How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable

 https://tomdispatch.com/how-this-country-fails-its-most-vulnerable/
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 23, 2021
Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

Economic crises shine a spotlight on a society’s inequities and hierarchies, as well as its commitment to support those who are most vulnerable in such grievous moments. The calamity created by Covid-19 is no exception. The economic fallout from that pandemic has tested the nation’s social safety net as never before.

Between February and May 2020, the number of unemployed workers soared more than threefold — from 6.2 million to 20.5 million. The jobless rate spiked in a similar fashion from 3.8% to 13.0%. In late March, weekly unemployment claims reached 6.9 million, obliterating the previous record of 695,000, set in October 1982. Within three months, the pandemic-produced slump proved far worse than the three-year Great Recession of 2007-2009.

Things have since improved. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced in December that unemployment had fallen to 6.7%. Yet, that same month, weekly unemployment filings still reached a staggering 853,000 and though they fell to just under 800,000 last month, even that far surpassed the 1982 number.

We Must Fight the System, Not Each Other

Link:  https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/02/14/we-must-fight-system-not-each-other

Published on

Sunday, February 14, 2021

by

Common Dreams

Once I saw the connection between domestic and international injustices of our societies and capitalism, I found myself awoken after years of sleeping in the belly of the beast.

by

Elaheh Farmand 

Once a year on our immigration anniversary, my mother and I reflect on our journey from Iran to the United States. In the past, we would celebrate the freedoms we were given in America, embrace the struggles we endured as immigrants to settle in a new home, and learn not only a new language, but also a new way of living, a new culture, a new dream.

But if you ask me to celebrate this immigration today, I would tell you how bittersweet it is to be an American, how disappointing it feels, and how my heart aches with disappointment and rage. Sometime in late 2019, I began learning about the destructiveness of capitalism: its ravaging of our planet earth, imperialism—its disastrous twin—fighting to keep it from collapsing. Once I saw the connection between domestic and international injustices of our societies and capitalism, I found myself awoken after years of sleeping in the belly of the beast.

No One Is Listening: A Country Divided Against Itself

 By Philip Giraldi

January 15, 2021

The U.S. may morph into two nations with the increasingly impoverished helot “deplorables” under the heel of the empowered social justice warriors.

In a recent article Catholic University professor Claes G. Ryn wrote “Few people are really open to persuasion in any case—not just on political subjects but on any subject about which they care and on which they have adopted certain views. Diehard partisans for a certain outlook will refuse to have their beliefs questioned, and so will many others. They will be no less dismissive of a document challenging their opinions if it is full of footnotes and appendixes. Such a document will, indeed, make them resist it even more. As for the relatively few people who are truly open-minded, they will not find another person’s observations dispositive. They will, as they should, want to consider the evidence on a contested matter for themselves.”

9/11 Was the Prelude. 1/6 Is the Holy Grail

 Jan. 14, 2021 By Pepe Escobar

Whether civil war is coming will depend on the degree of stoicism prevalent among the Deplorable multitudes.

I hear the sons of the city and dispossessed

Get down, get undressed

Get pretty but you and me

We got the kingdom, we got the key

We got the empire, now as then

We don’t doubt, we don’t take direction

Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me

Sisters of Mercy, Lucretia my Reflection

9/11 was the prelude. 1/6 is the Holy Grail.

9/11 opened the gates to the Global War on Terror (GWOT), later softened by Team Obama to the status of Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) even as it was suavely expanded to the bombing, overt or covert, of seven nations.

9/11 opened the gates to the Patriot Act, whose core had already been written way back in 1994 by one Joe Biden.

1/6 opens the gate to the War on Domestic Terror and the Patriot Act from Hell, 2.0, on steroids (here is the 2019 draft ), the full 20,000 pages casually springing up from the sea like Venus, the day after, immediately ready to roll.

And as the inevitable companion to Patriot Act 2.0, there will be war overseas, with the return in full force, unencumbered, of what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern memorably christened the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank) complex.

And when MICIMATT starts the next war, every single protest will be branded as domestic terrorism.

Ripe for Fascism: A Post-Coup d’Trump Autopsy of American Democracy

 By: NOLAN HIGDON – MICKEY HUFF

January 14, 2021

For the past few years, the corporate/establishment news media oft analyzed Donald Trump’s presidency in an historical vacuum, ignoring the decades-long, bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism that helped bring about his successful candidacy while focusing sensationally on his cult of reality TV personality. Such bread and circus tunnel vision misses the bigger picture. Trump, even with all his faults, is a symptom of a much larger pattern brought on by increased privatization of the public sphere, especially in the realms of education and media, which go back over half a century, particularly the past forty years. With the continued degradation of these key pillars of our society, our civic and information literacy has suffered greatly at a time when the world has become more complex, and our country more unequal. As a consequence, we have become more partisan, more divided, and more estranged from one another as a society. We argued this in our book, United States of Distraction, and unfortunately our thesis continues to ring true.

The Empire Is Not Done with Julian Assange

 By: Chris Hedges

January 5, 2021

Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes — including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints — the towering civil rights attorneys Michael Ratner and Len Weinglass, who had defended Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case, met Julian Assange in a studio apartment in Central London, according to Ratner’s newly released memoir “Moving the Bar”.

America’s Defining Problem In 2021 Isn’t China: It’s America

A new essay casts doubt on the China threat as promulgated by our nation's ruling elite.

JANUARY 4, 2021

ANDREW J. BACEVICH

Writing in the journal Palladium, Richard Hanania has produced the first must-read essay of 2021. A research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Hanania is part of an emerging generation of young scholars who reject the increasingly dubious verities of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Their arrival comes not a moment too soon.

New York Times Joins Trump's Anti-China Crusade

 https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/31/new-york-times-joins-trumps-anti-china-crusade

David Baker

12/31/2020

There is no doubt that bureaucratic bungling and authoritarian practices slowed China’s response to the coronavirus. A New York Times piece documents many of these failings. But, it is a big step to go from the evidence presented in the article to the assertion in the first paragraph:

“Beijing acted against the coronavirus with stunning force, as its official narratives recount. But not before a political logjam had allowed a local outbreak to kindle a global pandemic.”

Should You Be Worried About the New COVID Strains?

By: Gleb Tsipursky

12/30/2020

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/30/should-you-be-worried-about-new-covid-strains

Should you be worried about the new COVID strains originating in the UK, South Africa, and elsewhere, and recently identified in the US?

The authorities claim there's no cause for alarm. They’re focusing on concerns about vaccine effectiveness, saying the vaccine will be highly successfully against the new strain.

They’re mostly right. While some legitimate concerns have been raised about the vaccines potentially being 10-20% less effective against the new strains, this small difference shouldn’t make you too worried.

However, another aspect of these new strains should make you very worried indeed: they’re much more infectious. Unfortunately, the implications of their infectiousness has received little news coverage, which is cause for serious alarm.

Such complacency reflects our sleepwalking in the pandemic’s early stages, despite many warnings from myself and other risk management experts, leading us to fail to prepare successfully for this situation. We’re about to make the same mistake with seriously tragic consequences.

'Unhinged, Lame-Duck President Wants to Start a War'

 

Thursday, December 24, 2020

By: Jake Johnson

Anti-war campaigners are warning that U.S. President Donald Trump is on the verge of launching a full-blown military conflict with Iran after the lame-duck incumbent on Wednesday blamed the Middle East nation for a rocket attack on the American Embassy in Baghdad over the weekend, an accusation Tehran rejected as "fabricated."

"Our embassy in Baghdad got hit Sunday by several rockets. Three rockets failed to launch," Trump tweeted late Wednesday afternoon, attaching a photo purporting to show the three rockets. "Guess where they were from: IRAN. Now we hear chatter of additional attacks against Americans in Iraq."

"Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible," the outgoing U.S. president added. "Think it over."

میگویند امام زمان می آید

میگویند امام زمان می آید

اما نمی آید

بدبخت انسانی که منتظر است

او کیست که می آید؟چرا می آید؟

Can we save Assange?

It’s Time We Called It What It Is: Fascism

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/14/its-time-we-called-it-what-it-fascism

December 14, 2020

by

Robert Freeman

The epic thrash we’re witnessing is because the forces of capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching, are attempting to preemptively replace democracy with authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can control the outcome.

When the economy in a democratic but capitalist country fails, there are two alternatives. You can modify the economic system. Or, you can modify the political system.

When you modify the economic system (capitalism) but retain the political system (democracy), you have the arrangement the U.S. has lived under since capitalism failed in the 1930s, in the Great Depression.

The other alternative is where the economic system (capitalism) is retained but the political system (democracy) is discarded and replaced with authoritarianism. This is fascism and is what happened in Germany, also in the 1930s.

The battle between capitalism and democracy is the conflict that is being fought out in the U.S. right now. The epic thrash we’re witnessing is because the forces of capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching, are attempting to preemptively replace democracy with authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can control the outcome. A quick look at history shows us the pattern.

Inequality Gone Viral: The Obscene Numbers

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/30/inequality-gone-viral-obscene-numbers

By:

Paul Buchheit

November 30, 2020

In a distressing analogy to the relentless surge of Covid-19, which has disproportionately impacted low-income communities and people of color, there has been an unstoppable transfer of wealth from desperate Americans to the people who already had most of our nation's financial assets.

While the great majority of us have been focusing on the health and well-being — and the very survival — of loved ones, the super-rich have become "pandemic profiteers," isolating themselves from Covid while riding the stock market to its highest-ever level. At the same time we are seeing a dramatic demonstration of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, with the "perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren’t all so disoriented."

We need to ask ourselves: In a year of disease and death and destroyed families, should a massive, inexplicable increase in new American financial wealth go to billionaires or to health care workers? Should unearned gains go to the few hundred richest Americans or to the millions of American households who have lost their means of support?

We Must Do More to Stop Dangerous Doctors in a Pandemic

 Some have crossed the line from free speech to medical practice — or something akin to malpractice.

By: Richard A. Friedman

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/opinion/scott-atlas-doctors-misinformation.html?searchResultPosition=1

It’s bad enough when our political leaders promote quack theories about coronavirus and its treatment; but what do we do about the doctors who enable them and use their medical authority to promote pseudoscience?

Absolute Disaster

 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/12/07/millions-tenants-headed-absolute-disaster-after-new-year-owing-average-nearly-6000

By: 

Julia Conley

December 7, 2020

"This is like a Charles Dickens novel. It's an evolving story of how people at the bottom are suffering."

Without a coronavirus relief package centered on helping working families who have lost jobs and watched their savings dwindle amid the pandemic, millions of people are "headed for absolute disaster," one observer said Monday as Moody's Analytics reported that 12 million renters are expected to owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities after the new year.

Biden Wants America to Lead the World. It Shouldn’t

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/opinion/biden-foreign-policy.html?searchResultPosition=1

12/2/2020

There’s a lot we still don’t know about how President-elect Joe Biden and his foreign policy team will approach the world. But this much is clear: They believe in American “leadership.”

In a 2015 speech, Antony Blinken, Mr. Biden’s choice to be secretary of state, employed some version of the word 21 times. This spring, Mr. Biden wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” Last week, when he introduced his national security nominees, he said that “America is back, ready to lead the world.”

Let’s hope not. In the post-Trump age, “leadership” is a misguided, and even dangerous, vision for America’s relationship with the rest of the globe.

Lookout for Karl Marx!

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/27/lookout-for-karl-marx/

November 27, 2020

By: Chuck Churchill

Marx wrote all of his analyses and criticisms of capitalism well over one hundred and fifty years ago. Since then the capitalists have been working overtime to discount and demonize his assessments of capitalism as a system that exploits and indeed enslaves workers in order to profit from their labor. Our big business rulers have used their monopoly over state power and the mass media to inoculate the population against Marx’ ideas and strategies, which have historically been used to organize the workers and their allies throughout the world, and thus threatened the unchecked power of capital. Our corporate rulers have sought to discount Marx’s ideas as wrong or irrelevant for our times. But if this is so, then why not show this by widely presenting these ideas for discussion and debate? After all, do we not have “democracy” and “free speech” here in the “exceptional “US? Is not our system of education a “market- place for ideas?”

Five scientists in 10 years: Iran's nuclear physicists are top targets for assassins

 https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-nuclear-scientists-fakhrizadeh-targets-assassination

By: Sheren Khalel
27 November 2020

To be a nuclear scientist in Iran is to be in danger. During the past decade, up to this week, at least four had been killed in vehicle bombings and shootouts, and several others have been targeted but survived. On Friday, the alleged architect of Iran's military nuclear program joined the ranks of the slain. Armed assassins gunned down Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in his car in an ambush in Absard city, outside the capital Tehran.

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