Riots in Covid-19 era are the ‘language of the unheard’, looted bare by white elite

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The massive scale of the protests sparked by the police killing of a black man in Minneapolis bares the roots of American discrimination – economic woe and ‘legal’ ruling-class looting, multiplied amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The killing of 46-year-old black man George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis has sparked a wave of violent protests rooted in something bigger than one more terrible incident of racist police brutality.

There is nothing new, sadly, about mass black protests in the wake of a white police officer killing an unarmed black man in the 21st Century United States. Mass marches and confrontations with police and (in some cases) the National Guard followed the ‘police-involved killings’ of Eric Garner (New York City in July 2014), Mike Brown (in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014), Walter Lamar Scott (North Charleston, South Carolina in April 2015), Freddie Gray (Baltimore in April 2015), Philando Castille (Falcon Heights, Minnesota in July 2016), and Keith Lamont Scott (Charlotte, North Carolina in September 2016).

Familiar unrest on a massive scale

With the killing of Floyd, however, the response has gone beyond the usual ‘Black Lives Matter’ speeches, marches, and confrontations. Minneapolis has experienced four days and nights of civil disturbance, with over 100 buildings damaged or looted. The unrest has included popular break-ins to appropriate life necessities and other goods from corporate retail outlets (“looting”), and arson, including the remarkable burning down of the Minneapolis police precinct that was home base for the four cops complicit in Floyd’s death.

The city’s white mayor has been compelled to apologize for the killing, and Minnesota’s governor has acknowledged “institutional racism” even while deploying the National Guard to squelch the rebellion.

Donald Trump has used social media to threaten state-sanctioned mass murder by tweeting that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – a comment Twitter flagged for “glorifying violence.” Trump’s phrase is taken from southern segregationists cracking down on black protests since the 1960s,

As nobody in the mainstream US media wants to admit, looting is a regular and highly organized ruling-class activity in the US. The recent bipartisan $2.2 trillion coronavirus pandemic corporate bailout (passed with only a pittance of relief for the nation’s working-class majority) is just the latest example. “How much,”left activist Doug Selwyn writes me, “have the rich looted, that is, stolen through tax giveaways and bailouts... trillions... with no real protest?” (None, at least since the Obama administration and Democratic-run city governments moved to repress the Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011.)

The “Say His Name, George Floyd” rebellion has spread from Phoenix to Columbus, Denver, Memphis, Los Angeles and other US cities, with thousands converging in city centers and marching on state capitols. Gunfire has broken out in numerous cities, including Louisville, where crowds rose up against the fatal police shooting of 26-year-old black woman Breonna Taylor. In downtown Columbus, protesters occupied major arteries, broke Ohio statehouse windows, shattered retail storefronts, and broke into the DGX store, a subsidiary of Dollar General.

Ultimately, the protests reached the capital, where tear gas was sprayed at protesters outside a locked-down White House.

Why the special and prolonged intensity of civil unrest after George Floyd’s death? Some of the property destruction has been initiated by white Americans of different ideological stripes – including, some allege, a St. Paul police officer functioning as an agent provocateur by smashing the windows of an AutoZone outlet. Right-wing white nationalists and neofascists may be actively seeking to spark the “race war” that they have long been advocating. Left-wing anarchists and antifascists may be seizing an opportunity to spark chaos and rebellion.

ALSO ON RT.COM White people should acknowledge they DO have privilege & life IS easier for them. Only then world’s racial wounds can be healed

Economic desperation

Still, it stands to reason that a significant number of black Americans would engage in serious civil unrest.

The Floyd killing, with a white police officer kneeling on his victim’s neck for eight minutes, is hauntingly reminiscent of the NYPD’s infamous, nationally scandalous killing of Eric Garner. Like Garner, Floyd was a middle-aged man charged with a nonviolent offense who pleaded “I can’t breathe” while being asphyxiated by a vicious white officer in a senseless assault caught on video.

Looting of retail stores is about economic desperation, as well as civil and human rights. Covid-19, and the economic depression that the coronavirus has sparked in the US, has hit already deeply impoverished and highly segregated black communities with special and tragic virulence. The median black household net worth is $17,600, compared with $171,000 for white households. The national black unemployment and poverty rates have long been at least twice as high as the white rates. As the real US employment reaches 20% or higher, one can be sure that the joblessness measure in the nation’s black ghettoes is much higher than that. And black Americans with jobs are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage occupations without health insurance – no small problem as Covid-19 wreaks special havoc in their neighborhoods.

It doesn’t help that the nation’s top job, the US presidency, is held this time around by a longstanding racist – a neofascistic white-nationalist who has called for the nation’s predominantly white police to “get tough” when dealing with urban communities of color. “Get tough” is code for beat, maim, and kill.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1966 reflections on the race riots of the mid-1960s apply well to the “Say His Name” uprising of 2020. “A riot,”King said, “is the language of the unheard… America has failed to hear… [that] the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”

Black riots are crimes – enabled by white looting

Do black rioters and looters in the streets (understood so differently from Trump and other looters in the suites) disrespect the law, as their white critics charge? Yes, King said on national Canadian radio in 1967, adding that rioters’ transgressions were “derivative crimes… born of the greater crimes of the… policy-makers of the white society,” who “created discrimination… created slums [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty… The white man,”King elaborated, “does not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.”

Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said in 1967, noting that their aggression was “to a startling degree… focused against property rather than against people.” King observed that “property represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [understandably] attacking and trying to destroy.”Against those who held property “sacred,” King argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being.”

Americans who reflexively condemn the “looting” and property violence on display in Minneapolis, Columbus, and elsewhere would do well to reflect on Dr. King’s judgement more than half a century later. The destruction of a window or building and the appropriation without purchase of household goods are minor crimes compared to the killing of human beings and the penning up of millions of people of color in ghettos and prisons where poverty, joblessness, and ill-health are rife, and where a deadly pandemic spreads disease and economic misery with extraordinary ferocity.

“The robbery we should concern ourselves with,”writes William C. Anderson, “is the theft perpetrated by a system that creates desperation where people in need have to go and take for themselves what should be a guaranteed right.”

Property is not more important than black life. Neither is the law.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Paul Street is the author of numerous books, including They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014) and The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Routledge, 2011).



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For Victory Day: It’s Time to Think About Finally Winning WWII

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This article is part of a series on disgusting US-led imperialism

Matthew Ehret


Samuel Prescott Bush, son of a minister, laid the foundation for the family’s fortune. Known as the grand patriarch of the Bush clan, he was an Ohio steel and railroad executive. (Sources: Business InsiderWikimedia Commons/Columbus Castings)


75 years ago Germany surrendered to allied forces finally ending the ravages of the Second World War.

Today, as the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of this victory, why not think very seriously about finally winning that war once and for all?

If you’re confused by this statement, then you might want to sit down and take a deep breath before reading on. Within the next 12 minutes, you will likely discover a disturbing fact which may frighten you a little bit: The allies never actually won World War II…

Now please don’t get me wrong. I am eternally thankful for the immortal souls who gave their lives to put down the fascist machine during those bleak years… but the fact is that a certain something wasn’t resolved on the 9th of May, 1945 which has a lot to do with the slow re-emergence of a new form of fascism during the second half of the 20th century and the renewed danger of a global bankers’ dictatorship which the world faces again today.

It is my contention that it is only when we find the courage to really look at this problem with sober eyes, that we will be able to truly honor our courageous forebears who devoted their lives to winning a peace for their children, grandchildren and humanity more broadly.

The Ugly Truth of WWII

I’ll stop beating around the Bush now and just say it: Adolph Hitler or Benito Mussolini were never “their own men”.

The machines they led were never fully under their sovereign control and the financing they used as fuel in their effort to dominate the world did not come from the Banks of Italy or Germany. The technologies they used in petrochemicals, rubber, and computing didn’t come from Germany or Italy, and the governing scientific ideology of eugenics that drove so many of the horrors of Germany’s racial purification practices never originated in the minds of German thinkers or from German institutions.

Were it not for a powerful network of financiers and industrialists of the 1920s-1940s with names such as Rockefeller, Warburg, Montague Norman, Osborn, Morgan, Harriman or Dulles, then it can safely be said that fascism would never have been possible as a “solution” to the economic woes of the post-WWI order. To prove this point, let us take the strange case of Prescott Bush as a useful entry point.


Prescott Bush, George HW Bush's father, and grandfather of George W Bush, in his "established" period.

Here's Prescott, again, with "Poppy" Bush (41st president)


The patriarch of the same Bush dynasty that gave the world two disastrous American presidents (and nearly a third had Donald Trump not annihilated Jeb at the last minute in 2016) made a name for himself funding Nazism alongside his business partners Averell Harriman and Averell’s younger brother E. Roland Harriman (the latter who was to recruit Prescott to Skull and Bones while both studying at Yale). Not only did Prescott, acting as director of Brown Brothers Harriman, provide valuable loans to keep the bankrupt Nazi party afloat during Hitler’s loss of support in 1932 when the German population voted into office the anti-Fascist General Kurt von Schleicher as Chancellor, but was even found guilty for “Trading with the enemy” as director of Union Banking Corporation in 1942!

That’s right! As demonstrated in the 1992 Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, eleven months after America entered WWII, the Federal Government naturally conducted an investigation of all Nazi banking operations in the USA and wondered why Prescott continued to direct a bank which was so deeply enmeshed with Fritz Thyssen’s Bank voor Handel en Scheepvart of the Netherlands. Thyssen for those who are un-aware is the German industrial magnate famous for writing the book “I Paid Hitler”. The bank itself was tied to a German combine called Steel Works of the German Steel Trust which controlled 50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron, 41.4% of its universal plate, 38.5% of its galvanized steel, 45.5% of its pipes and 35% of its explosives. Under Vesting Order 248, the U.S. federal government seized all of Prescott’s properties on October 22, 1942.

The U.S.-German Steel combine was only one small part of a broader operation as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had created a new international cartel alongside IG Farben (the fourth largest company in the world) in 1929 under the Young Plan. Owen Young was a JP Morgan asset who headed General Electric and instituted a German debt repayment plan in 1928 that gave rise to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and consolidated an international cartel of industrialists and financiers on behalf of the City of London and Wall Street. The largest of these cartels saw Henry Ford’s German operations merging with IG Farben, Dupont industries, Britain’s Shell and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The 1928 cartel agreement also made it possible for Standard Oil to pass off all patents and technologies for the creation of synthetic gasoline from coal to IG Farben thus allowing Germany to rise from producing merely 300 000 tons of natural petroleum in 1934 to an incredible 6.5 million tons (85% of its total) during WWII! Had this patent/technology transfer not taken place, it is a fact that the modern mechanized warfare that characterized WWII could never have occurred.

Two years before the Young Plan began, JP Morgan had already given a $100 million loan to Mussolini’s newly established fascist regime in Italy- with Democratic Party kingmaker Thomas Lamont playing the role of Prescott Bush in Wall Street’s Italian operation. It wasn’t only JP Morgan who loved Mussolini’s brand of corporate fascism, but Time Magazine’s Henry Luce unapologetically gushed over Il Duce putting Mussolini on the cover of Time eight times between 1923 and 1943 while relentlessly promoting fascism as the “economic miracle solution for America” (which he also did in his other two magazines Fortune and Life). Many desperate Americans, still traumatized from the long and painful depression begun in 1929, had increasingly embraced the poisonous idea that an American fascism would put food on the table and finally find help them find work.

A few words should be said of Brown Brothers Harriman.

Bush’s Nazi bank itself was the spawn of an earlier 1931 merger which took place between Montagu Norman’s family bank (Brown Brothers) and Harriman, Bush and Co. Montague Norman was the Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, leader of the Anglo-German Fellowship Trust and controller of Germany’s Hjalmar Schacht (Reichsbank president from 1923-1930 and Minister of Economy from 1934-1937). Norman was also the primary controller of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) from its creation in 1930 throughout the entirety of WWII.

The Central Bank of Central Banks

Although the BIS was established under the Young Plan and nominally steered by Schacht as a mechanism for debt repayments from WWI, the Swiss-based “Central Bank of Central Banks” was the key mechanism for international financiers to fund the Nazi machine. The fact that the BIS was under the total control of Montagu Norman was revealed by Dutch Central Banker Johan Beyen who said “Norman’s prestige was overwhelming. As the apostle of central bank cooperation, he made the central banker into a kind of arch-priest of monetary religion. The BIS was, in fact, his creation.”


George H.W. Bush doing some politicking, with wife Barbara by his side. The Bush clan had already grown powerful connections across the financial and social landscape.

The founding members of the Board included the private central banks of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium as well as a coterie of 3 private American banks (JP Morgan, First National of Chicago, and First National of New York). The three American banks merged after the war and are today known as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

In its founding constitution, the BIS, its directors and staff were given immunity from all sovereign national laws and not even authorities in Switzerland were permitted to enter its premises.

This story was conveyed powerfully in the 2013 book Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World.

A Word on Eugenics

Nazi support in the build up to, and during WWII didn’t end with finance and industrial might, but extended to the governing scientific ideology of the third Reich: Eugenics (aka: the science of Social Darwinism as developed by Thomas Huxley’s X Club associate Herbert Spencer and Darwin’s cousin sir Francis Galton decades earlier). In 1932, New York hosted the Third Eugenics Conference co-sponsored by William Draper Jr (JP Morgan banker, head of General Motors and leading figure of Dillon Read and co) and the Harriman family. This conference brought together leading eugenicists from around the world who came to study America’s successful application of eugenics laws which had begun in 1907 under the enthusiastic patronage of Theodore Roosevelt. Hiding behind the respectable veneer of “science” these high priests of science discussed the new age of “directed evolution of man” which would soon be made possible under a global scientific dictatorship.

Speaking at the conference, leading British Fascist Fairfield Osborn said that eugenics:

“aids and encourages the survival and multiplication of the fittest; indirectly, it would check and discourage the multiplication of the unfitted. As to the latter, in the United States alone, it is widely recognized that there are millions of people who are acting as dragnets or sheet anchors on the progress of the ship of state…While some highly competent people are unemployed, the mass of unemployment is among the less competent, who are first selected for suspension, while the few highly competent people are retained because they are still indispensable. In nature, these less-fitted individuals would gradually disappear, but in civilization, we are keeping them in the community in the hopes that in brighter days, they may all find employment. This is only another instance of humane civilization going directly against the order of nature and encouraging the survival of the un-fittest”.

The dark days of the great depression were good years for bigotry and ignorance as eugenics laws were applied to two Canadian provinces, and widely spread across Europe and America with 30 U.S. states applying eugenics laws to sterilize the unfit. Eugenics’ successful growth was due in large measure to the fierce financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the science magazine Nature which had been created in 1865 by T.H. Huxley’s X Club. The Rockefeller Foundation went onto fund German eugenics and most specifically the rising star of human improvement Joseph Mengele.

The Nazi Frankenstein Monster is Aborted

Describing his January 29, 1935 meeting with Hitler, Round Table controller Lord Lothian quoted the Fuhrer’s vision for Aryan co-direction of the New World Order saying:

“Germany, England, France, Italy, America and Scandinavia … should arrive at some agreement whereby they would prevent their nationals from assisting in the industrializing of countries such as China, and India. It is suicidal to promote the establishment in the agricultural countries of Asia of manufacturing industries”

While it is obvious that much more can be said on the topic, the Fascist machine didn’t fully behave the way the Dr. Frankensteins in London wished, as Hitler began to realize that his powerful military machine gave Germany the power to lead the New World Order rather than play second fiddle as mere enforcers on behalf of their Anglo masters in Britain. While many London and Wall Street oligarchs were willing to adapt to this new reality, a decision was made to abort the plan, and try to fight another day.

To do this a scandal was concocted to justify the abdication of pro-Nazi King Edward VIII in 1936 and an appeasing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was replaced with Winston Churchill in 1940. While Sir Winston was a life long racist, eugenicist and even Mussolini-admirer, he was first and foremost a devout British Imperialist and as such would fight tooth and nail to save the prestige of the Empire if it were threatened. Which he did.

The Fascists vs Franklin Roosevelt

Within America itself, the pro-fascist Wall Street establishment had been loosing a war that began the day anti-fascist President Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932. Not only had their attempted February 1933 assassination failed, their 1934 coup d’etat plans were also thwarted by a patriotic General named Smedley Darlington Butler. To make matters worse, their efforts to keep America out of the war in the hopes of co-leading the New World Order alongside Germany, France and Italy was also falling apart. A As I outlined in my recent article How to Crush a Bankers’ Dictatorship, between 1933-1939, FDR had imposed sweeping reforms on the banking sector, thwarted a major attempt to create a global Bankers’ dictatorship under the Bank of International Settlements, and mobilized a broad recovery under the New Deal.

By 1941, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor polarized the American psyche so deeply that resisting America’s entry into WWII as Wall Street’s American Liberty League had been doing up until then, became political suicide. Wall Street’s corporatist organizations were called out by FDR during a powerful 1938 speech as the president reminded the Congress of the true nature of fascism:

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power… Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing. This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.”

While America’s entry into WWII proved a decisive factor in the destruction of the fascist machine, the dream shared by Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace and many of FDR’s closest allies across America, Canada, Europe, China and Russia for a world governed by large-scale development, and win-win cooperation did not come to pass.

Even though FDR’s ally Harry Dexter White led in the fight to shut down the Bank of International Settlements during the July 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the passage of White’s resolutions to dissolve BISand audit its books were never put into action. While White, who was to become the first head of the IMF, defended FDR’s program to create a new anti-imperial system of finance, Fabian Society leader, and devout eugenicist John Maynard Keynes defended the Bank and pushed instead to redefine the post-war system around a one world currency called the Bancor, controlled by the Bank of England and BIS.

The Fascist Resurgence in the Post-War World

By the end of 1945, the Truman Doctrine and Anglo-American “special relationship” replaced FDR’s anti-colonial vision, while an anti-communist witch hunt turned America into a fascist police state under FBI surveillance. Everyone friendly to Russia was targeted for destruction and the first to feel that targeting were FDR’s close allies Henry Wallace and Harry Dexter White whose 1948 death while campaigning for Wallace’s presidential bid put an end to anti-colonialists running the IMF.

In the decades after WWII, those same financiers who brought the world fascism went straight back to work infiltrating FDR’s Bretton Woods Institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, turning them from tools of development, into tools of enslavement. This process was fully exposed in the 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit man by John Perkins.

The European banking houses representing the old nobility of the empire continued through this reconquering of the west without punishment. By 1971, the man whom Perkins exposed as the chief economic hit man George Schultz, orchestrated the removal of the U.S. dollar from the Gold-reserve, fixed exchange rate system director of the Office of Management of Budget and in the same year, the Rothschild Inter-Alpha Group of banks was created to usher in a new age of globalization. This 1971 floating of the dollar ushered in a new paradigm of consumerism, post-industrialism, and de-regulation which transformed the once productive western nations into speculative “post-truth” basket cases convinced that casino principles, bubbles and windmills were substitutes for agro-industrial economic practices.

So here we are in 2020 celebrating victory over fascism.

The children and grandchildren of those heroes of 1945 now find themselves attached to the biggest financial collapse in history with $1.5 quadrillion of fictitious capital ripe to explode under a new global hyperinflation akin to that which destroyed Weimar in 1923, but this time global. The Bank of International Settlements that should have been dissolved in 1945 today controls the Financial Stability Board and thus regulates the world derivatives trade which has become the weapon of mass destruction that has been triggered to unleash more chaos upon the world than Hitler could have ever dreamed.

The saving grace today is that the anti-fascist spirit of Franklin Roosevelt is alive in the form of modern anti-imperialists Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and a growing array of nations united under the umbrella of the New Deal of the 21st Century which has come to be called the “Belt and Road Initiative”.

Had Prescott’s grandson Jeb (or Prescott’s spiritual grand daughter Hillary) found themselves in the position of President of the USA at this moment, it is unlikely that I would be writing this now, as I’m fairly certain WWIII would have already been launched. However, with President Trump having successfully survived nearly four years of Deep State subversion, and having called repeatedly for a positive alliance with Russia and China, a chance still exists to take the types of emergency actions needed at this moment of existential crisis to do what FDR had always intended, and win World War II.


Meanwhile, the Bush clan still prospers. 

Says Business Insider (and we agree): "Despite being one of the world's most polarizing families, the Bush dynasty continues to triumph in money and politics."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.

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Government by billionaires? Cuomo names former Google CEO to join Gates & Bloomberg in drafting post-pandemic ‘reforms’

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An RT.com Dispatch


New York, meet your new overlords! (left to right: Schmidt, Gates, Bloomberg) © Reuters / Lucy Nicholson / Pool

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ew York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has appointed ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt to lead a panel on post-pandemic “reform” of health and education systems, despite criticism for taking other billionaires with conflicts of interest on board.

Schmidt [who is as good an example of shameless corporate fascism as you can find] will head a ‘Blue Ribbon Commission’ tasked with “reimagining” New York's existing systems of healthcare and education, Cuomo announced on Wednesday during his daily coronavirus briefing. The decision to place such power in the hands of another unelected billionaire has riled critics already uneasy about the governor's post-Covid-19 plans. 

The panel's initial priorities will be “tele-health, remote learning and broadband,” Schmidt announced, dropping into Cuomo's broadcast. The former Google exec still receives a paycheck from parent company Alphabet in an advisory capacity, raising questions of conflict of interest given Google's leading role in developing a digital contact-tracing platform for Covid-19. While Cuomo confirmed in the same presser that the state is partnering with former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg – another billionaire – in building a human contact-tracing network, any digital component will likely involve the participation of Google. At the same time, the tech giant's insatiable hunger for health data, as evinced by initiatives like Project Nightingale and Google's acquisition of Fitbit, is unlikely to sit well with New Yorkers concerned about the company's privacy record.
 

 
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Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt claims he can link tech & defense, but he’s just a civilian dilettante who doesn't get reality of war even lower in international rankings since its nationwide implementation in 2013. After steering over $4 trillion of taxpayer dollars into the government-funded program, the Foundation tacitly admitted failure in 2016, acknowledging in a letter to donors that it had “underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement [Common Core].”

Cuomo himself has landed in hot water in the past for his efforts to unilaterally refashion New York's admittedly dilapidated public school system. In 2015, he was accused of “unconstitutional interference in education policy” by New York State Allies for Public Education, which highlighted his “cozy relationships” with charter school advocates and education technology businesses. One of those education technology businesses was Google. In 2014, Schmidt, then the company's executive chairman, was appointed to a three-person commission to advise on a ‘Smart Schools’ bond issue, setting off alarm bells among consumer advocates who pointed out that Google would directly benefit from system-wide adoption of Google Apps and Chromebook laptops. 

The New York governor's history with his state's healthcare system is equally checkered, marked by a long string of budget cuts, hospital consolidations, and layoffs, and his pledge to “revolutionize” the chronically strapped system has already gotten off on a bad foot. On Wednesday, Cuomo announced that out-of-state nurses who had come to New York to help out with the coronavirus epidemic would be required to pay state income tax on whatever compensation they had received, even if they were being paid by companies located in their home state.

ALSO ON RT.COMDueling corporations: Cuomo's elite consultants spar with Trump's Big Business CEOs to control Americans' futures

Cuomo's decision to appoint private equity bigwigs, including Bill Mulrow of Blackstone Group and Steven Cohen of MacAndrews & Forbes, to the economic advisory team charged with reopening New York has also come in for criticism, given that private equity firms often benefit from the same bankruptcies the state's businesses are hoping to avoid.

 



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The Lethal—Perhaps Omnicidal—Plutocracy

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Eric Schechter
OpEds


A premature or immature revolution against capitalism may leave capitalist values practically intact, warns the author, and we agree.[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ome people believe the plutocrats are a well-organized hierarchy, like the fabled Illuminati. Those people are mistaken. The plutocrats are, in fact, an unruly and stupid mob, fighting against each other and even themselves almost as much as they fight against the rest of us.

This was already evident from the fact that the plutocracy is gradually destroying the ecosystem, on which even the plutocrats ultimately depend – they can’t eat money, though they may not realize that yet. And the destruction is speeding up, due to feedback loops, much faster than most people realize. With current trends I would estimate the point of no return around 2025, collapse of civilization (due to immense famine) around 2032, and the extinction of our species around 2040. So it’s worse than the Ted Rall cartoon to which I’m attaching this little note..

But that self-destruction was not fast enough for the plutocrats. Now they are using the pandemic as a way to speed things up. Capitalism always was a balancing act, and now I think they are losing their balance. With mass layoffs and insufficient unemployment checks, they are rapidly, greatly increasing the numbers of the poor. I think this makes inevitable EITHER A REVOLUTION OR THE COLLAPSE OF OUR CIVILIZATION, perhaps by 2022.

If we have a revolution then, I fear its vision will be too small. In desperation, people may hastily cobble together the first revolutionary arrangement they can manage. That will only apply a band-aid to our economic system, not the deeper changes we need, and that will not address the ecosystem problems at all. Those problems will continue on the schedule I mentioned earlier.

Our only hope for a future is if we get more people talking about these things. Tell everyone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Schechter is a professor emeritus in mathematics from Vanderbilt University. Retired in 2013, Schechter is currently an anti-capitalist activist. His main blog is at https://leftymathprof.wordpress.com.



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CHARLES KOCH NETWORK PUSHED $1 BILLION CUT TO CDC, NOW ATTACKS SHELTER-IN-PLACE POLICIES FOR HARMING BUSINESS

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Lee Fang
THE INTERCEPT


Criminal plutocrat Charles Koch enjoys a  direct line to presidents' ears and of course lavish treatment by the whore media.


The work of mean-spirited libertarian billionaires is never done. 

, the pro-corporate pressure group founded and funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, wants employees to return to work despite desperate pleas from public health officials that people should stay home as much as possible to help contain the spread of the coronavirus. 

As states began to order nonessential businesses to shut down last week, AFP released a statement calling for all businesses to remain open.

“Rather than blanket shutdowns, the government should allow businesses to continue to adapt and innovate to produce the goods and services Americans need, while continuing to do everything they can to protect the public health,” said Emily Seidel, chief executive of AFP, in a press release.

Some of the group’s state chapters have taken a similar tone. AFP Pennsylvania’s state director, as well as a regional director with the group, have taken to Twitter to lambast shelter-in-place policies. The Michigan chapter of AFP on Monday slammed Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, which closed down fitness centers, nail salons, amusement parks, casinos, and other businesses deemed nonessential, calling it the “wrong approach for our state.”

Whitmer’s order, variations of which are being implemented by state and local governments nationwide, contains exceptions for critical industries such as grocery stores, pharmacies, health care providers, financial services, transportation, child care, hazardous materials, and energy.

“All businesses are essential — to the people who own them, the people who work in them, and the communities they serve,” said Annie Patnaude, the Michigan state director for AFP, in a statement responding to the order.

AFP’s position, which directly contradicts the advice of medical experts who say that social isolation is essential to curbing the spread of the coronavirus, comes after the group lobbied the Trump administration in 2018 to rescind $1 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Much of AFP’s recommended cuts to government programs, which included CDC money for infectious disease control and global health, became part of the official White House budget request, though most were not adopted by Congress. 

The cuts, AFP argued, would “relieve the burden overspending is placing on all taxpayers.” The CDC is now one of the front-line organizations dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, which has impacted nearly 70,000 people in the United States and has claimed over 1,000 lives. 

The libertarian advocacy network has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying for corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and reductions to social welfare programs, particularly state Medicaid programs. This aggressive advocacy record has come into focus in recent days as Americans confront the coronavirus pandemic. Medicaid funding is seen as a critical tool for treating sick patients, and many are now questioning the wisdom of reductions to the CDC’s funding and staff.

Internal memos from AFP reveal the size and scope of the organization, which employed 650 staff members during the 2016 election and has successfully worked to block Medicaid expansion in at least four states. During the 2016 election, the group also aired negative advertising sharply criticizing Hillary Clinton and Senate Democrats, an electioneering push that dramatically shaped the current balance of power in Washington, D.C.

The group has since used its government influence to slash environmental rules, retreat from the Paris Climate Accord, and demand cuts to federal programs. It also helped secure $1.5 trillion in tax cuts as part of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul.

Experts around the country have called for shelter-in-place policies for nonessential businesses, arguing that social isolation can drastically curb the spread of the coronavirus. Slowing the pandemic, they say, can save lives by lowering the demand for medical supplies and limited hospital beds. Despite their medical necessity, these policies are being rejected by conservatives around the country. Republican state leaders, including Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have balked at shutdown requests. On Tuesday, Reeves signed an executive order superseding local bans on public gatherings.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has said he has “emphasized very emphatically” that bars, restaurants, and other nonessential businesses close and that those who may work from home do so.

The Intercept asked AFP if the group had consulted any public health officials before beginning the push against shelter-in-place policies, and whether the group continues to support steep cuts to the CDC.

The group did not respond to the inquiry regarding the CDC and did not name any public health experts.

A spokesperson for AFP noted in an email that they are “encouraging every public official dealing with these incredible challenges to consider how communities and businesses are adapting to meet critical needs as they make these difficult decisions” and that the group believes that there is “value in businesses and government working together to stop the spread of this virus and help the people who need it.”

The Koch network, while pushing for businesses to stay open, is taking the opposite approach for its lobbying apparatus. AFP and its affiliates, including LIBRE Initiative and Concerned Veterans for America, are now working from home. “Out of an abundance of caution and to ensure the health and safety of our activists, staff, and voters, our staff are working from home and are utilizing digital organizing as one way to continue their grassroots engagement,” a spokesperson from AFP told CNBC

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Fang (born October 31, 1986) is an American journalist. He is currently an investigative reporter at The Intercept. Previously, he was a reporting fellow at The Nation Institute and a contributing writer at The Nation.[1] Fang was also a writer at progressive outlet the Republic Report.[2][3] He began his career as an investigative blogger for ThinkProgress.[4] In 2018, the Izzy Award of the Park Center for Independent Media was awarded to Fang and fellow Intercept reporter Sharon Lerner, and was also shared by investigative reporter Dahr Jamail, and author Todd Miller.[5]




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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License


ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

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Keep truth and free speech alive by supporting this site.
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And before you leave

THE DEEP STATE IS CLOSING IN

The big social media —Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—are trying to silence us.