Archive | August, 2020

New figures from the Institute for Policy Studies show that, despite a pandemic that has stunted the economy for months, America’s billionaire class is becoming richer than ever, adding nearly $700 billion to their fortune since the nationwide lockdown in March.

Mary Filippo began in 2004 to audit economics classes in the hope that she could “learn something about globalization. Does it really help people in developing countries? What are its downsides?” She did not learn these things.

Patrón lived in Chocó in northwestern Colombia, where 96 percent of the people identify as Afro-Colombian or as part of the Emberá Indigenous community. Chocó is treated as a backwater of the country, with no real infrastructure in the province’s expanse and little social policy to enhance the lives of its population.

We became an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. imperialism in 1999. From that moment on, our enemy declared war, not a conventional war, but war nonetheless.

The phrase, which was used in the early nineteenth century to describe the the spoils system of appointing government workers, accurately describes the American economy today.* And it’s pretty clear who the victor is, and it’s not the working-class. Instead, a small group at the top have come out as the victor—and that’s been true […]

It is a common practice all over the world that when those incarcerated face a threat to life, the authorities send them home.

On 28 July, tens of thousands took to the streets of El Alto, the predominantly working-class and Indigenous city that overlooks La Paz, in a mobilisation called by the Bolivian Workers Centre (Central Obrera Boliviana, or COB), the country’s chief trade union federation, together with other worker, peasant and Indigenous organisations (gathered under the title of the “Pact of Unity”) to demand the TSE hold a general election on 6 September.

The centrality of race in the devilment of capitalism continues to be resisted by “the sort of hardline, orthodox folks who only look at class, alongside the sort of liberals and so-called racial multiculturals who have the misconception that race no longer matters,” said Charisse Burden-Stelly, professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College.

The company behind In The Now, Soapbox and Waste-Ed is taking on media giant Facebook, who it claims is falsely labeling it as Russian state-controlled propaganda.

The U.S. economy is undergoing a major transformation largely driven by the coronavirus pandemic. One hallmark of that transformation is the explosion in what is called “remote” work.

First, a lot of it is simply wrong: that is, it is misleading about how economies work and the implications of economic policies and processes. For decades now, a significant and powerful lobby within the discipline has peddled half-truths and absolute falsehoods on many critical issues.

On November 10, 2019, President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia announced his resignation from the presidency. Morales had been elected in 2014 to a third presidential term, which should have lasted until January 2020.

The danger doesn’t only come from the symptoms of a virus: it comes from our distorted relationship with the natural world.

The Japanese-owned (Mitsui-operated) MV Wakashio was en route to Brazil from China to fetch iron ore from a port owned by the notorious mining company Vale. Here the ship is seen having run aground near Blue Bay, one of the area’s most pristine sites for coral, already threatened by bleaching due to the climate crisis. Now the marine life and fisherfolk must survive this spill.

Action follows reports that USPS indicated to state election officials it will depart from long-standing practice of prioritizing election mail, delaying delivery times unless states pay more.

In the spring, we shut down our lives and our economy in hopes of reducing the spread of COVID-19 enough to be able to manage it through widespread testing and contact tracing. In spite of that shutdown, today the virus is raging virtually uncontrolled. We didn’t stick with it until the job was done.

To imagine that a country as structurally classist as Kuwait could have ever succeeded in fighting a pandemic that was born from exploitation and thrives on inequality is the kind of naivety one dreams of achieving, so comforting must it be.

“Russia’s health workers and teachers will be the first ones to receive the vaccine in the country,” Russia’s Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said.

Patrick Cockburn examines the threads between the pandemic and the media’s coverage of age of endless war.

An article by President Xi Jinping on opening new horizons of the Marxist political economy in contemporary China will be published Sunday.