Southcom boosts US military presence in Latin America, citing China, Russia ‘threats’

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/30/southcom-latin-america-china-russia-threats-brazil/#more-22180






Southern Command is ramping up the US military presence in Latin America to counter China, Russia, and Venezuela, after signing a historic military agreement incorporating Bolsonaro’s Brazil into its imperial orbit

By Ben Norton



The Donald Trump administration has ramped up US interventionism in Latin America, overseeing a far-right military coup in Bolivia and backing coup attempts against the leftist governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Against the backdrop of regime change operations, the United States Southern Command has announced a massive expansion of its military presence in the region.

Brazil will play an anchoring role in the new arrangement, embracing its new role as an extension of Pax Americana under the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro. In recent months, Brazil has been designated a “major non-NATO ally” and signed a historic agreement incorporating its domestic defense industry into a Pentagon funding and research program.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on March 11, the commander of US Southern Command, Admiral Craig S. Faller, announced, “There will be an increase in US military presence in the hemisphere later this year.”


U.S. Southern Command
✔@Southcom



#SOUTHCOM’s Adm. Faller: “There will be an increase in US military presence in the hemisphere later this year. This will include an enhanced presence of ships, aircraft, & security forces to reassure our partners… & counter a range of threats to include illicit narco-terrorism.”


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This hearing was held before the US government took lockdown measures over the coronavirus pandemic. But many US military activities have continued despite the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus — as have Washington’s suffocating sanctions imposed on Venezuela and Iran.
New cold war rhetoric demonizing China and Russia

The bellicose rhetoric Faller displayed in his verbal testimony and written statement submitted to Congress reflects the tone of Cold War aggression officially adopted by the US Department of Defense (DOD).

In 2018, the DOD published its first new national defense strategy in a decade. The historic document marked a shift from the US government’s so-called “war on terror” to a new military paradigm based on countering and containing China and Russia. In the words of former Defense Secretary James Mattis, “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

Faller’s congressional testimony reflected the new framework. The Southcom commander rattled off phrases like “the bad guys” when referring to the US government’s supposed enemies, and described China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela as “malign state actors” who are part of “a vicious circle of threats.”

Characterizing the Western hemisphere as “our hemisphere” and “our neighborhood,” Faller lamented that “Russia once again projected power in our neighborhood.” He added, “The ‘aha’ moment for me this past year is the extent to which China is aggressively pursuing their interests right here in our neighborhood.”

The goal is to “maintain the regional balance of power in favor of the United States,” Faller bluntly declared, advancing a clash of civilizations perspective in which China and Russia “don’t share our values.”

The Southcom commander’s testimony fixated on China, painting it as the supreme “threat.” Faller referred to China’s loans to countries in the region as “predatory financing,” and he claimed “the Chinese government absorbed three more Latin American countries into its One Belt One Road Initiative,” fear-mongering about Beijing’s attempt to build a new global territorial and maritime silk road.


U.S. Southern Command
✔@Southcom



During testimony before the #HASC, #SOUTHCOM’s Adm. Craig Faller discusses the importance of providing security support & investments for partner nations in #LatinAmerica & the #Caribbean and counter #China’s influence in the region.


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As usual, the Kremlin was singled out as a global evildoer. “Russia continues to play the role of ‘spoiler,’ seeking to sow disunity and discredit the United States within our own hemisphere,” Faller said.

The Southcom commander heaped praise on right-wing US governments in Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia, where a military coup installed an unelected Christian nationalist regime. Faller was especially grateful that these governments “now recognize the Cuban threat to freedom, expelling thousands of Cuban officials.”

Echoing the line from Washington, Faller denigrated the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua as “authoritarian,” and referred to Venezuela’s elected government as “the former Maduro regime.”

Without offering any concrete evidence, Faller went on to claim the “final malign actors—Maduro and his cronies in Venezuela—pose one of the most direct threats to peace and security in the Western Hemisphere.”
Expanding military presence in Latin America

In his congressional testimony, Admiral Faller disclosed that there are “recurring rotations of small teams of Special Operations Forces, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and National Guard personnel” in Latin America.

“There is no other region we depend upon more for our prosperity and security,” Faller said, “than Latin America and the Caribbean.”

The Southcom commander promised “major exercises to more directly support the global competition with the PRC and Russia.”

The National Guard has a State Partnership Program (SPP), he noted, in which it collaborates with the militaries of right-wing governments in the region.

The Southcom commander emphasized that Brazil is the newest member of the SPP. He added that the US military is “strengthening partnerships with” right-wing countries in the region, especially Brazil.

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro visited US Southern Command on March 8, 2020

US signs historic military agreement bringing Brazil into its imperial orbit

Craig Faller gave his congressional testimony just three days after hosting Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro at US Southern Command.

Bolsonaro had traveled to Florida to meet with Donald Trump at his resort in Mar-a-Lago to discuss escalating their hybrid war on Venezuela.

The extreme-right Brazilian leader then toured the headquarters of Southcom, where he signed a major military agreement.

Southcom effused in a press release that “Bolsonaro’s historic visit marks the first time a Brazilian president has visited U.S Southern Command.”

Bolsonaro’s trip came just days after he endorsed a series of far-right, explicitly anti-democracy protests back in Brazil calling for the restoration of the military dictatorship.


U.S. Southern Command
✔@Southcom



During @jairbolsonaro visit to #SOUTHCOM today, the U.S. & Brazil signed a bilateral Agreement on Research Development, Test & Evaluation Projects that will expand opportunities to collaborate on new defense capabilities. @EmbaixadaEUA @DefesaGovBr @thejointstaff @USAemPortugues


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Under the new agreement with the US, Brazil’s Ministry of Defense joined the Pentagon’s Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) funding system.

The deal followed Trump’s designation of Brazil as a “major non-NATO ally,” conferring special military status on the country.

The Brazilian daily, Folha de S.Paulo, described the treaty signed at Southcom as “an unprecedented military agreement that, if fully exploited, could help open the world’s largest defense market to the domestic industry.”

The RDT&E negotiations began in 2017 under the government of Michel Temer, an unelected right-wing leader who was installed after a parliamentary coup against the democratically elected left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party.

The right-wing Argentine newspaper Clarín summarized the agreement with the following headline: “Brazil is incorporated into the US military-industrial complex.”

Clarín noted that the deal shows “Brazil has changed its international status and left the regional framework of South America,” essentially integrating itself into the US imperial system.

This is especially significant because Brazil is the largest country in Latin America, with the sixth-greatest population on Earth and the fifth-largest economy.

Clarín called the RDT&E deal “an inflection point in the history of Brazil and Latin America’s relations with the US.”

Bolsonaro’s administration has now proposed a free trade agreement with the US, the newspaper added, conditioned on the implementation of four neoliberal reforms: cutting the social security system, liberalizing protectionist measures, privatizing 140 state companies, and opening up the Brazilian economy to foreign capital.

“From this moment on, Brazil has become the United States’ main strategy ally in South America,” Clarín said.









U.S. Southern Command
✔@Southcom




Strengthening Partnerships: Photos from today's visit by #Brazil’s President @jairbolsonaro to #SOUTHCOM. Bolsonaro met w/ Adm. Craig Faller, & @DeptofDefense leaders to discuss the growing U.S.-Brazil defense partnership. @EmbaixadaEUA @DefesaGovBr @USAemPortugues


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Our nativist freakout about China hides the real origin of the coronavirus. It’s political, global, and made in the USA.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/30/china-origin-coronavirus-political-global-usa/#more-22739






We’re facing something that’s more difficult than a medical emergency. We’re facing a political fight against the most powerful corporations in the world.
By Yasha Levine



This was originally published at Immigrants as a Weapon. Subscribe to Yasha Levine’s newsletter here.

Since the coronavirus started making news here in America, it’s been portrayed as a foreign pathogen. It’s not just Donald Trump and his the MAGA fan club. Starting with the Chinese bat soup meme, all kinds of nativist political theories and racist conspiracies have been oozing out of centrist, rightist, and progressive media and political circles — making it seem like the virus is primarily a foreign problem and quite possibly a foreign conspiracy against the United States.

Just check out this crazy viral xenophobic theorizing that ties the disruption caused by corona closures to Russia and Putin. It’s pushed by a respected liberal academic — someone who regularly gets space in the New York Times. Americans love their insane nativist conspiracies about foreign plots by shady asiatics. Don’t deny them this basic right!



This stuff is infectious and has already led to sporadic violence against Chinese-Americans and people from Asia in America. But this nativist blaming isn’t just happening here.

China’s been trying to pin the virus on the American government, and so has Russia. A few weeks back, Russian state news broadcast a segment that tied the virus to an American plot against China. Channelling Brass Eye, the host of the news program laid out his logic like this: China is America’s greatest enemy. “Corona” means “crown.” And Donald Trump “crowned” the winners of his Miss Universe pageant. It all added up. Trump unleashed a bioweapon. The clue is in the etymology!

And really, who knows? Maybe the virus is some shadowy American warfare program that backfired. It wouldn’t the first. See: lyme disease.


“Take the word ‘crown.’ What did Donald Trump, the president America, the main rival of China, do in his previous life? That’s right! He handed out crowns at his famous beauty contest.” — Kirill Kleimyonov, Channel 1


I’m sure that xenophobic panics have always followed pandemics and outbreaks of disease, going back to origins of human history. It’s a natural response when faced with a mysterious, deadly calamity. You blame the out-group — a different ethnic or religious or minority group. You blame whoever your official enemy is, or whoever it is most politically useful to blame. It happened during the “Spanish” Flu that decimated humanity a century ago. (Later it was determined that the “Spanish” Flu was actually made in America.) And it hasn’t changed today — in our age of supposed rationality.

And what’s politically useful today about blaming the coronavirus on a specific country? It helps obscure the real origin of the pathogen — which is not national, but international. It’s economic and political.

There’s a great academic by the name of Rob Wallace who has been doing amazing, pioneering work on this issue — looking at how our neoliberal globalized industrial economy pumps out deadly pathogens with increasing frequency.

Rob’s work shows that the real driver of corona isn’t China — it’s our oligarchic, hyper-industrial mode of food production. This monopolized, vertically integrated system was perfected here in America and then exported to every corner of the world. It paves over everything and prioritizes concentration of wealth and maximum profitability for a tiny elite, while offloading the death and destruction it causes to everyone else.

It has created perfect conditions for producing deadly pathogens. It draws out deadly diseases from deep in the forests and jungles by destroying habitats, builds vertically integrated industrial “meat” farms filled with cloned animals that breed the most virulent pathogens, and then hooks both of these disease factories up to a global supply chain that spreads the stuff around the world and to all of us.

If DARPA wanted to outsource an R&D lab for pandemic production — it couldn’t have come up with a better pathogen machine. Or as Rob said recently, “Agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk.”

Everyone is focused on trying to contain corona — and naturally this is the right thing to do. But there is a deeper problem here. This is not a singular event. Diseases like this (and possibly worse) will keep popping up with greater and greater frequency, unless we radically change our hyper-industrialization food production to something that respects the limits of our “natural” world.

This machinery is driven by largest companies in the world: Goldman Sachs, Koch Industries, Cargill, ADM, JBS, DuPont, Monsanto — you can can go down the line. Some names you’ll recognize. Others you wont. But together they might represent the largest concentration of political and economic power in the known universe.

In that sense, we’re facing something that’s even more difficult than a medical emergency. We’re facing a deep, systemic political problem — an issue that butts up against the interests of the most powerful corporations in the world and which goes to the heart of all the problems that we face in our hyper-industrialized, oligarchic consumerist society. Looking at part of this problem is something that Rowan and I are trying to do in with our documentary about the power of California oligarch farmers.


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We can’t solve this corona global health emergency without understanding what’s actually causing it. And Rob is a great resource for this.

He’s got a great book — Big Farms Make Big Flu — that lays out exactly how this happens. And Rob’s been giving very informative interviews on the topic over the last few weeks. One of them was with Marx21, a German lefty journal, where he encapsulates the work he’s been doing. I highly recommend it.

I’ll just quote a few parts:


The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure or—better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.

When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other.

Who is to blame?

I said industrial agriculture, but there’s a larger scope to it. Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots.

For which diseases is this the case?

There are no capital-free pathogens at this point. Even the most remote are affected, if distally. Ebola, Zika, the coronaviruses, yellow fever again, a variety of avian influenzas, and African swine fever in hog are among the many pathogens making their way out of the most remote hinterlands into peri-urban loops, regional capitals, and ultimately onto the global travel network. From fruit bats in the Congo to killing Miami sunbathers in a few weeks‘ time.

What is the role of multinational companies in this process?

Planet Earth is largely Planet Farm at this point, in both biomass and land used. Agribusiness is aiming to corner the food market. The near-entirety of the neoliberal project is organized around supporting efforts by companies based in the more advanced industrialised countries to steal the land and resources of weaker countries. As a result, many of those new pathogens previously held in check by long-evolved forest ecologies are being sprung free, threatening the whole world.

The capital-led agriculture that replaces more natural ecologies offers the exact means by which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.

How so?

Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence. In other words, agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk.

As for our xenophobic panic against the coronavirus? According to Rob, that panic should be directed at ourselves. “Capital centers — London, New York, Hong Kong, etc. — finance deforestation and development in capital peripheries around the world,” Rob wrote to me. “Look up Goldman Sachs buying into Chinese farms post-housing crisis. In a way the absurdity of blaming the U.S. for this isn’t that far off the mark once one reads between the lines of the nationalist sparring.”

Anyway, make sure you check out the rest of Rob’s interview here and read his book while you self-isolate. Take care of yourself!

Brazil’s ex-President Lula on Venezuela: Maduro is democratic, Guaidó should be in prison, US blockade kills civilians

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/30/brazil-lula-maduro-guaido-us-blockade/#more-21995






In comments ignored by English-language media, Lula da Silva slammed the US coup attempt against Venezuela, calling Nicolás Maduro a democratic leader who has supported dialogue while blasting Juan Guaidó as a criminal.
By Ben Norton



The far-right government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is one of Washington’s closest allies in Latin America. It has played a major supporting role in the Donald Trump administration’s coup attempt against Venezuela, even supporting a terror plot against the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

This March, the Bolsonaro administration signed a historic military agreement, bringing Brazil directly into the US imperial sphere of influence, essentially merging the country’s defense industry with Washington’s military-industrial complex.

Days before the deal was finalized, however, Brazil’s former president, the left-wing labor organizer Lula da Silva, spoke out vociferously against US meddling in Latin America, harshly criticizing Washington’s putsch against Evo Morales in Bolivia and its ongoing coup attempt against Venezuela.

In an interview with Brazilian media that has yet to be covered in the English-language press, Lula condemned US-backed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó as a warmongering criminal who should be in prison. He went on to emphasize that President Nicolás Maduro is a democratically elected leader who has encouraged peace and diplomacy.

“Europe and the United States can’t recognize a fraud who declares himself to be president,” Lula said, referring to Guaidó. “It is not right. Because if fashion takes over democracy, it is thrown in the garbage, and any scammer can declare themself president. I could declare myself president of Brazil, but where would democracy go?”

Lula was interviewed by Folha de S.Paulo, the most widely circulated Brazilian newspaper, which is owned by an elite family of billionaire media oligarchs.

When the paper pushed back against his comments, calling Maduro a “dictator,” Lula stressed that the Venezuelan president was elected, and has shown the kind of patience and restraint that no other leader would in similar circumstances.

“He [Guaidó] should be in prison,” Lula said. “And Maduro was so democratic and did not arrest him when he went to Colombia to try to instigate an invasion of Venezuela.”

“The one who is taking the initiative to talk is Maduro, not Guaidó,” Lula stated. “Guaidó would like the Americans to invade Venezuela — in fact, he even tried to force it.”

The newspaper pushed back again, saying Maduro has presided over an economic crisis in Venezuela.

“Whether his government is doing well or not, that’s another story. But you aren’t going to attack all of the countries that aren’t doing well,” Lula responded.

“People can’t criticize Maduro and not criticize the blockade. The blockade doesn’t attack soldiers, it doesn’t kill the guilty, the blockade kills innocents,” the former Brazilian president said.

These remarks from Lula received virtually no coverage in the English-language press, although they were widely covered in Portuguese- and Spanish-language media.
Lula defends Bolivian President Evo Morales

The Brazilian paper also pushed Lula to denounce Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was overthrown in a US-backed far-right military coup in November 2019.

Folha de S.Paulo noted that Morales had run for a fourth term as president, although the paper failed to mention that Bolivia’s Supreme Court permitted him to do so.

In the first round of the October 2019 election, Morales won with more than a 10 percent margin.

The newspaper falsely claimed that there were irregularities in the election — a myth initially spread by the Organization of American States (OAS) that has subsequently been debunked by numerous investigations by top scholars.

Lula defended Morales and his government against the newspaper’s claims that the Bolivian election was marred by supposed “complications.”

“Wasn’t George Bush complicated in his election against Al Gore? It was complicated, Bush took control of the government for eight years,” Lula replied.

“Was Trump not complicated? It was complicated, and he took power,” he said.

“Was Bolsonaro not complicated? Everyone know the farce of ‘fake news.'”
US coups brought extreme-right to power in Brazil

Remarks like these illustrate why Washington has backed coups and meddled in Brazil’s internal politics in order to overthrow Lula and his left-wing Workers’ Party and prevent them from returning to power.

Lula has not only been one of the most popular politicians in Brazil, he represents a regional buffer against US hegemony. When he left office in 2010, after completing his second term as head of state, he had a staggering 87 percent approval rating — one of the highest in the entire world.

Lula’s successor from the Workers’ Party, President Dilma Rousseff, was ousted in 2016 in a parliamentary coup led by Brazil’s right-wing opposition and a collection of oligarchs that was backed behind the scenes by the United States.

Lula has repeatedly stressed that Washington played a decisive role in the coups in Brazil. “Everything that is happening has the hand of the United States on it,” he said in a 2019 interview.

“The US created the Lava Jato investigation,” Lula added, referring to the supposed “anti-corruption” operation that was used to oust the Workers’ Party and install the far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro, an extremist who has called for restoring the military dictatorship.

In 2018, Lula was campaigning again for the presidential election, and leading the polls by a huge margin. It was only then that he was imprisoned on false charges of corruption, providing an opening for Bolsonaro to take power.

The judge who oversaw Lava Jato and imprisoned Lula, Sergio Moro, was subsequently rewarded by Bolsonaro with a post as minister of justice.

Immediately after taking office, Bolsonaro and Moro paid a special visit to CIA headquarters.

“No Brazilian president had ever paid a visit to the CIA,” commented Celso Amorim, who served as Foreign Minister under Lula. “This is an explicitly submissive position. Nothing compares to this.”

Tuberculosis drug could be Covid-19 silver bullet

Australian researchers set to test century-old TB treatment while global scientists expect to have Covid-19 meds ready by June

By ALAN BOYD

MARCH 31, 2020






https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/tuberculosis-drug-could-be-covid-19-silver-bullet/










SYDNEY – On April 6, Australian researchers will start trials of the tuberculosis drug Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) as a possible treatment of the deadly Covid-19 coronavirus now spreading across the globe.

It represents perhaps the most hopeful test yet of an existing medicine currently in everyday use to tame the highly contagious Covid-19 virus.

“I am hopeful that within three months we will have a good idea which drugs are good and which drugs are bad,” said Australian National University geneticist Gaetan Burgio. “The field is moving very quickly.”

Fast action is required as the pandemic jumps from global epicenter to epicenter, with caseloads currently exploding in the United States while still ravaging Europe and gaining ground in South America after originating in China.



Global scientists say they expect to have medicines ready to treat the Covid-19 coronavirus by the end of June, the product of an unprecedented global research effort backed by dozens of laboratories and a network of corporate donors.

Researchers are already undertaking more than 100 clinical trials of possible treatments worldwide, mostly of existing drugs. New drugs and vaccines are also being developed, but will not be ready for at least a year, reports say.

Healthcare workers in Melbourne, Australia, will next week start taking BCG, a shot that has been given to 130 million schoolchildren in the past century to protect against tuberculosis.

Australian researchers at the University of Queensland are among those rushing to develop a vaccine for the Covid-19 coronavirus. Image: Facebook



Staff will be randomly given either BCG, an influenza shot or a combination of the two, without knowing which as part of the clinical trial.


“These trials will allow the rapid advancement of the most promising candidates to clinical practice, giving us the most number of shots on goal against Covid-19 as possible,” said Professor Kathryn North, director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute director in Melbourne, while making a football allusion.

The institute’s director of infectious diseases, clinician–scientist Professor Nigel Curtis, added: “We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think that this might work. And of course the only way to find out is with our trial.”

Smaller tests of the drug are also underway in the Netherlands, and the institute is looking for potential trial sites in the US city of Boston. It is expected that several dozen hospitals in Australia will join the program, which initially aims to protect frontline medical staff from the virus.

It is not likely, however, that results of the trial will be released until September, a life time as the pandemic takes a rising lethal toll, with over 785,000 and 37,600 deaths from the disease recorded worldwide as of March 31.


Although it was developed to combat tuberculosis, BCG has been found to boost the “frontline” immunity of babies and trains their bodies to resist germs with greater intensity. Studies in Africa have shown that the drug builds up white blood cells that then target non-specific pathogens.

Curtis said about 4,000 doctors and nurses will join the trial. “We need to enroll them in the coming weeks, so the clock is definitely ticking,” he said.

Various labs are testing whether the anti-malarial drug chloroquine is a reliable treatment for the Covid-19 virus. Photo: Facebook



Separate trials of the retired drugs remdesivir and chloroquine, used to treat AIDS and malaria respectively before better treatments were developed, are proceeding in Queensland, despite safety warnings over chloroquine.

About 50 hospitals across Australia have started human trials of the drugs, both separately and together, and the program is being fast-tracked. It is believed a treatment, possibly using remdesivir, could be ready in months.

US President Donald Trump has talked up the combination of the two drugs as a “game changer” against the virus, but chloroquine can be fatal when ingested in high doses. An Arizona man died recently after ingesting a fish tank cleaner that contained the drug, according to news reports.

“What many people don’t realize is that the dose you use for malaria is very low, whereas studies show that for Covid-19 doses are 10 to 100 times higher,” said Burgio in Canberra. “I don’t think it is clear-cut that we can say it is going to be a cure. We are not at that point yet,” he said.

The Queensland trials will aim to determine what doses are acceptable, or whether it should be used at all. Chinese scientists said they had used chloroquine to treat infected patients, but their test results have not been publicly released.

China has also claimed that danoprevir, a hepatitis C treatment sold under the brand name Ganovo, is a “promising therapeutic option” that shows no side-effects. However, it was used on only 11 patients, too few to be considered a proper clinical study.

Meanwhile, the first human trials of four drugs formerly used to treat malaria, HIV-AIDS, and ebola, and combinations of them, have started in Spain and Norway as part of a global collaboration overseen by the World Health Organization.

A medical worker wearing protective gear looks out from behind a hospital tent built in preparation for dealing with a coronavirus case in Lhokseumawe, Aceh, March 17, 2020. Photo: AFP Forum via NurPhoto/Zick Maulana

Research groups in Iran, Germany, Italy and Switzerland will next test the drugs for their safety and effectiveness.

“This is a historic trial which will dramatically cut the time needed to generate robust evidence about drug work,” said WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “The more countries [that] join the trial, the faster we will have results.”

Tedros said that almost 50 countries were contributing to the drugs research and had said they were interested in conducting human trials.

Italy Becomes 53rd Nation to Call for Global Ceasefire During Pandemic

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/30/covid19-italy-becomes-53rd-nation-to-call-for-global-ceasefire-during-pandemic/






March 30, 2020 • 6 Comments



Italy on Monday became the 53rd nation to join a call by the UN secretary general for a ceasefire in all the world’s wars as the globe fights the Covid-19 pandemic.

Missing among the nations supporting a global ceasefire in the more than 40 wars being fought around the world are four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—Britain, China, Russia and the United States—who are among the world’s largest arms traders. All possess a nuclear weapons arsenal. Only France among the P5 has called for the ceasefire.

This statement by the 53 nations listed supports an end to hostilities to help prevent the further spread of the pandemic, “the true fight of our lives,” according to Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

War, it seems, is the only part of “normal” life that continues.

World Suffering Less from Coronavirus Crisis & More from an America Crisis

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/30/covid-19-world-suffering-less-from-coronavirus-crisis-more-from-an-america-crisis/






March 30, 2020 • 10 Comments


In the U.S., the abandonment of the poor and downtrodden to their fate has forged not a society worth living in, but a growing dystopia to be escaped, writes John Wight.

By John Wight
in Edinburgh, Scotland
Medium

In his 1948 classic novel “The Plague,” which tells the story of the fictional outbreak of a rat-borne plague in the Algerian port city of Oran under French colonialism, French writer and thinker Albert Camus explores the way the plague and ensuing crisis taps into the very best and worst of the human condition.

The current coronavirus crisis, which certainly is not fictional, is doing the same in our time — only not when it comes to the actions of people in response but instead when it comes to the actions or inaction or indeed base cruelty of national governments.

In this respect, if cruelty and barbarity were Olympic sports Washington would be the permanent holder of the gold medal. Because what does it tell us when even in the midst of a global pandemic this neocon infested administration and hegemonic political order refuses to agree to sanctions relief for Iran — a country that is among the hardest hit by the virus — in response to pleas from Tehran to do so?

Camus:


“Hitherto the plague had found far more victims in the more thickly populated and less well-appointed outer districts than in the heart of the town. Quite suddenly, however, it launched a new attack and established itself in the business center.”


Ohio Poor People’s Campaign, 2018. (Becker1999, Flickr)

Using the above as an analogy, let us imagine Iran as our “less well-appointed outer district” and the U.S. as the world’s “business center.” Do so and we grasp the fact that just like Camus’ fictional plague in Iran, coronavirus is no respecter of borders, cultures, religion, ideology or geopolitical agendas. In other words, if President Donald Trump and the clutch of fanatical neocons surrounding him believe that condemning the Iranian people — not its government, its people — to suffering and death is coterminous with anything other than the depraved actions of a debased and diseased culture, they are even sicker than originally thought.

The proper measure of a state or nation’s health in any given time is how said state or nation treats its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. And by this metric the most powerful and richest country there has ever been is also a contender for the most barbaric, despite the ocean of propaganda to the contrary.

I’m writing here as a non-American who spent a number of years living there and who came away politically radicalized by the experience. Because in America the abandonment of the poor and downtrodden to their fate has forged not a society worth living in, but a growing dystopia to be escaped, one in which the entrenchment of cruelty as a virtue rather than a vice has long been complete.

‘Understanding Mississippi’

The brutal actions of Washington on the global stage when it comes to its engagement with poorer countries and regions merely reflects the brutality meted out to its poorest and most vulnerable at home. And as Malcolm X sagely once put it, “You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo.”


Albert Camus. (Dietrich Liao, Flickr)

What’s going on in “Mississippi” — in other words the U.S. — today is that millions continue to exist without healthcare and who in the midst of this global pandemic find themselves reduced to the human equivalent of skittles in a bowling alley waiting in trepidation for a coronavirus ball to come hurtling in their direction.

Compare and contrast the barbarism of Washington in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic with the international solidarity demonstrated by the likes of China, Cuba and Russia.

China, where the outbreak of the virus originated, already has it under control and contained and is now sending medical aid and experts to Italy, Iran and South Korea. Cuba, meanwhile, has likewise sent a team of doctors to Italy along with supplies of Interferon Alpha 2B, a powerful antiviral developed by the Cuban pharmaceutical industry that has proved effective in treating coronavirus. Finally, as for Russia, Moscow is sending Iran 50,000 testing kits.

Based on the this, if there is one positive thing to take from the current crisis it’s the reaffirmation of internationalism as the acme of human solidarity and progress. For there is no national solution to pandemics only international, with the current crisis proving that nationalism begins where human connectedness ends. Precisely here is where Washington’s engagement with the rest of the world is to be understood.

Putting it bluntly, America is home to a culture and political order so removed from reality it no longer knows its land of the free arse from its home of the brave elbow — to the point where the self-appointed leader of the free world is the leader of nothing and nowhere.

Returning to Camus:


‘“However, you think, like Paneloux, that the plague has its good side; it opens men’s eyes and forces them to take thought?” The doctor tossed his head impatiently. “So does every ill that flesh is heir to. What’s true of all the evils of the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.”’

Our world is suffering less from a coronavirus crisis and more from an America crisis.

Support the striking Instacart, Amazon and Whole Foods workers!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/31/pers-m31.html






31 March 2020

The Socialist Equality Party calls on all workers to support the strikes and other actions by Instacart, Amazon and Whole Foods workers in the United States.

On Monday, Instacart workers initiated strike action because they are being forced to work without proper safety gear, including masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, the unsafe conditions in which they work endangers not only their own lives, but the lives of the customers they serve.

These workers are performing a critical and heroic social service. The US is now an epicenter of the crisis, with 165,000 cases as of this writing and more than 3,100 deaths. With shelter-in-place orders covering nearly 250 million people in the US, the need for the delivery of food, medicine and other essential needs to people who cannot or should not leave their homes is more important than ever.

The 150,000 Instacart workers, known as “shoppers,” pick up and deliver groceries from Kroger, Aldi, Sam’s Club and other major food retailers. With growing demand for home deliveries, the San Francisco-based company plans to hire another 300,000 workers. But it has resisted demands to provide workers with the most elementary protections.

While Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta, a 34-year-old former supply chain engineer for Amazon, sits on a private fortune of $400 million, Instacart workers earn an average of $7 a delivery. Like other gig economy workers, they are classified as “self-employed” contractors so that the company can avoid paying them the minimum wage, time off and unemployment benefits.

Workers want to do everything they can to combat the coronavirus pandemic. General Electric workers launched protests yesterday to demand that GE begin producing desperately needed ventilators. But workers do not want to endanger themselves and others so that the corporate oligarchs can accumulate their billions.

On the same day as the Instacart strike, Wall Street opened the week by celebrating the multitrillion-dollar “stimulus” handout to the banks and giant corporations. The Dow rose 690 points.

The Instacart strike is part of a broader movement of the working class. In recent days, Italian and Spanish auto and steel workers, British postal workers, French bus drivers and supermarket workers, and Brazilian call-center workers have struck to demand the closure of nonessential workplaces or protection for workers engaged in critical operations.

On Monday, workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in the New York City borough of Staten Island, where a worker tested positive last week, walked off the job to demand protective gear, the closure of the building until it is sanitized and full compensation for the 4,500 workers who work there.

Although workers in at least 10 of its warehouses have already tested positive, Amazon has refused to give workers paid time off and proper masks, gloves or other protective equipment.

In a letter to Amazon employees earlier this month, CEO Jeff Bezos said the company had ordered millions of masks to give to warehouse employees, drivers and contract workers but due to the global shortage “medical providers serving our communities need to be first in line. When our turn for masks comes, our priority will be getting them in the hands of employees.”

The richest man in the world—who makes $6.5 billion each month, or a little under $150,000 every minute, and owns his own apparel, aeronautics, supermarket, software, newspaper, robotics and digital companies—claims he is incapable of organizing the production of masks for workers who are processing and delivering food and other essential goods.

Amazon yesterday announced that it had fired an employee who had helped to organize the action.

Supermarket workers at Whole Foods, also owned by Amazon, are planning a walkout today. The workers are demanding the shutdown of any store where a worker tests positive, full compensation for workers, the reinstatement of health care coverage for part-time and seasonal workers and increased employer payments to cover testing and treatment for all workers.

According to Vice’s Motherboard site, workers at stores in New Orleans and Huntington Beach, California were informed by robocalls that fellow workers had tested positive and told to “press number one to confirm receipt.” The stores remained open, however, because Whole Foods is racking up huge profits from customers rushing to stock up on food and other items.

Like the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, Bezos and the rest of the corporate and financial oligarchs want their slaves to go and build their pyramids no matter how many workers die in the process. But workers have another thing to say. This was summed up in an email to the World Socialist Web Site from an autoworker who denounced plans for a return to work on April 14—the expected peak of the virus—and insisted, “Our lives matter!”

The Socialist Equality Party calls for the immediate closure of all nonessential workplaces with full compensation to workers for any lost wages and benefits.

Economic life must be concentrated on the production and distribution of essential goods and services, including the provision of health care, testing and the manufacture of masks, gowns, ventilators and other medical equipment, the production and distribution of food and medical supplies and the maintenance of critical infrastructure, including the electrical, telecommunication, water and sanitation systems.

There are millions of workers, including grocery delivery workers, who are willing and able to provide this critical social service. But these workers must be guaranteed living wages and a safe working environment. All gig workers must be turned into full-time employees, with full benefits.

The SEP urges workers to form rank-and-file workplace committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves, to oversee working conditions and ensure the defense of workers’ interests. No confidence can be placed in the trade unions, which are arms of corporate management that have done nothing to secure the safety of workers.

Rank-and-file committees, working with medical professionals at every workplace, must ensure the safety of all workers.

All the claims about the wonders of “private enterprise” are being exploded as Wall Street and the giant corporations come to the US government with hat in hand for trillions of dollars in public assets, which they expect the population to pay for.

The Socialist Equality Party insists that rather than being bailed out, the giant banks and corporations be turned into publicly owned utilities, democratically controlled by the working class, with no compensation to the billionaire shareholders and corporate executives.

There is no reason why the distribution of food and other essential items should be run by Instacart, Amazon and other private corporations. This vital social service should instead be part of a centrally planned socialist economy, based on addressing social needs, not generating private profit. All of society’s material and human resources must be marshaled on a socially rational basis not only to fight this deadly disease, but to put an end to poverty, social inequality and class exploitation.

Jerry White