Investigative journalist Sharon Lerner has an important article at The Intercept explaining how U.S. pharmaceutical companies, enabled by the recent Corona Relief Bill approved by Congress, are planning to make a killing (pun intended) during the covid19 pandemic. It is entitled, “Big Pharma Prepares to Profit From the Coronavirus.”
Warning: prepare to be disturbed, very disturbed.
Here is an excerpt:
“’Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,’ said Gerald Posner, author of ‘Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.’ The world needs pharmaceutical products, of course. For the new coronavirus outbreak, in particular, we need treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them.
“’They’re all in that race,’ said Posner, who described the potential payoffs for winning the race as huge. The global crisis ‘will potentially be a blockbuster for the industry in terms of sales and profits,’ he said, adding that ‘the worse the pandemic gets, the higher their eventual profit.’
“The ability to make money off of pharmaceuticals is already uniquely large in the U.S., which lacks the basic price controls other countries have, giving drug companies more freedom over setting prices for their products than anywhere else in the world. During the current crisis, pharmaceutical makers may have even more leeway than usual because of language industry lobbyists inserted into an $8.3 billion coronavirus spending package, passed last week, to maximize their profits from the pandemic.
“Initially, some lawmakers had tried to ensure that the federal government would limit how much pharmaceutical companies could reap from vaccines and treatments for the new coronavirus that they developed with the use of public funding. In February, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and other House members wrote to Trump pleading that he ‘ensure that any vaccine or treatment developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars be accessible, available and affordable,’ a goal they said couldn’t be met ‘if pharmaceutical corporations are given authority to set prices and determine distribution, putting profit-making interests ahead of health priorities.’
“When the coronavirus funding was being negotiated, Schakowsky tried again, writing to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 2 that it would be ‘unacceptable if the rights to produce and market that vaccine were subsequently handed over to a pharmaceutical manufacturer through an exclusive license with no conditions on pricing or access, allowing the company to charge whatever it would like and essentially selling the vaccine back to the public who paid for its development.’
“But many Republicans opposed adding language to the bill that would restrict the industry’s ability to profit . . .
“The truth is that profiting off public investment is also business as usual for the pharmaceutical industry. Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has put some $900 billion into research that drug companies then used to patent brand-name medications, according to Posner’s calculations. Every single drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 2010 and 2016 involved science funded with tax dollars through the NIH, according to the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs. Taxpayers spent more than $100 billion on that research.”
When the first U.S. case of the novel coronavirus was confirmed, President Trump assured the American people that the situation was “totally under control.” Cabinet officials, the vice president and the president repeated that refrain throughout February. By the end of that month, as global financial markets and the American public started to quiver, Trump held firm: “You may ask about the coronavirus, which is very well under control in our country.”
With the clarity of hindsight, it is obvious the situation was very much not under control. In reality, a lack of testing gave a false picture of how many people across the country were infected.
Through government documents, testimony, news reports and interviews, The Fact Checker video team has reconstructed events that left the government blind to the virus’s spread, and examined how those errors opened the door for 11 confirmed cases to balloon to more than 100,000 in less than six weeks.
The Facts
The novel coronavirus was first detected in early December in Wuhan, China. Chinese officials reported the pneumonia-like disease to the World Health Organization (WHO) at the end of December, but neglected to mention growing evidence that the virus could spread by human-to-human transmission through airborne droplets.
Still, China’s previous failures to be forthcoming about public health crises meant that public health officials elsewhere already were wary of its government’s official statements. As reports of the mysterious virus increased, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned Americans against traveling to China and activated an emergency management tool used to direct operations, deliver resources and share information.
Despite the alarm bells and increased intelligence briefings, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention for weeks. . .
The Bottom Line
The president spent nearly two months issuing confusing and contradictory signals — leaving the bureaucratic machine of the U.S. government to chart the course for the coronavirus response.
The CDC designed its own test. The FDA picked a conservative testing strategy, allowing labs to use only the CDC test. When those tests failed, neither a new strategy nor a new test was available for more than two weeks. Azar failed to push the agencies to change direction, and the president didn’t intervene.
Even then, widespread testing was not immediately available. It’s not just the number of tests that are the problem — it’s getting the materials to do the tests and the personal protective medical equipment for providers to give those tests. That means we may never have a true count of how many Americans contracted the virus.
The missteps that went unmanaged were ignored by leaders at the highest level of government and allowed cases to go undetected, contributing to the spike in the virus’s spread.
The Washington Post has also been keeping track of Pres. Trump’s many false and misleading claims about the corona virus and the (in)effectiveness of his response.
You can follow the litany of dangerous presidential misinformation here.
Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 2008 financial crisis. (See his full C.V. at the American Economic Liberties Project).
Mr. Stoller was recently interviewed by Democracy Nowwhere he critiqued the Congressional Pandemic Relief Bill. He describes not only the American pandemic response under Trump, but the formulation of this “relief” bill a “total system failure.”
Here are a few excerpts from that interview. You can watch or read the entire interview here.
“Well, I mean, it’s not really a $2 trillion bill. It’s more like a $6 trillion to $10 trillion bill. So, one of the reasons you can tell that the bill is packed with corporate goodies is that, you know, Congress is debating and trying to figure out, oh, you know, is it $2 trillion, a bunch of money for hospitals or money for cities, and meanwhile, a couple days ago, Larry Kudlow is on a press conference and says, “Actually, this is a $6 trillion bill.” And it’s like, how does a bill go from $2 trillion to $6 trillion without anyone really noticing? And the answer is, there’s a bunch of stuff in there — and, you know, there are people on Wall Street chattering about how it’s actually going to be $10 trillion, because, you know, what’s another four? And that’s how you know that the bill is just packed with stuff for Wall Street, for large monopolists.
“And it’s done through a variety of opaque slush funds — the Federal Reserve, the FDIC guarantees a bank debt. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that, you know, some of us who worked in the financial crisis noticed, paid attention to, said, “Oh, that’s where they’re stealing all the money.” And so there’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s going to get to Boeing and airlines, that we know about, has been reported. There’s also a bunch of stuff that’s going to get to the hedge fund guys that are bunkering down in their underground wine caves or whatever. And meanwhile, the stuff that we need, for normal people — the ventilators, the unemployment — you know, that’s going to dribble out. Small business is going to dribble out.
“And so, what you’re going to see is the $4 trillion to $6 trillion to $8 trillion of basically no-cost or low-cost guaranteed credit is going to be used by Citibank, JPMorgan, and then any big monopolist or large company that can get access to it, to buy up their competitors and buy up small business, who are obviously now in a really distressed state because they don’t have any revenue. So that’s what’s going to happen.
“And all of this stuff that’s happening, the handover of power to Wall Street, is happening under the really cynical guise of helping people in a pandemic. A lot of this money is going to go to — some of the money is going to go to hospitals. Some of the money is going to go to help people in the pandemic. So there’s some good stuff here. That, of course, is going to dribble out on the rickety infrastructure of the Small Business Administration and unemployment insurance. Our government has been hollowed out, so this stuff isn’t going to get out quickly.
“If you have — basically, if you have an account at a large bank, if you’re a wealthy investor like Goldman Sachs, there’s a whole set of programs that you can get access to at the Federal Reserve — at least this was the case in 2008, and the Fed says they’re setting up similar structures — where you can borrow from the Fed, and you can gamble with it. And then, if you lose — right? — in your gambling, then the Fed will — you don’t have to pay the loan back to the Fed. So, that’s one of the — you know, and this is one of the programs they say, “Oh, we need to provide liquidity in the markets,” or various other really super boring things that sound like — you kind of go to sleep when you’re like, “Oh, all these alphabet soup programs and all this kind of jargon.” But that’s really what it is. It’s just, you know, “heads, I win; tails, you lose.” And that’s a lot of what these programs are.
“I mean, the Fed has already hired BlackRock, which is one of the world’s largest asset managers, to manage this multitrillion-dollar bailout, and they’ve said that BlackRock is going to be allowed to participate in the bailout. So they’re running the bailout, and they’re participating in the bailout. They’re already stealing, before the vote, the bill has even passed the House.”
from yesterday explaining the hidden — and horrendous — details in the pending Congressional “relief” bill slithering its way through Congress.
This bill is a good example of the malicious ways in which corporate capitalists exploit moments of national crisis. Naomi Klein’s important book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is now essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the economic times in which we live.
Dayen details some of the ways that Disaster Capitalists, corporate vultures haunting the halls of power, eager to pick over the bones of America’s corona victims, are exploiting the current pandemic to further enrich themselves, just as they did in 2018.
Human nature never changes. As in ancient Greece, the haves are doing what they can for themselves, while the have-nots are suffering as they always do.
“This is a robbery in progress. And it’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility that made these companies so fragile that a few weeks of disruption would destroy them. The short-termism and lack of capital reserves funneled record profits into a bathtub of cash for investors. That’s who’s being made whole, financiers and the small slice of the public that owns more than a trivial amount of stocks. In fact they’ve already been made whole; yesterday Wall Street got the word that they’d be saved and stocks and bonds went wild. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is running these bailout programs for the Fed, and could explicitly profit if the Fed buys its funds, which it probably will.
“This is a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship to the majority of America. The people get a $1,200 means-tested payment and a little wage insurance for four months. Corporations get a transformative amount of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition…
“This bill is an outrageous betrayal, a testament to how power works and saves itself. And Congress is about to put itself on the hook for it. Schumer has the Senate under his thumb, and he praised this bill at 2am this morning, so that’s a done deal. Any House member could deny unanimous consent and stop this, but that would require getting to Washington, forcing everyone else back to Washington in the middle of a pandemic, and delay what is needed (if temporary) relief for everyday people. I doubt anyone will do it. Pelosi purposefully put this in place before turning to remote voting to make such an action toxic…”
That’s the opening sentence to Kystal Ball’s (yes, that’s her real name) description of the “relief bill” crafted by Congress.
Ms. Ball is a co-anchor of “The Rising” on Hill TV. I heartily recommend watching.
Today she provided a very good, and very scathing, break-down of the big-money corruption that lies at the heart of the most recent Senate bail-out bill.
Her analysis goes to the point. Watch her below by clicking on Krystal’s nose:
American democracy died a long time ago, but just in case some folks hadn’t noticed, the political antics of 2020 have proven that fact, once and for all.
We began with the Republican-controlled Senate acquitting our guilty-as-sin-president on all counts of his multiple impeachment indictments.
The Senate’s dismissal of those charges was only the climax to the egregious failure of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to bring any additional – and far more significant — impeachment charges over Trump’s numerous, prior violations of the Constitution. (See the article by Chris Hedges outlining at least 12 Constitutional breaches by Trump and others by presidents of both partiesdemonstrating that “the rule of law” is now an empty phrase in this country).
Now the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is reminding us that corruption is a bipartisan affair in Washington D. C. as the party mandarins brush off its 2016 playbook and rig another series of primaries; this time against Bernie Sanders, in favor of Joe Biden.
How is it happening?
Joe Biden
First, the Democratic party is openly promoting a loser candidate who pledges to protect the status quo.
Biden is clearly the Democratic establishment preference even though he will very predictably LOSE to Donald Trump in the general election, just as Hillary Clinton — the previous establishment darling — lost to Trump in 2016.
The party establishment obviously wants another neo-liberal centrist like Clinton who will protect the current state of affairs in D.C., despite abundant evidence that a majority of the American public want change.
For example:
Most Americans want Medicare-for-All (which numerous studies have shown to be cheaper than our current system. This includes one study financed by the infamous, libertarian Koch brothers!).
64% of Americans believe that our massive income inequality gap is a problem that needs to be rectified. (Ignore NPR’s deliberately misleading headline for this story.)
Only one candidate has a lifetime track record of discussing all of these social problems while offering specific solutions that would get to the root of such serious challenges. That man is Bernie Sanders, not Joe Biden. (No, this is not a campaign advertisement. I’m simply pointing out a few realities here.)
Check out this compilation of 10 polls collected by Real Clear Politics –YES, count ‘em, TEN! – which ALL show that Bernie Sanders beats Donald Trump in the general election.
Second, the mainstream, corporate media does not want change any more than the Democratic party does. (They are all making too much money the way things are). So mainstream, corporate “news” coverage provides free advertisement and propaganda promoting Joe Biden.
The media continually pushes the narrative about Sanders’ unelectability, despite the many polls showing otherwise.
You will never hear about those polls showing Sanders’ popularity from our corporate news media. In fact, all you will hear from corporate/cable news is continuous applause for lie’n Biden (who promises not to upset the apple cart and to maintain the status quo), coupled with non-stop derision of Bernie Sanders. — For an important presentation of Biden’s many lies on the campaign trail, watch this. —
But the Democratic party does not care about the will of the people any more than does the Republican party.
Both parties have their noses buried far too deeply into the dark-money orifices created by big-money donors, lobbyists, CEOs, special interests, private insurance & pharmaceutical companies, the fossil fuel industries, and other major corporations.
They are following the lead of wealthy donors like Former Goldman Sachs CEO and lifelong Democrat Lloyd Blankfein who has said that if Sanders were the Democratic nominee, he would vote for Trump.
Even the New York Times finally admitted to the biased coverage given to these two men by major new outlets (print, radio and TV), including themselves. Watch this clip from Kyle Kulinsky talking about the recent story. You can also read it online, but you need to be a subscriber.)
Have you noticed how the media Talking-Heads weep, wail and gnash their teeth whenever Sanders wins a primary, but turn around a rejoice in
MSNBC host Chris Matthews warns of executions in Central Park after Sanders wins
jubilation when Biden wins? It’s common behavior because they, too, are very rich people who network and socialize with people like Lloyd Blankfein.
Third, not only did the Democratic party establishment admit to rigging the 2016 primaries, they have argued in court that it is their Constitutional right to rig the presidential primaries in favor of their preferred candidate(s).
Yep, you can’t make this stuff up, folks.
In the face of at least one lawsuit brought after the 2016 primaries, DNC lawyers successfully arguedthat not only do they have the right to rig primaries, it is an exercise of their Constitutional right to freedom of speech.
So, let’s be clear. There is now a court precedent affirming that rigging presidential primaries is a Constitutional right for our political parties. In fact, rigging primaries is an exercise of the party’s right to “freedom of speech.”
Donna Brazile, a major player on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign,
Donna Brazile, Political strategist
wrote a book in which she confessed to the many ways in which the Clinton campaign had controlled the DNC and directed its execution of the 2016 primary process. (Also look here, here, here, and there are many more reports available).
One of the reasons that the Democratic establishment hates Julian Assange (who is a journalistic hero being persecuted by the Western media-surveillance-military-industrial complex) and Wikileaks as much as the Republicans do is because Wikileaks published the countless DNC memos written by Democratic leaders admitting to the various ways they had rigged the primaries for Hillary Clinton.
There is no reason to think that the DNC’s prejudicial planning has changed in 2020. After all, why should they abandon their newly defined Constitutional right to cheat the voters?
Tom Perez
Journalist Kevin Gosztola has tracked down the identities and policy preferences of many recent super-delegates appointed by DNC chairman Tom Perez, ALL of whom are strongly pro-Biden and anti-Sanders. So, if the primaries happen (miraculously) to lead to a contested convention, Sanders still doesn’t stand a chance.
Fourth, the American electoral landscape has changed radically in the last several years, in very prejudicial ways. (And I cannot discover any evidence of the Democratic party working to reverse this horrible trend).
have been closed in 13 (primarily southern) states since the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Most if not all of those vanished polling places were in districts with a majority of black and Hispanic voters.
Though Sanders has not been doing well with older voters in the black (or white) community, he has done extremely well with both Hispanic and young African-Americans. The same groups whose voting stations have been extensively eradicated.
The Democratic party has rigged both the primary and the convention system on behalf of Joe Biden because they are more interested in protecting their money and power than they are in listening to the people.
The United States is not a democracy. It hasn’t been for a long time.
We are an oligarchy (ruled by the powerful few).
We are also a plutocracy (ruled by the richest 1%).
Our ruling class — in both parties; it’s a bipartisan affair — merely directs periodic exercises in national, kabuki theater for a naïve, ill-informed, easily manipulated public.
They allow the illusion of influence.
They direct us as we play out our powerless part in the scripted, manipulated stage production called “American democracy.”
Here is an excerpt from today’s editorial by Gideon Levy at the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. It is entitled, “The Israeli Army Doesn’t Have Snipers
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
on the Gaza Border. It Has Hunters.”
He is addressing the ongoing, daily slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children at the Gaza prison fence.
To date, 8,000 young men have been permanently disabled. The number of deaths is in the hundreds (approximately, 500 I believe) and the serious injuries in the tens of thousands.
And still, the United States and the rest of the world do nothing:
“They’re the best of our boys. One is a “musician from a good high school,” another a “boy scout” who majored in theater.” They’re the snipers who have shot thousands of unarmed protesters along the Gaza border fence.
“In the Gaza Strip there are 8,000 permanently disabled young men as a result of the snipers’ actions. Some are leg amputees, and the shooters are very proud of that. None of the snipers interviewed for Hilo Glazer’s frightening story in Haaretz (March 6) has any regrets. If they are feeling at all apologetic it’s because they didn’t spill more blood. One was mocked in his battalion with “here comes the killer.” They all act like murderers. If their actions don’t show it – more than 200 dead as a result of them – then their statements prove that these young men have lost their moral compass. They are lost. They will go on to study, to have careers and to raise families – and will never recover from their blindness. They disabled their victims physically, but their own disabilities are more severe. Their souls were completely twisted. They will never again be moral individuals. They are a danger to society. They lost their humanity, if they ever had it, on the shooting berms facing the Gaza Strip. They are the sons of our friends and the friends of our sons, the young people from the apartment across the hall. Look how they talk.
“…but it’s hard not to be shocked at the depths to which we have sunk. They recalled the number of knees they shot. ‘I brought in seven-eight knees in one
Israeli soldiers patrol the Gaza fence looking for people to shoot
day. Within a few hours, I almost broke his record.’ ‘He got around 28 knees.’ They shot at unarmed young men and women who were trying in vain to struggle for their freedom, an issue that couldn’t be more just. ‘The regular scenario is supposed to be that you hit, break a bone – in the best case, break the kneecap – within a minute an ambulance comes to evacuate him, and after a week he gets a disability pension.’…
“They chose their victims by their charisma, with a sniper’s precision. Their ‘leadership aura’ has destined young men to a life of disability in the cage that is Gaza. But that was not enough. They become bloodthirsty as only young incited people can be. They wanted more blood, not just blood, a child’s blood. Not just a child’s blood, but in front of his family.
“‘Let me just once take down a kid of 16, even 14, but not with a bullet in the leg – let me blow his head open in front of his whole family and his whole village. Let him spurt blood. And then maybe for a month I won’t have to take off another 20 knees.’
“They wanted blood from a boy’s head only to spare themselves the need to take down 20 more knees. They identified their victims’ age by their shirts: Dress shirts for the older ones, T-shirts for the youngest.
“None was court-martialed. Correction: One got seven days in military jail for shooting a sheep. Soldiers in the world’s most moral army don’t shoot sheep. With 200 dead and 8,000 wounded, they think ‘the restraints on us are shameful.’ That is their shame. They are our shame. They, and their commanders. They and the army that orders them to shoot at protesters as if they were ‘ducks who chose to cross the line.’
“People who shoot ducks aren’t snipers. They’re hunters.”
It is always disappointing when a person you’ve long admired for their counter-cultural, Christian thinking reveals the decay of a conventional adherence to the status quo.
Thus my growing disappointment in Ron Sider’s blog. A blog, I suspect, that is read by a good many evangelical Christians.
I was a young man when I got my hands on Dr. Sider’s classic book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I have deeply admired him and followed his work ever since. He was kind enough to write a promotional paragraph for my last book, I Pledge Allegiance: I Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st-Century America.
Unfortunately, his most recent blog post, entitled “Why Are the Russians Promoting Bernie Sanders,” continues the surprising (at least, to me) revelation that Dr. Sider’s ability at cultural criticism has eroded, his posts merely repeating the predictable canards of our corporate news outlets and the Democratic establishment.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
I won’t repeat my deep skepticism of the world-weary “Russian hacking/collusion” conspiracy started by Hillary Clinton as a malicious fig- leaf used to distract from her terrible presidential campaign.
I will only point my readers to the numerous — and consistently vindicated — reports (both in print and online) from real investigative journalists like Glenn Greenwald (here, here at The Intercept), Matt Taibbi (here, here at the Rolling Stone), Max Blumenthal (here, here, and Aaron Mate (here, here, here, here, and here both at the Greyzone Project and The Nation magazine).
Each of these men exposed the Russia-gate (I hate that term) narrative as a complete lie, perpetuated by the Dems as a useful tool to attack Donald Trump.
The new “intelligence reports” of ongoing election interference, on behalf of both Trump and Sanders, is even more dubious. Notice that we are never given any evidence to support the charges.
We are just supposed to take the intelligence community’s word for it. Excuse me, but does anyone remember when Iraq’s WMDs were a “slam dunk” according to our CIA director?
Or, more recently, remember the Congressional intelligence briefing (regarding the assassination of Iranian general, Soleimani) where Congress-people left the meeting complaining about the complete lack of evidence presented to them. One Congressman called it “a farce” another “a disaster.”
We discover much wiser counsel from Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who urges all citizens to “condemn” the malicious, anti-democratic “election interference by US intelligence agencies“! Please read what she says as a sitting member on the House Armed Services Committee.
In her article, Gabbard vehemently — and quite rightly — condemns such in-house intelligence tactics as the new McCarthyism. And she is absolutely right.
Not only am I deeply chagrined to see Sider uncritically repeating the establishment mantra about Russia, but he is also mimicking the DNC talking points against Bernie Sanders’ unelectability.
I won’t indulge in long counter-arguments here. I will only say, “Phewey on all that malarkey!”
Instead, I will give you a few short informative video clips to watch below.
Check out:
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, debunks the 6 common criticisms made against Sanders with data and evidence, not Democratic establishment talking points. Spoiler alert: numerous polls predict Sanders would beat Trump in a general election.
Jeremy Scahill, at The Intercept, talks about Sanders’ life-long opposition to America’s vicious wars of imperialism here, and how red-baiting is a long-standing tactic for fear-mongering and the deflection of public attention away from the virtues of an anti-establishment candidate like Sen. Sanders.
Finally, watch this ad from the organization Jews for Bernie explaining why they support Sen. Sanders, as do I.
So, I will probably continue to read Dr. Sider’s blog, but I stopped anticipating helpful political insights.
Those of you who follow Israeli politics know that they recently held their third national election in less than a year. And once again Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the numerous legal indictments against him, is again in the top position to form the new government.
Despite its frequent claims to being the only democracy in the Middle East,
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
Israeli-Palestinians still confront an all pervasive Zionist system of Jim Crow laws that suppress Palestinian involvement in government.
Twenty-first century Israel is the Middle Eastern equivalent of Louisiana, Alabama,Georgia, and Mississippi in the early nineteen-hundreds. Palestinians are Israel’s “Negroes.”
Israeli Zionism is the ideological equivalent of the white supremacy, baptized with Christian lingo and accouterments, so idolized by the southern Klansmen who burned crosses to terrorize anyone who forgot “their place.”
Gideon Levy is an opinion writer for the Israeli, daily newspaper, Haaretz. His is a rare voice speaking the truth about anti-Palestinian racism in his homeland. Levy’s recent analysis of the Israeli elections is entitled, “In Israel, Zionism is a Religion, And It’s Mandatory.” (Note: the joint list is an alliance of the majority-Palestinian parties in Israel.)
Here is an excerpt:
“Voting for a party that doesn’t have the Zionist banner flying over it is a painful, almost impossible step. That’s the result of 100 years of indoctrination that is practically unmatched. With the exception of North Korea, no other country has such a ruling ideology that is not to be doubted or deviated from. Aside from Iran, no other country has a mandatory religion. In Israel, Zionism is a religion, and it is mandatory.
“A Jew who votes for the Joint List is still considered a traitor, or at least a person who has some kind of screw loose. In our childhood, this is how we viewed activists from Rakah and Matzpen, and we shunned them like lepers. The Rakah office on Maza Street in Tel Aviv was like a mysterious, menacing headquarters of an enemy army. You didn’t want to be seen anywhere near it. I remember the first time I went there: I was terrified.
“These were the adolescent growing pains of a young country. But when a strong, thriving country disqualifies a legal ideology and makes it illegitimate, something has gone wrong with its democracy.
“Zionism is a worldview like any other. One can see its attractive and unattractive sides. It is not a religion in which doubters are denounced as heretics – yet it is forbidden to reject Zionism. Why? Because Zionism is not sure of itself. It knows that it brought a catastrophe upon another people and it knows that the fire of evil and injustice is burning beneath the carpet upon which it treads. If Zionism were certain of its righteousness, it would put itself to the test like any other worldview and it would be permissible to doubt it. Israel in 2020 is not yet ready for that. A true left will only arise here when we wean ourselves of the addiction to Zionism and free ourselves from its chains.”
pharmaceutical companies, enabled by the recent Corona Relief Bill approved by Congress, are planning to make a killing (pun intended) during the covid19 pandemic. It is entitled, “Big Pharma Prepares to Profit From the Coronavirus.”
Below is an excerpt from today’s Washington Post article entitled, “11 to 100,000: What Went Wrong with Corona Virus Testing in the U.S.”
Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book 
live.
problem that needs to be rectified. (Ignore NPR’s deliberately misleading headline for this story.)
is read by a good many evangelical Christians.
