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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:
Deferred Maintenance has Been the Policy of the United States Capitalist Class Since 1975:
The American Society of Civil Engineers report card says $588 billion is needed for roads, bridges and dams. Experts told us it could be more. Tackling Deferred Maintenance Should Be The Top Priority in all three areas, Richard Geddes, professor and founding director of the Cornell University Program in Infrastructure Policy, told us. “That is, when each type of facility is designed and constructed, there is a set schedule to keep each dam, road or bridge in a state of good repair,” he said. “The problem is that, when budgets become tight, infrastructure maintenance becomes one of the easier things to defer until next year, and then the year after, and so on. Sadly, if scheduled maintenance is deferred for too long, then major repairs are required. Those major repairs end up being much more costly than the regular maintenance would have been. It is the same as getting regular oil changes for a car engine, he said. “If those changes do not occur, then the entire engine must be replaced, which is much more costly.” — Understanding Infrastructure: The Cost of Repairing Our Roads, Bridges and Dams
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
Robber Barons Buy Pardens: Trump-Linked Lobbyists Made Big Money From Clients Seeking Last-Minute Pardons Washington lobbyists with close ties to outgoing President Donald Trump were paid lucrative sums by clients angling for last-minute pardons from the president. Matthew Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union and a close Trump ally, brought in the largest haul. According to a lobbying filing released Thursday night, Schlapp was paid a whopping $750,000 since mid-December to lobby Trump to pardon Parker Petit, a top Republican donor who served as Georgia finance chairman for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Petit was convicted of securities fraud in November and faced up to 20 years in federal prison. By Karl Evers-Hillstrom, Center for Responsive Politics
Why History Matters: the Legacy of Slavery Many Americans watched as Joe Biden marked his Inauguration Day celebration with a brief presentation before the statue of Abraham Lincoln, invoking the Civil War as an historical moment when the nation triumphed over deep division.When recalling Lincoln, many New Yorkers may remember the famous speech he gave at Cooper Institute (aka Cooper Union) in February 1860 calling to limit the extension – but not the end – of slavery. It was a critical campaign speech that helped him secure the Republican Party nomination for President. In November, he was elected, and, in December, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. By David Rosen
Indirect Deaths: The Massive and Unseen Costs of America’s Post-9/11 Wars “I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves,” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “One minute they belonged and the next, they were out, and they couldn’t fit in. They had nowhere to work, no one who related to them. And they had these PTSD symptoms that made them react in ways other Americans didn’t.” This veteran’s remark may seem striking to many Americans who watched this country’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere unfold in an early display of pyrotechnic air raids and lines of troops and tanks moving through desert landscapes, and then essentially stopped paying attention. As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, as well as a military spouse who has written aboutand lived in a reasonably up-close-and-personal way through the costs of almost two decades of war in the Greater Middle East and Africa, my Marine acquaintance’s comments didn’t surprise me. By Andrea Mazzarino
Environment:
Let Nuke Plans Run for 100 Years? Nuclear power plants when they began being built were not seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. So operating licenses were limited to 40 years. But with the major decline of nuclear power—the U.S. is down to 94 plants from a high of 129 and only two are now under construction—the nuclear promoters in the U.S. government and nuclear industry are pushing to let nuclear power plants run for 100 years to somehow keep nuclear power going. By Karl Grossman
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
In either case, people of color get the short end of the stick. Marital rates are relatively low in Black households, who often cite financial instability as the main reason not to get married. Black and Latinx Americans are less likely to accumulate wealth through tax-free retirement savings or unrealized capital gains than their white counterparts. They are also less likely to report health insurance coverage and university tuition payments than white Americans, largely because they face higher poverty and unemployment rates. To top it all off, although the EITC does effectively support specific groups of low-income taxpayers, and especially Black working mothers, the largest share of EITC recipients are white. In other words, the tax code doesn’t factor in racial discrimination in housing, employment, education, retirement or health care. In benefiting employed, highly educated, insured individuals, it effectively benefits white people the most. Our allegedly progressive income tax system is not as progressive, or as race-neutral, as it seems. — What Filing Tax Returns Taught Me About Racism in the US
Labor:
Economy:
Fictitious Capital Inflates Stock Market: Covid and Fictitious Capital During the year of the COVID, output, investment and employment in nearly all the economies of the world plummeted, as lockdowns, social isolation and collapsing international trade contracted output and spending. And yet the opposite was the case for the stock and bond markets of the major economies. The US stock market indexes (along with others) ended 2020 at all-time highs. After the initial shock of the COVID pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, when the US stock market indexes plunged by 40%, markets then made a dramatic recovery, eventually surpassing pre-pandemic levels. It is clear why this happened. It was the injection of credit money into economies. The Federal Reserve and other major banks injected huge quantities of cash/credit into the banking system and even directly into corporations through the purchase of government bonds from the banks and corporate bonds; as well as through direct government-backed COVID loans to businesses. Interest rates on this credit fell towards zero and, with so-called ‘safe assets’ like government bonds, interest rates even went negative. Bond purchasers were paying governments interest in order to buy their paper! . . . Marx called financial assets, stocks and bonds, ‘fictitious capital’. Engels first composed this term in his early economic work, the Umrisse; and Marx developed it further in Capital Volume 3 (Chapters 25 and 29), where he defined it as the accumulated claims or legal titles, to future earnings in capitalist production; in other words, claims on ‘real’ capital, ie capital actually invested in physical means of production and workers; or money capital, cash funds being held. A company raises funds for investment etc by issuing stocks and/or bonds. The owners of the shares or bonds then have a claim on the future earnings of the company. There is a ‘secondary’ market for these claims, ie buying and selling these existing shares or bonds; a market for the circulation of these property rights. Stocks and bonds do not function as real capital; they are merely a claim on future profits, so “the capital-value of such paper is…wholly illusory… The paper serves as title of ownership which represents this capital.” As Marx put it: “While the stocks of railways, mines, navigation companies, and the like, represent actual capital, namely, the capital invested and functioning in such enterprises, or the amount of money advanced by the stockholders for the purpose of being used as capital in such enterprises…; this capital does not exist twice, once as the capital-value of titles of ownership (stocks) on the one hand and on the other hand as the actual capital invested, or to be invested, in those enterprises.” The capital “exists only in the latter form“, while the stock or share “is merely a title of ownership to a corresponding portion of the surplus-value to be realised by it”. By Michael Roberts
World:
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
Anthony Fauci Says Trump Used To Scold Him For Not Being ‘More Positive’ About COVID-19 In an interview with The New York Times, the infectious disease expert described what it was really like to work for the 45th president. Anthony Fauci Says Trump Used To Scold Him For Not Being ‘More Positive’ About COVID-19. By Hayley Miller
Agroecology and Post-COVID Plunder Contingent on World Bank aid to be given to poorer countries in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, agrifood conglomerates will aim to further expand their influence. These firms have been integral to the consolidation of a global food regime that has emerged in recent decades based on chemical- and proprietary-input-dependent agriculture which incurs massive externalised social, environmental and health costs. Reliance on commodity monocropping for global markets, long supply chains and dependency on external inputs for cultivation make the food system vulnerable to shocks, whether resulting from public health scares, oil price spikes (the global food system is fossil-fuel dependent) or conflict and war. An increasing number of countries are recognising the need to respond by becoming more food self-sufficient, preferably by securing control over their own food and reducing supply chain lengths. The various coronavirus lockdowns have disrupted many transport and production activities, exposing the weaknesses of the food system. If the current situation tells us anything, it is that structural solutions are needed to transform food production, not further strengthen the status quo. By Colin Todhunter
We Have to Wake Up: Factory Farms Are Breeding Grounds For Pandemics Covid-19’s history is not yet fully known, but the links between animal and human health could not be clearer Imagine that while your country practised social distancing, your neighbouring country responded to Covid-19 by packing citizens into gymnasiums by the tens of thousands. Imagine if, in addition, they instituted genetic and pharmaceutical interventions that helped their citizens maintain productivity under such adverse conditions, even though this had the unfortunate side effect of devastating their immune systems. And to complete this dystopian vision, imagine if your neighbours simultaneously reduced their number of doctors tenfold. Such actions would radically increase death rates not only within their country, but yours. Pathogens do not respect national boundaries. They are not Spanish or Chinese. Pathogens do not respect species boundaries, either. Influenza and coronaviruses move fluidly between human and animal populations, just as they move fluidly between nations. When it comes to pandemics, there is not animal health and human health – not any more than there is Korean health and French health. Social distancing works only when everyone practises it, and “everyone” includes animals. By Jonathan Safran Foer and Aaron S Gross
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!
