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!
The malaise that infects Americans is global. Hundreds of millions of people have been severed by modernity from traditions, beliefs, and rituals, as well as communal structures, which kept them rooted. They have been callously cast aside by global capitalism as superfluous. This has engendered an atavistic rage against the technocratic world that condemns them. This rage is expressed in many forms — Nativism, neofascism, jihadism, the Christian right, alt‐right militias, and the anarchic violence of antifa. The resentment spring from the same deep wells of despair. This despair exacerbates racism, bigotry, and xenophobia. It poisons civil discourse. It celebrates hypermasculinity, violence, and chauvinism. It promises the return to a mythical past. Corporate elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, define the clash as one between Western civilization and racist thugs and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, anarchists, religious fundamentalists, and jihadists a baffling irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their duplicity, greed, use of indiscriminate industrial violence, and hypocrisy. — Chris. Hedges: Why They Hate Us Book
But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. And It’s Much Easier To Integrate A Lunch Counter Than It Is To Guarantee A Livable Income And A Good Solid Job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.Martin Luther King, The Other America Speech Stanford UniversityApril 14, 1967 A Film by Allen Willis
People in deprived areas may want to stay at home but they have no choice but to go to work to earn a living and to keep their job. “Most women on the estate work in care homes, home care, as cleaners or in supermarkets,” says one local community leader. “I guess that makes them key workers, though they don’t get the applause.” Nor do they get compensation if they test positive and quarantine, putting in doubt what proportion of the working poor do get tested. During the pilot scheme run by the British army in Liverpool, a local doctor estimated that in areas of maximum deprivation, those coming forward to be tested numbered just four per cent. The variant of the virus has become an alibi to explain away the government’s mistakes, but it was these same failings to better suppress the virus that helped produce the mutant in Margate in the first place. — Government Mistakes Provided the Breeding Ground for the Mutant Virus, Which it is Now Using as an Alibi for Its Failures
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
Chris. Hedges: Why They Hate Us Book Excerpt explores the rupturing of social bonds, despair and rage that come from being cast aside by the ruling elites and that define the deep animus of the radical right. I sat at a table in the barren dining room of the house, which was for sale, with the owner, Kat, who recently lost her job, and Scott Seddon, the founder of the militia group American Patriot the III%, or AP3. Its name was inspired by the belief that only 3 percent of the population actively fought the British during the American Revolu-tion. Seddon founded AP3 when Barack Obama took office in 2009. His initial focus was to connect survivalists for the coming collapse. But the militia soon took on a political coloring. It has expanded to multiple chapters nationwide, he said, each involved with organizing protests, training militia, and teaching survival skills to prepare for an imminent natural or man‐made calamity. He estimates AP3 currently has thirty thousand to fifty thousand members. It also provides security for right‐wing protests and rallies.
Poor People’s Campaign MLK Day Message to Biden: Act on Bold Agenda to Heal Nation “In 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called out the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism. In 2021, his words are no less relevant.” The Poor People’s Campaign marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day Monday by urging the incoming Biden administration to swiftly act on a suite of policy priorities that make up a “reconstruction and restoration agenda” to move the nation forward. By Andrea GermanosTrump May be on Trial, But the System that Produced Him will be Acquitted Barely concealing its alliance with the incoming Biden administra-tion, Silicon Valley has shut down Trump’s social media megaphone. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lobbied the joint chiefs of staff to cut an “unhinged” Trump out of the chain of command, in a move that was reportedly rejected out of hand by Pentagon officials because, they told the New York Times, it would amount to a “military coup”. And Biden, who boasts that he was the author the Patriot Act years before 9/11, has been touting a new “domestic terrorism” bill, as though the US did not already have a plethora of ways to crack down on dissent, of both the legitimate and the illegitimate varieties. By Jonathan CookEnvironment:Flint Activists Remember How Gina McCarthy, Biden’s Pick for Climate Policy, Failed Their City Former EPA chief Gina McCarthy has reportedly been picked as Biden’s domestic climate policy chief. That concerns activists in Flint, Michigan, who say that she failed to address the Flint water crisis. By Naomi LachanceCivil Rights/Black Liberation:
Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him. — Martin Luther King Jr. 1967, The Black Power Defined
New Documents Suggest J. Edgar Hoover Was Involved in Fred Hampton’s Murder Recently released FBI documents shed new light on the 1969 conspiracy to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. n March 1976, we sat in a cavernous Chicago courtroom while FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell testified in the federal civil rights case that we and our partners at the People’s Law Office had brought on behalf of the families of slain Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the seven survivors of the murderous pre-dawn Chicago police raid on their West Side apartment. Thanks to the liberation of FBI documents from the Media, Pennsylvania FBI offices, the revelations of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and our own hotly contested pretrial battles to uncover the truth about the raid, we had been able to document the local FBI’s central role in setting up the raid as part of the Bureau’s secret and highly illegal COINTELPRO Program. This program had previously targeted Black liberation leaders including Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad and the organizations that they led. As the Senate Select Committee would later find in its April 1976 report, the FBI had more recently turned its attention to “destroy[ing] the Black Panther Party.” By Flint Taylor and Jeff HaasBlack Agenda Radio for Week of January 18, 2021 With Margaret Kimberley and Glen FordLumumba Assassination Changed Black American PoliticsUS Imperialism Was in Disarray in 2020 A panel of academics and activists marked the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected prime minister, by agents of the US and Belgium. Texas A&M professor Ira Dworkin, author of “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State,” pointed out that it was Black women, led by singer Abbey Lincoln, who petitioned for Lumumba’s release from arrest, and later organized against US policy in Congo. These protests “did create a shift” in Black American politics towards confrontation with US policies in Africa and the world, Dworkin told the online seminar.
US Genocide Against Blacks, Now and in 1951 The Black leftists that presented a petition to the United Nations, 70 years ago, charging the US with genocide against Black Americans, understood that “there is a linked fate between what’s happening to Black people in the US and what is going to happen” to other racialized and oppressed people around the world, said Dr Charisse Burden-Stelly, speaking at an online commemoration of the event. The “We Charge Genocide” campaign was led by entertainer-activist Paul Robeson and Black members of the Communist Party.
US Imperialism Was in Disarray in 2020 Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka told a year-end conference of the Black Is Back Coalition that “the US settler state is facing the most serious crisis of legitimacy since the collapse of the capitalist economy” in the Great Depression. Betty Davis, of the Coalition’s Community Control of Schools Working Group, said: “The federal budget that comes down to New York City is the 23rd biggest budget in the world, but you don’t control that money and that’s why you are not having the same services as your white counterparts.”
Labor:
Family Benefits in US Fall Further Behind The New York Times recently noted that South Korea would be “offering monthly allowances of 300,000 won, or about $274, for every newborn and infant up to the age of 1 starting in 2022. Expectant couples would get a 2 million won cash bonus starting next year, along with increased medical and other benefits.” South Korea’s recent move further solidifies its shift from a minimalist welfare state toward the kind of family benefits found in universal welfare states. Using the OECD’s typology, family benefits include child care assistance, child allowances, and paid family leave. Historically, the Nordic social democracies — such as Norway and Sweden — While Canada and the United States spent similar amounts in 2000, Canada now spends twice the US amount, as does Japan. South Korea spent about 0.5 percent of GeDP less than Canada in 2018, but their recent expansion of child benefits will bring them closer to Canada. Meanwhile, the United States has fallen further behind. To increase spending on family benefits to the 2018 Canadian level, the United States would have to provide roughly $221 billion more for families; to reach Swedish levels, benefits would need to increase by $594 billion. By Shawn Fremstad
Economy:
The Catastrophe of the United States/World Capitalism: Warning World Is on ‘Brink of a Catastrophic Moral Failure,’ WHO Chief Denounces Vaccine-Hoarding by Rich Nations “We now face the real danger that even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots.”—Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO “The price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.” By Kenny Stancil
World:
Brazil: Occupy Ford to Save Jobs Ford announced last Monday the end of production of vehicles in Brazil. The decision led to immediate cessation of activities at the Camaçari (Bahia) and Taubaté (São Paulo) facilities, maintaining only the production of parts… By Jacqueline TakEducation, 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
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!
Quotes 0f the Day:
Trump May be on Trial, But the System that Produced Him will be Acquitted Barely concealing its alliance with the incoming Biden administra-tion, Silicon Valley has shut down Trump’s social media megaphone. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lobbied the joint chiefs of staff to cut an “unhinged” Trump out of the chain of command, in a move that was reportedly rejected out of hand by Pentagon officials because, they told the New York Times, it would amount to a “military coup”. And Biden, who boasts that he was the author the Patriot Act years before 9/11, has been touting a new “domestic terrorism” bill, as though the US did not already have a plethora of ways to crack down on dissent, of both the legitimate and the illegitimate varieties. By Jonathan Cook
Environment:
Flint Activists Remember How Gina McCarthy, Biden’s Pick for Climate Policy, Failed Their City Former EPA chief Gina McCarthy has reportedly been picked as Biden’s domestic climate policy chief. That concerns activists in Flint, Michigan, who say that she failed to address the Flint water crisis. By Naomi Lachance
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 18, 2021 With Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Lumumba Assassination Changed Black American Politics US Imperialism Was in Disarray in 2020 A panel of academics and activists marked the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected prime minister, by agents of the US and Belgium. Texas A&M professor Ira Dworkin, author of “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State,” pointed out that it was Black women, led by singer Abbey Lincoln, who petitioned for Lumumba’s release from arrest, and later organized against US policy in Congo. These protests “did create a shift” in Black American politics towards confrontation with US policies in Africa and the world, Dworkin told the online seminar.
Education, Health, Science, and Welfare:
