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!
Some experts have hypothesized that the novel coronavirus made the jump from animals to humans in China’s wet markets, just like SARS before it. Unsurprisingly, many people are furious that the markets, which were closed in the immediate wake of the outbreak in China, have already reopened. It’s easy to point the finger at these “foreign” places and blame them for generating pandemics. But doing that ignores one crucial fact: The way people eat all around the world — including in the US — is a major risk factor for pandemics, too. That’s because we eat a ton of meat, and the vast majority of it comes from factory farms. In these huge industrialized facilities that supply more than 90 percent of meat globally — and around 99 percent of America’s meat — animals are tightly packed together and live under harsh and unsanitary conditions. “When we overcrowd animals by the thousands, in cramped football-field-size sheds, to lie beak to beak or snout to snout, and there’s stress crippling their immune systems, and there’s ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs, and there’s a lack of fresh air and sunlight — put all these factors together and you have a perfect-storm environment for the emergence and spread of disease,“ said Michael Greger, the author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching. — The Meat We Eat Is a Pandemic Risk, Too
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
Texas Teen Was Forced to Use College Savings to Prevent Mom’s Eviction After Alondra Carmona, a high school senior in Houston, recently exhausted all of her college savings to prevent her unemployed mother from being evicted, one media outlet on Tuesday tried to portray it as an “act of kindness,” but progressives are emphasizing that the all-too-common story is an indictment of a deeply unequal society reliant on private charity as a result of policymakers’ failure to guarantee livable incomes, affordable housing and higher education, and more. By Kenny Stancil
Students Arrested for Sharing Copies of U.S. Constitution Sometimes I think we must be living in an Alice-in-Wonderland world. At least, it sure seems like it if we judge from the number of times we’re forced to cry “Curiouser and curiouser!” because of the cognitive dissonance which abounds around us. Take the incident at Kellogg Community College in Michigan which recently came to light via Campus Reform. According to Campus Reform, three students were giving out copies of the U.S. Constitution to passing students when they encountered an obstacle: “They were first stopped by Drew Hutchinson, the manager of Student Life at KCC, who told them they couldn’t approach students outside or engage them in conversation because it could ‘obstruct the student’s ability to get an education.’; ‘We ask that you don’t do it in the middle of everything, and part of that is because if we obstruct the student’s ability to get an education then it kind of becomes counterintuitive to the whole, um, right to speak, kind of Second Amendment rights [sic],’ Hutchinson explained, intending to cite the First Amendment.” By By Annie Holmquist
USA: the CIVIL WAR in the Republican Party Yesterday, the Senate acquitted Donald Trump of inciting the Capitol riot on 6 Jan. Although seven Republicans joined the Democrats to vote ‘guilty’, this was short of the two-thirds majority required to find Trump guilty. Despite a furious speech attacking the ex-president, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also voted to acquit. As explained in this article (published last month by our US comrades), the GOP is divided from top to bottom between MAGA true believers, opportunists looking to ride Trump’s coattails, and career politicians intimidated by his reactionary voter base. The future of a cornerstone of the bourgeois political system hangs in the balance. By Bryce Gordon
We Need to Talk About Judas The new film, Judas and the Black Messiah, is worth seeing, talking about and analyzing with a variety of historical lenses. The historical lenses include the history of Black Cinema, revolutionary cinema, African American history and the history of political repression in the US in general. Every once in a while, an important political film gets released by a major Hollywood company, even though the company’s owners don’t fully grasp how the message of the film might detract from their usual class interests. By Bernard NicolasEnvoronment:
‘The Fire This Tme!: Millions Will Die If World Fails On Climate Promises Action to keep climate promises could prevent millions of deaths each year. Unless nations try harder, that won’t happen. Action to keep climate promises could prevent millions of deaths each year. Unless nations try harder, that won’t happen. By Tim Radford
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Deacons for Defense (Full Movie) The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed self-defense African-American civil rights organization in the U.S. Southern states during the 1960s. Historically, the organization practiced self-defense methods in the face of racist oppression that was carried out under the Jim Crow Laws by local/state government officials and racist vigilantes. Many times the Deacons are not written about or cited when speaking of the Civil Rights Movement because their agenda of self-defense – in this case, using violence, if necessary – did not fit the image of strict non-violence that leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr espoused.Black Agenda Radio for Week of February 15, 2021 With Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Christian Theology Still Useful to Black Movement The US State “is using the so-called insurrection at the Capitol…to impose an ideological conformity that supports and sustains the neoliberal project” at home and abroad, said Ajamu Baraka, national organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace. Speaking on a Dissenters webinar, Baraka warned that Democrats, especially, are “setting us up” to “usher in a form of neofascism” that could win liberal and even progressive support because it is ostensibly aimed at Trump’s older brand of fascism.
Anti-Police Activists are Doing Post-Slavery “Wake Work” Today’s Black Americans are l ng in “the wake” of centuries of slavery, said Dr Corey Miles, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Morgan State University. Thus, contemporary Black activists are doing “wake work.” Dr Miles said the South, as the center of US slavery, presents special problems, but the whole country is hostile to Black lives. “We are trying to see how we can forge emotional belonging to a space that surveils and polices us,” he said.
Neoliberals Seek to Establish Their Own Brand of Fascism A progressive, liberationist theology can be useful to movements against both domestic politic repression and US imperial wars, said Dr Vincent Lloyd, professor of theology and Africana Studies at Villanova University. “Christianity has resources within it to think about prison abolition and police abolition,” said Lloyd.
Labor:
While 44%of the workimg class struggles to stay alive: “Even as the U.S. economy hums along at a favorable pace, there is a vast segment of workers today earning wages low enough to leave their livelihood and families extremely vulnerable. That’s one of the main takeaways from our new analysis, in which we found that 53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as “low-wage.” Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000. Brookings Institution study/”
Pandemic-Driven Unemployment Soared to an April 2020 Peak of About 32%,
Worse Than in the Great Depression; Such Was Against a January 2020
Pre-Pandemic U.3 Unemployment Rate of 3.5%
In the Latest Four Months, Pandemic-Driven Unemployment Has Leveled Off
Around 12%, Worst Since Before World War II, Other than for the Pandemic
Payroll-Employment Benchmark Revisions Showed a Deepening, Accelerating
Decline into an April 2020 Trough, With Renewed Deterioration at Present;
Recovery from the Pandemic Shutdown Has Stalled and/or Is Regressing
January 2021 Annual Growth in Money Supply M1 and M2 Surged to Respective
Record Highs of 69.7% and 25.8%, Despite Some Downside Benchmark Revisions
Near Record Growth of Currency in Circulation Foreshadows Inflation Risk
Nonetheless, January 2021 CPI-U Annual Inflation Hit a Soft, Ten-Month High of 1.4%,
Boosted by Gasoline Prices, but Constrained by Mixed Food and Core Inflation
Stock Indices Are At or Near All-Time Highs, Coming into the
First Anniversary of the Pre-Pandemic Stock-Market Peaks and Subsequent Crashes
Near-Term Financial-Market Turmoil Likely Is Far from Over,
Given Renewed Deterioration in Economic Conditions
What Did Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat Do to Get a $5 Million Pay Cut? Rewarding bad behavior with obscene pay is the sine qua non of Wall Street. Thus it’s a remarkable event to see a CEO of a mega Wall Street bank get punished with a 21 percent pay cut.Michael Corbat is slated to retire this month as Citigroup’s CEO and be replaced by Jane Fraser, the first woman CEO of any major Wall Street bank. (The news would be more welcome if the areas that Fraser previously supervised at the bank did not have all those fines and sanctions.) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
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: 
Videos of the Day:
Envoronment:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of February 15, 2021 With Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Shadow Government Statistics Flash Commentary No. 1457
