https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXR3zrnkpp4
Friday, August 14, 2020
AOC Gets 60 Seconds at DNC While Republicans Get a Bigger Seat at the Table
Alec Pronk August 13, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/aoc-gets-60-seconds-at-dnc-while-republicans-get-a-bigger-seat-at-the-table/
Republican John Kasich will enjoy a full speaker slot at the Democratic National Convention
With the Vice President selected, the Democratic Party is gearing up for the Democratic National Convention. To the surprise and frustration of many, it was announced that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would only be allotted a 60-second prerecorded message rather than a full speaking slot.
The news confirmed the fear of many on the left-wing have that the most prominent voice of a burgeoning left-wing movement would be cast aside in favor of centrist, moderate, and conservative voices.
For her part, Ocasio-Cortez took the breaking news in stride and tweeted a poem about only having 60 seconds to speak.
Even prominent Biden supporter Charlotte Clymer spoke out against the decision calling it “absurd”. “AOC has done some of the most effective comms work of any Democrat in the country. 60 seconds is ridiculous,” she said.
But for many left-wing voices, the concern also stems from the other names on the speaking list, including the Republican former governor of Ohio John Kasich.
David Sirota, former senior adviser and speechwriter for the Bernie Sanders campaign, tweeted, “overjoyed that millions of progressives get a 60-second ad at the John Kasich concert.”
Time for Republicans, But Not The Squad?
John Kasich’s appearance on the first day of the DNC has been pitched as a “night of unity”. Kasich’s slot falls on the same day as Bernie Sanders’s speech, Joe Biden’s biggest competitor in the primary.
Kasich is part of a somewhat growing of “Never Trump” Republicans who insist they have turned their back on the party. And while the optics of nabbing a former Governor who ran in the Republican presidential primary, it has left the progressive wing of the party worried about their seat at the table.
There is little that unites the edges of the coalition the Democrats are attempting to build for the 2020 election. Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have little in common politically with a governor who signed “one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans.”
And it’s not just Kasich, the Republican strategist hodgepodge at The Lincoln Project has gained notoriety on social media, a group of Republicans who have questionable intentions.
Biden has also looked to the ranks of Republican strategists for political help. Biden picked Republican strategist Ana Navarro to help drive Latinos out to the polls, a demographic Biden struggled with during the primary.
Never Trump?
Setting aside what Republican strategists and right-wing think tanks want after Biden is elected, a larger question remains to be seen, are Never Trump Republicans relevant if and when Trump is out of the picture?
Despite the swelling number of coronavirus cases and deaths and an unprecedented pandemic-induced economic recession, Trump’s approval ratings have held steady and are actually at a higher level than much of 2017.
And while Democrats have cheered progressive victories over established incumbents, the radical fringe of the Republican Party has enjoyed its own victories.
Several QAnon-supporting candidates have won Republican primaries, with a couple looking like they are nearly guaranteed a spot in Congress due to the voting breakdown of their district.
Marjorie Taylor Greene nearly cemented her seat in the House after her victory in the run-off primary in Georgia. Greene was facing off with another pro-Trump Republican, but the candidate who believes in the QAnon conspiracy took home the winning prize.
Not only does Greene believe in a conspiracy theory the F.B.I. labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat, but she also holds extreme views on race and religion.
Greene is not the only QAnon sympathizer running for Congress, and while she may be the first to be elected to Congress in November, she likely will not be the last.
If Biden Wins, Get Ready for Trump to Punish America
Thom Hartmann August 12, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/if-biden-wins-get-ready-for-trump-to-punish-america/
Revenge is as sweet to Trump as a race war.
What could happen to America if Trump were to further, severely crash the U.S. economy the day after Joe Biden is announced as the winner of the 2020 presidential race?
As Trump tweeted on June 15, 2019, “if anyone but me takes over… there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before!”
On July 6, 2020, he tweeted, “If you want your 401k’s and Stocks, which are getting close to an all time high (NASDAQ is already there), to disintegrate and disappear, vote for the Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats and Corrupt Joe Biden.”
And on July 27, 2020, he further tweeted that “if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. Markets would crash and cities would burn. Our Country would suffer like never before.”
Meanwhile, the meme is spreading. CCN Markets was quoting traders saying that a Biden win would cut 25 percent from the stock market, and Forbes is suggesting Biden “would be bad for businesses and could negatively impact the stock market.” Yahoo Finance quotes AdvisorShares CEO Noah Hamman as saying “a 25 percent decline is not an unreasonable expectation” if Biden wins.
Even the New York Times got into the act, with Matt Phillips writing that “the Trump tax cuts were a windfall for major American corporations, helping to drive up the profitability of companies in the S&P 500 more than 20 percent in 2018.” The suggestion is that reversing that tax cut will drive profitability down, and stock prices would follow.
All of these scenarios simply envision Biden removing the “sugar high” of unusually low corporate and billionaire tax rates through a Biden reversal of Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut.
But what if Trump decides he wants a slice of his favorite meal—revenge—and will get it during the nearly three months between the November 3 election and Biden’s inauguration on January 20?
What if Trump decides to punish America for not being sufficiently loyal to him, and that punishment is to drive America into a second Republican Great Depression while he’s handing the government over to Biden?
He now has the power to make this Depression, amplified by the pandemic, far, far worse than the Republican Great Depression of 1930, now that he’s cowed the Fed. It’s almost like it was set up in advance.
Jerome Powell is the first Fed chief in two generations who’s not an economist; instead, he’s a lawyer, a multimillionaire private equity banker and former partner with the Carlyle Group, whose BA was in politics.
And politics is where Powell shines. In a complete abrogation of the rules governing the Fed, he’s created roughly $7 trillion (one-third of the entire nation’s normal annual GDP) out of thin air and used much of that money to buy corporate stock and bonds to keep the stock market afloat.
In its 107-year history, the Fed has never, ever done this; some observers consider it illegal.
And the rest of the world is watching, as the dollar drops in value (and gold skyrockets) relative to other currencies, another sign that both inflation and economic disaster are on the horizon.
So, imagine that all the ballots are counted on, say, November 20, and Joe Biden is declared the winner. The next day, the Fed stops supporting the stock and corporate bond markets, and the Dow drops over the following few months to 7,800, roughly where it was in October 2008, the last time a Republican administration goosed the economy to keep things looking good until an election (although Bush mistimed it by a bit short of a year).
Making things even worse, Powell could announce that he’s actively working to drive up interest rates (a function related to inflation).
That would cause a tsunami of corporate bankruptcies (corporate debt is currently higher than any other time in American history) and a collapse of the housing market just as Biden is stepping into the White House.
Powell recently suggested he’s considering just such a move, as CNBC reported on August 4 with the headline: “The Fed is expected to make a major commitment to ramping up inflation soon.”
If Trump and Powell do this, Republican commentators will be all over TV and other media saying that the crash was entirely because Biden was elected. It’ll be a bald-faced lie, but the GOP has been peddling this kind of crap since the Reagan Revolution.
Getting our economic house in order, then, will be a more herculean effort than Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled off after Republican President Herbert Hoover’s tax-cut and deregulation policies crashed the economy in 1930, and could take well over a decade.
And then there’s the matter of Trump showing the fascists in the GOP where the weaknesses are in our three branches of government. If a major market crash and even more widespread unemployment, homelessness and hunger than we’re experiencing today were to ripple across the country, a surge of protesters into the streets is probable.
And Trump’s been rehearsing how to respond to that, particularly in Portland, as Charles P. Pierce lays out in Esquire.
This would play right into the hands of right-wing groups that are openly working for a race-based second civil war, a replay of The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh.
Trump and Attorney General William Barr have already revealed a number of areas where our rule of law is sadly deficient, including the inability to hold a president to account for crimes he has committed while in office and the damage a president can do by gutting almost every federal agency and then putting lobbyists in charge of them.
Many of the holes, cracks and weaknesses in our republic that Trump has exploited were put into place by the Supreme Court in the 1970s and by Congress after 9/11. It’s so bad that the headline of a Rolling Stone article by David S. Cohen notes, “Donald Trump is trying to start a race war. And with the Insurrection Act, he has the statutory authority to do so.”
America needs a major reboot.
The Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti Supreme Court decisions of the 1970s gave corporations and billionaires the “free speech right” to own politicians and political parties, and the Patriot Act and other similar legislation since 9/11 have given the president vast police powers that, throughout history, we’ve only seen in authoritarian, strongman governments.
We must reevaluate, rescind and replace all of these, if our republic is to survive the fresh hell that Trump and his right-wing paramilitaries are apparently planning for this fall and winter.
If Democrats acquire federal power through holding the House and taking the Senate and White House, the entire country needs to be laser-focused on stripping the oligarchic and fascistic elements that have crept into our republic since the Powell memo, multiple Supreme Court interventions, and the Patriot Act with its associated war crimes and torture.
America today is at a turning point, and whether we continue our slide into fascism and oligarchy, or pull back to small-d democratic values will depend, in no small part, on the planning and work we do now, and the candidates and policies we support and put forward two and four years from now.
Within Healthcare USA, Risk and Reward Have Never Been More Out of Kilter
Sam Pizzigati August 12, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/within-healthcare-usa-risk-and-reward-have-never-been-more-out-of-kilter/
Nurses are losing lives and jobs while execs rake in million after million.
(Common Dreams) How’s pandemic life been going for you? If you work in America’s healthcare industry, that depends. That totally depends.
If you happen to provide healthcare services to actual Covid-19 patients—as a nurse or a doctor, an orderly or a physician’s assistant—this has been the year from hell. Amid the worst worldwide pandemic in over a century, you’ve been working long, intense, chaotic hours. You’ve watched patients die at rates unimaginable just six months ago. You’ve watched colleagues die. You’ve worried that you may be bringing death home to your families.
If you work in healthcare but don’t interact with pandemic patients, the months since March haven’t exactly been easy street either. In April alone, 1.4 million healthcare workers lost their jobs, as virus-free Americans delayed and cancelled appointments and elective procedures.
If, on the other hand, you swivel your day away in a corporate healthcare executive suite, these difficult and horrific months of Covid-19 have been among the most rewarding—financially—you’ve ever seen. The “vast majority” of healthcare companies, Axios reports, “are reporting profits that many people assumed would not have been possible as the pandemic raged on.”
Health insurers are leading the way, enjoying earnings, as a New York Times analysis puts it, “double what they were a year ago.” UnitedHealth, for instance, registered $6.7 billion in 2020 second-quarter profits, up from $3.4 billion in last year’s second quarter.
What explains this huge insurance industry profit spike? The simple story: Insurers like UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Anthem are continuing to collect their regular premiums from the Americans they insure, but they’re paying out far less—as the pandemic rages on—for claims on normal maladies.
Now the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare —does have a provision that requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of the premium dollars they collect on providing direct healthcare services. If they miss that target, they have to rebate dollars to the businesses and individuals they insure. Those rebates, unfortunately, seldom amount to much.
One reason: Many of the giant health insurers don’t just sell insurance. They also control networks of doctors and own health services firms like pharmacy benefit managers. These auxiliary companies charge—and overcharge—their parent health insurer for the healthcare services they provide. These relationships, in effect, let health insurers launder their profits and sidestep the Obamacare profit limits.
A second reason the Obamacare rebates provision has been less than an effective check on corporate greed: Health insurers can delay paying any rebates to customers for up to three years. In the meantime, their excessive profits can trigger one windfall after another for the CEOs who engineer them.
At CVS Health, the corporation that owns Aetna, CEO Larry Merlo pocketed $36.5 million last year, up from $21.9 million the year before. Merlo took home 790 times the pay of his company’s most typical worker.
The lowest-paid CEO among America’s seven biggest health insurers, Anthem chief Gail Boudreaux, grabbed a healthy $15.5 million in 2019, the equivalent of just under $300,000 a week.
If current pandemic-time trends continue, top execs like Merlo and Boudreaux will end up doing even better in 2020. But they might not do quite as well as their counterparts in Big Pharma.
The Trump administration is currently shoveling cash to the nation’s biggest drugmakers—for the development of coronavirus vaccines—at a furious pace. If the vaccines these companies are developing and testing end up flubbing, the drugmakers get to keep all that cash. If the vaccines work, these companies will get still more cash—since their deals with the White House entitle them to register patents they can exploit for years to come.
The most visible of these corona vaccine companies has so far been Moderna, a Massachusetts-based start-up founded ten years ago. The federal government, notes economist Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has signed Moderna to nearly $1 billion in contracts, $483 million for pre-clinical research and initial testing and another $472 million for advanced testing. In the process, notes Baker, the federal government is taking all the risk.
“If Moderna’s vaccine turns out to be ineffective,” he points out, “the government will be out the money, not Moderna.”
Already “in” the money: Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. His company’s soaring share price now has him a billionaire three times over.
How can we put the kibosh on this sort of shameless profiteering? We need, no more than ever, systemic change in healthcare, starting with Medicare for All.
In the shorter term, legislation along the line of the “Make Billionaires Pay Act” that Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have just introduced would speak directly to Corporate America’s pandemic jackpots.
This new legislation would, if enacted, place a one-time 60 percent tax on the $732 billion in new wealth that 467 top U.S. billionaires have added to their fortunes since the corona lockdown in March.
Some of those billionaires—most notably Tesla CEO Elon Musk—have openly defied the pandemic’s public health protections. Musk reopened his flagship California Tesla plant in a direct challenge to local safety rules. His defiance of these rules has helped Musk triple his personal fortune since the pandemic began. Under the new Senate legislation, he would face a richly deserved wealth tax of $27.5 billion.
By clasping hands with Netanyahu, ‘top cop’ Kamala Harris whitewashes Israel’s racism
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/11/netanyahu-top-cop-kamala-harris-israel-racism/#more-39136
A friendly meeting California senator and self-declared “top cop” Kamala Harris held with Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows she is more than willing to throw anti-racism — and Palestinians — under the bus.
By Hamzah Raza / AlterNet’s Grayzone Project (December 12, 2017)
(Editor’s note: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate on August 11, 2020, in a move immediately celebrated by Wall Street executives. In light of the news, The Grayzone is republishing this December 2017 report by Hamzah Raza investigating Harris’ support for Israel.)
As the second black female senator in American history, Kamala Harris has been a pioneer in American politics. Many considered her to be a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
Harris was even branded by the New York Times as a “‘Top Cop’ in the era of Black Lives Matter,” a tip of the hat to the former California attorney general’s progressive politics and support for social justice issues.
But while the senator has been praised as someone who fights racism in the United States, some critics feel she has failed to be consistent in that approach abroad.
On November 20, 2017 Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the meeting, Harris ignored the avalanche of officially sanctioned anti-black racism in Israel, turned her back on historic black solidarity with the Palestinian cause, and ignored the human rights demands of Palestinians living under apartheid.
Harris revealed herself as the latest in a long line of “Progressives Except for Palestine,” and one of the most egregious examples given her personal and political background.
The day before Netanyahu’s meeting with Harris, the Israeli prime minister announced a plan to expel 40,000 non-Jewish African migrants, branding the asylum seekers as “infiltrators” whose existence poses a threat to Israel’s “Jewish character.”
This came after years of anti-black protests in Israel, where politicians across the political spectrum, including those from Netanyahu’s own party, made statements referring to African immigrants as a “cancer” who “emit a bad stench” and are “likely to cause all kinds of diseases.”
Historical black solidarity with Palestine
For over half a century, black Americans have stood in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were all groups that consistently stood in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael were passionate opponents of Zionism, and James Baldwin famously wrote, “The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.”
In the present day, black intellectuals such as Michelle Alexander, Eddie Glaude, Alice Walker, and Cornel West have all endorsed a movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, to pressure the state of Israel to comply with international human rights conventions. West has referred to the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza as “the hood on steroids.”
Athlete Colin Kaepernick endorsed the BDS movement. The Movement for Black Lives platform supported the BDS movement and condemned Israel as an apartheid state.
Black Lives Matter activists have been taking yearly solidarity trips to Palestine since 2014. An August 2017 trip included rapper Vic Mensa, who subsequently toured with Jay Z.
Black artists such as Snoop Dogg, Future, and Lauryn Hill have refused to perform in Israel, in cooperation with the BDS movement’s call for cultural boycott of Israel.
Black American solidarity with Palestine has been accompanied by a broader international black solidarity with Palestine. The African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, ratified by 53 of 54 African nations, calls for an end to Zionism as necessary to bringing about an end to racism.
A week after Harris’ meeting with Netanyahu, Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela and member of parliament in South Africa, visited occupied Palestine and stated that “Palestinians are being subjected to the worst version of apartheid.”
Mandela then echoed the words of his grandfather: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Israel’s racist demographic engineering
At a speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in 2016, Kamala Harris cited her biracial background as her inspiration to support sending tens of billions of dollars in US government aid to the Israeli military.
Yet the Israeli government demands its right to engineer demographic purity through violence, walls, and laws that have forbidden Palestinian residency in certain areas and that even restrict marriages between Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli citizens.
Harris’ opportunism mirrors that of another Democratic black senator in Congress, Cory Booker. In December 2016, I attended a town hall with Booker. After the event, a constituent asked the senator about illegal settlements in the West Bank that were destroying his family’s village in Palestine. In response, Booker brought the conversation around to Israel’s “right to defend herself.”
When I asked Booker if he considered Israel to be an apartheid state, he responded “no.”
Booker is one of the leading recipients of pro-Israel cash, which goes a long way toward explaining how he can so shamelessly square his pro-Israel politics with rhetorical support for civil rights in America.
Progressive Democrats rally for Palestinian human rights while Kamala Harris turns her back
By clasping hands with Netanyahu, Kamala Harris stood against the historical momentum for justice that is even sweeping through the halls of Congress.
In June 2017, 35 members of Congress wrote a letter in support of Issa Amro, an activist from the occupied city of Hebron who has been lauded as the Palestinian Gandhi for his nonviolent approach to confronting Israeli occupation.
Israel’s occupation authorities had put Amro on trial for 18 trumped-up charges, ranging from “insulting a soldier” to “assault.” Amnesty International has stated that “the deluge of charges against Issa Amro do not stand up to any scrutiny,” describing the charges as “baseless and politically motivated.”
In the letter, the 35 House Democrats defended Amro’s right to peacefully protest.
On November 14, 2017, 10 House Democrats co-sponsored the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, which requires the secretary of state to annually certify that no American tax dollars given in the form of military aid to Israel are used to “support military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”
In an unprecedented move on November 29, 2017, 10 Democratic senators wrote a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu urging him to put a halt to the Israeli government’s planned demolition of the Palestinian village of Susiya, in order to create yet another illegal settlement. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris did not sign the letter.
As activists, intellectuals, entertainers, and progressive forces within the Democratic Party began to advocate for Palestinians living under occupation, Harris remains a prisoner of her own opportunism.
Desperate to remain in good standing with the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Harris has attempted to reconcile her progressive politics at home with her support for an apartheid regime that is responsible for racism and violence against communities of color abroad.
While Bolivia’s coup regime lets its citizens die, Cuba has nearly defeated Covid-19
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/02/while-bolivias-coup-regime-lets-its-citizens-die-cuba-has-nearly-defeated-covid-19/#more-33937
A dispatch from Bolivia shows the staggering human toll of the military coup, as an incompetent US-backed regime leaves impoverished citizens to die amid a pandemic. In Cuba, meanwhile, the country’s socialized system has saved its population from the worst of Covid-19.
By Ollie Vargas
Cochabamba, Bolivia – As Latin America becomes the new focal point for the devastating spread of Covid-19, Cuba stands virtually alone in having saved its population from the dramatic health and societal collapse seen across most of the region. At the other extreme is Bolivia, where the coup regime is using the trauma of mass graves and corpses in the streets – the fruits of its own inaction – as an excuse to ban elections. A close look the divergent results of the two countries gives an insight into how two opposing ideological models have shaped the situation that Cuba and Bolivia find themselves in today.
The two countries have roughly the same population of about 11 million and were among the last in the region to see their first imported cases. Covid-19 arrived in Bolivia on March 10th; it hit Cuba the following day. The similarities end there.
At the time of writing, Cuba has yet to see a single medical professional or child die from the virus, and has a total of 2,495 cases. Meanwhile, Bolivia had 1,825 cases of Covid-19 just in the last 24 hours, adding to a staggering national total of 68,281 infections. Cuba has suffered 87 deaths from the virus while Bolivia has suffered a whopping 2,535.
The number of tests carried out is a core component of any Covid-19 strategy, if those who are presenting symptoms or are carriers of the virus are not able to access tests, then it makes tracing and isolating impossible. So far, Cuba, a blockaded country, has carried out 247,203 tests. In Bolivia, where the coup regime has complained that such tests are expensive to acquire, only 134,769 have been carried out.
This is an extraordinarily low number in comparison not just to Cuba, but to immediate neighbors like Peru, which has carried out 2 million tests. Instead of buying tests, Bolivia’s incompetent government purchased 500 faulty ventilators at inflated prices. This corruption scandal forced the country’s Health Minister Marcelo Navajas to resign after just a few miserable weeks on the job.
Socialized public health vs. profiteering and price gouging
The strengths of Cuba’s socialized health system are well known. Figures from the World Health Organization show that the island has the highest doctor-patient ratio in the world, with 8.4 per 1000 of the population, compared to just 2.6 in the United States. The infant mortality rate in Cuba is 4 per 1000 live births, the same as the UK and Denmark. Meanwhile, the US stands at 6 per 1000.
These statistics alone are a testament to Cuba’s general preparedness for the challenges of Covid-19. But beyond its superior public health system, Cuba’s concrete pandemic prevention strategy has been far more advanced than that of most around the world.
Ariana Campero was the former Minister of Health in Evo Morales’ government between 2015-2018 and served as Bolivian ambassador in Cuba, where she lives today. She detailed for me the prevention system that sets Cuba apart from Bolivia and other neoliberal governments in the region: “Unlike Bolivia, Cuba has had a real plan, most importantly in its active search for cases through primary healthcare provision. An example of this is how the nurse assigned to our neighborhood comes by our house every single day to check that no one is presenting symptoms or has had contact with anyone who’s been abroad recently, or any change of circumstance that would expose the family to Covid-19.”
While Cuba’s early measures allowed its government to run a properly functional track and trace operation, the Bolivian coup regime sat on its hands as Covid-19 inched toward its borders. Don Fitz, a leading academic expert on Cuba’s health system, explained to The Grayzone, “The only reason that Cuba’s tracking system has worked is that the Coronavirus Plan for Prevention and Control was implemented on March 2, 2020.
Within four days, it expanded the plan to include taking the temperature of and possibly isolating infected incoming travelers. These occurred before Cuba’s first confirmed Covid-19 diagnosis on March 11. Cuba had its first confirmed Covid-19 fatality by March 22, when there were thirty-five confirmed cases, almost one thousand patients being observed in hospitals, and over thirty thousand people under surveillance at home. The next day it banned the entry of nonresident foreigners.”
Conversely, Bolivia has almost no discernible strategy. Following the coup against Evo Morales in November 2019, Bolivia focused instead on purging its public sphere of anything that could be remotely connected to Cuba. The new government formally broke off diplomatic relations and expelled the 700 Cuban medical professionals stationed here.
While Bolivian health ministers once sought to emulate Cuba, the coup government of Jeanine Añez turned to the private sector and appointed Marcelo Navajas, an owner of an elite private clinic in the upper class south side of La Paz, as health minister just as Covid-19 cases began to surge. The ideological divergence handicapped the country as it careened into the current health crisis.
Before the coup, Cuban doctors were running entire hospitals in working class urban and rural areas of Bolivia. Today, those clinics are still empty. The government claims to have plans to open one of the clinics in La Paz, but said nothing of the others. I visited a former Cuban clinic in the working class ‘Valle Hermoso’ district in the city Cochabamba, the establishment was home to 143 Cuban doctors providing free healthcare to the community. When I visited the area in January 2020, the gates were locked and the only information was a handwritten sign reading, “There is no service. There are no doctors. There are no nurses.”
Today, more than four months since the start of the pandemic, the clinic’s gates are still closed. María Rodríguez, Valle Hermoso resident, explained to local media in June how her husband had been receiving long-standing treatment for pulmonary fibrosis at that Cuban hospital, but is now unable to access any service at all since the pandemic hit. “We were told that it would only be closed for a short time,” Rodríguez said, “that they just needed to hire new staff. We had to go to the ‘Hospital del Sur’ to continue with the treatment. It was ok there, but a week ago when I went, they didn’t even let us in because they said everything is full…they don’t want to treat him anywhere.”
The closure of the Cuban clinics is a particularly bitter twist now that Bolivia’s privately driven health system is falling apart at the seams. The largest hospital in Cochabamba declared itself ‘collapsed’ over a month ago. In neighboring Quillacollo, one doctor spoke anonymously to Kawaschun News, where I am employed, revealing that though staff hadn’t been paid since March, they are still expected to perform 24 hour shifts, at times they’ve had to leave dead bodies on the floor of the hospital without any material with which to wrap them. As public health is neglected, private clinics are seeking to turn a profit off the pandemic. Thanks to government inaction, clinics are charging Covid-19 patients up to $3000 per night for a hospital stay, then charging again, at inflated prices, for each medication used during that stay.
Where the state has failed, local authorities have done what they can, but are hamstrung by austerity measures that starved municipalities of government funding. This is a policy that began after the coup and before the pandemic. Alvaro Ruiz (MAS), Mayor of Uriondo and President of the Federation of Municipal Associations (FAM Bolivia) told The Grayzone, “There are projects in water, health, education that are now paralyzed because the central government has cut local authority budgets. We can’t allow our people to go backwards and lose the social gains made thanks to the work and coordination under Evo Morales”.
Matilde Campos (MAS), Mayor of Shinahota, in the Chapare region, echoed Ruiz’s points, complaining the austerity policy has affected their ability to respond to Covid-19. “As municipalities, we’ve been abandoned,” the mayor told The Grayzone. “The government doesn’t have any initiative, they haven’t even bought any ventilators for the hospitals in this region. Total inefficiency”.
Rather than holding the new government to account for this disaster, Bolivia’s corporate media has blamed Cuban doctors and the country’s pre-existing health system instead.
Leading the attacks has been Jhanisse Vaca Daza, US-linked regime change operative who now has a weekly column in the right-wing newspaper Pagina Siete. She condemned the MAS for praising Cuba, commenting, “Luis Arce (MAS candidate) asked the central government to accept the help of Cuban doctors. This follows a long line of praise for the Cuban health system that should be questioned. If you listen to testimonies of activists who manage to leave the island, the stories about the lack of resources in Cuban hospitals are horrendous.”
While Cuba’s biotech sector saves lives, desperate Bolivians turn to natural herbs
In order to suppress the Covid-19 mortality rate, the issue of medicines is vital. The US economic blockade on Cuba is an obstacle in accessing imported medicines. However, the island has spent decades developing a first-rate biotech industry. The state initiative was launched during Fidel Castro’s period in the presidency, when the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology was founded to carry out world leading research. The center was complimented by a wider network of state-run production that now manufactures the vast majority of the medications used in the country, as well as 300 products for export.
The Cuban-made Interferon-AlfaB2 has proved to be a lifesaver. Cuba began producing Interferon in 1981 to combat Dengue fever. Since then, the drug has come into international demand. Its effectiveness against coronaviruses was first demonstrated during the 2003 SARS outbreak; it is now being exported by Cuba to 72 countries to help fight the symptoms of Covid-19. Cuba currently has a mortality rate of just 3.77 compared to 5.71 throughout Latin America.
Ariana Campero points to Cuba’s biotech sector as a key to reducing deaths among those who are hospitalized. “It’s an example of the futurist vision of Comandante Fidel,” the Bolivian diplomat said. “This project of producing medicines within Cuba started decades ago. That futurist vision has helped save countless lives now. Not just with Interferon, but there’s now another medicine that’s been developed here, CIGB-258. It’s only very recently been authorised for trial use on patients in a critical state, but it’s showing very good results. All these innovative medicines are developed here and follow all WHO standards and protocols.”
Despite its contribution to global health, the only factor impeding further growth in Cuba’s health sector is US sanctions, which places innumerable obstacles to stop commercialization and research.
In Bolivia, where the US offers full-throated support for the coup regime, doctors’ associations have become increasingly desperate about the regime’s failure to provide adequate medications. In the Amazonian department of Beni, one of the worst affected regions, the medical college has formally asked the state to import Interferon Alpha B2, but the request has fallen on deaf ears.
The medicine shortages have forced desperate Bolivians to turn to herbs and forgotten ancestral medicine. The primary ingredients used in these remedies include eucalyptus, ginger, honey and a plant called Huira Huira. These elements contain medicinal properties and have been used for generations in rural indigenous communities. Huira Huira can help with respiratory problems, for instance, and ginger boosts the immune system.
However, these solutions are only experiencing a revival because of the government’s near-total abdication and incompetence. Leonardo Loza, a union leader in the Tropico of Cochabamba has been helping to distribute medicinal plants to the communities he represents, but told The Grayzone he was forced to do so because the central government has abandoned his community. “I remember these medicines when I was a child,” Loza told The Grayzone, “but as our people started rising out of poverty we all began going to the pharmacy and buying those medications, most of us have forgotten how to even prepare these remedies. But now we’re forced to learn this again.”
With the government absent, indigenous unions are inviting elders with medicinal knowledge to give workshops at local union halls. One workshop I witnessed in Central Litoral in the Municipality of Villa Tunari featured instructions on how to make a therapeutic syrup from ginger, onion, garlic and honey.
Mayor Matilde Campos is one of a number of local mayors sponsoring these efforts, but emphasises that they arisen from necessity: “It’s due to a lack of conventional treatments. Where did the initiative of medicinal plants come from? It has come from the population, from citizens, and so we’re supporting them as a municipality because the municipalities are with the people. The government is with the IMF and the United States.”
It is not yet clear if these remedies actually produce results against Covid-19. There are testimonies such as those of 55 year old David Pascual, a neighbor of mine in the Tropico of Cochabamba, who was ill with Covid-like symptoms for 35 days. For much of that time he had very serious respiratory problems and complained that his brain ‘stopped working’. Unable to find a test, he decided to treat himself with natural remedies including boiling ginger with Coca Cola.
When I asked Pascual why he hadn’t gone to a hospital during such a severe stage of the illness, he replied: “Those (natural) medicines are the way I was cured of Covid-19. It took a while to work, but it was worth it. I didn’t go to a doctor or the hospital … I don’t trust them, I’ve heard lots of stories recently about negligence that results in deaths and also, they don’t even have any medicine there anymore. What’s the point of going?”
David is in good health now and is back at work on his plot of land, picking coca and mandarins. But his DIY solutions are a far cry from Cuba’s impressive biotech industry, whose products have undergone clinical trials in Wuhan and have shown to be effective in strengthening the immune system and reducing inflammatory proteins that lead to complications in Covid-19 patients.
“We’re tired, we don’t know what to eat:” A lockdown without government support
The strain on health systems is not the only crisis caused by the pandemic. As Nash Landesman reported for The Grayzone, total lockdown measures imposed in many Latin American countries threaten to starve the masses of workers that subsist off the informal economy, depending on a day’s labor for basic provisions.
The economic crisis has already begun for both Cuba and Bolivia, who have each adopted quarantine measures to varying degrees. However, there’s a vast difference in how the two nations have approached the economic question during the last four months. In Cuba, those under lockdown have been receiving 60% of their salary to help with the cost of living.
In contrast, Bolivia’s government has presided over the mass impoverishment of its own population through a strict implementation of lockdown, coupled with an almost total absence of any support for the millions who’ve lost their income.
Figures from the CELAG think tank show that 38% of Bolivians have lost the entirety of the earnings, while 52% have lost part of their earnings. Just 8.5% responded that they had not been affected by the neoliberal-style lockdown policy.
The only measure the Bolivian coup regime has introduced to soften the blow is a one-off payment of 500bs (70 USD) for every citizen over 18 unable to earn a living during the pandemic. Needless to say, in a country where the minimum wage is over $300 per month, $70 has hardly been enough to last four months.
Bolivians have taken to the streets to protest against the hunger and impoverishment facing the majority of the country. In mid-May almost every region was gripped by marches that spread from El Alto and Potosi in the Andes to Cochabamba in the valleys to Yapacani and San Julian in the Eastern department of Santa Cruz.
One protester in the working-class district of K’ara K’ara (Cochabamba) described the desperation that led the community to break quarantine: “We’re tired, we don’t know what to eat. What we want is to go back to work immediately. We want to be able to bring home at least a piece of bread for our children, because the payment this government gave us is nothing, it’s already run out…the banks (loans) are pressuring us, we still have to pay for basic services, we still have to pay for water.”
The pandemic has wrought vast destruction, particularly in Latin America where health systems have crumbled upon impact. That Cuba has avoided the scenes of dead bodies lining the streets and collapsed hospitals is a historic victory for its socialist model. Its approach has saved countless lives at home while sending 2000 well-trained doctors abroad to fighting Covid-19 in 28 different countries.
In Bolivia, meanwhile, where an unelected, US-backed regime has abandoned the model that Evo Morales employed to lift millions out of extreme poverty, the bodies continue to pile up.
Cochabamba, Bolivia – As Latin America becomes the new focal point for the devastating spread of Covid-19, Cuba stands virtually alone in having saved its population from the dramatic health and societal collapse seen across most of the region. At the other extreme is Bolivia, where the coup regime is using the trauma of mass graves and corpses in the streets – the fruits of its own inaction – as an excuse to ban elections. A close look the divergent results of the two countries gives an insight into how two opposing ideological models have shaped the situation that Cuba and Bolivia find themselves in today.
The two countries have roughly the same population of about 11 million and were among the last in the region to see their first imported cases. Covid-19 arrived in Bolivia on March 10th; it hit Cuba the following day. The similarities end there.
At the time of writing, Cuba has yet to see a single medical professional or child die from the virus, and has a total of 2,495 cases. Meanwhile, Bolivia had 1,825 cases of Covid-19 just in the last 24 hours, adding to a staggering national total of 68,281 infections. Cuba has suffered 87 deaths from the virus while Bolivia has suffered a whopping 2,535.
The number of tests carried out is a core component of any Covid-19 strategy, if those who are presenting symptoms or are carriers of the virus are not able to access tests, then it makes tracing and isolating impossible. So far, Cuba, a blockaded country, has carried out 247,203 tests. In Bolivia, where the coup regime has complained that such tests are expensive to acquire, only 134,769 have been carried out.
This is an extraordinarily low number in comparison not just to Cuba, but to immediate neighbors like Peru, which has carried out 2 million tests. Instead of buying tests, Bolivia’s incompetent government purchased 500 faulty ventilators at inflated prices. This corruption scandal forced the country’s Health Minister Marcelo Navajas to resign after just a few miserable weeks on the job.
Socialized public health vs. profiteering and price gouging
The strengths of Cuba’s socialized health system are well known. Figures from the World Health Organization show that the island has the highest doctor-patient ratio in the world, with 8.4 per 1000 of the population, compared to just 2.6 in the United States. The infant mortality rate in Cuba is 4 per 1000 live births, the same as the UK and Denmark. Meanwhile, the US stands at 6 per 1000.
These statistics alone are a testament to Cuba’s general preparedness for the challenges of Covid-19. But beyond its superior public health system, Cuba’s concrete pandemic prevention strategy has been far more advanced than that of most around the world.
Ariana Campero was the former Minister of Health in Evo Morales’ government between 2015-2018 and served as Bolivian ambassador in Cuba, where she lives today. She detailed for me the prevention system that sets Cuba apart from Bolivia and other neoliberal governments in the region: “Unlike Bolivia, Cuba has had a real plan, most importantly in its active search for cases through primary healthcare provision. An example of this is how the nurse assigned to our neighborhood comes by our house every single day to check that no one is presenting symptoms or has had contact with anyone who’s been abroad recently, or any change of circumstance that would expose the family to Covid-19.”
While Cuba’s early measures allowed its government to run a properly functional track and trace operation, the Bolivian coup regime sat on its hands as Covid-19 inched toward its borders. Don Fitz, a leading academic expert on Cuba’s health system, explained to The Grayzone, “The only reason that Cuba’s tracking system has worked is that the Coronavirus Plan for Prevention and Control was implemented on March 2, 2020.
Within four days, it expanded the plan to include taking the temperature of and possibly isolating infected incoming travelers. These occurred before Cuba’s first confirmed Covid-19 diagnosis on March 11. Cuba had its first confirmed Covid-19 fatality by March 22, when there were thirty-five confirmed cases, almost one thousand patients being observed in hospitals, and over thirty thousand people under surveillance at home. The next day it banned the entry of nonresident foreigners.”
Conversely, Bolivia has almost no discernible strategy. Following the coup against Evo Morales in November 2019, Bolivia focused instead on purging its public sphere of anything that could be remotely connected to Cuba. The new government formally broke off diplomatic relations and expelled the 700 Cuban medical professionals stationed here.
While Bolivian health ministers once sought to emulate Cuba, the coup government of Jeanine Añez turned to the private sector and appointed Marcelo Navajas, an owner of an elite private clinic in the upper class south side of La Paz, as health minister just as Covid-19 cases began to surge. The ideological divergence handicapped the country as it careened into the current health crisis.
Before the coup, Cuban doctors were running entire hospitals in working class urban and rural areas of Bolivia. Today, those clinics are still empty. The government claims to have plans to open one of the clinics in La Paz, but said nothing of the others. I visited a former Cuban clinic in the working class ‘Valle Hermoso’ district in the city Cochabamba, the establishment was home to 143 Cuban doctors providing free healthcare to the community. When I visited the area in January 2020, the gates were locked and the only information was a handwritten sign reading, “There is no service. There are no doctors. There are no nurses.”
Today, more than four months since the start of the pandemic, the clinic’s gates are still closed. María Rodríguez, Valle Hermoso resident, explained to local media in June how her husband had been receiving long-standing treatment for pulmonary fibrosis at that Cuban hospital, but is now unable to access any service at all since the pandemic hit. “We were told that it would only be closed for a short time,” Rodríguez said, “that they just needed to hire new staff. We had to go to the ‘Hospital del Sur’ to continue with the treatment. It was ok there, but a week ago when I went, they didn’t even let us in because they said everything is full…they don’t want to treat him anywhere.”
The closure of the Cuban clinics is a particularly bitter twist now that Bolivia’s privately driven health system is falling apart at the seams. The largest hospital in Cochabamba declared itself ‘collapsed’ over a month ago. In neighboring Quillacollo, one doctor spoke anonymously to Kawaschun News, where I am employed, revealing that though staff hadn’t been paid since March, they are still expected to perform 24 hour shifts, at times they’ve had to leave dead bodies on the floor of the hospital without any material with which to wrap them. As public health is neglected, private clinics are seeking to turn a profit off the pandemic. Thanks to government inaction, clinics are charging Covid-19 patients up to $3000 per night for a hospital stay, then charging again, at inflated prices, for each medication used during that stay.
Where the state has failed, local authorities have done what they can, but are hamstrung by austerity measures that starved municipalities of government funding. This is a policy that began after the coup and before the pandemic. Alvaro Ruiz (MAS), Mayor of Uriondo and President of the Federation of Municipal Associations (FAM Bolivia) told The Grayzone, “There are projects in water, health, education that are now paralyzed because the central government has cut local authority budgets. We can’t allow our people to go backwards and lose the social gains made thanks to the work and coordination under Evo Morales”.
Matilde Campos (MAS), Mayor of Shinahota, in the Chapare region, echoed Ruiz’s points, complaining the austerity policy has affected their ability to respond to Covid-19. “As municipalities, we’ve been abandoned,” the mayor told The Grayzone. “The government doesn’t have any initiative, they haven’t even bought any ventilators for the hospitals in this region. Total inefficiency”.
Rather than holding the new government to account for this disaster, Bolivia’s corporate media has blamed Cuban doctors and the country’s pre-existing health system instead.
Leading the attacks has been Jhanisse Vaca Daza, US-linked regime change operative who now has a weekly column in the right-wing newspaper Pagina Siete. She condemned the MAS for praising Cuba, commenting, “Luis Arce (MAS candidate) asked the central government to accept the help of Cuban doctors. This follows a long line of praise for the Cuban health system that should be questioned. If you listen to testimonies of activists who manage to leave the island, the stories about the lack of resources in Cuban hospitals are horrendous.”
While Cuba’s biotech sector saves lives, desperate Bolivians turn to natural herbs
In order to suppress the Covid-19 mortality rate, the issue of medicines is vital. The US economic blockade on Cuba is an obstacle in accessing imported medicines. However, the island has spent decades developing a first-rate biotech industry. The state initiative was launched during Fidel Castro’s period in the presidency, when the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology was founded to carry out world leading research. The center was complimented by a wider network of state-run production that now manufactures the vast majority of the medications used in the country, as well as 300 products for export.
The Cuban-made Interferon-AlfaB2 has proved to be a lifesaver. Cuba began producing Interferon in 1981 to combat Dengue fever. Since then, the drug has come into international demand. Its effectiveness against coronaviruses was first demonstrated during the 2003 SARS outbreak; it is now being exported by Cuba to 72 countries to help fight the symptoms of Covid-19. Cuba currently has a mortality rate of just 3.77 compared to 5.71 throughout Latin America.
Ariana Campero points to Cuba’s biotech sector as a key to reducing deaths among those who are hospitalized. “It’s an example of the futurist vision of Comandante Fidel,” the Bolivian diplomat said. “This project of producing medicines within Cuba started decades ago. That futurist vision has helped save countless lives now. Not just with Interferon, but there’s now another medicine that’s been developed here, CIGB-258. It’s only very recently been authorised for trial use on patients in a critical state, but it’s showing very good results. All these innovative medicines are developed here and follow all WHO standards and protocols.”
Despite its contribution to global health, the only factor impeding further growth in Cuba’s health sector is US sanctions, which places innumerable obstacles to stop commercialization and research.
In Bolivia, where the US offers full-throated support for the coup regime, doctors’ associations have become increasingly desperate about the regime’s failure to provide adequate medications. In the Amazonian department of Beni, one of the worst affected regions, the medical college has formally asked the state to import Interferon Alpha B2, but the request has fallen on deaf ears.
The medicine shortages have forced desperate Bolivians to turn to herbs and forgotten ancestral medicine. The primary ingredients used in these remedies include eucalyptus, ginger, honey and a plant called Huira Huira. These elements contain medicinal properties and have been used for generations in rural indigenous communities. Huira Huira can help with respiratory problems, for instance, and ginger boosts the immune system.
However, these solutions are only experiencing a revival because of the government’s near-total abdication and incompetence. Leonardo Loza, a union leader in the Tropico of Cochabamba has been helping to distribute medicinal plants to the communities he represents, but told The Grayzone he was forced to do so because the central government has abandoned his community. “I remember these medicines when I was a child,” Loza told The Grayzone, “but as our people started rising out of poverty we all began going to the pharmacy and buying those medications, most of us have forgotten how to even prepare these remedies. But now we’re forced to learn this again.”
With the government absent, indigenous unions are inviting elders with medicinal knowledge to give workshops at local union halls. One workshop I witnessed in Central Litoral in the Municipality of Villa Tunari featured instructions on how to make a therapeutic syrup from ginger, onion, garlic and honey.
Mayor Matilde Campos is one of a number of local mayors sponsoring these efforts, but emphasises that they arisen from necessity: “It’s due to a lack of conventional treatments. Where did the initiative of medicinal plants come from? It has come from the population, from citizens, and so we’re supporting them as a municipality because the municipalities are with the people. The government is with the IMF and the United States.”
It is not yet clear if these remedies actually produce results against Covid-19. There are testimonies such as those of 55 year old David Pascual, a neighbor of mine in the Tropico of Cochabamba, who was ill with Covid-like symptoms for 35 days. For much of that time he had very serious respiratory problems and complained that his brain ‘stopped working’. Unable to find a test, he decided to treat himself with natural remedies including boiling ginger with Coca Cola.
When I asked Pascual why he hadn’t gone to a hospital during such a severe stage of the illness, he replied: “Those (natural) medicines are the way I was cured of Covid-19. It took a while to work, but it was worth it. I didn’t go to a doctor or the hospital … I don’t trust them, I’ve heard lots of stories recently about negligence that results in deaths and also, they don’t even have any medicine there anymore. What’s the point of going?”
David is in good health now and is back at work on his plot of land, picking coca and mandarins. But his DIY solutions are a far cry from Cuba’s impressive biotech industry, whose products have undergone clinical trials in Wuhan and have shown to be effective in strengthening the immune system and reducing inflammatory proteins that lead to complications in Covid-19 patients.
“We’re tired, we don’t know what to eat:” A lockdown without government support
The strain on health systems is not the only crisis caused by the pandemic. As Nash Landesman reported for The Grayzone, total lockdown measures imposed in many Latin American countries threaten to starve the masses of workers that subsist off the informal economy, depending on a day’s labor for basic provisions.
The economic crisis has already begun for both Cuba and Bolivia, who have each adopted quarantine measures to varying degrees. However, there’s a vast difference in how the two nations have approached the economic question during the last four months. In Cuba, those under lockdown have been receiving 60% of their salary to help with the cost of living.
In contrast, Bolivia’s government has presided over the mass impoverishment of its own population through a strict implementation of lockdown, coupled with an almost total absence of any support for the millions who’ve lost their income.
Figures from the CELAG think tank show that 38% of Bolivians have lost the entirety of the earnings, while 52% have lost part of their earnings. Just 8.5% responded that they had not been affected by the neoliberal-style lockdown policy.
The only measure the Bolivian coup regime has introduced to soften the blow is a one-off payment of 500bs (70 USD) for every citizen over 18 unable to earn a living during the pandemic. Needless to say, in a country where the minimum wage is over $300 per month, $70 has hardly been enough to last four months.
Bolivians have taken to the streets to protest against the hunger and impoverishment facing the majority of the country. In mid-May almost every region was gripped by marches that spread from El Alto and Potosi in the Andes to Cochabamba in the valleys to Yapacani and San Julian in the Eastern department of Santa Cruz.
One protester in the working-class district of K’ara K’ara (Cochabamba) described the desperation that led the community to break quarantine: “We’re tired, we don’t know what to eat. What we want is to go back to work immediately. We want to be able to bring home at least a piece of bread for our children, because the payment this government gave us is nothing, it’s already run out…the banks (loans) are pressuring us, we still have to pay for basic services, we still have to pay for water.”
The pandemic has wrought vast destruction, particularly in Latin America where health systems have crumbled upon impact. That Cuba has avoided the scenes of dead bodies lining the streets and collapsed hospitals is a historic victory for its socialist model. Its approach has saved countless lives at home while sending 2000 well-trained doctors abroad to fighting Covid-19 in 28 different countries.
In Bolivia, meanwhile, where an unelected, US-backed regime has abandoned the model that Evo Morales employed to lift millions out of extreme poverty, the bodies continue to pile up.
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