World News

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>but you'll make trumptards mad

>The U.S.-backed regime could be conspiring with the Armed Forces to suspend the elections through a "self-coup d'etat."

>Bolivia's Senate President Eva Copa Friday denounced that the Armed Forces Commander General Sergio Orellana gave lawmakers a week-long ultimatum to ratify their promotions.

>"If they do not comply with our request, the Armed Forces commander-in-chief will approve the promotions, as our regulations establish," Orellana said.

>According to Telesur's correspondent in Bolivia Freddy Morales, however, this threat is very irregular given that only the Senate has the authority to ratify promotions.

>"Bolivia could be on the verge of a joint plan between the Armed Forces and the government to organize a self-coup, as Senate President Eva Copa warned this week," Morales said.

>The main target of this likely self-coup could be the Legislative Branch, which is controlled by the Movement Toward Socialism Party (MAS).

>Without the Legislative Branch, the coup-born regime led by Jeanine Añez could suspend the elections and expand its time in power.​​​​​​​

>On top of that outrage, the Feds are bidding against states who are trying to buy their own supplies, and refusing to interfere in those auctions between states, which have driven prices up by ten times or more. But while you might think that was as bad as federal management of this crisis could be, it is not. This new outrage is deeper: Even those states that are trying to manage their own resources, buying equipment themselves with incredibly scarce resources to aid in a time of crisis, are being stopped, and those resources seized on the way to delivery.

>You could call this piracy. You could call it sanctions. The federal government is choking supply chains to states like it chokes supply chains to Iran and North Korea. These blockades aren’t as complete as those surrounding sanctioned regimes, of course, and some amount of the disruption may be honest confusion in a time of crisis. But the disruption is being brought about by federal interference, and unlike the kind of disruptions you’d want to engineer against antagonistic states, the purpose seems completely unclear — indeed the policy is inexplicable and indefensible.

>Which may be one reason why no explanation has been given. We don’t know where these supplies are going. We don’t know on what grounds they are being seized, or threatened with seizure.

>The COVID-19 global pandemic is a nightmare unfolding before our eyes that could have devastating impacts that Black Americans could feel most acutely. With scarce testing, health care workers and ventilators, combined with a pattern of red state governors ignoring science and placing profits above people, there are signs that Black communities across the country are bearing the brunt of an inept federal response and unjust health care system unprepared to handle the surge of COVID-19 patients.

>This, of course, doesn’t have to be the case, but government failure and systemic racism means far too many Black people, especially in the South, will lose their lives unless government leaders immediately course correct from the predictable and alarming outcomes ahead.

>Preliminary data show high case counts among Black residents in emerging hotspots, including New Orleans, New York, Detroit, Milwaukee, Charlotte and Albany, Georgia. There are also reports from cities, including St. Louis and Nashville, that predominantly Black neighborhoods have been slow to receive testing sites and equipment compared to white, affluent areas.

>White “America” pretends once again to be surprised by the emerging facts that African Americans are disproportionately bearing the brunt of the coronavirus assault. But why should anyone be surprised? African Americans make up a disproportionate number of the 87 million people in the U.S. who are under-insured or lack health insurance, who occupy the lowest paid jobs, jobs today deemed “essential.” It is in our communities where the toxic waste dumps are located, the petroleum processing companies, the hog farms, garbage dumps, the buildings with lead paint and asbestos, and the highways pumping out millions of tons of pollution every day.

>And it is in our communities that, before gentrification, over the last 40 years, governments under the pressure of neoliberal austerity cut budgets and services. It was in our communities, both urban and rural, where the hospitals and clinics were closed, the sewer and sanitation deteriorated and something as basic to life as water was commodified, contaminated and often cut off.

>While the data is still incomplete and factors contributing to the spread of the coronavirus are not yet fully understood, some experts caution against interpreting the racial disparity as caused by race itself. “It can make sense to point to race as a proxy for other causal factors, such as greater rates of poverty and poorer access to health care,” said Adolph Reed, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. But Reed warned of the danger of “neatly tying up the specific epidemiological factors for coronavirus or other bad health outcomes with the ribbon of race.”

>“Insofar as people insist on race as the framework, then it clouds what the causal mechanisms are,” said Reed. Race correlates with poverty, a lack of sick leave, exposure to pollution, jobs that leave employees exposed to the coronavirus, and a need to take subways and buses, which can be a source of exposure.

>Kizzmekia Corbett, the National Institute of Health's lead scientist for coronavirus vaccine research tells CNN's Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta that a vaccine for coronavirus could possibly be available to the general public by next spring.

>stay home, everybody!

>Amazon-owned Whole Foods is tracking and scoring stores it deems at risk of unionizing, according to five people with knowledge of the effort and internal documents viewed by Business Insider.
>The scores are based on more than two dozen metrics, including racial diversity, employee loyalty, "tipline" calls, and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
>Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider.
>The stores' scores on each metric are fed into the heat map, which is a geographic illustration of the United States peppered with red spots to indicate high-risk Whole Foods stores.