Due to Years of Austerity, Cuts to Public Health Care, And An Anti-Science and Profiteering President, The United States Now Leads the World In Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World! And Now the Total Caronavirs Deaths in the United States are Over 20% of the Total Death in the Entire 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!
Public indebtedness constitutes a system of plundering our wealth and subjecting our peoples to the global imperialist system. Debt services absorb every year the social budgets of our countries. Public health spending is significantly less than the minimum levels set by the World Health Organization. It is necessary to stop repaying public debts to provide the necessary financial liquidity in order to face the Corona epidemic and to confront the deepening social and economic crisis. Likewise, all forms of privatization of public services must be halted. Priority should be given to developing a public health sector and developing free and good health and medical care systems. The demand for cancellation of external debt has always been among the popular demands in our region since the debt crisis and the structural adjustment programmes that followed in the early eighties. Tunisia and Egypt campaigned to cancel the odious debts contracted by the dictators who were ousted by the revolutions. Initiatives have emerged in the recent Lebanese popular movement calling for stopping the payment of debts and enacting a program of social, food and health protection reforms for the population. In the context of the Corona crisis at the global level, calls for stopping the payment of public debts of countries from the Global South increased. Therefore, we must continue to mobilize at the level of our region to impose a unilateral and sovereign moratorium on debt repayments in our countries that are threatened by a humanitarian catastrophe due to the absence of conditions to cope with the Corona outbreak. Popular control must also be established over the funds that will be freed by stopping the payments, which must be spent first on health needs and support for the groups mostly affected by the Corona crisis. The moratorium on repayments must be coupled with the establishment of mechanisms for auditing public debts that would enable the majority of citizens to be involved in identifying the illegitimate, odious and illegal sections of these debts, which must be cancelled and entirely revoked. The freed up resources will be allocated to implement economic, social and environmental measures that derive their foundations from the basic needs of the working classes, small-scale producers and marginalized groups in general. — For the cancellation of debts and dropping of the “free trade” agreements
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 Reublicrats 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.
An Old Story Again: Capitalism vs. Health and Safety The U.S. president recently ordered meatpacking employees back into workplaces plagued by coronavirus. He did not order the employers to make their slaughterhouses safe. GOP-proposed legislation exempts employers from lawsuits by employees sickened or killed by coronavirus infections at workplaces. The GOP is mostly silent about requiring employers to maintain safe or healthy workplaces. Employers across the country threaten workers who refuse to return to jobs they find unsafe. They demand that employees return or risk being fired. Job loss likely means loss of health insurance for employees’ families. Being fired risks also losing eligibility for unemployment insurance. By Richard D. Wolff
Aiming Missiles at Viruses: a Plea for Sanity in a Time of Plague The point I am trying to make here is a simple and obvious one, or would be in a society not burdened with a two-pronged ideology of extreme militarism and extreme individualism. It is this: In feeding the military-industrial complex so richly at this time, we are starving ourselves of many vital things and weakening ourselves as a society, perhaps to the point of suicide. We are in effect sacrificing our future on the altar of American imperialism, which like some dark god of the past, is ever hungry and can be assuaged only by human life. By Hugh Iglarsh
RayaltiesFor Pollution: Oil Companies Can Set Their Own Rates for Royalties From Drilling on Public Lands Thanks to Trump: Report “Oil and gas corporations already pay pennies compared to what they make in profits from plundering public lands—land that belongs to the American people—and now they’ll pay even less.” By Julia ConleyFactory Farming on Hold Covid-19 has infected meat-packers, almost 12,000 of them. At least 48 have died and many plants have temporarily closed. So it seems like a good time to ask, would it be so terrible if slaughterhouses shut down for good? True, meat-packers would have to find other employment, but the end of factory farming and industrial slaughter of cows, pigs and chickens has many upsides. First, stopping animal torture. Chickens are so crowded together they have to be de-beaked. Cows spend their entire lives cramped in cells, barely able to turn around. The treatment of pigs – highly intelligent mammals and doubtless aware of the brutality they suffer and who causes it – is abominable. So the idling of slaughterhouses by the pandemic could be a lucky development, and not just for animals. By Eve Ottenberg
Civil Rights/BlackLiberation:
History Discovered: For years, the ceremony was largely forgotten. It had been mentioned in some history books, including Robert Rosen’s “Confederate Charleston,” but the story gained national attention when David W. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale, took interest. He discovered a mention of the first Decoration Day in the uncataloged writings of a Union soldier at a Harvard University library. He contacted the Avery Research Center in Charleston, which helped him find the first newspaper account of the event. An article about the “Martyrs of the Race Course” had appeared in the Charleston Daily Courier the day after the ceremony. Blight was intrigued and did more research. He published an account of the day in his book, “Race and Reunion.” Soon he gave lectures on the event around the country. “What’s interesting to me is how the memory of this got lost,” Blight said. “It is, in effect, the first Memorial Day and it was primarily led by former slaves in Charleston.” Read More
The First Memorial Day Charleston was in ruins. The peninsula was nearly deserted, the fine houses empty, the streets littered with the debris of fighting and the ash of fires that had burned out weeks before. The Southern gentility was long gone, their cause lost. In the weeks after the Civil War ended, it was, some said, “a city of the dead.” On a Monday morning that spring, nearly 10,000 former slaves marched onto the grounds of the old Washington Race Course, where wealthy Charleston planters and socialites had gathered in old times. During the final year of the war, the track had been turned into a prison camp. Hundreds of Union soldiers died there. For two weeks in April, former slaves had worked to bury the soldiers. Now they would give them a proper funeral. The procession began at 9 a.m. as 2,800 black school children marched by their graves, softly singing “John Brown’s Body.” Soon, their voices would give way to the sermons of preachers, then prayer and — later — picnics. It was May 1, 1865, but they called it Decoration Day. On that day, former Charleston slaves started a tradition that would come to be known as Memorial Day. By Brian Hicks
This April 1865 photo shows the graves of Union soldiers who died at the Race Course prison camp in Charleston, which would later become Hampton Park. On May 1 of that year, former slaves gave the fallen a daylong funeral. The Library of Congress
An obelisk, erected by L. T. ‘Eliza’ Potter, stands in Beaufort National Cemetery. It reads, ‘Immortality Hundreds Of The Defenders of American Liberty Against The Great Rebellion.’
Fed Chair Powell Promises “Transparency,” then Draws the Dark Curtain Tighter During his appearance before the Senate Banking Committee this past Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told Senator Jon Tester that the Fed “has committed to disclose all of the borrowers and the amounts in a timely way.” Powell was referring to the alphabet soup of emergency bailout programs for Wall Street that the Fed has established under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. By Pam Martens and Russ MartensWorld:
Study Warns 1.1 Million Children Could Die as Pandemic Interrupts Access to Food & Medical Care A new report finds 1.1 million children under 5 could die the next six months from secondary impacts of the pandemic, like disruptions to health services and access to food. Mothers are also imperiled. We speak with Tim Roberton, lead author of the study and assistant scientist in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and with infectious diseases pediatrician Dr. Beate Kampmann.
60 Million People Could Be Driven Into Extreme Poverty Due to the Pandemic A new report finds that as many as 60 million people could be reduced to living on less than $2 a day as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. “The pandemic and shutdown of advanced economies could push as many as 60 million people into extreme poverty — erasing much of the recent progress made in poverty alleviation,” World Bank Group President David Malpass explained in a statement Tuesday. By Matthew RozsaWorld War II: From War To Revolution The COVID-19 pandemic has frequently been compared to a war. The ruling class fear the radicalising impacts these events will have on the consciousness of the working class, just like in World War II. COVID-19 is bringing economic and social dislocation with no parallel since the Second World War. It is a huge burden on working-class people, and a real concern for the strategists of capital. By Ben GlinieckiHealth, 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
Coronavirus and Other US Health Threats? Fund Public Health Not Foreign Wars How is it that in the richest nation on Earth we don’t have enough masks, gowns, virus tests, and ventilators to serve our front-line healthcare providers in this coronavirus pandemic? Part of the answer is that the nation’s wealth has been mis-allocated between military and civilian needs over the past four decades By Heather Gray – Jonathan King
Quotes of the Day:
Factory Farming on Hold Covid-19 has infected meat-packers, almost 12,000 of them. At least 48 have died and many plants have temporarily closed. So it seems like a good time to ask, would it be so terrible if slaughterhouses shut down for good? True, meat-packers would have to find other employment, but the end of factory farming and industrial slaughter of cows, pigs and chickens has many upsides. First, stopping animal torture. Chickens are so crowded together they have to be de-beaked. Cows spend their entire lives cramped in cells, barely able to turn around. The treatment of pigs – highly intelligent mammals and doubtless aware of the brutality they suffer and who causes it – is abominable. So the idling of slaughterhouses by the pandemic could be a lucky development, and not just for animals. By Eve Ottenberg
World:
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare: