Sunday, July 12, 2020

Stuck in the 80s -- MARVEL AGENTS OF SHIELD

Last Wednesday, the latest episode of MARVEL AGENTS OF SHIELD aired on ABC.  It was the best episode of the season so far.

Recap.

Deke and Mac are stuck in the 80s.  The previous episode ended with an upset Mac taking his motorcyle off the Shield ship and driving into the woods to be by himself.  (His parents were killed and replaced by robots that he had to terminate.)  The ship was about to follow the bad guys into the future so Deke got off quickly to go get Mac.

But the ship left before they could get back. 

So they're trapped in the 80s.

But not together.  Mac wants nothing to do with Deke or anyone else.  He hides out refuses to answering the door when Deke visits, refusing to take the groceries Deke leaves on his doorstep.  All he does is make model cars. 

Finally, he goes out to see Deke.  Deke's at a bar.  Performing in a band.

He's performing a great new song he's written, "Don't You Forget About Me."  The crowd loves it.  Mac doesn't and points out that it's from THE BREAKFAST CLUB.  Deke's stealing all the songs that haven't yet emerged.  FOr fame and money, Mac thinks.

No, the band is the cover.  Deke has a group of spies he's training.  Their cover is the band, it allows them to travel from city to city and if anyone suspects them, they'll just write it off as rockers on drugs.

Mac's not impressed and he and Deke fight over the group.  Even though Coulson endorses them.

Yes, Coulson's back.  On the TV.  He lives on in data.  He's like Max Headroom.  And this is a Coulson I can put up with, by the way.

Mac's going to leave but Sybil shows up.  She's gotten a man to build a robot that she in habits.  She then built killer robots.  One of the killer robots kills the band's drummer (and the guy's girlfriend) but the group manages to kill it -- that's when Sybil herself shows up.

They defeat her but she escapes.

Jemma sends May and Yo-Yo in a ship for Deke and Mac and to retrieve data Coulson.

It was a good episode and it was good to see Mac -- and Deke -- lead on an episode.



Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 
Friday, July 10, 2020.  We look at presidential candidates in the US and note the increase (again) in deaths from COVID in Iraq.



Starting in the US where a presidential election is set to take place in November.  Among those running for the presidency?  Gloria La Riva who is the presidential nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation as well as for the Peace and Freedom Party.  LIBERATION notes:

In an exciting development for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, on July 2 the PSL was officially designated by the New Mexico Secretary of State as a qualified political party in the state of New Mexico. This despite the onerous requirement of signature gathering, made even tougher in time of the pandemic.
Now, when New Mexicans register to vote or update their registration, they can make their party affiliation the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Also, when they go to the polls in November, New Mexicans will be able to vote for a grassroots socialist presidential campaign!
Karina Aracely, New Mexico PSL organizer, stated, “Soon, the Statewide Convention of the PSL-NM will be held. There, delegates of the party will officially nominate our 2020 socialist candidates for the November 3 presidential election: the national candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Gloria La Riva for president and her running mate, Native activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier. Our campaign is raising Leonard Peltier’s freedom struggle and in support of his longtime defense efforts. In reality, he should have never spent one day of his 44 years in prison.
“We are excited about the opportunity to talk with people throughout New Mexico, of an alternative not only for the election, but the urgent need for the system we are fighting for, socialism, which puts the people first, not profits.”
In addition to being the PSL candidates in several states, La Riva and Peltier will be the 2020 candidates for the Peace and Freedom Party of California, and the Liberty Union Party of Vermont.
The U.S. electoral system is rigged to give only the two ruling-class parties a competitive chance to win. Third-party candidates are subject to exclusionary and expanding obstacles in every state. For more than two years, the Democrat and Republican candidates have had non-stop media coverage, while the people only get realistic exposure to third-party candidates at their polling place, due to strict media censorship.
Still, the PSL nationally is running an energetic campaign to put forth our 10-point program, while also marching in the streets against racism and police brutality, holding car caravans to Cancel the Rents and more.

Milan Simonich (SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN) also notes: "The Party for Socialism and Liberation also has received minor-party status. It has a presidential candidate, Gloria La Riva."  Also fighting for ballot access is the Socialist Equality Party and their presidential candidate Joesph Kishore.  At WSWS, Kishore writes:


On Wednesday, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Michigan denied the Socialist Equality Party’s challenge to the state’s 12,000 physical signature ballot access requirement during the coronavirus pandemic.
The judge, Sean F. Cox, a Republican, sided with the Democratic administration of Governor Gretchen Whitmer in ruling that the coronavirus pandemic did not seriously “burden” our constitutional rights or the rights of those Michiganders who want to vote for our campaign.
Cox issued his ruling as the deadly coronavirus pandemic is spiraling out of control. Yesterday, the official global death toll surpassed 550,000, and the number of infections increased to more than 12.3 million.
The United States is the epicenter of the virus, which is now spreading without restraint. Already, COVID-19 has claimed more than 135,000 lives in the United States. More than 61,000 people tested positive yesterday, a new record, and the daily death toll is approaching 1,000.
Hospitals in Texas, Florida and Arizona are overwhelmed, and nurses are again facing critical shortages of personal protective equipment and ventilators. Cases are increasing in most states, including in Michigan, where they are at levels not seen since the end of May.
The surge in cases and deaths is the direct and predictable outcome of the criminal policies of Trump and the entire political establishment, including the Whitmer administration. Even as the pandemic exacts its horrific toll, the White House is demanding that schools reopen in the fall, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of teachers and students, as part of the overall back-to-work campaign.
It is under these conditions that Judge Cox declared his full support for the argument of the state of Michigan that SEP should have been gathering signatures and that it still should be doing so.
Cox’s decision is not a serious legal ruling grounded in jurisprudence or reasoned analysis. It is a political decision aimed at barring socialists from the ballot, with the legal rationalization serving to justify a conclusion determined in advance.
Cox asserts that it is not the coronavirus pandemic or the governor’s stay-at-home orders that have prevented signature gathering, but the candidates’ own lack of “diligence.”
In fact, it is the “diligence” of the SEP that required that it not attempt to gather signatures. If we did make this attempt, we would have been violating our own political principles and our warnings of the dangerous consequence of the reckless policies of the ruling class—warnings that have now been completely confirmed.

Julianna Forlano interviewed Joseph for ACT TV yesterday.



Yesterday, Joseph Tweeted about the Democratic Party's presumed presidential nominee Joe Biden and Joe's athletic supporter Bernie It Lifts And It Separates Sanders:


Sanders' political revolution--ends not with a bang, but a whimper. "The task forces did not recommend... 'Medicare for all,' tuition-free public college for everyone or canceling all student debt." Not surprising, and they are meaningless anyway.
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders Deepen Their Cooperation
Allies of the onetime presidential rivals revealed a long list of policy proposals. Most were widely acceptable to liberals, and some were broader than Mr. Biden’s



But assessing just how much Biden’s task force’s plan would improve the lives of patients depends on details we simply don’t have. The proposal stipulates that premiums will be capped at 8.5% of income (more for a family), which could potentially mean that a slate of relatively robust public option plans would force private plans to improve substantially to compete. Or, more likely, private insurers could take a cue from Medicare Advantage and find ways to cherry-pick healthier patients while off-loading sicker ones onto the public program.
Cost-sharing is also partially unresolved—a public option plan with zero deductibles, for example, may well entail higher copays and coinsurance, perhaps going so far as to foist enrollees into private supplemental plans parallel to “Medigap” coverage for Medicare recipients.
Furthermore, the crucial issue of provider networks goes unmentioned. As networks have narrowed in recent years with insurers trying to save money by covering fewer and fewer providers, many ACA plans have failed to adequately cover certain types of care, like mental health. Traditional Medicare, by contrast, doesn’t have networks and thus affords patients free choice of providers. What kinds of benefits and cost-sharing will be applied to which public option plans will make a world of difference—and will require even more expertise to suss out than the notoriously confusing ACA exchanges already do.
Ultimately, however beefy a public option turns out to be, there are things it can never do. By offering one more insurance product to a list of several others—even if it’s the best of the bunch—the public option does little to alleviate the misery of navigating the administrative quagmire endemic to our healthcare system. It still leaves gaps for patients to fall into, and forces them to beg claims assessors for coverage by phone. And it still casts us as healthcare consumers, shopping for the best-valued access to a foundational human need that shouldn’t be commodified to begin with.

Also at IN THESE TIMES, Hamilton Nolan notes the labor and working rights platform:

Perhaps the most notable part of the platform, however, is an omission. It asks to “ensure that all private-sector workers' right to strike... is vigorously protected.” But for public sector workers, it asks only to “Provide a federal guarantee for public sector employees to bargain for better pay and benefits and the working conditions they deserve.” In other words, despite the fact that the public sector is much more heavily unionized than the private sector, and has been under legal attack from the right for decades, there is no demand that public sector workers be granted the right to strike—the single most potent weapon in any union’s toolbox.
More remarkable is the fact that Lee Saunders, one of America’s most powerful public sector union leaders and an Obama confidante, represents the faction that was not seeking to give his own members the right to strike. “In the public sector, AFSCME has taken the position that… in order to come to a conclusion if there are difficult negotiations, we should have binding arbitration in place of the right to strike,” Saunders told In These Times. “Public sector unions believe binding arbitration is better because we provide valuable public services.”
Saunders acknowledged that the issue of the public sector’s right to strike was discussed in the task force’s negotiations, but his view, unsurprisingly, carried the day. Sara Nelson, a leftist in the labor movement who is often mentioned as a future candidate to lead the AFL-CIO, pushed unsuccessfully for public workers to have the same right to strike as their counterparts in the private sector. “My mind wasn't changed during this process on any issue we brought forward. I fundamentally believe in the right to strike. The strike is a necessary component of collective bargaining,” she told In These Times. “If federal workers had the right to strike, there would never be a government shutdown ever again.”

To dethrone the overtly racist and imperially undependable Donald Trump, the oligarchs ensured the presidential nomination of hapless Joe Biden, who vows to veto Medicare for All, opposes defunding the police, and whistles tunes of war with Russia (but doesn’t remember the words). Biden personifies ruling class determination to double down on endless war, Race to the Bottom austerity, and an ever-expanding national security state, including the local police component -- the same policies that led to the Crisis of Legitimacy of 2020. (The Covid mass deaths and accompanying economic shutdown is the result of privatization and austerity). The oligarchs get what they pay for. Therefore, the Democrats will wipe the clown paint from their faces, fold up their kente cloths, and apologize to the cops for joining in the “dozens” circle (“Your cops so brutal…”), as soon as the movement has been sufficiently exhausted or co-opted.  
If the “Black Lives Matter” movement is to be neutralized, it will be by capture/cooptation by the Democratic Party – just as befell the great mass Black movement of half a century ago. The oligarchs are now vastly more concentrated and powerful than in the previous era, and their Democratic duopoly apparatus has thoroughly infested every nook and cranny of Black civic life. The Democrats are the capitalist enemy within Black America, ultimately answerable to the same forces that pull Republican strings. The main difference is that Democrats, like most of the oligarchy, have seen the advantages of a diversified, multiracial management of Black grassroots unrest and repetitive capitalist crises. Send in the Kente squads.
Half a million or more protesters in the streets, resisting the police, brought people’s politics back to life, but the Black movement will be asphyxiated by the ubiquitous fingers of the Democratic Party if it does not build independent nexuses of people’s power. ‘Defunding the police” may result in some reshuffling of local budget funds to social services, but does not in itself transfer power over those services -- or the police -- to the people. Movement-speak is replete with the word “transformational,” but only people’s power can transform the relationship between the Black masses and the oligarchs’ state. Cutting police budgets does not alter the anti-Black nature of the police mission, and neither does adding Black cops to the blue ranks. Only community control of the police can create the institutional people power to transform, and eventually do away with, policing as we know it. The cops will still be the cops, whatever their numbers and pay scales, unless they are made accountable to the communities they “serve,” who will shape the security force’s mission and manage and evaluate its performance. 
Community control of the police is a project in democracy and Black self-determination, while defunding the police – inevitably, in practice – is an immersion in Democratic Party budgetary dickering that legitimizes the imposition of the police upon the people. It will suck the righteous energy out of the movement, while failing to transform any power relationships of importance. Along the way, key operatives will be “captured” as they form alliances with the “better” Democratic politicians in divvying up the budgetary spoils. 

Jo Jorgensen is the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate.  Earlier this week, her campaign issued the following:

GREENVILLE, S.C.—July 7, 2020. An article in the Guardian, a British newspaper, featuring a picture of Dr. Jo Jorgensen, attempts to smear the Libertarian Party presidential candidate by associating her with a movement known as boogaloo, because of her appearance on a podcast hosted by some members of the movement. The Guardian describes boogaloo by detailing its most radical elements.
The boogaloo movement has no organization and no leadership. Participants within vary widely, from white supremacists, at one extreme, to those who vehemently condemn both racism and white supremacy. Their unifying characteristic is the belief that citizens have the right to rise up against an oppressive government, and in particular, one that denies their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, or their right to self-defense.
This view is enshrined in America’s Declaration of Independence from, coincidentally, Great Britain. It states that whenever a government becomes destructive of human rights, “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”
The Guardian article fails to distinguish between anti-government and anti-authoritarian government sentiment, the latter of which better describes the views of boogaloo members.
As both the Libertarian Party and the Jorgensen campaign have made consistently and abundantly clear, and as the Guardian‘s journalist surely knows, libertarians vehemently oppose the initiation of force, whether by government or civilian forces.
As Dr. Jorgensen explained to the reporter, the Libertarian Party has a membership requirement unlike that of any other U.S. political party. To be eligible to join, each individual must sign a pledge attesting that they oppose the initiation of force for the purpose of achieving social or political goals.
“I reject violence and bigotry, and I advocate non-aggression, peaceful persuasion, and voluntary cooperation,” Jorgensen said. “At the same time, I and my fellow libertarians reject so-called cancel culture, which denies people their right to free speech.”

THE GUARDIAN is a UK publication that is controlled by New Labour -- a right-wing element of the Labour Party.  That's why THE GUARDIAN did not come out against the Iraq War and why they never reported on The Downing Street Memo.  They employ centrists and right-wing American Democrats as columnists and that tells you all you need to know.  


The Green Party kicks off it's presidential nominating convention Saturday, July 11th.  Howie Hawkins is the party's presumed presidential nominee.  Louise Boyle (INDEPENDENT) reports:

Mr Hawkins, 67, a longtime grassroots organiser, has run for office two dozen times. He was the Green Party’s candidate for New York governor in 2010 and 2014, where he received 5 per cent of the vote, one of the highest for an independent progressive party candidate in the state’s history. 
His campaign aims to pull together disillusioned liberals, the Bernie Sanders “refugees”, he says, and beyond.
“Our main target is the 100 million voters who sat out the 2016 election. They are disproportionately working class, people of color, and young. They are the future of independent left politics in the US,” Mr Hawkins writes.
He gives short shrift to both the main parties’ nominees. President Trump is a “loser”, and a “modern Typhoid Mary” who is willing to risk infecting his own supporters at his “super-spreader rallies”.
Joe Biden’s “conservative policies … would fit comfortably into the centre-right parties of Europe”. 
Boyle is reporting on -- but fails to link to -- this column Howie wrote for THE INDEPENDENT.  From the column:

But where is Joe Biden? As the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, he has the national stage. When you think of Biden, what issue is he the champion of? Biden should be mobilising the public behind a federal test, trace, and isolate programme to suppress the virus like most other organised countries are doing – and he should be the driving force behind universal mail-in balloting so everyone can vote in this pandemic. 

Turning to Iraq, a country still shattered by the decisions Joe Biden made as US senator and Vice President.  KURDISTAN 24 reports:

The Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment on Thursday announced that health officials had confirmed more than 2,000 new COVID-19 infections and the death of over 100 patients across the country within the previous 24 hours.
The ministry’s daily statement on the current health crisis noted that it had conducted 11,809 coronavirus tests in a single day, 2,170 of which returned positive.
According to the statement, since the spread of the virus to Iraq in late February, 69,612 people have been infected, 39,502 have recovered, and a total of 2,889 individuals have died from its complications.
Iraq faces multiple issue.  Paul Iddon (ARAB NEWS) notes:

In an act that shocked the Arab world late on Monday, unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed Hisham Al-Hashimi, a leading Iraqi expert on Daesh and other armed groups. As with so many unsolved murders of prominent public personalities in Iraq since 2003, there is no dearth of suspects. The big question is what action Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi can afford to take under the circumstances.
The 47-year-old Al-Hashimi was a well-respected Iraqi academic and political analyst. His expertise on Daesh earned him the position of adviser to the US-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. After the destruction of Daesh’s self-styled caliphate in 2018, he shifted his focus to the workings of the Hashd Al-Shaabi (or Popular Mobilization Forces) units that participated in the anti-Daesh campaign.
Al-Hashimi had expressed fears in recent weeks that Iranian-backed constituents of Hashd had him in their crosshairs. A medical source at the hospital where he was taken after Monday’s shooting said he had suffered “bullet wounds in several body parts.”
 Iraq witnessed a spate of deadly attacks on intellectuals, academics and moderate politicians at the height of the insurgency. More than 500 people have been killed since protests erupted in Oct. 2019, demanding an end to corruption and Iran’s overarching influence. But analysts believe that with Al-Hashimi’s killing, a loud warning shot has been fired across Al-Kadhimi’s bow.
“The assassination is intended to signal militia displeasure with Al-Kadhimi and his inner circle,” said Michael Knights, a noted Iraq analyst and Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“They are saying that there is a cost to the Al-Kadhimi team for arresting militia members and disrupting militia money-making enterprises,” he added.

Remember when ISIS took Mosul?  Remember years later when Iraq claimed to have finally liberated Mosul?  There's no real progress there.  AFP reports:

Iraq gathered $30 billion in pledges from international donors in Kuwait in 2018 to rebuild, but virtually none of the funds have been disbursed.

The lack of progress has been widely blamed on Iraq's infamous bureaucracy, corruption that has siphoned off reconstruction funds and polarised city politics.

Amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and plummeting oil prices, Iraq's government is struggling to rake in enough monthly revenues to break even – pushing rebuilding even lower on its priorities list.

"Politicians keep telling us we need to go home," Hamed said, slamming the government's insistence on closing down the camps where more than one million Iraqis, rendered homeless by the fighting, are still seeking shelter.

"But how? Our homes are destroyed and there isn't a single public service that works."

According to a Norwegian Refugee Council survey in Mosul, over 270,000 people remain unable to return home and of those living there, 64 percent said they would be unable to pay rent in the next three months.

The following sites updated:







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