Health/Medical

It is unrealistic to expect capitalists to manage any social crisis. Their goal is to accumulate capital, which they do exceptionally well, as evidenced by their enormous wealth in a world where billions struggle to survive.

Ha Manh Thang, Not Memory no. 1, 2009.

Although we do not tie our organizing to the election cycle, the 2020 election is an opportunity for the people to set the agenda for the 2020s. We need to show that whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden are elected, the people will rule from below. We need to build our power to demand the transformational we need.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Donald Trump is no George Washington, but his descent from commander-in-chief to vector-in-chief is nonetheless dizzying. Trump’s narcissism, mendacity, bullying, and malignant incompetence were obvious before the coronavirus crisis and they have been magnified rather than moderated in his surreal response to a catastrophe whose full gravity he failed to accept until March 31, when it had become horribly undeniable.

The neoliberal Council on Foreign Relations through its journal Foreign Affairs has amped up its criticisms of China. United States president Donald Trump and American officials have orchestrated a gambit to deflect unwanted attention from the miserable US response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the souring US economy. The Trump administration has directed its invective at China which elsewhere has been praised for its handling of the COVID-19 epidemic, getting back to business, and helping out other countries to fight the virus.

Some years ago, the then vice-president of Monsanto Robert T Fraley asked, “Why do people doubt science”. He posed the question partly because he had difficulty in believing that some people had valid concerns about the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture.
Critics were questioning the science behind GM technology and the impacts of GMOs because they could see how science is used, corrupted and manipulated by powerful corporations to serve their own ends. And it was also because they regard these conglomerates as largely unaccountable and unregulated.

The US president is in a warring mood.  Having declared himself a president at war, a meaningless gesture given that the US is always, somewhere in the world, at war, finding necessary enemies in distraction was always going to be a priority.  Donald Trump already had the “China virus” in his artillery, attaching nationality to pathogen.

With millions forced out of work and many more stuck at home, Canadians need to ask tough questions of organizations receiving billions of dollars to protect them from foreign threats. The country’s intelligence/security sector has done little to respond to the ongoing social and economic calamity. Even worse, their thinking and practices are an obstacle to what’s required to overcome a global pandemic.

God help us all.  The acrid stench of death wafts through the air.  I cough, choke, every breath is an effort, and non-stop nausea portends retroperistalsis.  The ceaseless, somber wail of ambulance sirens permeates every fiber of my being.  They are busy non-stop, blasting through the streets, hauling the dying and the dead to overflowing Tucson, Arizona hospitals.  Soon they’ll be burning piles of corpses in the streets.  There is nowhere to hide.  My neighbor has become my potential assassin.  I avoid her, and the virus which likely infects her, like the plague.