Plutocracy

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Will Feuer at CNBC reports that Joe Biden will invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up the manufacture of more doses of the coronavirus vaccine. You may ask yourself, why has this not already been done? Trump said on December 9 that he “might” invoke the Korea War-era act, […]

Debt

Austerity Terrors: Congress Stimulus Package Finally Passes – but it is Too Little, Too Late

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – 900 billion dollars is a big amount, Apparently one trillion is a whole order of magnitude greater. Or at least the number is so terrifying that politicians bend heaven and earth to avoid being connected with trillion dollar expenditures. And this allergic reaction is bipartisan. In the […]

Donald Trump

White House Partying like it is 2021, with a Covid 9/11 Death Toll Every Day

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – ‘Tis the season to be folly Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la Don(ald) we now our gay apparel, Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!… It’s party time in the nation’s capital and the Christmas spirit reigns supreme, even if the Texas Republican Party does want to secede from the Union. I mean, who doesn’t? And hey, don’t you want to […]

Employment

Mitch McConnell Wants to Let Corporations Kill You

Thom Hartmann

( Otherwords.org ) – The Senate GOP leader’s refusal to pass COVID-19 aid without corporate immunity should be the scandal of the year. By Thom Hartmann | December 16, 2020 Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans […]

Donald Trump

Pandemic Failure, Vaccine Success Indict American Monopoly Capitalism

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The contrast between the unprecedented failure of the United States to deal successfully with the coronavirus pandemic, and the success of pharmaceutical companies in coming up with effective vaccines in record time is bittersweet. The reason for the difference is that no one could make any money on mitigating the […]

Debt

The Great American Moonshot: Now we Need a Vaccine for Poverty, Inequality and Racism

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Martin Luther King, Jr., offered this all-too-relevant comment on his moment in his 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”: “The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the […]

Inequality

McConnell was holding up Stimulus over Shielding Businesses from Coronavirus Liability — A Very Bad Idea

The Conversation

By Timothy D. Lytton | – Congress may be close to a deal on another coronavirus bailout, but Senate Republican demands for liability protections for businesses remain a major obstacle. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has long warned of an “avalanche” of lawsuits that will stymie economic recovery efforts if Congress does not grant companies […]

Donald Trump

Where’s the Second Relief Act? The US Safety Net is working, but there are Capitalists who don’t Want it to

John Buell

Why can’t our political leaders learn to live with success? In an era marked by cynicism about politics both parties managed to enact an initial COVID-19 relief package that if anything exceeded expectations. Last June Jason DeParle, summarized academic research on this act by quoting Columbia University’s Zachary Parolin: “Right now, the safety net is […]

Donald Trump

From Salmonella to Workers’ Injuries: Trump Races to Weaken Environmental and Worker Protections on Way Out

ProPublica

By Isaac Arnsdorf ( ProPublica) – Six days after President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the U.S. Department of Agriculture notified food safety groups that it was proposing a regulatory change to speed up chicken factory processing lines, a change that would allow companies to sell more birds. An earlier USDA effort had […]