Archive | May, 2020

he current pandemic is giving humanity a crash course in apocalypse management. Whether COVID-19 is actually apocalyptic or not is debatable, but the pandemic has many of the characteristics that we associate with something of that scale.

Is oil a stranded asset? Or is the system defunct? This thought-provoking talk was given by Andy Higginbottom, Associate Professor in the Politics Department of Kingston University in Britain. In this talk he looks at Marx’s theory of rent as surplus profit and its parallels within the oil markets.

Americans rate their own government’s response, along with that of the UK and Italy, higher than that of China despite those countries having much higher death and infection rates.

In early May, Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine began reopening the state economy. And to support business and slash state expenses, both at worker expense, he had a “COVID-19 Fraud” form put up on the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services website where employers could confidentially report employees “who quit or refuse work when it is available due to COVID-19.”

The Trump regime is ratcheting up its protectionist rhetoric vis-à-vis China. If this leads to new sanctions, it would worsen the COVID-induced trade crisis rather than help the U.S.

In this historical conjuncture we are faced with the risk of a double temporality. The double temporality that I have in mind is that between saying, ‘now let’s make the economy restart quickly’, adding ‘later we will think about its contents’. It is an illusion. And a dangerous illusion.

The CIGB-258, a peptide designed to reduce inflammatory processes, and the monoclonal antibody Itolizumab (Anti-CD6) have shown great effectiveness for the survival of critical and severe COVID-19 patients in Cuba, announced Friday Francisco Duran, national director of epidemiology at the ministry of public health.

All told, 38.6 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past nine weeks.

Karl Marx has a reputation for being one of the foremost critics of liberalism and the discourse of rights. In Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism, political theorist Igor Shoikhedbrod contests this simplistic assumption.

The notion of “pre-crime” is the purview of dystopian horror fiction when applied to individual people, and there’s no reason we should find the prospect of attacking and destroying for hypothetical future offenses any less insane on an international scale.

The World is in Their Care calls our awareness down upon those who do the daily work which improves, repairs, and sustains life. All labor is shared. Bless the listener without whom their is no poet. This poem is dedicated to Jerry Tucker.

David Chappelle is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer, best known for his satirical comedy sketch series Chappelle’s Show (2003 – 2006).

The hyper-political R.A.P. Music track gets a hyper-political animated video.

Taking a fresh look at animal production also involves considering its effect on world hunger.

The threat that the American Left sees in China aligns with the white supremacist underpinnings of American exceptionalism.

The Keynes crisis, the Minsky crisis and the Means crisis

Venezuela is confronting COVID-19 amid foreign sanctions and mercenary incursions. Complicating matters further is the explosive combination of deep recession and a nationwide lockdown, which has triggered incidents of looting and riots.

This was announced by the Minister for Defense, Vladimir Padrino López, this Wednesday. “We have established contact with the Minister of Defense of Iran. All these ships, when they enter our exclusive economic zone (370Km), will be escorted by ships and planes of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), to welcome them and say to the Iranian people: thank you for so much solidarity and cooperation!” Minister Padrino López said during the inauguration of the Textile Center of the Bolivarian Army, in Fuerte Tiuna.

On 23 March, the UN Secretary General António Guterres called for a ceasefire. ‘The fury of the virus’, he said, ‘illustrates the folly of war’. In a recent report, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) wrote that the ‘call for a global ceasefire has not had the desired result’.

Sarah Jones, in The Coronavirus Class War in New York Magazine, does a neat, tidy job of kneecapping the notion that the anti-lockdown protests are manned by workers who want to get back to their jobs so they can start making money again.