Originally published at http://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/12/17/we-are-not-embarrassed-enough-ilhan-omar-rips-congress-failing-public-covid-relief
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a beacon of morality!
The numbers are mind-boggling, aren’t they ?
Three, four trillion dollars, short term according to those two economists.
I am reminded of FDR and the Great Depression - even the New Deal was not enough to staunch the depression, apparently, in hindsight, it took WW II to get things up and running, just as John Kenneth Galbraith explained in his book “The Affluent Society” so long ago.
Dunno anymore - this really is a new world, with eight billion hungry people in it, and the world ecosystem coming apart.
And this pandemic - I’m seeing the mental effects right here at home, in my family, and in me. Not surprising that I suppose, but it does feel surprising. 3500 deaths in the US yesterday.
Jim Hightower over on his thread is trying to put a nice face on things - you know, the better angels of our nature, social creatures who like helping each other out.
Dunno about that either anymore - this election - 74 million actually voted for this cretin.
People help each other when it is clear their own interests are served - quite natural - we have always been tribal.
But this spectacular lack of good governance - virtually everywhere - the rapacious greed of so many - the clinging to fairy tales - it’s disheartening to say the least.
That other cretin - the GOP Senate Majority leader - he smells defeat in Georgia - and so now he wants a package.
Yea - that’s inspiring.
I find it impossible to think like a politician, or at least extremely distasteful. But you ask me - no three or four trillion - no deal ~
since we know that the government can “print” an unlimited amount of “money” at any time they want the cash–as the first stimulus and our war budgets show-- under Modern Monetary Theory we can continue this indefinably as long as we have a GDP --that the politicians do not "print " the money for the use of the American people is part of the capitalist scam and as predictably cruel as one would expect from the ruling classes to the peons who they wish to keep in a state of fear, deprivation, and hopelessness as then they make more compliant wage slaves
But, BUT… I’d thought, this was what everyone wanted us to LOTE for? It’s not like Joe didn’t BRAG about BEATING the “socialist” or how NOTHING would fundementally change?
~https://www.dailyposter.com/p/end-the-austerity-loop
~https://cepr.net/important-addition-to-edsall-column-on-the-politics-of-resentment-downward-mobility-was-by-design/ (if “essential” = non-white, what’s “socialist” mean?)
~https://www.boredpanda.com/heartbreaking-images-covid19-medical-front-lines-go-nakamura/
~https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.13.20248147v1 (the aspirin question)
~https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/12/further-discussion-of-the-red-flags-in-the-pfizer-vaccine-paper-in-the-new-england-journal-of-medicine.html#comment-3485351
Our digest of Johns Hopkins test-positivity stats is meant to convey an idea of where lie the epicenters of USA’s national outbreak. This map from CDC (updated daily) conveys much the same relation, only in terms of 7-day average daily case-rate.
~https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days
The distribution of USA’s outbreak epicenters described by this map at the moment can be fairly summarized “all over the place.” Our composite ranking continues to show the outbreaks in California and Texas rising meteorically, as Pennsylvania’s hold on first place solidifies.
STATE COVID-19 OUTBREAKS
Ranking is momentum-based on Johns Hopkins’ test-positivity factored with “per-capita newcases” & “immediate mortality” – the ratio of totals on hand for deaths and cases.
> JH per-capita immed
> positivity newcases mortality
> % % %
> 1. Pennsylvania 36.1 68.3 1.60
> 2. Idaho 50.3 77.7 1.16
> 3. Alabama 34.5 61.7 1.04
> --- --------------------- ----------- -----------
> 4. South Dakota 42.7 94.4 2.62
> 5. Tennessee 17.0 89.7 0.99
> 6. Kansas 37.0 81.7 1.46
> 7. California 10.5 63.4 0.53
> 8. Texas 18.7 48.3 1.16
> 9. Mississippi 22.3 59.7 1.52
> 10. Ohio 16.3 79.6 0.76
> 11. Nevada 15.9 78.8 1.12
> 12. Iowa 37.8 70.0 2.39
> 13. New Mexico 13.7 90.6 1.48
> 14. Oklahoma 16.3 75.5 0.70
> 15. Arkansas 16.4 64.5 1.58
> 16. Utah 18.8 86.9 0.46
> 17. Indiana 12.4 90.9 1.22
> 18. Kentucky 13.9 68.5 0.66
> 19. New Hampshire 9.9 48.2 0.74
> 20. Rhode Island 7.5 102.6 1.06
> 21. Arizona 14.1 73.9 0.84
> 22. Delaware 8.5 67.3 0.52
> 23. Missouri 17.6 60.2 1.41
> 24. Wyoming 11.7 91.3 1.09
> --- --------------------- ----------- -----------
> 25. South Carolina 9.9 44.2 1.00
> 26. West Virginia 8.6 61.5 1.45
> 27. North Carolina 10.1 46.1 0.83
> 28. Montana 14.3 78.7 1.22
> 29. Georgia 12.2 45.1 0.88
> 30. Wisconsin 12.9 78.7 1.23
> 31. Connecticut 6.2 62.0 1.18
> 32. Louisiana 8.8 50.6 1.20
> 33. Alaska 5.8 80.7 0.52
> 34. Virginia 11.3 35.7 0.82
> 35. Colorado 9.2 72.0 1.37
> 36. Massachusetts 5.1 57.7 1.02
> 37. Minnesota 9.7 85.3 1.19
> 38. Illinois 9.2 73.3 1.67
> 39. Nebraska 10.5 82.0 1.37
> 40. Michigan 10.3 61.8 1.77
> 41. Florida 8.8 42.5 1.00
> 42. North Dakota 8.7 93.4 2.13
> 43. Washington 10.1 31.5 0.96
> 44. New Jersey 7.8 50.9 1.13
> 45. New York 4.8 43.4 0.82
> 46. Maryland 5.9 41.7 1.36
> --- --------------------- ----------- -----------
> 47. Maine 4.1 22.2 1.11
> 48. D.C. 3.5 31.7 0.92
> 49. Vermont 2.0 16.1 1.74
> --- --------------------- ----------- -----------
> 50. Oregon 5.7 31.6 1.32
> 51. Hawaii 2.4 7.5 1.72
We also know that the United States should easily be able to help those in need during a pandemic since all they have to do is to slash the military budget by at least half. But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and members of The Squad, are offering to do this apparently believing that they would be accused of being too radical.
“You have guided missiles and misguided men.”-Martin Luther King Jr.
“Endless money forms the sinews of war.”-Cicero [106-43 BC], Roman statesman and philosopher
“Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible.”-A. Philip Randolph [1889-1979], African American civil rights leader
“There is a demand today for men who can make wrong appear right.”-Terence [ca. 190-159 BC], Roman playwright
" Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."-Dwight Eisenhower, from his Chance for Peace speech, April 16, 1953
Two things consistently present in these negotiations
Pelosi and McConnell
They have to go. If we are to move forward
Their process is broken like their ideas
Moscow Mitch and P’loser need to retire so they can spend more time with their family and money.
It’s not really a negotiation, all three, Pelosi, McConnell, and Schumer, are all working for the same side, and it’s not our side. I’m also not seeing anything about the gains for corporations in these stories today. Rumor has it, they received their lawsuit protection retroactive to the start of the pandemic, and if you try to sue your employer for COVID related issues, the Justice Dept. can somehow fine you $50,000. Now this sounds crazy to me, so for now I call it a rumor, until it can be confirmed or denied.
I’m still curious to see just how Nancy, Cheri, etc. CRUSH any chance Nina Turner has to nudge the Squad, into calling for a floor vote on Medcare For All? And I’m all outa popcorn!
~https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1339384575785627649
~https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/12/the-case-for-forcing-a-floor-vote-on-medicare-for-all
~https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-donald-trump-rescued-the-blob/
~https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/12/farmworkers-labor-rebellion-worker-central-valley/
Anyone following Jimmy Dore and other others pressuring AOC to withhold votes from Pelosi unless M4A is put to a vote?
Weird huh. Pushing hard for M4A during a goddamn pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 moms and dads, grandpas and grandmas and many others. I applaud Dore’s efforts.
Is a “progressive” a real thing or not? I want to believe. I know liberals are basically worthless. With Biden they can go back to sleep.
Vote and succeed and help people during a pandemic. Fail and find out who is actually on your side. Dump Pelosi.
Duly Noted
It is the casting of the die to divvy up the Cloak of our Fellow Citizens
Taking sustenance from the mouths of our poverty stricken children
So they can have More
Their Day of Reckoning will come
We all leave through the same portal
And the payment required is the same for us all
That Eye of the Needle is getting smaller with every theft
I would go further and say that real progressives should dump the Democratic Party and form their own party [such as a Workers’ Party, Labor Party, Populist Party or whatever they wish to call it] and finally come to the realization that the Democratic Party, as Lance Selfa informs the reader in his brilliant book The Democrats: A Critical History, is the place where social movements go to die.
Agreed. I’m afraid that the Möbius strip of Duhmerican political dysfunction must be discredited for even the most complacent to see. That’s gonna be painful. Biden and his Cabinet will help further damage the “center” and that’s necessary. Attachment to what, clearly isn’t working, has to be torn away.
Yup, western PA is a wonderful place to be during this pandemic. Our positivity rate is skyrocketing, and not just in Pittsburgh. The major growth in infections is in the surrounding counties of Pennsyltucky, particularly Westmorland county where Trump held one of his maskless rallies in late October.
We may be too stupid to live.
Some scholars are trying to parse out the influence of penal institutions on community spread. Between state prisons & migrant detention, Texas & California have plenty. That might account for their shocking ascent. I haven’t heard any numbers on Pennsylvania jails… Whatever’s going on inside (across the Bay from me, inside San Quentin: plenty) it’ll continually, often quietly leak out in the bodies of staff.
We may be too stupidly vicious to live.
Omar is lamenting about her “embarrassment” and the inability of democratic leadership to negotiate on behalf of the american people.
Meanwhile, AOC and the entire squad is being outed in real time as sheep-herding frauds by Jimmy Dore and scores of others. They have absolute leverage to bring up a yes or no vote on medicare for all in the house whilst also sticking a thumb in the eye of pelosi. They only give excuses as to why they cannot do what is right.
I say if they do not force Pelosi to bring up a vote on M4A then you can put aside any belief that there is such a thing as a “progressive” within the democratic party.
If they do not force an M4A vote - I will only vote 3rd party, green or peoples party.
So 68% of new cases in Pennsylvania are per capita?
Give me a break: “outed in real time” like secret perverts?
I’m out of touch with this Jimmy Dore character so many here seem to worship. Your post substantially increases my level of JimmyDore-WTF: instinctive distrust of those who make no sense, that is.