The pandemic did not start this month. It did not start at the start of the year or after the 2020 election. My point, it did not take Joe Biden by surprise. And he was supposed to have experience and be up for the job of president. He's proven that he is not up to the job. And that COVID 'relief' nonsense did nothing of value for We The People.
Bucking economists’ prognostications of a “recovering” job market, the release of the weekly Department of Labor (DOL) first-time unemployment state claims report on Thursday revealed another devastating 770,000 jobless claims for the week ending March 13, as the worst economic calamity to hit the working class since the Great Depression of the 1930’s continues.
In addition to sky-high state claims, over 282,000 jobless claims were filed under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program (PUA), bringing the weekly total to over 1 million combined claims.
The PUA program, created under the CARES Act last March and renewed under the American Rescue Plan signed into law by President Joe Biden last Thursday, was designed to provide unemployment benefits for workers in the growing “gig” or temporary employment economy, which is increasingly the only source of work for younger, less-experienced, “over-experienced” and laid off workers.
In the last 52 weeks, there has not been a single week where combined state and federal claims did not exceed 1 million. There also has not been a single week in which state claims have not exceeded the previous weekly high of 665,000 weekly claims, set in March 2009 during the Great Recession, or the record high of 695,000 claims registered in October of 1982.
In the past year 81,790,000 state claims have been filed, nearly seven times the yearly average of 13 million. Even as millions of workers have lost their jobs, sold their belongings and cut back on food in order to survive, and over 550,000 in the US tragically and needlessly succumbed to COVID-19, “pandemic profiteers” such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk have seen their wealth soar, as billionaires the world over added nearly $4 trillion to their wealth last year.
While over 22 million jobs were lost when lockdowns were first implemented in March and April, the over 80 million claims filed in the last year do not correlate directly to over 80 million job losses. The figure is more a result of technologically outdated and purposely confusing state unemployment systems which in many cases force jobless workers to apply multiple times in order to qualify for benefits, only to be followed by requests to reapply again in order to maintain or re-up the eligibility of said benefits.
These broken and frustrating state unemployment systems, which have been purposely underfunded, neglected and designed to frustrate those in need of income, are part of concerted effort on the part of the ruling class and its lackeys in both big business parties to deny previously earned benefits to eligible workers, while forcing them back into dangerous factories and work sites in order to create surplus labor value for the ruling class.
We need better than Joe Biden. Sad truth, anyone in the Democratic Party primary would have been better than Joe Biden.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Thursday:
Thursday, March 18, 2021. The 18th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War looms.
The 18th anniversary of the start of the on-going Iraq War approaches. THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS notes:
On March 18, 2003: The Winnipeg Free Press reported that U.S. president George W. Bush declared Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to leave the country in exile or the U.S. and its allies would invade. Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien said Canada would not join the looming war in Iraq because the offensive did not have UN approval; his declaration in the House of Commons was met with a standing ovation.
Reverend Bill Armstrong (LARGS AND MILLPORT WEEKLY NEWS) reflects on that time period:
Have you ever joined a protest march, or written a tetchy letter to a newspaper, or even surprised your friends by standing out from the crowd, taking a stance which may seem to be out of character?
Many years ago, and for the first time in my life, I did such a thing when I joined the march in Glasgow against the impending war in Iraq; I was joined by one of my elders who was similarly concerned. The memory was stirred by the Pope’s recent visit to Iraq.
The route was from George Square in the city, ending in a rally outside the SECC. No doubt the march had been arranged for that day and place when the then leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, was due to address the Labour Party Conference. The chant rose that he should come out and meet the protesters, but he escaped by another way; and the rest is history.
In a few days, March 21st, someone born after the Iraq War began will be old enough to servce in the US miliary in Iraq. The war is still going. Bully Boy Bush and Congress started it, Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Congress continued it and today Joe Biden and the Congress keep it going still.
At MILITARY.COM, Retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis offers:
The U.S. military rushed thousands of combat troops to the Middle East in 1990 to prevent Saddam Hussein from capturing Saudi oil fields and disrupting global oil supplies. More than 30 years and two major land wars later, we're still there -- and still with no plan or strategy to leave.
[. . .]
In a February interview, Lt. Gen. Paul Calvert, commander of American Forces in Iraq and Syria, said that, based on conversations with Iraqi leaders and government officials, "There's a significant amount of concern in terms of the possibilities of an internal Shia civil war between those that are aligned to Iran [and] those that are Shia nationalist."
In fact, added British Army Maj. Gen. Kevin Copsey, unless the Iraqi government "comes up with a proper strategy to deal with them, in five years' time, it could end up tearing the country apart."
I fear that the default answer out of Washington -- whether senior uniformed leaders or elected officials -- will be that U.S. troops "have" to stay in Iraq to stabilize the situation.
As was patently obvious during my 2016 visit -- and as these two generals confirm is still the case -- the political and military fundamentals in Iraq remain hopelessly arrayed against a peaceful end to the fighting. It didn't matter that U.S. troops kept fighting alongside Iraq for the past five years, and it won't matter if they stay the next five years. The result will be the same: continued instability. The good news for Americans, however, is that we don't need to "solve" Iraq's problems to guarantee our security.
There is still no exit strategy just continued war and occupation all these years later.
There is also still no functional government in Iraq. MEME reports:
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi said on Tuesday that the country needs an open, transparent and responsible dialogue to stop the cycle of harsh days.
A government statement noted that Al-Kadhimi had received representatives from Halabja on the 33rd anniversary of the chemical weapons attack carried out on the city by Saddam Hussein's regime.
"Our people have shared harsh and sad days, not only during the dictatorial regime, but also in subsequent periods" said Al-Kadhimi. "The pain must stop. The future of our people must be better than their past, and the responsibility for this transformation lies on our shoulders."
The Iraqi premier explained that the proposed national dialogue initiative is the essence of this hope. He called last week for a national dialogue that includes political and youth forces as well as those representing protesters.
Meet Iraq's AOC, Mustafa al-Kadhimi. He thinks a dialogue needs to be started. Isn't that his job? And the ongoing protests, which started in the fall of 2019, the protesters have been attempting that dialogue. Their thanks for that? Being beaten, being kidnapped and being killed. By Iraqi security forces. And with each public death, Mustafa offers a public tut-tut but never actually does anything and the violence against the protesters continue. So his call for a dialogue is as laubhable as everything else he's done (said, actually, he doesn't do much of anything).
A long with the ongoing protests, new ones spring up. Dilan Sirwan (RUDAW) reports:
Security forces in Sulaimani fired live ammunition to disperse school
students protesting in front of the education directorate’s
headquarters on Thursday morning, witnesses have told Rudaw.
Grade 12 students gathered in front of the directorate’s building for
the fourth day in a row, a protesting student told Rudaw’s Horvan
Rafaat. Protesters are calling for various reforms, including their
pre-exam study period to be reverted to 40 days, after it was reduced to
28.
“What we want is that the 40 days that was reduced to 28 be changed back to 40, and the amount of subject included in exams to be reduced,” Dabin Ibrahim, a protesting student told Rafaat on Wednesday.
Security forces fired into the sky as students attempted to break into the building, several students reported.
A land of orphans and widows, that's what the war left Iraq.
Baghdad, 18 March 2021 - Under the auspices of the Secretary General of the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers in Baghdad, a conference was held under the title “Displaced Women in Liberated Areas (Challenges and Solutions)”. In the presence of the Minister of Migrations and Displacement (MoMD) and with the participation of a number of international organizations, UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes and various ministries' representatives attendees discussed ways of support to displaced women to return to their areas of origin by setting up their own programs in line with MoMD’s plan. Here is the video message by the Deputy Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Iraq/Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, Ms. Irena Vojáčková-Sollorano, to the participants of the conference.
The oil rich country continues to see money pour in but it gets lost before it can get to the people (corruption). ALJAZEERA reports on the Parliament's budget process.
In other news, Sandy Rashty (THE JC) reports:
One of the last Jews living in Iraq has died aged 61.
Dhafar Fouad Eliyahu, a leading orthopaedic doctor at the al-Wasiti hospital in Baghdad, died in the capital on Sunday. There are now believed to be only three Iraqi Jews still in Baghdad.
Iraqis paid tribute to the doctor, a former student at Baghdad’s Jewish school, Frank Iny, who used to provide free medical care to people who could not afford to pay.
According to former classmates now living in London, Dr Eliyahu was highly-academic and could recite textbooks “word by word”.
Edwin Shuker, a Jew born in Baghdad now living in London, wrote about Eliyahou on Facebook:
“Thafer was an orthopedic surgeon, who served Iraq with skills and loyalty to the very last day of his life,” Shuker wrote. “Thafer worked under the most challenging of conditions, especially during the long years of war and sanctions. He continued to treat patients in the state hospitals knowing that many of them were not able to pay towards the treatment but always received each and everyone, with a broad smile and a warm welcome. His modesty was legendary and he will be sorely missed.”
Let's note this from Restore The Fourth:
The
PATRIOT Act's most invasive provisions expired on March 15th, 2020, but
some lawmakers and bureaucrats want to bring back this invasive
surveillance law so the government can spy on our phone calls, text
messages, emails, and Internet history … without a warrant. We can’t let
that happen.
For years, the US government used the PATRIOT Act to spy on hundreds of millions of Americans, including journalists,1 whistleblowers,2 and protesters.3 They told us this massive surveillance program was necessary to keep us safe from terrorism, but internal review boards found that the government’s spying failed to identify or prevent a single terrorist attack.4 And yet lawmakers continued to renew the PATRIOT Act over and over again.
Thankfully, Congress finally let the most invasive provisions of the PATRIOT Act expire last year, and we’re all safer because of it. But some politicians and government officials have begun openly attacking our privacy rights once again. They’re likely to try to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, or create a new law to allow them to spy on us. We have to stop them.
Thanks for all you do,
Alex Marthews, Restore The Fourth
[1] The Intercept
[2] CNN
https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/01/media/fbi-spy-journalists/index.html
[3] Brennan Center
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fbi-targets-new-generation-black-activists
[4] Vox
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/2/8701499/patriot-act-explain
We'll wind down with this from Glenn Greenwald (SUBSTACK):
Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.
The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.
The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.
This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their censorship of my article, they published an article by a different journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their assertion. From The Intercept on October 21:
Their latest falsehood once again involves Biden, Ukraine, and a laptop mysteriously discovered in a computer repair shop and passed to the New York Post, thanks to Trump crony Rudy Giuliani….. The U.S. intelligence community had previously warned the White House that Giuliani has been the target of a Russian intelligence operation to disseminate disinformation about Biden, and the FBI has been investigating whether the strange story about the Biden laptop is part of a Russian disinformation campaign. This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.
Oh my, marvel at those extremely rigorous editorial standards: regurgitating serious accusations from ex-CIA operatives without bothering to note that they were unaccompanied by evidence and that even those agents admitted they had none. But, as they usually do these days, The Intercept had plenty of company in the corporate media.
ADDED: I meant for the video below to be included today. We'll also include it tomorrow but, if it's not included today, I'll forget it.
The following sites updated:
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