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Images Of the Day:
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!
Quotes 0f the Day:
Freedom or Death! The day when the state and its police power ceases to protect the community but in turn attacks the people of the community has arrived in this country. This is the first stage of building a total police state. Black people have always been subjected to [the] police state and have moved to organize against it, but the structure is now moving to encompass the entire country. The elimination of black leadership–from Dr. King to Eldridge Cleaver, Adam Clayton Powell to Huey P. Newton–is designed to throw the black community into chaos. Intensified and concentrated police power in the black community is designed to impose total control. The next step is GENOCIDE . The black community faces two alternatives: total liberation or total extinction. — EDITORIAL: Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder: Kathleen Cleaver, September 14, 1968
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!
Contrary to What Biden Said, US Warfare in Afghanistan Is Set to Continue No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and “special operations” that remain shrouded in secrecy. By Norman Solomon
Biden Fires Up the Waco Controversy Anew Twenty-two years ago in CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn aptly described the press’s coverage of federal atrocities at Waco, Texas as “one of the great failures of American journalism, one of the most sickening, one of the most predictable and one of the most revealing.” They observed that the “central mission of the Fourth Estate” was to serve as “accomplices in the great and ongoing Cover-up of Everything that Really Matters.” The Waco coverup is once again relevant since one of its prime players, President Joe Biden, has re-ignited the fire. By James Bovard
Resuscitating Normalcy Will Kill Us. What We Need Is a Just Recovery. What kind of world are we trying to imagine into being? Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about disasters and the lessons they bring. From COVID-19 to wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and much more, we are living in an era of compounding catastrophes. The spread of variants like B.1.1.7 has outpaced a troubled vaccine rollout in the U.S. and experts have already predicted another highly energetic hurricane season. And yet refrains about “getting back to normal” abound. But as most of us know, the normal we knew was already a disaster for many. It was the disaster of capitalism, which atomized us into individual narratives on the same sinking ship. It was the disaster of neoliberalism, a capitalist project that has systematized the destruction of many of the gains we had won under this system and decimated an already unsound social safety net. It was a ubiquitous and yet divided tragedy that allowed many people to feel just secure enough that they weren’t willing to fight for anything better or for each other. By Kelly Hayes
There’s Now a Glimmer of Hope That 20 Years of War in Afghanistan Might End Even if Biden withdraws the troops by 9/11, thousands of private contractors will remain to defend corporate profits. “If we break the May 1st deadline negotiated by the previous administration with no clear plan to exit, we will be back at war with the Taliban, and that was not something President Biden believed was in the national interest,” an anonymous individual familiar with the negotiations told The Washington Post. It’s a wheel, a frictionless machine designed to make excuses for itself and create war profit. If we stay, it will be war. If we leave, it will be war and we will have to return. Every choice is bad, every outcome likely calamitous; choosing the less painful course is impossible, because the whole thing is pain. Yet here looms May 1, and an opportunity to make our way home at long last. And so, 20 years and trillions of dollars later, with more than 2,000 U.S. troops and God only knows how many civilians killed, this nation appears set to join the former Soviet Union, Great Britain and a cavalcade of others going back to Alexander the Great, all of which shared the same conceit: They thought they could win a war in the graveyard of empires. By William Rivers Pitt
If the Cops Knew, You Can Bet That Trump’s Insurrections Knew That Cops Would not Stop Attack Upon Congress!: Capitol Police Knew Trump’s Mob Would Attack Congress But Were Unprepared Anyway Though an internal assessment found that the mob was targeting Congress, Capitol Police leaders downplayed the threat. Capitol Police knew ahead of January 6 that Congress itself was the target of the Donald Trump-fueled mob that violently breached the Capitol, but the police department’s leaders ignored warnings and were thoroughly unprepared for the mob, a new report from the department’s watchdog has found. Michael A. Bolton, the Capitol Police inspector general, excoriates the Capitol Police department in the 104-page document reviewed by The New York Times and not yet available to the public. The department’s intelligence unit, Bolton finds, warned staff three days ahead of January 6 that the pro-Trump mob was targeting Congress and had the potential to be violent. “Unlike previous postelection protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counterprotesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th,” read an internal assessment of threats from January 3, reports The New York Times. By Sharon Zhang
Environment:
To Bust Monopoly Power, Start With the Companies Controlling Our Food Busting the monopoly power of abusive and arrogant food giants is broadly popular—even in Congress. No longer just a parlor game, monopoly is what’s for dinner. Practically every commodity and every step in producing our families’ most essential consumer purchases is in the tight grip of four or fewer global conglomerates:
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Four chemical conglomerates—Bayer (German), BASF (German), ChemChina (Chinese) and Corteva (U.S.)—control more than 60% of the world’s commercial seeds market.
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Tyson Foods and three other U.S. poultry firms control 60% of the U.S. poultry market. Three global giants—JBS (Brazil), Tyson (U.S.) and Smithfield (China)—control 85% of the U.S. beef market and 71% of the pork market.
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Four multinational grain-trading powers—Cargill, ADM, Bunge and Dreyfus—control 90% of all grain (corn, wheat, rice, etc.) marketed in the world.
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John Deere and Italian conglomerate CNH Industrial control nearly half of the U.S. market for tractors and other farm machinery (even using their monopoly clout to prohibit farmers from repairing their own machines, forcing them to travel to expensive authorized dealers for repairs).
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Multibillion-dollar Wall Street speculators are the nation’s biggest buyers of farmland, jacking up per-acre prices beyond what family farmers (especially young people trying to get into farming) can pay; indeed, the largest owner of U.S. ag land is superrich tech mogul Bill Gates, who holds land in almost 20 states that would amount to a nearly 400-square-mile farm (bigger than four Seattles, the sprawling metropolis where he lives). By Jim Hightower
Floods and Fires This Time! Accuweather: US to Face Above-Normal Strikes From Tropical Systems in 2021… Again Although spring is just in its infancy, a group of AccuWeather meteorologists has been focusing on a different time of year: hurricane season. And based on current weather data as well as long-range climate clues, the forecasters are urging residents in traditional hurricane-prone areas of the United States to make their preparations now. So what does the 2021 season have in store? According to AccuWeather forecasters, another busy year is in the cards, albeit one that will turn out a bit less hectic than 2020’s nonstop season. By Kevin Byrne
Wildfire Researchers Forecast 2021 Fire Season That May Be More Severe Than 2020 Earlier this April, researchers at San José State University’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center in Northern California were gathering chamise at Blackberry Hill, a site in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. In the past few years, it was a site that they had revisited to gather samples of the native shrub. While surveying the land at the site, the researchers made a disconcerting discovery: new, green growth was nowhere to be found. “Wow, never seen April fuels look so… dry,” the research center tweeted. In a separate tweet, the researchers stated that fire season in 2021 was looking “grim.” The reason? This year’s live fuel-moisture content (FMC), a metric which measures the ratio of moisture to natural combustible material, is historically low. Average fuel-moisture content in the wild is 137 percent; low is usually considered to be 115 percent. Right now, in 2021, the Northern California region is at 97 percent. Lower fuel-moisture content means higher flammability, and therefore higher chances of wildfires. By Nicole Karlis
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
What We Can Learn from the Derek Chauvin Trial After a long and shameful history of police violence against Black people, the George Floyd murder case might finally bring about some justice. The Derek Chauvin trial for the murder of George Floyd is one of the most significant and high-profile legal dramas of our time. In big-picture terms, it tells the story of unending racism and unrelenting police brutality in the United States. U.S. law enforcement has a long and shameful history of violence against unarmed Black people, stretching from the slave patrols of the antebellum south to the 2014 slayings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; and Eric Garner in New York City; to the 2015 execution of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; the shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2020; and Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, on April 11. According to a report released by National Public Radio earlier this year, since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black people across the country. NPR also found that at least 75 percent of the officers involved were white. By Bill Blum
The Bloody Catch-22 of Modern Policing In America The system as it exists makes it almost impossible for Black and brown Americans to avoid harm. The novelist Joseph Heller invented the term “Catch-22” in his 1961 novel of the same name. In his book, airmen can avoid danger only if they declare themselves unfit for duty. But fitness is characterized by “a concern for one’s safety in the face of danger.” So by informing their commanding officers of their unfitness, Heller’s airmen were inadvertently demonstrating their fitness. Police in the U.S. create their own Catch-22. Police ask for extreme obedience. By obeying, motorists open themselves up to violence — but hesitation about exposing oneself to violence only triggers more violence. The officer who confronted Caron Nazario has been fired, but his firing will not change the rhetoric, conventions and implied violence of traffic stops. Until the people expected to handle mass shootings are no longer the first responders who show up for routine encounters with the public, this will continue. After all, the violence Nazario experienced is a part of the violence that, as Robert F. Williams reminds us, is “unceasing and unremitting.” By Matthew Guariglia
Editors, The Black Agenda Review: EDITORIAL: Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder: Kathleen Cleaver, September 14, 1968 Panthers and their radical Black contemporaries are now the stuff of Hollywood — but with more leather jacket than political substance. The Review Team offers some historical correctives.
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor:Fordham University Is One of Many Canaries in the Zionist Coal Mine A Blacklist against those who oppose Israeli policies is now in effect in effect at Fordham University, and can be expected to grow.
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence: Reese Piece… Salute to City of Angels’ son! He wrote, he wrote, he wrote And he wrote… Ramparts, The Progressive, The Nation, Mother Jones, Dateline Havana, 48 hills…
Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist: Murder of Daunte Wright Ruined Derek Chauvin Show Trial The Black-murder-by-cop next door to Minneapolis shows the world the dehumanization that is built into the white supremacist DNA of settler-colonialism will continue to produce crimes against our c
Joseph B. Atkins: Organizing in the South Strong condemnations from the NAACP and Black Congressional Caucus of Amazon’s treatment of its workers might have made a difference in the strike vote,
Riva Enteen: Reality Police Erase Lesbians, Covid-skeptics and Democracy Corporate reality police have stablished themselves as the authorties on what constitutes “information” or “disinformation.”
Nkechi Taifa: Daniel Kaluuya No Longer Getting “Out”; But Does That Make COINTELPRO In? COINTELPRO’s key target — the Black Panther Party — should be the entity getting most of the Oscars’ socio-cultural ink and attention from the film.
Wilmer J. Leon III: The Hypocrisy of “American Democracy” The US is the anti-democratic force undermining the will of Venezuelans as the US steals their resources and money.
Kenneth Rogoff: The US Dollar’s Hegemony is Looking Fragile French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously the dollar’s special status called America’s “exorbitant privilege” – which it might be in the process of losing
Labor:
Economy:
IMF and Debt: A New Consensus? There is much talk among ‘progressive’ economists that the IMF and the World Bank have turned over a new leaf. Gone are the days of supporting fiscal austerity, demanding that national governments get public debt levels down and insisting on conditions for countries borrowing IMF-WB funds that their governments privatise their state assets, deregulate markets and reduce labour rights. Now after the experience of the unprecedented COVID pandemic slump, the old ‘Washington Consensus’ is over and has been replaced by a new ‘consensus’. Whereas the “Washington Consensus” for international economic policies of the 1990s saw government failures as the reason for poor growth performance and advised governments ‘to get out of the way’ of market forces, now the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation’s chiefs call for more fiscal spending, more funds for lending, and measures to reduce inequality between nations and within nations through higher taxes on the rich. By Michael Roberts
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Inflation Charts The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living.
World:
Israel Sabotages the Natanz Nuclear Facility Over the weekend, Iran marked National Nuclear Technology Day. The stars of the show were going to be new advanced centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Unfortunately, the stars did not shine and President Hassan Rouhani and his officials were left with a reminder of the previous time the centrifuges at Natanz crashed. In 2010, a joint US-Israeli operation against Iran’s nuclear program is said to have destroyed a fifth of the Iranian centrifuges, using the Stuxnet virus. By Binoy Kampmark
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
There Shouldn’t Be Vaccine Patents in a Health Crisis. Most Americans Agree: Waive Them. A new poll found most Americans want Biden to break drug companies’ monopolies and end Covid-19 vaccine apartheid. The extremity of Covid-19 vaccine apartheid cannot be overstated. As of mid-February, the United States had acquired enough vaccines for three times its total population, while in 130 countries, not a single vaccine shot had been administered. This is no accident, but the direct and long-predicted result of a vaccine production and access model tied to privatized intellectual property and entrenched medicine monopolies. The majority of Americans want President Joe Biden to act to end this intolerable vaccine inequality. Sixty percent of U.S. voters said they wanted Biden to endorse a motion at the World Trade Organization that would waive patent barriers and other crucial intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines, according to a new poll from Data for Progress and the Progressive International. This would enable a significant expansion of global production and rollout, while disrupting the extraordinary profiteering of pharmaceutical leviathans in a death-dealing pandemic. By Natasha Lennard
Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Threat Over 5 Years Ago and Did Nothing!: Under Capitalism — Human Lives Don’t Matter Capitalism Does Not, and Never Has, Worked for the Masses! In Its Death Agony, Capitalism Is Traveling About The World Like The Four Horsemen of the The Apocalypse, Spreading Racism, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The future of Humanity Is Now At stake!
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!