Right To Left

Read some history, psychology, and anthropology, then you'll have some grounding before getting up on your soapbox and trying to pontificate about human nature. Then you'll understand that capitalism is a perverted economic system that values the worst aspects of human nature....the stuff we have to set aside during times like this as we become 'socialists' on the local level at least, and try to look out for others. That is why, faced with a pandemic, it's the capitalist nations like the US of A, that are going to shit. Because, during a health crisis like this, you need healthcare systems that treat the sick, prevent the spread of dangerous diseases, because it's to everyone's benefit if nobody and no population is carrying a disease and can't be treated or afford to be treated! That's why the billionaires were the first to flee New York and other business centers as soon as the Covid-19 got out of control in Europe and the US, and started holding their meetings on Zoom. Capitalism means the pandemic gets bigger and takes longer to get under control than it does in more socialistic societies, where the first priority is public health/not the health of banks and major corporations! And, there are many of us who are frontline workers in a range of fields, who have no choice other than to work directly with people who may be exposed to this virus, and do what we can to try to protect ourselves, and our families....who we do not want to bring it home to also! And on the bottom rungs of the work ladder are people who are doing REAL work...not fiddling on their computers or trying to sell shit online instead of in person.....those who have to work as delivery drivers, grocery stores, food prep, meat processing plants and other industries declared as essential...they have to go out and do it everyday for less money than they should be earning, especially during a time like this! The capitalists who grab the lion's share of the returns do not do real work! And that's why....especially doing a 3 trillion money grab in the US, they're anxious to get the real workers out there again and make the economy run....pandemic or not!

Goddammed Americans and Canadian koolaid drinkers just can't run out of foreign enemies to attack: China Cracks Down on Fentanyl. But Is It Enough to End the U.S. Epidemic? Dec. 1, 2019 XINGTAI, China — An online pharmacy advertising itself as a seller of “high purity, real pure” fentanyl still responds right away to potential customers. “Which products do you want to buy,” a salesperson replied within a minute to an inquiry in English on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service.But when contacted from an American telephone number and asked about the availability of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid fueling an epidemic killing tens of thousands of Americans a year, the seller demurred.“I don’t sell any more.” Until recently, much of the illicit fentanyl that found its way to the United States came like this: easily ordered online from a source in China and seamlessly shipped by international delivery companies, including the United States Postal Service.Fentanyl sourced from China accounted for 97 percent of the drug seized from international mail services by United States law enforcement in both the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to The Times Now, China’s Communist government is taking steps to stop the flood, as the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, promised President Trump he would do. Okay, happy now? This story tells me that the fentanyl sales were being done by Chines freeenterprizers...NOT the Chinese Government! And they have cracked down on the distributors in their nation. NOW, what is the US doing about American big pharma companies that have been selling fentanyl and other synthetic opioids through doctors and pharmacists they encourage with big bonuses. I guess that's the part of the story the NY Times writer asks: but is it enough to end the US epidemic?

And what kind of country is America? The capitalist paradise you worship, has further revealed its evil intentions during the Pandemic....stealing and outbidding PPE supplies destined for other countries- INCLUDING CANADA!!! But, since you ask, our spine-free prime minister is going to give them a stern talking to: he says "he’s working with the U.S. and is following up on this specific issue. He says he knows the needs are great in the U.S. but says it’s the same in Canada." There! That out a show those Yankee vultures...who don't know how to prepare for a crisis that we all have been long warned was coming our way. The US has been stealing from other nations they expect to be allies, like France and Germany; and even poor countries they've deliberately made destitute like Haiti, for christs sakes!

Well, my point is that now that Kanye is one of those who was let in to "many, many doors," and is now an honorary white man, like other wealthy African Americans who forgot where they came from, and like other rich whites, does little or nothing for the people he left behind! But, that's how capitalism works! He's not going to tear down the system that provides him mansions and fancy cars and coke to blow up his nose. Worth noting that since I grew up and came of age before rap and hip hop was a mainstream corporate product, I didn't pay much attention to this stuff, except I noticed the change in the 80's, after the first beat poets/rappers like Gil Scott Heron were highly focused on uplifting their communities and the poor in general, not enriching themselves and making up stupid bullshit reasons why they deserve it/while the people they left behind get nothing!

Democracy and mis-named "free" enterprise have nothing in common! The more freedom the rich have to influence government to change the rules regarding taxation, inheriting wealth, regulating corporations, the less freedom those who work for them have! It should be as obvious as democracy meaning each citizen has an equal vote...regardless of wealth etc., while capitalism means each company share provides an equal vote, and those who own the most shares, run the company! As we can see today, all around the world, billionaires and other wealthy citizens have a greater say in choosing and electing candidates than average slobs who can't buy influence or use commercial media and social media platforms that favor those who can make major ad buys. The great innovation today is that so many billionaires are cutting out the middle man and running for high office themselves! And we don't "all agree on" maintaining a social safety net and minimum wages! Admit it...both are a violation of conservative philosophy, which contends that wages should be governed by 'market' principles and those have-nots will be motivated to get out and work longer hours if they're struggling to feed and shelter themselves and their families! Never mind the claptrap about AOC, who like Bernie Sanders is NOT a socialist, and like Bernie, may intend or have intended to bring about some reforms to counteract the neoliberal rightwing slide in US governance; but that does not a socialist make! And the donor class who run the Democratic Party have told them and other progressives to back off and sit down....and just accept whatever crap Joe Biden comes up with....because....well, because Trump bad orange man and all other matters take a back seat until the hapless Dems manage to win back the White House. But don't ask them if they'll bother doing anything if they do get one of their guys in the White House. Odds are they will be a holding pattern until the GOP wins again and goes on the next rightwing corporate rampage! As for socialism being a 'perversion of independent human spirit'.....total BS! That 'independent' spirit has always been regarded as the perversion by traditional hunter-gatherer societies who lived in small, closely bonded communities where sharing, cooperation were the promoted values, not the selfish, radical individualism we've been deluged with in modern times!

The question I've wanted answered here is: what is Trump or anyone else in US Gov going to put in place to replace the functions of the World Health Organization? Or do they just not give a shit about consequences of their actions?

Many Americans are getting worried that Trump will not relinquish power voluntarily, even if he does lose an election. Still, I can't imagine the Democrat Party put Biden up front if they were really trying to stop Trump. Only thing that stops Trump now will be one-too-many cheeseburgers or if he gets accidentally shot by one of secret service agents!

No, this is bullshit that serves two purposes: 1. deflecting blame from Trump failure. 2. finding reasons to launch economic warfare and likely real warfare later against China, to try to prevent them from de-linking from the US trade zone and US Dollar.

It's not an either/or situation! There are many dirt poor whites living in Appalachia...especially after the collapse of the coal industry/while there are some rich people-of-color who get to move into nice houses, buy nice cars and adopt the same class attitudes as their rich white brethren. Kind a like getting a white card I suppose! How else can you explain a clown like Kanye, bitching about the latest Fortune 500 listings placing his net worth at about one billion/while he claims to be worth 3.3 billion. Never occurred to this overcompensated asshole that a whole helluvalot of black people are dying in this covid pandemic because they don't have access to the same health care as whiter/wealthier populations. So, if you're going to make it a competition....under a capitalist system, class trumps race!

I don't know if you embellished MLK's words here, but most of his core teachings were stripped of his concerns over poverty and war...which was not well received by LBJ or major news editors at the height of the Vietnam War. Dr. King's message went a lot further than 'don't be racist.' His views weren't much different than Malcolm X, who was not concerned whether or not white people had racist attitudes.....as long as they did not have the power to subjugate black and brown people. It's because MLK had radical pacifist and socialist goals that 99% of what he said or wrote was discarded by later pop culture historians who just want to repeat "I have a dream" every year since then.

Another bullshit deflection! New York is headquarters of global capitalism and its failures and misery reflect the failure of reliance on capitalism as a guiding principle. And capitalism has nothing to do with democracy! When capitalism is in ascendency/ democracy either falls or becomes a pointless exercise....like the propaganda exercise the presidential sweepstakes have turned in to!

WGAF! The guiding philosophy never changed! And Bernie was no socialist!

The problem in the modern era of media consolidation is that large corporate interests put their stamp on the new/infotainment divisions they own. It's not just about money, it's also about serving up the kind of propaganda their owners want.

I'll bet these are comments you never make to black people face to face. The black immigrants I know...mostly Jamaicans, first started coming here on work permits as farm laborers, before applying for permanent status and then citizenship. Their homelands are under the boot of foreign corporations and big money interests. So the compliant governments that are State Dept. approved, follow a path of hollowing out their public services and selling off public assets to foreign investors. In Jamaica, the only people who want to stay are those who go to work for government offices.

I've been to NYC a few times. I know it's crowded, but so are most cities. The problems start with the grossest, most distorted disparity in wealth and income that gives New York a small community of super-rich who make all the rules, while working class New Yorkers have to pay exorbitant rents because the billionaire class have parked so much of their loot in New York real estate, and driven prices out of sight for middle class....kind of similar to Toronto. Cuba gets a few Canadians....like me! America is a threat to the collective safety of the entire world, let alone Canada, and even to Americans as well! Because their sociopath ruling class would rather push for all out nuclear war than accept the fact that America....like all empires, don't last forever! I know Churchill didn't like it, but the British Empire stepped back and gave up its colonies and more important: it's reserve currency status to the US Dollar. But today, if China or even the Eurozone threatens to displace the USD, they're going to start launching the nukes!

I could see "planning" in the sense that the masters of the universe have been studying how to adapt and profit from this sort of global pandemic for some time now, but I don't agree that this disease is no more than a seasonal flu. In a typical flu season, only about .01% of those affected die from a flu virus. In most of the countries affected so far, Covid-19 has been averaging about a 5% death rate. What's worse is that this disease is leaving many survivors with permanent damage - lost lung capacity and damage to kidneys and other internal organs. And this is happening to much younger people as well, unlike the high fatality rates among nursing home patients. If the Davos crowd were waiting for this opportunity, they will regret it if Covid-19 succeeds in destroying the global trading system and bringing down the US Dollar. That would explain why Buffet, Gates, Branson and a number of prominent billionaires are trying to buy up hard assets now....especially land, cause if the Dollar crashes, it''s not just going to be us small investors who lose, they'll be on the losing end as well!

Me neither....young that is! But when I heard some squawking about Sweden in recent weeks, I checked into the story and discovered that the rightwing clods who want to re-open everything do not have honorable intentions. Because although Sweden didn't do a lockdown like other Scandinavian countries or Britain and France, their 'social distancing' strategies include marking off most of the seats in restaurants so that they could onlly serve a quarter of their normal clientele. I'm not sure how that would work out here (let alone in the US). We seem to have enough problems just trying to enforce similar rules on our transit buses and trying to enforce the 'essential travel' rules.

Being dual US/Can citizen with a lot of cousins, nephews and nieces stateside, I can't get over how sucked in to the reality show fake drama even the brightest and most astute of them have been in recent times. Looking in from the outside, the only apparent difference between the two parties is regarding social positioning (liberal vs conservative) and a few cultural / non-monetary issues. Because when it comes to money issues, most Democrat candidates are funded by the same donors as Republicans, and therefore if they agree to public healthcare, it's going to be a sham like Obama concocted with the ACA...which sends public dollars through private insurance and drug companies rather than providing a public system that's not dependent on what a sick person has in their wallet. Likewise, in geopolitics, I had more than a few arguments with younger relatives who support Bernie, AOC and a few other fake radicals, and never notice that their chosen heroes don't tread very far from the company line when it comes to regime change ops or the use of sanctions and embargoes as low-grade warfare! The MSM elevates and highlights the minor differences to create a pro-wrestling like drama to hide their bipartisanship. We can see this now in the Covid Era where both parties unanimously signed on to bailing out and underwriting trillions in debts and almost certain insolvent loans to revive Wall Street and protect the four largest banks from failure.

NO, the 13 colonies were led by middle and upper classmen who risked revolution because they insisted on slavery and continued westward expansion...so no sale!

Right! DeBlasio and Cuomo are 'socialists!!!' By what definition? When I think socialist, I'm thinking of Cuba, which is dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic much better than the US (goes without saying) and is able to provide hundreds of doctors to other countries dealing with the pandemic....except for the US....which is too dumb to act in its own interests....that's a big part of how President Clorox got to where he is today! Mixed economy nations that have strong public healthcare systems...even up here in Canada, are doing much better than the US. much reviled China...where the pandemic started, is recovering...much to the chagrin of US Neocons and is re-opening their economy...even in Wuhan ...where it all started, and sending doctors and protective equipment abroad, because they have less use for it now. Aside from America's idiocy about continuing private/for profit healthcare, the other great failing is the great capitalist innovation in production in the era of Neoliberalism: Just In Time production and distribution of products...even for hospitals and other care facilities! And even after all of these weeks, many states still have frontline staff at risk because of inadequate protection from catching this disease.

We live in a world where the sociopaths who have a single-minded, insatiable lust for money and power, are praised and rewarded for their efforts...rather than being shunned...as they would be in more primitive societies where greed and selfishness are considered vices/not virtues.

How do you think we got in this mess? Scientists have been warning us for years that the continued growth in human populations, destruction of tropical forests, increasing reliance on factory farming practices would lead to more and more disease pandemics, including making bacteria and viruses (like corona viruses which rarely affected humans before) bigger problems for us today. And after all of the years us socialists have had to put up with propagandists working for capitalism shoveling shit at us about how efficient and quick-responding capitalist market forces were, we end up with this quagmire where onlly the most socialistic nations and societies are adequately dealing with the crisis/while the most capitalistic...like those to the south have really crapped their pants this time and made the pandemic worse than it could have been!

I could add that slavery likely would not have existed at all except for economic incentives provided when the first empires were being built, and in modern times the dynamics of capitalist economic systems makes slavery an extremely lucrative economic value.....but you won't find do-gooder well-funded propagandist organizations like HRW ever mention that! The slave trade in Libya didn't exist until the US and the Eurozone decided it was time to overthrow Gadaffi and created anarchy...likely cause the members of the ruling class club are still arguing among themselves whether the US or France gets to rule over Libya and claim the oil. Elsewhere in Africa, the nonsense generated by dogooder groups blaming the carnage that's continued on in the Congo for most of the past 60 years on undefined rebels and civil wars etc. doesn't hide the fact that the Congo's cobalt, col-tan, manganese and other exotic minerals and metals demanded by high tech industries, find their way out of the Congo and to western markets, making televisions, computers, cell phones, electric motors etc. at low prices that allow huge markups in profit.

It was way more than 100 years! Slavery existed as soon as English and Spanish colonists started up and brought African slaves with them. As for Persians or whatever else, the great innovation in America...and the one that nobody thought of before....which shocked the Brits and led to demands of ending slavery within their Empire, was the US brought the great innovation of breeding slaves like cattle and other livestock. In other cultures throughout history which engaged in slavery, slaves were viewed as inferior groups owing their masters free labor. BUT, neither the Persians nor anyone else thought up selective slave breeding!

As already mentioned, the numbers are still easily found, and NO the northern states profited from slave-produced resources like cotton from the south...as did England also, as Baptist's book mentions; which is likely a major reason why England tacitly supported the Confederacy during the War, and tried to starve Lincoln's Union of funds....leading to the creation of the first fiat currency the "Greenback."