HE’S YOUR PRESIDENT AMERICA (ODT)
“We have developed a testing capacity unmatched and unrivaled anywhere in the world,” he said. While the United States has in fact done the highest raw number of coronavirus tests of any country, its per capita testing rate is still behind several other countries’:
via Trump Claims the US Has “Prevailed” on Testing, Then Storms Out of the Rose Garden – Mother Jones
Against all of this background, are you now convinced about the dangerous mental state of the POTUS? What is the Trump Dx? Have recent events been a ‘clincher’ for you too?
If you still harbour doubts, read this article in Salon. Are you alarmed? Is the whole world in peril with this man at the helm?
What can be done?
via The Trump Dx – Have we seen the clincher? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
and
Our legal system purports to place no person above the law. The court’s decision on Trump’s tax returns will tell us whether that principle stands strong — or is just so many empty words.
via The stakes of Trump’s tax return case couldn’t be higher (opinion) – CNN
They tell others to do what they don’t (ODT)
Fox News hosts from Tucker Carlson to Laura Ingraham have used their platforms to celebrate the anti-government protesters, some of whom attend rallies bearing guns. At an “American Patriots” rally in Michigan earlier this month, a group of militia members in military-style getups blocked the office of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after armed protesters entered the state capitol building.
Commercial Espionage it’s not China (ODT)
And where to go from here? Friedman opines that “the equation of U.S.-Israel relations needs to be flipped. Rather than Americans seeing themselves as helping Israel, they must realize how much Israel can do for the U.S. – for example, by putting groundbreaking Israeli innovations on the market in the U.S. first.” Sure, steal the technology, re-engineer it, and then quietly arrange sweetheart trade deals through one’s co-religionists to sell it back to the suckers in the United States.
via Israel To Annex the United States, by Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review
Some Unions are part of the problem (ODT)
Insecure, underpaid, and often dangerous work is not just a feature of the global health crisis — it’s built into Australian capitalism. Illegal underpayment of workers is a business model for many employers.
Retail and fast food workers face an additional challenge. Unlike the other workforces who can turn to their unions for protection, the largest union that purports to represent workers in these sectors is an active collaborator in their exploitation.
via Australia’s Youngest Union Is Organizing Retail and Fast-Food Workers
POLITICAL ATTACKS on investigative journalism by the Morrison Government pose a significant threat to Australia’s democracy.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is shrinking – Facebook is now 60 times the size – yet its political clout still has Australia’s politicians entranced. When will its hold over politicians fade?
News Corp is just not that big any more. Google is worth $US946 billion on the sharemarket and Apple $US1.3 trillion while the American media mogul Rupert Murdoch presides over an empire in decay. News is valued by the sharemarket at a piddling $9.5 billion.
We say piddling with tongue firmly planted in cheek. It is still enormous but it is shrinking. Having just posted a billion-dollar loss for the March quarter, News and its rival Nine continue to flog assets to raise cash.
My generation grew up without vaccines and without all of the associated illnesses associated with vaccines among the over-vaccinated youth of today. Today vaccinations begin at birth and increase into high numbers. Does the natural immune system ever develop?
That is an irrelevant question. The driving force behind vaccination is profit, not health. If we want a health system instead of a death system, Big Pharma must be nationalized and run by scientists on salaries without patent rights and “performance bonuses.”
What scientists might learn from such studies, like the new contact-tracing one in Massachusetts, remains to be seen, but surely one inescapable conclusion is that this virus is smarter, more agile, and faster on its feet than any of its associates we’ve met before or, for that matter, than most of our public officials, from a failed president on down. And for any readers who believe in politics more than science, let me just say that without science, you won’t even know what hit you.
I Left Norway’s Lockdown for the US. The Difference Is Shocking. | The Nation
What the LNP call “casual work” is actually “precarious”. With the destruction of unions a priority work became increasingly “precarious ” or “insecure”. How did it get this way when Royal Commissions found trade unions to be basically honest and Banks and Business callous and corrupt. Where was the ALP during all of this?(ODT)
Australians deserve better than a post-crisis “snapback” to an economy in which workers worry about job insecurity while jobseekers are relegated to poverty, Anthony Albanese will declare on Monday.
In his latest “headland” speech, the Labor leader will sharpen his message that the public is looking for a recovery “in which no one is left behind” and will not accept a return to “the law of the jungle and unfettered market forces”.
News Corporation is the latest international media company to reveal that it has been hit hard by COVID-19, with third-quarter accounts showing a $US1 billion ($1.5 billion) loss.It is a setback that spurred Rupert Murdoch to join the growing list of senior executives forgoing their bonuses for this year.
But while the US, like the rest of the world, is feeling the heat from COVID-19, much of News Corp’s pain came from Australia.
As the owner of 65 per cent of pay TV operator Foxtel, News Corp’s accounts give an insight into how Foxtel is travelling.
Coronavirus update: Follow all the latest news in our daily wrapAnd it’s not pretty.
“In one, two, three years, then either they totally change their business model and become like another Netflix, or, you know, another model that they may think of, otherwise I don’t think they will survive for much longer.”
As Virgin Australia found out a few weeks ago, when shareholders stop stumping up the cash for a loss-making business, the consequences are dire.
It beggars the question of just how many more $1 billion-plus writedowns Mr Murdoch is prepared to tolerate
Coronavirus losses may force Newscorp and Rupert Murdoch to rethink Foxtel business model – ABC News
This is symbolic of the REAL America today being led into the darkness by Trump (ODT)
A company that offered to make life-saving protective masks as the coronavirus began its spread across the U.S. in January was snubbed by government officials.
Michael Bowen, the owner of medical supply company Prestige Ameritech, told the Department of Health and Human Services that he could begin producing 1.7 million N95 masks a week, only to be denied, The Washington Post first reported.
“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen emailed a top HHS official on Jan. 22, the day the first coronavirus case was detected in the country. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.”
Laura Wolf, director of the agency’s Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection, responded that the government wasn’t “anywhere near answering those questions for you yet” in response to Bowen’s offer.
“We are the last major domestic mask company,” Bowen emailed the next day. “My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’ government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman second.”
The new revelation is part of an 89-page whistleblower complaint from former federal vaccine chief Rick Bright, who alleges he was removed from his position as retaliation for his early warnings about the pandemic and his refusal to make “potentially harmful drugs” to combat the virus.
In the past, the Pentagon suggested that it does not have the resources to conduct on-the-ground investigations in cases in which civilians are alleged to have been killed. Recently, reports surfaced that the military has begun requesting more funds to help track civilian deaths. But independent researchers and nongovernmental organizations have already been carrying out such investigations for years, with far few resources than the Pentagon — with its vast budget — has at its disposal. All this raises the question of who exactly the military has been killing over nearly two decades of war.
via Pentagon Releases a Rosy Report on Civilian Casualties in Foreign Wars
US Military is in Colombia. The US is sanctioning Venezuela. The US wants Exxon to control the oil as they do in Iraq and Syria. Why Green Solar and Wind energy is essential (ODT)
Liberate citizens from the centrally controlled fossil fuel industries. Expand opportunities for work and self determination from the grass roots up transition to not from new opportunities. (ODT
Just as we’re remembering to wash our hands more than we used to, coming out of the pandemic, it will pay to be more attentive about remembering to choose the zero-emissions option at every step.
We stand at a crossroads. If government stimulus packages around the world favour carbon-intensive practices and miss the moment to modernise and decarbonise, we will lock ourselves into a warming future.
If, however, we rise to the challenge, we can use the recovery from one crisis to simultaneously address another.The Conversation
via Why it doesn’t make Economic Sense to Ignore Climate Change in our Recovery from the Epidemic
Advisors Consultants what do MPs really do in their hammocks other than memorising their talking points? (ODT)
via Government spending on consultants still soars despite economic calamity – Michael West
She’s not that Kind (ODT)
Even Joe Biden — who sits on the conservative end of a Democratic Party more conservative than most of New Zealand’s political spectrum — has called for measures that go further than our government’s response. At various times, Biden has called for direct cash payments to families, freezing and forgiving rent payments, a moratorium on utility shutoffs, and forgiving at least $10,000 of student debt, a proposal that has been considered a laughable half-measure by American progressives, but has no comparable equivalent in New Zealand politics at the moment. That Joe Biden of all people has a more progressive vision than a New Zealand Labour-led government should prompt some serious soul-searching by our country’s liberals.
The worry is that even as the government has pumped more than $30 billion into financial markets, an inordinate number of New Zealanders now have less money to spend, and a bigger share of the meager income they do have has to be directed toward paying off debts, including any credit card and landlord debts they may have run up under lockdown. This is not only immoral, but as some economists have warned, could be economically disastrous, as less and less money goes toward buying the goods and services that drive the actual economy, and more and more goes into the world of finance.
via New Zealand’s Coronavirus Response Isn’t as Great as It Seems
I’m not advocating a socialist overthrow of our whole system here. I’m not even advocating that we stay like this permanently. I’m simply saying that now that so many of us have taken a step off the hamster wheel, it’s worth realising that the faster we ran, the faster the wheel went and maybe we could move a little bit more slowly when we do get back on.
Today’s Sermon From Saint Scotty Of Marketing – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The horrific truth is that the uncoordinated, slipshod economic reopening spurred on by Trump and his minions is likely to double our per capita deaths before Election Day. At that point we will lead the world both in deaths per capita and in the total number of Covid-19 deaths. He finally will have made America number one again.
We have to face up to the chilling truth: To win reelection Trump is willfully allowing the virus to kill more and more of us, especially our most vulnerable—the old, the infirm, the poor, and the essential low-wage workers.
It’s on us if we let him get away with it.
via President Donald Trump Culls the Herd | The Smirking Chimp
The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation’s top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press.
The files also show that after the AP reported Thursday that the guidance document had been buried, the Trump administration ordered key parts of it to be fast-tracked for approval.
The trove of emails show the nation’s top public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spending weeks working on guidance to help the country deal with a public health emergency, only to see their work quashed by political appointees with little explanation.
via Top White House Officials Buried CDC Report On Reopening Country | HuffPost
When the cart starts pulling the ss in another direction you know the ass was heading to the knackery. (ODT)
via Fox News starts to turn its attention away from the coronavirus pandemic | Media Matters for America
The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to ensure that America’s meatpackers, immigrant and native-born alike, continue to work during the coronavirus pandemic at considerable risk to themselves, their families, and the entire public. “It’s genocide against the working class,” the leader of Teamsters Local 238, which represents meatpackers in Iowa, told the Guardian. And while the unions that continue to represent these workers are pushing back, their actual power is a shadow of what it was fifty years ago.
So workers crowd in refrigerated facilities as a deadly virus makes its way down the disassembly line — all so the grocery store shelves will remain stocked for consumers and voters, and the Beef Trust will stay in the black. Modern meatpacking may not be the unsanitary industry of The Jungle, but in the absence of strong worker organization, the nauseating disregard for human well-being remains.
via Conditions in US Meatpacking Plants Today Aren’t Much Better Than They Were in The Jungle
Ocasio-Cortez has been the only Democrat in Congress to come out against the coronavirus relief packages; she said she “couldn’t stomach” voting for the previous bill knowing she would have to go back to her community “having to fundraise for diapers and fundraise for food myself because the federal government has chosen not to.”
Imperial over-reach was on full display this week as the US government demanded that a pair of US citizens — former Special Forces soldiers leading a 60-man invasion of Venezuela with the goal of fomenting a coup and/or capturing or killing that country’s elected president — be released from arrest and returned to the US.
Bad enough that the US almost certainly knew in advance about this invasion which involved multiple simultaneous border crossings and beach landings by mercenary forces, many of them reportedly sketchy former Venezuelan soldiers involved in the drug trade, who were on a payroll as soldiers-for-hire. But how about the gall to also claim that when the effort fails, the intended victim of the coup, Venezuela, has no legitimate right to punish the perpetrators, but must release them to their home country, the US — a country that has for years been trying to oust Venezuela’s elected government?
Mike Seccombe: ‘ It sounds like a marketing slogan, almost a cliché: in times of national crisis, Australians turn to the national broadcaster. But over the past six months or so, it has proved profoundly true.First came the bushfire crisis, when the ABC’s network of regional reporters distinguished themselves not just in reporting the disaster as it unfolded but also warning those in harm’s way. Then came the current coronavirus crisis….Continue Reading
Take the Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, which measure online interaction. In December last year, on the back of its bushfire coverage, the broadcaster surged into second place with a “unique audience” of more than 10 million – passing Nine and just behind news.com.au, which both fell.
By January, the ABC was No. 1 in the country, with an audience of 11.2 million, well ahead of the Murdoch news site. The most recent figures, for March, showed its audience up to 15.2 million, a 53 per cent gain in a single month, and almost three million ahead of its closest rival.
In one sense, this is unsurprising. Innumerable surveys over the decades have shown the ABC to be the most trusted media outlet, and one of the most trusted institutions in the country.
On another level, though, it is remarkable that the ABC has done so well during these particular crises – given that it has been working while grievously wounded. Since the current government came to power in 2014, the broadcaster has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and about 1000 jobs.
The Australian Labor Party’s Kristina Keneally is using the lockdown to call for a reduction in immigration once borders reopen, citing the nativist trope that migrant workers are driving down wages. But it’s not immigrants that have driven down Australian workers’ wages — it’s the Labor Party’s own history of neoliberal policies.
A majority of Americans are today wary of unlocking the economy and opening up the nation. Yet, each week, more and more people are demanding that it be done. And each week, more and more governors, reflecting the views of their constituents, are moving up the dates for partial reopenings.
By midsummer, the country will have caught up with Trump. That is the idea that animates the pivot.
Behind Trump’s Strategic Pivot, by Pat Buchanan – The Unz Review
Now, sure, you may read Daniels’s piece and wonder: yeah, what’s the point of looking back and holding people accountable?
Well, for one thing, we want a deterrent: we want public officials to fear that if they break laws, act unethically, or otherwise harm the public during a lethal pandemic, they will face some form of justice in the future from those looking back on their actions. That justice can be meted out in all kinds of ways — prosecution, firing, or at least public shaming in front of a national commission that has subpoena and discovery power.
But beyond deterrence, we should also want accountability in order to learn and grow as a society.
A country that doesn’t hold accountable those who lied us into the Iraq War is a country that effectively says it is fine with being lied into any war in the future.
A country that doesn’t hold accountable those corporate executives who created the financial crisis is a country that tells those executives they can continue fleecing us without fear of punishment — just as they have.
In short, a country that lets demands for bipartisanship create a cover-up is a country that refuses to learn from history — and then is doomed to repeat it.
via David Sirota: A Bipartisan Effort to Prevent Accountability for the Coronavirus Response Is Underway
Division for division sake is a political act. (ODT)
via Deconstructed Podcast: Are Trump and the Anti-Lockdown Militias Itching for Violence?
Now another person close to Trump has tested positive, this time a member of the U.S. Navy who serves as a personal valet to Trump inside the White House and is responsible for serving Donald Trump his meals. (Side note: How weird is it there is an elite Navy unit dedicated to being the president’s butlers?)
CNN reports Trump was “upset” at the news and things were “hitting the fan” inside the White House. Unlike some of the earlier exposures, this member of the U.S. Navy was said to be symptomatic when tested.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said both Pence and Trump have since tested negative. The rub is the rapid tests for COVID-19 have 14.8% rate of false negatives. So, a negative test today does not necessarily mean a negative test tomorrow.
via Trump’s Personal Valet Has Tested Positive For COVID-19 | Crooks and Liars
Meanwhile Trump authorised Treasury to stop the $1,200 cheques sent to those that owe the government any money. (ODT)
Canada has become the latest country to refuse pandemic bailout money for tax dodgers. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joins leaders of Denmark, Poland and France in axing financial aid to corporations registered in offshore tax havens. Noel Turnbull reports.
Should tax dodgers get taxpayer-funded COVID-19 bailout? – Michael West
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