worldwide, and the greatest number of United Nations staff slain in any period: Israel has set out to methodically obliterate every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, with the Lancet estimating that its war may have already left more than 186,000 dead. As part of this ten-month rampage, Israel has targeted schools, universities, libraries, archives, cultural centres, heritage sites, mosques and churches. It has assassinated professors and massacred teachers, faculty and staff, along with their entire families. It has also caused irreparable harm to tens of thousands of students, in what UN officials have described as a ‘scholasticide’.    In the United States, the country most responsible for overseeing and abetting these horrors, university and college presidents have, at best, responded with stony silence. Many of them had rushed to denounce the violence perpetrated on October 7th, swept up in the panic over what Biden called the ‘deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’ and the lurid fabrications about beheaded babies. Since then, they have expressed concern for the alleged safety of their Jewish students and introduced mandatory ‘antisemitism awareness’ training (along with an occasional nod to Islamophobia, but with scarcely a word about the anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism rampant on campuses).     It is extraordinary that to date not a single US university has officially condemned the genocide in Gaza – or, at the very least, the systematic Israeli destruction of universities there. On the contrary, they have insisted that they will maintain institutional ties with their Israeli counterparts, including those that are implicated in the war on Palestinian society and life, as well as their investments in the corporations gorging on the profits generated by Palestinian death. The fact that Palestinians, Christians and Muslim Arabs, as well as Jewish anti-Zionists, are now well-represented in many Western universities – mostly as students, and to a lesser extent as faculty and staff – means they have an intimate view of their own erasure. 

Environmanet:

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’!

We Must Hold These Monsters to Account!

Black Liberation/Civil Rights: 

Black Agenda Report

• Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist Racists Riot in Britain The United Kingdom’s ugly history of subjugating people in the global south has created a deeply racist country. The criminal ruling class exploits, but white racism blames the desperate newcomer.
• S. Rejection of Venezuela’s Democracy Vindicates Trump Contesting the 2020 Election It cannot be said that the U.S. has free and fair elections. Yet, the country regularly uses the false virtue of democracy to enact regime change when its interests are threatened by a nation seeking sovereignty. In Venezuela, this effort has reached a particular level of absurdity on multiple occasions – this time surpassing the sideshow that was the Trump 2020 campaign and the events of January 6th.
• ESSAY: On the Question of Political Prisoners, Safiya Bukhari,1995 To commemorate Black August, read Safiya Bukhari’s essay on political prisoners and political movements. Her words resonate today.
• Kamala Harris’s Environmental Deceptions Kamala Harris’s vaunted “environmental justice unit” prosecuted only the most trivial violations in San Francisco’s toxic Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. Ferdinand Ibebuchi
• From East to West Africa: The People Are Uprising against Colonial Oppression and Corruption Waves of uprisings are spreading across the African continent and the masses are demanding freedom from imperialist powers and the comprador leaders that enable their ongoing exploitation.
• Black Left Critique of Kamala Harris Black Left Critique of Kamala Harris Immediately after Joe Biden announced that he would not seek re-election and instead endorsed Kamala Harris, she was anointed as the Democratic Party presidential nominee with little analysis of her record or her program. In fact, her website, com, makes no mention of a political program at all. While foolish debates about whether she should be considered Black garner media attention, questions about policy are largely ignored. Black Agenda Report has been writing about Harris for some time, and we share what we and others have noted about her record over the years.
• War on Gaza: Two Al Jazeera journalists were killed – and the West is silent Israel’s slaughter of media workers should ignite outrage and condemnation across the industry. But because they were Palestinian, the world looked away.
• ‘Watering down’ Genocide: No More Moral Compromises on Palestine, Please No further expose western duplicity in Gaza, we must learn to speak with no reservations, no matter the restrictions on the pro-Palestine voice or the censorship on social media.
• Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE): Its Origins and Contemporary Importance The 2024 elections in Venezuela are a demonstration of U.S. counterrevolutionary tactics. The right wing opposition, supported by the U.S., stubbornly proclaimed the elections to be a sham months in advance. Now, they refuse even to yield to the Venezuelan National Electoral Council, revealing their agenda for regime change.

Labor:

We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening Remember the Repo Crisis in the fall of 2019 when the Federal Reserve had to jump in with both feet and make billions of dollars in revolving emergency loans each weekday to the megabanks on Wall Street? And remember when Wall Street On Parade was the only media outlet that named the banks that got the money and graphed the largest borrowers when the Fed released the granular loan data two years later? Well, guess what. Two of the financial firms that played a starring role in the repo crisis of 2019 appear to be part of the cast in the current trading debacle in Japan that’s spilling into global markets – if their share price performance is any indicator.

World:

Thousands Protest Against Racism Across the UK After Far-Right Riots

Thousands Mobilise to Drive the Fascists Off Our Streets – Fight Racism! Fight Capitalism! The far right were met with mass mobilisations of workers and youth last night. This is a great victory in the fight against racism and fascism. This energy must now be channelled into a struggle to overthrow the establishment and their rotten system   Tens of thousands of workers and youth mobilised across the country last night in response to the far-right menace that has tormented Muslim communities and migrants over the last 10 days.     The fascists and thugs, meanwhile, were nowhere to be seen. Where they did turn up, their numbers were so small that they were very quickly crushed.    This is a great victory, which is rightly being celebrated by all those looking to fight against racism and protect our neighbourhoods.

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 

 Genocide In Africa!: Fifth of Medicines in Africa May Be Sub-Par Or Fake, Research Finds Analysis suggests extent of problem UN estimates is causing 500,000 deaths a year in sub-Saharan region’