Daily News Digest December 17, 2024
Images of the Day:
Ted Rall: Greed Has Good Odds Corporate executives worried about becoming the targets of the next Brian Thompson-style killing of those who run an evil company have to choose between a chance of losing their lives versus the certainty of making more profits.
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 has Outlived its Time, It is Now a Threat to Life and Humanity! Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Has Been Aware of the Coming 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!
The Current Five Current and Constant Threats to Humanity!:
- Pauperization of the World, as the 1% get Richer!
- Global Warming!
- Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace!
- The Crisis of Famine is Soaring Throughout the World! And
- Factory Farms Production is the Primary Cause of Pandemics!
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:
The U.S. national debt just passed $36 trillion, only four months after it passed $35 trillion and up $2 trillion for the year. Third quarter data is not yet available, but interest payments as a percent of tax receipts rose to 37.8% in the third quarter of 2024, the highest since 1996. That means interest is eating up over one-third of our tax revenues. Total interest for the fiscal year hit $1.16 trillion, topping one trillion for the first time ever. That breaks down to $3 billion per day. For comparative purposes, an estimated $11 billion, or less than four days’ federal interest, would pay the median rent for all the homeless people in America for a year. The damage from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina alone is estimated at $53.6 billion, for which the state is expected to receive only $13.6 billion in federal support. The $40 billion funding gap is a sum we pay in less than two weeks in interest on the federal debt. — How to Escape the Federal Debt Trap
Podcasts/Vide0s of the Day:
Glen Greenwald: Iran Fear-Mongering: Provoking The U.S. Into War
The Chris Hedges Report: Organized Oblivion – Read by Eunice Wong Gaza is destroyed. It will not, at least for the Palestinians, be rebuilt. Those who lived there will spend their lives, like survivors of the Armenian genocide, desperately trying to protect memory.
That Which Can Be Destroyed By The Truth, Should Be “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.” This is a line by fantasy author PC Hodgell, though it’s often misattributed to Carl Sagan. I think about this quote a lot. I think about it when reflecting on the way Israel is exterminating Palestinian journalists in Gaza while keeping western journalists out of the enclave to prevent the world from learning the truth about what the IDF is doing there.
The U.S. Strategy of Controlled Anarchy: Syria, Ukraine, and Beyond Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: The Desperation of America’s Empire at Its Peak!
The Duel (1% and (99%) Justice: Some Will Rob You With a Six-Gun, and Some With a Fountain Pen
Meditations On A Six Year-Old Amputee Crawling Through Gaza With The Help Of A Roller Skate This genocide has been going on so long that the child amputees who live all over Gaza are learning strategies to get through life without their limbs.
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!)
Migration isn’t the Problem! The Migration of Wealth to the 1% is the Problem! The most significant “migration problem” is not the movement of people across borders, but rather the migration of wealth into the hands of a small elite (1%) which ultimately drives people to migrate in search of better economic opportunities! Addressing wealth inequality is key to tackling the root cause of global migration issues! — Roland Sheppard
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.
Trump Says No to ‘Foolish’ US Missile Attacks on Russia President-elect Donald Trump accused the Biden administration of “escalating this war” in Ukraine and “making it worse” by allowing U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired from Ukraine deep into Russia. “I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” Trump told Time magazine in an interview published on Thursday. He said: “Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. Now they’re doing not only missiles, but they’re doing other types of weapons. And I think that’s a very big mistake, very big mistake.”
United States Armed and Funded Terrorist Middle East War/Palestinan Genocide: When Biden Says ‘He’s a Zionist’ —Believe Him!
How did We Get Here? Excerpt From my New Book “Gaza Yet Stands” … At the Versailles Peace Conference after the war and more specifically at its San Remo satellite conference, Britain was awarded a League of Nations Mandate over Iraq and Palestine. Mandates were envisaged by the League of Nations as a temporary guardianship, such that the mandatory power had the responsibility to train up their wards for independent statehood. This plan, however paternalistic and imperialist, did give birth eventually to the new independent nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Togo, Rwanda and Tanzania. The Mandate of Palestine, however, did not lead to a state of Palestine in the same way. In 1917, the British cabinet had been convinced by London Zionists, proponents of turning Judaism into a form of nationalism that sought to colonize a territory, to issue the Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild, saying, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” It was a ridiculous pledge, since no such home for the Jewish people (even if the British then thought about it more as a community center than a new nation-state) could have avoided injuring the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. The British rulers of hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans thought nothing about moving people around to suit their imperial interests, and even at one point considered transporting millions of Punjabis to Iraq to relieve what they saw as India’s dangerous population pressure. In 1915, two years before the tragic Balfour Declaration, 683,389 Arabic-speaking natives dwelled in the territory that the British would call Palestine, about 81,000 of them Christians and the rest Muslims. There were only 38,752 Jews, most of them recent immigrants from Russia and Europe permitted to come into these provinces by the Ottoman sultan, some as pilgrims qua retirees.[i]
Greater Israel
Netanyahu Moves to Expand Illegal Israeli Settlements in Syrian Golan Heights Turkey’s foreign ministry condemned the plan as “a new stage in Israel’s goal of expanding its borders through occupation.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would move to expand settlements in the occupied and illegally annexed Golan Heights, exploiting the collapse of the Assad government to further entrench its control of Syrian land. Netanyahu said in a statement Sunday that “strengthening” the Golan Heights is synonymous with “strengthening the state of Israel” and declared that “we will continue to hold onto it, make it flourish, and settle in it.”
Congress Keeps Trying to Hide the True Gaza Death Toll A little-noticed provision in the annual defense bill would bar the Pentagon from citing the Gaza Health Ministry as an authoritative source. …The legislation comes shortly after Amnesty International declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, noting as a factor in their decision the immense death toll in the besieged Strip. In the first year of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, the military had killed 44,835 people in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry. Now, the legislation will move to the Democratic-controlled Senate, likely for a vote next week. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has already come out in opposition, arguing that at a time when Americans are struggling paycheck to paycheck, Congress should not be giving a $900 billion handout to the military-industrial complex.
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’!
We Must Hold These Monsters to Account!
Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Have Subsidized Project 2025 and Climate Denial After the hottest summer in recorded human history — along with Hurricanes Helene and Milton, flooding and wildfires — why isn’t there a greater push for action on climate change? One reason is that big oil, gas and coal companies — and their allies in Congress — block the urgent action that’s required. They do this in part by denying basic climate science, and in many cases, they receive enormous, publicly subsidized tax benefits to do it. And in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, millions in charitable donations poured into policy development at the Heritage Foundation, producing the Project 2025 Blueprint for the incoming Trump administration.
Rising Desertification Shows We Can’t Keep Farming with Fossil Fuels; 3/4s of Earth’s Land Is Drier Three-quarters of Earth’s land has become drier since 1990. Droughts come and go – more often and more extreme with the incessant rise of greenhouse gas emissions over the last three decades – but burning fossil fuels is transforming our blue planet. A new report from scientists convened by the United Nations found that an area as large as India has become arid, and it’s probably permanent. A transition from humid to dry land is underway that has shrunk the area available to grow food, costing Africa 12% of its GDP and depleting our natural buffer to rising temperatures. We have covered several consequences of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction in this newsletter. Today we turn to the loss of life-giving moisture – what is driving it, and what we are ultimately losing.
‘Everytime We Come Back, We All Get Sick’: Ga Residents Affected by September Biolab Fire Are Still Going Through Hell “Where do you go to escape this?… Is it safe to go back home? Do I stay here? Where do I go? How do you run from a chemical plume?”“In late September,” Timothy Pratt writes in Capital & Main, “a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta, lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage. The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated in Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred, and in surrounding areas… Smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness and skin rashes in the days that followed, along with a deepening worry about their community’s safety… The fire was pool-chemical company BioLab’s fourth in the last two decades, a track record that has created what one observer described as “generational rage” among residents.” In this installment of our ongoing series Sacrificed—where we speak to people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones”—we speak with Hannah Loyd, Christina O’Connor, and Jeramie Julian: three residents who live near, and have been directly affected by, the September fire at the Conyers BioLab facility.
A Texas Town Faced Dangerous Benzene Fumes. Regulators Never Told Residents. The levels exceed even Texas’s benzene guidelines — the weakest in the nation — but aren’t being recorded by monitors. Dangerously high levels of the cancer-causing chemical benzene continue to plague Channelview, Texas, despite warnings from state regulators that began almost 20 years ago. Data collected during the state’s most recent air monitoring trips include one benzene reading that was three times the Texas hourly guideline, the weakest in the nation. In two instances, benzene fumes were so strong that scientists with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, experienced headaches and had to leave the area.
Black Liberation Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
Federal Debt: Total Public Debt Q3 2024: 35,464,674 Millions of Dollars, Not Seasonally Adjusted
The Global South is on the Brink of a Disastrous Debt Crisis. Reform is Urgent. The coming debt crisis will surpass that of the 1980s and disproportionately impact women, economist Ilene Grabel warns. Countries across the Global South are experiencing climate, poverty and development crises — all made worse by the unbearable costs of debt servicing. Indeed, according to Development Finance International, “Citizens of the Global South now face the worst debt crisis since global records began.” Low-income countries, which have seen the amount paid on foreign debt payment increase by 150 percent since 2011, are being hit especially hard.
$663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks According to the December 6 release of Federal Reserve H.8 data, cash assets at the 25 largest U.S. banks have dropped by a stunning $663 billion from their peak levels on December 15, 2021. (See chart above, taken from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED graph, which is updated on an ongoing basis. Put your cursor on the FRED chart line here to get the weekly dollar figures.)
World:
Turkey’s Campaign Against the Kurds: How Imperialism Betrayed Rojava Over the last few weeks, the Turkish-backed offensive by Hayat-Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has managed to topple the Assad regime. In the western media this has been generally celebrated. One thing that has not been reported on, however, is the simultaneous Turkish advance into a part of the Kurdish Autonomous Area in North Eastern Syria (AANES), more commonly known as Rojava.
Health, Education, and Welfare:
Deny, Defend, Depose: Elites Recoil At Public Support For Unitedhealthcare Ceo Assassin Violence is not a solution, but the pain, indignity, and early deaths of millions under the privatized healthcare system can’t go unaddressed. The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has gripped the nation and revived a passionate debate on the dismal state of healthcare in the US. With suspect Luigi Mangione now in custody, the police manhunt is over—but the real political fallout may have only just begun. In this special edition of Inequality Watch, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis react to the media’s response to the killing, and also speak with Kat Abughazaleh of Mother Jones, Prem Thakker of Zeteo, and activist Jeff Singer on the predatory nature of the US healthcare system.
Health Insurance Killing: Economics Does Have Something to Say I’m not one to generally tout the wisdom of the economics discipline, but it actually does offer some useful insights into the likely motive for the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare (UHC). According to media accounts, the suspect, Luigi Mangione, was angered by his own and others’ experiences being turned down when submitting claims for healthcare service. United and other insurers make a profit by restricting the claims they pay, so their profit motive goes directly against people’s need to get healthcare. That simple story is undeniably true, but the picture is more complicated. Many of the claims being submitted are outlandishly high, due to high prices for drugs and medical equipment, as well high fees for medical specialists and hospital administrators. In recent years, private equity firms have also seen the healthcare industry as a promising source of profits.