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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!
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!
Images of the Day:
Quotes 0f the Day:
When we invest in millions (not thousands) of new green jobs, they should be in care work and basic services as well as insulation, manufacturing, and renewable energy. They should be provided through new public companies, not the private sector. When it comes to transport, greening the status quo won’t do. It is both impossible and undesirable. Drastically expanding the provision of free, high-speed public transport so every community is connected can marginalise the car from its role of social dominance and get short-haul planes out of the sky, at least. Neither Labour or the Tories are prepared – strategically or ideologically – to embrace to core tenets of a meaningful green industrial revolution or green recovery to the pandemic. But now is not the moment for tepid technocracy or greenwash. How we recover to the Covid-19 pandemic will determine our economic settlement for the next decade – precisely the period in which the UK must fully decarbonise. Now is the time to be brave, because only a revolution in how our economy works will do. — We Need a Real Green Industrial Revolution
Videos of the Day:
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 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. Rax the Rich! — They Can Afford To Pay!
Vaccine Thinking Applied to All of American Life The remarkably speedy hunt for a Covid-19 vaccine shows what might be possible when it comes to the inequality that may be the most striking aspect of American life in the twenty-first century. Martin Luther King, Jr., offered this all-too-relevant comment on his moment in his 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”: “The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent.” King concluded that American society was degrading human life by clinging to old thinking rather than turning to bold, visionary solutions — words that (sadly enough) ring even truer in our day than in his. By Liz Theoharis
Environment:
New Book Highlights Need for Solidarity for Humans to Survive Global Collapse Is this the end? The end of capitalism? The end of the human species? Anyone who has closely observed developments of the last 10 years can be forgiven a quick affirmative response. In a decade that has seen startling discoveries in climate science (none positive), unprecedented fires, and increasingly frequent and far more destructive tropical storms and hurricanes, the evidence is clearer than ever that our economic plunder of the planet’s natural bounty has gone too far. Add to that the emergence of a deadly worldwide pandemic with devastating economic consequences, and the question does seem to answer itself. By Michael Lynn
Fire and Flood Menace Parts of US and Bangladesh Fire and Flood Menace Parts of US and Bangladesh Fire and flood are on the rise. Bangladesh and New York face more flooding: the American West may see more forests burn. More extreme weather is on the way for the hapless residents of Bangladesh, New York and the western US, facing the prospect of worsening fire and flood. There is a new future for New York. By the close of the century, thanks to sea level rise and global heating, parts of it could be swept by hurricane-driven catastrophic floods almost every year. Things don’t look much brighter for much of Bangladesh. Scientists have recalculated the risk of flooding by the Brahmaputra river system to find that, even without the climate emergency, they had under-estimated the likelihood of devastating floods across the crowded, low-lying landscape. By Tim Radford
As the Earth Warms and the Antarctica Summer Begins.: Antarctic Ice Sheet is Primed to Pass Irreversible Climate Thresholds: Researchers The melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is well underway and will be almost impossible to reverse, even if global emissions reduction targets are met, according to new research published in Nature. By Gloria Dickie
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New research finds that the world’s oceans could rise by roughly 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) due to the partial reduction of the Antarctic Ice Sheet over a period extending beyond 2100.
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Importantly, the new study finds that it will be difficult to reverse Antarctica’s ice loss after the world reaches 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above pre-industrial levels — likely to occur in this century.
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The study suggests that in addition to the long-term partial collapse of the ice sheet at 2 degrees C of warming, an increase of 6-9 degrees C would trigger the loss of more than 70% of the ice sheet’s present-day volume. At more than 10 degrees C of warming, Antarctica would be committed to becoming “virtually ice-free.”
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However, predicting precisely when and how the Antarctic Ice Sheet will respond to temperature changes this century — and how much of it may melt over the next 80 years — has proven difficult and is the subject of continuing research.
Alaska Drilling Project Squashed By Court Decision Was Touted By Oil-Friendly Former Trump Official This week, a federal court overturned the Trump administration’s approval for what would have been Alaska’s first drilling project in federal waters, citing faulty analyses of how the Arctic oil and gas facility would affect the climate and polar bears. The Department of Interior approved Hilcorp’s Approches Liberty project in October 2018. However, months before the agency completed the project’s environmental review and issued its decision, a high-ranking Trump Interior official said he expected it would be approved and went on to praise and defend the company, despite Hilcorp’s checkered environmental and safety record in Alaska. By Ashley Braun
Factory Animal Breading are Breading Grounds for Disease and Pandemics: The North Carolina Hog Industry’s Answer to Pollution: A $500m Pipeline Project Instead of implementing safer systems, activists say Smithfield Foods is seeking to profit from hog waste under the guise of ‘renewable energy’ By Michael Sainato and Chelsea Skojec
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The communities built in prison help us stay balanced while we are here. This balance is upended when we are taken to solitary confinement. The boredom and loneliness is extreme and often amplifies mental illness, psychosis and suicidal tendencies. I talked with people who had gone to solitary for singing in the lunchroom, braiding someone’s hair, walking backwards on the sidewalk in the courtyard, and for eating someone’s piece of cake in the lunchroom when it was offered to them. Women prisoners are disciplined more often than male prisoners — two to three times more — and often receive harsher punishments. — Incarcerated Women Are Punished for Their Trauma With Solitary Confinement
Labor:
From these facts about two known carcinogens and one probable carcinogen, common in paints, one can tell that OSHA can not prevent occupational cancer. Especially in painters who are exposed to over 150 known and suspected carcinogens and over 3000 hazardous substances daily. As you can see people getting cancer is part of the equation; OSHA pel’s are at least ten times higher than NIOSH; therefore, the OSHA “feasible” (In the video Before Their Time (about workers dying of cancer) produced by the Workers Health and Sfaety Centre, Ontario Canada, Peter Infante, Director of Standards for OSHA, stated that NIOSH includes one more cancer per 1000 workers exposed as feasible.) risk for cancer is at least ten times higher. — This is the usual difference between NIOSH and OSHA.) — The War at the Point of Production: The ‘Killing Fields’ of the United States
State and federal laws say facilities like Ludeman are required to alert Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials about work-related employee deaths within eight hours. But facility officials did not deem the first staff death on April 13 work-related, so they did not report it. They made the same decision about the second and third deaths. And Walter’s. It’s a pattern that’s emerged across the nation, according to a KHN review of hundreds of worker deaths detailed by family members, colleagues and local, state and federal records. Workplace safety regulators have taken a lenient stance toward employers during the pandemic, giving them broad discretion to decide internally whether to report worker deaths. As a result, scores of deaths were not reported to occupational safety officials from the earliest days of the pandemic through late October. KHN examined more than 240 deaths of health care workers profiled for the Lost on the Frontline project and found that employers did not report more than one-third of them to a state or federal OSHA office, many based on internal decisions that the deaths were not work-related — conclusions that were not independently reviewed. — OSHA Is Helping Employers Get Away With Underreporting Health Care Worker Deaths
‘The Actual Scandalous Headline Is Medics Need Two Jobs to Survive’: AOC Defends Paramedic Outed by NY Post Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday night was among those who came to the defense of a New York City paramedic who the New York Post outed and attempted to shame in a recent article about her decision to earn extra money via nude modeling. The progressive New York congresswoman tweeted that instead of publishing a salacious article suggesting the woman isn’t adhering to “standards of personal ethics” while naming both her and her employer—reportedly against her wishes—the newspaper should have focused on “the actual scandalous headline…’Medics in the United States need two jobs to survive.'” By Julia Conley
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Pandemic-Driven U.S. Economic Collapse Continues in a Hardening, Protracted “L”-Shaped Recovery
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Severe Systemic Structural Damage from the Shutdown Will Forestall Meaningful Economic Rebound into 2022 or Beyond, Irrespective of Coronavirus Treatments and Vaccines
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Panicked, Unlimited Federal Reserve Money Creation and Federal Government Deficit Spending Continue and Will Expand, Triggering Major Domestic Inflation
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With Fundamental Dollar Debasement Intensifying, Holding Physical Gold and Silver Protects the Purchasing Power of One’s Assets
Trump Regulator Set to Consider Approving the Banking Model that Ushered in the Great Depression – Uninsured Deposits Seven banking and credit union associations have sent a letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks in the U.S., spelling out the dangers of the OCC approving a pending bank charter that would allow a national bank to accept and hold deposits that lack federal deposit insurance. The lack of federal deposit insurance triggered the bank runs and banks collapses that played a key role in ushering in the Great Depression. (More on that in a moment.) By Pam and Russ Martens
World:
New World Capitalist Theme: Elections Fraudulent: Even the Opposition Believes Venezuela’s Election Was Legitimate Before the National Assembly elections on December 6 in Venezuela, the United States government began a campaign to delegitimize the process. The U.S. government sanctioned the head of the National Electoral Council (CNE) and members of the opposition who had decided to run in the election. Just hours after the election, both the U.S. government and the European Union—as well as their allies in Latin America—announced, predictably, that the elections had been fraudulent. They did not need evidence; they did not need anything except the reiteration of the simple line that an election in a country whose government challenges U.S. authority cannot be legitimate in any way. By Vijay Prashad
21st Congress Of Italian Marxists: An Exceptional Time to Be a Revolutionary!FThe 21st congress of Sinistra classe rivoluzione, the Italian section of the International Marxist Tendency, took place on 5-7 December. Restrictions due to the pandemic forced us to keep it online. Far from preventing a large number of participants, these conditions facilitated an exceptional turnout of 94 delegates, and around 200 guests from over 40 cities. By Federica Acconcia
Britain: Foreign Aid – The Smiling Face of Imperialism The move by the Tories to cut Britain’s foreign aid budget has caused uproar amongst the establishment. But beneath their ‘concern for the poor’ lies their concern for their own profits. The recent announcement by Chancellor Rishi Sunak that British foreign aid would be cut by £5 billion – from 0.7 to 0.5 percent of GDP – was greeted with uproar by the establishment. But whilst the imperialists shed crocodile tears for the world’s poorest, their real concern is that with these cuts, their own financial interests will suffer. By Anthony Oakland
Education, Health, Science, 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
‘A Lost Generation’: Surge of Research Reveals Students Sliding Backward, Most Vulnerable Worst Affected After the U.S. education system fractured into Zoom screens last spring, experts feared millions of children would fall behind. Hard evidence now shows they were right. A flood of new data — on the national, state and district levels — finds students began this academic year behind. Most of the research concludes students of color and those in high-poverty communities fell further behind their peers, exacerbating long-standing gaps in American education. A study released this week by McKinsey & Co. estimates that the shift to remote school in the spring set White students back by one to three months in math, while students of color lost three to five months. As the coronavirus pandemic persists through this academic year, McKinsey said, losses will escalate. By Laura Meckler and Hannah Natansonaa
As Vaccine Gains Approval, Hospitals Scramble Over Which Workers to Prioritize If there’s such a thing as a date with destiny, it’s marked on Dr. Taison Bell’s calendar.At noon Tuesday, Bell, a critical care physician, is scheduled to be one of the first health care workers at the University of Virginia Health System to roll up his sleeve for a shot to ward off the coronavirus. “This is a long time coming,” said Bell, 37, who signed up via hospital email last week. “The story of this crisis is that each week feels like a year. This is really the first time that there’s genuine hope that we can turn the corner on this.” For now, that hope is limited to a chosen few. Bell provides direct care to some of the sickest COVID-19 patients at the UVA Health hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. But he is among some 12,000 “patient-facing” workers at his hospital who could be eligible for about 3,000 early doses of vaccine, said Dr. Costi Sifri, director of hospital epidemiology. “We’re trying to come up with the highest-risk categories, those who really spend a significant amount of time taking care of patients,” Sifri said. “It doesn’t account for everybody.”“We’re trying to come up with the highest-risk categories, those who really spend a significant amount of time taking care of patients,” Sifri said. “It doesn’t account for everybody.” JoNel Aleccia
COVID-19: the Winter Wave And The Death Toll The winter wave of COVID-19 cases continues to rage in Europe, North America and even Latin America and Asia. So, as the vaccines get rolled out across the world to varying degrees of rapidity and volume, let’s measure the damage done in deaths from COVID-19 as we approach the end of 2020.Which countries have been hit hardest? Using the Worldometer coronavirus database, I’ve selected some of the major countries globally in Chart 1 (measured as deaths per million of population). It’s the large European countries and the US that lead the way on this measure, followed closely by Brazil and Mexico, two Latin American countries that have made little effort to contain the pandemic or provide any robust health support. The countries that have done that, like Germany, have a much lower death rate. And countries like South Africa and India, with relatively young populations, also have lower death rates. By Michael Roberts
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”
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! 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!
A Liberal
Shadow Government Statists Daily Update