Daily News Digest August 13, 2024

Daily News Digest Archives 

Images of the Day:

Climate Change As Class War Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

System Change Not Climate Change!

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:

When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall runThere can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun; Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of oneBut the union makes us strong!     It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;     Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;        Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;    But the union makes us strong! They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the union makes us strong!    They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earnBut without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn  We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the union makes us strong!  — Solidarity Forever

Podcasts/Vide0s of the Day:

As Stock Market Crashes, Is US Facing New Financial Crisis? Economist Michael Hudson Explains

Putin’s Dire Warning to Israel | Brian Berletic on Ukraine’s Kursk Invasion | China on High Alert

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.

US Military Has Polluted Guam for Decades. This Year, It Could Get Even Worse. The relocation of 5,000 U.S. Marines to Guam could soon exacerbate its military-rooted environmental catastrophe. Naek Flores’s day-to-day life in Guam has always been shadowed by the U.S. military.     The U.S. military owns about one-third of Guam, where it stations three important bases in which about 10,000 military personnel are located.    For the Pentagon, Guam is one of its most strategic locations in the Pacific, while the CIA credits military operations as being “the island’s most important source of income and economic stability.     However, Flores — whose grandparents lost their land to military buildup following World War II — paints a different picture: one in which Guam’s native inhabitants, the Chamorro people, are kept trapped in a cycle of dependency and disempowerment, while the U.S. military continues to exploit the island’s resources, leaving environmental destruction in its wake.

Fake Revolutions Everywhere You Look This happens all the time these days: people who are inextricably intertwined with establishment power structures posturing as brave revolutionaries leading a resistance against the very establishment they themselves are a part of. Elon Musk is no more a part of any “resistance” than Joe Biden or Bill Gates, but his sycophantic fanboys will mindlessly. …It’s hard to be sure what’s going on in Musk’s sluggish mind, but at the moment he appears to be referring to the white supremacist rioting that’s been occurring in the United Kingdom, which he has come under fire for enthusiastically supporting. It really doesn’t matter, though, since there’s no way a billionaire Pentagon contractor who’s been forcefully backing Israel in its genocidal atrocities in Gaza could possibly be considered a part of any kind of resistance.

CN Condemns FBI Raid on CN Columnist’s Home Consortium News condemns in the strongest terms the F.B.I. raid on the home of CN columnist Scott Ritter.     Federal agents removed Ritter’s electronic equipment and numerous boxes of paper files from his Albany, N.Y. area home Thursday on suspicion that the former U.N. weapons inspector is violating the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.    In a video posted to his Substack page, Ritter said that normally in alleged FARA violation cases the authorities send a letter to the subject of the inquiry informing them of the investigation. They do not send numerous F.B.I. agents to the door with a warrant to search and remove potential evidence.     The warrant, a copy of which Ritter posted, only called for electronic devices to be removed, but the agents, whom Ritter said acted professionally, also removed boxes of paper United Nations files from his days as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s. As Ritter says in the video, U.N. documents are never classified and could have nothing to do with the alleged FARA case against him.

United States Funded Genocide in Israel:

Palestinians Say US Responsible for Latest ‘Massacre’ of Children in Gaza “U.S. funding of Israeli genocide is ballooning as the Israeli army uses ever more lethal bombs,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, said Sunday after bombing that killed 100 people, mostly civilians, in Gaza City.     The office of the Palestinian Authority’s president is holding the U.S. government responsible for a weekend bombing in Gaza that killed an estimated 100 people, including at least 11 children. The victims of the attack on the al-Tabin school were blown to ‘pieces,’ according to video evidence and on-the-ground reporting, when U.S.-provided missiles were fired on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City.https:

‘Crime Minister!’: Israeli Families of Hostages March Against Netanyahu “This is our final chance to secure a deal that will save lives,” said one family member. “Netanyahu continues to trade on the lives of hostages in exchange for maintaining his seat of power.”    Thousands marched in the streets of Israeli cities on Saturday to demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu end his sabotage of negotiations that would see an end to the fighting in Gaza and the release of hostages held by Hamas for over nine months.

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!

Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) Weekly average CO₂ at Mauna Loa Week beginning on August 04, 2024: 424.18 ppm  Weekly value from 1 year ago: 420.16 ppm Weekly value from 10 years ago: 397.93 ppm Last updated Aufust 11, 2024

World’s Biggest Meat and Dairy Companies Spend More on Ads than Cutting Emissions — New Report Brazilian meat giant JBS invested just 0.03 percent of annual revenues into climate measures, researchers found. Global meat and dairy giants are investing just a fraction of their revenues into cutting emissions despite being among the world’s largest polluters, according to new estimates.     Company spending on advertising outstripped that on low-carbon solutions, the report by campaign group Changing Markets Foundation found, as corporations ramped up attempts to win consumers over with their green credentials.   The meat and dairy sector – responsible for over 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – has come under increasing pressure in recent years to tackle major climate harms.

For Those With Power and Rich Donors – The AC is Always On, Even If It’s Melting Outside Astaple of dystopian science fictions is an inner sanctum of privilege and an outer world – chemical desert/airless waste/District 12 – peopled by the desperate poor. The insiders, living off the exploited labour of the outlands, are indifferent to the horrors beyond their walls. Well, here we are.    Even as extreme heat raged across the southern United States this summer, the governors of Florida and Texas struck down heat protections for outdoor workers. Construction companies and agricultural firms lobbied against the rights of workers to water, shade and rest breaks when temperatures soar – and Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, two men also lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industry, gave them what they wanted.     After all, why should they care? Though temperatures hit a Florida record on the day DeSantis excised references to climate breakdown from state law, he had no fear of the consequences, as the inner sanctum is always air-conditioned. Air conditioning is the only answer such politicians have to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. That the homes and offices through which they glide and the food they eat are built and grown and harvested by people working in the outlands, who face escalating temperatures, is no concern of theirs: however many die, there will always be more.–

Running in America’s Worst Air: ‘Like Binging on a Carton of Cigarettes’ For a writer and runner in Denver, Colorado, the city’s severe air pollution creates a daily dilemma: do something you love,

‘Left With Nothing’: Inside California’s Wildfire Home Insurance Crisis As California sees increasingly devastating fires, Butte county residents lose their insurance – and homes

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Labor:

To Defeat the ‘Billionaire Class’, What is Needed is to United the Working Class, Both Economically and Politically, to Break from the 1%’s Duopoly and in Build Worker Pollical Power! — A Workers Party!:  Calling Trump a”scab” who will “ruthlessly fight for a vision of America in which the wealthy rule everyone and everything, and the working class is left behind and forced to settle for the scraps,” Fain argues that “what we win or lose now will ultimately impact “whether we go forwards or backwards for a generation—everything is at stake.   In the wealthiest country in the world, working class people shouldn’t have to scrap to get by, paycheck to paycheck,” Fain says before championing the UAW’s historic strike last year in which the union’s members stood up to the Big Three automakers—and won historic contracts.  We united the entire working class,” he added, “that’s the winning formula,”  The dream of a man like Donald Trump is that the vast majority of working class people will remain divide,” says Fain. “They divide us by race. They divide us by gender, by who we love, or where we were born. That’s the game of the wealthy, divide and conquer.:  — ‘Holy Sh*t This Ad Is Powerful’: UAW Says It Knows How to Defeat Trump and the Billionaire Class

Economy:

Shadow Government Statistics New Weekly Commentary August 10, 2024GENERAL HEADLINES

• Current Policies of the Both the Federal Reserve and Federal Government Are Driving the U.S. Economy into an Inflationary Recession/Depression
• Those Serious, Domestic U.S. Inflation and Economic Issues Are Intensifying And Will Continue to Deteriorate in the Year Ahead and Beyond (See Below)
• Impact of “High Prices and Weakening Incomes” on Personal Finances Held July 2024 Consumer Sentiment Shy by a Deepening 32.5% (-32.5%) of Ever Recovering Its 2020 Pre-Pandemic Peak Unfolding Third-Quarter 2024: Resurgent Inflation Increasingly Is in Context Of Flat-to-Minus (Contracting) Monthly Economic Activity, Irrespective of Any Happy Hype Out of the Federal Reserve or the Administration (Such as “No Inflation” or Headlined 3.0% Real Annual 2q2024 GDP Growth)
• ShadowStats Benchmark Commentaries Follow August 16th and 23rd, Reviewing and Previewing Pre- and Post-Pandemic Impact for (1) U.S. Inflation and (2) the U.S. Economy
• The Rapidly Dimming Outlook for Both Inflation and Economic Prospects Will Be Assessed for the Balance of 2024 into 2025 and Following
• Most Major Monthly Economic Numbers Show No Real (Inflation-Adjusted) Recovery from the Pandemic-Driven Downturn, With Current Year-to-Year Change Still Holding Flat-to-Minus, or in Deepening Contraction, for Most Headline Monthly Numbers Reported into Second-Quarter 2024
• In Contrast, the Commerce Department’s (Bureau of Economic Analysis) “Advance” Real Quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Growth Continued Booming Along at 3% Year-to-Year for Second-Quarter 2024
• A Major Break in the Currently Contravening Headline Monthly versus Quarterly Growth Is Inevitable and Likely Will Be to the Downside In the Heavily Gimmicked, Quarterly GDP

  THIS FRIDAY’S (AUG 16) HEADLINES: BENCHMARKED INFLATION COMMENTARY  ADVANCE HEADLINES

• A Rapidly Deepening U.S. Inflation Crisis
• Headline U.S. Inflation and Business Activity Continue in Meaningful Deterioration, Based on the Latest Federal Reserve, Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics and ShadowStats Alternate Data At Historic Highs, the Federal Government’s Surging Debt, Deficit and Systemic Liquidity Continue to Fuel the Rapidly Deteriorating Inflation Picture
• Also Seriously Driving the Intensifying Inflation Are the Fed’s Continuing Monetary Debasement, with Systemic Liquidity in the Money Supply Still Holding at a 57-Year Peak

Calculating Comparative Headline Inflation for the June 2024 CPU-U and the ShadowStats Alternate CPI Inflation From Pre-Pandemic February 2020 to the Latest June 2024 Reporting of Headline CPI-U Inflation of 2.98% vs. Shadow Stats Alternate Inflation of 10.78%.

July 2024 University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Notched Lower, Holding Shy by 32.5% (-32.5%) of Ever Recovering Its Pre-Pandemic Level.

US Unemployment Rate: The Official Rate is 3%, The U-6 Rate ss 7.8%, and The Shadow Stats Alternat Unemployment Rate is 28.5%

Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk According to a report at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Gross Notional Exposure at hedge funds has skyrocketed by 24.5 percent in the span of one year: from $22.946 trillion on March 31, 2023 to $28.579 trillion on March 31, 2024. (Run your cursor along the top green line at this link to observe the stunning growth in hedge fund exposures despite the banking crisis in the spring of 2023 when the second, third and fourth largest banks blew up.)     Gross Notional Exposure (GNE) is defined by OFR as “the sum of the absolute value of long and short exposures, including those on and off the balance sheet.”

World:

The Geneva Conventions at 75: Do the Laws of War Still Have a Fighting Chance in Today’s Bloody World? It has been 75 years since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions on August 12 1949. In theory, these rules of war are universally agreed by every nation. In practice, they are routinely violated everywhere.With an estimated 120 armed conflicts worldwide, more than 450 armed groups and 195 million people living in areas under their control, the protection of the vulnerable is as vitally important as ever.

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