Monday, April 27, 2020

IS THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS AMERICA'S GREATEST THREAT? OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE BILL GATES KISSES CHINA'S ASS

Bill Gates praises China, blasts US on coronavirus response


"I hate Bill Gates" is a common expression among Windows users, based on the balkiness of Gates's signature Microsoft program.
Now he's given everyone a new reason to hate him.
According to the Daily Wire:
Left-wing billionaire Bill Gates attacked the United States during a CNN interview on Sunday while praising communist China, claiming that China "did a lot of things right at the beginning" of the coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan.
CNN's Fareed Zakaria asked Gates: "How would you respond to the charge that the Chinese covered this up, they essentially deceived the rest of the world, and as a result, they should be held in someway responsible for this?"
"Well, I don't think that's a timely thing because it doesn't affect how we act today," Gates claimed. "China did a lot of things right at the beginning. Like any country where a virus first shows up, they can look back and see where they missed some things."
China "did a lot of things right at the beginning"? 
Such as throwing infected people alive into furnaces and leaving Wuhan residents screaming in despair from their balconies?  Tossing residents into collective sick pens like livestock against their will?  Throwing the doctor who sounded the alarm into prison and exonerating him only after he died of the virus in prison?
Or was Gates most impressed by China keeping U.S. medical researchers out and scrubbing down the wet markets where the virus was said to originate to paper over the evidence?
Was China's buying up of medical supplies worldwide to keep a stash solely for itself, while releasing five million people from the city of Wuhan to spread the virus around the country, and world, what Gates liked best?
Or was it China's refusal to share its lab data, and the growing suspicious that the virus was released from a lab, either incompetently or on purpose?
It defies belief that anyone could be so out of touch with the atrocious performance of China in the early days of the pandemic.  Their mismanagement, in fact, is why it seems to be the only place out there that is regularly releasing pandemics.
Whatever it was, Gates is way off base, and it's strange stuff, given that he's usually a rational center-left voice of reason on many issues.
Maybe that comes of living the billionaire life and not having to weigh the things that ordinary people do.
Maybe it's some kind of profit motive — the old "China market" argument.
Maybe it's Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Whatever it is, to praise China and then to criticize the U.S. demonstrates a profoundly strange and incompetent ability to distinguish something unpleasant from shinola.  China has much to answer for for its dishonest and inhuman response to this pandemic, and it probably will have to.
To praise China, while blasting the U.S., and then making pious noises about saving the blame for later is the height of hypocrisy.
Image credit: OnInnovation via FlickrCC BY-SA 2.0.



US billionaires increase wealth by $280 billion since March, as millions are unable to get unemployment benefits

 
“Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel, former investment banker, Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Emanuel and Obama led the reorganization of class relations in the United States, cutting social services, education, health and pensions, and accelerating a shift to temporary and low-paid work. As a result they created the largest stock market boom in history.
Today, this catchphrase is once again on the lips of the ruling 
class. The largest financial and corporate 
powerholders are seeking to use the global 
health emergency to expand their wealth and 
increase the exploitation of the working class.
The billionaires in the United States have increased their wealth by $282 billion since the mid-March stock decline, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies. While more than one fifth of the American population is now unemployed, and millions are deprived of basic needs and confront an uncertain future, the fortunes of the ultra-rich have not only recovered, they are improving substantially.
Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
Jeff Bezos’s fortune increased by $25 billion 
between January 1 and April 15. Never in 
history has any individual made so much 
wealth so quickly. As the report noted, “this is 
larger than the Gross Domestic Product of 
Honduras, which was $23.9 billion in 2018.”
Eight billionaires, so-called “pandemic profiteers,” have increased their wealth, each, by over $1 billion during this time: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), MacKenzie Bezos (Amazon), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), John Albert Sobrato (Silicon Valley real estate), Elon Musk, Joshua Harris (Apollo, financial asset management) and Rocco Comisso (Mediacom, cable and internet).
Why, when 200,000 have died around the world and millions more lives are in jeopardy, are the ultra-rich profiting so fabulously?
First, the bailout package crafted and voted on unanimously by Republicans and Democrats has funneled wealth to the richest banks and corporations, while leaving peanuts for the working population.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act gives only $550 billion to direct payments and extended unemployment, which most people have yet to receive. Of the remaining more than $1.7 trillion, $500 billion goes directly to bailing out major corporations. While $377 billion ostensibly goes to small businesses, most have not seen a penny, as the banks pocketed $10 billion in fees and larger companies largely consumed the available funds.
The CARES Act also contains within it an additional $173 billion in tax breaks to super-wealthy individuals and companies. For example, it allows households earning at least $500,000 a year to reduce their taxes by substantially increasing deductions from business losses and applying them to taxable money earned on the stock market.
All of this is on top of trillions being funneled 

into the financial markets and corporate 

coffers by the Federal Reserve.
Meanwhile, a study from the Pew Research Center finds that while over 10 million people applied for unemployment in March, only 29 percent of jobless Americans received any benefits that month. The report says that unemployed workers “face a hodgepodge of different state rules governing how they can qualify for benefits, how much they’ll get and how long they can collect them.”
Real unemployment has grown past 20 percent of the population. Over 26.5 million jobs have been lost, adding to the 7.1 million people who were already unemployed prior to the crisis.
Even when workers receive these benefits, they come, ultimately, at the expense of state and federal debt. Like in 2008, when state after state and city after city faced a budget crisis, so too, with COVID-19, will fiscal problems emerge. Who will pay when budgets are exceeded? As in Detroit, Michigan and Stockton, California in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the ruling class will once again say, “There is no money” for basic social services such as education and clean water. Meanwhile, trillions are funneled to the ultra-wealthy.
A second reason the pandemic has been a bonanza for the ultra-rich is that it has intensified corporate consolidation, part-time and temporary work, and digital and physical automation.
Bloomberg writes: “Big Business Has All the Advantages in the Pandemic.” While most small businesses are on the rocks--deprived by larger firms of the small funding that was theoretically given to them in the CARES Act--many large corporations, such as Amazon, are carrying out a massive hiring spree. Walmart plans to hire 150,000 people by May; Amazon, 100,000; and Dollar Store, 25,000.
Because larger firms are more likely to have the capital not only to weather the crisis, but to dominate internet-based commerce, they will come out of the crisis with even greater domination of their market. In particularly hard-hit industries, such as the oil and gas sector, the giant companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil see the crisis as an opportunity to purchase their smaller competitors.
The Financial Times likewise writes that “Covid-19 will only increase automation anxiety” as companies “pandemic-proof their operations.” Capitalism has a natural tendency toward automation, which in the long term breeds economic crises and joblessness. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says COVID-19 will spur a “surge of labour-replacing technology,” as automated cashiers, cars, logistic robots and automated assembly lines replace workers. Again, the largest companies will emerge on top because they are the ones that can afford this automated overhaul.
Capitalism’s fundamental trajectory—toward increasing automation, temporary and part-time work, corporate consolidation, ever increasing inequality and financial bubbles—will intensify. The result, in turn, will be an ever more staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.
The socialist response to the COVID-19 crisis demands that this mass of wealth be confiscated. The major companies which dominate our lives cannot be run for the private profit of a handful of billionaires who seek to squeeze the working class, literally, to death. They must be placed under the social and democratic control of the working class.

ABC News Taken to the Woodshed for Continuing to Push Chinese Propaganda About COVID-19

Julio Rosas
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Posted: Apr 27, 2020 10:20 AM
ABC News Taken to the Woodshed for Continuing to Push Chinese Propaganda About COVID-19
Source: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan
ABC News came under fire on social media on Sunday for uncritically sharing Chinese propaganda about the country's "success" on combating the Wuhan coronavirus.
As part of their rolling coverage for the global pandemic, ABC News reported Wuhan, the city where the novel coronavirus originated from, no longer has hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
Their source for the report was from China's state-run media organization Xinhua, who was citing Mi Feng, a spokesperson for China's National Health Commission.
The short blurb did not mention about the reports of China purposefully misreporting and undercounting the country's number of COVID-19 patients and death toll. 
"Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak began, no longer has any patients hospitalized with COVID-19, China's state-run media organization Xinhua reported Sunday.
"Citing Mi Feng, a spokesperson for China's National Health Commission, Xinhua reported that the last patient in serious condition in China's coronavirus epicenter was released Friday,
"As of Sunday, China has reported 83,909 diagnosed COVID-19 cases and 4,636 fatalities, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University."
Users on Twitter expressed their doubts about the report and criticized ABC News for sharing the news with little pushback on their misleading history.
It is possible the authoritarian Chinese government has a better handle on the outbreak, but they have given the rest of the world no reason to believe them since they have been misleading about the virus since day one. The whole world has been adversely affected by the disease because of their mishandling of the outbreak and attempts to hide it.

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