Corona-virus, Militarism And The End Of An Illusion…

People are waking people up to the fact that the US state and government does not belong to them but to a capitalist class that is only looking out for itself. The ‘sheltering in place’ order is starting to look like a convenient tool for the state to manage the growing frustration, fear and anger.”

“The nation that considers itself to be the apex of capitalist achievement on planet Earth turns out to have no health care system worthy of the name – a testament to the sucking moral vacuum at America’s imperial, white settler colony core. A lowly virus – a form of being that exists at the very border between “life” and “not-life” – has revealed the world’s superpower as butt-naked and very much afraid. (Glen Ford)

Coronavirus and second economic collapse in just ten years should finally put to rest the fairy-tale of U.S. Exceptionalism.
Trump’s “Make America Great” and Obama’s “U.S. Exceptionalism” are slogans that reflect an ongoing commitment to the normalized assumption of white racial and civilizational superiority. The idea that the territory that became the United States, and its settler population, were specially anointed by a god who gave them providence over the land and the Indigenous people is so ingrained in the national imagination that its extension to rationalize and justify U.S. imperialist policies was seamless.
The U.S. over the years shamelessly boasted of its “greatness” and being number one in all things, including having the best healthcare system in the world. And even though Bernie Sanders and healthcare movements in the U.S. consistently revealed the devastating reality of a system that generated billions of dollars for the healthcare industry while simultaneously generating unnecessary deaths, bankruptcies and millions without coverage — the mythology that the U.S. had a workable system remained in place, until now.
The coronavirus has dramatically stripped away the veneer of the for-profit healthcare system to expose a patchworked and completely dysfunctional system held together by state programs and two national programs, Medicare and Medicaid, that are still unable to provide basic coverage to millions of citizens and non-citizens.

 

 

The mythology that the U.S. had a workable system remained in place, until now.”

 

But it is not just the absence of a public healthcare system that exposes the lie of U.S. exceptionalism. Black Alliance for Peace Coordinating Committee and Black Agenda Report’s Margaret Kimberley writes that COVID-19 is not just a health emergency but it has exposed the causes of inequality and suffering in the U.S.
And what is the source of inequality and suffering?
Union del Barrio says that coronavirus has “unmasked the sick brutality of capitalism .”
The brutality and criminality of the colonial/capitalist system of state violence is reflected most graphically by the illegal and immoral policy of sanctions imposed on 39 nations by the U.S. and its Western allies. Sara Flounders from the International Action Center exposes the role of Big Pharma as part of U.S. effort to destroy the capacity of nations to protect their population’s health. She details the inhumane policies being imposed on nations like Venezuela and Iran, that are being denied the ability to import medicines and medical equipment to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. to accept draconian restrictions on basic civil liberties and human rights under the guise of the public health emergency.
BAP is concerned with the troubling signs that the global recession and disruption of the national economy that has resulted from the coronavirus crisis is now seen as a serious security threat by the capitalist oligarchy. The state, with the full support of corporate media, appears to be a conditioning the public to accept draconian restrictions on basic civil liberties and human rights under the guise of the public health emergency.

 

“Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are being denied the ability to import medicines.”

 

Ahjama Umi raises the very important point that we must resist efforts to panic the public into supporting a growing police state.
It is becoming clear that if the issue is really about containing the spread of the virus, there are effective protocols for combatting pandemics. Mark P. Fancher, a member of BAP’s Africa Team, discusses the measures that are in place in Africa, in nations like Nigeria, for preventing, tracking and containing infection; measures that could have been easily applied to the U.S.
But with the repressive proclivities of the U.S. national security state, it is important that we view critically some of the measures being called for: from the use of the military to national lockdowns.
The “sheltering in place” order is starting to look like a convenient tool for the state to manage the growing frustration, fear and anger as it becomes apparent that the economic and racially stratified healthcare delivery system are unable to protect the lives of the working class.
As the system finds itself immersed in a crisis that is deepening by the day, the propensity for violence and ferocious repression on the part of the U.S. state must be seen as a real threat to the people. BAP will continue to monitor the situation. The oppressed should have no illusions.
The conservative pro-business measures offered by the capitalist class to deal with the consequences of COVID-19 are waking people up to the fact that the state and government does not belong to them but to a capitalist class that is only looking out for itself.
That revelation of truth will be the only positive that will emerge from the crisis.
Netfa, Brandon, Vanessa, Jaribu, Margaret, Dedan, YahNe, Paul, Ajamu
BAP Coordinating Committee

The Black Alliance for Peace is a people(s)-centered human rights project against war, repression and imperialism.

 

“TRUE REVOLUTION COMES FROM TRUE REVULSION; When things get bad enough the Kitten will kill the Lion” Are we there yet brothers & sisters! New & Used Left Wing & Progressive Books, Memorabilia – http://www.facebook.com/Fahrenheit451bookstore/

 

You Are The Battlefield; Words of inspiration for the great awakening by Zen Gardner “Waking up costs everything” There is only one direction and only one way out; Wake Up!

“While it is true that people must liberate themselves from their servitude, it is also true that they must first free themselves from what has been made of them in the society in which they live”. Herbert Marcuse

 

 

 

Published on Feb 1, 2013

Video produced by Patrick Willis/Snordelhans/Snordster of Heretic Productions and posted with permission.

“You Are The Battlefield” written by Zen Gardner:

 

WORLD NEEDS A LOVE REVOLUTION

 

 

Noam Chomsky: The Relentless Class War; Capitalism: The Systematic Poverty and Exploitation of Human Beings! No War but Class War!

Jan Nederveen Pieterse in conversation with Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher and political commentator. Chomsky is Emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT. Jan Nederveen Pieterse is professor of Global Studies and Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Series: “Carsey-Wolf Center” [5/2014] [Humanities] [Show ID: 28120] (Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/)

 

NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR, A WORLD AT REVOLUTION

Capitalism: The Systematic Poverty and Exploitation of Human Beings by Finian Cunningham

“Crises are essential to the reproduction of capitalism. It is in the course of crises that the instabilities of capitalism are confronted, reshaped and re-engineered to create a new version of what capitalism is about”. That was an excerpt from the prologue of David Harvey’s forthcoming book, ‘Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism’, to be published by Profile Books in the UK and Oxford University Press in the US (April 2014). http://roarmag.org/2014/03/david-harvey-seventeen-contradictions

The Changing Face of Labor by Rivera Sun by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad Popular Resistance April 18, 2014

Depending on one’s proximity to wage and workplace issues, the term Labor Movement may conjure up images of 19th century Wobblies with rolled-up shirtsleeves, Detroit autoworkers, or Walmart strikers. The face of labor evolves through the decades and with each change in the workplace, our identity as a populace of laborers has shifted.

 

 

Inequality and the Inevitable Collapse: The Common Sense Solution–Sharing by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles Writer, Dandelion Salad London, England April 18, 2014

Depending on who you listen to and how it is defined, worldwide income and wealth inequality is either more acute than it has ever been, or the gap between the rich and the rest is narrowing. The numbers may be distorted by conflicting statistics but what is indisputable is the shadow of extreme poverty that billions are living under, the economic induced anxiety millions more face every day, and the fact that the rich continue to get richer. Of the 7.2 billion people in the world, around half are living on less than $2.00 a day  ̶ that’s the official barrier to the land of poverty set by the World Bank. Most of these people are to be found in the slums or villages of India, China, and the shantytowns and rural settlements of Sub-Saharan Africa, where 48% of the population live on less than $1.25 a day. [World Bank 2010]

 

 

Bernie Sanders: Inequality–A Threat to American Democracy

Bernie Sanders on Mar 27, 2014 Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks on the Senate floor about skyrocketing income and wealth inequality and the destruction of the middle class

 

The Oppressed 99.9% Have Had Enough by Graham Peebles by Graham Peebles Writer, Dandelion Salad Rajasthan, India February 16, 2014

You can see it glistening in colours red, white and blue, smell its choking fumes through the fogs of ambition and greed and mac-taste its convenient food; fast and furious, no time to waste, to pause, to question and wonder. Market fundamentalism pervades all areas of contemporary civilization, has saturated every corner of the world, and created what Pope Francis recently described as the “Globalisation of Indifference”, a world in which “we have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business” [The Guardian[i]]. This extreme model of capitalism places profit, not people at the centre of everything. The wellbeing of human beings has become secondary to the aim of maximizing returns no matter the costs, human or environmental, remorselessly pursued by corporate governments and their multi-national bedmates.

One of the major “trends of globalization” is what P. Sainath[ii] calls “corporate globalism”. Today’s world is “marked by the collapse of restraint on corporate power, in every continent.” This is borne out by the fact that over half of “the world’s 100 wealthiest bodies are corporations” [Global Issues[iii]]. Organizations with enormous political influence who own media groups, essential utilities – water, electricity and gas, telephone and Internet companies – and control transportation systems. They are the major donors to political campaigns, they finance development projects and fund think tanks, they are the mining giants clearing indigenous people from ancestral land in search of minerals; and are the driving force behind the commodification of everything and everyone everywhere. They jangle the corporate politicians in their silk-lined pockets, influence policy and determine elections.