BREAKING NEWS

The Geopolitics of World War III
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC3tINgWfQE

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Change Must Go Viral

Change Must Go Viral

The World Cannot Be Fixed With The Same Thinking That Broke It

By Adbusters.com
April 29, 2020

It struck as if from on high, like a bolt of lightning.

After striking an insulating material such as lawn or earth or flesh,
lightning often leaves behind scorch-marks in branch-like patterns,
which trace its path through the stricken material as the latter
undergoes electric breakdown.

Likewise, as the coronavirus contagion has surged through its
human medium, it has left behind a pattern of destruction laying
bare the structural failings of the world as we knew it before
the shock of the pandemic.

The scale of the crisis is historic.

Last Friday, President Trump signed into law a plan for the relief
of the American economy: a stimulus package totalling $2.2 trillion,
the largest relief package in the country’s history.

For comparison, the package wrought under President Obama
in 2009, to alleviate the toll of the Great Recession, came to
a mere $831 billion.

And yet the provision of urgently needed medical supplies, such as
masks and test-kits and ventilators, remains woefully — mortally —
beyond the United States’ reach.

It is a country mighty enough to summon two trillion dollars to
stave off the demise of its economy (and, owing to its central
predominance, that of the rest of the globe), but unwilling to
do much of anything to save the lives of its citizens.

This is a matter not just of the current president’s especial
callousness, nor of his unfortunate intellectual shortcomings.

It is a symptom of the country’s diseased moral makeup,
at least as manifested among the powerful.

No more hospital beds will be procured until they prove able to
turn a profit; no factories will be converted to the manufacture
of ventilators unless doing so becomes gainful.

In times of crisis, only warfare has provoked the political will
necessary to override the supremacy of American wealth, thereby
harnessing the economy to serve the immediate interests of
the nation, rather than solely its elite.

If the imminent deaths of tens of thousands of are not enough
to motivate the same today, then there is little else that will.

To leave the burden of choice — to earn, or to aid — up to the
charity of private individuals is grossly negligent, if not criminal.

It remains to be seen just how charitable they will prove to be.

Meanwhile, as nearly every nation on Earth wrestles with the
costs of the pandemic (which doubtless will endure in the form
of enormous debts, not to mention the loss of many lives and
even more livelihoods), other existential dangers loom.

In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the
Doomsday Clock closer to midnight — one hundred seconds
away — than at any time since its establishment in 1947.

Today’s nuclear powers are plunging headlong into not just
a renewal but an acceleration of the Cold War’s race towards
annihilation.

Furthermore, though the worsening of the climate crisis has been
temporarily allayed by the virus’ precipitating a plummet in fossil
-fuel consumption, it will resume with a vengeance once everyone
— that is, everyone who still has a job — returns to work.

Whether the coronavirus can soon be controlled, larger disasters
await.

As this perilous situation has thrown into stark relief, “business
as usual” is sorely inadequate to the solving of threats the likes
of which all of humanity must face as one.

Indeed, this state of affairs has not only abetted the pandemic;
it lay at the very root of it.

Densely intermeshed, global supply chains, transporting goods
and people all across the surface of the Earth, ensured that any
novel and highly contagious disease, once introduced into this
network, would rapidly become widespread without improbably
proactive intervention on the part of the world’s leadership.

What is more, the post-2008 financial paradigm left the global
economy critically vulnerable to further and greater
destabilization.

Meantime, the strained political mood, both within and between
the world’s most powerful states, inspires little confidence in the
prospect of a worldwide united front in the face of worldwide
problems.

Morale is in short supply, while fear risks metastasizing into a
pandemic of its own.

The cracks are showing, and yesterday’s approach can only fail
to stop their spread.

The world cannot be fixed with the same thinking that broke it.

The rotten nature of the financialized global economy must
be addressed.

The vital necessity of healthcare, for all of society, must be
recognized.

The unchecked political and economic orthodoxies that brought
humanity to such a state of peril must be overturned.

All habits and assumptions must be reconsidered.

Sweeping, systemic change must go viral; all else points to
darkness.  


https://www.adbusters.org/articles-coded/change-must-go-viral 

Monday, April 27, 2020

Dear Washington D.C.

Dear Washington D.C.

By The Last Boy In Line
Monday, April 27, 2020

Dear Washington D.C.:


Sincerely,

Friday, April 24, 2020

Dear America

Dear America

By The Last Boy In Line
Friday, April 24, 2020

Dear America:


Sincerely,

Monday, April 20, 2020

Dear Capitalism

Dear Capitalism

By The Last Boy In Line
Monday, April 20, 2020

Dear Capitalism:


Sincerely,

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Capitalism Has Failed In Fighting Coronavirus

Capitalism Has Failed In Fighting Coronavirus

By Richard D. Wolff
Information Clearing House
April 16, 2020

As economies reel from the meltdown triggered by the novel
coronavirus pandemic, governments scramble to build the system
back up.

But it’s the system that brought about the fall, and if we keep
reviving it, will do so again.

The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve
throwing huge amounts of money at collapsed economies in
response to the coronavirus threat.

Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low
interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks:
“to get them through the crisis.”

Government treasuries borrow vast sums to spend the collapsed
economy back into what they imagine is “the normal, pre-virus
economy.”

Capitalism’s leaders are rushing into policy failures because of
their ideological blinders.

The problem of policies aimed at returning the economy to what it
was before the virus hit is this: global capitalism by 2019 was itself
a major cause of the collapse in 2020.

Capitalism’s scars from the crashes of 2000 and 2008/09
had not healed.

Years of low interest rates had enabled corporations and
governments to “solve” all their problems by borrowing
limitlessly at almost zero interest rate cost.

All the new money pumped into economies by central banks had
indeed caused the feared inflation but chiefly in stock markets
whose prices thus spiraled dangerously far away from underlying
economic values and realities.

Inequalities of income and wealth reached historic highs.

In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash
that any number of possible triggers could unleash.

The trigger this time was not the dot.com meltdown of 2000 nor
the sub-prime meltdown of 2008/09; it was the virus.

And of course, mainstream ideology requires focusing on
the trigger, not the vulnerability.

Thus mainstream policies aim to re-establish pre-virus capitalism.

Even if they ‘succeed’, that will return us to a capitalist system
whose accumulated vulnerabilities will soon collapse again from
yet another trigger.

In light of the coronavirus pandemic, I focus criticism at capitalism
and the vulnerabilities it has accumulated for several reasons.

Viruses are part of nature.

They have attacked human beings – sometimes dangerously
– in both distant and recent history.

In 1918, the so-called ‘Spanish flu’ killed nearly 700,000 in
the US and millions elsewhere.

Recent viruses include SARS, MERS, Ebola, etc. What matters
to public health is each society’s preparedness: stockpiled tests,
masks, ventilators, hospital beds, trained personnel, etc. to
manage dangerous viruses.

In the US, such objects are produced by private capitalist
enterprises whose goal is profit.

It was not profitable to produce and stockpile such products,
which was not and still is not being done.

Nor did the US government produce or stockpile those medical
products.

Top US government personnel privilege private capitalism;
it is their primary object to protect and strengthen it.

Result: neither private capitalism nor the US government performed
a most basic duty of any economic system: to protect and maintain
public health and safety.

US capitalism’s response to the coronavirus continues to be what
it has been since December 2019: too little, too late.

It failed.

It is the problem.

The second reason I focus on capitalism is because the responses
to today’s economic collapse by Trump, GOP, and most Democrats
carefully avoid any criticism of capitalism.

They all debate the virus, China, foreigners, other politicians…
just never the system they all serve.

When Trump and others press people to return to churches and
jobs despite thereby risking their lives and those of others, they
place reviving a collapsed capitalism ahead of public health.

The third reason capitalism gets the blame here is because
alternative systems – not driven by a profit-first logic – could
manage viruses better.

While not profitable to produce and stockpile everything
needed for a viral pandemic, it is efficient.

The wealth already lost in this pandemic far exceeds the cost to
have produced and stockpiled the now missing tests, ventilators,
etc. that contribute so much to today’s disaster.

Capitalism often pursues profit at the expense of more urgent
social needs and values.

In this, capitalism is grossly inefficient.

This pandemic is now bringing that truth home to people.

A worker-coop based economy – where workers democratically run
enterprises, deciding what, how, and where to produce and what
to do with any profits – could and likely would put social needs and
goals (like proper preparation for pandemics) ahead of profits.

Workers are the majority in all capitalist societies; their interests
are those of the majority. Employers are always a small minority;
theirs are the ‘special interests’ of that minority.

Capitalism gives that minority the position, profits, and power to
determine how the society as a whole lives or dies.

That’s why all employees now wonder and worry how long our jobs,
incomes, homes, bank accounts, etc. will last if we still have them.

A minority (employers) decides all those questions and excludes the
majority (employees) from making those decisions even though that
majority must live with their results.

Of course, the top priority now is to put public health and safety
first.

To that end, employees across the country are now thinking
about refusing to obey orders to work in unsafe job conditions.

US capitalism has thus placed a general strike on today’s social
agenda.

A close second priority is to learn from capitalism’s failure in
the face of coronavirus.

We must not suffer such a dangerous and unnecessary social
breakdown again.

Thus, system change is now also moving onto today’s social agenda.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55041.htm

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Dear Easter

Dear Easter  

By The Last Boy In Line
Sunday, April 12, 2020  

Dear Easter:  


Sincerely,