Urgent action is necessary to stop the US Delta variant surge!
The United States is in the midst of a major new upsurge of the COVID-19 pandemic that has already taken the lives of 624,000 people. Over the past month, daily cases have increased 250 percent, driving a rise in hospitalizations and a significant increase in the daily death rate.
“The Delta (4th) wave in the United States is already showing it to be on a path to its the worst yet” in major hotspots, noted Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institution. The surge is concentrated in the poorest sections of the country, including Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Florida and Nevada, where vaccination rates are lowest. In Missouri, the tenth-poorest state in the country which has one of the lowest vaccination rates, hospitals are at the highest occupancy at any point of the pandemic. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coult
Australia’s coronavirus outbreak and the failure of the capitalist system
The claims of Australian governments to have protected the population from the worst of the coronavirus catastrophes witnessed overseas, and media depictions of the country as an idyllic exception to the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been exposed as an utter fraud.
Sydney, Australia’s largest city, is in the grip of its worst outbreak to date, with daily infections having exceeded a hundred for the first time in over a year and total cases surpassing 1,000 in a month. Hospitalisation rates are rising rapidly, including among the young, prompting fears of a collapse of the healthcare system. Government ministers admitted this week that the surge is “out of control.”
Eighty-five years since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
Eighty-five years ago, on July 17, 1936, the Spanish army led by General Francisco Franco launched a fascist coup aimed at toppling the elected government of Spain’s Second Republic. Workers and peasants across Spain responded with an armed insurrection, setting up factory committees and forming militias to fight the fascist troops. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 had begun.
The Spanish Civil War was one of the great battles between the international working class and European fascism in the 20th century. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sent tens of thousands of soldiers to join Franco. While the British, French and US ruling classes maintained a policy of non-intervention, blocking military aid to the Republic, there was mass sympathy in the international working class for the workers’ uprising against fascism. Tens of thousands travelled to Spain to fight Franco. The anti-fascist International Brigades numbered
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New poll shows growing majority of youths in the United States now hold a negative view of capitalism
A new poll conducted by Axios and Momentive has found that more than half of young adults in the US view capitalism negatively, part of a years-long trend in the US that has seen growing hostility to capitalism juxtaposed with growing support for socialism.
College students at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan
The poll, conducted June 11–15, surveyed 2,309 American adults, with the data weighted by age, race, sex, education and geography to reflect the demographic composition of the United States. It found that a majority of Americans (57 percent) still have a positive view of capitalism while 36 percent said they had a negative view. A similar poll conducted in January 2019 found slightly higher support for capitalism 61 percent as against 36 percent.