Monday’s news links – Aug. 17, 2020

Coronavirus

“Beds Not Bodybags”: Activists Warn Hospital Closures Make NYC Vulnerable To Another COVID Wave Gothamist

‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland Guardian

Forty percent of U.S. Covid-19 tests come back too late to be clinically meaningful, data show CNBC

“All These Rich People Can’t Stop Themselves”: The Luxe Quarantine Lives of Silicon Valley’s Elite Vanity Fair

Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Profiteers Rolling Stone

The U.S. is far behind other rich countries in coronavirus response Axios

Climate crisis: Two million Californians went dark Countercurrents

EXCLUSIVE: Police bodycam footage shows moment-by-moment arrest of George Floyd for the first time – from terror on his face when officer points gun at his head, sobbing before he’s shoved into squad car and begging to breathe as his life drains away Daily Mail

Black People Arming to Confront Racist Violence Fighting Words

A Brief History Of Political Interference In The U.S. Postal Service NPR

Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, potentially Earth’s highest temperature since at least 1931 MSN

Capitalist crisis

A flood of job losses looms as airline industry struggles in pandemic CNBC

The $24 an Hour Minimum Wage CEPR

This means that if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth it would be over $24 an hour today. Furthermore, if we go out four years to 2024, and we see normal inflation and productivity growth, a productivity adjusted minimum wage in that year would be almost $27 an hour, nearly twice the $15 an hour target.

Germany’s biggest union calls for 4-day week to save jobs DW

Cory Doctorow: ‘Self-Driving Cars are Bullshit’

Venezuela

President Trump Says Stolen Iranian Fuel Sent to Houston Dave DeCamp

Palestine

As UAE celebrates “peace,” Israel escalates bombing, collective punishment of two million Palestinians besieged in Gaza Electronic Intifada

China

US Navy carrier conducts exercises in South China Sea amid rising tensions ABC Australia

Hong Kong activist, writer ‘Kong Tsung-gan’ confirms that’s only a pen name; website says he’s really Brian Kern, an American SCMP

[A] controversy was sparked recently by an American alternative news website that accused Kern of adopting a fictitious identity as an ethnic Chinese grass roots activist as a “deceptive ploy” to “disseminate anti-China propaganda”.

Chinese President Xi Jinping says Marxist political economy is the bedrock for nation’s growth SCMP

The ‘dominant position of public ownership cannot be shaken’, general secretary of Chinese Communist Party says

Xi’s article on Marxist political economy in contemporary China to be published Monthly Review

Connecting the Dots: Iran, China, and the Challenge to U.S. Hegemony Qiao Collective

Belarus

Belarus: Who benefits from the protests?

Belarus opposition copies Ukrainian ‘reform package’ to appeal to Western capital

August 12-22, 1945: Washington Starts the Korean and Vietnam Wars H. Bruce Franklin, Counterpunch

Bolivia: Esther Morales, Evo’s Older Sister, Passes Away teleSUR

From the Archive | Part two: Marxism and African liberation New Frame

In this second of a two-part series, Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney argues that the theory of scientific socialism can and should be used in the African context.

---

Send suggestions and comments to [email protected]