Part-way through writing this week’s article the unthinkable happened again. ICE/CBP agents murdered another American citizen in cold blood on a cold street in Minneapolis during a general strike. Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse at the VA hospital. He was helping another person when he was beaten to the ground and shot several times by federal agents. Videos of the incident show that he was never a threat at any time to anyone before the agents murdered him.

Within the past month we’ve witnessed the deaths of three citizens at the hand of federal agents—Keith Porter was murdered by an off duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve, Renee Good and Alex Pretti shot by ICE/CBP in Minneapolis in January while working as legal observers. Three Americans who had long lives to look forward to have been cut down early by the fascist state. They are symbols and martyrs of the Revolution… The Revolution that is being born even as I type this.

Rest in power, Alex, Renee, and Keith. May we do you proud.

The following poem posted by Sony Thăng on his X account inspired my article. You’ll see why.

Trump is the perfect American symbol.

A loudmouth preacher of greatness standing on a 

mountain of debt, spectacle, and unpaid human cost.

He is the flag turned into a product.

The gospel turned into a grift.

The empire turned into a reality show.

The Perfect American Symbol

by C. A. Matthews

If things appear to be falling apart, so much the better.

The global capitalists’ empire truly is a “reality show” of sorts. It’s scripted by the twelve richest men in the world and acted out by their chosen politician-puppets. The entire plot of this sick and twisted reality show has become more and more obvious over the last few years. It can be summed up simply: Endless War for Endless Profits.

Millions of deaths are necessary in order to generate the trillions of dollars’ worth of profits for those lucky billionaires (or oligarchs if you prefer that term). I mean, you wouldn’t buy a killer drone or an AI surveillance program that hasn’t been extensively tested, would you? You wouldn’t waste your money on something that doesn’t work as advertised, right?

What better place to test out your new “toys” than in an open-air concentration camp called Gaza? It’s full of frail human bodies to crush, explode, and dismember at will. And once it has been emptied and turned into a luxury resort, they’ll just move the weapons testing on to a new location. Hmm… How about Minneapolis?

These twelve super-wealthy white males didn’t get filthy rich by holding back any. They didn’t get rich by having morals or practicing compassion. Eight decades ago, about the same time the apartheid regime in what is now called Israel formed, novelist George Orwell penned their mantra:

War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.

 

To learn more about who should be our "perfect American symbols", please copy or click on the following link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

Subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack today. Power to the people!   

This article is the 555th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven years. Thanks!

You can also make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is our only source of income. Thank you. 

 

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. 

--H.L. Mencken

Make History—Don’t Repeat It!

by C.A. Matthews

I have to stifle my giggles whenever an acquaintance goes on about how “Trump is the worse president ever! He’s supporting a genocide in Gaza! He’s taking away our freedom of speech! He’s trying to steal Greenland! No other president has ever done such horrible things!”

(Yes, I know that Biden also supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza among other horrendous things, but to these poor dears, Joe Biden is a kindly old man who likes licking ice cream cones and playing with little girls’ hair. He’s some sort of saint apparently in Dem circles. No kidding.)

The reason I want to giggle—actually I want to laugh out loud in their faces—is because it’s just too obvious how well our government’s propaganda works. These people are clueless! Any US history classes they may have taken in high school or college were woefully inadequate. Their instructors obviously never went into depth on certain topics, and the textbooks used in those classes didn’t waste much print on those topics, either.

It’s as if American powers-that-be don’t want to air our dirty laundry to the working masses. If American workers really learned about their country’s actual history, they might get ideas. Bad ideas. Ideas and examples of how Americans stood up against oppression, intolerance, bigotry, and outright theft of land, labor, and resources in the past.

In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn doesn’t beat around the bush. He tells things straightforwardly, without the narrative spin that always seems to make the wealthy, white, occasionally slave-owning male elites the heroes in your average US history book. From now on, whenever somebody says a silly thing like Trump is the “only president to support a genocide,” I will point them to Zinn’s classic tome.

Here’s what Zinn has to say in the seventh chapter of A People’s History about one particular incident of genocide that was not only supported by the United States government, it was actually committed by the US government against several groups of indigenous people...

To learn more about US history that doesn't bear repeating, please continue reading the rest of this article by copying or clicking on this Substack link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

Subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack today. Power to the people!

This article is the 513th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years.

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

Performative Politics

Performative Politics

by C. A. Matthews

I’ve heard the term performative politics quite often in recent times. It makes me wonder why this kind of politics has come into vogue.

 

Let’s take a look at the words and define them separately. According to Wikipedia:

Politics...activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

Merriam-Webster Online defines performative this way:

1. Relating to or marked by public, often artistic performance

2. Made or done for show (as to bolster one's own image or make a positive impression on others)

Both definitions describe more than a few actions taken recently by neoliberal politicians. Before I describe these incidents, perhaps it’s wise to define what exactly is meant by neoliberal or neoliberalism.

From Britannica.com:

Neoliberalism: an ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition. ...It is most commonly associated with laissez-faire economics... Its confidence in free markets as the most-efficient allocation of resources, its emphasis on minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, and its commitment to the freedom of trade and capital.

Now that we’re on the same page with what is meant by these terms, politics, performative, and neoliberalism, here are three examples of recent performative politics and what I think each of the actors (that is, politicians) is communicating to their obvious and not-so-obvious audiences and why they choose to perform in such as way at this time.

First off, we have the extremely photogenic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or “AOC” as she is known. AOC gave a fiery speech at the recent March to End Fossil Fuels in New York City. Her obvious audience was, of course, the crowd that gathered there or watched her performance online. This crowd included environmental activists and protesters of all the destructive things “Big Oil” has done to our planet with their constant drilling, mining, and burning of fossil fuels. But who was the not-so-obvious audience AOC was reaching out to with her speech? And why did she choose to perform this particular speech at this particular place and time?

To understand, AOC’s motivations we have to do a little research and look back at her history in politics. AOC ran as a “Bernie Sanders Democrat” and was photographed interacting with the youth-led Sunrise Movement environmental organization. She led a very loud protest with these young environmental activists inside Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s offices early on in her career, so it makes sense that she would show up at the march where many of them were protesting that day.

But many things have happened since AOC’s time hanging out with the Sunrise Movement in 2018. AOC has been re-elected to Congress a couple times, and she’s made quite a name for herself, not so much as an environmentalist but as a very good Democrat who does as she’s told. She has voted several times for massive Pentagon/Defense Department budgets in spite of the fact the US military is one of the most polluting organizations in the world.

AOC declared earlier this year that she supports President Biden running for office again, although he has done the complete opposite of what an environmentalist would support. Biden has opened up more federal land to oil drilling than any other president, particularly with the Willow Project:

The Biden Administration released its final decision approving three drilling sites for the Willow Master Development Plan, otherwise known as the Willow Project that threatens local communities, wildlife, and the global climate. This is a massive oil drilling development on Alaska’s North Slope, which is a stretch of public land known as the National Petroleum Reserve that borders the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

This project developed by ConocoPhillips would be the single largest oil extraction point on US public lands, emitting 278 million metric tons of climate pollution over the next 30 years. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions from 74 coal plants — one-third of all remaining U.S. plants. Willow will disproportionately impact the community of Nuiqsut, a predominantly Iñupiaq village of about 500 people already suffering extreme pollution from existing oil projects.--from Biden Administration Breaks Climate Promise and Approves Willow Project

By supporting Biden's actions, it seems AOC doesn't care much about the environment at all.

AOC has never protested the billion of dollars Biden has sent to Ukraine to continue NATO’s proxy war there. She hasn’t really come out against the sale of cluster munitions (cluster bombs) and depleted uranium to Ukraine, either. Cluster bombs maim primarily civilians—children for the most part—and depleted uranium radiation can lead to generations of genetically malformed babies and horrible rates of cancers in persons of all ages.

By supporting these astronomical Defense budgets and the US sale of cluster bombs (munitions that have been outlawed in almost every country in the world) as well as Biden’s Willow Oil Project, AOC's actions tell us that she isn’t particularly concerned with the health and well-being of her fellow human beings or the planet. Her actions in Congress just don’t support her image or “performance” as an environmental activist, now does it?

Who is Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s not-so-obvious audience she was trying to reach with her fiery environmental tirade at the march? I think she was telling the major donors of the Democratic Party—the military-industrial complex, corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing and the rest—that she is more than willing to act as a front to keep the public from looking too closely at what’s really going on behind the scenes in Washington DC. AOC is good at getting positive press by looking pretty on camera and saying what the public expects at the right time and place. What she says has no real depth or substance, since none of her actions back her words up. 

AOC’s example of performative politics shows that she is willing to act as the perfect front in order to take interest away from the true polluters and causers of death and destruction on our planet. She’ll make all those young environmental activists in NYC forget that nothing has really changed since she first marched with them. Magicians would say she’s the “smoke and mirrors” of the establishment, a perfect distraction. And by the size of her growing bank account since joining Congress, she has been well rewarded for her work.

This next example of performative politics is very easy to spot, and it’s easy to figure out who the obvious and not-so-obvious audiences are. The United Auto Workers are on strike. President Joe Biden—who didn’t permit the railroad workers to go on strike for safer working conditions in 2022—said he wanted to be the first sitting president to visit a picket line. So Biden spent about 12 minutes for a photo op at one of the picket lines in Detroit. Looking at the photos of some of the strikers, you can tell what the obvious audience thinks about Biden’s performance. Just look at the expression on the guy’s face standing to the far left in this picture!

Tim Black tells us exactly what Biden’s motivations were for making that oh-so-brief visit in this video clip on Twitter:

Does Joe Biden Really Care About Union Workers? #JoeBiden #CornelWest2024 #UAW pic.twitter.com/4s55qW127k

— RealTimBlack (@RealTimBlack) September 29, 2023

The not-so-obvious audience of the CEOs of the Big Three Automakers know that Joe Biden’s many years of not supporting the workers and always being there to help bail out the corporations at the expense of the public purse isn’t going away anytime soon. They understand Biden's trip to a UAW picket line was just the photo op that it so obviously was. The billionaires hope that it will trick enough workers into thinking they're being heard by Washington to stave off the revolution for a while. But does Biden and his campaign staff realize just how shallow this attempt came across? That remains to be seen.

Our last example of performative politics took place recently north of the border. Compared to the first two examples, it was a complete and unmitigated disaster. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government invited a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran to be honored with a standing ovation in the House of Commons… A man who turned out to be a veteran of the 14th division of Hitler’s Waffen-SS (1st Galician) in World War II, a group that was known for its genocide of Poles, Jews, and other ethnic minorities in what eventually became Ukraine after the break up of the Soviet Union. The soldiers of the 1st Galician were responsible for burning 1,000 Polish people alive.  Horrific!

Oops! 

After Canadian Jewish groups demanded an explanation, the prime minster tried to rationalize why his government acted so callously:

Trudeau, meanwhile, pointed to the “deeply embarrassing” event as a reason to “push back against Russian propaganda,” as though the Kremlin somehow smuggled an nonagenarian Nazi collaborator into parliament, then hypnotized the Prime Minister and his colleagues, Manchurian Candidate-style, into celebrating him as a hero. --from Canada's Honoring of Nazi Vet Exposes Ottawa's Longstanding Ukraine Policy

Using your critical thinking skills you’ve sharpened with the first two examples, who are in the obvious audience and the not-so-obvious audience Trudeau hoped to reach with this performance? We can assume that the public wasn't suppose to discover the genocidal history of this particular Ukrainian-Canadian veteran and that this “honor” given by Parliament would promote more Canadian corporations arms sales to Ukraine. Obviously, independent thinkers weren’t fooled and shared the information of the man's identity widely. Whether or not this negative publicity will affect Canadian arms sales to Ukraine remains to be seen.

Trudeau's not-so-obvious audience were the arms manufacturers who want the bloodshed to continue in Ukraine. The CEOS of the Canadian military-industrial complex were probably salivating at the thought of more arms sales. Endless proxy war is great for the NATO war machine, even if it’s not so great for the health and safety of human beings on the whole.

Hopefully you’re getting a handle on what is meant by “performative politics” by studying these recent examples. If you’re still confused why I labeled these three politicians “neoliberals” then go back to the definition for neoliberalism above and re-read the last line: [neoliberalism's]“commitment to the freedom of trade and capital.”

Think about that sentence. There’s a lot of capital to be made in the trading of armaments and munitions. All three of these politicians—AOC, Biden, and Trudeau—are on good terms with the military-industrial complex and are eager to see the trade in arms grow. They may say they support the striking workers, the environment, and veterans, but at the end of the day their actions make more money for the CEOs of the Big Three automakers, Big Oil, and the military-industrial complex.

And remember: actions always speak louder than words. Just ask this guy:

Keep sharpening your critical thinking skills and doing your research into the backgrounds and motivations of everyone who is involved in politics or the “activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.” 

Why? Because it seems politicians enjoy distributing the world's resources into their own pockets and keeping the status quo exactly the way it is while the world burns. Their fat personal bank accounts apparently help them sleep well at night, too. Stop believing the "performances" of politicians and hold them accountable before it's too late.

 

Related Articles and Interesting Links:

The Climate March, Joe Biden, and AOC's Dubious Endorsement https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/19/the-climate-march-joe-biden-and-aocs-dubious-endorsement

Biden Administration Breaks Climate Promise and Approves Willow Project https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-breaks-climate-promise-and-approves-willow-project 

Clusterf*cked: The Cruelty is the Point https://continuousrev.blogspot.com/2023/07/clusterfcked-cruelty-is-point.html

Nazi SS Veteran Receives Standing Ovation in Canadian Parliament https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/09/26/nazi-ss-veteran-receives-standing-ovation-in-canadian-parliament/

Canada's Honoring of Nazi Vet Exposes Ottawas Longstanding Ukraine Policy https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/01/canadas-honoring-of-nazi-vet-exposes-ottawas-longstanding-ukraine-policy/

How Joe Biden and The Democratic Party’s Climate Agenda Increases Environmental Racism More Than It Reduces Emissions https://blackagendareport.com/how-joe-biden-and-democratic-partys-climate-agenda-increases-environmental-racism-more-it-reduces

GOOD NEWS: Climate Lawsuits Against Fossil Fuel Industry Starting to Build Major Momentum https://stevendonziger.substack.com/p/good-news-climate-lawsuits-against

Biden’s Picket Line Visit Doesn’t Mean He Is On Our Side
https://www.leftvoice.org/bidens-picket-line-visit-doesnt-mean-he-is-on-our-side/

Canadian parliament’s applause for Nazi war criminal exposes NATO war against Russia  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/28/xalg-s28.html

In Canada, Denialism Grows Over Residential Schools Ahead of Orange Shirt Day  https://truthout.org/articles/in-canada-denialism-grows-over-residential-schools-ahead-of-orange-shirt-day/

Senator Menendez and co-defendants plead not guilty as Democrats seek to contain fallout from bribery scandal
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/28/lwpt-s28.html

William Astore: What Would Real ‘National Defense’ Look Like?
https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/27/william-astore-what-would-real-national-defense-look-like/

People Are Dying For Inches In Ukraine, The "World's Largest Arms Fair"  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/people-are-dying-for-inches-in-ukraine

Caitlin Johnstone: Neocons Love the Ukraine War
https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/28/caitlin-johnstone-neocons-love-the-ukraine-war/

US House Rejects Cluster-Bomb Ban https://consortiumnews.com/2023/09/28/us-lawmakers-reject-cluster-bomb-ban/

Fog Over Nord Stream https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/28/fog-over-nord-stream/

Files Expose Syrian ‘Revolution’ As Western Regime Change Operation https://popularresistance.org/files-expose-syrian-revolution-as-western-regime-change-operation/

Patrick Lawrence: The Undiscovered Country https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/28/patrick-lawrence-the-undiscovered-country/

Suing For a Livable Planet https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/28/suing-for-a-livable-planet/

A Major Win Against Factory Farming In Oregon https://popularresistance.org/a-major-win-against-factory-farming-in-oregon/

Uninvited and Unaccountable: How CBP Policed George Floyd Protests https://theintercept.com/2023/09/21/cbp-george-floyd-protests/

UN Report Urges End to Forced US Prison Labor—a 'Contemporary Form of Slavery' https://www.commondreams.org/news/racism-in-the-criminal-justice-system

Philadelphia Youth React When Charges Are Dropped Against Killer Cop https://popularresistance.org/philadelphia-youth-react-when-charges-are-dropped-against-killer-cop/

Why Our Popular Mass Movements Fail https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/why-our-popular-mass-movements-fail

 

Vaccine Apartheid

Vaccine Apartheid

by C.A. Matthews

Billionaire Bill Gates and his foundations say that no one else is capable of manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines except the current pharmaceutical firms who hold the patents. Other pharmaceutical companies worldwide insist otherwise. The end result? There are no cheap, generic Covid-19 vaccines available currently, and outbreaks in countries like India and Brazil have killed and sickened millions.

Welcome to the world of vaccine apartheid, a new way to keep poorer and developing economies in debt to Western corporations and economies. It may not be considered racism per se, but it sure comes darn close to it. "Elitism" or straight up "disaster capitalism" might be more accurate terms, but does terminology really matter when so many lives are at risk?

It's no accident that, as the majority of the poor and working classes have suffered financially and physically from the pandemic, the billionaires have prospered more than ever. Can't go shopping in your local stores due to a Covid outbreak and lockdown? Shop online via Amazon! Jeff Bezos, the first or second richest individual on the planet, really appreciates your business. Don't forget you'll need the latest in computer software and systems to do your online purchasing and to please your boss (who's making you work twice as hard for half the pay from the comfort of your heavily-mortgaged home) now. "Ka-ching! ka-ching!" go the cash registers at Microsoft.

While you grow poorer, they grow richer. And richer… And richer yet.

The coronavirus pandemic is a windfall for capitalists like Gates and Bezos. Could this simple fact alone explain "vaccine apartheid?" The more people become sick and the longer the Covid-19 pandemic lasts, the more profits they realize? Why would any self-respecting billionaire not want such a scenario to continue until they've milked the last drop of revenue possible out of it?

The more one thinks about it, Bill Gates--who has worked hard to establish his philanthropist status--might actually want to make it difficult to impossible for certain countries (or areas of the US) to obtain and purchase vaccines in order to make them dependent on his benevolence. Perhaps he's buying up all the patents for Covid-19 vaccines even now as you read this post. He stands to make a good profit or great publicity for his "causes" if he does. Either way, Gates and his kind are exercising the ultimate control over life and death for billions.

Control.  Maybe that's what billionaires and potential trillionaires want above all else? After all, they own practically everything else. What's left for über-capitalists to compete over except power and control? Why stop at being "King of the World," as journalist Krystal Ball calls Bill Gates, when you can become "King of the Universe"?

I used to wonder why billionaires like Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (Space X) are so eager to get into space exploration. I don't think it's just because they're visionaries who want to see man return to the moon surface or land on Mars in the next decade. Not anymore. I have become somewhat jaded by their recent antics. I no longer trust their motives for spaceflight as I might have in the past.

Their motivations are cloudy, but one thing does stand out. Consider the control these capitalists will enjoy on another planet such as Mars when they land their corporations' spacecrafts on its surface. They won't be landing there for "all mankind" as the Apollo astronauts claimed when they landed on the moon. Space X isn't going to build a United Nations' utopian space colony dedicated to pure science. No, they'll be landing there to make a profit for their businesses--their mining, terraforming, or space tourism businesses.

There won't be any "police" stationed on Mars to tell them what they can or cannot do to the planet itself or with the workers they bring from Earth to their new corporate location. The only policing agencies will be the kind these corporations provide themselves, private agencies akin to the Pinkertons. And it's not like we haven't seen any evidence of wrongdoing by police working for private corporations on Planet Earth already… Remember the cops working for the oil companies at Standing Rock?

Strip mine the Moon or contaminate the atmosphere of Mars with your heavy industry, Mr. Musk? Sure, why not? Refuse to provide a life-saving vaccine for an outbreak of coronavirus to your workers because it'll eat into profits, Mr. Gates? Yeah, that's allowable. Turn off the oxygen to the dome if you decide you can't have your workers form a union on Mars and protest for better wages, Mr. Bezos? Go ahead! Who's there to stop you?

Already we've seen how Covid-19 vaccines are being used as a genocidal weapon against a persecuted minority: Palestinians haven't been vaccinated against the coronavirus at anywhere near the same rates as Israelis. Using health care as a weapon or a threat (as in it can be denied to you by your employer if you don't continue working under unsafe conditions) is nothing new. Throw in some anti-vaxxer conspiracy talk, plenty of state-sponsored propaganda, an authoritarian regime such as the current ones in Brazil or India, and a lack of affordable patent-free Covid-19 vaccines and the death toll will continue to rise. And rise...

Vaccine apartheid. I'm afraid this won't be the last time you'll read these two words together. We have to get out of our comfort zones and make some noise about how worldwide Covid-19 death and hospitalization statistics represent actual human beings... Human beings who aren't things to be used and then discarded by capitalists seeking to make obscene profits. Health care is a human right and that will always mean people over profit. Period.

Links to articles to learn more about Covid-19 vaccine apartheid:

Rally for a People's Vaccine in DC this May 5!  https://freethevaccine.org/2021/04/19/dc-rally-for-a-peoples-vaccine/

Drug Companies Took None of the Risks to Develop a COVID-19 Vaccine, Yet They're Getting All of the Profits https://migrate.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/69144-focus-drug-companies-took-none-of-the-risks-to-develop-the-covid-19-vaccine-theyre-getting-all-of-the-profits

 "The US public poured billions of dollars into developing a COVID-19 vaccine, yet drug companies are reaping the profits and jealously guarding the intellectual property from poor countries. Let the drug companies cry: we should release the vaccines immediately."

Covid Cases Soar in India: Advocates Urge Biden to End Vaccine Apartheid  https://truthout.org/articles/as-covid-cases-soar-in-india-advocates-urge-biden-to-end-vaccine-apartheid/

"At issue, as the Washington Post reported Friday, is a proposal India and South Africa submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) last October to suspend Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) rules on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments to boost manufacturing capacity. It’s now cosponsored by 60 nations and backed by over 100 countries as well as hundreds of U.S. and international civil society organizations, former world world leaders and Nobel laureates, and some U.S. lawmakers.

In addition to the U.S., other wealthy nations including the U.K. and Canada are blocking the proposal — which needs consensus to pass."

Brazil Seeks to Hold Bolsonaro Accountable for More than 400,000 Covid-19 Deaths https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/69162-focus-brazil-seeks-to-hold-bolsonaro-accountable-for-more-than-400000-covid-19-deaths 

"Brazil, which is lagging behind in vaccinations, has suffered over 400,000 coronavirus-related deaths, one of the highest tolls in the world, and has become an international pariah, as well as a prime breeding ground for new variants of the disease. The collapse of health care systems and overflowing cemeteries have made global headlines and spread the devastation across South America. Disentangling the whos, whats, and whys will be no easy task, especially as the president’s allies will work to stymie the investigation at every turn.

Of particular interest will be revealing why Brazil ignored or rejected initial offers to procure millions of doses of vaccines on at least 11 separate occasions, as well as how much of Brazil’s failure to combat the disease has been due to deliberate policy or administrative incompetence and ideological delusion."

Covid Vaccine Factory Production https://theintercept.com/2021/04/29/covid-vaccine-factory-production-ip/

"Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist whose foundations help manage the United States and Europe’s primary Covid-19 outreach efforts to the developing world, known as Covax, was even more blunt. “It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines,” Gates said last weekend by way of explaining to Sky News why he thought the recipe for making coronavirus vaccine should not be shared.

Except it is exactly like that. Factory owners around the globe, from Bangladesh to Canada, have said they stand ready to retrofit facilities and move forward with vaccine production if given the chance.

“We have this production capacity and it’s not being used,” said John Fulton, a spokesperson for Biolyse Pharma, a company based in St. Catharines, Ontario, that produces injectable cancer treatments. Fulton noted that Biolyse has spent years buying equipment to produce biologics and is uniquely prepared to start getting ready to produce vaccines. The company, which Fulton said is best suited for replicating the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, could produce as many as 20 million vaccines per year, he estimated."

 CDC Finds Anxiety Was Cause of Many Adverse Responses to J&J Vaccine https://truthout.org/articles/cdc-finds-anxiety-was-cause-of-many-adverse-responses-to-jj-vaccine/

“It is possible that some persons seeking Janssen COVVID-19 vaccination could be more highly predisposed to anxiety-related events after being vaccinated,” the authors of the study explained. “The stress of an ongoing pandemic might also increase anxiety surrounding COVID-19 vaccination.”

US Weaponizing Medical Technology Against Other Countries (Video) https://youtu.be/rVpKdP_FEQA

Bill Gates Is Lying To You On Vaccine Patent Protection (Video) https://youtu.be/kZ5DavuOkcM

***

From Friends of the Earth:

Breaking news: The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit just found that the EPA illegally kept the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos on the market. The agency did too little to determine the pesticide is safe for children. Take action now.

The court left the door open for continued use of chlorpyrifos. But this pesticide damages children’s developing brains, harms farmworkers and is toxic to bees and other pollinators. There is no safe use of chlorpyrifos.

This is your chance to stop this toxic pesticide from harming people and the planet. Can you help get it out of our food system for good?

Demand the EPA ban chlorpyrifos NOW!

Sign Now

Chlorpyrifos is one of the most dangerous pesticides on the market. But for decades the EPA has allowed it to continue to be used, despite the harm it causes to children’s developing brains. People who are regularly exposed to toxic pesticides -- farmworkers and their families -- have an increased risk of severe neurological conditions.

The EPA’s own scientists have twice recommended this chemical be banned. Several states, including California, New York, Maryland, and Hawaii -- along with the European Union -- have taken steps to eliminate it.

This new court ruling provides an opening to push the EPA ban it once and for all across the U.S.

Use your voice: Tell the EPA that children are more important than pesticide profits.

Sign Now

Bees and pollinators are responsible for one in three bites of food we eat -- but they are dying at an alarming rate, in part thanks to chlorpyrifos. And up to 97% of endangered species are at risk from chlorpyrifos.

The evidence is clear: Chlorpyrifos only benefits the pesticide companies who make it. The risk of allowing its use are far too great.

Standing with you,

Jason Davidson,
Senior food & agriculture campaigner, 
Friends of the Earth

 ***

The Revolution Continues is now in our sixth year taking on the propaganda of the fauxgressives and their friends in the corporate-owned duopoly. We need passionate revolutionaries like you to help us provide progressive insights that are being actively censored elsewhere. If you can donate a little to the cause, please do so at the Paypal.me link below.

http://paypal.me/camatthews

Thanks for all you do in making the world a better place. Power to the people!