Sanjay Gupta Reveals How Bad US Crisis Really Is

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDvpl_k4XIs&ab_channel=TheDamageReport

Record breaking surge of the pandemic pushing US health care workers to the edge

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/14/pand-n14.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




Benjamin Mateus
13 November 2020







The surge of COVID-19 infections in the United States is mounting as state after state reports new record highs pushing the national health system closer to collapse.

On Friday, the COVID Tracking Project reported more than 69,000 patients in hospitals throughout the nation, a one-week increase of more than 14,000 admissions. This comes as a record high of more than 183,000 new cases of COVID-19 infections were diagnosed throughout the nation. The growth of infections is showing no signs of slowing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has forecasted daily new hospitalizations could reach from 2,000 to 13,000 by the end of November.

As in the deadly wave of infections in the spring, hospitals and health systems are turning to traveling nurses to supplement the staff that are otherwise infected, in quarantine from exposure, or exhausted from multiple shifts caring for patients with a complex array of health maladies that have been ascribed to severe COVID-19 infections.
The CEO of Henry Ford Health System, Wright Lassiter, told Crain’s Detroit Business, “The difference between November and April is we have COVID cases all over the country now. When we had the need for field hospitals, there were only a dozen states that were overwhelmed. We could draw from other states for personnel. Now with so many cases, there are not excess critical care nurses or additional personnel to pull from.”

When hospitals become inundated with patients, the strain placed on the entire workforce leads to a growing number of medical errors and a declining standard of care, which have fatal consequences.

Lawanna Rivers, a traveling nurse who was temporarily assigned to work at University Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, recounted in a video posted this week on Facebook, “Out of all the COVID assignments I’ve been on, this is the one that’s really left me emotionally scarred. The facility I’m at has surpassed the one I was at in New York. I saw a lot of people die who I felt shouldn’t have died.”

El Paso County presently has more than 31,000 active cases, which means that almost 1 in 30 residents have recently been tested positive. Twenty-seven new deaths yesterday have pushed the cumulative death toll to 778. There are 1,132 hospitalized patients with 317 in the ICU. The county has deployed six mobile morgues that can hold 176 bodies. Additional units will be arriving.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has reinforced the county with an additional 1,400 medical personnel, while the US Department of Defense has offered its medical staff to stem the burgeoning disaster. Dozens of non-COVID patients have been airlifted to other hospitals in Texas and New Mexico to provide much-needed bed space. However, as the COVID-19 surge is beginning to fill these regional hospital systems as well, and El Paso may find itself in the difficult position of rationing care.

Utah’s governor has declared a state of emergency as hospitals there are well into their contingency plans. Greg Bell, president of the Utah Hospital Association, reported that its ICU capacity had reached 83 percent state-wide. However, some hospitals are effectively at or above 100 percent as they are attempting to expand capacity.

According to the Associated Press (AP), almost 200 traveling nurses have recently joined Utah nurses in keeping staffing levels up. A nurse from New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Wen-Hui Xiao, told the AP, “I decided to come to Utah because I wanted to pay it forward to the front line workers who left their homes to aid us at our time of need. It was really vital and essential to us, and we are so thankful.”

As hospital systems compete for staffing by paying double or quadruple for a skilled ICU nurse willing to travel, health systems in states like Colorado, which had furloughed nurses in the spring because of cutbacks in elective surgeries, are suddenly facing a severe drought in nurses in the face of a dramatic swell in new cases.

States such as North Dakota have turned to implement rules allowed by the CDC for crisis response that allows designated “essential” health care providers continue working despite being infected with coronavirus. Nurses on social media have indicated states like Georgia, Indiana, and Florida have also forced nurses to stay on the job despite testing positive or having symptoms of COVID-19.

Many medical facilities are once again curbing elective surgeries to prepare for the rising tide of COVID-19 patients. Idaho, one of 17 states with a record-high number of hospitalized patients, has halted major surgeries requiring overnight stays and has begun to transfer cases regionally. Dr. Joshua Kern, vice president of medical affairs for St. Luke’s Magic Valley, Jerome and Wood River medical centers, told CNN, “Basically when we get to the point where the hospital is full—based on the staffing capacity that we have available—then we’ll say no to any additional patients. So, that’ll be patients in our own ER that we’ll then have to transfer to Boise via ambulance or helicopter or fixed-wing plane.”

Unlike in the springtime, when only a few hospitals were slammed with a massive influx of patients, the situation has become ubiquitous. Throughout less affected regions, many nurses and physicians feel their turn to face an onslaught is nigh and feel compelled to stay put for their community.

Surges in rural regions are most concerning, as limited resources and capacity to treat patients place significant hardship on the staff who frequently are friends and family members. Many of those infected also suffer from an excess of chronic ailments, leading to severe consequences with COVID-19 making care in a limited treatment facility dangerous. However, transfer to regional centers with the closest ICU could be six hours by car, complicating transportation.

There has also been a call to bring retired health care workers back to work in a situation where possible infection with COVID puts them at significant risk. According to CNN, in Wisconsin, Bellin Health Systems in Green Bay has redeployed and rehired more than 200 people. Assurances are being given that they will not be working in frontline settings, but as infection rates continue to climb, such promises will fall by the wayside.

The health crisis and the ruling class’s complete disregard for health care workers’ safety and well-being are once again fueling a growing tide of outrage and opposition. Over 1500 nurses at Einstein Medical Center and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia are preparing to strike over being “pushed to the brink by unsafe staffing that seriously undermines patient safety,” according to a release put out by their association.

Nurse practitioners, physicians, and physicians’ assistants at 20 Indigo Urgent Care facilities based out of Tacoma, Washington who belong to the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD) are preparing to strike next week, seeking better work and safety conditions.

Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of UAPD, said, “For too long these providers have been subjected to irresponsible and unsafe policies including working 12+ hour shifts, sometimes seeing over 70 patients in one day without breaks. Not only has MultiCare put patients at risk through these assembly-line conditions, but since the COVID-19 outbreak, MultiCare refuses to allow providers to wear N95 masks, even if they purchase their own.”

The esteemed epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, appointed last week to the Biden coronavirus taskforce, was forced to walk back his advocacy of a paid national lockdown of six weeks duration to get the pandemic under control.

Asked Friday about the possibility of a national lockdown by ABC News, Osterholm deferred, saying he had not discussed his opinions with the incoming administration. In a candid assessment, he put it bluntly, “Nobody’s going to support it [lockdown]. It’s not going to be supported out of the administration. It’s not going to be supported in Congress.”

These simple words contain the entire policy of the Democratic Party and their response to the pandemic—nothing will be done that in any way hinders profit making, no matter the cost in lives. However, the shutdown of non-essential business to get the pandemic under control and save lives would receive broad support from the rank-and-file health care workers and the working class.

Survival Bread Sticks: A Camp Fire Favorite

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LnIpHw0m-I&ab_channel=CoalcrackerBushcraft

People’s Party Strategy Explained by Ryan Knight

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9nxdNfV0BU&ab_channel=GrahamElwood

Neo-Nazis march in Germany on anniversary of anti-Jewish November Pogroms

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/14/pogr-n14.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




Peter Schwarz
13 November 2020







Commemorations marking the 82nd anniversary of the November Pogroms were cancelled or prohibited across Germany due to the coronavirus pandemic. By contrast, the right-wing extremist Pegida movement was allowed to hold a rally at Dresden’s Altmarkt with the neo-Nazi Andreas Kalbitz as the main speaker.

On the night of November 9–10, 1938, Nazis across Germany torched synagogues, looted Jewish businesses, murdered hundreds of Jews and sent tens of thousands more to concentration camps. The November Pogroms, which were coordinated at the highest levels of the Nazi regime, marked a new phase in the persecution of the Jews, which culminated in the state-organised murder of 6 million people.
The Jewish community in Dresden responded with “astonishment and extreme anger” to the right-wing extremist march in the centre of the state capital of Saxony. “It is totally tasteless and ignorant of history that on November 9, a Pegida demonstration is allowed to take place,” argued state rabbi Zsolt Balla. The German Orthodox Rabbi Conference criticised the fact that “right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic sentiments are being chanted openly in the streets” while official commemorations were cancelled due to the pandemic.

Dresden Mayor Hilbert (Free Democrats) justified the authorisation of the right-wing extremist march by saying that neither Germany’s Basic Law nor Saxony’s law on gatherings provided a legal basis to restrict freedom of assembly. But this is a brazen lie.

“Heart not Hate,” a broad alliance of churches, political parties and other organisations, which regularly mobilises against the Pegida marches, recalled the fact that the city authorities possess the powers to take such decisions and have repeatedly banned the alliance’s rallies. For example, a demonstration against Pegida in 2015 involving 6,000 people was “discredited and suppressed by regulations.”

“Heart not Hate” contacted the mayor prior to November 9 with the goal of not permitting any racist events in the city centre, reported spokeswoman Rita Kunert. But a planned meeting with the police and the authorities responsible for events was cancelled without any reason being given. With goodwill and a bit of common sense, it would have been possible to prevent Kalbitz’s symbolically significant appearance on that day, she added.

Thomas Feist (Christian Democrats, CDU), the government of Saxony’s commissioner for the Jewish community, also criticised the city authorities for their unwillingness in the lead-up to the march “to speak with members of the Jewish community about options to prevent it.”

The authorities in Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, and Dannenberg, Lower Saxony, proved that a very different approach is possible. They banned events and justified this on the basis of the need to guard against infection. However, these were not marches by right-wing extremists, but commemorations for the victims of the November Pogroms.

In Salzwedel, a tour of the city’s Stolpersteins, which are cobblestone-sized monuments located around German cities to commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust, was banned, despite the fact that the organisers, “Solidarity Action Salzwedel Alliance,” presented a stringent plan to the authorities to reduce the risk of infection. This included a reduced number of participants and a requirement for everyone to wear a mask and observe social distancing. Only a decision by the administrative court in Magdeburg overturned the ban ordered by the local authorities. A candlelit procession to sites associated with Jewish life in Dannenberg was banned due to the pandemic.

Pegida’s march in Dresden on November 9 is the latest in a long line of incidents in which the police, judiciary and governments have closely collaborated to promote the far right. The established parties, the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and neo-Nazis work hand-in-glove to this end. Saxony is a stronghold of this right-wing conspiracy.

Just two days earlier, on November 7, 20,000 people protested in Leipzig against the federal government’s coronavirus restrictions, including hundreds of neo-Nazis from across the country. Although they ignored all public health measures, continued the demonstration after it had been officially suspended and launched violent attacks on protesters and journalists, the police allowed them to run riot. A growing number of videos have appeared online showing how police officers indicated their solidarity with the far-right demonstrators.

Saxony Minister President Michael Kretschmer and Interior Minister Roland Wöller (both CDU), and federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Social Union, CSU) have since given their full backing to the Leipzig police. “We must stop questioning the police’s tactics in retrospect and from afar without any understanding of details and without the full picture,” said Seehofer. “The police have my full backing.”

It is also no mere coincidence that it was the regional high court in Bautzen that gave the go-ahead for the “lateral thinkers” demonstration in the city centre against the wishes of the Leipzig city authorities, providing the right-wing extremists with a big stage.

The president of the court, Erich Künzler, was praised to the skies two years ago by the AfD. This followed his complaint in the Freie Presse newspaper that refugees whose asylum applications had been rejected by the court were not being deported. This damages the rule of law and undermines the judiciary, he claimed. They increasingly feel “like they are working for the dustbin.”

The AfD’s group in Saxony’s state parliament enthused, “Senior asylum judge adopts the AfD’s line: CDU asylum madness is undermining the rule of law.” The party newspaper, AfD Kompakt, wrote, “It is increasingly clear that the CDU wants to flood Germany with illegal immigrants. The criticism by the judge from Saxony is appropriate.”

The Association of Democratic Jurists and the Republican Lawyers Association (RAV) warned Künzler against engaging in “dangerous incitement on the extreme-right” immediately prior to Saxony’s state election. Dresden-based lawyer Kati Lang, who specialises in immigration law and is a member of the RAV executive, said, “The interview plays directly into the hands of the AfD. The statements are one-sided and an affront to people seeking protection, who trust in the legality of the German courts.”

The close ties between the government, state and right-wing extremists already emerged into the open during the summer of 2018, when leading AfD members and neo-Nazis marched side-by-side through Chemnitz and led a xenophobic mob in attacking immigrants, journalists and left-wing people, as well as a Jewish restaurant.

Kretschmer and Seehofer both backed the far-right march at the time. “There was no mob, no witch-hunt, there was no pogrom in Chemnitz,” claimed Kretschmer in a government statement. Seehofer expressed his understanding that “the population is enraged and angry,” and told the Rheinische Post, “If I were not a government minister, I would have taken to the streets as a citizen.”

Ever since, the intimate ties between the judiciary, police, intelligence agencies, the government, the AfD and neo-Nazis have become ever more obvious. Within the AfD leadership there are several representatives of the security agencies, which are also overrun by right-wing extremist networks. For example, Jens Maier, a judge at the Dresden district court, has been a parliamentary deputy for the AfD since 2017.

Steffen Janich, a police officer in Saxony, is local leader of the AfD in Pirna, and was one of the first to organise a very aggressive demonstration against public health restrictions in April. He was subsequently suspended from duty. He has been nominated for the AfD as a candidate for the federal parliamentary elections in the electoral district of former AfD leader Frauke Petry. The AfD deputy from Bautzen, Karsten Hilse, is also a police officer. When he spoke last week in parliament, he was wearing a “Lateral Thinker” T-shirt.

Prison official Daniel Zabel, who passed an arrest warrant for an asylum seeker suspected of a crime to members of the right-wing extremist milieu and thus triggered the rampage in Chemnitz, is now a parliamentary deputy for the AfD in Saxony’s state parliament. Prior to that, he was handed a suspended sentence.
Maier, Janich and Zabel are believed to be members of the far-right “Wing” of the AfD, which continues to dominate the party even though it has been officially dissolved. The AfD leader in Brandenburg, Andreas Kalbitz, was one of the “Wing’s” leading spokesmen, together with the leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke. However, Kalbitz was expelled from the AfD after it emerged that he had concealed his membership in a neo-Nazi organisation that was subsequently banned.

This expulsion, however, is purely cosmetic. Last week, Kalbitz pointedly stood directly in front of the stage as his political mentor, Alexander Gaulland, the leader of the AfD’s group in the federal parliament, spoke at an event in Cottbus organised by the right-wing extremist Future Homeland organisation. The rally in Dresden marked Kalbitz’s first public speech since his expulsion.

Gordian Meyer-Plath, who headed the state intelligence agency in Saxony between 2013 and 2020, is active on the far right. He is a member of the thuggish student group Marchia Bonn and was heavily involved as an informant in the building up of the right-wing extremist milieu in Brandenburg, which had close ties to the National Socialist Underground (NSU) terrorist cell. At the beginning of the year, he was fired by Saxony Interior Minister Roland Wöller, not because he is such a right-winger, but because he refused to delete data gathered on the AfD.

The right-wing extremist rally in Dresden on the anniversary of the November Pogroms underscores just how far advanced is the rightward lurch of the state and political establishment. All of the major parties are responsible for this. The Social Democrats joined Saxony’s state government in 2014, and the Greens followed in 2019. They provide backing to Minister President Kretschmer and political cover for the right-wing conspiracy within the state apparatus. The Left Party also firmly supports the judiciary and police.

By contrast, the right-wing extremists have hardly any support among the population. Only a few hundred participants joined the Pegida rally in Dresden. The right-wing extremists are being deliberately built up from above in order to intimidate and suppress mounting opposition to social inequality, militarism and the deadly reopening of the economy under conditions of the pandemic.

A Simple Trick Everyone Who Carries a Hatchet Should Know! Axe, Survival, Bushcraft, Woodworking

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6NKPIezsA&ab_channel=CoalcrackerBushcraft

Stalinist Podemos minister pledges to keep US military bases in Spain

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/14/spai-n14.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




Alejandro López
13 November 2020







Alberto Garzón, consumer affairs minister for the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government and general coordinator of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE)-led United Left, has welcomed Joe Biden’s election as US president. On this basis, he pledged to keep US military bases in Spain.

Last Sunday, in a television interview in La Sexta’s programme El Objetivo, Garzón hailed Biden’s election as “good news.” Donald Trump’s defeat, he said, was a loss for “the far-right of the whole world,” adding: “People committed to freedom have voted en masse for the Democratic candidate who represents a very diverse space, who raises hopes around the world because he is something different from Trump.”
After promoting Biden—who as vice president of the previous Democratic administration bailed out Wall Street at the expense of the working class, waged war in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched new wars in Libya and Syria, and orchestrated coups and drone murders around the world—Garzón then went on to defend the renewal of Spain’s military agreement with the US.

He endorsed the agreement that regulates the presence of the US military bases of Rota (Cadiz) and Moron de la Frontera (Seville) in the southern region of Andalusia. He used the cynical argument that “from the labor point of view, it creates a large number of jobs and this is the first thing that has to be preserved.”

Garzón was referring to the estimated 500 civilian jobs, and a few thousand more indirect ones, involved in the bases. He did not mention that these two bases played a key role in US-led wars in the past three decades in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria that led to the deaths of millions in the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans.

Garzón’s comments were a calculated signal to Washington. Days after the interview, the Spanish government announced it would grant a one-year extension to a bilateral defence agreement with the United States that expires on May 21, 2021. This would give an incoming Biden administration time to organise new geopolitical guidelines and renegotiate the defence agreement with Spain.

The military bases are an important asset for Madrid in trade and military negotiations with Washington. The PSOE-Podemos government hopes to use US military presence in Spain to request lower US tariffs on Spanish products. Last year, the Trump Administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on Spanish agricultural products such as olive oil, wine and cheese, whose exports to the US total around €800 million.

More importantly, it is a bargaining chip for a greater Spanish presence in South America. Diplomatic sources told El País: “there is some leeway [with the renewal of the agreement] on a few issues, like the sanctions imposed on Spanish entrepreneurs in connection with Title IV of the Helms-Burton Act [and] Latin America policy, particularly with regard to Cuba and Venezuela.”

The bases are of key strategic importance to Washington. In 2011, Washington secured with the previous PSOE-led government an eight-year extension to the Agreement on Defence that allowed the deployment of four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, 1,200 soldiers and 100 civilians. In 2017, two US warships steamed from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria.

At the end of 2019, the PSOE-Podemos government accepted that more modern US warships would replace these US destroyers. They are to arrive next year. They are part of the Missile Defence System, which forms an essential component of the Pentagon’s plans for waging offensive nuclear war against Russia and China: this system would aim to shoot down whatever missiles Russia and China fired back at the United States or Europe after a US nuclear first strike.

The Washington Post has named Rota as a candidate to house the headquarters of USAFRICOM, the United States Africa Command.

While Garzón was defending Spain’s imperialist interests with the US on television from Madrid, his government counterpart, Spanish Deputy Prime Minister and Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias was attending the inauguration of Luis Arce of Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia at the behest of Spain’s major corporations and banks.

The Spanish ruling class banked on Iglesias’ “left populist” ties in the region. Travelling with Spanish King Philip VI with a large delegation to welcome the MAS government in Bolivia, Iglesias held closed meetings with candidates for the presidency of Peru and Ecuador, Verónika Mendoza and Andrés Arauz, and Argentine president Alberto Fernández.

While most of the pseudo-left groups orbiting the Podemos-United Left alliance remained silent on Garzon’s comments and the imperialist foreign policy trip of Iglesias, the Morenoite Workers’ Revolutionary Current (CRT) expressed concern at how Podemos is rapidly exposing itself.

Its article published in Izquierda Diario stated: “Garzón’s replies show up to what point IU [United Left] and the PCE are subordinated to the PSOE and to positions on ‘order’ and ‘responsibility of state’ in order to get a seat in the government. IU and the PCE have historically made rhetorical points against military bases and NATO. To be consistent in this central anti-imperialist question (against US and Spanish imperialism) would mean going much further than the ‘politics of gestures’ they have had in recent years. But what happened with Garzón is a qualitative leap. The integration is such that the IU and Podemos ministers have become true defenders of the agenda of Spanish imperialist capitalism.”

It concluded with an appeal to members of the Stalinist PCE machine to “ask themselves how is it possible to talk about ‘communism’ while their leaders, such as Alberto Garzón or [Labour Minister] Yolanda Díaz, are ministers of a neoliberal and imperialist government with the PSOE.”

The pro-imperialist role of Podemos and the PCE flows from their history and anti-Trotskyist programme, and the middle-class interests that they defend. These are state parties that attack workers’ living standards, support wars and coups, attack democratic rights and block working class opposition to the bourgeoisie’s fascistic agenda. The CRT’s appeal to the PCE underscores that the CRT is itself a barely disguised wing of the United Left and of Podemos.

In truth, the Stalinist politics of the PCE and Podemos have for decades been inseparable from their support for Spanish imperialism and, in the last four decades, for the PSOE.

Under the 1953 Madrid Pacts, agreed with the fascist dictator General Francisco Franco, four US military bases were built in Spain. In exchange, the Franco dictatorship received economic and military aid, and de-facto international rehabilitation after years of isolation following the Second World War, when Franco tacitly backed Nazi Germany after having received aid from Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. The Franco regime was integrated into the Western defence system aimed at the Soviet Union, though without formally being accepted into the NATO alliance.

Three years later, in 1956, the PCE called for a “National Reconciliation” with Spanish capitalism’s “modern” sector, based on a perspective of establishing a capitalist parliamentary regime. The PCE called for the fictitious “peaceful coexistence” and “neutrality” between Spanish imperialism and the Soviet Union, while not calling for the end of US military bases.

In 1975, according to recently-declassified CIA documents, PCE leader Santiago Carrillo spoke to a Time magazine correspondent, who was apparently functioning as a US intelligence asset. Carrillo, who was infamous for his implication in Soviet intelligence agents’ murder of revolutionaries in Spain during the Civil War, told him that “Americans can stay as long as the Russians keep troops in Czechoslovakia.”

In 1976, as the PCE suppressed the largest strike wave since the 1930s against the Franco regime, Carrillo said he was against “all foreign bases, both American ones in capitalist countries and Russian ones in socialist countries.” For now, he added, the PCE “would accept the American bases in Spain.”

Washington welcomed Carrillo for an 11-day visit the following year. He spoke at Yale, Harvard and John Hopkins and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The New York Times wrote: “Chatting informally at a dinner Saturday with politicians, businessmen and journalists with connections to the United States, Mr. Carrillo said half‐jokingly that he was going to the United States ‘to sell merchandise’—namely, his novel brand of Communism.”

Since then, the PCE and since 2014 Podemos have aligned themselves ever more closely with NATO wars in the Middle East in Afghanistan and Libya, Spanish weapons sales to Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen, and Spain’s membership in NATO. Former chief of the Armed Forces General Staff General Julio Rodríguez, who led Spanish participation in the 2011 NATO war in Libya that left 30,000 dead, is a leading Podemos member.