Daily Archives: April 5, 2021

2021-04-05: News Headlines

Ben Chacko (2021-04-05). Venezuela calls for debt restructuring in response to Covid pandemic. peoplesworld.org Venezuela is calling for a comprehensive restructuring of international debt in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Addressing the UN heads of state meeting on international debt, President Nicolas Maduro said that more than 130 million people had been plunged into poverty during the pandemic. A "profound revision of debt conditions" was needed to prevent …

WSWS (2021-04-05). Australian richest billionaires double their wealth during COVID-19 crisis. wsws.org The Australian's rich list boasts: "The biggest names in Australian business thrived during the pandemic."

Eurasia Review (2021-04-05). US Deaths Normally Change Less Than 2% Each Year; In 2020 They Rose Nearly 23%. eurasiareview.com Extended surges in the South and West in the summer and early winter of 2020 resulted in regional increases in excess death rates, both from COVID-19 and from other causes, a 50-state analysis of excess death trends has found. Virginia Commonwealth University researchers' latest study notes that Black Americans had the highest excess death rates per capita of any racial or ethnic group in 2020. | The research, publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offers new data from the last 10 months of 2020 on how many Americans died during 2020 as a result of the effects of the pandemic — beyond…

Carl Davis, Meg Wiehe, Misha Hil (2021-04-05). How Sales Taxes Widen the Racial Wealth Divide. counterpunch.org The public discourse over inequality and racial disparities has rightly shifted to how to dismantle structural challenges that create these gross inequities. Addressing racial disparities will require a concerted effort by government across all policy areas. A new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) offers some perspective on how state and

Mark Gruenberg (2021-04-05). Official jobless rate down but reality a lot worse. peoplesworld.org WASHINGTON —The official U.S. unemployment rate declined to 6% in March, down 0.2% in one month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on April 2. Driven by big gains in bars and restaurants, companies claimed to create a net of 780,000 new jobs. Governments added 136,000—125,600 of them as schools reopened. But the story was …

WSWS (2021-04-05). Biden seeks to deploy federal employees to immigrant detention facilities. wsws.org The deployment of federal civilian employees is aimed at facilitating, not changing, a brutal policy of incarcerating children fleeing violence and poverty, which has led to thousands of child migrants being packed into cages along the US-Mexican border.

Paul Jay (2021-04-05). Can You Destroy $20 Billion in Wealth Without Committing a Crime? — Bill Black. theanalysis.news The U.S. SEC has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and trades that led to $20 billion in losses for his firm and perhaps billions more for various banks. What kind of perverted system allows such chaos? Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

WSWS (2021-04-05). Australian workers face poverty as wage subsidies and welfare supplements end. wsws.org Virgin Australia stood down 170 workers the same day the JobKeeper scheme concluded.

Dean Baker (2021-04-05). Inside the Economic Bounce. counterpunch.org The March employment reports show the economy bouncing back sharply due to the spread of vaccines and the first effects of the Biden recovery package. The establishment survey showed the economy adding 916,000 jobs in the month. The household survey was also encouraging, with the unemployment rate dropping 0.2 percentage points to 6.0 percent, a

Rayhan Uddin (2021-04-05). Egyptians criticise mummy parade for neglecting the living. middleeasteye.net Egyptians criticise mummy parade for neglecting the living | Journalists and activists denounce celebration of ancient Egypt as distraction from repression, poverty and government's poor handling of pandemic | Mon, 04/05/2021 – 17: 33 | A performer rides a two-horse chariot at the start of the parade of 22 ancient Egyptian royal mummies (AFP) | Egypt held an extravagant parade on Saturday, as it trans…

Staff (2021-04-05). Being "Anti-Racist" Isn't Enough. The Violence of Whiteness Must Be Exposed. truthout.org Even if the movement for reparations someday transforms the profound economic disparities that fall along racial lines in this country — addressing income disparities, the wealth gap, housing and health care inequities, and unemployment disparities — a fundamental problem of anti-Black racism still won't be solved. | What remains is a fundamentally ontological problem: the reality of the being of whiteness, and its denial of Black humanity within white racist America. | White privilege…

Staff (2021-04-05). MLK Opposed "Poverty, Racism & Militarism" in Speech One Year Before His Assassination 53 Years Ago. democracynow.org Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 53 years ago, on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of 39. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor, organized the Poor People's Campaign to address issues of economic justice, and was a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War. We air an excerpt of his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated, in which Dr. King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violen…

VOA (2021-04-05). China Adopts Kremlin's 'Information War' Tactics — Analysis. eurasiareview.com By Jamie Dettmer | China is taking a page out of the Kremlin's playbook and is seeking to highlight America's faults and weaponize the culture wars and identity politics currently buffeting the West, according to disinformation analysts. | Much like the Kremlin and state-owned Russian media, Chinese propagandists are focusing on the problems of racial injustice and income inequality in the U.S. and Western Europe — a move to distract attention from Beijing's own rights abuses, including the internment of more than a million ethnic Muslim Uyghurs, analysts say. | "Civil unrest in the United States followi…

otowenh (2021-04-04). TikTok Video Promotes Neo-Colonialism and Gentrification in Guatemala. orinocotribune.com Social networks were in turmoil after a TikTok video arose promoting a neo-colonial project of gentrification in Guatemala. | Even if the COVID-19 lockdowns have reduced the amount of air travel, this hasn't stopped companies in the tourist sector from taking advantage of low demand to cheapen their resort prices. Although drawing in more customers during a downturn does benefit local communities to some extent, the winners are still the hotel and tour complex owners, where the famous "trickle down economics," of course, do not trickle down profits to workers, but instead leave wealth concentrated in the hands of…

Andy Kroll (2021-04-04). "The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World" tomdispatch.com Fifty-four years ago, standing at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his now-famous "Beyond Vietnam" sermon. For the first time in public, he expressed in vehement terms his opposition to the American war in Vietnam. He saw clearly that a foreign policy defined by aggression hurt the poor and dispossessed across the planet. But it did more than that. It also drained this country of its moral vitality and the financial resources needed to fight poverty at home. On that early spring day, exactly one year before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King warned that "a natio…

Peoples Dispatch (2021-04-04). Explained: How Intellectual Property Rights are blocking vaccine production. peoplesdispatch.org Estimates suggest that the mass of the population in wealthier countries are likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by mid of 2022. However, in poorer economies, mass immunization will take until 2024, if it happens at all. These countries will pay the cost of this delay in the form of 2.5 million avoidable deaths. | What is standing in the way of expanding production and carrying out mass vaccination campaigns across the world?

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