the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

The president-elect has tapped a former DuPont consultant to join his Environmental Protection Agency transition board   by Erin Brockovich   For years, I’ve been trying to impart a simple concept that Superman is not coming. Dare I say, I had hopes that this new administration would usher in the dawning of a new day. As picks for President-elect Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team were announced, I felt concerned and disheartened about a chemical industry insider being on the list. Are you kidding me?    Michael McCabe, a former employee of Biden and a former deputy Environmental Protection Agency administrator, later jumped ship to work as a consultant on communication strategy for DuPont during a time when the chemical company was looking to fight regulations of their star chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) also known as C8. The toxic manmade chemical is used in everything from waterproof clothes, stain-resistant textiles and food...

του system failure   Είναι ξεκάθαρο, πλέον, ότι η κυβέρνηση Μητσοτάκη έχει χάσει τον έλεγχο στο μέτωπο της καταπολέμησης της πανδημίας. Και το χειρότερο είναι ότι ο έλεγχος έχει χαθεί όχι τόσο λόγω ανικανότητας, αλλά περισσότερο λόγω αναλγησίας και ιδεολογικού φανατισμού που χαρακτηρίζει τα περισσότερα μέλη της. Είχαμε ήδη επισημάνει από τον Μάρτιο ότι οι κυβερνώντες παίζουν κρυφτούλι και δείχνουν απρόθυμοι να κάνουν τις απαραίτητες προσλήψεις για να ενισχύσουν τα δημόσια νοσοκομεία. Αλλά και τα γνωστά "παπαγαλάκια", εν μέσω τέτοιας υγειονομικής κρίσης, δεν σταματούν ούτε στιγμή να λοιδορούν με άφθονη προπαγάνδα το Εθνικό Σύστημα Υγείας.   Όπως είχαμε επίσης επισημάνει, είναι φανερό ότι η κυβέρνηση Μητσοτάκη έχει ρίξει όλο το βάρος στα αυστηρά μέτρα περιορισμού, ώστε να μην αναγκαστεί να κάνει το αυτονόητο: να ενισχύσει αποφασιστικά τα δημόσια νοσοκομεία με ιατρικό προσωπικό και εξοπλισμό.    Την ίδια στιγμή, η μιντιακή χούντα, που στηρίζει με νύχια και με δόν...

Sweden’s longtime refusal to impose a general lockdown has seen it portrayed as an alternative “model” for coping with the pandemic. Yet death rates in its care homes have been appalling — and as a scandal that broke last month highlighted, much of the blame lies with the breakup and privatization of the country’s once-mighty public services.   by Anton Ösgård   Part 4 - Mass Privatizations   Most people working in the Swedish health care sector are underpaid and overworked, especially those employed in the elderly care home sector. The labor market in Sweden has been progressively deregulated, and precarious contracts are becoming the norm in the already disadvantaged care sector. Jobs there have increasingly become reserved for the most exploited people in Swedish society — in many cases, immigrants living paycheck to paycheck. They are forced to accept contracts that do not meet their household needs, compelling many of these workers to take on multiple jobs, often in ...

The Ecuadorian diplomat who gave Julian Assange political asylum reports from the extradition hearing against the WikiLeaks journalist, and explains why it is “the most important case against the freedom of expression in an entire generation.”   by Fidel Narváez, (translated by Ben Norton)   Part 9 - Assange faces a high risk of suicide in the U.S.   The conditions surrounding the physical and emotional health of Julian Assange were discussed in great detail in the court. This was the only area in which the prosecution presented its mere two witnesses. It is important to remember that, soon after Assange was detained in Belmarsh prison, United Nations specialists specialists examined him and determined that he was suffering from several effects of psychological torture, a result of nearly a decade of persecution, made even worse by his last year of confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, when the government of President Lenín Moreno subjected him to isolation and cruel har...

When Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission announced it was investigating Labour’s treatment of its Jewish members, many of Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents claimed this as proof of his supposed antisemitism. But the inquiry is itself a political weapon — and as the Commission publishes its much-hyped, long-delayed report today, the attacks against the Left are only intensifying.   by Daniel Finn   Part 5 - A Dodgy Dossier Fortunately, we have the opportunity to scrutinize the JLM’s submission to the EHRC, which was leaked on the eve of the 2019 general election (the CAA submission has yet to reach public view). Close examination of the JLM’s dossier reveals it to be stuffed with falsehoods, trivialities, misrepresentations, and non sequiturs. The section on Jeremy Corbyn, for example, claims that “ a video emerged showing Mr Corbyn in Tunisia in 2014 laying a wreath next to the graves of Black September terrorists, who murdered Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972. ” In fact, t...

Much will certainly change in the world of U.S. foreign policy when Joe Biden enters the White House. There will be a more measured tone, and less reliance upon Twitter to announce U.S. policy. Trump is brusque, as illustrated by the way he shoved aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic at the 2017 NATO meeting; Biden might not push and shove his way to the front of the group, but his silvery smile will camouflage as ruthless a set of aims. On foreign policy, Biden will appear to be different from Trump, but the broad outlines of their policy will be identical.   by Vijay Prashad  Part 1 - Trump’s Isolationism Masks Sinister Alliances Was Trump an isolationist? Not really, though it’s easy to see how he got this reputation, at first glance of his foreign policy. He had an aggressive posture against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, with his illegal sanctions policy against these countries.    He demonstrated total fealty to the Israeli project to annihilate Palesti...

A glance at the Biden-Harris agency review teams should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be “pushed to the left.”   by Kevin Gosztola  Part 1 An eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration. A substantial percentage of them worked in the United States government when Barack Obama was president. The appointments should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be pressured to move in a progressive direction, especially on foreign policy. If the agency teams are any indication, Biden will be firmly insulated from any pressure to depart from the neoliberal status quo, which the former vice president has pledged to restore. Instead, he is likely to be pushed in an opposite direction, towards an interventionist foreign policy dictated by elite ...

globinfo freexchange The globalist faction of the US capital (primarily consisted by the liberal plutocracy ) had the chance to counterattack against the capitalists around Trump through Biden's recent victory, in the ongoing capitalist civil war .   Yet, despite the fact that Trump brought some serious trouble to the liberal capitalists, ironically, he came right on time to rescue them. He helped them escape from the dead end, after eight years of an utterly disappointing Obama administration.  At the time when the liberal capitalists ran out of tricks (and social movements were pushing for real change in the US), Trump came to their rescue. Suddenly, the Obama fraud was almost forgotten and all the progressives had to align behind the liberal fraudsters in order to defeat the "creepy orange clown". After four years of anti-Trump liberal hysteria and a pandemic nightmare that also came right on time, the liberal capitalists managed to put another puppet in power. And the...

“I expect the prevailing direction of U.S. foreign policy over these last decades to continue: more lawless bombing and killing multiple countries under the cover of “limited engagement,” – Biden Biographer Branko Marcetic  by Alan Macleod    Part 2 - Building Back Better? The former vice-president’s team is also looking to be made up of extremely wealthy individuals as well. His transition task squad has been, in his website’s words, crafted to ensure they “ reflect the values and priorities of the incoming administration, ” and includes executives from Lyft, Amazon, Capital One, Uber, Visa, and JP Morgan. One name being strongly floated for a cabinet position is former mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, a move being met with vocal opposition from the left.  Emanuel’s first tour of duty in the White House came under President Bill Clinton, where he was one of the key architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a deal that decimated manufacturing in t...

Jonathan Cook dissects the investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into the U.K. Labour Party.  by Jonathan Cook Part 3 - Too Hasty & Aggressive The corporate media long ago styled Labour staff who delayed the complaints procedure to harm Corbyn as anti-Semitism “whistleblowers.” Many of them starred in last year’s BBC Panorama program on Labour in which they claimed they had been hampered from carrying out their work. The equalities commission’s report subtly contradicts their claims, conceding that progress on handling complaints improved after senior Labour staff hostile to Corbyn — the “whistleblowers” very much among them — were removed from their posts. Indeed, the report suggests the very opposite of the established media narrative. Corbyn’s team, far from permitting or encouraging delays in resolving anti-Semitism complaints, too often tried to step in to speed up the process to placate the corporate media and Jewish organisations. In an example of h...