Daily Archives: April 6, 2021

2021-04-06: News Headlines

K. Lloyd Billingsley (2021-04-06). The Art Of The New Racism — OpEd. eurasiareview.com "Certain San Francisco artists may receive $1,000 a month under a new city program, the latest in a series of universal basic income initiatives cropping up in cities across California," writes They must be "San Francisco residents under certain income thresholds who faced economic loss during the pandemic." The recipients can be from "every artistic tradition," b…

Sonali Kolhatkar (2021-04-06). How Police Preserve Inequality in Los Angeles—and Everywhere Else. counterpunch.org The 1974 classic Hollywood film "Chinatown" features a scene set on a picturesque lake in Los Angeles where J.J. "Jake" Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, spies on two characters, Hollis Mulwray and Katherine Cross, snapping photos of them as he leans back in a boat. The iconic location where this and many other Hollywood movie scenes were filmed was near the site of a violent confrontation by hundreds of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers against protesters on March 24. Riot gear-clad law enforcement faced off against protesters and bystanders, including residents of the surrounding neighborhood, legal…

Sonali Kolhatkar (2021-04-06). How police preserve inequality in Los Angeles—and everywhere else. peoplesdispatch.org Instead of dismantling encampments where unhoused people have formed their own communities, we ought to dismantle the economic system that fosters homelessness and the state power that preserves inequality…

MEE correspondent (2021-04-06). Yemen: Fishermen find valuable 'whale vomit' and become rich overnight. middleeasteye.net Yemen: Fishermen find valuable 'whale vomit' and become rich overnight | Thanks to a displaced fisherman from Hodeidah, a huge chunk of precious ambergris was found in a sperm whale, bringing wealth to a whole village | Tue, 04/06/2021 – 08: 55 | Yemeni fisherman and the 120kg piece of ambergris they found in a sperm whale (social media) | Life as a fisherman in Yemen has become near-im…

Zachary Conti (2021-04-06). IMF Reports Pandemic Economic Outlook Uncertain. indybay.org Amidst Rising Inequality, Ninety Million Could Fall into Extreme Poverty…

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…

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.

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). 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.

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). 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…

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…

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

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