Robert B. Livingston

1. Emblematic of the brutal consequences of US foreign policy: a boat carrying South American migrants sinks, claiming the life of an 8-year-old Venezuelan boy

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders

Barry Grey at the World Socialist Web Site describes the pseudo-leftist Bernie Sanders and his opportunistic "fight the oligarchy" road show:

On February 21, the [New York] Times published an interview with Sanders under the headline “Bernie Sanders Isn’t Giving Up His Fight.” In it, Sanders advised the Democrats to recognize that “the system is broken, period. And you can’t patch it up a little here and a little there.”

Yet in the next breadth he said that “the best thing we could do is to win over at least two Republicans [sufficient to defeat the budget reconciliation bill in the narrowly divided House]… There are about 15 house districts in America where Republicans won with very slim margins. One of them is in the Omaha area. One of them is in the Iowa City area.”

It would be difficult to devise a more apt definition of the politics of “patching up” the system.

Asked if he regretted his decision to back Biden’s reelection bid until the bitter end, Sanders said: “The reason I stood behind President Biden is that he was supporting an extremely progressive agenda, an agenda which, in fact, did speak to the needs of working people in this country… and I think that’s exactly what the Democratic Party has to do right now.”

This “agenda” included institutionalizing Trump’s “forever COVID” policy, record military spending, an imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and sharp cuts to Medicaid and social programs. It also included an alliance with the union bureaucracy in betraying and blocking strikes, including a government ban on a rail strike. In backing Biden, the supposed anti-oligarchy fighter vouched for a president who oversaw an 88 percent increase in US billionaire wealth to a total of $5.5 trillion.

3. The mandate for President Trump's nominee to become the US Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, is already clear: to transfer the billions presently spent on public schools into corporate-run training, private schools or other for-profit businesses and eviscerate the Enlightenment goals of public education—scientific pursuit, world knowledge and critical thinking

4. President Trump tags podcaster Dan Bongino to become the next Deputy Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) chiefly for his unflinching loyalty and fascist politics

5. A 46-day-long strike by 5,000 nurses and other medical workers in Oregon comes to an ignominious end after their union announces their ratification of a sellout labor contract

6. A new film that reaches beyond the usual fare Hollywood delivers within the horror genre, The Substance, "is a heavy-handed statement about beauty standards and the pressure placed on female performers to appear conventionally attractive and youthful"

7. A statement by the Socialist Equality Party in Germany regarding the results of Germany's recent federal elections: how the fight against fascism and war must be waged now

8. A socialist message to all University of California workers going on strike this week

9. A ten-year employee of Costco writes the World Socialist Web Site about worsening working conditions and how the Teamsters union contributes to them

10. Amid a continued blockade of fuel and humanitarian aid by the illegal Israeli occupation in Gaza, at least six babies freeze to death

11. Pathology workers at Australian Clinical Laboratories in the state of Victoria overwhelmingly vote to take protected industrial action against their company’s contract offer which would cut their real wages

12. To demand the reinstatement of workers who were arbitrarily suspended, around 500 workers at Samsung India’s Tamil Nadu household-appliance manufacturing plant have been on strike since February 5

13. As part of new and enhanced security initiatives to be used in all its Dearborn-based manufacturing plants, the Ford Motor Company announces it will routinely allow raids by police and K-9 units

14. Flaws begin to appear in America's economic exceptionalism-- which are never reflected in the underlying reality most Americans experience