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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!
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:
‘The House Negro and the Field Negro’: . . . Back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes – they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ’cause they ate his food — what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we,” he said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro. If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here. This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about “I’m the only Negro out here.” “I’m the only one on my job.” “I’m the only one in this school.” You’re nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, “Let’s separate,” you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. “What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?” I mean, this is what you say. “I ain’t left nothing in Africa,” that’s what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa. On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro — those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call ’em “chitt’lin’” nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That’s what you were — a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters. The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.” You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear these little Negroes talking about “our government is in trouble.” They say, “The government is in trouble.” Imagine a Negro: “Our government”! I even heard one say “our astronauts.” They won’t even let him near the plant — and “our astronauts”! “Our Navy” — that’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent. That’s Tom making you nonviolent. It’s like when you go to the dentist, and the man’s going to take your tooth. You’re going to fight him when he starts pulling. So he squirts some stuff in your jaw called novocaine, to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there and ’cause you’ve got all of that novocaine in your jaw, you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw, and you don’t know what’s happening. ’Cause someone has taught you to suffer — peacefully. — Malcolm X
Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him. — Martin Luther King Jr. 1967, The Black Power Defined
For years, scholars and activists have critiqued the algorithms used in data-driven policing, arguing that they merely techwash bias by making sloppy investigative work seem objective. Leading the charge in Los Angeles is the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Through public records requests, the group’s activists have obtained documents on police use of data analytics, and in 2018, they successfully pushed the city’s Office of the Inspector General to audit the department’s use of technology. “Surveillance is basically the tip of the policing knife,” said Hamid Khan, a co-leader of the coalition. “When you look at policing and the history of policing, from our vantage point, it’s not about public safety when it comes to nonwhite folks. It’s about the content to cause harm.” Big data, he added, simply gives police more ways to do that. Brayne’s contribution is showing exactly how data is distorted in the hands of police. “Most sociological research on criminal justice has focused on those who are being policed,” she told The Intercept. “I very deliberately wanted to flip the lens to focus on those doing the surveilling — on the police themselves.” —How the Lapd and Palantir Use Data to Justify Racist Policing
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
Fossil Fuel Companies Fuel American Fascism The oil, gas, and coal industries all support and fund white supremacy and far-right politics. My Institute for Policy Studies colleagues Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo recently documented the top billionaire donors to the Trump campaign. In first place is Kelcy Warren, co-founder and board chair (and until last October, CEO) of Energy Transfer — the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Trump’s wealthy backers over the years have also included the notorious (and now deceased) coal billionaire Robert Murray, who effectively bribed Trump and his former Energy Secretary Rick Perry to implement a policy agenda that would benefit Murray. This isn’t a case of a few isolated billionaires backing one extremist politician. It’s a case of an entire industry filling the campaign coffers of politicians who’ve waged war on our democracy. In the 2020 election cycle alone, the oil and gas industries gave some $9.3 million to lawmakers who refused to certify the 2020 election results By Basav Sen
Hedges: Papering Over the Rot The staggering concentration of wealth at the top has deformed our governing institutions — new window dressing will not end oligarchy. The death spiral of the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It will not be halted with the 42 executive orders signed by Joe Biden, however welcome many are, especially since they can, with a new chief executive, be immediately revoked. It will not be halted by removing Donald Trump, and the crackpot conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists and racists who support him, from social media. It will not be halted by locking up the Proud Boys and the clueless protestors who stormed the Congress on January 6 and took selfies in Mike Pence’s Senate chair. It will not be halted by restoring the frayed alliances with our European allies or rejoining the World Health Organization or the Paris Climate Agreement. All of these measures are window dressing, masking the root cause of the demise of America — unchecked oligarchic power and greed. The longer wealth is funneled upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal, who put Biden into office and whose interests he assiduously serves, we are doomed.
The Imperial Presidency Under Joe Biden The Executive Order— Keep in mind that those were still the good-old days before George W. Bush launched his own imperial war on significant parts of the planet with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based only on an open-ended, post-9/11 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force. That first AUMF and a second one passed a year later would then be cited by the presidents to follow, whether to “surge” in Afghanistan or drone assassinate an Iranian leader at Baghdad International Airport. Congress declare war? You mean Congress have anything (other than endlessly funding the Pentagon) to do with the mess that an American world of warfare has created? So, before Donald Trump ever left The Apprentice, the presidency had already become an imperial one on the world stage. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could still work together domestically, but just in Republican (or in the case of Bill Clinton, Republican-style) administrations largely to further the yawning gap between the 1% of wealthy Americans and everyone else. By Tom Engelhardt
The Politics of Debt Can Strangle a Society, Just Look at What Happened to Rome For the democratically ambitious, an obvious issue to focus on is debt. And I’m not talking about government debt, which is certainly part of the problem, but debt across the whole societal spectrum – corporate, personal, and government. At this point, one is tempted to throw out a bunch of numbers to make the case, but that’s not helpful. America is basically an innumerate culture. We’re not good at gleaning a plot from numbers, a social ignorance useful for a culture dominated and defined by money changers. Just be assured, all this debt says something, nothing good. Creating massive amounts of debt is always the final and ultimately futile attempt of continuing a no longer viable status quo. In our case, the status quo is euphemistically known as the “American Dream” – the industrial, militaristic, resource intensive, hyper-consumptive, post-World War II American lifestyle. Every year for a half-century now, despite the massive rise of debt, the Dream increasingly moves beyond the grasp of an ever greater number of Americans and America itself. By Joe Costello
Environment:
Ireland’s Peat is Helping to Fight Climate Chaos Ireland’s peat is offering the country a novel way to back the global effort to save the planet from overheating dangerously. It is helping to lock up the carbon emissions which are feeding the steady rise in the Earth’s temperature. For generations its farmers have cut turf from the bog lands for fuel, and now their laborious, back-breaking work, seen as an integral part of Irish rural life, immortalised in songs, paintings – and picture postcard images − is earning them plaudits for protecting the atmosphere. By Kieran Cooke
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
As Vaccine Rollout Expands, Black Americans Still Left Behind Black Americans are still receiving covid vaccinations at dramatically lower rates than white Americans even as the chaotic rollout reaches more people, according to a new KHN analysis. Almost seven weeks into the vaccine rollout, states have expanded eligibility beyond front-line health care workers to more of the public — in some states to more older adults, in others to essential workers such as teachers. But new data shows that vaccination rates for Black Americans have not caught up to those of white Americans. By Hannah Recht and Lauren Weber
The American Way of Fascism In an essay for Prison Radio, Mumia Abu Jamal cited journalist Chris Hedges’ contention that “the Christian Right is always “ready to support repressive measures against all who do not embrace their movement.” American fascism has distinctly Christian characteristics, according to the nation’s best known political prisoner.
US Militarists Invent Enemies – and Russiagate — for Dollars Russiagate is a fiction concocted by Democrats and intelligence agencies explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat and fuel a New Cold War, said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst. “You can’t spend $740 billion a year if you don’t have a plausible enemy, like Russia and now China,” McGovern told Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, of The Gray Zone. McGovern is active with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Billionaire Wealth Breaks All Records in Crisis The US billionaire class has grown at unprecedented speed during the pandemic and economic crises, increasing their wealth by over a trillion dollars and adding 46 new oligarchs to their numbers, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. Never has the world seen wealth accumulation at such a scale, said Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the study. “We need to create an economic system that does not allow for wealth tobe extremely concentrated,” said Ocampo. “ This could be done by “growing the labor movement” and instituting “workplace democracy and worker ownership.”
Labor:
Economy:
Citadel Didn’t Just Bail Out a GameStop Short Seller; Citadel Also Had a Big Short Position in GameStop Politico reported yesterday that the House Financial Services Committee plans to call Vlad Tenev to testify on February 18. That’s the CEO of the online trading app known as Robinhood that has played a role in the controversy surrounding the bull raid (now turned bear raid) in the shares of GameStop. If that’s to be the only witness, you might as well call Ken Griffin’s personal shopper to testify. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
The European Union, the Vaccine, and the Left The latest twist in the vaccine deployment saga has exposed the contradictions within the European Union and the limits of the capitalist market to deal with a crisis. In the last few days, we have witnessed the beginning of a clash both between the EU and the UK, and within the EU in something that reminds us of the debt crisis of 2011 and 2012. By Pablo Sanchez
France: Workers and Youth Against State Repression, Racism and Destruction of Culture On 30 January, big demonstrations against the Global Security Bill, the so-called Separatism Bill and for the reopening of cultural institutions took place in Paris, and all over France. These demonstrations were led by thousands of youth, who are increasingly radicalised given the seemingly endless pandemic (which means campuses are closed), and are determined to oppose the rotten Macron government. By Anouk Witkowska Hiffler
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
Even though the World Health Organization had, in March 2020, offered coronavirus test kits to the world and had advice on how to combat the coronavirus pendemic in March of 2020, “Effective quarantine is essential for tackling the coronavirus and this cannot happen without extensive testing for covid-19, says World Health Organization assistant director general Bruce Aylward. ‘To actually stop the virus, China] had to do rapid testing of any suspect case, immediate isolation of anyone who was a confirmed or suspected case, and then quarantine the close contacts for 14 days so that they could figure out if any of them were infected,; Aylward told New Scientistin an exclusive interview.’’’Those were the measures that stopped transmission in China, not the big travel restrictions and lockdowns.’” — WHO Expert: We Need More Testing to Beat Coronavirus The White House refused to take advantage of their information. And since then, the Trump adminstration has refuse help fom the World Health Organization, and even stop funding it!
NYT Scrutinizes Coronavirus Response in China Where Less Than 5,000 People Have Died in One Year While US Loses 3,250 People Per Day Eighty-seven times as many people have now died from Covid-19 in the U.S. as in China, but in a puzzling attempt to undermine the notion that China’s pandemic response has been better, the Times has recently highlighted that country’s “efforts to hide its missteps”—and criticized it for sending excess vaccines to other nations. By Jim Naureckas
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!
Quotes 0f the Day:
Black Agenda Radio for WeekBlack Agenda Radio for Week of February 1, 2021 With Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford