Daily News Digest March 26, 2020

Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Threat 4 Years Ago and Did Nothing!

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 War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The very future of Humanity Is Now At stake!occupy1

Daily News Digest Archives

Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, under 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!  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:

$6 Trillion Stimulus Package!

Quote of the Day:

Americans got their first whiff that this was going to be another massive giveaway to Wall Street banks, just as happened from 2007 to 2010, when White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow appeared at the White House briefing yesterday evening. Kudlow revealed that the stimulus plan is actually a $6 trillion package — $2 trillion to strugglingAmericans and $4 trillion to dispense as Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and the Federal Reserve see fit. Since the Federal Reserve has seen fit since September 17 of last year to flood the trading houses of Wall Street with $9 trillion cumulatively in revolving loans, one can reasonably expect that this is where the new $4 trillion will be going. — Stimulus Bill: The Fed and Treasury’s Slush Fund Is Actually $4 Trillion

It’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility.  We can call it a bailout. But this is so big it is more like Congress is creating a new government for our economy, replacing our old government. And this one doesn’t have any meaningful democratic protections. A pandemic coup. —Zephyr Teachout, Fordham Law—The Senate Corporate Bailout Package Is a ‘Robbery in Progress,’ Warn Critics

Apologists for capitalism preach the superiority of the free market system over economic planning. But pharmaceutical production and R&D are totally hobbled by market forces. In the past two decades, there have been a number of international viral outbreaks that have claimed thousands of lives (Sars-CoV-1, Mers, Zika, Ebola etc.) To date, only one vaccine for these diseases has reached the market – for Ebola.[1]   Coronavirus is not an unknown threat. SARS is part of the coronavirus family. The US government has spent more than £500m on coronavirus research over the past 20 years.[2] However, scientists are starting well behind the curve. Jason Schwartz, professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told the Atlantic earlier this month: “Had we not set the SARS vaccine research programme aside [in 2004], we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus.”[3] The high-cost, high-reward business model of for-profit medical R&D doesn’t apply well to active pandemics, because the market immediately dries up when the crisis peters out, which means that funding is pulled and research is shelved.[4]  —  You Want a Vaccine? Show Me The Money

Videos of the Day:

Watch Live: Sen. Bernie Sanders Holds Town Hall on Coronavirus With Public Health Experts

Trump’s Coronavirus Calendar As Trump pivots to coronavirus crisis mode, let’s not forget the months of downplaying and denial.Trump’s Coronavirus Calendar Of Shame

U.S.:

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 Republicrats 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.

Sanders Demands Trump Rescind ‘Truly Outrageous’ Decision to Hand Gilead Exclusive Rights Over Possible Coronavirus Treatment “We must put human life above corporate profit. We cannot give pharmaceutical corporations a monopoly on treatments that could save millions of people during this crisis.” By Jake Johnson

Trump Will Feed You to COVID-19 to Keep the Money Happy I have developed a strange affinity for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Donald Trump made Fauci — the 36-year director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has advised every president over that span — the hood ornament on this administration’s careening coronavirus Cadillac. Fauci is the face of SCIENCE in this fight, and from the sound of things, SCIENCE is about to get fired. According to a number of sources, Trump has grown irritated at Fauci for the ever-increasing frequency of Fauci’s public corrections of Trump. Trump has been using the daily coronavirus briefings as a stand-in for his raucous, fiction-raddled rallies to spray dangerous, history-obscuring gibberish into the wind. He does not like it when Fauci, his own hand-picked face of SCIENCE, clowns him from the same podium. Because of this, Fauci may soon be gone. By William Rivers PittEnvironment:

Huge Win for Standing Rock and the National Environmental Policy Act Today, in a major win against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the pipeline remains “highly controversial” under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had not “adequately discharged its duties under that statue,” and ordered the Army Corps to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The court will also order a briefing on whether to shut down the pipeline while the EIS is being prepared. This is a major development in the four-year-old DAPL lawsuit, which has pitted the governments of the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes against the government of the United States and the oil industry stakeholders that operate and use the pipeline. By Dan West

HBHF5E Cannonball, US. 05th Dec, 2016. Winter has arrived in Standing Rock at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in North Dakota, the day after the Army Corps of Engineers denied the easement needed to build the pipeline. Despite driving snow and 40-plus mile an hour wind a group of 700-plus veterans and water protectors marched toward the barricade on highway 1806. Credit: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Alamy Live News

Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:Labor:

LIVE: Italian workers meet the corona-crisis with class struggle! Watch our second livestream with Claudio Bellotti, editor of the Italian Marxist newspaper Rivoluzione, right here on marxist.com! We will discuss the ongoing political crisis and strike wave in Italy, where the working-class are showing the world how to fight the bosses’ attempts to make them shoulder the burden of the coronavirus pandemic.

Unprecedented Surge in US Unemployment Claims Cause State Government Servers to Crash Deal reached in the Senate, says Chuck Schumer, contains “unemployment insurance on steroids” to help with the crisis. By Eoin Higgins

‘This Chart, Holy Sh*t’: Analysis Shows More Workers Filed for Unemployment Last Week Than Any Other in US History “This will dwarf every other week in history.” A new analysis released Tuesday shows that more U.S. workers filed unemployment claims last week than during any other week in the nation’s history. An estimated 3.4 million Americans filed such claims for the week ending

Economy:

Stimulus Bill: The Fed and Treasury’s Slush Fund Is Actually $4 Trillion Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and New York State Senator and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer trotted out to the Senate floor after midnight last night to announce that they had reached a deal on the government stimulus package – the text of which the American public has not seen and only snippets of which have been seen by the members of Congress. Neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives have yet to vote on the bill. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

World:

 Democracy Now!: “Humanitarian Solidarity”: Even Under U.S. Sanctions, Cuba Sends Doctor Brigade to Italy and More As Italy’s death toll soars past 6,000, Cuba has sent medical brigades to combat COVID-19. Cuba has also deployed doctors to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Suriname and Grenada. “The arrival of a medical brigade from Cuba to Italy is pretty historic. You have a leading European nation accepting support in the form of a medical team from a small Caribbean island,” says our guest, Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. “It just goes to the history of Cuba’s deep and long-lasting commitment to humanitarian solidarity with other countries.” Kornbluh covers Cuba for The Nation magazine.

Health, Science, Education, 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 ‘governn’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they 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!

Pandemics, profiteering and big pharma: how capitalism plagues public health A perfect storm of private sector profiteering, reckless production practices, environmental destruction and underinvestment in medical research has made global pandemics more common, and undermined our capacity to deal with them. Capitalism not only gave rise to this invisible and deadly enemy – it is the biggest obstacle in our fight against it.