Thursday’s news links – Aug. 5, 2021

If a Vaccine Resistant Covid Strain Develops, Will Dr. Fauci Pay Any Price? Common Dreams

The idea that millions of people will needlessly die because our political leaders did not want to jeopardize the profits of the pharmaceutical industry is too horrible to be aired in places like the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio.

Mexico Files Historic Lawsuit Against US Gun Companies Fueling Cartel Carnage Common Dreams

The first-of-its-kind suit alleges U.S. weapons firms “design, market, distribute, and sell guns in ways they know routinely arm the drug cartels in Mexico.”

Watch a Never-Before-Aired James Baldwin Interview From 1979 Esquire

Buried by ABC at the time, the segment reveals a unique glimpse into Baldwin’s private life—as well as his resounding criticism about white fragility, as blisteringly relevant today as it was in 1979.

Park Slope Shop Closes After Staff Walkout Over BLM Sign Removal Patch

Athletes Break Down Under Extreme Heat at the Olympics Gizmodo

New York City’s Vaccine Passport Plan Renews Online Privacy Debate NYTimes

Note: How to prevent COVID app privacy abuses This should be obvious, but the best way to avoid “privacy creep” and privacy abuses — whether intentional or accidental — in COVID apps is to NOT USE THOSE APPS AT ALL. If you need to prove vaccination, show your paper record. Sometimes hi-tech is the wrong approach.
Indigenous Peoples

Native Attorney Tara Houska ‘People were shot in their faces, a young woman’s head was split open.’ Brutal arrests at Enbridge’s Line 3 Minnesota

Cuba

Insight into protests in Cuba Richard Medhurst speaks with Marlen Redondo, the Chargée d’Affaires of the Republic of Cuba’s Embassy and Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Vienna

Venezuela

Exclusive: Juan Guaidó paid UK legal fees with looted Venezuelan money The Canary

Palestine

Palestinians Reject Israeli Court’s Deal That Would Put Them at “Mercy of Settlers” in Sheikh Jarrah Democracy Now

China

China vows to hit back at US$750 million US arms sale to Taiwan South China Morning Post

The New Cold War on China John Bellamy Foster

On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the George W. Bush administration, went so far as to acknowledge that “the [Donald] Trump administration basically declared a cold war on China.” Nevertheless, no New Cold War, Christensen optimistically indicated, would actually materialize, since Washington under Joe Biden would presumably back away from Trump’s extreme policies toward China given its “vital position in the global value chain.” …

[D]ays before Christensen’s Foreign Affairs article went to print declaring that there would be no New Cold War, the Biden administration made it clear that it not only intended to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it, pushing it to greater heights. This was evident in the first high-level bilateral talks between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China following the election of Biden as U.S. president, held on March 18, 2021, in the Captain Cook Hotel in downtown Anchorage, with U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan sitting across from China’s director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi. …

The chief mechanism for defeating China was spelled out in 2017 by Harvard foreign policy analyst Graham Allison, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, in his book Destined for War: Can America Escape the Thucydides Trap?, a work highly praised by Biden, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and former CIA director and former commander of the U.S. Central Command David Petraeus.

40 Years of Capitalist Loan Conditions Have Made Covid Worse Tribune

The Global South’s pandemic response has been hamstrung by mountains of global debt – but also by the neoliberalism it had to accept to get loans in the first place.

See yesterday’s news links here

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