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Humanity Will Not be Covid Free, Until the Vaccines are Free For the Whole World!
Images of the Day:
‘Don’t Look Up!’
Movie Review By Roland Sheppard: ‘Don’t Look Up!’ Netflix’s “Don’t Look Up”. A social commentary film simular to Dr, Stangelove, but instead of a nuclear catastrope, scientists warn of’ planet destroying comet, the size of Mt. Everest, threating earth. Just like the current climate denial, of the impending global warming crisis, the United States capitist political and economic machine deny the scientific. When the whole world can see the comet approaching earth, the US President’s message. to the the world, is ‘don’t look up’! The movie also demonstrates how disaster capitalist attempt to profit from the immenent catastrophe. The movie shows how the media, the 1%’s government, and capitalists are intertwined in a denial of science. With an all star cast, the movie is filled with humor and a realistic satire of today’s United States. It is enjoyable to watch and it forces to think about the present state of today’s world, as ecocide approaches the earth. At the end of the movie, as the comet is about to strike earth, the business/government leaders escape in their own spaceship! It is a movie that well worth seeing! The messgage is ‘Do Look Up’, if we are to have a future and not ecocide!
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:
While Don’t Look Up shows a government and a population that refuse to believe in the existence of a comet heading towards earth, Dr. Mainzer sees frustrating similarities in real life with a number of topics such as the climate crisis and the pandemic. It’s her hope that Don’t Look Up displays why we should believe our scientists. — How ‘Don’t Look Up’ Got the Science Scarily Accurate
The contractor the worker said he worked under, JC Longoria Castro, was one of two dozen defendants indicted on federal conspiracy charges in October, based on findings from a multi-year investigation into a massive human smuggling and labor trafficking operation based in southern Georgia that extended to Florida and Texas. The indictments characterized the operation as “modern-day slavery”, a longstanding issue in the US agricultural industry where workers were smuggled from Central American countries to the US and imprisoned as contracted farm workers.A Farmworkers in the US, especially immigrant workers, have few protections. They were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Workers in America’s agricultural fields are regularly subjected to abuses ranging from high occurrences of sexual assault and harassment, wage theft and safety issues including injuries, fatalities on the job, and exposure to hazardous chemicals. ‘A Lot of Abuse for Little Pay’: How US Farming Profits From Exploitation and Brutality
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
The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity Wartime savagery requires that its perpetrators are told that their actions are acceptable — maybe heroic — and must not cease. My education in wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. We tend to associate barbarism with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood on their boots. That’s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization Airwars, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000. 
Hedges: PEN America and the Betrayal of Julian Assange Careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks successfully leverage corporate money and backing to seize and deform historic rights organizations into appendages of the ruling class. Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer’s integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can’t say the words “Belarus,” “Myanmar” or the Chinese tennis star “Peng Shuai” fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime. PEN America only stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government, which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank, for the literary group’s annual World Voices festival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end PEN America’s partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories included Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louis Erdrich, Russel Banks, Cornel West, Junot Díaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.
Environment:
100 Years Ago Rosa Luxemburg Raised the Slogan: ‘Socialism of Barbarism!’ — Today the Slogan Should Be: ‘Ecosocialisn or Ecocide!’
Warnings from the Far North “Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries.”(Source: Susanne Rust, Unprecedented Die-offs, Melting Ice: Climate Change is Wreaking Havoc in the Arctic and Beyond, Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2021). “Breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures” is horrific to contemplate. It sends a powerful signal of trouble dead ahead. In that regard, scientists agree that what happens up North signals what’s in store to the South, and what’s happening up North is a gut-wrenching reality of life on a knife’s edge of catastrophe. “The costs of climate change have been grave this year, both in terms of eye-watering financial losses but also in the death and displacement of people around the world.”: World’s Top 2021 Climate Disasters Cost Nearly $200 Billion: Study “Climate change will bankrupt us, and along the way, we will lose so much more than money,” said one activist in response to the new figures
America’s longest running oil spill dispute is close to a resolution after a Louisiana-based energy firm has agreed to a proposed multi-million dollar settlement. Taylor Energy agreed to pay more than $43m in clean-up costs, civil penalties and natural resource damage, and transfer a $432m clean-up trust fund to the Department of Interior, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Department of Justice. The proposed agreement stems from more than a dozen Taylor Energy-owned wells in the Mississippi Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico that began leaking after a production platform was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The pipeline has lost hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil, and continues to leak. — Louisiana Energy Firm to Pay Millions Following Oil Spill That Began 17 Years Ago
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
‘A Lot of Abuse for Little Pay’: How US Farming Profits From Exploitation and Brutality Two dozen conspirators forced workers to pay fees for travel and housing while forcing them to work for little to no pay. In June, a farm worker from Mexico, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, was transported through a trafficking network from Monterey to work on farms in Georgia. They paid the traffickers 20,000 pesos, about $950, loaned from their mother, taking frequent trips back and forth to Monterey, before being told it was safe to leave. Then they were finally transported across the border.
Economy
World:
Desmond Tutu Opposed Capitalism, Israeli Apartheid and US/UK Imperialism, Too This may sound either arrogant or forgetful, but I could not possibly remember the number of times I was in the same room or at the same protest as Desmond Tutu. And the main reason I know he was there is because I was there listening to him speak, often from a distance of not more than two meters or so. I say this not to associate myself with the great man — though I’ll forgive you for thinking I’m a terrible, narcissistic name-dropper — but just to be sure we all know this all really happened, because I saw and heard it. It seems very important to mention, because of the way this man is already being remembered by the world’s pundits and politicians. As anyone could have predicted, Tutu is being remembered as the great opponent of apartheid in his native South Africa, who was one of the most recognized and most eloquent leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle there, for most of his adult life.
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 VWhen health systems are moving toward crisis conditions, the first steps we take are to do all we can to conserve and reallocate scarce resources. Hoping to keep delivering quality care – despite shortages of space, staff and stuff – we do things like canceling elective surgeries, moving surgical staff to inpatient units to provide care and holding patients in the emergency department when the hospital is full. These are called “contingency” measures. Though they can be inconvenient for patients, we hope patients won’t be harmed by them. But when a crisis escalates to the point that we simply can’t provide necessary services to everyone who needs them, we are forced to perform crisis triage. At that point, the care provided to some patients is admittedly less than high quality – sometimes much less. The care provided under such extreme levels of resource shortages is called “crisis standards of care.” Crisis standards can impact the use of any type of resource that is in extremely short supply, from staff (like nurses or respiratory therapists) to stuff (like ventilators or N95 masks) to space (like ICU beds). — Ethical Dilemmas and Painful Decisions: Triage in the Time of a COVID Surge
Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Ws 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”, is Still True for Today’s World!
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!