PP NewsBrief: 2021-02-18

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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Chris Hedges: Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die

"Campbell would have reminded us that the demonization of the Trump supporters who stormed the capital is a terrible mistake.  He would have reminded us that racial injustice will only be solved with economic justice. He would have called on us to reach out to those who do not think like us, do not speak like us, are ridiculed by polite society, but who suffer the same economic marginalization. He knew that the disparities of wealth, loss of status and hope for the future, coupled with prolonged social dislocation, generated the poisoned solidarity that give rise to groups such as the Klan or the Proud Boys.

We cannot heal wounds we refuse to acknowledge.

The Washington Post, which analyzed the public records of 125 defendants charged with taking part in the storming of the Capital on January 6, found that “nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades.”

“The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public,” the Post found. “A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.”

“A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records,” the paper reported. “A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien. Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.”

We must acknowledge the tragedy of these lives, while at the same time condemning racism, hate and the lust for violence.  We must grasp that our most perfidious enemy is not someone who is politically incorrect, even racist, but the corporations and a failed political and judicial system that callously sacrifices people, as well as the planet, on the altar of profit.

Like Campbell, much of my own family comes from the rural working class, many espousing prejudices my father, a Presbyterian minister, regularly condemned from the pulpit. Through a combination of luck and scholarships to elite schools, I got out. They never did. My grandfather, intellectually gifted, was forced to drop out of high school his senior year when his sister’s husband died. He had to work the farm to feed her children. If you are poor in America, you rarely get more than one chance. And many do not get one. He lost his.

The towns in Maine where my relatives come from have been devastated by the closures of mills and factories. There is little meaningful work. There is a smoldering anger caused by legitimate feelings of betrayal and entrapment. They live, like most working class Americans, lives of quiet desperation. This anger is often expressed in negative and destructive ways. But I have no right to dismiss them as irredeemable.

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Corporations know these moral purity tests are, for us, self-defeating. They know that by making the cancel culture legitimate — and for this reason I opposed locking Donald Trump out of his Twitter and other social media accounts — they can employ it to silence those who attack and expose the structures of corporate power and imperial crimes. The campaigns of moral absolutism widen the divides between the liberal elites and the white working class, divisions that are crucial to maintaining the power of the corporate elites. The cancel culture is the fodder for the riveting and entertaining culture wars. It turns anti-politics into politics.  Most importantly, the cancel culture deflects attention from the far more egregious institutionalized abuses of power.  It is this smug, self-righteousness crusade that makes the liberal class so odious."

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Too Big and Too Powerful: The Criminality of Global Capitalism

"In an important legal case in 1886 an American judge used laws that were intended for protecting the rights of freed slaves to enable corporations to have the same rights as people.(13) This legal ruling still stands today. Bizarrely, whilst they have the same rights as people, they have fewer responsibilities to do no harm. If humans committed the same crimes as corporations do, they would receive long prison sentences, or be put in an institution for the criminally insane. But a company cannot go to jail. In theory, a corporation can have its charter withdrawn, which means that it gets shut down. In practice, this does not happen. (Some campaign groups have been exploring how to apply this to the most criminal corporations for many years(14)). Various rules have been introduced to make executives more responsible for the actions of their companies, but so far in the US and Britain these have not been enforced. In almost every industry, the world’s biggest corporations have been found guilty of committing crimes, some very serious, but the punishment is just a fine – the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Corporations effectively operate outside the law."

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Biden Dismisses China’s Uyghur Genocide as Difference in “Cultural Norms”

"Despite the Trump administration and his own characterizing Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims as a genocide, Biden furiously backpedaled after he was asked about the issue.

“If you know anything about Chinese history, it has always been the time when China has been victimized by the outer world is when they haven’t been unified at home,” said Biden, going on to say that President Xi Jinping is aiming to achieve a “tightly controlled China.”

“I’m not gonna speak out against what he’s doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uyghurs in the western mountains of China…culturally there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow,” he added."

There were some people at the beginning of the "pandemic" who were commenting on how China's abilities to combat the virus were greater given it's authoritarian tendencies. How long until that line is used with regard to "deradicalization" at home? Or maybe it already has?

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S--t Public Defenders See: The Great Covid-19 Jury Charade

"In news reports, we mostly read that prosecutors and corrections officials were trying to find ways to reduce the risk of disease both in jails and in court, another institution that traditionally required people to congregate indoors. Many districts suspended jury trials indefinitely, a serious problem for those awaiting trial, and one that raised a question: if officials were too worried about the safety of jurors to schedule trials, what did that mean for grand juries?

In other words, was the pandemic too dangerous for speedy trial rights, but not dangerous enough to slow indictments? Were there places where jury trials were canceled, but grand juries were not?

In some select jurisdictions across the country, the answer appeared — and appears — to be yes.

“It highlights the way in which the pandemic is being used selectively,” says Scott Hechinger of Zealous, a national public defender advocacy organization. “In some places it’s used to perpetuate the system, in some places, to make it worse.”"

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The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot

"One of the most significant of these falsehoods was the tale — endorsed over and over without any caveats by the media for more than a month — that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by the pro-Trump mob when they beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. That claim was first published by The New York Times on January 8 in an article headlined “Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.” It cited “two [anonymous] law enforcement officials” to claim that Sicknick died “with the mob rampaging through the halls of Congress” and after he “was struck with a fire extinguisher.”

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It took on such importance for a clear reason: Sicknick’s death was the only example the media had of the pro-Trump mob deliberately killing anyone. In a January 11 article detailing the five people who died on the day of the Capitol protest, the New York Times again told the Sicknick story: “Law enforcement officials said he had been ‘physically engaging with protesters’ and was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

But none of the other four deaths were at the hands of the protesters: the only other person killed with deliberate violence was a pro-Trump protester, Ashli Babbitt, unarmed when shot in the neck by a police officer at close range. The other three deaths were all pro-Trump protesters: Kevin Greeson, who died of a heart attack outside the Capitol; Benjamin Philips, 50, “the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo,” who died of a stroke that day; and Rosanne Boyland, a fanatical Trump supporter whom the Times says was inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.”

This is why the fire extinguisher story became so vital to those intent on depicting these events in the most violent and menacing light possible. Without Sicknick having his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher, there were no deaths that day that could be attributed to deliberate violence by pro-Trump protesters. Three weeks later, The Washington Post said dozens of officers (a total of 140) had various degrees of injuries, but none reported as life-threatening, and at least two police officers committed suicide after the riot. So Sicknick was the only person killed who was not a pro-Trump protester, and the only one deliberately killed by the mob itself."

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Global Coup d’État: Mapping the Corporate Takeover of Global Governance

"What we’re really concerned about is really that this initiative by the World Economic Forum actually looks to entrench the power of those most responsible for the crises we’re facing. In many ways, it’s a trick. It’s a sleight of hand to make sure that things continue as they are; to continue the same.

That will create more of these crises, more of these pandemics, will deepen the climate crisis, which will deepen inequality. It’s not a Great Reset at all. It’s a Great Corporate Takeover. And that’s what we were trying to draw attention to.

What we’ve been finding in recent years is that really there is something I would call it a kind of a global, silent coup d’état going on in terms of global governance. Most people don’t see it.

And people have become familiar with the way that corporations have far more influence and are being integrated into policymaking at a national level. They see that more in front of them. People see their services being privatized. They see the influence of the oil companies or the banking sector that has stopped actions such as regulation of banks or of dealing with a climate crisis.

What people don’t realize is a global level there has been something much more silent going on. Which is that their governance, which used to be by nations, is now increasingly being done by unaccountable bodies dominated by corporations. And part of the problem is that that has been happening in lots of different sectors but people haven’t been connecting the dots.

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Just to give an example, we have now the global pandemic and one of the key bodies that is now making the decisions is a facility called COVAX [COVID-19 Vaccines Global Alliance]. You’d have thought global health should be run by the World Health Organization. It is accountable to the United Nations. It has a system of accountability.

Well, what’s actually happening is that the World Health Organization is just one of a few partners but really [COVAX] it’s being controlled by corporations and corporate interests. In this case it is GAVI [The Vaccine Alliance formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunization] and CEPI [The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations].

And they are both bodies, which don’t have a system of accountability. Where it’s not clear who chose them; who they’re accountable to; or how they can be held to account. And what we do see is that there’s a lot of corporate influence in each of these bodies.

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The irony is that as you’ve had nationalists governments come to power, the kind of Trump America first in the world or Modi India first, they articulate a nationalist agenda but they haven’t actually questioned the role of corporations in any way whatsoever.

And as they’ve retreated from multilateral forums like the United Nations, they’ve left a vacuum that corporations have been able to fill. Corporations now say: we can be the global actors. We can be the responsible actors. We’re the ones who can tackle the big crises we face such as inequality, such as climate change, such as the pandemic.

So really we’ve had this convergence of forces coming together where as States have retreated corporations have filled the vacuum."

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Another Deadly Decision by Cuomo: Ventilators

"It’s possible the early rush to place sick people on ventilators unnecessarily killed thousands of New Yorkers. A study released in late April 2020 showed nearly 90 percent of intubated patients hospitalized in the state’s largest health care system died in the first five weeks of the pandemic; during that same period, at least 4,000 New Yorkers, according to one data source, were put on the breathing machines. (The state’s website, oddly, does not disclose how many New Yorkers were intubated from the start of the pandemic through early May.)

Ventilators can cause a variety of other serious health concerns; patients must remain heavily sedated so they don’t wake up and attempt to remove the tube. The machine can lead to fatal infections such as pneumonia. Some COVID-19 patients who recovered after being intubated describe the ordeal as being “buried alive” and many suffer severe physical, emotional, and mental after-effects.

By mid-April, after widespread use of ventilators, a handful of courageous New York health care providers started speaking out; one Brooklyn emergency room doctor posted a video explaining how the practice was killing people or causing lifelong lung damage.

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After hospitals largely abandoned the practice of automatically placing sick patients on ventilators, the city’s fatality rate dropped dramatically between the initial spring outbreak and a fall surge. “In the earliest days of the pandemic, hospitals in New York City tended to intubate patients early. Now, if possible, they avoid intubation, in which a mechanical ventilator breathes for a patient who is deeply sedated. Instead, doctors first attempt to give patients oxygen by less invasive means,” the Times reported in October 2020. One study showed death rates among infected New Yorkers decreased from 25.6 percent in March to 7.6 percent in August.

Of course, health care providers in New York weren’t the only ones intubating COVID sufferers. In a shocking Wall Street Journal exposé last year, many doctors expressed regret for using ventilators and confessed the practice wasn’t for the benefit of the patient but to prevent the “spray [of] dangerous amounts of virus into the air” that could infect doctors, nurses, and other patients. “That felt awful,” one Michigan critical care physician told the paper."

#ICantBreathe

Ignorant and cowardly doctors and nurses killed people. Just as ignorant and cowardly teachers are harming children's futures. You don't need to be a hero, just don't be an ignorant coward.

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“New Landlordism”: Vulture Funds Plan to Use the Pandemic to Pillage the Global Economy

"There’s a new app with a tagline that promises that you, too, can ‘profit like a landlord from just £1 with no effort’.Proptee, set to launch this year (subject to approval from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority) allows anyone with, say, five grand to buy shares in a buy-to-let flat in London worth half a million. In return, you receive a slice of its tenants’ monthly rent—here about one percent—with the promise you can cash-out your investment as the value rises.

‘We’re building a stock exchange for properties that lives on your smartphone and combines the high yields and low risk of property investing with the high liquidity of a stock exchange,’ explains 24-year-old cofounder Benedek Toth.

Proptee shows just how far the logic of Wall Street has infiltrated housing across the US and Europe since the Global Financial Crisis, before which most private landlords remained conventional, small-scale operations, with a handful of properties at most. But after the US housing market crashed in 2007, a few Wall Street investment firms cracked the code for how to turn homes into a tradeable asset class worth billions.

A handful of giants led by private equity firm Blackstone were the frontrunners, snapping up single-family houses in US foreclosure auctions and apartments in firesales launched by Europe’s right-wing governments, as EU-imposed austerity measures forced cities like Madrid to sell off social housing for pennies on the dollar.

Scooping up whole suburbs of distressed homes on both sides of the Atlantic, Blackstone became the world’s largest landlord in a matter of years. First, it set up various rental companies—Invitation Homes in the US, or Fidere in Spain—before selling off shares in these companies to other investors or packaging together thousands of tenants’ rental income into obscure financial products.

While Proptee offers you a share of one house’s rent, private equity sold investors the chance to get their hands on thousands of homes’ rent cheques bundled up together. For Blackstone, it paid off, as wealthy backers poured billions into these schemes: the $88.4 billion of investor capital it held at the time of the 2007 crash has today ballooned to $619 billion, and is rising.

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The last decade offers a grim lesson in what the consequences could look like. The raid by private equity after the 2007 crash meant prospective homeowners’ hopes of getting a cheap foot on the ladder vanished, as Wall Street agents outbid young families. In the recovery years after past recessions, first-time buyers rose with the housing market, but from 2010, the entire wealth uplift was captured by financial actors, according to research by Georgia State University.

Yet renters were harder hit, squeezed by their new corporate landlords whose mission it was to maximise investor returns by hiking rents and cutting maintenance costs, becoming both brutal and absent landlords in the process. Former UN housing expert Leilani Farha has ridden to the fore, accusing Blackstone of human rights violations (claims that Blackstone has disputed, at length)."

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Shopkeeper who stopped robbery in California by shooting into the air ARRESTED for discharging his gun

"An Oakland liquor store owner in violence-besieged Chinatown shot into the air to stop the robbery of a woman in front of his shop, only to be arrested as police signaled that armed resistance to a crime wave won't be tolerated.

The merchant was reportedly bailed out on Tuesday after being arrested for felony assault with a firearm. The arrest stemmed from an incident in which the 36-year-old man shot into the air four times after seeing a woman being violently robbed, prompting the alleged robber to run away with her camera.

"We don't want our business owners or others to begin to arm themselves," Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong told reporters on Tuesday. He said there could be unintended consequences when citizens shoot at alleged criminals, such as striking innocent bystanders or creating confusion when officers arrive on scene and try to identify an assailant. "We want them to observe and report," he added, and "be good witnesses.""

If the law requires that you stand by while a fellow human being is assaulted then the law is a joke and its authority null & void. This "leave it to us" attitude is only logical to people who worship "experts". They're believers in the idea that you're too dumb and incompetent to handle yourself and complex issues.

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Biden promises vaccines available to all Americans by end of July, ‘significantly’ less social distancing & masks a year from now

"President Biden has predicted a “very different circumstance” for the US’ Covid-19 outbreak by Christmas, saying some 600 million vaccine doses will be ready by July while noting that he’s been advised against ‘over-promising.’

Biden waxed optimistic about the ongoing viral outbreak during a CNN town hall event on Tuesday, declaring that “by next Christmas, I think we’ll be in a very different circumstance, God willing, than we are today.” He said the improvement would be further helped along if an inoculation developed by Johnson & Johnson receives FDA approval, as it is expected to sometime this month.

“A year from now, I think that there’ll be significantly fewer people having to be socially distanced, have to wear masks, etc.,” the president went on, adding, however, “But we don’t know. So I don’t want to over-promise anything here. I told you when I ran and when I got elected, I will always level with you.”

Despite the note of caution, Biden went on to say that some 600 million vaccine doses would be available for distribution by late July – “enough to vaccinate every American.”"

Here is Biden making it crystal clear that even if every American who wants a vaccine gets one (or has the opportunity to) you still don't get freedom. This is a state they want you in for the duration of the reset period. Fight back before it's too late.

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Brace Yourself for Four More Years of Racial Divisiveness

"Unfortunately, neither as a candidate nor as our President did Donald Trump endeavor to ease racial tensions and return us to the straight and narrow high road leading to a post-racial future. The regressive left’s race war had, no surprise, summoned up an aggressive (and at times inarticulate) culture warrior rather than a reflective peacemaker.

From the very moment Trump descended that gleaming escalator and regaled us with tales of rapists and drug dealers from Mexico, the hand for the next four years was dealt. For a media obsessed with racial alarmism, every other word out of Trump’s mouth was headline-worthy: “shithole countries,” the “Chinese virus,” or referring to undocumented immigrants as “animals” (something CNN’s Oliver Darcy himself remarked was taken out of context by media outlets).

The problems Donald Trump identified were pressing and real: unchecked illegal immigration, rampant identity politics, and a nation ruled for too long by complacent technocrats who were unwilling to stand up against stale orthodoxies that put the interests of actual Americans below those of international bodies and multinational corporations. What is more, his populist agenda could and should have united us and created a new consensus for decades to come. But the rhetorical and political firebombs Trump often threw into the mix tended to create easy fodder for the sensation-peddling corporate media, undermine Trump’s own agenda and, ultimately, divide Americans still further.

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Our unremitting national obsession with racial and other identity issues will continue to engineer its predictable backlash. Membership in white supremacist organizations, once a fringe phenomenon, will continue to grow, and race-baiting leftists, faced increasingly with real white supremacy as opposed to the contrived kind they currently fulminate against, will get to say, “I told you so”—oblivious to their own starring role in the catastrophe.

I hold out hope that one day a greater, wiser politician than the ones that currently rise up among us will come along and guide us back to the high road; the path that leads up to the post-racial future rather than down into the seething cauldron of identity, in which teams of color-, gender- and sexually-coded gladiators fight tooth and claw over scarce social spoils. But we are moving further and further away from the high road today. Donald Trump played our dangerous game on behalf of our team, and now Joe Biden, his hollow professions of unity notwithstanding, is playing on behalf of the other team. But the game remains fundamentally the same. It is one in which a loss is certain to result in a tantrum that sweeps all the pieces off the board and sends us all hurtling towards the abyss."

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The Third Party Morass

"In the backwash of the impeachment scandal and the cowardly vote by seven Republicans, there is increasing talk of a new MAGA or Trump third party. Without question, the Republican Party is corrupt, feckless, and largely gutless. It is very nearly a part of the Uniparty. But Donald Trump has rejected any association with a third party.

Why? A third party is seemingly a no-brainer. Over and over, the GOP has proven either unwilling to change or deeply in bed with the Deep State. Republican “leaders” (i.e., those whom the Hoax News runs to any time they want to quote a Republican) have proven hostile to MAGA and Trump issues. Most are receiving money from either China or big pharma. It should be easy to toss these bilgebarrels over the side, right?

Not so fast."

What the piece is actually arguing (though its author may not realize it) is just that narrowly focused niche parties are a dead end. Which is true. But a third party need not be that. A party centered on the concerns and problems faced by the average American and not one wedded to this or that particular ideology, individual, or dusty academic tome is still capable of absolutely crushing the elite at nearly all levels of political representation.