How might we imagine a transition to a socialist economy? There are clues in unlikely places: the management practices of some private corporations, which have been developing planned, democratic economies in miniature.
via What Socialists Can Take From Corporate Strategic Management
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says authorities have captured 13 “terrorists”, including two US citizens he described as mercenaries, on allegations they were involved in a failed plot to invade the country and oust him.
In a state television address on Monday local time, Maduro showed what he said were the passports and other identification cards of Airan Berry and Luke Denman, who he described as employees of Silvercorp, a Florida-based company whose owner, Jordan Goudreau, has claimed responsibility for the invasion attempt.
via Venezuela coup attempt: American ‘mercenaries’ detained, says Nicolas Maduro
Australian Joint Stock Companies. Multinational Corporations and companies have been working in opposition for years telling us they are serving our common interest a better life through the achievement of shared profit. However growth and profit not for any common good but only in the interests of their shareholders and CEOs. Like the British East India Company the model on which they were built it can only eventually leads to Fascism bankruptcy or revolution. Since their main function is assett stripping material and human resources of a nation which will eventually come to a dead end. Oil, Gas and Mining are perfect examples and will even have nations go to war to further these short term interests. Today more than at any other time in history do we see the Aus government operating as a mercenary protecting the wealth of these major corporations and their shareholders at the expense of the common good of the general population. The pandemic and climate change has brought their less than altruistic activities to the fore. (ODT)
However, the neo-liberal prescriptions for growth and economic management have allowed Australia to fall behind its peers, indeed be overtaken by many countries which are not even its peers. There are many reasons for this, and just as many things to do to fix it. But the solution is not business tax cuts and “IR reform”.
Business taxes have been coming down for years, from as high as 70 per cent, and those corporations hit by the virus won’t pay tax for years anyway. Tax losses. Dozens of the world’s largest companies don’t pay tax here anyway.
On IR reform, we already have the gig economy. Topping that, the JobKeeper scheme has allowed businesses to shed workers without entitlements or pay-outs, and taxpayers picking up the tab. It has saved them billions and given them the option of rehiring or not.
Igglepiggle’s Scoop: Virus War Costs Australia $4 Billion a Week! – Michael West
Non-Payment to the UN, Non-Payment to the WHO, Non-Payment to a global fight against Climate Change, No Payment to The Global Covid Fund Do we get a sense that America has left the planet? No they have armed forces in 149 countries and are sanctioning and threatening others even allies if the don’t support them. The clear message you jump we say how high!! (ODT)
President Donald Trump’s brand of “America First” isolationism was on full display Monday as the U.S. declined to participate in a international pledge drive which raised more than $8 billion during its kick-event to create a global fund to develop and deploy diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
That is the outcome being demanded by the “reopen” protesters who menaced Michigan’s state capitol with confederate flags, Nazi paraphernalia, and assault weapons. They are a tiny group and should not be given too much attention, especially since some of the protests are astroturfed by the super wealthy, such as the DeVos’s in Michigan. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer denounced the racism and Nazism.
via Neo-Nazi “Reopeners” would Kill nearly as many Americans as died in All US Wars
Life and death are on the line and the president and his minions appear reluctant to grasp the reality
The level of Trump’s mendacity is far grosser than that used to sell the Iraq War by claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Then too there were stories of secret laboratories developing biological weapons. Though Trump is purging US intelligence chiefs and replacing them with Trump loyalists, even they could not stomach his latest conspiracy theory. “The intelligence also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified,” said a statement from the office of the director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell.
The purpose of Trump’s lies is not to convince by rational argument but to dominate the news agenda by outrageous allegations. This simple PR trick has previously worked well for him, but scapegoating China may not be enough to divert attention away from the price Americans have paid for his calamitous mishandling of the pandemic. The casualty figures tell their own grim story: in China there have been 84,373 cases of the illness and 4,643 deaths while in the US there have been just over 1.1 million cases and 64,460 deaths. Trump loyalists will claim that the Chinese are lying, but then they must also explain away the lower loss of life in South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.
Others tauting the “open” Swedish model ignore that according to the Swedish Riksbank de facto the Swedish economy is closed. Sweden has experienced a sharper drop in first quarter GDP than the US, with the Swedish economy down 11%. The Riksbank’s estimates are a 70 percent decline in restaurants and cafes, a 90% decline in cinema, sports, and other crowd events. a 40% decline in car sales, a 23% fall in exports, a 30% decline in shoes and clothes purchases, a 75% drop in Swedish recreational travel.
The “open” Swedish model is a bet on herd immunity which at our present state of knowledge is merely an assumption.
President Trump and the neoconservatives are determined to blame China for manufacturing the virus in the Wuhan laboratory despite the fact that the US knew about the research and contributed to its financing, which was approved by Dr. Fauci himself. So when Trump and the warmonger neocons point at China the finger also points at the US.
Sweden Is Not The Model, by Paul Craig Roberts – The Unz Review
Murdoch cares nothing about Australia or Australians. It was Murdoch who tossed his Australian citizenship in the garbage all those years ago when he wanted to spread his tentacles throughout the USA and could not do so with dual citizenship! All Murdoch cares about is himself and the fascist, neoliberal agenda of his IPA!
Murdoch swaggered into News Limited with the instructions: “Kill Whitlam!” … and that’s exactly what the fascist Murdoch papers did! Murdoch was the one who helped bring down the democratically elected Whitlam government and the manipulated, gormless idiots out there in the Australian public hung on to every word, believed his lies and followed his agenda. Murdoch did it all again with Gillard and Rudd and, trust me, he will do it again at the next election!
via Dial M for Monster – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Bernie Sanders didn’t just put forward a set of progressive policies that we can fight for — he showed us that a completely different way of doing politics was possible.
The unbiased conspiracies of Western Intelligence revealed (ODT)
The document, described by the Australian newspaper the Sunday Telegraph, was prepared by “concerned Western governments.” The publication mentions that the Five Eyes intelligence agencies are investigating China, pointing to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.
The authors of the research found some pretty strange ways to paint China’s response to the outbreak in a negative and even sinister way. For instance, despite a presumed requirement for brevity in such a short paper, it refers to a study which claimed the killer coronavirus had been created in a lab.
Host Jamilah King asked Mother Jones DC Bureau Chief David Corn to analyze the ways in which Trump has, or hasn’t, taken responsibility for the United States’ pandemic, uncovering an all-too familiar pattern. “He is trying to blame foreign power for what it did wrong so that we don’t look at what he did wrong,” Corn says.
via “You Can’t Bullshit a Virus.” What Trump Doesn’t Get About His 2020 Election Strategy – Mother Jones
Definition of Insaniy– Trump is but he can’t say it into Herd Immunity but the the leader of a herd of Lemmings. Belief that while death sky rockets now it will have flattened by Nov 2020. In the meantime he’s a rabid dog on the attack of anyone and everyone not kowtowing to him (ODT)
US President Donald Trump had a quick reaction on Sunday, in the US, after former President George W. Bush called for national unity. He attacked Bush.
National unity, Trump made clear, was not on his agenda for the day, even as the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic that has ravaged the country passed 67,000 and tens of millions of out-of-work Americans struggled to get by.
Amid the death and devastation, the President was busy not only assailing Bush but another predecessor as well, embracing a fringe conspiracy theory to accuse former president Barack Obama of masterminding a “hoax” to take him down.
Trump also attacked a prominent Democratic congressman, denigrated the media and threatened to withhold aid to states hard hit by the virus unless they bowed to his demands on immigration policy.
via Bush calls for unity. Trump attacks Bush. And then a host of others
“Bad battleground state polling is why the president lashed out at as campaign manager. He won’t like this from an ABC/Ipsos poll: only 42 percent of Americans now approve of the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. 57 percent disapprove. That’s a 14-point spike in disapproval over the last six weeks.”
via CNN host pours cold water on Trump’s re-election hopes with devastating new poll numbers – Raw Story
Blame Game
To some people the answer is self-evident: China. Maybe those calling for a “China only” investigation should be looking closer to home?
The world is entitled to know the origins of COVID-19 and exactly how the outbreak began and how it was handled by every major nation, including China, given the pandemic alarm was raised back in September 2019. The World At Risk report by WHO and the World Bank Group contained dire warnings of a possible pandemic. These were largely ignored by most G20 countries including Australia. Is it any wonder most countries were dangerously ill-prepared, resulting in needless deaths? Marcus Reubenstein reports.
Thanks to a virus, transported in droplets just 0.005 millimetres in diameter, life as we know it has changed enormously.
The mortality rate of COVID-19 should see that is does not even come close to the deadliest pandemic in global history. However, as the world is so much more interconnected than at any previous time in history, the global disruption and economic fallout is without precedent.
With the world having sustained so much damage, the inevitable question is: Who is to blame?
Expand China investigation – most G20 countries ignored pandemic warning – Michael West
But some of us are in more danger than others: physically, mentally, socially, economically. Not only from the virus itself but from some of the social and political responses to it.
From First Nations people experiencing homelessness being issued with move-on notices to asylum seekers in detention, from frontline health workers to frontline retail workers, from casuals and contractors to visa holders, Covid-19, while imposing a common danger upon all of us, heightens the pre-existing contrasts in society, forcing us to focus on the glaring structural inequalities upon which our economy is built.
With the GOP in death-cult mode, steady destruction of checks and balances previously imagined to be fail-safe, the jelly-spined leadership of the Democratic Party, and the Soviet-grade purging of any disloyalty or disobedience in the federal systems, Trump has effectively destroyed American politics.
What the actual resolution might look like, I fear to envision, but I know it will not resemble anything Americans can remember or dare to imagine.
via Trump’s Nationalism Advances on a Trajectory to Violence
Trump’s accounting methods like his tax returns are not to be publicly seen (ODT)
Those states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Delaware — have recorded 35,718 deaths out of a combined population of about 53.6 million. That mortality rate of 66.6 per 100,000 for the region exceeds the current figure for every European country except Belgium, which, unlike the U.S., includes in its count a large number of deaths in nursing homes that are suspected of being virus-related, but have not been confirmed by testing.
“When @realDonaldTrump makes a macabre ranking, by pointing the finger at Belgium to give the impression that all is well in the U.S.A. I find it disgraceful, the basest of politics.”
via Trump Uses Sleight-of-Hand to Hide His Failure to Save Lives
via Promises Made, Promises Broken: Four Trump Doozies On COVID-19 Response | HuffPost Australia
“The proposition from Beijing is very simple. If you want to go ahead and make policies according to your own national interests, and not ours, we will cut your income. Specifically, China’s official representative to Australia threatened boycotts of four Australian industries’ sales to China: those of the wine, beef, tourism and education sectors.
Sovereignty or money. Simple. What’s Australia’s choice?” Hartcher
If this inquiry was based on genuine medical and scientific grounds then Hartcher might have an argument but it’s not and what he calls China’s “talking points” are as valid as those he aims at it. It’s this politicized Cold War bullshit and our American aping that led us to Korea Vietnam Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Our assistance in the slaughter of a million Indonesians. Black and white choices like this are better understood by asking why are we so eager to be a developing American colony in the Pacific? We are afterall an American military base.
Put in context how many wars have we entered at America’s behest puffed up and acting as one of the USA deputies. War today is America’s economy out of which oligarchs make money and we have subsidized. Was Abbott protecting our national interest when he sent troops to bomb the crap out of the Middle East or America’s oil interests threatened by ISIS? He wanted us in Ukraine and to “shirtfront” Russia to be the “pillock of the Pacific” and an honorary member of NATO. That was a global ambition but Climate Change was not. Whose cost and interest was he serving? What substantial gains have we made historically for always being on America’s side while pretending to be independant? Over the years we have seen all our institutuions becoming less British and more American not independant like New Zealand’s has.
The fact is America has a military presence in 149 countries and is forcibly sanctioning those where it doesn’t but wants the governments changed. Even Australia has a presence in more countries beyond it’s borders than China which has only one.
Apparently we argued strongly against the discovery we were the biggest pp planet warmers? Apparently that’s not in our interest and should be ignored. But not so a global pandemic. Diseases can be discovered like the Spanish flu was in Kansas why wasn’t it called the American flu as the German measles origins unkown. We and Trump want Covid to be called the China virus but like the others it’s origins have never been specifically pinpointed. There was no urgency back then to do so because it was impossible. Why the urgency now? Because the lens through which this demanded inquiry is being made is not purely out of scientific curiosity.
If the blame game had cast a shadow over all previous pandemics there’d be greater reason of national interests not to publicize or warn anyone of any discovery and simply let “herd immunity” run it’s course. The very opposite of what the Chinese did. The demand for this inquiry is a very specific one and not exactly at arms length from Trump. It’s easily seen as part of his scapegoating blame game and desperate excuse for his personal mismanagement. Even the WHO has been blamed and it appears his Australian shadow the LNP has fallen in step behind him. This is in nobody’s national interest America’s or ours but it is in party political interest and very individually specific. (ODT
“Australia has arrived at its moment of truth. It is now presented with the explicit choice between sovereignty and money. It arrived this week when the Chinese Communist Party publicly threatened Australia with trade boycotts for proposing an international inquiry into the global pandemic.”
Bouyed by the success of Bernie Sanders on an International level the Greens have an opportunity to influence the very direction of Australian politics (ODT)
It’s flagship policy is a Green New Deal, articulated along similar lines to those in the United States and the UK, which aims to address the crises of work, inequality, and the climate at the same time.
In theory, conditions seem favorable to turn this around. Even before the pandemic, continent-spanning bushfires transparently linked to climate change devoured 20 percent of our forests and killed at least thirty-four people. Prior to the worst recession since the 1930s, the Liberal–National Coalition government presided over stagnant wages and 3.2 million people living in poverty. Racism and xenophobia were already on the rise — in the last month anti-Chinese and Asian racism has spiked.
While Australia has so far escaped runaway coronavirus infections, the crisis has pushed millions more into poverty and housing insecurity. Excluded from the JobKeeper scheme, millions of casual and migrant workers are particularly vulnerable.
via The Australian Greens Must Democratize Their Party Structures
Parliamentary disclosure is a joke. The Register of Members’ Interests is routinely gamed and ignored by politicians. This is where MPs are supposed to declare their financial interests. Yet even when they do so, in accordance with the rules, key financial conflicts can be concealed. For instance, where an MP puts his lawyer as director of a company which is trustee for a trust and his niece as the beneficiary of that trust, does he or she even have to disclose the existence of a trust at all? In the case of controversial minister Angus Taylor, there have been blatant breaches. Taylor is by no means alone. Jommy Tee reports on Taylor’s other Cayman Islands company, AML
via A Member’s Interests: Angus Taylor’s other Cayman Islands company is wound up – Michael West
The act of encouraging members of his base to court death is clearly that of a man without an ounce of empathy, even for those who love and admire him most — and so of a stone-cold killer. You couldn’t ask for more proof that the only sense of empathy he has lies overwhelmingly in his deep and abiding pity for himself (which matches his staggering sense of self-aggrandizement) and perhaps for his children, other billionaires, and fossil-fuel executives. Them, he would save; the rest of us, his base included, are expendable. He’d sacrifice any of us without a second thought if he imagined that it would benefit him or his reelection in any way.
But there’s no point in leaving it at that. After all, as he pushes for a too-swiftly reopened country, he’s declaring open season on Americans of all sorts. And every one of us who will die too soon should be considered another Covidfire missile death and chalked up to a president who, by the time this is over, will truly have given a new meaning to the phrase assassin-in-chief.
It’s time for the global community to come together in the realization that weapons don’t make us safer. Investment in people—including public health and global cooperation—is infinitely more important than propping up the military-industrial complex.
Fortunately, advocacy and community groups across the world are already mobilizing for change. Even during a time of social distancing, people are finding ways to come together and demand better from our governments.
As the leading military spender, the U.S. has an important leadership role to play in transitioning the world away from military spending and towards spending public funds on things that actually build more resilient communities.
If we’re successful, the next generation will get to experience well-funded public health systems, peaceful societies, and the many benefits that come along with investing in people rather than the Pentagon.
“On the criminally irresponsible directives issued and at the insistence by Trump medications are now being promoted and politicized for use in the USA that show little or no effect on Covid-19 other than saving stockmarket shares and the political image of a president rather than lives of Americans on a “what have we got to lose” basis. Trials have shown that the success rate is as good as Trump’s suggestion to use disinfectant. ( ODT)
Emergency drug approval differs from full FDA approval in that it is only valid while the emergency declaration – in this case, the coronavirus pandemic – remains in effect. Remdesivir is not the first drug to receive such approval for treating Covid-19 – the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were approved on an emergency basis in late March.
The infectious disease expert is being kept from appearing before a House panel to talk about the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, some states, including Texas and Georgia, have begun to reopen businesses. President Donald Trump has referred to right-wing protesters demanding that states reopen workplaces as “great people,” despite their open flouting of social distancing measures as they protest.
via White House Blocks Anthony Fauci From Testifying Next Week | HuffPost Australia
“To start with these words is a 100% guarantee that you WILL be lied to on an EPIC scale.”
Trump’s predictions are as solid as Swiss Cheese 60k to 70k now 100k and that’s after underquoting the numbers ” I did better than doing nothing” says Trump. Sorry Mr Trump but Ameriricans were left to scramble and they alone have done their best with minimal help from you. You did say “I’m not responsible”. They heve hed more help from China and your declaration “It’s not up to the Fed” proved actions speak louder than ” We are gaunna we have ordered”. false promises. (ODT)
“So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people. But if you look at what original projections were — 2.2 million — we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000,” Mr Trump said at a press briefing on Monday.
On Wednesday, the number of deaths passed 60,000, eclipsing the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.
The death toll currently stands at 62,406, according to the latest figures provided by the US Centers for Disease Control.
“It will magically go away in April,” said the Statue of Liberty figurine, echoing a statement made by Mr Trump earlier this year.
via Chinese state media releases animated propaganda video mocking US coronavirus response – ABC News
So Trump insisted with OPEC+ (including Vladimir Putin’s Russia) that they do their effing job and put prices back up to forestall a collapse of the US petroleum industry.
When oil prices began falling in March, Trump was pleased, and said that cheaper gasoline would be good for the consumer. But once the oil state senators began phoning him angrily, Trump all of a sudden became very support of OPEC, and, indeed, insisted that they swing into action to support higher prices.
So Trump sided with US Big Oil against the consumers. What a surprise.
But it was all for naught. Even after the OPEC deal, oil prices are soft, and there isn’t an early prospect of oil prices rising much.
The reality was that the insulation program covered 1.2 million homes which had, by 2015, produced savings of approximately 20,000 gigawatt-hours (72,000 TJ) of electricity and 25 petajoules (6.9×109 kWh) of natural gas. But this was of little interest to the Coalition partners.
Their interest focussed on the tragic loss of life of four workers, accidentally electrocuted, while they were installing the batts. It was this tragedy that the Opposition and the media sought to magnify, purely to discredit the government and gain political advantage.
Notwithstanding the benefits to the economy, particularly in the area of employment, the ongoing reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and being able to avoid a recession, the political outcry from the Opposition and the media, over the four deaths and anecdotal evidence of rorting, was unrelenting.
The Rudd government subsequently suffered a drop in popularity and a perceived mis-management of the economy.
Since then, under intense media attack, the Labor party has been cast as responsible for all ongoing budget deficits (aka, the debt and deficit disaster), while the Liberal/National Coalition has enjoyed the confidence of the media and a deceived public, in matters of financial management, despite the reverse being the reality.
As they say in politics, that’s politics.
Now, however, it seems some comeuppance is on the horizon.
via Is Morrison’s Pink-Batts Moment Coming? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Who else can you trust but yourself and those around you, because you certainly can’t trust Morrison and the app. That’s not what rainbows are made of, and just an aside, when the ‘snap back’ comes, when everything goes back to the ‘normal’ settings, back to blind economy and rampant neoliberalism, corruption and lies, how long will it take for Morrison and the Liberals to fuck you up once more, and now they’ve got the app out of you – Because their ideology never worked to get you out of this one. This one required a good dose of reason and humanitarian socialism, which they lovingly and uncharacteristically bestowed on us, and it’s now theirs to take away. But we can wish for a little bit of genuine democracy on the other side, with a dose of truth and reason, that might help. And we can wait for the vaccine, but who will immunise us against these politicians, I don’t recall picking them up in a wet market.
Did I download the app? You’re kidding me, right?
via Somewhere over the rainbow – on the other side – » The Australian Independent Media Network
In spite of the hysteria, it is important to note that no Americans have been killed or injured as a result of recent Iranian, Russian, Chinese and North Korean actions. When you station ships and planes close to or even on the borders of countries that you have labeled as enemies it would be reasonable to expect that there will be pushback. And as for taking advantage of the virus, it is the United States that has suggested that it would do so in the cases of Iran and Venezuela, exerting “maximum pressure” on both countries in their times of troubles to bring about regime change. If those countries that are accustomed to being regularly targeted by the United States are taking advantage of an opportunity to diminish America’s ability to intervene globally, no one should be surprised, but it is a fantasy to make the hysterical claim that the United States has now become the victim of some kind of vast international conspiracy.
olddogthoughts 
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