12 May 2020 — Youtube
Michael Roberts talks to Brian Green about the role of profitability of capital in the coronavirus crisis
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No comments on Watch: ROBERTS/GREEN Covid and profitability May 2020
Watch: ROBERTS/GREEN Covid and profitability May 2020
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COVID-19 bulletin 23: will a ‘shock-resistant food system’ be adopted?
16 May 2020 — Political Concern
Since the coronavirus pandemic took over and some supermarket egg and flour shelves are still bare here – and in parts of America – there has been greater public awareness of the fragility of our food system.
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Covert unit in London for the “reconstruction” of Venezuela
15 May 2020 — Voltaire Network
The Canary news website based in the United Kingdom recently obtained the declassification of British official documents relating to Venezuela. They disclose the existence, since January 2019, of a secret unit within Whitehall (the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office) in charge of planning first the destabilization and subsequently the reconstruction of the country.
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How Biosecurity Is Enabling Digital Neo-Feudalism
15 May, 2020 — Strategic Culture Foundation
Pepe Escobar
Italian master thinker Giorgio Agamben has been on the – controversial – forefront examining what new paradigm may be emerging out of our current pandemic distress.
He recently called attention to an extraordinary book published seven years ago that already laid it all out.
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Foreign Policy Sees ‘Repression’ in Vietnam’s Fight Against Coronavirus
15 May 2020 — FAIR
JANINE JACKSON
Foreign Policy (5/12/20) illustrates a story on “repression” in Vietnam with a photo of a “propaganda poster” encouraging people to wear masks.
A recent piece in Foreign Policy (5/12/20) is headed with a photograph of a placard that features an image of a nurse demonstrating the importance of wearing a face mask as both personal and interpersonal protection against the coronavirus. But reader beware: It’s not public education, it’s a “propaganda poster”—because it’s not from New Jersey, but was “seen on a wall in Hanoi.”
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Perspectives on the Pandemic | Professor Knut Wittkowski Update Interview | Episode 5
28 April 2020 — Youtube
Time for an independent alternative to Youtube!
Update 3 – 21 May 2020: Watch it here – https://www.aier.org/article/stand-up-for-your-rights-says-bio-statistican-knut-m-wittkowski/
Update 2 – 20 May 2020: Well it’s finally been censored. I’ll see if it’s been made available elsewhere. Time to dump Youtube and setup a truly uncensored video platform (mind you I predicted that this would happen almost 20 years ago!)
As a replacement, I have added a transcript of the censored video. WB
Update – 18 May 2020: Apparently, Youtube have taken down this video although it still seems to be available. WB
Perspectives on the Pandemic Episode 5: In this highly-charged follow-up interview, Knut Wittkowski says his initial claim has been vindicated: The lockdowns – always a dubious proposition for a respiratory virus – came too late in the U.S. and elsewhere, and were therefore even worse than useless. By turns emotional and darkly comic, Wittkowski ranges across all the essential topics of the crisis, and gives answers you are unlikely to see in the major media. Not to be missed.
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WATCH: UK Chief Medic confirms (again) covid19 harmless to vast majority
15 May 2020 — Off Guardian
Catte Black
From the beginning of this crisis we have been pointing out that there are two mutually contradictory messages at the heart of the covid19 rollout, and, just as Orwell describes in 1984, a major point of the exercise seems to be to get people to believe both at the same time.
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Revealed: UK government opposing patent-free Covid-19 vaccines
15 May 2020 — Global Justice Now
Last night BBC Newsnight revealed how the British government has been opposing patent-free coronavirus vaccines and treatments in the run up to a crucial World Health Organisation meeting on Monday. Despite government pledges to ensure vaccines are accessible to all, they are still not willing to take on big pharma and challenge their monopolies.
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Reserve army—pandemic edition
12 May 2020 — Occasional Links & Commentary
You know things are bad—and going to get worse—when a mainstream newspaper like the Washington Post invokes the Mohr:What Karl Marx once called “the reserve army of the unemployed” will probably keep wage growth in check as the recovery inches forward.
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UK: Coronavirus rent crisis
15 May 2020 — London Renters Union
CAn’t Pay, Won’t Pay!
Two months ago, we demanded a suspension of rents, a total ban on evictions throughout the pandemic and its aftermath, and that all those in need of shelter should be housed.
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‘Our Food System Is Very Much Modeled on Plantation Economics’
13 May 2020 — FAIR
JANINE JACKSON
Janine Jackson interviewed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Ricardo Salvador about the coronavirus food crisis for the May 8, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Consequences of Coronavirus Pandemic are being Kept Under Wraps
11 May 2020 — New Eastern Outlook
As the global battle against the Coronavirus rages on, many fairly important processes are taking place in the international community. But current ruling elites have sought to keep silent about them and have stopped media outlets, answerable to them, from openly reporting about these developments.
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INTERVIEW: Debunking the COVID-19 Narrative with Prof. Dolores Cahill
13 May, 2020 —
Are public health officials and the mainstream media really telling the public scientific accurate and correct information about the Coronavirus and treatment for COVID-19? Was there any scientific or medical basis for governments to impose a lockdown? Are the government-media complex irresponsibly spreading misinformation about COVID-19? Is this misinformation harming the public and causing needless suffering and additional deaths? Apparently, yes.
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The Covid-19 Chronicles: USA
14 May 2020 — Land Destroyer
Author’s note: This is part of The Covid-19 Chronicles Series covering how nations and regions are responding to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) crisis.
May 13, 2020 (Gunnar Ulson – NEO) – The US is claimed to be hardest hit by Covid-19 with, at the time of writing, over 80,000 deaths attributed to the virus. The nation is also suffering from socioeconomic disaster as lockdowns have driven millions of Americans into not only unemployment, but predictable poverty and hunger as a result.
The crisis has been pounced upon by special interests to help propel various sociopolitical and economic agendas rather than confront and overcome the crisis, leading many to suspect the crisis itself has been deliberately overblown.
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Hunger Gnaws at the Edges of the World: The Twentieth Newsletter (2020)
14 May 2020 — Tricontinental
Kanat Bukezhanov, Coronavirus, 2020Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 21 April, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley said that the world was experiencing a ‘hunger pandemic’. That day, the Global Network Against Food Crises and the Food Security Information Network released the 2020 Global Report on Food Crises. It suggested that 318 million people in 55 countries experience acute food insecurity and are on the cusp of acute hunger. This number is a gross underestimate: the actual number – before the global pandemic – would have been closer to 2.5 billion, if you measure hunger by caloric intake for intense activity.
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Black Agenda Report 13 May 2020
13 May 2020 — Black Agenda Report
Leftists Jump the Corporate Democratic Ship, Leaving Sanders Behind
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
History may record that the corporate duopoly dike was finally broken in the Time of Plague, with the defection of Bernie’s former sheep from the Democratic Party.
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Putting provid before workers to reopen the economy
13 May 2020 — theplanningmotivedotcom
[I think this is a MUST-READ essay that gets to the heart of how and why capitalism is killing us in the so-called developed world. WB]
Capitalism has and is making us sick. For three generations we have been besieged by pesticides, fungicides, preservatives and pollution. Our defences have been undermined by food that has been denatured, deodorized, processed, cheapened, and served in plastic film or containers. Supermarkets have essentially become mausoleums to dead food (there are exceptions). This poor diet has led to the biggest and most silent holocaust in history, countless hundreds of millions, mainly poor, who have eaten themselves into an early grave, but not before being trapped in their bodies and suffering for many years. Such unrecognised cruelty.
On Sunday, Boris Johnson ordered workers in manufacturing and construction back to work. Everyone commented on how muddle headed he came across. That was a deliberate smokescreen to obscure the threat he and his class pose to workers. No doubt, behind the scenes, government assistance to these categories of workers will be withdrawn despite the extension of furlough. In time honoured tradition, the bosses will drive workers back to work, if not with batons, then through financial coercion. The unwritten agenda is to build immunity in society before winter, even if this means spikes in fatalities, so the production of profits can continue.
reversing-lockdown-pdf.pdf
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Disease capitalism and COVID-19: Hunger in the belly of the beast
10 May 2020 — Peoples Dispatch
For capital, profits come from disease, not peoples’ health. COVID-19 shows the consequence of disease capitalism in a globalized world, the rich—countries or individuals—will not be spared either
Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish flu at a hospital ward at Camp Funston Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish flu at a hospital ward at Camp Funston.We frequently hear that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu. It is forgotten that the third plague pandemic killed millions in South, South East and East Asia from the 1890s, and continued well after the Spanish flu, to the 1950s. That pandemic killed an estimated 10 million in India alone. I remember my family talking about it, as also numerous stories I read which had plague as their backdrop, and a recent book on the Bombay plague.
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Syria Spinmeisters Fumble Attempts To Narrative Manage OPCW Leaks
10 May 2020 — Caitlin Johnson
By Caitlin Johnson
It’s been over 72 hours since The Grayzone published new leaks further exposing how the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been lying about its investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria two years ago.
