22 karma · joined May 22, 2021
>U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams even told Americans in a late February tweet that they need to “STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
As time went on, the tone changed, and Americans were encouraged to wear face masks, with many places requiring them.
Now Fauci has admitted that the reason Americans were initially discouraged from using them is because there was a shortage, as Adams acknowledged in the second part of his February tweet.
“We were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply,” Fauci told The Street. "We wanted to make sure the people, namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in harm's way to take care of people who you know were infected with coronavirus, and the danger of them getting infected. We did not want them to be without the equipment they needed."
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/06/17/fauci...
Grocery prices have been rising since the start of the pandemic. Far more people are now accustomed to cooking at home. Anecdotally, I am one of them. I buy at least twice as many groceries as I did pre-pandemic and that is not going to change. Also the pandemic is still in full force internationally, especially in places where the US sources major food imports.
Clothing is up because commerce with the Chinese textile industry was shut down during the pandemic. It will take at least another year before clothing prices are restored.
Notice that the massive spikes in real estate prices are not even mentioned in the article. This is a propaganda piece. It cherrypicks items that poor people depend on in order to promote backlash against redistribution.
For example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/koch-e2-80-99s-foundation-...
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
[0]:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&he...
The U.S. has grounded and delayed flights of foreign government officials numerous times. What makes you think the U.S. would consider a commercial flight off limits?
“On 20 September, Evo Morales announced a lawsuit against the U.S. government for "crimes against humanity" for repeatedly blocking presidential flights, after an incident in which authorization for an overflight of Puerto Rico by President Maduro of Venezuela was delayed, although U.S. authorities said that they were entitled to three days' advance notice. Maduro had been en route to arrive in Beijing for bilaterial talks with the People's Republic of China.[14]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incide...
Marxists are for organizing society to serve the needs of the working class which reproduces society.
Marxists are progressive as they don’t deny the progress of history, which moves in one direction and cannot be turned back. Marxists understand capitalism as a necessary stage in the development of society but one that can only be temporary.
That said, Marx was also less consistent on the definitions than some suggest.
Regardless, “communism” was the term decided on shortly after the civil war ended. It was confusing and a poor choice but there was certainly no confusion as to how well it correlated with the idea that communism was a final stage. Nobody believed the USSR had reached a final stage of anything.
But, as I said, it can be complicated, especially if that is your goal, as can be done with anything if you so please.
But, a self-sufficient farmer with no employees is not even part of a societal economy in any modern sense. They are a mere peasant. If they are a farmer with a farm that requires no hired labor or modern technology then same thing. If they require a military to protect them and they send surplus to a feudal arrangement, they probably live in a feudalist society. If they own their land and use industrial technology and hire their own wage laborers to produce a surplus to trade it on a market to pay for all of that, they are now part of a modern economy and Marxism would have more to say about that. The latter have dependencies beyond the mere protection of their farmland, meaning the farmer now lives in a capitalist society.
See:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...
What do they think socialism is? Even the most radical Marxists define it as “democratic worker ownership of the means of production.”
And fwiw the USSR did not even consider itself a socialist state. That’s why it decided on using the term communism instead, and Marxists tend to agree it was not deserving of that name either, deeming it state capitalist.
This looks like a very cool project. I wish it was around before I glued together my current hellish multi-platform release system. I will dig into it before I require it again.