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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:
From The Day the Music Died: Malcolm X’s Assassination, Feb. 21, 1965”: When I got to the ballroom, things were radically different – there were no cops. Normally, Malcolm’s meetings in Harlem were crawling with cops. As I was selling papers, Malcolm X approached the Audubon Ballroom. I offered to sell him the latest issue, but he told me, “Not today, Roland. I am alone and in a hurry.” (2/21/21 Update: I always wondered Why Malcolm X had no guards with him, when he was approaching the Audubon Ballroom, Now I know! “Without any training, Wood’s job was to infiltrate civil rights organizations and encourage leaders and members to commit felonious acts. He was also tasked with ensuring that Malcolm X’s security detail was arrested days prior to the assassination, guaranteeing Malcolm X didn’t have door security while at the Audubon Ballroom, where he was killed on Feb. 21, 1965.” — US: Ex-Policeman Implicates NYPD, FBI in Malcolm X Murder)
The catastrophe in Texas, coming amidst the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed half a million people in the United States, makes the urgent case for the abolition of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism. The Socialist Equality Party insists that those responsible for the catastrophe must be held accountable, including through arrests and prosecutions. The negligence and greed of the directors and executives of the energy conglomerates and their accomplices in the state government led directly to death and destruction that will doubtless reach into the tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in cascading economic ramifications. The huge profits that were reaped from the Texas energy racket over the preceding decades must be traced and recovered, including from the Wall Street banks and hedge funds through which they flowed. The proceeds must be used to compensate the victims and repair the damage. The energy conglomerates themselves must be confiscated, taken out of the hands of the capitalist oligarchs and transformed into democratically-controlled public utilities. The profit motive of the oligarchs can then be replaced with scientific planning to address climate change, shift to renewable energy, and develop more robust infrastructure in advance of future extreme weather. Climate change, which is likely to produce more and more extreme weather events, together with infectious diseases are challenges requiring global coordination and planning. — The Texas Catastrophe and the Case For Socialism
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
Why Didn’t Speaker Pelosi Want Witnesses?As Republican strategist Kevin Philips noted years ago, the Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries. By Ralph Nader
We Need More Than a Green New Deal, Which Biden Opposes, We Need a Green Industrial Revolution!: Republicans ‘Fear’ Green New Deal, Argues Naomi Klein, Because It’s a Viable Alternative to Free-Market Failure “Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action. Fortunately, there’s a way out.” By Jake Johnson
Environment:
Climate Deniers Backed Violence and Spread Pro-Insurrection Messages Before, During, and After January 6 On the evening of January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former coal mining executive Don Blankenship, who ran against Donald Trump as a third-party candidate in the 2020 election, began an all-caps Twitter thread. “Why is it that American politicians and the American media support citizen uprisings in China, Poland, South Africa, and throughout the world, but when an American citizen is killed during an uprising against a corrupt American government the citizens are at fault?” @DonBlankenship posted on Twitter. “Members of the media and the government are all saying what we saw today doesn’t work — but that is only because they don’t want it to work,” the thread continues. “What we saw today is what freed mericans from King George and England.” Blankenship at one time served as the CEO of Massey Energy Company, a coal mining company that at one time was Appalachia’s largest coal producer. He later served a one-year prison sentence after he was convicted of conspiracy to violate mine safety standards, causing the 2010 deaths of 29 coal miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. By Sharon Kelly
Vulture Capitalism: Demands Grow for Texas to ‘Forgive All Utility Bills’ as Price Gouging by Energy Companies Sparks Outrage “The people of Texas should not have to pay these outrageous bills. Exorbitant costs should not be passed on to consumers who are not responsible for poor planning by state officials.” By Jake Johnson
Who Messed with Texas? Texans like to brag endlessly about how great their state is, its “independence,” and warn, “don’t mess with Texas.” But as millions of Texans now huddle freezing in the dark of this self-proclaimed “energy capital of the world,” it might be worth thinking about how this tragedy happened, who and what caused it, and why Republican politicians are trying to blame renewable energy for a problem caused by poorly built and maintained fossil fuel generation facilities and the predatory capitalism of its deregulated energy system. By George Ochenski
‘California and Texas are Warnings’: Blackouts Show US Deeply Unprepared for the Climate Crisis When California saw widespread power blackouts last year during wildfires and a summer “heat storm”, Republican lawmakers from Texas were quick to deride the coastal state’s energy policies. “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity,” tweeted Senator Ted Cruz during the record-breaking heatwave in August. Those Republicans, including Cruz, had to swallow their words this week as a massive winter storm took out the Lone Star state’s power grid, leaving nearly 4 million people without electricity and heat amid polar temperatures. The crises in California and Texas are different, in scale and severity. One faced fire, the other an ice storm. But experts say the power outages in both states make one thing clear: neither is prepared for the chaos of the climate crisis. By Maanvi Singh
White Supremacy Set the Stage for Texas’ Miserable Disaster ResponseThe problems illuminated now in Texas are interconnected with the decline of the white majority and the liberal order. In order to make sense of the natural and human-induced disaster that has struck Texas, the nation will first need an accurate picture of who lives here. Yes, Texas has its oil barons, fossil-fuel lobbyists, and opportunistic political “leaders” who have extracted wealth from the state at the expense of the environment and human needs. But the real figure that should stand out is 17 million people. By Scott Kurashige
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Former Cop Raymond Wood’s Deathbed Letter Implicates NYPD, Feds in the Assassination of Malcolm X
Book Review: The Judas Factor by Karl Evanzz
In this book, Evanzz documents how the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Bureau of Special Services (BOSSI) using agents provocateurs and infiltrators; set the stage for the assassination of Malcolm X. It outlines the motives for their actions. Evanzz spent 15 years researching over 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents. From Page 214 of The Judas Factor: (A few days after Malcolm X’s press conference announcing his split from the NOI) “William C. Sullivan (FBI) contacted the directors of BOSSI and asked them to recruit several African Americans to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organization. Among the directors at the time were two men who later would play key roles in the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation: Anthony Ulasewicz, the infamous bagman of Watergate, and Nixon advisor John J. Caulfield. “Ulasewicz was all too happy to comply with Sullivan’s request. Malcolm X had been a thorn in the New York Police Department’s side for more than a decade. He told Sullivan that he would have officers ready to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organizations within thirty days. “While Sullivan was coordinating the domestic counterintelligence program against Malcolm X with BOSSI, the CIA initiated a similar program to determine the extent of Malcolm X’s influence with Third World leaders. ’What do we have on Malcolm X?’ a CIA official wrote in an inter-office memo dated March 10. The request for information had come from the U.S. State Department. The official ordered a clerk to run a thorough check in the CIA’s database to determine which Third World countries seemed receptive to Malcolm X. . .” By Roland Sheppard
Labor:
Economy:
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Pandemic-Driven U.S. Economic Collapse Continues in a Hardening, Protracted “L”-Shaped Non-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
How Corrupt Is Wall Street? Two Watchdogs Weigh In How Corrupt Is Wall Street? Two Watchdogs Weigh In Better Markets and Public Citizen, two of the most informed Wall Street watchdogs, provided written testimony for last Thursday’s hearing before the House Financial Services Committee on the structure of Wall Street. And, to put it mildly, their assessment of the state of affairs on Wall Street does not align with what hedge fund titan Ken Griffin of Citadel told lawmakers at the same hearing. Griffin testified, under oath mind you, that: “The U.S. capital markets are the envy of the world. Our nation’s ability to allocate capital to its best and highest use creates jobs, drives innovation and fuels our economy.” In reality, foreign regulators have repeatedly filed enforcement actions against the largest banks on Wall Street for engaging in fraud and rigging markets. As for allocating capital “to its best and highest use,” Better Markets describes the prospects for GameStop, one of the hot meme stocks today, as follows: By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Juan Cole on the Clearest Example of Israeli Apartheid Yet The Middle East scholar joins Robert Scheer on “Scheer Intelligence” to discuss what the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination program got underway in recent months, reports in Western media, including the New York Times, lauded the country’s speedy inoculation efforts to vaccinate every Israeli over the age of 16. What many news reports failed to immediately note in detail, however, was that as the Middle Eastern nation was rapidly vaccinating its citizens against the deadly virus that turned the whole world upside down, it showed no signs of inoculating the approximately 5 million Palestinians whose land Israel occupies in the Gaza strip and the West Bank. After a global outcry ensued over the immorality of this decision, Israel ultimately promised to transfer 5,000 doses to the West Bank for medical staff. However on Monday the Palestinian Authority accused Israel of blocking the 2,000 COVID-19 vaccines Palestinian officials were attempting to send to health care workers in Gaza from entering the blockaded territory.
Sharp Shift to the Left in the Kosovo Elections The parliamentary elections in Kosovo on 14 February 2021 ended with a sweeping landslide victory for the left-wing “Movement for Self-Determination” Vetevendosje (VV). They scored a 20 percent increase, from 27.7 percent in the last election in 2019 to 47.85 percent according to the latest count. The centre-right PDK (Democratic Party of Kosovo), founded by Hashim Thaci, lagged far behind with 17.41 percent. The bourgeois conservative LDK (Democratic League of Kosovo), which had been in power for many years in the past, only scored 13.08 percent. Another right-wing formation, the AAK (Alliance for the Future of Kosovo), led by former UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army) commander Ramush Haradinaj was stuck at 7.43 percent. Nisma-Social Democrat (Social Democratic Initiative) scored only 2.6 percent and will thus not get any seats. By Max Brym
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
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!
Nina Simone
Quotes 0f the Day: