Due to Years of Austerity, Cuts to Public HealthCare, And An Anti-Science and Profiteering President, The United States Now Leads the World In Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World!
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 War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The very future of Humanity Is Now At stake!
During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program: 1.Austerity, 2.Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel! 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!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a million times, I must be a Democrat. ‑ David Hendrickson Re ‘Lesser Evil Voting’
Adding outrageous insult to injury, Congress saw fit in the CARES Act to provide $454 billion of taxpayers’ money to go into this alphabet soup of Wall Street programs to backstop any losses they suffer. Once again, just as in 2008, Wall Street has privatized the profits for the one percent and now the losses will be socialized to workers on Main Street, where 16 million job losses have occurred in just the past three weeks. Mainstream media has been negligent at informing the public of these outrages by Congress, the Federal Reserve and the New York Fed. Wall Street On Parade began in-depth coverage of this latest Wall Street looting on September 18, 2019 and has chronicled each new development in more than six dozen articles. You can access this free archive here. — American Workers Get a 4-Month Safety Net; Wall Street Gets a 4 to 5-Year Bailout
I went on to remind him that the other problem that we have faced over the years is that this society placed a stigma on the color of the Negro, on the color of his skin because he was black. Doors were closed to him that were not closed to other groups. And I finally said to him that it’s a nice thing to say to people that you ought to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And the fact is that millions of Negroes, as a result of centuries of denial and neglect, have been left bootless. And they find themselves impoverished aliens in this affluent society. And there is a great deal that the society can and must do if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs. Now one of the answers, it seems to me, is a guaranteed annual income, a guaranteed minimum income for all people and for all families of our country. It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income. Begin to organize people all over our country and mobilize forces so that we can bring to the attention of our nation this need, and this something which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro’s economic problem and the economic problem which many other poor people confront in our nation. — Martin Luther King, The Other America Speech, Stanford University April 14, 1967
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.
Amid COVID-19, It’s Time to Nationalize Airlines and Other Industries he $2 trillion stimulus bill that Congress passed on March 27 gave billions to industries like the airlines, but it did not explicitly give money to the oil and gas industry. Senate Democrats negotiated out the $3 billion to oil and gas (and lost clean energy provisions in the meantime) that Trump wanted to fill oil reserves “to the top.” The omission was a tiny win for the climate — kind of — but not really. According to the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry didn’t even want the money to begin with. Bailouts, as CEO of API Mark Sommers told CNN, explaining the industry’s rationale, can come with strings attached. For instance, in 2008, the banking and auto industry bailouts came with cuts to executive pay and plant closures. “They will never live that down,” said Sommers. Ironically, the oil and gas industry will probably end up getting money anyway, as Amy Westervelt of Drilled News points out. Sharon ZhangSanders Says Congress Must Stop Trump From Using Covid-19 Crisis to ‘Bankrupt and Privatize the Postal Service’ “Now, more than ever, we need a strong and vibrant postal system to deliver mail 6-days a week. Congress must act now to save it.” “Now, more than ever, we need a strong and vibrant postal system to deliver mail 6-days a week,” tweeted Sanders, a senator from Vermont. “Congress must act now to save it.” Sanders’ call comes as the Postal Service is warning that it will completely run out of cashwithin the next several months if Congress doesn’t act swiftly to provide relief. The USPS has been hit hard by the sharp decline in mail volume caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Postmaster General Megan Brennan told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in a briefing Thursday. By Jake Johnson
Environment:
Agri-Business — Food For Profit Industry :Food is Not Produced if it is Not Profitable, Even if Millions are Hungry: Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic With restaurants, hotels and schools closed, many of the nation’s largest farms are destroying millions of pounds of fresh goods that they can no longer sell. By David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery
A tractor mulches green beans at an R.C. Hatton farm in Florida. “It’s heartbreaking,” an owner of the farm said.Credit…Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times
Coal Miner Doug Rutherford Takes A Break After His Shift At A Small Mine On May 19, 2017 Outside The City Of Welch, West Virginia. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Attempting to Keep the Number of Cornavirus Cases Down, the Trump Openly Anti-worker Adminisation Tells Employers not to Report the Cases!: Former OSHA Officials Voice Alarm as Trump Tells Corporations They Don’t Have to Record Coronavirus Cases “If you work in a grocery store or factory then sorry, the coronavirus cases there probably aren’t being reported.”President Donald Trump’s Labor Department has quietly issued guidance informing most employers in the United States that they will not be required to record and report coronavirus cases among their workers because doing so would supposedly constitute an excessive burden on companies. The new rules, released Friday by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), were met with alarm by public health experts and former Labor Department transparency that could further endanger frontline workers. By Jake Johnson
Resistance Growing to Covid-Capitalism Dr. Abdul Alkalimat, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, compiled and circulated a list of grassroots labor and social activist actions in the time of plague across the nation and the world. (Followed By many websites of strinking workers.— R.S.) By Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Economy:
American Workers Get a 4-Month Safety Net; Wall Street Gets a 4 to 5-Year Bailout The stimulus bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in March, (the CARES Act), increases the miserly amount most states provide in unemployment benefits (an average of $378 weekly) by an additional $600 per week. But that extra $600 only lasts until July 31 — a period of four months. Millions of small businesses, such as restaurants and retail shops, will shut down permanently as a result of this business disruption, meaning that workers in places like Florida, the third most populous state in the U.S., will be back to their preposterously low weekly unemployment allotment of $275 per week in just four months. Let that sink in for a moment. A worker in Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is in charge, is expected to live on $275 a week or $1100 per month, or the annualized amount of $13,200 per year. That $275 a week hasn’t increased in more than two decades, despite the cost of food and housing soaring over that period in Florida. And among the 50 states, Florida ranks dead last in terms of how long its Scrooge-esque unemployment benefit lasts: just 12 weeks versus 26 weeks for most other states. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Medical Colonialism in Africa is Not New Remarks about testing coronavirus drugs on Africans part of pattern where some bodies are dehumanised, others protected. . . . a French doctor caused controversy when he proposed that vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic be tried on Africans because they lack masks and other personal protective equipment. By Friday, after widespread accusations of racism, he was forced to apologise for what he then called his “clumsily expressed” remarks. But the type of thinking exposed by his words is nothing new. Neither is it exceptional to this doctor. It is part of a trend that for generations has seen the dehumanising of some people because of the superiority complex of others.
Health, Science, Education, 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 ‘governn’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they 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!
Experts inside and outside the government identified the threat early on and sought to raise alarms even as President Trump was moving slowly. Read some of what they had to say among themselves at critical moments. As the coronavirus emerged and headed toward the United States, an extraordinary conversation was hatched among an elite group of infectious disease doctors and medical experts in the federal government and academic institutions around the nation.
Red Dawn — a nod to the 1984 film with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen — was the nickname for the email chain they built. Different threads in the chain were named Red Dawn Breaking, Red Dawn Rising, Red Dawn Breaking Bad and, as the situation grew more dire, Red Dawn Raging. It was hosted by the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Duane C. Caneva, starting in January with a small core of medical experts and friends that gradually grew to dozens.
February was a tipping point for some experts. The concern these medical experts had been raising in late January and early February turned to alarm by the third week in February. That was when they effectively concluded that the United States had already lost the fight to contain the virus, and that it needed to switch to mitigation. One critical element in that shift was the realization that many people in the country were likely already infected and capable of spreading the virus, but not showing any symptoms. Here Dr. Lee discusses this conclusion with Dr. Robert Kadlec, the head of the virus response effort at the Department of Health and Human Services and a key White House adviser. By Eric Lipton
Quote of the Day:
Sanders Says Congress Must Stop Trump From Using Covid-19 Crisis to ‘Bankrupt and Privatize the Postal Service’ “Now, more than ever, we need a strong and vibrant postal system to deliver mail 6-days a week. Congress must act now to save it.” “Now, more than ever, we need a strong and vibrant postal system to deliver mail 6-days a week,” tweeted Sanders, a senator from Vermont. “Congress must act now to save it.” Sanders’ call comes as the Postal Service is warning that it will completely run out of cashwithin the next several months if Congress doesn’t act swiftly to provide relief. The USPS has been hit hard by the sharp decline in mail volume caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Postmaster General Megan Brennan told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in a briefing Thursday. By Jake Johnson
“They’re Crooks”: Coal Industry Aims to Exploit Coronavirus Crisis to Cut Payments to Miners With Black LungCoal companies are “going to try to use this virus thing to stop paying benefits,” warned one retired miner suffering from black lung. By Jake Johnson
