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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 of the Day:
“The United States should not be rubber-stamping weapons sales to the Israeli government as they deploy our resources to target international media outlets, schools, hospitals, humanitarian missions and civilian sites for bombing,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday. “We have a responsibility to protect human rights.” — AOC Moves to Block US’s $735M Weapons Sale to Israel Citing Human Rights Abuses
The representative of Bolivia in the Security Council reads the names of the martyrs of the massacre of Palestine and says to the Israeli occupation: ′′ You are killing children and women, and Gaza has turned into a big prison. I ask forgiveness from the Palestinian people after 70 years of the Security Council’s inability to support you. Don’t repeat Hamas as if it were the real problem, the problem is the occupation that stole lands, when the occupation ends, all problems are over “. — Bolivian Delegate At UN Reads Out the Names of the Palestinian Dead
There’s no way that any Wall Street economist that I know can see if the economy is really going to recover. The stock market is going way up, thanks to a Federal Reserve policy of subsidizing bonds and stocks, with 83% owned by the 1% of the population. But the Federal Reserve is not backing any spending into the actual economy. Well that’s where the first part of President Biden’s speech came in. He was talking about building infrastructure and somehow reviving the economy. But it doesn’t look like he’s going to get much support from this from the Republicans, and he wants to be bipartisan. In other words, he says the Democratic Party, as always, won’t do anything that Republicans wouldn’t agree on. Because the Democrats are an arm of the Republican Party. Their role is to protect the Republican Party from left-wing criticism. — Michael Hudson
Videos 0f the Day:
On Contact: Palestinian and Israeli Hostilities On this week’s “On Contact,” Chris Hedges discusses the disputes between the Palestinians and Israelis with Palestinian political activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Hedges argues that nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, drones, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment in 2018 to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. Israel has made it clear they are ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as they were in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas, in his words, “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.”
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 ownershipof the Reublicrats, who profit from war and the war budget, voted 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. Tax the Rich! — They Can Afford To Pay!
United States/Israel Genocide Continues!:
United States: Biden Backs Israel’s Racist And Immoral War Despite United States President Joe Biden pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a ceasefire, the US has thrown its full support behind Israel’s murderous war against the Palestinians. Israel is pounding Gaza in a one-sided war against the people, not just the Hamas leadership. Palestinians in the West Bank have mobilised in demonstrations against the war in Gaza and against Israeli forces that control the West Bank. The Israeli army is responding with live ammunition, killing many and wounding hundreds. Armed Israeli settlers have joined the attacks on Palestinians. For the first time, Palestinians who are formally citizens within Israel proper, also called “green line” Israel, have risen up to support their brothers and sisters, and have been attacked by Jewish far-right groups, resulting in lynchings of Palestinians. This uprising is a new stage of Palestinian resistance, largely fueled by a new generation of young people, organising themselves on social media and bypassing the increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority (PA). By Barry Sheppard
Progressives Can’t Ignore Role of Christian Zionism in Colonization of Palestine The forced displacement of Palestinians is funded by the millions of dollars Christian Zionists send to Israel yearly. Over the past several weeks, the world has witnessed Palestinians continuing to resist forced displacement, apartheid and brutal military occupation. There have been outcries around the world calling for solidarity and to hold the Israeli government accountable. Missing in a lot of the circulating narratives, however, is the indisputable role that the powerful Christian Zionist movement plays, both now and in the long and bloody history of the colonization of Palestine. By Jonathan Brenneman and Aidan Orly
‘US-Made Bombs Are Devastating Gaza’: Sanders Resolution Aims to Block $735 Million Weapons Sale to Israel “We cannot simply let another huge arms sale go through without even a congressional debate.” Joining his progressive allies in the House, Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced a resolution of disapproval against the Biden administration’s proposed sale of advanced weaponry to the Israeli government, which continues to unleash deadly airstrikes on the occupied Gaza Strip amid global calls for a cease-fire. By Jake Johnson
Israels’s US Fifth Colum Threatens Congresswomen: Targeted By AIPAC Ads Over Support for Palestinian Rights, Omar Vows ‘No Level of Harassment Will Silence Me’ “The rights of Palestinians and all people yearning for freedom and self-determination will not be ignored.” Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Wednesday vowed not to be deterred from fighting for Palestinian rights after the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC began running ads this week linking the Minnesota Democrat with Hamas, spots that Omar’s office condemned as both inaccurate and dangerous. “Given the number of threats of death and violence the congresswoman receives on a near-daily basis, it’s not just irresponsible—it’s incitement,” Isi Baehr-Breen, Omar’s deputy communications director, told The Nation. By Jake Johnson
Money Rules Capitalist Election Politricks: FEC Sued for Not Cracking Down on Dark Money Group That Opposed Sanders’ Presidential Run Erin Chlopak of the Campaign Legal Center said that this “is yet another example of the agency’s dysfunction and its disregard for the campaign finance laws it was designed to oversee.” The Campaign Legal Center on Wednesday filed suit against the Federal Election Commission, charging that the regulatory agency has failed to enforce the law against a group that spent millions of dollars on advertisements targeting key voters and opposing 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. Though Sanders ultimately suspended his second presidential campaign and endorsed President Joe Biden, the Vermont Independent’s impressive finish in the Iowa caucuses and victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary were immediately followed by the formation of the Big Tent Project in mid-February 2020. By Common Dream Staff
Environment:
Monstanto Still Owns the Regulators: Biden EPA Admits Faulty Glyphosate Review Under Trump But Still Won’t Take It Off US Market “Time to face the music, not run and hide,” said one critic of the agency’s latest legal maneuver. “We will ask the court to deny this extraordinary request to paper over glyphosate’s ecological harms only to approve it anyway down the road.” —George Kimbrell, CFS. In its federal court filing (pdf) requesting to redo the Trump administration’s faulty assessment of glyphosate, the EPA failed to provide a deadline for a new decision; instead, the agency maintained that Roundup—created by agrochemical giant Monsanto, which was acquired in 2018 by the German pharmaceutical and biotech By Kenny Stancil
As the ‘Tipping Point’ Approaches: Brazil’s Environmental Licences Face Near-Abolition President Bolsonaro wants to slash Brazil’s environmental licences, a move critics say will open a free-for-all in the Amazon. The pro-government majority in the lower house of the congress has rushed through a bill (PL3792) which will virtually eliminate the need for Brazil’s environmental licences for a wide range of economic activities, opening the way for widespread exploitation. The activities which will be freed from licensing include agriculture, cattle raising, logging, dam and road building, sewage plants and water management. Their abolition will impact the Amazon and other biomes, including hundreds of indigenous and quilombo territories, areas occupied by descendants of runaway slaves, which have not yet been officially recognised. By Jan Rocha
There Can Only Be International Cooperation — Unless the Global Warming Polluters Are Taxed 100%! There Will Be No Silver Bullet For Climate Change There is no silver bullet for climate change, no one answer. To save civilisation, nations must co-operate on five fronts. The world could meet a global commitment made six years ago to limit climate heating to no more than 1.5°C by the century’s end − but only by taking urgent and challenging action on five separate fronts, by doing so at speed, and ceasing to dream of a silver bullet for climate change. In 2015, the world’s nations met in Paris and agreed to try to contain the inexorable rise in planetary temperatures by the century’s end, to “well below” 2°C above the historic average before the emergence of coal, oil and gas as fuel to power population growth, technological advance and the global economy. By Tim Radford
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist: Freedom Rider: The Palestine Litmus Test President Joe Biden continues to proclaim endless support of apartheid Israel, but millions have decided that defense of Palestinian rights and lives is the only civilized response to barbaric aggression.
Editors, The Black Agenda Review: Poem: June Jordan, Moving towards Home, Seventy-three years after the Nakba began, the Zionists continue their land and rights thievery, to which June Jordan, the Black American poet, bore powerful witness.
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor: The Hoops and the Hype: Basketball Africa League Debuts The decision to debut the Basketball Africa League in Rwanda is a huge public relations coup for totalitarian, war criminal, and US military partner Paul Kagame.
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence: Herd impunity?
What if a colonial settler state accidentally vaccinated 61% of its population With a virulent variant of a vicious virus?
Annie Olaloku-Teriba: Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness Entrenched in anti-racist theory and practice today is the belief that all racial and ethnic domination is structured around a global hierarchy, with “white” people at the top and “black” people at the bottom.
Left Lens Live: Justice Not Served by Verdict in George Floyd’s Murder Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges in the murder of George Floyd last year. Just two hours before the verdict, Ohio police killed Ma’Khia Bryant. Margaret and Danny discuss why justice has not been served as liberals and Democrats have so enthusiastically proclaimed.
Heather Ann Thompson: Saying Her Name Remains that were found to be those of a Black MOVE teen-ager who was killed by Philadelphia police in 1985 were treated as an anthropological specimen.
Lester Feder: The Police “Just Launched a War” Do some, most or all US police departments have a pattern and practice of racial bias that makes them fundamentally unable to regulate themselves?
Denise Lynn: Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant, by Dorothy Hunton Hunton’s devotion to peace and “mutual cooperation” came out of his understanding that “war and militarism were endemic” to capitalism.
New African Institute: Disinformation in Tigray: Manufacturing Consent For a Secessionist War Corporate media in the imperial countries have spread disinformation on the real nature of the fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray state.
Gregory Shupak: Israel/Palestine Coverage Presents False Equivalency Between Occupied and Occupier Media coverage of heightened violence in Israel/Palestine has misrepresented events in the Israeli government’s favor by suggesting that Israel is acting defensively, presenting a false equivalency between occupier and occupied, and burying information necessary to understand the scale of Israeli brutality./
Labor:
GOP States Spurn Unemployment Funding to Force Workers Back Into Low-Paying Jobs The GOP’s actions could leave the country with vastly different employment social safety nets for red and blue states. As the pandemic raged in 2020, tens of millions of U.S. families were kept economically afloat by expanded unemployment benefits — which lasted longer, were of higher value, and were accessible by more categories of workers (in particular freelancers or independent contractors) than was the case in non-pandemic moments. By Sasha Abramsky
Working-Class Mothers and the COVID-19 Shecession Since the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, women have disproportionately borne the brunt of the pandemic’s economic devastation. Literature on gender-related economic divergence during the public health emergency has been mostly concerned with disparities between men and women. Studies looking at parents specifically, including those parsing the pandemic’s effects on working hours and employment levels, have similarly tended to primarily compare mothers to fathers. Less has been written about within-group employment disparities among women and mothers during the pandemic. Not all women have been affected equally by this crisis. Comparing women to each other rather than their male counterparts reveals substantial variation along parental status and class lines. Our analysis uses Basic Monthly data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to assess the impact of COVID-19 on employment and labor force participation for women between the ages of 25 and 64. To do so, we compare outcomes from April through December of 2020 to outcomes from the same nine-month span in 2019. This reflects the time period during which states implemented pandemic-related restrictions, including business closures and remote schooling requirements. We assess the impact of parental status by comparing women with and without at least one minor child of their own in their household. We use educational attainment to examine the effect of class, with the lack of a bachelor’s degree serving as a proxy for working-class status. Though an imperfect measure, one’s level of formal education is strongly correlated with job quality, and the possession of a bachelor’s degree is a reliable if blunt way of distinguishing between the professional and working classes. By Hayley Brown, Simran Kalkat , and Aiden Lee
Economy:
Fed Chairman Powell – “We’ve Got a Long Ways to Go” • March 2021 Money Supply and April Monetary Base Growth Continued to Explode — U.S. Government’s Financial Condition Deteriorated Sharply in 2020
General Headlines Pandemic-Driven U.S. Economic Collapse Continues to Harden in a Protracted “L”-Shaped Non-Recovery
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Revisions and Pending Revisions to Key Economic Numbers Show Not Only That the Collapse Was Worse Than Headlined, But Also That the Unfolding Recovery Has Been Much Weaker Than Indicated
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Severe Systemic Structural Damage from the Shutdown Is Forestalling Meaningful Economic Rebound into 2022 or Beyond, Irrespective of the Advances in Coronavirus Vaccines and Treatments
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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, Irrespective of Any Near-Term Central Bank or Other Machinations to the Contrary.
As Bitcoin Crashes 34 Percent in a Week, U.S. Congressman Ted Budd Pushes Bank Regulator to Approve More Crypto National Bank Charters Yesterday, Bitcoin put on a display that should put to rest any lingering doubts that it is a stable currency that could be used to pay for products or services. The current month Bitcoin futures contract at the CME swung between a low of $30,250 to a high of $43,530 – a difference of $13,280 in one trading session. From its intraday high of $58,140 on Wednesday, May 12, to its close one week later on Wednesday, May 19, Bitcoin had lost 34 percent of its value. As we explained here at Wall Street On Parade on May 12, some of the smartest minds in the investment community think Bitcoin is very bad for America. One of the most iconic investors in America, Warren Buffet, stated in May 2018 that Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.” In January of the same year, Buffet told CNBC in an interview that “In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Is Colombia’s Military Displacing Peasants to Protect the Environment or Sell Off Natural Resources? Colombia witnessed a series of mass protests at the end of April following a call for a national strike in the city of Cali. Still ongoing, the protests have many causes: an apparent “tax reform” that was going to transfer even more wealth to the 1 percent in Colombia; the failure of the most recent peace accords; and the inability of Colombia’s privatized health care system to contain the COVID-19 crisis. In response to these ongoing protests, the government has killed dozens, disappeared hundreds, imposed curfews on multiple cities, and called in the army. But the protests continue—because they are, at least in part, a repudiation of the militarization of everything in the country. By Justin Podur
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
Why Big Pharma’s Arguments Against Patent Waivers Don’t Add Up Days after he publicly opposed the waiving of patents for lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates had a change of heart. He released a statement saying, “No barriers should stand in the way of equitable access to vaccines, including intellectual property, which is why we are supportive of a narrow waiver during the pandemic.” His statement came after President Joe Biden, in a surprising move, and in contrast to his European allies, backed a temporary waiver on COVID-19 vaccine patents. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai released a statement saying, “extraordinary circumstances… call for extraordinary measures.” Immediately, the big drugmakers’ share prices fell, and they shot back in anger with a litany of dire predictions. By Sonali Kolhatkar
Bendib: Palestinian Lives Matter
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!
Black Agenda Report
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update (May 20th to 21st
