#COVID19 Relief #Bailouts and #Handouts

Venezuela Dismisses US Justice Department ‘Narco-terrorism’ Accusations

By Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz, March 27, 2020

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro rejected US drug trafficking accusations against his person and senior members of his government. In a televised address Thursday evening, Maduro blasted the State Department’s “racist cowboy methods” of offering money for information leading to his and other Venezuelan leaders’ arrest. The president likewise touted Venezuela’s role in fighting the drug trade and in the Colombian peace process.

 

COVID-19 Puts Capitalism on a Ventilator. No More Bank and Corporate Bailouts!

By Prof. Anthony A. Gabb, March 27, 2020

The aftershock of previous pandemics was catastrophic. The fourteenth century Black Plague and the 1918 Flu pandemics inflicted colossal hardships and caused many deaths. The Black Plague shook the foundations of feudal social relations. It killed 25 to 30 million people, resulting in peasant uprisings, shortages that caused wages to rise, and large parcels of land to go fallow. Scientists believe the 1918 Flu could have come to Spain from the United States and spread to other parts of the world killing 20 to 50 million people, more than the 17 million who died in WW1. Even though it was common knowledge that the flu was already in Philadelphia, the authorities went ahead anyway with a parade to raise funds for the war causing many unnecessary deaths—at the time the economics of the war took priority over stopping the spread of the flu. Similarly, today there are competing views about whether fixing the economy should take precedence over addressing the ravages of COVID-19.

 

The Senate’s Coronavirus Relief Package Must be Stopped!

By Mike Whitney, March 27, 2020

The Senate’s $2 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Package is not fiscal stimulus and it’s not a

lifeline for the tens of millions of working people who have suddenly lost their jobs. It’s a fundamental restructuring of the US economy designed to strengthen the grip of the corrupt corporate-banking oligarchy while creating a permanent underclass that will be forced to work for slave wages. This isn’t stimulus, it’s shock therapy.

 

Recognizing and Resisting the “Hasbara Pandemic”

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, March 27, 2020

On the opposite side is the news story about a former FBI agent Robert Levinson. Levinson disappeared in 2007 and the United States had accused Iran of holding him hostage. Iran has no information about him. Yesterday, out of nowhere, various hasbara outlets cited Levinson’s family releasing a statement citing that they recently received information from US officials that led them to conclude that “our wonderful husband and father died while in Iranian custody.”

Iran denied having held him in custody and the news of his death was news to them. Why was this unbelievable? After all, I have no way of knowing who is lying, the US or Iran. Though one certainly may question the timing of this report.

 

Covid-19: Lithuania on the Brink of a Catastrophe

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, March 27, 2020

COVID-19 expands in Lithuania. Having registered its first official case in February, the country currently has almost 300 infected people and four confirmed deaths. Taking into account that the official numbers tend to differ from the real ones due to the delay in investigating suspicions, it is likely that there are already many more infected, perhaps even thousands. In parallel, state measures to contain the announced catastrophe are few and weak and the government is more concerned in dealing with an alleged “Russian threat” than with the country’s imminent crisis.

 

Lancet Chief Skewers Johnson Government for Its Disastrous Covid-19 Failure

By True Publica, March 27, 2020

Horton looks at the moment when the government realised their ‘herd immunity’ strategy had imploded. “Many journalists, led by the BBC, reported that the science had changed and so the government had responded accordingly. But this interpretation of events is wrong. The science has been the same since January. What changed is that government advisers, at last, understood what had really taken place in China. The UK’s best scientists have known since that first report from China that Covid-19 was a lethal illness. Yet they did too little, too late.”