THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.
Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.
Pandemic continues to kill in America, while the ruling elite squabbles over mandates
There is barely a mention of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States any more, other than the assertions by the mainstream press that the worst is now behind us or announcements of new approvals of vaccinations. The recent declines have been celebrated even though the daily infection rates remain above most of the previous peaks, and new waves—and variants—could well arise.
The pandemic has had and continues to have a massive impact on the population regardless of the media’s silence on the matter. There have been more than 45.4 million reported COVID-19 infections during the pandemic. The reported number of COVID-related deaths is approaching 740,000. Over the last three months, 10 million infections were registered with 114,000 deaths, demonstrating the virulence of the Delta variant despite more than half the population being fully vaccinated.
However, even these figures are a significant underreporting of the true calamity. According to data provided by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s model of excess COVID-19 deaths, the death toll stands at a horrific 1.33 million lives lost over the span of 18 months. Nearly 300,000 of these deaths occurred during the last wave of infections.
The discrepancy between the reported COVID deaths and the excess deaths estimated on the basis of COVID-19 models is staggering, and yet there is not a mention of it in the bourgeoisie press and by the political establishment.
And despite these horrific developments, instead of employing any significant public health measures to save lives and livelihoods, the message has evolved into mitigate through vaccinations only.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” provided what passes for caution in the official discourse. He told anchor Jonathan Karl, “We certainly are turning the corner on this particular surge, Jon. But we have experienced over now close to 20 months of surges that go up and then come down, and then go back up again. The way to keep it down, to make that turnaround continue to go down, is to do what we mentioned: get people vaccinated.”
Critical modeling of the dynamics of community spread employing various strategies for dealing with the pandemic has shown that vaccinations alone will not stem the tide of infections. The vaccination campaigns have all but stalled, making any stated vaccination goal difficult to achieve. Currently, only 56.6 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, below what would be required even to slow the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.
As for eradicating the virus and freeing humanity from this deadly threat, neither of the two camps in bourgeois politics hold out any such prospect.
Placing the discussion into context, even before the last surge in the US this summer, scientists had estimated that combined with infections and vaccines, approximately 83.3 percent of the population had some level of immunity. And yet, the last wave was only second in its destructive force to the winter surge. Without measures in place to curtail the spread of infection, the virus will continue to spark new fires across the country, including a likely new surge accompanying the colder weather that is imminent in the Northern US states.
Presently, the pandemic is rippling through dispersed populations of rural regions for whom the lack of infrastructure and access to health care are playing havoc. A new study from the University of Iowa College of Public Health found COVID-19 death rates in rural regions were double those reported in urban areas.
On Wednesday, Alaska saw 18 more people hospitalized for COVID-19, bringing the total to 204. Cases also doubled overnight with 1,220 new infections. The state continues to lead in infection rates. Earlier in the month the state health officials activated a “crisis standard of care” policy across 20 hospitals, which means critical life-sustaining care is being rationed to those deemed best fit to survive. For instance, at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, treatment for a 70-year-old woman on a ventilator and dialysis machine was terminated to free up the machine for a 48-year-old man, according to CNBC . Both patients, however, passed away.
The current surge in hospitalizations in Montana has persisted. This week the state broke the 2,000 mark for the first time during the pandemic as the figure rose to 2,227 COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, breaking the previous record of 1,456 on October 4, 2020. Wyoming and West Virginia are experiencing similar surges of cases.
But more densely populated states are also suffering anew. Michigan has witnessed a resurgence of the infection. The state’s health department reported on Wednesday that there were 8,671 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases and 110 deaths over the span of just two days. Hospital emergency rooms are filled with patients lying on stretchers in the crowded hallways left unattended from staffing shortages. However, many are also there not because of COVID-19 but other ailments that have been long neglected, but which are now forcing people to overcome their understandable reluctance to seek hospital treatment.
Dr. Brad Uren, an emergency medicine professor at the University of Michigan College of Emergency Physicians, told the Detroit Free Press, “We’re back to pre-COVID volumes, but also have the added burden of the COVID patients and the sort of backlog of patients that have been deferring some of their care over the last year.”
Wisconsin has seen cases peak across the state, with the seven-day average having reached over 2,600 cases. As schools there ended even mitigation policies, the number of infections among children has soared, contributing to the present dire situation. Deaths have begun to track upwards again. According to the Wisconsin Hospital Association, more than 1,170 people are admitted to the hospitals in the state with 310 in intensive care units.
Though the number of new cases nationally has been declining, with the seven-day average now a little over 91,000 per day, the death toll remains high, with more than 1,900 people dying each day. There are also indications that the decline in national COVID-19 cases is slowing, which has ominous implications as the country is heading into winter with the added burden of the flu season.
Though full vaccination status for the elderly has reached 80 percent, they were also the first to be vaccinated, meaning their immunity to the coronavirus is most likely to have weakened. The continuing drive to return to pre-pandemic norms means that this age group faces renewed dangers of the full implementation of the “learning to live with the virus” policy. Though one in 450 people has died from COVID-19 in the United States, COVID-19 deaths among the elderly are now at one in 100, highlighting the dangers for this age group. Thus far, more than a half million people aged 65 or older have died from coronavirus in America.
Despite these grim statistics, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with a policy focused almost exclusively on vaccinations, while other public health measures go by the boards. Biden signed an executive order implementing emergency temporary standards (ETS) that would force companies with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination or regular testing. Once it goes into effect, the ETS would impact around 80 million workers, half the US workforce. Yesterday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) submitted the text of the new vaccine rule for large employers to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has taken the offensive against the vaccine mandate push by signing an executive order on Monday that would prohibit companies and organizations from enforcing a COVID-19 mandate on workers . The order states, “No entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including any employee or a consumer, who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, including prior recovery from COVID-19.” However, as many of these corporate “entities” operate across multiple states, it will only further exacerbate the global supply chain issues and the chaotic economic situation as companies have to determine which rules they will abide by.
The vaccinated governor presides over a state with one of the highest COVID-19 death tolls. Close to 69,000 people have died thus far, and more than 200 are still dying each day. Assuredly, these decisions are driven by personal political ambitions and not based on any moral stance or consideration based on sound scientific advice. In this regard, both the Democrats and Republicans are complicit in the massive number of deaths caused by their policies.
As Biden remarked last month during a White House speech urging large companies to enforce vaccination mandates on their labor force, “While America is in much better shape than it was seven months ago when I took office, I need to tell you a second fact: we’re in a tough stretch and it could last a while.” The president said more than he had probably intended.
The 2021 Global Hunger Index (GHI), published on Thursday, revealed soaring levels of hunger among the poor and working populations around the globe.
The foreword, written by the heads of Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, the organizations responsible for the GHI, stated that the report “points to a dire hunger situation, a result of the toxic cocktail of the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increasingly severe and protracted conflicts.”
Rising food prices are a critical contributing factor in the growth of world hunger over the past year. Rapidly mounting inflation and the disruption of the supply chain networks of global capitalism are driving up the prices of all basic consumer goods. The U.S. Energy Information Authority reported that nearly half of all US households who use natural gas to heat their homes will pay an average of 30 to 50 percent more this winter for heating than last year.
Real hourly earnings for American workers have fallen 1.9 percent since January. Workers in countries around the globe confront a similar situation, one that has become unlivable. Increasingly unable to pay rent, purchase adequate food, obtain fuel, they are being driven into struggle.
They confront a social system, capitalism, that exploits them, overworks them, and then leaves them without the basic necessities of life. The producers of the world’s goods find themselves without the means of survival. Nowhere is this more palpable than with the skyrocketing levels of world hunger.
The GHI report on hunger appears a week after the United Nations held a high-level event, Action in Support of Preventing and Ending Famine Now. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Director-General Qu Dongyu told the assembly, “Today we face unprecedented food crises on multiple fronts. Starvation and hunger-related deaths are a present reality. ... As we near the end of 2021, the situation has continued to deteriorate.”
The report stated that hunger remained at “serious, alarming, or extremely alarming levels in nearly 50 countries” and noted that “after decades of decline, the global prevalence of undernourishment ... is increasing.”
Three factors, according to the GHI, drive the rising levels of world hunger, which have driven 41 million people to “the very edge of famine”—“conflict, climate change, and the economic devastation brought on by Covid-19.”
Fueled by inflation and the economic dislocation caused by the pandemic, world food prices are soaring. The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI), which measures change in international prices of a basket of food commodities, reported in September that prices were 32.8 percent higher than they had been a year prior. The prices of the most basic staples rose even more sharply; wheat was up 41 percent and maize 38 percent from September 2020.
These figures contain immense misery. According to an article published in Nature Food in July, three billion people could not afford a healthy diet before the pandemic. Soaring food prices, and rising prices of consumer goods generally, have markedly worsened the situation. While 43 percent of the world’s population could not afford a healthy diet prior to COVID-19, by the end of 2020 the numbers had risen to 50 percent.
A 32 percent rise in the price of food has a profound impact on the poor. In underdeveloped countries, a majority of the population will spend somewhere from 40 to 60 percent of household income on food. The poorest 20 percent of the population in the United States spent from 30 to 40 percent of household income on food. Rising prices either mean an inability to pay rent and other expenses or cuts in the quality and overall calories of the food consumed.
The mass hunger and malnutrition confronting a substantial portion of the world’s working class is a social catastrophe, not a natural one. It is an immense crime which has been committed by the capitalist class around the globe.
The three factors driving world hunger identified by the GHI—conflict, the economic dislocation of the pandemic and climate change—are all the results of the irrational and rapacious character of capitalism.
The sharp rise in world hunger over the past year is above all a result of the criminal mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic by capitalist governments around the globe. The FAO cited “food price spikes, movement restrictions that limit market and pastoralist activities alike, rising inflation, decreased purchasing power” among the economic effects of the pandemic on world food consumption.
There are now 2.37 billion people in the category of “food insecure.” Most subsist on one or two small meals a day of inadequate nutrition, often simply a grain extended with a meager source of fat and a vegetable.
Around the world, working parents go hungry to ensure that there is food on their children’s plates. They invent ways of extending their food. They find ways to cook scraps. They dull hunger pains with instant coffee. They eat rice with a pinch of fish paste and a smear of vegetable oil.
Basic necessaries in much of the world are sold in small units as it is all that most can afford. Rice is purchased by the cup; oil in a small tied-off plastic bag.
The problems of malnutrition and hunger confront the working class in even the richest country in the world. American inner cities are food deserts, where the nearest source of healthy food is often miles away and inaccessible by public transit. All that is available at a nearby liquor store are Spam and Frosted Flakes. Lines form outside food banks often stretching for a block. One in five Americans relied on food bank assistance in 2020.
Every day more than seven hundred million people, 8.8 percent of the world’s population, go to bed on an empty stomach, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Hunger and malnutrition mean shortened life expectancies, stunted mental development, the premature death of loved ones; it means widows and orphans and childless parents.
The crisis of the pandemic, the drive of the capitalist class to force workers back into the factories, and the soaring cost of food and other basic goods are fueling an explosive growth in the global class struggle. Workers around the world are beginning to move, in opposition to the capitalist class and in defiance of the corporatist trade unions that have for decades strangled their struggles. They are engaged in a fight for their lives in a struggle over how society’s resources will be allocated.
The vast wealth of humanity, the product of our collective labor, is enough to feed, clothe, shelter and provide a rich and meaningful life to every human on this planet.
These immense resources, however, are controlled by a handful of billionaires and the super-rich, who have parasitically profited off the exploitation of the world’s working class and who squander this wealth. They have grown richer in the pandemic. Over the course of 2020, the world’s billionaires brought in an additional $1.9 trillion in personal wealth.
Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos compete with each other to take vanity flights to space, while a majority of the world’s population cannot afford a healthy diet. Society can afford to feed everyone on earth, but it cannot afford the billionaires.
The Biden administration’s failure to successfully fight the coronavirus and the ensuing supply chain crisis has trickled down to school cafeterias, as food workers struggle to get meals for students on the table.
In Oakland County, Michigan, Sara Simmerman, a food and nutrition supervisor, said the district is still getting Little Caesars pizzas for its 8,600 students, but the rest of the supplies it needs are stalled.
A satellite kitchen got only 35 of 400 cases of food it had ordered at one point. A few days later, 700 cases arrived on one day.
“You never know what you’re going to get,” Simmerman said. “It’s amazing how many kids want to eat salad when you don’t have lettuce.”
The Guardianreported on the unprecedented lack of supplies for U.S. consumers, the media outlet advancing the Biden administration narrative that the supply chain issue is global, thus not the failure of White House policies:
Like most districts across the country, Huron Valley is facing unprecedented food and labor shortages caused by what supply chain experts say is nearing a “global transport systems collapse.” Experts say as the economy reopened after lockdowns, many industries – including those involved in delivering food and supplies to schools – have faced increased demand they can’t meet.
Many predict the backlog of orders could extend throughout the rest of the school year. Forced to adapt their meal programs to a grab-and-go system last year when schools shut down for remote learning, school nutrition departments are now scrambling to find menu items and enlisting front office staff and school administrators to serve meals. They’re adapting their menus almost daily, depending on deliveries, and putting off equipment purchases to make up for higher prices on food and supplies.
A nationwide shortage of long-haul truckers is one piece of the complex puzzle that determines whether Los Angeles students get applesauce or schools across Michigan’s Oakland county offer chocolate milk.
“Deliveries of goods and foods are extremely delayed,”Lieling Hwang, assistant director of nutrition services for the Long Beach Unified School District in California, the Guardian report said. “It now takes an average of eight weeks to receive an item that previously showed up in two to three weeks.”
“Typically, these deliveries are coming in short, as well,” Hwang said.
That means middle and high school students are no longer getting their favorite “spicy cheese crunchers” or whole wheat croissants that used to be offered for breakfast sandwiches, Hwang said.
The Guardian reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently approved $1.5 billion in assistance to help school nutrition operations keep up with rising food prices. The money will be used to provide schools with fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy products.
Congress passed legislation to make all school lunches free for this year in the wake of the pandemic.
“We’ve been told it may even get worse before it gets better,” Simmerman said.
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