Daily News Digest September 3, 2024
Why I Celebrate May Day But I Do Not Celebrate Labor Day! By RolandSheppard Retired Business Agent Painters Local # 4 San Francisco Labor DayMay Day/ Labor Day I celebrate May Day, but I don’t celebrate Labor Day — I just observe it. To me, Labor Day means the codification of the labor bureaucracy’s subservience to the capitalist class. That was the original purpose for the United States capitalist class when it made labor day a holiday. It was organized as such in opposition to the Labor Day that was/is celebrated everywhere else in the world — a demonstration class solidarity! — May Day! May Day was celebrated, in memory of the martyrs of the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 Chicago and the unending struggle of the world working class for their “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Images of the Day:
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 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:
June 10th marks 61years since American President John F. Kennedy delivered a searing critique of the Cold War and its mindset at a commencement address on the campus of American University in Washington, DC. June 10th marks 60 years since American President John F. Kennedy delivered a searing critique of the Cold War and its mindset at a commencement address on the campus of American University in Washington, DC “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” — What Kind of Peace to we Seek
Podcasts/Vide0s of the Day:
Glenn Greenwald: Brazil’s Repressive Censorship Judge To Ban X Nationwide
The West Truly Doesn’t See Palestinians As Human The message is clear: Israelis dying is a terrible tragedy, while Palestinians dying is just the normal way for things to be You never see the dehumanization of Palestinians in western society exhibited so clearly as when something bad happens to Israelis during the genocidal assault on Gaza.
“Stop Doing Genocide” Is The Most Reasonable Political Demand Ever “Stop doing genocide” is the single most reasonable political demand anyone could possibly make. It’s so reasonable it’s insane it even needs to be made. You don’t get to cry if people don’t support your candidate because they didn’t meet that ridiculously reasonable demand.
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.
From Birth to Death, The US Army Continues its Native American Genocide Policy!: This Obscure Army Office Is Blocking Repatriation of Native Children’s Remains The Office of Army Cemeteries is blocking the return of remains of children who died at the infamous Carlisle school. Hiding in the shadows of the U.S. government’s boarding school investigation is an obscure agency with broad control over the remains of about 180 Native children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. “As long as the Army can avoid scrutiny and accountability and maintain absolute control over the remains, it doesn’t care if tribes’ rights as sovereigns are abused in the process,” said Greg Werkeiser, an attorney with Cultural Heritage Partners, which has joined with the Native American Rights Fund in representing the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska in a lawsuit over the issue, along with the tribe’s general counsel, Danelle Smith, at Big Fire Law & Policy Group.
United States Funded Genocide in Israel:
Israel Has Built an Economy Fueled by Genocide at Home and Abroad With the help of the US, Israel exports instruments of oppression abroad, while testing them against Palestinians. As Israel tightens its siege, medical supplies in the Gaza Strip are running out, and doctors confront patients with unimaginable injuries. The orthopedist Hani Bseso operated on his niece Ahed’s leg, after a shell plowed through their home. Bleeding profusely, Ahed remained in an agonizing daze, as relatives carried her downstairs. Reaching a hospital was impossible. So Bseso amputated her leg on the kitchen table where her mother had made bread that morning.
The Violent “Othering” of Palestinians Has Political Roots Anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and political racism overlap in othering of Palestinians, says Palestinian scholar Yasmeen Daher. In my book, Black Bodies, White Gazes, I interrogate the white gaze, which I describe as a structural and habitual way of racially distorting the world in binary and hierarchical terms, buttressed by ideological, material and institutional power. In that book, I argue for the dismantlement of whiteness and the eradication of the white gaze. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon tells the story of being on a train when he is confronted by a young white boy who says to his white mother, “Look, a Negro!” The white boy says to his mother that he is frightened by Fanon, which is indicative of the white gaze which perceives Fanon’s Black body as monstrous and dangerous. I’ve personally felt the sting of the white gaze.
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 25, 2024:421.36 ppm, Weekly value from 1 year ago: 419.27 ppm, Weekly value from 10 years ago: 396.42 ppm. Last updated: September 01, 2024.
What has Ghosh Contributed to Our Understanding About rhe Root Causes of Climate Change? Julia Taylor: In Ghosh’s recent non-fiction book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he used his storytelling prowess to outline the roots of climate change within two systems of power and oppression: imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism is the expansion of influence over other countries through military force and colonisation. It usually entails the destruction of the environment to support imperial interests. Capitalism is the dominant economic system where ownership of the means of production (industry) is private. Private actors are driven by profit and growth, which has relied on combustion of fossil fuels.
A Look at the Global Warming Future — Pestilence!: How Climate Change Spread This Deadly Mosquito-Borne Illness to the US Northeast Eastern equine encephalitis, a rare mosquito-borne disease, has been spreading as temperatures rise. A41-year-old man in New Hampshire died last week after contracting a rare mosquito-borne illness called eastern equine encephalitis virus, also known as EEE or “triple E.” It was New Hampshire’s first human case of the disease in a decade. Four other human EEE infections have been reported this year in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Though this outbreak is small and triple E does not pose a risk to most people living in the United States, public health officials and researchers alike are concerned about the threat the deadly virus poses to the public, both this year and in future summers. There is no known cure for the disease, which can cause severe flu-like symptoms and seizures in humans 4 to 10 days after exposure and kills between 30 and 40 percent of the people it infects. Half of the people who survive a triple E infection are left with permanent neurological damage. Because of EEE’s high mortality rate, state officials have begun spraying insecticide in Massachusetts, where 10 communities have been designated “critical” or “high risk” for triple E. Towns in the state shuttered their parks from dusk to dawn and warned people to stay inside after 6 p.m., when mosquitoes are most active.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
After Weekend Walkouts, Hotel Worker Strikes Grow on Labor Day “We refuse to accept wages that can’t support our families. It’s insulting. And it ends now.” After approximately 10,000 hotel workers across the United States walked off the job over the weekend ahead of Labor Day, the strikes not only continued but grew on Monday, with employees of the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor taking to the streets. In Maryland’s biggest city, workers with UNITE HERE Local 7 carried signs that said, “Respect our work,” “One job should be enough,” and “Make them pay
The War at the Point of Production: The ‘Killing Fields’ of the United States If we dedicate war memorials to the memory of men and women, who are cut down before their time, these (Workplaces) are war memorials. . . . — Homer Seguin, Video: Before Their Time” Cancer & Health And Safety On Our Jobs. Cancer & Health And Safety On Our Jobs (Video). Like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, world imperialism spreads War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, throughout the world. Author Gore Vidal describes this era as ‘Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace’. One perpetual war, which is not openly publicized, is the war for profits. It takes place every single day at the point of production, and is killing increasing numbers of workers every year. Today, workers are used as ‘cannon fodder’ both in the war in Iraq and in the war for profits at home. Workplaces have become perpetual ‘killing fields’.
The Fall of the Trade Union Movement (2010 Update) Elections: The Default of The Trade Union Movement 2017 Preface Leon Trotsky foretold the ‘Partnership’ Between the Trade Bureaucracy and the Boss: From Leon Trotsky and the Iron Heel: “One must accentuate especially the role which Jack London attributes to the labor bureaucracy and to the labor aristocracy in the further fate of mankind. Thanks to their support, the American plutocracy not only succeeds in defeating the workers’ insurrection but also in keeping its iron dictatorship during the following three centuries. We will not dispute with the poet the delay which can but seem to us too long. However, it is not a question of Jack London’s pessimism, but of his passionate effort to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches. The artist is audaciously utilizing the methods of hyperbole. He is bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism: of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal, to their extreme expression. He is operating with centuries in order to measure the tyrannical will of the exploiters and the treacherous rôle of the labor bureaucracy. But his most “romantic” hyperboles are finally much more realistic than the bookkeeper-like calculations of the so-called “sober politicians.” It is easy to imagine with what a condescending perplexity the official socialist thinking of that time met Jack London’s menacing prophecies. If one took the trouble to look over the reviews of The Iron Heel at that time in the German Neue Zeit and Vorwärts, in the Austrian Kampf and Arbeiterzeitung, as well as in the other socialist publications of Europe and America, he could easily convince himself that the thirty-year-old “romanticist” saw incomparably more clearly and farther than all the social-democratic leaders of that time taken together. But Jack London bears comparison in this domain not only with the reformists. One can say with assurance that in 1907 not one of the revolutionary Marxists, not excluding Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imagined so fully the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy. This suffices in itself to determine the specific weight of the novel.”
The Condition of the United States Working Class — Where Do We Go From Here? Since 2008 Increase Wealth for the 1% and No Recovery for the Working Class! Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment Rate The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.Shadow Government Statistics Alternet Unemployment Rate is 25.20%.
Economy:
World:
Deaths at Sea: Mass Media Mourns the Rich, Ignores the Poor! Not All Deaths at Sea Are Treated Equally Over the past week the tragic sinking of tech magnate Mike Lynch’s yacht has been front page news in the papers and on TV every day. By now, we all know about the lives and backgrounds of all the passengers. We know for instance that the youngest person lost, Lynch’s daughter, was all set to go to Oxford and that Lynch was ready to play a similar tech advisory role with the Starmer government, as he did with Sunak. His lawyer, who successfully won the case against Hewlett Packard, died. Jonathan Bloomer, the international boss of Morgan Stanley, was also lost. These were people who moved at the highest level of capitalist society and had the ears of government ministers. … Now let us think not about the horrible consequences for the seven people who were tragically lost in the Bayesian but the 66 people, including 26 women and children, who drowned not that far from there just weeks before. Most people would not even know that had happened since it received such scant coverage in the press. Since 2014, it has been calculated that 20,000 migrants and asylum seekers have been drowned in the Mediterranean trying to get to a safe country or to find the same sort of life and security that we all enjoy. Refugee deaths. We do not know the names of most of these drowned people. Some lists are kept by refugee agencies and charities but are mostly ignored by the mass media. Even these agencies have to end up registering many as unknown. In Lampedusa and other places, the bodies that are washed up are laid in many unmarked graves. We know these drowned people had exactly the same drive and motivation as Lynch’s daughter to work for a better life and to fulfil their dreams. We have to rely on a few survivors’ accounts that do make the mass media, or fictionalized accounts like the film Il Capitano, to get some sense of their story.
US Press Loses Interest as Winners of French Election Aren’t Allowed to Take Power France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it. One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.
India Outstrips Japan in Solar Energy The energy consultancy Ember reports that the growth in solar production in India was 5.9% in 2023, which outstripped the growth in solar in Japan last year. Japan is the fourth-largest economy in the world, and India is the fifth.
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