CORPORATE CRIMINALITY

MoA—There are way more measures needed than Pelosi’s bill allows for. The government must cover all costs for virus testing and Covid-19 care. It must pay sick leave to everyone who has to stay home independent of their job status. Not providing such will prolong the crisis as infected people who need to work because they lack money will otherwise continue to spread the virus. The U.S. and other economies will also need a fiscal injection on the demand side. Send a $5.000 check to every household which makes less than $100,000 per year and include the homeless in it. The money can be taken from the defense budget. A 355 ship navy will never stop a pandemic.

DAVID WALSH—As we noted in our original review, South Korea is one of the most socially unequal societies on the planet. Bong’s film spells out, in a thoughtful and logical manner, the inevitable results of such a division: the impoverished will do almost anything to emerge from their nightmarish conditions, subsisting literally in the underworld. The pampered rich, living in a cocoon, are utterly unprepared for the envy, anger and violence their dominance and arrogance provokes.

Tilford cites a litany of sobering statistics showing just how profligate Americans have been in using and abusing natural resources. For example, between 1900 and 1989 U.S. population tripled while its use of raw materials grew by a factor of 17.  “With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper,” he reports. “Our per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.”
He adds that the U.S. ranks highest in most consumer categories by a considerable margin, even among industrial nations.

CARL BOGGS—One daunting roadblock to reversing the crisis – the U.S. military-industrial colossus – could be responsible for five percent of the global carbon footprint, a problem never systematically addressed by Klein or the Dems. In On Fire we find a call for 25-percent reduction in worldwide military spending, but that exhausts discussion of the matter.

Concerning demonstrations in some countries, Pompeo said those riots are not an expression of “people’s democratic will.” Pompeo said these statements today during a speech at the University of Louisville. He is delivering these statements as people are rebelling against neoliberal economic policies in Chile and Colombia, as well as protests that erupted in Ecuador last October; all of these countries are U.S. allies and neo liberal projects.