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 Cuban government will produce 100 million doses of its vaccine, Soberana 02, against the new coronavirus this year in order to respond to its own demand and those of other countries. The 100 million doses planned would be only from Soverana 02 and there are already several countries interested in acquiring it, such as Vietnam, Iran and Venezuela, among others, and with those which the island has collaboration agreements, including Pakistan and India. In the coming weeks, vaccination will be extended to 150,000 people on the island, on the way to mass immunization, and a test will be carried out in February to protect children with Soverana 02. Despite being a small country, Cuba has a developed scientific center that produces almost all the vaccines it needs and state-of-the-art medicines. Cuba’s strategy to commercialize the vaccine has a combination of humanity and health impact and the need for our system to support, financially, the production of vaccine and drugs for the country. The antigen is safe since it does not contain the live virus but parts of it, so its placement generates immunity, but it does not cause major reactions and, therefore, it does not require extra refrigeration, like other candidates in the world. Cuba is going to be one of the first countries in the world to vaccinate all its inhabitants if not the first; during this year we will all be vaccinated. — Rapid Response: Production of the Caccine Soberana 02 in Cuba
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
Biden Is Rejecting Trump’s Border Wall — But Favors His Own Technological Wall President Joe Biden will sign a number of immigration-related executive actions today continuing his reversals of former President Donald Trump’s harsh policies toward undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees as part the new administration’s effort to pursue a more humanitarian approach to immigration and border enforcement. However, at least one of Biden’s proposals suggests that while he rejects Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” approach, he favors a different kind of “wall”: a ramping up of technology-driven surveillance at the border. By Chris Walker
You Can’t Hurt the Gangsters at the Capitalist Casino by Shuffling the Chips Around To Different Bets. You Take Their Chips off the Table. Pumping up GameStop will do nothing to change what people hate about Wall Street. There’s a better way. The spectacle of watching the entire professional investing class and the financial media descend into a panicked frenzy thanks to a bunch of Reddit-fueled waves of stock-pumping has certainly been entertaining. If its goal is to laugh at a particular hedge fund momentarily losing a ton of money for the weirdest imaginable reason, it is a success. As a populist uprising trying to change Wall Street, though, it is a big waste of time. You can’t fix Wall Street by becoming it. By.Hamilton Nolan
The Real Winners of Pandemic Super Bowl 2021? The Sports Owners Raking in Billions Even in a pandemic, 64 billionaires have seen incredible gains from the major league sports teams they own. We won’t know the winner of this year’s Super Bowl till Sunday, but we already know the big winners in our COVID-ravaged economy include dozens of billionaire sports barons.On the eve of the big game, and after 10-plus months of the pandemic, 64 billionaire owners of major league sports franchises—including the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs’ Hunt family and the NFC champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Glazer family—have enjoyed a $98.5 billion rise in their collective net worth, a 30 percent increase, even as millions of fans have fallen ill, lost jobs, neared eviction, gone hungry and died due to the coronavirus. The 64 billionaires, who together own or co-own 68 professional sports franchises, had a combined wealth of $426 billion on January 29, 2021, up from $325 billion on March 18, 2020, roughly since the start of the pandemic lockdowns, according to “Pandemic Super Bowl 2021: Billionaires Win, We Lose,” a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) analyzing data from Forbes and Wealth-X. [Note: The increase in total billionaire wealth from March to January was $101 billion, but has been adjusted to $98.5 billion because two billionaires only reached that status in January 2021. By Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo
Environment:
Toxic Tuedays CHEJ highlights several toxic chemicals and the communities fighting to keep their citizens safe from harm. — Manganese
Manganese is a naturally occurring metal found in the environment. It is present in most foods (especially grains and beans), and our bodies need small amounts of it to function. Manganese is also used in manufacturing, most commonly to improve the strength of steel. Manufacturing use and improper disposal can release manganese into the air, water, and soil. Once in the environment manganese does not break down, so people can be exposed to high levels of manganese by breathing contaminated air, drinking contaminated water, or eating foods grown in contaminated soil. Exposure to high levels of manganese has devastating effects on the nervous system. This includes movement defects, behavioral changes, psychiatric episodes, and death of brain cells. In the long term, symptoms are similar to those of Parkinson’s Disease. While little is known about how manganese exposure affects children, a 2011 study found that high levels of manganese in drinking water was associated with intellectual impairment in children ages 6-13. For over a decade the residents of East Liverpool, Ohio have been exposed to dangerous levels of manganese from the SH Bell manufacturing plant. In 2010, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (Ohio EPA) conducted air sampling and found that manganese levels were 30 times higher than the concentration US EPA deems safe. The facility was required to reduce manganese emissions, but in 2012, US EPA air sampling at a local elementary school still found dangerous levels of manganese, raising questions about damage to children. Despite this evidence, residents were still unprotected – according to the US EPA a 2016 evaluation “found that the exposures in this community represent a public health hazard.”
Camp: It’s Now or Never — We Stare Into the Abyss Despite millions of years of finding ways to survive, these species failed to outlast that most destructive force — unfettered capitalism. The northern white rhinoceros is now functionally extinct. Sudan — the last male of his kind — passed away recently. There are two females remaining but obviously they can produce no more of their species without a male — and mating with nearby giraffes is not something in which they seem interested.Mysterious California Sea Lion Deaths Linked to Toxic Synthetic Chemicals SSea lions in California had been dying of a mysterious cancer for decades. Now, scientists say they have finally uncovered the likely cause: toxic chemicals from industrial trash, pesticides and oil refinery waste. A team of mammal pathologists, virologists, chemists and geneticists have concluded that sea lions with higher concentrations of DDT, PCBs and other chemicals in their blubber are more prone to cancer triggered by a herpes virus. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, are the result of 20 years of research, gleaned from tissue samples collected from 394 sea lions. ea lions in California had been dying of a mysterious cancer for decades. Now, scientists say they have finally uncovered the likely cause: toxic chemicals from industrial trash, pesticides and oil refinery waste.A team of mammal pathologists, virologists, chemists and geneticists have concluded that sea lions with higher concentrations of DDT, PCBs and other chemicals in their blubber are more prone to cancer triggered by a herpes virus. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, are the result of 20 years of research, gleaned from tissue samples collected from 394 sea lions.The War On Ocean Life: Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism Beginning a series on the role of fishing in the birth and spread of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in today’s mass extinction of ocean life. Fishing is as old as humanity itself.[1] Indeed, it is older — paleontologists have found evidence that our ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus caught lake and river fish in east Africa a million years ago. Large shell deposits show that our Neanderthal cousins in what is now Portugal were eating shellfish over one hundred thousand years ago, as were Homo sapiens in South Africa. Island people have been fishing in the southwestern Pacific for at least thirty-five millennia. For most of our species’ existence, fish were caught to be eaten by the fishers themselves. “They may have traded dried or smoked fish to neighbors, but this trade was not commerce in any modern sense. People donated food to those who needed it, in the certain knowledge that the donors would someday need the same charity.”[2] by Ian AngusCivil Rights/Black Liberation:
A human rights movement, King believed, held revolutionary potential. Speaking at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in May 1967, he told SCLC staff, who were concerned that the Civil Rights Movement had lost its steam and its direction, “It is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.” Political reform efforts were no longer adequate to the task at hand, he said. “For the last 12 years, we have been in a reform movement…. [But] after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution. We must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement. We are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” 63. More than forty years later, civil rights advocacy is stuck in a model of advocacy King was determined to leave behind. Rather than challenging the basic structure of society and doing the hard work of movement building —the work to which King was still committed at the end of his life — we have been tempted too often by the opportunity for people of color to be included within the political and economic structure as-is, even if it means alienating those who are necessary allies. We have allowed ourselves to be willfully blind to the emergence of a new caste system—a system of social excommunication that has denied millions of African Americans basic human dignity. The significance of this cannot be overstated, for the failure to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of all persons has lurked at the root of every racial caste system. This common thread explains why, in the 1780s, the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery adopted as its official seal a woodcut of a kneeling slave above a banner that read, “AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?” That symbol was followed more than a hundred years later by signs worn around the necks of black sanitation workers during the Poor People’s Campaign answering the slave’s question with the simple statement, I AM A MAN.— Chapter 5, The New Jim Crow: Obama—the Promise and the Peril By Michelle Alexander
The Mainstream: Meeting the Historic Challenges? Recently, newly confirmed US Treasury secretary and former Fed chief, Janet Yellen, spelt out the challenges facing US capitalism in a letter to her new staff. She said: “the current crisis is very different from 2008. But the scale is as big, if not bigger. The pandemic has wrought wholesale devastation on the economy. Entire industries have paused their work. Sixteen million Americans are still relying on unemployment insurance. Food bank shelves are going empty.” That’s now; but ahead, Yellen says that there were “four historic crises: COVID-19 is one. But in addition to the pandemic, the country is also facing a climate crisis, a crisis of systemic racism, and an economic crisis that has been building for fifty years. “ She did not spell out what this 50-year crisis was. But she was confident that mainstream economics can find the solutions to these crises. “Economics isn’t just something you find in textbook. Nor is it simply a collection of theories. Indeed, the reason I went from academia to government is because I believe economic policy can be a potent tool to improve society. We can – and should – use it to address inequality, racism, and climate change. I still try to see my science – the science of economics – the way my father saw his: as a means to help people.” These are fine words. But is mainstream economics really designed to ‘help people’ improve their lives and livelihoods? Indeed, is mainstream economics really offering a scientific analysis of modern economies that can lead to policies that can solve the ‘four historic challenges’ that Yellen outlines? By Michael RobertsSevere Dysfunction in Washington and Wall Street Put the U.S. at Risk of Capital Flight There is recent evidence that the U.S. is already seeing capital flight. According to a January 24 report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China beat out the U.S. in foreign direct investment inflows last year, receiving $163 billion versus $134 billion for the U.S. That was a radical change from 2019 when the U.S. received $251 billion in foreign direct investment versus $140 billion for China. Capital flight could accelerate this year if the craziness in Congress and Wall Street continues. Just ask yourself this, would you want to invest in a country that had scenes of a bloody attempted coup of the government featured on the front pages of newspapers around the world? Would you want to risk your savings in a stock market that has ceased to perform its two key functions: a pricing mechanism for the value of companies and efficient allocation of capital to worthy businesses and industries. By Pam Martens and Russ MartensWorld:
Viral Inequality and the Farmers’ Struggle in India According to a new report by Oxfam, ‘The Inequality Virus’, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth now stands at $11.95tn. The world’s 10 richest billionaires have collectively seen their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. By Colin Todhunter
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
Covid-19: WHO Warns Against “Vaccine Nationalism” Or Face Further Virus Mutations World Health Organization officials have voiced concerns at “vaccine nationalism” which could increase the risk of the coronavirus mutating further, after a week long row over a shortfall in EU supplies of covid-19 vaccines. Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to WHO’s director general, said, “Anything that restricts the ability to get these products out will affect our ability to control this disease and prevent variants emerging. The world is going to have to collaborate to get out of this,” he said. Vaccines alone were not the solution, however, said WHO technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove. Test and trace measures, social distancing, mask wearing, and personal protective equipment will still be essential to control the virus, she said.
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:
Mysterious California Sea Lion Deaths Linked to Toxic Synthetic Chemicals SSea lions in California had been dying of a mysterious cancer for decades. Now, scientists say they have finally uncovered the likely cause: toxic chemicals from industrial trash, pesticides and oil refinery waste. A team of mammal pathologists, virologists, chemists and geneticists have concluded that sea lions with higher concentrations of DDT, PCBs and other chemicals in their blubber are more prone to cancer triggered by a herpes virus. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, are the result of 20 years of research, gleaned from tissue samples collected from 394 sea lions. ea lions in California had been dying of a mysterious cancer for decades. Now, scientists say they have finally uncovered the likely cause: toxic chemicals from industrial trash, pesticides and oil refinery waste.A team of mammal pathologists, virologists, chemists and geneticists have concluded that sea lions with higher concentrations of DDT, PCBs and other chemicals in their blubber are more prone to cancer triggered by a herpes virus. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, are the result of 20 years of research, gleaned from tissue samples collected from 394 sea lions.
The War On Ocean Life: Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism Beginning a series on the role of fishing in the birth and spread of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in today’s mass extinction of ocean life. Fishing is as old as humanity itself.[1] Indeed, it is older — paleontologists have found evidence that our ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus caught lake and river fish in east Africa a million years ago. Large shell deposits show that our Neanderthal cousins in what is now Portugal were eating shellfish over one hundred thousand years ago, as were Homo sapiens in South Africa. Island people have been fishing in the southwestern Pacific for at least thirty-five millennia. For most of our species’ existence, fish were caught to be eaten by the fishers themselves. “They may have traded dried or smoked fish to neighbors, but this trade was not commerce in any modern sense. People donated food to those who needed it, in the certain knowledge that the donors would someday need the same charity.”[2] by Ian Angus
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Severe Dysfunction in Washington and Wall Street Put the U.S. at Risk of Capital Flight There is recent evidence that the U.S. is already seeing capital flight. According to a January 24 report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China beat out the U.S. in foreign direct investment inflows last year, receiving $163 billion versus $134 billion for the U.S. That was a radical change from 2019 when the U.S. received $251 billion in foreign direct investment versus $140 billion for China. Capital flight could accelerate this year if the craziness in Congress and Wall Street continues. Just ask yourself this, would you want to invest in a country that had scenes of a bloody attempted coup of the government featured on the front pages of newspapers around the world? Would you want to risk your savings in a stock market that has ceased to perform its two key functions: a pricing mechanism for the value of companies and efficient allocation of capital to worthy businesses and industries. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World: