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! And Now the Total Caronavirs Deaths in the United States are Over 20% of the Total Death in the Entire World!
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!
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!
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.— Maya Angelou
When somebody’s the President of the United States, the authority is total. — Donald Trump.
Don’t Ever Forget That All Of The Republicrats And The Progressivecrates Voted For The Wall Street Bailout Again!!! Just Remember That Even A Jackass Dosen’t Stub Its Toes On The Same Stone Twice! Stop Voting For Evi — Only Evil Can Come From The ‘Lesser Evil’!
We have previously called Wall Street an institutionalized wealth transfer system from the 99 percent to the 1 percent. The CARES Act puts the wealth transfer system on steroids by letting the fat cats on Wall Street keep their decade-long obscene compensation which was made by hiding their risks off their balance sheets (privatizing the profits) and now forces taxpayers to pick up the tab for the losses on the toxic debt (socializing the losses). Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has said this is nothing like the 2008 financial crisis – and yet, it is everything like the 2008 financial crisis except that it’s an even more brazen money grab. — Here Are the Contracts Showing How $4.5 Trillion in Stimulus Was Outsourced to Wall Street
Videos of the Day:
COVID-19 and Capitalism’s Deepest-Ever Crisis Watch Fred Weston (editor of marxist.com) discussing the world situation as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. While the bourgeois are trying to blame the current social and economic turmoil on the virus alone, it was in fact just the trigger for a crisis prepared in the last period. This video was recorded during an internal meeting of the IMT in Britain.
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.
Under Donald Trump, COVID-19 is Accelerating the Republican Party’s Descent Into Authoritarianism That Maya Angelou quote about believing people when they show you who they are gets tossed around quite a bit in reference to the 45th President of the United States, but it seems like no matter how many times Donald J. Trump beats us over the head with the message, there are still a lot of people who don’t quite get it. So allow me to translate: Trump and his allies within the GOP ecosystem are hostile to democracy. Their response to the COVID-19 outbreak clarifies existing authoritarian trends within the regime and the broader Republican coalition and provides a pretext for accelerating them. Most recently, Trump fired both the Inspector General for the intelligence community who complied with the law and passed on a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s attempt to strong arm Ukraine to Congress, and the Inspector General originally responsible for overseeing over $2 trillion in pandemic bailout funds. (We’ll return to these offenses.) By Charlie Savage‘Catastrophic for Democracy’: Experts Warn Trump Assault on Postal Service Threatens November Elections “All the plans we have for a safe and legitimate general election in November depend heavily upon the ability to expand vote-by-mail. Yet those plans would be completely upended if the United States Postal Service collapses.” By Jake Johnson
COVID-19 and the Return of a Dangerous Idea, Austerity The past decade delivered powerful lessons of what not to do in an economic crisis. Many countries pursued, or had imposed on them, austerity policies. That is, cutting government spending when the economy tanks in order to balance the books. The idea is that with less spending now, taxes will be lower later on, which will make people feel more confident now, thereby shortening the recession. It’s a nice idea. But it actually makes things worse. By Mark Blyth – Jeffrey Sommers
Bailouts stir up images of businesses acting recklessly, enriching themselves, and then asking the government for money. That’s not the case this time.
Francene Bailey sits in the window of her home in Hartford’s North End. Bailey contracted COVID-19 and is home in quarantine. Bailey is a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in Windsor.
Consistent with an Unfolding 1q2020/ 2q2020 Recession, Latest New Claims for Unemployment Signaled an April 2020 Unemployment Rate Not Seen Since the Great Depression
March 2020 Housing Starts Plunged, but First-Quarter 2020 Held Positive
Historic Quarterly Collapses in First-Quarter 2020 Real Retail Sales and Manufacturing Were the Second Consecutive Quarterly Declines for Those Series
With Only One Month or Less of Coronavirus Impact, First-Quarter 2020 Real Retail Sales Annualized 10.9% (-10.9%%) Quarterly Drop Was Worst Since the Great Recession
March Industrial Production Plunge of 5.40% (-5.40%) Was Worst Since the Shutdown of World War II Production / March Cass Freight Index® Continued in Annual Decline for the 16th Straight Month, Down Year-to-Year by 9.2% (-9.2%)
March 2020 Money Supply Surged, Shifting Towards Cash (See ALTERNATE DATA TAB) / Headline March Inflation Was Hit by Collapsing Oil Prices and Sampling Disruptions / February 2020 U.S. Trade Deficit Narrowed Sharply as Pandemic in China Slashed Exports to the U.S.
Here Are the Contracts Showing How $4.5 Trillion in Stimulus Was Outsourced to Wall Street Bloomberg News has an article up today with the headline: “The Fed Loves Main Street as much as Wall Street This Time.” The article is accompanied with a graphic of Fed Chair Jerome Powell shooting equal amounts of money at Main Street and Wall Street. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the headline, the article by Peter Coy offers not a scintilla of evidence to support the premise that Main Street is getting a fair shake from the Fed. What the article does do is adopt the talking points the Fed has used in every press release it has issued on a new funding facility rollout – that the money will (through some magical and invisible and unexplained hand of the market Gods) make its way to American workers and households. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
A Strange Timeline at JPMorgan Chase Includes a Meeting with Fed Chair Jay Powell “This begs the question: did the U.S. have a Wall Street banking crisis similar to 2008 long before there was a pandemic crisis?” From 3 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19 of this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome (Jay) Powell met in the anteroom to his office in Washington, D.C. with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Adding to the unusual nature of this meeting, the Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase, Jennifer Piepszak, had traveled with Dimon from New York to Washington, D.C. to attend this meeting. During the entire month of February, Powell met with no other CEO or CFO of any other Wall Street mega bank. We obtained this information from areview of the Fed Chairman’s daily calendar. The meeting came one day after Reuters reported a “sweeping reshuffle” at JPMorgan’s investment bank and two weeks after Bloomberg News reported that the bank was, once again, under a criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice. This would be the fourth, publicly known, criminal probe at JPMorgan Chase during Dimon’s tenure as Chairman and CEO. A prior investigation into how JPMorgan Chase had handled the business bank account for Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff ended in two criminal felony counts against the bank in 2014, to which the bank pleaded guilty. Another investigation into the bank’s role in rigging foreign exchange trading ended in one criminal felony count in 2015, to which the bank also pleaded guilty. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
How China Broke the Chain of Infection On March 31, 2020, a group of scientists from around the world—from Oxford University to Beijing Normal University—published an important paper in Science. This paper—“An Investigation of Transmission Control Measures During the First 50 Days of the COVID-19 Epidemic in China”—proposes that if the Chinese government had not initiated the lockdown of Wuhan and the national emergency response, then there would have been 744,000 additional confirmed COVID-19 cases outside Wuhan. “Control measures taken in China,” the authors argue, “potentially hold lesso[n]s for other countries around the world.” In the World Health Organization’s February report after a visit to China, the team members wrote, “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.” By Vijay Prashad, Du Xiaojun – Weiyan Zhu
Boris Johnson and COVID-19 BoJo Johnson was admitted to hospital on 5th April, after spending several days at his residence in self-isolation as a result of testing positive for the COVID-19 virus. When his condition worsened while in hospital he was put in intensive care, where he spent 3 nights before being discharged on 12th April. He is expected make a slow recovery. BoJo was almost killed by his fundamental unseriousness. On 3rd March 3, the always lighthearted and clownish BoJo joked: “I’m shaking hands continuously [sic]. I was at a hospital the other night [for one of his usual photo ops] where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands”. By Kenneth SurinPandemic and Economic Crisis In Latin America: Let’s Prepare For The Future! The COVID-19 pandemic has created one disaster after another in Latin America, exposing the naked contempt of the ruling class for the workers of the region. But with the memory of Red October still fresh, this explosive new development is preparing revolutionary upheaval in the near future.
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!
‘Catastrophic for Democracy’: Experts Warn Trump Assault on Postal Service Threatens November Elections “All the plans we have for a safe and legitimate general election in November depend heavily upon the ability to expand vote-by-mail. Yet those plans would be completely upended if the United States Postal Service collapses.” By Jake Johnson
The End of Sanders, and Maybe the Beginning of a Mass Independent Left Sander’s early Return of the Prodigal Son to the bosom of the Party allows him to escape the deep critique of capitalist medicine and political-economy that would be required of a “leftish” presidential candidate in this never-in-our-lifetimes crisis.B y Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Freedom Rider: COVID-19 and Deadly Health Care for Black People Even if the United States had a strong public health system, Black and brown people would be plagued by racist medical practices. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
The USS COVID-19, from Guam to Puget Sound While the world confronts a real-life deadly epidemic, the Covid-afflicted US Navy struggles to maintain the farce of keeping the planet safe from fictitious threats. By Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Yellow Skin, White Masks: Andrew Yang and the Democratic Party’s School of White Supremacist ThoughtYang’s hope that Asian-Americans fight racism by marrying themselves to American exceptionalism is nothing more than an attempt to maintain his own economic privileges, By Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
Coronavirus and the Crisis of African American Human Rights Pushing workers back to work and attempting to “normalize” the economy was the growing consensus among the capitalist class, not just Trump. By Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
Capitalism’s Weak Doses of Socialism to Treat the Economic Infection of COVID-19 The same proposals that were demonized yesterday as radical socialism are embraced today to save the society from collapse By Max Rameau
Cuba Under Media Attack for Sending Doctors, Not Bombs, to Help Covid-19 Media outlets have exploited the current pandemic to disseminate rank anti-Cuban propaganda. By Belen Fernandez
The Cognitive Dissonance of “Democratic Socialists”— Cults Die a Slow Death The blame-anyone-other-than-Sanders apologists exposed themselves as devotees to a cult of personality devoid of any real political strategy. By Quetzal Cáceres 
Sanders Supporters Pledge to “#DemExit” and “#GreenEnter” to Make a Home in a Party That Shares Their Core Values Online contributions to the Green Party tripled after Sanders’ capitulated to Biden, and ten times as many people signed up to volunteer. By Independent Political Report
Systemic Racism Is Making Coronavirus Worse in Black America COVID-19 is a perfect storm of systemic inequities operating together to worsen existing vulnerabilities. By Judy Lubin
Movement for Black Lives National Demands for Covid-19 Read and save this comprehensive document from M4BL. A vision for Black lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice. By Movement for Black Lives
