These are excerpts of July 2021 articles. For a quick sense of information and faster summary just read the red marked texted.
My primary source is the extremely well researched RFK jr.’s “Children Health Defense” organization. The CHD is suffering some severe censorship on social media because they are exposing government/corporate media inconsistencies, distortions and censored facts about the Covid pandemic!
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2020-05-30 Children with baffling syndrome linked to COVID-19 may be experiencing deadly ‘cytokine storm’ https://www.aninews.in/news/world/us/children-with-baffling-syndrome-linked-to-covid-19-may-be-experiencing-deadly-cytokine-storm20200530082706/
2020-05-23 A Left Perspective on Emerging Post-Pandemic Global Relations COVID-19 pandemic, its emergence, global spread and the crisis therefrom are inseparably linked up with the character of neoliberal accumulation today. As is widely recognised, its origins are rooted in profit-driven corporate capital’s unbridled plunder of nature and consequent invasion and intrusion in to wild life ecosystem leading to spill-over of viruses to humans and their subsequent mutations. That is, most of the zoonotic viruses and consequent highly infectious diseases coming up one by one during the neoliberal period are rooted in increasing disruptions in ecosystem and biodiversity. The entire health care system under capitalist-imperialist system being driven by profit motive, this pandemic has given rise not only to a health crisis but also to an unprecedented economic collapse given the globalised character of world today. Many concerned and well-meaning scholars, political scientists and economists the world over envisage the outcome of COVID-19 pandemic as more deadly and destructive than that of all previous crises including even world wars. In particular, while the world is celebrating the 75th year of the end of Second World War, COVID-19, with both US and UK under its highest death tolls, has exposed the political-economic and social bankruptcy of the Anglo-American led capitalist-imperialist system of more than two centuries. Many observations and hypotheses on this aspect based on the emerging trends are pouring in from various quarters.https://countercurrents.org/2020/05/a-left-perspective-on-emerging-post-pandemic-global-relations/
2020-05-23 After 3 Children Die, a Race to Investigate a Baffling Virus Syndrome Tissue samples from at least one of the three patients to have died from it — ages 5, 7 and 18 — have been sent to a public health laboratory for intensive testing. A team of more than 30 disease detectives — epidemiologists, clinicians and statisticians — is poring over thousands of pages of medical records.
New York state has become the center of a parallel effort to investigate an unnerving aspect of the outbreak: an illness that is sickening a small but growing number of children. The ailment has now been reported in at least 161 children in New York, making the state’s caseload one of the largest publicly reported anywhere. Hundreds of other children across the United States and in Europe have also been sickened with the illness, now called multisystem inflammatory syndrome.
The syndrome can be characterized by severe inflammation of the heart, blood vessels, the gastrointestinal tract or other organs, believed to be caused by a reaction to the coronavirus. The inquiries into why it is occurring and whether a treatment can be found could have an impact on how authorities handle the reopening of schools and other activities for children. https://news.yahoo.com/3-children-die-race-investigate-141442434.html
2020-05-23 A Left Perspective on Emerging Post-Pandemic Global Relations https://countercurrents.org/2020/05/a-left-perspective-on-emerging-post-pandemic-global-relations/
2020-05-22 The Emerging Bipartisanship on Supply Chains and China Policy The crisis has triggered a reckoning in circles on the left and right about China policy. We found ourselves unable to produce sufficient supplies of protective equipment and medical devices precisely at the moment they were vitally needed. And that just stood in for a host of products we can no longer manufacture in America.
Senators like Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have been talking about the undermining of American manufacturing for decades. “Why don’t we have enough cotton swabs? U.S. companies lobbied Congress to weaken the rules,” Brown said yesterday. “We have to look at trade policy, look at tax policy, and align it with our national interest.”
What’s new here is that Brown and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and other manufacturing-state Democrats are joined, in what could be a marriage of convenience but sounds indistinguishable for now, by conservatives like Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Josh Hawley (R-MO). “We need to be able to sell and trade, but we need to pursue policies internationally that will foster industry in our country and protect vital jobs,” Hawley said. “And this equation in textbooks about trade working if the aggregates are good, it’s not good if it’s captured by a small class on Wall Street.”
When you put together ideas from the left and right, you have a panoply of policies to revive domestic manufacturing. You can require Buy America standards, with domestic content requirements. You can provide low-interest financing to onshore plants and jobs. You can address it as a national security issue and mandate certain local supply chains. You can build a coalition to confront China on its unlevel playing field, its subsidies for state-owned enterprises. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-emerging-bipartisanship-supply-chains-china/
2020-05-22 For-Profit Colleges See Opportunity in Depression An industry with a sketchy track record has ramped up advertising to desperate prospective students. https://prospect.org/education/for-profit-colleges-see-opportunity-in-depression/
2020-05-22 Can We Maintain Our Coronavirus Emissions Reductions? or will we just go right back to normal once the threat has been neutralized? Researchers aren’t optimistic, except for the fact that we are learning how to deal with a global crisis.
Global CO2 emissions during April 2020—while the world was largely locked down—were 17 percent lower than the same time a year earlier. Climate scientists and environmental advocates say any short-term drop in emissions gives a misleading sense of progress. This could do harm if it saps some of the urgency to address climate change at a time when there are many competing demands for public money and attention.”
Environmental advocates are hopeful that the world’s reaction to the pandemic—people and governments coming together to protect human health and minimize loss of life—bodes well for our ability to handle the climate crisis as it gets more critical over the next two decades. https://emagazine.com/coronavirus-and-transportation/
2020-05-22 ‘Lab Rats to Shore Up Hospital Revenue Streams’ Workers’ comp insurers are in some cases pushing claimants to resume surgical procedures in the midst of the pandemic. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/workers-comp-shores-up-hospital-revenue-streams/
2020-05-22 The Impact of Unplanned Lockdown on Migrant Workers https://countercurrents.org/2020/05/the-impact-of-unplanned-lockdown-on-migrant-workers/
2020-05-22 Here Are the Corporate Lobbyists on the DNC Committee That Blocked the Climate Debate Who, then, are the DNC members of the Resolutions Committee who first voted against recommending a climate debate?
The 28-member Resolutions Committee contains in advancing at least five members with backgrounds corporate interests: three current corporate lobbyists, one of them a co-chair of the committee and another a News Corp lobbyist put forward by Tom Perez; one past electric utility lobbyist and drug industry consultant, who established a Democratic precedent of corporate PAC fundraising; and one principal with a consulting firm whose current clients include large corporations and whose past clients include BP. The committee also includes Symone Sanders, a senior advisor for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
Crucially, at least 13 of the standing committee’s 28 members are at-large DNC members, which means they were put forward as a slate by Perez and approved by a voice vote, not individually elected. Of these 13, ten committee members voted against a climate-focused debate when the matter was voted on by the full DNC membership, as tracked by a publicly-viewable spreadsheet released by Michael Kapp, a pro-transparency DNC member from California, as well as Kenji Yamada, also from California.
The Resolutions Committee is co-chaired by Hon. Lottie Shackelford, an at-large DNC member who was mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas from 1987-1988. As one of three senior advisors at consulting firm Global USA, Shackelford’s past lobbying clients include Allstate Insurance, Hyundai, and from 2000-2008, a coalition of Big Bank trade groups called FM Watch.
According to records maintained by ProPublica, Shackelford and Global USA lobbied for several months in 2006 for Strategic Communication Company on “Taxes pertaining to oil and gas companies.” The committee’s other co-chair is Stuart Appelbaum, a DNC member from New York who is the current chair of the DNC Labor Council. Appelbaum is president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and was appointed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the state’s Regional Economic Development Councils. https://prospect.org/politics/corporate-lobbyists-on-the-dnc-committee-blocked-climate-debate/
2021-05-20 POST A COMMENT: CHD Calls on FDA to Immediately Take COVID Vaccines Off the Market Millions Against Medical Mandates (MAMM), a coalition of health freedom organizations and individuals, joins CHD and other vaccine safety and health freedom groups in inviting the public, including healthcare workers, parents and military members, to submit comments on the petition.
CHD compiled and submitted 72 references supporting the request for revocation and restraint. To read the full petition text, download it from the FDA website or read the full petition here — then submit your comments using this form.
According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data, there have been 192,954 reported adverse events following COVID vaccination, including 4,057 deaths between Dec. 14, 2020 and May 7, 2021. These numbers stand in stark contrast to those reported following the aborted 1976 swine flu vaccine campaign that ended abruptly following approximately 30 reported deaths and 400 cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome.
Citing the extremely low risk to children from COVID, the petition calls on the FDA to immediately refrain from allowing minors to participate in COVID vaccine trials and to immediately revoke all EUAs permitting vaccination of children under 18. “It’s time for the FDA to make a dramatic course correction before more deaths and injuries occur,” said Maureen McDonnell, MAMM founder.
CHD and MAMM are asking the FDA to take these seven actions:
FDA should revoke all EUAs and refrain from approving any future EUA, NDA [new drug application] or BLA [biologics license application] for any COVID vaccine for all demographic groups because the current risks of serious adverse events or deaths outweigh the benefits, and because existing, approved drugs provide highly effective prophylaxis and treatment against COVID, mooting the EUAs.
Given the extremely low risk of severe COVID illness in children, FDA should immediately refrain from allowing minors to participate in COVID vaccine trials, refrain from amending EUAs to include children, and immediately revoke all EUAs that permit vaccination of children under 16 for the Pfizer vaccine and under 18 for other COVID vaccines. FDA should immediately revoke tacit approval that pregnant
2020-05-20 Universal Basic Income or Job Guarantee? Why Not Both? Supporters set these programs at odds, but they can work together to mitigate a crisis and provide basic dignity to everyone. As a quick refresher: A universal basic income (UBI) would be a no-strings check sent regularly—probably every month—to every person in the country. The idea is to set a floor for everyone’s standard of living. Meanwhile, a job guarantee (JG) is essentially a public option for employment: Anyone who wants work will be provided a job in their community, funded by the federal government, with benefits, and at a decent living wage. The idea here is twofold: to set a floor for conditions and compensation in the U.S. job market, as well as to push the economy to full employment and keep it there.
The two programs have often been cast in opposition to one another. To an extent, the friction is understandable: The UBI seeks to lessen Americans’ entanglement with work by breaking the link between jobs and income, while the JG can be seen as an attempt to strengthen that entanglement further. But the coronavirus has offered a very concrete and painful lesson in why this friction must be overcome. The destruction wreaked by the disease is demonstrating how the implicit critiques the UBI and the JG level at U.S. society are both right—and how we must tend to both solutions if America is to dig itself out of this mess and learn anything from the catastrophe. https://prospect.org/economy/universal-basic-income-or-job-guarantee/
2020-05-20 From Economic Relief to Pandemic Profiteering
The Pandemic Made Politicians Notice Basic Needs. Workers Left Out of the Paid Sick Leave Discussion. DNC Shuts Out Sanders, But His Ideas May Salvage the Country. Delay or Hold Primaries Amid the Pandemic. How to Avoid Spreading COVID-19 Misinformation. Scientist Pushed from US to China Made a Fast COVID-19 Test. Inaction Will Make Jails and Prisons Ground Zero for COVID-19. Trump’s Science Denial Delayed Response to COVID-19. Coronavirus Profiteering. https://www.parkindymedia.org/from-economic-relief-to-pandemic-profiteering/
2020-05-20 The Journey of the Jobless Congress boosted unemployment benefits. Now the challenge lies in getting them out to the unemployed, through underfunded state-level programs. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/the-journey-of-the-jobless/
2020-05-19 The Post-Corona World Prospect editors look beyond the horizon at what the aftermath of the crisis will yield. It’s clear that we’re facing a Depression-level event economically and a public-health crisis with no easing in sight, even as the current administration has decided to give up on containment and safeguarding the general welfare.
Our senior editors, meanwhile, tried to look beyond the horizon at what the aftermath of the crisis will yield. And it’s a very uncertain picture. Paul Starr lays out the multiple options: a rebirth of egalitarian spirit, or an accelerant of ugly nationalism and entrenchment. Harold Meyerson sees labor either battered by mass unemployment and impossible legal barriers or uplifted by radical collective action and newfound “essential” status. Bob Kuttner forecasts either the rise of China as an economic hegemon, or a renewed domestic manufacturing sector and a green stimulus powering America back to a sustainable prosperity. And I look at concentrated corporate power, which will either become unbearably dominant after the crisis, or be felled by all the shortcomings the crisis has exposed. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/the-post-corona-world/
2020-05-19 ‘No One Will Help, No One Will Listen’: Workers Impacted By COVID-19 Outbreak Describe Struggle For Unemployment Benefits Since the coronavirus pandemic triggered lockdowns across the United States two months ago, more than 36 million Americans filed unemployment claims. The surge of claims has created major backlogs of unemployment claims that plague several states, large and small. This dysfunction is a result of outdated infrastructure, underfunding, and years of right-wing policies. In fact, most workers, who find themselves unemployed in the U.S., will likely never obtain benefits because systems in many states are set up to limit support to the least amount of people possible. https://shadowproof.com/2020/05/19/no-one-will-help-no-one-will-listen-workers-impacted-by-covid-19-outbreak-describe-struggle-for-unemployment-benefits/
2021-05-18 Federal Law Prohibits Mandates of Emergency Use COVID Vaccines, Tests, Masks — 3 Resources You Can Use to Inform Your School or Employer Under federal law, employers and universities cannot legally mandate COVID vaccines because they are unlicensed Emergency Use Authorization products which are, by definition, experimental. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/resources-federal-law-prohibits-mandates-emergency-use-covid-vaccines-tests-masks/
2020-05-17 Karen Greenberg, So Long to American Exceptionalism Other normal expectations about American life are also breaking down in ways once associated with foreign lands. As George Packer recently wrote in the Atlantic, the federal government now looks more like a failed state than a vibrant democracy. As he put it, the Trump administration’s reaction to the coronavirus crisis was more “like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” In fact, the government’s response to the crisis has failed in a striking set of ways, ranging from the unpreparedness of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the failure of diplomatic and domestic efforts to procure ventilators and protective masks or implement the distribution of stockpiles of medical equipment.
Meanwhile, the socio-economic level of the country has plummeted as middle-class Americans lose their jobs and begin the long fall into another existence. Since March, significant parts of the economy have been shut down and more than 33 million people laid off with 6% of the labor force filing for unemployment in the last two weeks of that month alone. Official U.S. unemployment recently hit 14.7%, a figure unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment claims have surged catastrophically and are still climbing weekly.
For an increasing number of Americans, food insecurity has become a fact of life. Empty shelves for some products are increasingly common in grocery stores nationwide. While predictions of shortages and price increases vary from cautious denials to measured concern, certain aspects of the usual food chain do seem to be breaking down.
Meanwhile, as the homelessness rate grows, many shelters have closed and those that remain open, social distancing being impossible and sanitary conditions bleak, are now potential hotbeds of infection, or as Emma Grey Ellis put it in Wired, “Homelessness is incompatible with health.” And let’s not forget the nightmare of nursing homes, some of which have become literal graveyards for the aged and infirm.
Prisons and detention centers have similarly become incubators for the spread of the disease, as our incarceration system suffers the kinds of deaths that might once only have been possible in countries like Chile, El Salvador, Peru, or elsewhere in Latin America (where notoriously overcrowded prisons have led to the rampant spread of Covid-19). http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176702/tomgram:_karen_greenberg,_so_long_to_american_exceptionalism/
2020-05-17 Democracy Dies in Dysfunction There are clear steps we can take now to ensure fair and functional elections in November—but time is quickly running out. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democracy-dies-dysfunction-voting/
2020-05-17 Facing a Real Catastrophe With a Pretend President With Trump AWOL and Biden keeping a low profile, there is no national leadership. In a comprehensive chronicle of the Trump administration’s response to the crisis, Financial Times national editor Edward Luce highlights how disengaged from reality the White House has been. “Again and again,” Luce writes, “the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner—the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world.”
In essence, Kushner won Trump over to a do-nothing approach. For a six-week interlude from mid-March until late April, the surge of bad news forced Trump to act like he was doing something. But now that the pandemic is plateauing, Trump has announced a “transition to greatness” policy that is in fact a return to his initial approach of disengagement. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/coronavirus-obama-commencement-president/
2020-05-16 Dissenter Weekly: Federal Whistleblowers Try To Save Americans From Corrupt COVID-19 Response Bright was retaliated against by officials in President Donald Trump’s administration after he recommended in January that the administration take the coronavirus pandemic more seriously. He also challenged cronyism, including the manner in which certain drugs were fast-tracked for approval to address COVID-19 simply because a company had political connections to Jared Kushner or others. https://shadowproof.com/2020/05/16/dissenter-weekly-federal-whistleblowers-trump-covid-19/
2020-05-16 Did SARS-Cov-2 start in a Chinese lab? (Youtube Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk&t=0s
2020-05-15 As Corporations Adapt to a COVID-19 Economy, the Working-Class Prepares for a Paradigm Shift In a disturbing trend foreshadowed by suddenly ubiquitous multi-screen video chatting applications like Zoom and now Google Meet, a soup-to-nuts restructuring of corporate policies and procedures designed around a “new normal” where people are conditioned to avoid social contact and remain in their homes or cars, is being pushed by global consulting giants like McKinsey & Company, which yesterday published a “90-day plan” to initiate “rapid migration to digital technologies driven by the pandemic.”https://www.mintpressnews.com/corporations-adapt-covid-19-digitized-economy-working-class-paradigm-shift/267630/
2020-05-14 Congressional watchdog demands probe after energy secretary admits WH pressed Fed to give oil companies access to COVID-19 funds https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/congressional-watchdog-demands-probe-after-energy-secretary-admits-wh-pressed-fed-to-give-oil-companies-access-to-covid-19-funds/
2020-05-13 Chicago Mayor Lightfoot’s Coronavirus Threats and Government Incapacity to Handle a Pandemic Saturday May 2, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared you can be arrested and jailed for having house parties. “We will shut you down, we will cite you, and if we have to, we will arrest you,” said Lightfoot. “Don’t make us treat you like a criminal, but if you act like a criminal and you violate the law and refuse to do what’s necessary to save lives in the middle of a pandemic, we will take you to jail, period.”
It is telling that Lightfoot addressed her arrest and jail comments mostly to parties and gatherings in Black neighborhoods. It is true that three quarters of Chicago’s corona virus deaths are among Blacks and Latinos with pre-existing medical conditions. Yet the very day before she made her threats, a Re-Open Illinois rally of around 500 people took place in downtown Chicago. Lightfoot made no mention of this gathering, which was probably 95% white.
“Lightfoot addressed her arrest and jail comments mostly to parties and gatherings in Black neighborhoods.” To heighten the Mayor’s hypocrisy, National Public Radio reported that Chicago’s Cook County jail “The rate of infection in the jail is higher than most anywhere else in the country.” Yet Lightfoot threatens to jail people as a method of fighting corona virus! In fact, this very mayor opposed releasing those in Cook County jail who have not yet been tried but are only in jail because they are poor and cannot pay bond. https://www.blackagendareport.com/chicago-mayor-lightfoots-coronavirus-threats-and-government-incapacity-handle-pandemic
2020-05-13 Patriotic Vaccines: The Divided Coronavirus Cause One such effort of solidarity, and a not very convincing one at that, was made at this month’s Coronavirus Global Response Pledging Conference. The European Commission gave it a deceptively united title: “Joining forces to accelerate the development, production and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics – on-line pledging event.” Representatives from 43 countries, a range of non-profit entities and scientific groups also added to the number.
The Trump administration had already signaled its intention to avoid any show of unity in the vaccine effort, which may suggest an unintentional expression of blunt honesty. It has frozen funding to the WHO and refused to send any representatives to a meeting organized by the organization at a meeting, conducted virtually, last month. A spokesman for the US mission in Geneva told Reuters at the time that Washington “looked forward to learning more about this initiative in support of international cooperation to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 as soon as possible” but would not be participating in any official way. The response was much the same to the European Commission’s pledging conference. For the Trump administration, finding a COVID-19 vaccine will, contrary to Johnson’s belief, be a predatory exercise in self-interest because other countries will, given the chance, treat it the same way.
This is stern and admirable stuff but not particularly convincing. The global patent system is marked by vicious rivalries rather than tea-ceremony tranquillity. The behaviour of its participants, according to the University of Hong Kong’s Bryan Mercurio, tends towards a winner takes all approach. “The rest of the efforts will go unrewarded.”
The fractious scramble for appropriate vaccines and viral drugs, as with other scrambles of history, serves to highlight the crude, even cruel reality of power politics, which proves stubborn even in the face of the existential and costly. This is pure Donald Trump, unilateral, instinctive and unromantic, with a reaction in keeping with previous thinking when it comes to international efforts of solidarity. Look more closely at them and see the sham; it’s every state for itself. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/13/patriotic-vaccines-the-divided-coronavirus-cause/
2020-05-13 CEOs Say America Is Running Out of Meat—While Shipping Ever More Pork Overseas US companies have exported a third of the pork they’ve produced in 2020. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/05/packing-execs-say-america-is-running-out-of-meat-while-shipping-ever-more-pork-overseas/
2020-05-12 COVID-19 Billionaires: Who Are the Virus Profiteers? The vast majority of the population is suffering from unemployment, hunger, and higher infection rates as a result of being on the front lines of the fight against the pandemic.
In the United States, the richest nation in the world, more than 30 million people have applied for unemployment since the virus hit the country. At the other end of the spectrum, the fortunes of the country’s 629 billionaires (people with more than $1 billion in wealth) increased by $282 billion, an almost 10% gain, in 23 days according to a study conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The IPS also states that the three largest fortunes (those of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) are equal to the wealth of the poorest half of the population of the entire United States, that is, some 164 million people.
“The world’s richest are not immune to the devastating impact of the coronavirus… The drop in the number of billionaires this year reflects the economic impact the pandemic is already having” said Kerry Dolan, Forbes assistant managing editor of wealth. 267 people dropped off the billionaires list because their fortunes fell below $1 billion. It is likely that as the pandemic continues, these numbers will increase. But at least 8 people have exponentially increased their wealth since the virus began. https://www.leftvoice.org/covid19-billionaires-who-are-the-virus-profiteers
2020-05-12 Donald Trump can’t keep his own workplace free of the coronavirus — so why does anyone in America trust him with their lives? https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/donald-trump-cant-keep-his-own-workplace-free-of-the-coronavirus-so-why-does-anyone-in-america-trust-him-with-their-lives/
2020-05-12 Coming Soon: Bipartisan Deficit Hawks Calling for Austerity Right now, government money is flowing. But soon the self-appointed guardians of “fiscal responsibility” will call for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP, while leaving the defense budget and large tax breaks for the wealthy intact. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/coronavirus-covid-budget-deficit-defense-spending-trump-biden
2020-05-12 We Can’t Lose the Right to Protest in the Age of Coronavirus Mayor de Blasio at his press conference on Sunday illustrated why elected officials should not determine who gets to exercise Constitutional rights. “I’m a huge believer in the First Amendment,” the mayor said before declaring that “to gather in the middle of a pandemic” is “idiotic.” He insisted that all activists should seek to call attention to issues online.
But as leading civil rights attorney Norman Siegel told the Indypendent, “COVID-19 could be with us for a couple of years or longer, so we need to speak out. We should use [our] rights. If we don’t, they’ll atrophy. And then one day we’ll wake up, and we won’t have them anymore.” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/we-cant-lose-the-right-to-protest-in-the-age-of-coronavirus
2020-05-12 Street Medics See Cuba As A Model For COVID-19 Response In Vulnerable Communities Prevention is key to the successes of Cuba’s free and universal healthcare system, which is a direct result of the revolution’s progress. Some of their health achievements include one of the highest doctor-patient ratios in the world, a higher life expectancy rate than the U.S. and many so-called developed nations, accessible clinics in almost every neighborhood throughout the island, and the development of several successful vaccines and treatments.
In Cuba’s health care system, the profit motive is largely nonexistent, which many experts suggest is a key factor in the country’s incredible achievements. It is highly common for medical workers like Cabrera to make dozens of house visits a day, with rural communities and people outside of major cities or in poorer neighborhoods receiving regular care.
Cabrera explains that once the COVID-19 outbreak began, they moved swiftly to “classify and move patients immediately” to predetermined locations which already existed. The Cuban health care system is not perfect, however, most problems are a direct result of the U.S. economic blockade. The decades-long policy has created a scarcity of medical necessities, like respirators and basic medicines, as well as a lack of soap products, which public health professionals internationally have lambasted as breaking international humanitarian law. Most recently, the blockade prevented Cuba from obtaining medical supplies needed to combat the pandemic. https://shadowproof.com/2020/05/12/street-medics-see-cuba-as-a-model-for-covid-19-response-in-vulnerable-communities/
2020-05-11 Small Businesses Realize Small Business Loans Aren’t Meant to Save Small Businesses Owners figured out that the PPP doesn’t do much for their personal survival. They should have gotten the hint when it was called the Paycheck Protection Program. It was effectively a pass-through grant to workers, to keep them on the payroll for two months, whether they came in to work or not. Only one-quarter of the loan amount could be used for anything other than salary, or else the loan would remain a loan, and the last thing small businesses with no revenue and an uncertain future want right now is additional debt.
Some have had trouble hiring back staff because unemployment is temporarily a better deal. More important, as word traveled that 75 percent of the loan had to go to payroll, businesses with high rent or a lot of fixed expenses realized PPP would not assist their survival. For example, every restaurant and bar in New York, or Boston, or San Francisco. The lack of clarity over how loans will be made forgivable is also threatening demand, because small businesses like this don’t want to take on debt. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-small-business-loans-not-meant-to-save-small-businesses/
2020-05-11 Capitalism is a Virus: Value Chains, Class Struggle, and the United Front Belokamenka is a rural community in the Russian arctic with a permanent population of just 85 people. The locality is hundreds of miles from anything resembling a city and is one of the last places you would expect a major outbreak of COVID-19. And yet in late April, more than 200 temporary residents — workers on a liquid natural gas supply facility construction site — were diagnosed with the disease. The outbreak spread quickly throughout the 600 acre construction site in large part because of the crowded living conditions of the workers and the total lack of any social distancing measures.
But how did the virus manage to get to such a remote location in the first place? How did a disease that was originally diagnosed in Wuhan, China manage to make it to the farthest reaches of the globe in such a short period of time, despite all efforts to contain it? The answer is simple: the disease spread so quickly — quicker than any previous virus — by following the very same circuits that connect the global just-in-time supply chain, a chain that is powered by the kind of cheap energy that the Belokamenka facility makes possible and the kind of cheap immigrant labor needed to build such a facility. While human viruses have often followed the flow of commodities — the bubonic plague, for instance, traveled along trade routes for years — the speed and massive scale of globalized capitalism has produced a scenario in which disease can spread across the entire planet in just a matter of weeks. In this respect, COVID-19 is the first great pandemic of the age of global capitalism.
Capitalism’s drive toward efficiency and its attempts to squeeze value out of every minute of the process of production and distribution, mean that workers in the industries that make these supply chains possible (not to mention those who work in high value-added production near logistics hubs and those who help produce and maintain the logistics infrastructure) have an enormous amount of potential leverage. In effect, the nature of the global supply chain shows that despite all of the advanced technology behind global capitalism, it is still working people who make the world run, and it is working people who have the power to shut it down. https://www.leftvoice.org/capitalism-is-a-virus-value-chains-class-struggle-and-the-united-front
2020-05-11 We Shouldn’t Need GoFundMe to Respond to Catastrophes. We Need a Strong Welfare State. Even if everyone who started a GoFundMe for a desperate need did get the money they requested, forcing everyone in such situations to sacrifice their privacy and throw themselves on the mercy of strangers by crafting a “compelling” story would still be obscene. And it’s absurd to ask random people to “chip in anything they can” rather than funding basic social goods through redistributive taxation.
The $1 million Arnold Schwarzenegger donated to the Frontline Responders Fund represents one-quarter of 1 percent of his net worth. The equivalent for someone with $30,000 would be $75 — except that they’d notice the loss of the $75 a hell of a lot more than Schwarzenegger will notice the loss of $1 million. At bare minimum, any reasonable solution to the “shortage of masks, gowns, gloves, and other critical supplies to protect our medical professionals” involves taxing far more of the necessary funds from the Schwarzeneggers of the world and making collective democratic decisions about where the money needs to go, rather than hoping that enough individual eyeballs happen to be caught by any particular story.https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/gofundme-crowdfunding-coronavirus-covid-cancer-treatment
2020-05-11 Mass Unemployment Is a Failure of Capitalism The difficulties caused to workers by record unemployment during the pandemic are a product of capitalism. Most of the time, employers decide to hire or fire workers depending on which choice maximizes employers’ profits. Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is “the bottom line” of capitalism and thus of capitalists. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their profits are high and punished when they are not. It’s nothing personal; it’s just business.
However, unemployment is received almost everywhere and by almost all as a negative, unwanted experience. Workers want jobs. Employers want employees producing profitable output. Governments want the tax revenues that flow from employees and employers actively collaborating.
So why has the capitalist system periodically produced economic downturns wherever it has settled across the last three centuries? They have happened, on average, every four to seven years. There are good reasons why capitalism produces and reproduces unemployment over time. It draws benefits (as well as suffers losses) from doing so. Reproducing a “reserve army of the unemployed” enables periodic upsurges in capital investment to draw more employees without driving up wages. Rising wages—and thus falling profits—would accompany investment surges if all workers were already fully employed before such surges. Unemployment also disciplines the working class. The unemployed, often desperate to get jobs, give employers the opportunity to replace existing employees with unemployed candidates willing to work for less. Unemployment thus operates as a downward pressure on wages and salaries and thereby a boost for profits. In short, capitalism both wants and does not want unemployment; it expresses this tension by periodically adding to and drawing down a reserve army of the unemployed that it continually maintains. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/11/mass-unemployment-is-a-failure-of-capitalism/
2020-05-10 COVID-19: 2020 Year of the Virus “The evidence seems clear: lockdowns do not cause deaths. Instead at a time of pandemic they save lives.”
Whilst in theory the lockdowns could be kept going until all transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus fully and finally stopped, in practice the time needed to achieve that outcome is far longer than Western societies seem able to bear. The result is that governments in Europe and the United States, worried about the state of their economies and sensing the restiveness of a part of their populations, have rushed to ease the lockdowns at the first sign of a decline in total numbers of deaths and cases.
That in turn means that lockdowns are being eased across Europe and North America whilst the SARS-CoV-2 virus is still circulating, with no means (in the absence of adequate testing) to keep track of it and to identify and isolate its carriers. The risk is that this will lead to a further upward spike of deaths and cases, requiring renewed lockdowns, leading to a debilitating cycle of recurring easing and lockdown, which could ultimately do more damage to the fabric of Western society and to its morale than the thorough and consistent application of a suppression strategy would ever do.
According to the WHO there are as many as seventy possible vaccines under trial, and though development of a successful vaccine is not guaranteed, and may take years, evolutionary changes in the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, unlike in flu virus, have been relatively slight, which gives good grounds for hope that before long an effective vaccine will be developed.
Even if none of these hopes come true, it is a certainty that modern medicine and modern science, which is learning more about the SARS-CoV-2 virus every day, will before long come up with effective treatments for the Covid-19 disease which it causes. Already there are early signs that improvements in treatment of Covid-19 patients in hospitals are causing death rates in the richer countries to fall.
Whilst the end of the pandemic is an eventual certainty, its end is being unnecessarily delayed by partisan infighting and by the confused response to it. The muddle about which approach to follow – the mitigation strategy or the suppression strategy – shows that this confusion exists at the political level more than at the scientific and medical one. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/10/covid-19-2020-year-of-the-virus/
2020-05-10 “Can People Pay Rent This Month?’ The Consensus Was No” Millions of people can’t pay rent because of the coronavirus-induced recession. In the absence of government action to help them, many are going on a rent strike. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/rent-strike-new-york-tenant-organizing-coronavirus
2020-05-10 Disease capitalism and COVID-19: Hunger in the belly of the beast We frequently hear that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu. It is forgotten that the third plague pandemic killed millions in South, South East and East Asia from the 1890s, and continued well after the Spanish flu, to the 1950s. That pandemic killed an estimated 10 million in India alone. I remember my family talking about it, as also numerous stories I read which had plague as their backdrop, and a recent book on the Bombay plague.
So why is this forgotten when we talk about pandemics today? Is the reason for this similar to why the world seems to have forgotten about a host of diseases that still plague the world—diseases that Peter Hotez, a molecular biologist, has called “forgotten diseases” of “forgotten people” in his book? Diseases that the WHO more neutrally terms Neglected Tropical Diseases?
One of the consequences of the belief that infectious diseases are no longer a concern for the rich is the drying up of research funds for developing new medicines for such diseases. Annually, tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people and infects 10 million (WHO’s 2019 TB Report), with India alone accounting for nearly half a million deaths and about 2.7 million infections. Yet the first set of new tuberculosis drugs entered the market after more than four decades! The last three new medicines for malaria, which infects more than 200 million annually, are now 50 years old. Two of these three were developed by the United States Army for its soldiers fighting its colonial war against Vietnamese liberation forces. https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/05/10/disease-capitalism-and-covid-19-hunger-in-the-belly-of-the-beast/
2020-05-09 Trump is a cornered rat — and the coronavirus has him trapped Trump’s arrogance and dithering and denial has cost tens of thousands of American lives and will cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, more. He is the president, and he is supposedly in charge, and nothing he has done has worked. His scattershot plan to “reopen” the economy won’t save him. Blaming China or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or anyone else won’t save him. He is a defeated, desperate man. We still have to vote in the election in November, but he has already lost. The virus beat him.https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-a-cornered-rat-and-the-coronavirus-has-him-trapped/
2020-05-09 Whistleblower: TSA hoarded 1.4 million masks, despite plea to donate to health care workers https://www.startribune.com/whistleblower-tsa-hoarded-1-4-million-masks-despite-plea-to-donate-to-health-care-workers/570342861/
2020-05-09 Getting Trumped by COVID-19 Donald Trump is not a president. He can’t even play one on TV. He’s a corrupt and dangerous braggart with ill-concealed aspirations for a Crown and, with an election coming up, he’s been monopolizing prime time every day, spouting self-congratulation and misinformation. (No, don’t inject that Lysol!) His never-ending absurd performances play out as farce against the tragic background of the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the nation. If we had a real president, which is to say, almost anybody else, things would be different. We would have seen the pandemic coming. It would not have attacked me in my old age. And most of the dead might still be alive.
The records of other countries make this clear. South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, and Norway have all had commendable success in protecting their people. Could it be by chance that seven out of eight of the most successful nations in combating the Covid-19 pandemic are headed by women? https://www.salon.com/2020/05/09/getting-trumped-by-covid-19_partner/
2020-05-09 Pandemic Response Watchdogs in Congress Working Diligently to Increase Unemployment We learned that 20.5 million jobs were lost in April, a deliberate policy choice on the part of Congress to make unemployment insurance the most robust channel for individual relief. That untold numbers of Americans can’t get through to process their claims is the tragic flaw in this plan. A panel of policymakers assembled to judge the coronavirus response might look at the state of things and publicize the need to bolster broken state unemployment systems. It might think about how to make those temporary job losses come back when the lockdowns end. It might highlight the value of paying businesses to keep people on payrolls—a universal standard that doesn’t depend on individual luck with the state unemployment systems. Or maybe it would address disasters in workplace safety, or rental and mortgage markets. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-pandemic-response-watchdogs-congress-working-to-increase-unemployment/
2020-05-09 No State Execution by COVID-19! Join the Car Caravan to San Quentin – May 9th The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal is calling for a car caravan/protest and rally at San Quentin Prison on Saturday May 9th. We demand that Governor Newsom act to prevent prisoners from being infected by this deadly pandemic. Overcrowded and unsanitary conditions which are pervasive in San Quentin and prisons across the country! In the Marion, Ohio prison fully 80% of prisoners have tested positive! Packing inmates like sardines in San Quentin Prison cells will infect many and some will die. Confined spaces like prisons, ICE jails and cruise ships act as incubators of the deadly COVID-19 virus.
Innocent death-row prisoners in San Quentin such as Kevin Cooper, who was blatantly framed by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department for a crime he did not commit.(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-jerry-brown-dna.html) could be sentenced to death by insufficient action on this virus! Cooper currently awaits an overdue order from Governor Gavin Newsom to pursue an investigation of his innocence. Newsom has declared his opposition to the death penalty, but Cooper and many other prisoners, due to his inaction could die. We demand the immediate release of the elderly, sick or immune-compromised prisoners, and all those who are close to parole.
2020-05-08 Cuomo announces partnership with Bill Gates to ‘revolutionize’ NY schools in wake of coronavirus Taking time off from mismanaging a pandemic and turning lifesaving masks sent from all over the country into an art installation, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared yesterday that he would use the deadly COVID-19 virus as an opportunity to “revolutionize” the state’s school system, inviting Microsoft founder Bill Gates to implement his controversial ideas about education statewide. Cuomo did not divulge many details of what his imagined education revolution would look like but did mention virtual education and remote learning. However, Gates is best known for one thing in education: charter schools.
Gates is one of the most important driving forces leading the assault on the American public education system through the promotion of charter schools. Charter schools effectively privatize the public school system, where the public continues to foot the bill for the school, but has no influence or say in how it is run. While very popular with both the private sector and the religious right, the large majority of unionized public school teachers oppose them. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/29857
2020-05-07 Norway kept me safe from COVID-19 — and Trump’s America nearly killed me Trump’s never-ending absurd performances play out as farce against the tragic background of the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the nation. If we had a real president, which is to say, almost anybody else, things would be different. We would have seen the pandemic coming. And most of the dead might still be alive.
The records of other countries make this clear. South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, and Norway have all had commendable success in protecting their people. Could it be by chance that seven out of eight of the most successful nations in combating the Covid-19 pandemic are headed by women? Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, Sanna Marin of Finland, Angela Merkel of Germany, Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, and Erna Solberg of Norway have all been described in similar terms: as calm, confident, and compassionate leaders. All of them have been commended for thorough preparations, quick decisive action, and clear, empathic communication. Erna Solberg has even been hailed as the “landetsmor,” the mother of her country.https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/norway-kept-me-safe-from-covid-19-and-trumps-america-nearly-killed-me/
2020-05-07 COVID-19: Seniors Rip Trump for Tying Relief to Social Security Cuts Grassroots advocacy groups representing millions of retirees and seniors across the United States are speaking out against and urging Congress to oppose President Donald Trump’s threat to block desperately needed Covid-19 relief legislation if it does not slash the payroll tax, which funds Social Security and Medicare. The multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in late March, contains a provision allowing employers to delay payment of the payroll tax for at least the duration of 2020.
Advocates warned at the time that the provision, which replaces payroll tax revenue with general revenue, represents a fundamental threat to Social Security’s long-term financial health. In a statement on Monday, Altman said the president’s relentless push for a payroll tax cut shows “how desperately Trump and the right-wing ideologues surrounding him want to defund Social Security, so they have an excuse down the road to demand cuts to our earned benefits.”
“Trump’s actions are a war on seniors,” said Altman. “He wants to open up the economy, even though Covid-19 is disproportionately costing seniors their lives. Now he is insisting on threatening Social Security on which most seniors rely for their food, medicine, and other basic necessities. Members of Congress, particularly House Democrats, need to stand strong and call Trump’s bluff.” https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/07/covid-19-seniors-rip-trump-for-tying-relief-to-social-security-cuts/
2020-05-07 Ten Tips on Talking about China, Chinese People and COVID-19 A quick read for organizers on how to talk about China, Chinese people and COVID19. The rise of xenophobia and the onslaught of China bashing is just another right wing political and narrative strategy to deflect responsibility of COVID-19 by Trump. https://portside.org/2020-05-07/ten-tips-talking-about-china-chinese-people-and-covid-19
2020-05-07 How Private Equity Firms Will Profit From COVID-19 Unless Congress and regulators act, private equity will shed its nonperforming assets and feast on new ones. J. Crew joins a long list of private equity–owned retail chains that have made millions for their Wall Street owners, pillaging the companies they buy while costing hundreds of thousands of retail workers their jobs. Private equity owners shuttered stores at an alarming rate over the last decade, disrupting the lives of more than 590,000 retail workers. Some household names are out of business entirely: Toys “R” Us, Sports Authority, Charlotte Russe, Gymboree, and Payless ShoeSource, to name a few.
Without passage of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act (SWLA) to rein in unsustainable debt and put an end to private equity owners enriching themselves, otherwise successful retailers brought low by the COVID-19 pandemic will be fair game for these vultures. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/private-equity-firms-profit-covid-19-j-crew/
2020-05-06 ‘The most horrifying aspects of capitalism’: To the ultra-rich, the coronavirus pandemic is a trial run for apocalypse But for some people the coronavirus pandemic is a type of utopian dream. Many right-wing Christians see the combination of the pandemic and President Trump as good things. Why? Because in their mythology these events are harbingers of the apocalyptic “end times,” a titanic battle between good and evil during which true Christians who are “saved” will be raptured away to paradise. https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-most-horrifying-aspects-of-capitalism-to-the-ultra-rich-the-coronavirus-pandemic-is-a-trial-run-for-apocalypse/
2020-05-06 Unsanitized: The War on the Postal Service Continues We’re in a time when many people are confined to their homes and require package delivery of basic goods. It’s an election year where the safest option to exercise your civic duty is clearly receiving a ballot in the mail, filling it out, and returning it. So of course, it makes perfect sense that the U.S. Postal Service’s very existence is under threat.
Late Monday afternoon, the Postal Regulatory Commission announcing the resignation of vice chair David C. Williams from the USPS Board of Governors, effective at the end of April, but he had until the end of this year to depart, and could have been reinstated for a new term. This is distressing for a couple reasons. First of all, nobody is more knowledgeable about the inner workings of the postal service than David Williams. He understood the mission of the postal service, to connect the nation and promote commerce. Worst of all, my sources indicate that this was a resignation in protest. Williams’ resignation suggests the worst is about to happen: that Treasury will use its power and the leverage of the coronavirus crisis to fundamentally damage the postal service and its workers.
Everyone has been focused on Donald Trump blathering that the USPS needs to quadruple package delivery charges to Amazon or they won’t get any rescue funds. But the CARES Act included a $10 billion expansion of the Treasury Department’s line of credit to the postal service. There have been reports that Treasury was using the leverage gained through those purse strings to demand significant changes to the agency, not limited to package rates. It includes forcing concessions on postal union pay and benefits, interfering in hiring decisions (including the next postmaster general, the key figure on postal policy), and the terms of large contracts. The USPS would have to formally request the loan money, and as of late April they hadn’t, though there had been preliminary discussions.
Williams’ resignation suggests the worst is about to happen: that Treasury will use its power and the leverage of the coronavirus crisis to fundamentally damage the postal service and its workers. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), “If political pressure played a role in the sudden departure of David Williams, it is an ominous storm cloud over the head of our postal service,” Pascrell said. Congress must investigate the circumstances here and guard against Donald Trump’s efforts to use this pandemic to decapitate one of our nation’s crown jewels and endanger the USPS’s over 600,000 employees.” https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-war-on-the-postal-service-continues/
2020-05-06 Mass Unemployment Amid the Pandemic Is an Indictment of Capitalism Worker co-ops lack capitalism’s irrational fixation on profit, so they are not subject to boom-and-bust job cycles. Unemployment always stood as a mocking indictment of capitalism. Unemployment also threatens capitalism. This system rewards employers with profits from the waged labor of employees. Yet it fails to keep them working and thereby undermines its profits. Worse, that failure recurs quite regularly — a phenomenon known as the business cycle.
Its cycles expose capitalism as intrinsically socially irrational. Unemployed workers continue to consume, albeit in reduced quantities. They just stop producing. It would obviously be better to keep workers producing what they keep consuming. Capitalism cannot do that during its recurring cycles despite countless efforts, including Keynesian economics and policies since the 1930s. The cycles repeatedly cause much suffering and loss. https://truthout.org/articles/mass-unemployment-amid-the-pandemic-is-an-indictment-of-capitalism/
2020-05-04 US Government Fears China will Give Away COVID-19 Vaccine for Free Dean Baker, Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and Senior Economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, D.C., offered an alternative view. Baker has previously advocated for replacing the system of private medical research with a publicly funded open source system that he believes will not only save lives but will save money. telling MintPress News that:
The coronavirus pandemic is a clear instance in which the whole world shares a common interest in developing and distributing a vaccine. This should mean that we have open research, where all findings are posted on the web as quickly as possible, so that they can build on them. Once a vaccine is developed we should want it spread throughout the world as quickly as possible at the lowest possible cost. Trump’s concern that China would somehow “steal” a vaccine means that he is more concerned about protecting someone’s profits here, as well as possibly an ego trip (we’re number one) than possibly saving hundreds of thousands of lives. https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-government-terrified-china-will-give-coronavirus-vaccine-away-free/267235/
2020-05-04 Trump Isn’t the First to Threaten WHO, but His Threat Is the Most Dangerous Donald Trump isn’t the first president to threaten to cut funding from the World Health Organization (WHO), but he’s the first to actually do it. And, in the middle of a global pandemic, when this agency is saving lives, it couldn’t come at a worse time.
Ever since the early Reagan years, the right wing in this country has waged war on U.N. agencies such as the WHO. They’ve called these agencies ineffective, but the truth is they’re more worried about the bottom line for a small number of multinational corporations.
Now, Trump is trying to further that mission for even more venal reasons: shifting blame for his own catastrophic failure on containing the coronavirus pandemic. Trump announced in a tweet on April 14 that he was “halting funding” for the global health organization. He charged the WHO with colluding with the Chinese and failing to “share information in a timely and transparent fashion.” This despite the fact that top Trump officials, including the National Institute of Health’s Anthony Fauci, had been consulting with the WHO on a regular basis throughout the crisis. https://fpif.org/trump-isnt-the-first-to-threaten-who-but-his-threat-is-the-most-dangerous/
2020-05-03 Pushback: US Elites Use Russiagate Playbook To Blame China And Promote Hostility The US establishment is demonizing China over the COVID-19 crisis with a familiar Russiagate playbook of specious claims, fearmongering, and deflecting responsibility for homegrown dysfunction. https://popularresistance.org/pushback-us-elites-use-russiagate-playbook-to-blame-china-and-promote-hostility/
2020-05-02 Dr. Michael Osterholm on Covid-19 We just have a shortage of testing for what we call the PCR test. This is the one that detects the actual virus itself… The challenge has been that we need reagents, chemicals that run the test… What we’ve needed is a national, international effort almost like a Marshall Plan with the private sector and public sectors coming together. Everybody is out there trying to get the reagents for themselves, and there are not nearly enough. https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/dr-michael-osterholm-on-covid-19/
2020-05-02 COVID-19, Capitalism, and Socialism Coronavirus reveals the divide between the socialist principal of using health care to meet human needs and the capitalist practice of treating health care as a commodity. https://portside.org/2020-05-02/covid-19-capitalism-and-socialism
2020-05-01 Natural spillover or research lab leak? Why a credible investigation is needed to determine the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. There is solid evidence based on genetic analysis from scientists in multiple countries that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a natural spillover event, with the coronavirus most likely jumping from bats to people, perhaps via an intermediate animal species. What we have less evidence about is where that spillover event happened. While many scientists believe that the coronavirus first infected humans in nature or through the wildlife trade, others think an accident could have occurred during the course of scientific research on coronaviruses or the animals that harbor them.
Within two weeks of notifying the World Health Organization (WHO) of a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019, the Chinese government maintained the cases were associated with exposures at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where live wildlife was reportedly sold. By then, researchers in China had already identified the new coronavirus, later named SARS-CoV-2, and shared its genetic sequence with other countries to use in developing diagnostic kits. But a description of the first clinical cases published in the medical journal The Lancet on January 24 challenged Beijing’s version of events. Written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, the article concluded that 13 of the first 41 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Wuhan had no contact whatsoever with the market. This included the first person to present with the disease. https://thebulletin.org/2020/05/natural-spillover-or-research-lab-leak-why-a-credible-investigation-in-needed-to-determine-the-origin-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic/
2020-05-01 Coronavirus: Letting bad science slip through the cracks? Science has an ugly, complicated, dark side. And COVID-19 is letting it out Good science requires time. Peer review. Replication. But in the past few months, the scientific process for all things related to COVID-19 has been fast-tracked. While that is, of course, understandable on some level—thousands are dying worldwide every day, after all—it’s not necessarily safe. What was once a marathon has been compressed to a 400-meter dash: Researchers race to deliver results, academic journals race to publish, and the media races to bring new information to a scared and eager public. And, at the same time, unverified opinions circulate widely on social media and on TV from so-called experts, which makes understanding the situation all the more difficult. Bad science—or at the very least, incomplete science—is simply slipping through the cracks. https://thebulletin.org/2020/05/coronavirus-letting-bad-science-slip-through-the-cracks/
2020-05-01 Back to the Future: ‘Evil Communist’ Bogeyman Returns U.S. pundits and politicians have with gusto taken to dusting off an old bogeyman – “evil communism” – in reference to China over the Covid-19 pandemic. Such retrograde rhetoric shows how politically bankrupt Washington is.
Leading the charge is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who hardly ever now refers to China simply as “China” in media interviews. He continually and feverishly equates the nation with the “Chinese Communist Party”. In recent weeks, going by the number of times the word “communist” has been heard across U.S. media one would be forgiven for thinking that we have been transported back to the Red Baiting days of the Cold War ca. 1950-60. Fox News, the pro-Trump, rightwing Murdoch-owned channel, is the premier platform for this China bashing. Its hosts and guests are painting “communist China” as the “evil of our time”. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/01/back-to-the-future-evil-communist-bogeyman-returns/
2020-05-01 Coronavirus and the Increase in Domestic Violence Americans are paying dearly as they suffer through the coronavirus epidemic. The costs of inadequate testing, poor medical care and even death in isolation are only compounded by the nation’s staggering economy, mounting unemployment rate and uncertainty of recovery. Making matters worse, there has been an increase in domestic violence. Domestic abuse – or intimate partner violence – is an endemic feature of American social life, one example of the all-pervasive sexual or gender violence. A recent report on “domestic violence” from the National Center for Biotechnology Information paints a grim picture:
Family and domestic violence (including child abuse, intimate partner abuse, and elder abuse) is a common problem in the United States. Family and domestic health violence are estimated to affect 10 million people in the United States every year. It is a national public health problem … Under conditions of the Corvid-19 plague, the number of incidents of domestic violence appears on the uptick.https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/01/coronavirus-and-the-increase-in-domestic-violence/
2020-05-01 The Black Death killed feudalism. What does COVID-19 mean for capitalism? The coronavirus crisis has thrown the global economy into cardiac arrest, and now you are acutely aware of the very markets that you had previously just assumed would function as normal. The first indication was the precipitous drop in the stock market that took place in late February. Then, as the United States began to enter quarantine, the labor market collapsed and hundreds of millions of people were suddenly out of work. Shortages in a few key commodities—masks, ventilators, toilet paper—began to appear.
It is one of the central tenets of laissez-faire capitalism that markets behave like automatic systems, that an “invisible hand” regulates supply and demand. Market fundamentalists believe that the less the government interferes with these automatic systems, the better. They argue, to the contrary, that markets should increasingly take over government functions: a privatized post office, for instance, or Social Security accounts subjected to the stock market.
Market fundamentalists are like Christian Scientists. They refuse government intervention just as the faithful reject medical intervention. Much like God’s grace, the invisible hand operates independent of human plan.
Then something happens, like a pandemic, which tests this faith. States around the world are now spending trillions of dollars to intervene in the economy: to bail out banks, save businesses, help out the unemployed. Countries are imposing export controls on key commodities. As in wartime, governments are directing manufacturers to produce critical goods to fill an unexpected demand for greater supply.
But some pandemics fundamentally alter the economy. In such emergencies, people realize that an economy is constructed and thus can be reconstructed. Are we now at just such a moment in world history? Will the coronavirus permanently transform the relationship between the state and the market? Let’s take a look at three key markets—oil, food, and finance—to measure the impact of the pandemic and the prospects for transformation. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/29801
2020-05-00 Two-Tier Response to COVID-19 The COVID-19 crisis poses a fundamental challenge to the economic and cultural logic of settler colonial, capitalist society. Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal adage that “there is no society” is proven obviously false when coronavirus shows that if one has the virus, all are vulnerable.
The only real solution is to recreate a society where no one is cast out and where all people have what they need to be healthy and safe. But Canada’s response shows that who the state and civil society define as full person, one deserving protection, is not universal. Those outside of the public receive answers drawn from the toolkit of fascism. https://againstthecurrent.org/atc206/two-tier-response-to-virus/.
2020-05-00 Not Simply a “Natural Disaster” It would be a mistake, likewise, to see the human toll of the coronavirus pandemic as the inevitable fallout of a natural disaster. The pandemic originated with a highly infectious and deadly virus jumping the “species barrier” to human beings. The human impacts depend, however, not just on the characteristics of the virus or the infection it causes, but also on the particular political and economic arrangements in a given society. In the United States, the impacts of this novel virus lay bare grave failings of economic policy and institutions—indeed, of the capitalist system itself—that are not at all new.
The coronavirus has detonated a severe economic crisis in the United States and other affected countries. The most direct and obvious effect of job loss is the worker’s loss of income and employer-provided benefits. Social scientists, however, have also found large negative psychological effects, resulting from social isolation, loss of identity and self-worth, etc. The overall negative health effects of unemployment—both psychological and physical—are enormous. many people will die during the current crisis, not because they have contracted a deadly infection, but because they have lost their jobs. http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2020/0520reuss.html
2020-05-00 The Most Important Economic Lesson from the COVID-19 Crisis In early spring of 2020, the richest and most powerful country in the history of planet Earth was brought down by a virus. What the crisis made crystal clear is that the nation was monumentally unprepared to deal with an epidemic that scientists knew was a near statistical certainty—the question was never “if,” but only “when.” And when hit by a global pandemic, the U.S. health care system, which accounted for 17% of the nation’s spending in 2018 (compared to an OECD average of 8.8%), was unable to either slow its spread or to deal with its consequences. There were 30 cases of the disease in the United States on March 1. By the end of April, that had exploded to nearly a million confirmed cases and over 50,000 deaths.
The pandemic brought to the surface the issues masked by our previously “roaring” economy, from lack of federally mandated sick leave, to lack of access to health care, and the folly of tying retirement security to the stock market. The crisis also exposed the hypocrisy of deficit hawks and supply-siders. Suddenly the U.S. government could spare $2 trillion for companies big and small, as well as for helicopter drops of cash for the rest of us. Suddenly the government is not the problem, but the solution. The problem with our health care system extends well beyond the dearth of medical supplies, hospitals beds, and caregivers to a payments system that relies far too heavily on for-profit private insurance.
For generations Americans have been told that our government doesn’t have the money to pay for public services, provide healthcare, invest in our infrastructure, or provide income for seniors and low-income families.
But the most important lesson we must learn is that the ability of the government to run deficits is not limited to times of crisis. We must finally accept that deficits are fine in normal times, just as we accept them to be necessary in times of crises and wars. Indeed, it was always crazy to think that in the normal times before this crisis hit, our government’s ability to mobilize underutilized resources was limited by financial constraints. The real limits faced by government before the pandemic were far less constraining than the limits faced after the virus had brought a huge part of our productive capacity to a halt. http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2020/0520nersisyan-wray.html
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Coronavirus Covid-19 Research History – Index
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