As the coronavirus spreads fast in the U.S., the Trump administration – instead of helping – is taking the blame game to a new level. An example is found in a recent editorial in The Daily Beast. Called “White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China for Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up,'” that piece should, hopefully, wake up the world…
Our fundamental responsibility is to protect the American people, the homeland, and the American way of life.
— National Security Strategy of the United States, 2017 (President Donald Trump)
The United States government has no greater responsibility than protecting the American people.
— National Security Strategy, 2015 (President Barack Obama)
At home our most important priority is to protect the homeland for the American people.
— The National Security Strategy of the United States of Americas, 2002 (President George W. Bush)
The United States’ National Security Strategy is based on foundational Instruments of National Power (INP). The INP consists of Diplomacy, Informational, Military, Economic, Financial, …
Humanity is faced with a series of self-made, interrelated crises, from the environmental catastrophe to poverty, inequality, the absence of peace and an unprecedented level of displaced persons, among other pressing issues. All have been brought about by the negative behaviour of mankind, by the pervasive modes of living, the corrosive values and ideologies that dominate all aspects of contemporary life.
The latest crisis is the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and the potential resulting collapse of the world economy. It is a collective crisis the like of which we have never seen before. Whole populations are being forced to change behaviour, to …
In what is being called the worst financial crisis since 1929, the US stock market has lost a third of its value in the space of a month, wiping out all of its gains of the last three years. When the Federal Reserve tried to ride to the rescue, it only succeeded in making matters worse. The government then pulled out all the stops. To our staunchly capitalist leaders, socialism is suddenly looking good.
The financial crisis began in late February, when the World Health Organization announced that it was time to prepare for a global pandemic. The Russia-Saudi oil price …
During the 2019 State of the Union Address United States president Donald Trump promised, “America will never be a socialist country.” This was followed by GOP chants of “USA, USA, USA.”
Donald Trump affirmed his antipathy of socialism during the 2020 State of the Union Address stating, “Socialism destroys nations.” This was followed by applause from the politicians present.
Apparently being totally in the dark about the contagiousness of COVID-19, Trump also promised during the 2020 SOTU: “To those watching at home tonight, I want you to know: We will never let socialism destroy American health care.”
On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the People’s Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) …
Two categories of propaganda must be distinguished. The first strives to create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be reinforced. Its goal is to make the masses ‘available,’ by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination. The second category involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects. It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary).
– Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, October 12, 1967
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus’ great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning to us today, but a warning …
The coronavirus pandemic is sweeping the globe. There seems to be no way of containing it at this point, and health systems are struggling to keep up. The virus is exposing inadequacies in health systems all over the world, especially the U.S.’s abysmal health infrastructure. Health workers on the ground continue to provide care during the pandemic despite the severe lack of resources and dangers to their personal health. Photo: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Coronavirus has officially hit the United States. Throughout the country, there have been …
Sun Yang is an Olympic Gold medalist and world record holding swimmer. He was recently ruled to be guilty of an anti-doping rule violation (ADRV) and banned from competing for eight years. Unless his appeal to overturn the decision is successful, this will end the swimming career of the 28 year old athlete.
The decision was met with shock and anger among his many fans in China; glee and gloating by some western media and swimming competitors. What lies behind this important decision? Was it upholding ‘fair sport’ …
Lancet Editor Exposes Devastating Government Failure on Coronavirus
by Media Lens / March 20th, 2020
Over the last 20 years, we have documented some shocking examples of journalistic irresponsibility, but the tweet from ITV’s political editor Robert Peston on March 14 was something special. With China, South Korea, Italy, Spain and other countries in shutdown, lockdown and general medical meltdown, with the UK reeling from rising cases and deaths – with the elderly, in particular, facing a terrifying threat that had already claimed thousands of lives around the world – Peston tweeted:
A socialist electoral policy needs to take shape based on: (1) evaluations of the key players (Trump, the Republicans, the centrist Democrats, and the progressive Democrats); (2) social justice principles; and (3) appropriate strategy and tactics.
1st. Regarding the Republicans.
Almost all Republican politicians, some happily and others reluctantly, are overwhelmingly backing Trump as he persists in his bigoted rightwing populist demagoguery and his racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and other antisocial policies.
2nd. Regarding the Democrats
Responding to widespread popular discontent, the few social-liberal reformer politicians in …
One of the major concerns about COVID-19 in northern Italy after concern for the physically infirm and elderly is the impact treating patients will have on the healthcare system. The healthcare system in many northern Italian regions is already at a breaking point as within the first twenty days of the outbreak over 10,000 infections were reported with a current total of 41,035 coronavirus cases [19 March, Coronavirus Cases]. An uptick of cases is expected despite the curbs which were enacted on 23 February in the north of the country followed by a harsher regime around …
Amidst the current hysteria of the covid-19 pandemic, talk of general chaos and economic collapse have taken the forefront of peoples’ minds.
Increasingly over recent months, western media has been hit with warnings of “financial Armageddon” and the need for a “global hegemonic synthetic currency” to replace the collapsing US dollar under a new system of green finance. These statements have been made by former and current Bank of England Governors Mark Carney and Mervyn King respectively and should not be ignored as the world sits atop the largest financial bubble in human history reminiscent of the 1929 bubble …
Part 1. More of the Same Old Failed Electoral Policy
by Charles Pierce / March 19th, 2020
The broad left has been uniting behind the Democratic Party for the past four decades without having achieved much real progress for its base constituencies. In fact, there has been considerable regress: increased inequality of wealth and income, diminished collective bargaining, increased homeless numbers, rising student debt burdens, reduced abortion access, increasingly unaffordable costs of healthcare, mass incarceration, new cold wars, new arms race, and so forth. Longstanding abuses against the vulnerable remain, including: impunity for police violence; and abuses in the criminal justice system targeted against the poor …
The rush to elevate self-isolation to Olympian heights as a way to combat the spread of COVID-19 has gotten to the celebrities. Sports figures are proudly tweeting and taking pictures from hotel rooms (Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton being a case in point). Comics are doing their shows from home. Thespians are extolling the merits of such isolation and the dangers of the contagion. All speak from the summit of comfort, the podium of pampered wealth: embrace social distancing; embrace self-isolation. Bonds of imagined solidarity are forged. If we can do it, so can you.
So much is changing so fast, by the time I publish this piece, it will likely sound very yesterday very soon. But particularly now, there seem to be some salient points worth making, and a few recent moments worth recounting.
Over the past several weeks — which up until Sunday morning included a visit to Australia, which I cut short in order to return to the US — I have been following a wide spectrum of news from many different countries, largely while …
Let’s try a little thought experiment. Just for fun. To pass the time while we’re indefinitely locked down inside our homes, compulsively checking the Covid-19 “active cases” and “total death” count, washing our hands every twenty minutes, and attempting not to touch our faces.
Before we do, though, I want to make it clear that I believe this Covid-19 thing is real, and is probably the deadliest threat to humanity in the history of deadly threats to humanity. According to the data I’ve been seeing, it’s only a matter of days, or hours, until nearly everyone on earth is infected and …
A recent landmark study of massive ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland fulfills the “worst case” prognosis, as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It’s a nightmare come true, as the impact of global warming on the planet’s most significant/biggest masses of ice multiplied six-fold in only 30 years. It wasn’t supposed to happen so unexpectedly, so suddenly.
Studies in the journal Nature conducted by an international team consisting of 89 climatologists reveals an unprecedented rate of ice melt at the planet’s greatest ice masses. They assessed ice loss data from 11 satellites that monitored both Greenland and …
If a disease can teach wisdom beyond our understanding of how precarious and precious life is, the coronavirus has offered two lessons.
The first is that in a globalised world our lives are so intertwined that the idea of viewing ourselves as islands – whether as individuals, communities, nations, or a uniquely privileged species – should be understood as evidence of false consciousness. In truth, we were always bound together, part of a miraculous web of life on our planet and, beyond it, stardust in an unfathomably large and complex universe.
It is only an arrogance cultivated in us by those narcissists …
Syrian Refugees Should Not Be Used as Political Pawns
by Ramzy Baroud / March 18th, 2020
In a surprising move, Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, announced on February 29 that he will be re-opening his country’s border to Europe, thus allowing tens of thousands of mostly Syrian refugees into Greece and other European countries.
Expectedly, over 100,000 people rushed to the Ipsala border point in the Edirne province separating Turkey from Greece, hoping to make it through the once-porous border.
Even though, initially, the sea route was not opened for the refugees, many attempted to brave the sea, anyway, using small fishing boats and dinghies. A …
If you are a saver in a money market account or in a bank, you’ve already noticed your dwindling interest income as interest rates have been at their lowest in modern American history. Well, brace yourself. Your saving account has just become little more than a lock box, thanks to the supreme dictatorship of the Federal Reserve.
On Sunday, March 15, the Federal Reserve announced that it would cut interest rates to “near zero.”
After ignoring the largely unproductive spiral in corporate debt, now a staggering $9.3 trillion, the risk of …
For the purposes of preserving any status quo in the present day United States, nothing surpasses a strategy of any question or issue ‘cultural.’ This has the immediate effect of splitting even slight difference of opinion into hostile camps and deliberately provokes absolutist, visceral responses. Such exchanges, particularly in the sewer of social media or cable news shows fiercely competing with each other as much of this as can by squeezing as much as this as possible into a given timeslot, provoke further tribal response and so it goes until we have things like ‘Red States vs Blue States’, the …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / March 18th, 2020
While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near Baghdad on March 11, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory strikes against five of the militia’s weapons factories and announced it is sending two more aircraft carriers to the region, as well as new Patriot missile systems and hundreds more troops to operate them. …
Epidemiologist William Hanage was more than perplexed by the plan. “When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan,” he reflected in The Guardian, “I thought it was satire.” Much public policy, foolishly considered and expertly bungled, tends to succumb to satire; having Prime Minister Boris Johnson leading the show provides an even better chance of that happening.
Herd immunity, as a policy, would involve easing off risk and preventive measures, allowing what would effectively be a mass infection, and focusing on recovery from younger members of the populace. Doing so would provide the assurance of immunity to prevent the …
Cuban Medical Brigade (Photo by Bill Hackwell)
Some years ago I was talking to a Cuban doctor about what a remarkable achievement it was that Cuba was able to eliminate Malaria in 1973. He took the discussion in stride and said that it didn’t mean much until we eradicate Malaria in the entire world.
Today Cuba is proving once again that their view of health and battling diseases is one that is global in scope and despite living under the unilateral 60 year old US blockade, with additional sanctions …
On 12 May 1996, Lesley Stahl, moderator for the US TV show “60 Minutes” interviewed former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Stahl: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Albright: We think the price is worth it.
The “price” was US sanctions imposed on Iraq under colour of a UN Security Council Resolution, the effect of which was to deny Iraq access to basic medical supplies. Of course, the death toll in Iraq was not confined to the denial of medical …
Protester’s sign decries sanctions, “a silent war” (Photo Credit: Campaign for Peace and Democracy, 2013)
U.S. sanctions against Iran, cruelly strengthened in March of 2018, continue a collective punishment of extremely vulnerable people. Presently, the U.S. “maximum pressure” policy severely undermines Iranian efforts to cope with the ravages of COVID-19, causing hardship and tragedy while contributing to the global spread of the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Iran’s Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif urged member states of the UN to end the United States’ unconscionable and lethal economic warfare.
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / March 17th, 2020
The coronavirus epidemic is creating an ongoing teachable moment that could be used to transform the US economy. COVID-19 and the oil war are triggers leading to a recession that has its roots in record corporate and personal debt, longterm low wages and an artificially-inflated stockmarket. The shortcomings of US economic policy, the healthcare system, and workers’ rights are being magnified by the current crisis.
These days, local is global. Dorset is a small rural county on England’s south coast. That doesn’t mean that its inhabitants aren’t worried about climate change. They are. Very. Unfortunately, Dorset Councillors are more concerned about following government policies, policies that back using public money to invest in climate-damaging projects. ‘Global’ doesn’t do ‘local’. Global makes money for corporations and their investors, not the people who have to live with the result.
Sometimes it takes a threat to our own neighbourhood, our own county or country, before we wake up to what is happening across the world. It will take food …
WORLD / COUNTRIES / CHINA
Last updated: March 17, 2020, 14:20 GMT
China
Coronavirus Cases: 80,881
Deaths: 3,226
Recovered: 68,715
ACTIVE CASES
8,940 Currently Infected Patients
5,714 (64%) in Mild Condition
3,226 (36%) Serious or Critical
Total Coronavirus Cases in China:
Jan 22 near 0
Feb 11 50K
Feb 12 60K
Feb 15 70K
Feb 27 80K
Mar 13 80K
That’s 0 to 50K in 20 days, and in only 16 more days there was a stable total of 80K …
