Daily News Digest May 2, 2017

Daily News Digest Archives

During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program:  1. Austerity, 2. Scapegoating Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal Immigrants’ for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel.

Daily News Digest May 2, 2017

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!

Images of the Day:

Cuba’s celebration of International Workers Day — May Day Long-time Iowa farm cartoonist fired after creating this cartoon Quotes of the Day: 

. . . Comrade workers! Let us then prepare with redoubled energy for the decisive battle that is at hand! Let the ranks of the Social-Democrat proletarians close ever firmer! Let their word spread ever farther afield! Let campaigning for the workers’ demands be carried on ever more boldly! Let the celebration of May Day win thousands of new fight ers to our cause and swell our forces in the great struggle for the freedom of all the people, for the liberation of all who toil from the yoke of capital! — Long live the eight-hour day! — Long live international revolutionary Social-Democracy! — Down with the criminal and plundering tsarist autocracy! — Lenin on May Day

What “United States society?” There’s no society here. This is just a great money chase. It’a a hopelessly commercialized rate race rigged for the rich, backed up by an ever more powerful police state and bound up with a vast global killing machine (the Pentagon System) that is itself a great profits stream for the wealth corporate and financial few. Along the way, this “society” is hard-wired for the ever-deepening and soulless destruction of livable ecology That’s the sociopathological nothingness and indeed evil that is the United States today. If you want live in a society instead of an Ecocidal rate race, prison state, and Empire well, then you’d have to get off the rat wheel to make one. It would mean organizing a socialist revolution. And that is of course “crazy talk,” to be ignored since it distracts one from the money chase and is therefore “dysfunctional.” — Paul Street

Corbyn offers an alternative that challenges the ‘Washington consensus’. He stands on an anti-war and anti-austerity platform, is committed to investing in the public sector, wants to get rid of Britain’s nuclear weapons and says he wants to renationalise profiteering public sector utilities. Jeremy Corbyn is a credible alternative to the current crop of mainstream politicians – whether Blairite Labour, Conservative or Lib-Dem – not just because of what he says but because of the reactions he elicits from this bunch of discredited and corrupt pro-austerity, pro-war, pro City of London/Wall Street, union-bashing, welfare cutting handmaidens to the rich that have ruined the economy and have helped to devastate countries across the globe with their penchant for militarism. Whether Corbyn could actually stem to tide of militarism and neoliberalism if elected PM is highly debatable, given the pressure he would face to tow the Establishment line and the forces lined up against him (see this). He would however at least offer a degree of hope for positive change. The only danger to Britain and the world is US militarism and its wars of aggression, not Jeremy Corbyn. But Boris Johnson’s rhetoric and that of his millionaire cronies in government depends on the British public remaining blind to the chains that enslave them. — Jeremy Corbyn is Britain’s Best Hope

Videos of the Day:

Humpback whales charge a pod of killer whales in Monterey Bay

Apple hardware completely compromised

Installed at the time of manufacture: The weekly report from Julian Assange

Inequality Study in Countries of the World Fails to Show Its Continuing Rise The Guardian newspaper’s Global Inequality Project gives us a snapshot of current inequality, but fails to show how inequality is growing with the intensification of capitalism says Prof. Leo Panitch

Wilkerson: Trump’s Cuts to Foreign Aid Threaten Global Health, Benefit War & Disaster Profiteers
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the Trump’s administration drastic cuts to foreign assistance endanger global health, to the benefit of national security state profiteers

U.S.:

In order to ‘promote’ the ongoing never-ending ‘war on terrorism’ the British and Us War Lords have to create the terrorists!: Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place. By Seumas Milne The Relentless Push Towards War The only real constant to be found in both European and US politics is war.  A steady feature of both regions for the past 20+ years has been small, lucrative conflicts waged against countries unable to effectively defend themselves.  It doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office in the US — there’s a war machine constantly running. My concern is that there’s a building risk that one day that war machine is going to bust apart. And when it does, the long relative peace that the US and Europe have enjoyed (even as they’ve visited a lot of death and destruction elsewhere) will be shattered. As I’ve written extensively in the past, as was the case with Russia last fall, this push to war includes a series of carefully-crafted talking points being endlessly repeated over the print and airwaves.  It’s an ever-present condition of living in our manufactured reality, where what we are told to care about is beamed at us around the clock in a rather tediously but emotionally-manipulative way on the “news.” By Tyler Durden Thrown Under the Bus Again? Common sense needs to inform those on the left that hitching our collective and individual aspirations to the Democratic Party is like throwing oneself under a proverbial bus and expecting to come out of the catastrophe unscathed. The latter happens with about the same regularity and predictability as trains that ran during Mussolini’s rule. by Howard Lisnoff

After his first 100 days in office, we should fear Trump more than ever America’s political, economic and ideological power is declining, so it’s turning to military power to keep its world status By Patrick Cockburn The Many-Sided, Overlapping Meanings of May Day  . . . Only later did I learn that May Day’s real left origins were in the older revolutionary socialist- and anarchist-led struggle of the U.S. working class for an eight-hour day. Targeting May 1 as the day for the introduction of shorter hours, activists brought the issue to a boiling point in Chicago in the spring of 1886. The fight culminated in the fateful tossing of the Haymarket bomb, the savage execution of four of the city’s great radical leaders—“the Haymarket Martyrs”—and a great wave of anti-union and anti-left repression across the nation. By Paul Street Black Liberation/Civil Rights: 

Environment:

People’s Climate Movement Shows Strength and Diversity at DC March By Julie Dermansky Yes, I am a climate alarmist. Global warming is a crime against humanity There can be no greater crime against humanity than the destruction of conditions that make human life possible By Lawrence Torcello Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:

Sparking Fears of Airborne Radiation, Wildfire Burns in Fukushima ‘No-Go Zone’ Contaminated forests such as those outside fallout sites like Fukushima and Chernobyl ‘are ticking time bombs’ by Lauren McCauley Labor:

General strike in Brazil: Workers fight back against corrupt Temer government On Friday, Brazilian workers and unions led the first general strike in Brazil for over two decades, protesting austerity measures, and in particular harsh cuts in pensions, which are being implemented by the corrupt Temer government. By Victor Murray Economy: 

Shadow Government Statistics “Corrected” Real GDP Index (2000—2017), First Estimate of First-Quarter 2017This Chart Proves Paul Krugman Is Dead Wrong on Wall Street Reform Back in 2014 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman embarked on a mission to defend President Obama’s reform of Wall Street’s biggest banks that had brought the country to the brink of financial collapse just six years earlier. In August of 2014 Krugman wrote that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that Obama had signed into law in 2010 “is a success story.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens:

Citigroup’s Stock Price (Green) Versus S&P 500 (Orange) in Leadup and Aftermath of the 2008 Crash

World:

Ωyongyang slams Israel as ‘disturber of peace armed with illegal nukes under US patronage’ North Korea has accused Israel of being the “only illegal possessor” of nukes and threat to peace in the Middle East, and threatened Tel Aviv with a “thousand-fold punishment” after Israeli Defense Minister called Pyongyang’s leadership a “crazy and radical group.” Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:

Why in Heaven’s Name Aren’t Teeth Considered Part of Our Health? It is estimated that 108 million Americans have no dental insurance. By Susan Sered