Daily News Digest September 10, 2024
Images of the Day:
Don’t Vote For Ecocide or Genocide!
Which Multiple Record Breaker is So Hot Right Now?
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:
In 2008, the Government Voted Unanimously to Bailed Out Wall Street, But not Worker Pension Funds!: Our Pensions are not Protected by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation!:
Michael Hudson: “Well, there’s something very radical happened that people haven’t been talking about very much. Normally a budget is supposed to decide what gets funded and what doesn’t get funded, and it’s simply a decision of what to cut back. A budget is not supposed to rewrite the law. But what happened is something very radical. They rewrote two laws. One of the laws was about bank derivatives that Elizabeth Warren has spoken about, promising to bail out Citibank and other banks. If they lose on derivatives, they’re going to get bailed out like they did in 2008. And the other was a decision not to bail out the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government’s pension fund insurer. They’ve decided–they passed a new law. They rewrote the law. They declared the 1974 ERISA act protecting pensions illegal, and they said if pension funds cannot pay their retirees, they get to be cut back and they don’t get to go to the government to get guarantee. We’ve abolished the government guarantee on pension funds if the pension fund is run by a labor union, meaning if a pension fund is a multiemployer fund that has more than one employer contributing to it, like airline funds, truckers funds, Teamsters funds if you’re a truck driver, insurance employees, we’re going to give the fund managers, mainly the financial managers on Wall Street, the right to cut back on these pensions that are due. So the pensions that people had expected to receive when they made their wage contract saying, well, we’re not going to ask for as fast a wage increase if you give us security when we retire, all of this has been rewritten. — Playing the Pension Funds
Podcasts/Vide0s of the Day:
“Why Should I Care About Gaza?” We can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
Daily News Digest September 11, 2024
It’s The Trump Party Vs The Cheney Party One of earth’s most evil living beings, Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney, has officially endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
Revolution Is Now An effective solution that we can all begin applying in the here and now is working to foment a revolutionary zeitgeist by spreading awareness of the depravity and deceit of the empire. People are always asking me what we can do to fight the tyranny and depravity of the empire and create a healthy 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 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.
The U.S. has Been At War in Yemen for 20 Years, But Houthis Can Still Choke the Red Sea Despite U.S. talk of peace and stability, and two decades of war, the people of Yemen are still suffering. Yemen’s Iran-Backed Houthi Rebels attacked two oil tankers in the Red Sea on Monday with ballistic missiles and a one-way attack drone, according to U.S. Central Command, which characterized the strikes as “reckless acts of terrorism.” The U.S. responded on Tuesday with an airstrike on a “Houthi missile system” that the U.S. claimed “presented an imminent threat to U.S. and coalition forces, and merchant vessels in the region.” The Saudi-flagged Amjad and the Panama-flagged Blue Lagoon 1 struck on Monday are just the latest ships to be damaged by the Houthi rebels, who have attacked more than 80 merchant vessels since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, and have said the attacks will continue until Israel’s war on Gaza ends. The Houthi campaign has led to a 90 percent decline in shipping activity through the Red Sea, according to a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, and shows little sign of stopping, even though two U.S. aircraft carriers are now deployed in the region.
America’s Catch-22: Not enough Affordable Housing, but it’s increasingly Illegal to be Homeless In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close the encampment.
Roaming Charges: Ain’t That America, Something to See, Baby?
- The school year in America hasn’t officially opened until there’s been a school shooting.
- School shootings are American Exceptionalism in action. No other country does them like we do. None even come close. USA! NRA! USA! NRA! USA! NRA!
- A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic. …
Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire? Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely. The Associated Pressreports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers. “Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire… That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.” This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command. One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.
US Food Insecurity Rate Rose to 13.5% in 2023 as Government Benefits Declined and Food Prices Soared Barring any major policy changes that continue to slow inflation and dramatically reduce the price of food in 2024 or 2025, this rate is unlikely to drop again. The official U.S. food insecurity rate rose to 13.5% in 2023 from 12.8% in 2022, according to data the U.S. Department of Agriculture released on Sept. 4, 2024. That means more than 1 in 8 Americans – about 47 million people – couldn’t get enough food for themselves or their families at least some of the time. This is a significant increase from a recent low of 10.2% in 2021. Food insecurity grew in the two years that followed due to a sharp decline in government benefits, including money for groceries from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the program that pays for students to get lunch and breakfast for free at school. Higher food prices, largely driven by rapid inflation, also played a big role, as did elevated housing costs.
‘They See These Price Hikes as a Good Thing’CounterSpin Interview With Freddy Brewster on Supermarket Megamerger “Kroger’s CEO, on a shareholder call, admitted that inflation is a good thing, because it’ll allow the company to raise prices.” Janine Jackson: In October of 2022, the largest supermarket chain in the US, Kroger, announced a plan to take over the second-largest supermarket chain in the country, Albertsons, in a merger that would create the country’s third-largest private-sector employer overall—after Walmart and Amazon—a conglomerate of some 5,000 stores and 710,000 employees. What could go wrong? A lot of things, the Federal Trade Commission suggested, as they sued to block the merger this February, including less competition, lower quality products and weaker bargaining positions for workers. Legal proceedings began this week
United States Funded Genocide in Israel:
Is Gaza America’s Heart of Darkness? During World War II, American leaders proudly proclaimed this country the “arsenal of democracy,” supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union. To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants. However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion) for 2026 and thereafter caught me off guard. Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there. So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?
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!
Light Pollution at Night May Increase Risk of Alzheimer’s, Study Finds Research says outdoor light exposure in evening increases prevalence of the disease, especially in people under age 65 New research claims that exposure to outdoor light at night may increase the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease, especially in people under the age of 65. The researchers who conducted the study, funded by a National Institutes of Health grant and published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience on Friday, said they have found correlations between areas of the US with excessive exposure to artificial light at night and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)Last Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke before the Economic Club of New York. During the speech, Trump revealed that if he wins the election he will create a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund. Sovereign Wealth Funds are what countries that are rich from oil exports create with their surplus budget balances in order to diversify their nation’s investments. (Countries such as Norway, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and numerous other countries have Sovereign Wealth Funds.) Not only does the U.S. not have any budget surpluses to invest but it is projected to have a $1.9 trillion budget deficit this fiscal year as well as having an existing national debt of $35.4 trillion.
World:
Grenfell Report Released – But Still No Justice A Grenfell inquiry report has uncovered further details of the corruption and negligence that led to the loss of 72 lives. But seven years after this tragedy, there is still no justice. We must fight to do away with this murderous system. Findings from stage two of the inquiry into the Grenfell fire which killed 72 people were finally released yesterday – seven years after the tragedy took place. The report found that every one of these 72 deaths was avoidable and down to “systematic dishonesty”, corruption, and decades of government failure. Blood is on the hands of the cladding manufacturers who deliberately concealed the reality of their products to line their pockets, the developers willing to cut corners, and the Tories who relaxed regulations – and then proceeded to ignore every warning of the impending deadly consequences that came their way.
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
The Corporatization of ‘Higher’ Education!: Here’s How the Fossil Fuel Industry Infiltrates and Influences Higher Education There are dozens of programs and even entire schools across the country funded by the fossil fuel industry. For decades, oil and gas companies have donated tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities, sat on governing boards, sponsored scholarships and built pro-fossil fuel programming and curriculum — resulting in real or apparent conflicts of interest for universities and their researchers. “Fossil fuel companies have embedded themselves in universities across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and beyond,” according to the research paper published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change. “Archival documents show that the fossil fuel industry deliberately uses university partnerships to further its own interests.”