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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! And Now the Total Caronavirs Deaths in the United States are Over 20% of the Total Death in the Entire World!
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!
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:
Quotes of the Day:
Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s – it emerged at the weekend.The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”. — Doctor Admits Israeli Pathologists Harvested Organs Without Consent
Wall Street Gave Most of it Campaign Contibutions to Obama in 2008 For The Express Purpose That US Imperialis Neeed a Black President to Facilitated its Intervention into Africa!:
This growing US military engagement in Africa reflects the Obama administration’s genuine concerns about the threat posed by Islamic extremism and by instability in key resource-producing regions, and its desire to help resolve conflicts throughout the continent. However, all these measures increase the militarisation of Africa and tie the United States even more closely to unstable, repressive and undemocratic regimes. Furthermore, despite President Obama’s rhetorical commitment to an approach that combines military and non-military activities, the administration lacks a comprehensive and effective plan to address the underlying issues – the lack of democracy and economic development – that lead to extremism, instability and conflict in Africa. This is chiefly because the Obama administration lacks the diplomatic and economic means to address these issues. The State Department and the Agency for International Development have been systematically starved of funding and other resources for years and simply lack the capacity to engage in Africa in the manner that would make such an effort possible. It will take many years and substantial increases in funding to build this capacity. And the Obama administration’s food security programme – its one major new initiative for Africa – is highly problematic since it relies on the use of expensive petroleum-based fertilizers, the mechanisation of agricultural production and the use of genetically-modified seeds. In the meantime, President Obama has decided that he has no choice except to rely primarily on military instruments and to hope that this can protect US interests in Africa, at least in the short term, despite the risk that this military engagement will exacerbate existing threats. The Obama administration would be well advised to curtail its military engagement in Africa and devote its attention to developing the capacity for diplomatic and economic efforts to address Africa’s underlying problems (as Joint Chief of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen argued in a recent speech) and to working with the European Union, China and other stakeholders on a cooperative engagement with Africa that will not further undermine African security and jeopardise America’s long-term interests. — Obama and U.S. Military Engagement in Africa
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.
As 100,000 Die, the Virus Lays Bare America’s Brutal Fault Lines – Race, Gender, Poverty and Broken Politics The US’s Brutal Fault Lines – Of Race, Partisanship, Gender, Poverty and Misinformation – Rendered It Ill-Prepared to Meet the Challenges of Covid-19 In one of the rare expressions of empathy that Donald Trump has displayed during the course of the coronavirus pandemic, he talked earlier this month about the disease claiming so many lives it was “filling up Yankee Stadium with death”. Now the death toll from Covid-19 stands at almost twice the capacity of the Yankees’ home stadium, and has reached another booming landmark: 100,000 deaths. A country that prides itself on its exceptionalism can now without ambiguity claim that title for its experience of the virus. The United States stands head and shoulders at the top of the world league table of confirmed cases, as well as the total number of deaths. By Ed Pilkington
The Future of Forever War, American-Style Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy, may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question America’s most malignant policies at home and abroad. Regarding Washington’s war policies abroad, there’s been speculation that the coronavirus might, in the end, put a dent in such conflicts, if not prove an unintended peacemaker — and with good reason, since a cash-flush Pentagon has proven impotent as a virus challenger. Meanwhile, it’s become ever more obvious that, had a fraction of “defense” spending been invested in chronically underfunded disease control agencies, this country’s response to the coronavirus crisis might have been so much better. By Danny Sjursen
Environment:
Murder Hornets Are Scary. But Pesticides Are Scarier While everyone is freaking out about invasive hornets, the largest threats to America’s pollinators remain unchanged. The good news is that murder hornets aren’t new—they’re just new to us. So far, just one hive has been found in North America, on Canada’s Vancouver Island, and there have been two individual hornets discovered across the way in a suburb in Washington State. More officially known as Asian giant hornets, these wasps have been around for a long time, as in millennia, and they only kill people who happen to be allergic to their venom. So while the menacing-looking bugs clock in at about two inches in lengthwith stingers that pack an extra painful punch, they aren’t any more likely to murder you than any other wasp. The bad news is Asian giant hornets do happen to be quite good at butchering smaller insects, such as honeybees. They’re carnivores, after all. And if the species were to establish itself in the United States, the so-called murder hornet could inflict a pretty nasty impact on all sorts of pollinators. By Jason Bittel
Civil Rights/BlackLiberation:
And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover — even in a country which makes the grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. — James Baldwin, From ‘Victim’ to ‘Threat’: James Baldwin and the Demands of Self-Respect
The police continue to use extra legal means to subjugate the Black Community, as Malcolm X stated in speach at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (1964):
“The community must reinforce its moral responsibility to rid itself of the effects of years of exploitation, neglect, and apathy, and wage an unrelenting struggle against police brutality.” Yes. There are some good policemen and some bad policemen. Usually we get the bad ones. With all the police in Harlem, there is too much crime, too much drug addiction, too much alcoholism, too much prostitution, too much gambling. So it makes us suspicious about the motives of Commissioner Murphy when he sends all these policemen up here. We begin to think that they are just his errand boys, whose job it is to pick up the graft and take it back downtown to Murphy. Anytime there’s a police commissioner who finds it necessary to increase the strength numerically of the policemen in Harlem and, at the same time, we don’t see any sign of a decrease in crime, why, I think we’re justified in suspecting his motives. He can’t be sending them up here to fight crime, because crime is on the increase. The more cops we have, the more crime we have. We begin to think that they bring some of the crime with them. So our purpose is to organize the community so that we ourselves since the police can’t eliminate the drug traffic, we have to eliminate it. Since the police can’t eliminate organized gambling, we have to eliminate it. Since the police can’t eliminate organized prostitution and all of these evils that are destroying the moral fiber of our community, it is up to you and me to eliminate these evils ourselves. But in many instances, when you unite in this country or in this city to fight organized crime, you’ll find yourselves fighting the police department itself because they are involved in the organized crime. Wherever you have organized crime, that type of crime cannot exist other than with the consent of the police, the knowledge of the police and the cooperation of the police.” — The Historic Role of Police Brutality in the Black Community and African American Oppression
The Blue Plague and Black Death George Floyd’s death by Blue Plague in Minneapolis was widely condemned by the same parties that have encouraged and funded the spread of the fatal contagion. “The Blue Plague is a serial killer that dates back to the slave patrols of the pre-Civil War South.” The pathogen that kills Black people at two and a half times the rate of whites took the life of 46 year-old George Floyd , this week in Minneapolis. Floyd’s last words were, “I can’t breathe,” much like the desperate utterances of plague victim Eric Garner , struck down in 2014 in New York City. Unlike the still raging Covid-19 virus, which is virulent among Blacks of both sexes, the Blue Plague is especially lethal to Black males of all ages. According to researchers at Rutgers University and the University of Michigan, 1 in every 1,000 black boys and men will be fatally stricken by the Blue Plague at some point in their lifetimes – at ages ranging from 12 year-old Tamir Rice , snuffed out in Cleveland in 2014, to 50 year-old Walter Scott , who fell victim to the pestilence in North Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. By Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Freedom Rider: Biden and the Low Point of Black Politics Black folks perform phenomenal feats of mental gymnastics and self-delusion to convince themselves that Joe Biden is on their side. “There is a strange magical thinking afoot that equates acknowledgement of Biden’s faults with support of Trump.” Joe Biden was always an intellectual light weight and he always had poor impulse control. He was always in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Now he believes the hype of the black misleadership class charlatans who make his case by claiming that he has some sort of special relationship with black people. The combination of all these attributes makes his presidential campaign one long train wreck. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
BAR Editors Receive Serena Shim Award Black Agenda Report editors Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, and Danny Haiphong are recipients of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism.:Your work is deemed important, courageous and relentless in pursuit of truth, however inconvenient it may be to those who use deception for political gain,” said Paul Larudee, Treasurer for the Serena Shim Award. “We believe that you represent the highest standard of what journalism should be, and not the handmaiden of power that it so often is.” The three will share $7,500 to ”enable these courageous journalists to continue their work in an environment that penalizes them for their clarity of vision and willingness to expose the powerful.” By Shim Award Committee
Rwanda: “Victoire Ingabire Should Be Arrested at Least, Killed at Best” The life of the woman who leads Rwanda’s most prominent opposition to Paul Kagame’s dictatorship is being publicly threatened in the wake of the killing of many of her supporters. “I call on its donors to press Rwandan authorities to open political space and help us establish the rule of law in our country.” On May 26, I interviewed opposition leader Victoire Ingabire. Our exchanges were transmitted electronically between my home in the San Francisco Bay Area and hers in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. By Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Michael Jordan’s “Last Dance:” A Celebration of the American Nightmare Michael Jordan embodies the kind of athlete and Black leader that the U.S. ruling class has gone to great lengths to cultivate. “ESPN expedited the documentary knowing that Jordan has served as a reliable ambassador of U.S. capital.” Michael Jordan is perhaps the best player to ever set foot in an NBA arena or any arena for that matter. His achievements have inspired generations of fans and players alike. The Last Dance is a tribute to the greatness of Michael Jordan. In typical Disney fashion, Jordan’s legacy is framed as a tale of perseverance and hardship on the road to the American Dream. The documentary is a reminder that the making of Michael Jordan has always been a celebration of Malcolm X’s American Nightmare, and that this nightmare has come at great cost to Black America and the lives of working people all over the world. By Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
For Breonna Taylor (And my Bry) By Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
How I wish I could sing her name
like Brother Ray or ‘Ree—
‘Cause Breonna Taylor’s real close
to Bryana Turner to me . . . I wish I could sing her name
and other names, other towns—
Galvanizing Black Folks—and
fifty million John Browns…
On African Liberation Day, the Black Alliance for Peace Demands U.S. Shut Down AFRICOM The US Military Command in Africa allows Washington and its European allies to dominate the continent and its resources. “The campaign calls on Africans throughout the diaspora to mark Soweto Day on June 16.” On the 57th anniversary of African Liberation Day (ALD), the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) calls on international civil society and progressive states to “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM.” “Today, U.S. bases, as well as military-to-military relations between 53 out of the 54 African countries and the United States, characterize the aggressive strategy of the U.S. to preserve the interests of the Pan-European, white supremacist colonial/capitalist project on the African continent,” says Netfa Freeman, organizer with Pan-African Community Action (PACA) and member of BAP’s Coordinating Committee. “The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) represent an existential threat to African independence because these forces are committed to the use of violence to maintain control over the land, resources and labor of African people.” By Black Alliance For Peace
Haiti’s Revolutions and Revisions: An Interview with Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg Toussaint stressed that freedom was something that had to be fought for and taken from below by the masses themselves. “We are dependent on Haiti for the vision of a universal emancipation that the American and French Revolutions could not even imagine.” In Toussaint Louverture : A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto) Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg have produced what is arguably the most important biography of Louverture since CLR James’ magisterial Black Jacobins was first published in 1938. Kicking against the contemporary anti-Black and anti-radical revisionism that downplays the historical importance of the revolution while dismissing the significance of Louverture himself, Forsdick and Hogsbjerg’s short monograph is urgent, timely, and strikingly well-written. They have also created a sort of supplement to the book, editing The Black Jacobins Reader (Duke), an excellent collection of essays, commentaries, and primary source material that provides additional context and critique for the writing, production, and circulations of James’ classic history. By The Public Archive
The Spy Plane Over Baltimore is a Tool of Voter Suppression The eye-in-the-sky tells residents of the majority Black city that they are enemies of the state — to be watched and, ultimately, crushed. “The spy plane steals any sense of belonging and says you are not a respected resident.” Baltimore does not need a spy plane for the safety of its residents. It needs thoughtful, ompassionate leaders who understand that a spy plane further alienates the mostly black, brown, and poor communities that are its targets. The spy plane is another tool of law enforcement to invade the community rather than help build it. Its purpose is more aligned with the revelations of the Gun Trace Task Force , and the surveillance technology used to target political dissidents . Rather than protecting these communities and making them safer by decreasing crime, it puts a bull’s eye on their backs and further alienates them. Rather than being seen as valued residents by the Baltimore political leadership, these communities once again are confronted with the City leadership’s vision of them as “other.” By Barbara Arnwine, Curtis Cooper and Adjoa A. Aiyetoro
Once Dead, Thrice Killed The summary execution of my brothers, sisters, women, men and children is so commonplace that it becomes numbing ‘white’ noise in the minds of an entire continent. “Every time these executions occur it is the same playbook.” Two cases of extra-judicial, summary executions of Black People in America have gained national attention in recent weeks. Breonna Taylor was 26-year-old young woman shot over a half-dozen times while she slept in her bed. I have three children, all of them young women and any one of them could have been Breonna. Breonna is dead.Less than three weeks before Breonna’s murder, Ahmaud Arbery was shot to death. He would have, like Breonna, soon turned 26. Ahmaud is dead. By Rohn Kenyatta
The Black American Amputation EpidemicBlack patients lose limbs at a rate triple that of others, despite the fact that diabetic amputations are, by some measures, the most preventable surgery in the country. “He asked the congregation, ‘How many of you know of someone who’s had an amputation?’ Almost everyone raised their hands.” It was a Friday evening in the hospital after a particularly grueling week when Dr. Foluso Fakorede, the only cardiologist in Bolivar County, Mississippi, walked into Room 336. Henry Dotstry lay on a cot, his gray curls puffed on a pillow. Fakorede smelled the circumstances — a rancid whiff, like dead mice. He asked a nurse to undress the wound on Dotstry’s left foot, then slipped on nitrile gloves to examine the damage. Dotstry’s calf had swelled to nearly the size of his thigh. The tops of his toes were dark; his sole was yellow, oozing. Fakorede’s gut clenched. Fuck, he thought. It’s rotten. By Lizzie Presser
Getting a Covid-19 Education: From Race to the Top to a Plunge to the Bottom As bad as the Obama/Duncan era was for public education, the current administration is even more hostile. “We are back in shock doctrine, disaster capitalism territory and public schools are again in the crosshairs.” In 2009, federal intervention during the last financial crisis gave rise to the Obama administration’s signature education initiative: the Race to the Top (RTTT). Created with $4.3 billion from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, RTTT weaponized its forerunner, the No Child Left Behind Act, and led to new levels of assault on unions, the teaching profession, and public schools, and to a decade of damaging privatization. Its two primary weapons of mass destruction were tests and charters. By Stan Karp
Labor:
Economy:
A Growing Wave of Bankruptcies Threatens U.S. Recovery The bankruptcy epidemic in the U.S. started last year, long before any COVID-19 pandemic had touched down. U.S. retailers ranked among the greatest casualties of 2019 with a total of 17 bankruptcies. Big names among the retail bankruptcies in 2019 included Gymboree on January 16; Charlotte Russe on February 3; Things Remembered on February 6; Payless ShoeSource on February 18; Charming Charlie on July 11; Barneys New York on August 6; and Forever 21 on September 29. Now, the retail shutdowns resulting from COVID-19 have simply accelerated what was already a growing trend of companies seeking relief from debts they cannot pay back. Some of the major bankruptcies this year mean permanent, not temporary, job losses. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Britain: a Government of Liars, Crooks and Conmen “That there is a falsehood in his looks, I must and will deny: They tell their Master is a knave, And sure they do not lie. (On Hearing It Asserted Falsehood, by Robert Burns) The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the cynicism, incompetence and brazen dishonesty of the tiny clique who run Britain. The mask has been torn away to expose the ugly face of class privilege. As Alan Woods explains, the public are sick of being treated with contempt. Johnson, Cummings and the rest are destined
Italy Recommends Cuban Medical Brigade for Nobel Peace Prize “When you came here you said that your homeland is the world, so from now on you will always be our compatriots, in this vast world, often mistreated by the absence of the supreme value of solidarity,” the Mayor of Crema, Stefania Bonaldi, said.Cuban doctors held over five thousand consultations in Italy and discharged 210 Covid-19 patients after the severe outbreak in March. Italian authorities, ecclesiastic representatives, and social organizations acknowledged on May 23 Cuban efforts to face COVID across the country.
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
