Archive | December, 2020

“You really are the men and women who do everything eh, you people!” That was the reaction of an 88-year-old patient when she received a phone call from one of our Medicine for the People (MPLP) volunteer workers or staff in mid-March.

The Russian-Chinese entente emerged as one of the most significant templates of international politics in the recent period since the hugely consequential developments in Ukraine in 2014 that led to western sanctions against Moscow, which in turn galvanised the latter’s ‘pivot to Asia’. 

Tova Charles & Zai Sadler performing “Hair” at Write About Now Poetry.

The speaker is too poor to move to a different region, so they can only move slightly farther away from an inevitable problem.

We live in the age of the pandemic. We live in an age of environmental destruction and climate change. None of these are natural disasters–they all result from the way society and production is currently organised.

The Communists were determined to eradicate disease. In the 1930s, Mao joined the Chinese Communist Party’s Public Health Commission; in 1934, when he was in the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao placed public health at the top of the list for party work.

There is an exodus of finance from the third world at present, far exceeding in scale what had occurred in 2008 after the financial crisis.

The wave of far-right anti-lockdown protests show how capitalist politics can create monsters. Worse might be on the way.

SSER-IDEAS Online Lecture Series — COVID-19 Pandemic: Policy Failures and Their Impact on the Lives of People

Media in the era of an incompetent president.

America’s billionaires have accrued more wealth in the past three weeks alone than they made in total prior to 1980.

In this blog post, I want to connect what we’re currently seeing in the retail sector during this pandemic to deep-seated narratives about the nature of economic exchange, in particular to the notion of “the market”.

If you are reading this, you probably already know a lot about climate change. But what images come to mind if I asked you to visualize climate change?

But do these assumptions hold up to the test? To find out, we must first take a quick look at some recent history.

Given the exponentially rising death toll from COVID-19 and the devastating social and economic effects of brutal lockdowns, what could a humane and progressive response to the global pandemic look like?

Leftword Books Editor Vijay Prashad on Life and Legacy of Italian Marxist Com. Antonio #Gramsci. #Bennito #Mussolini’s court stated, “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning” during the trail of Com Gramsci.

Anti-Cuba zealots in the Trump administration have been enticing Cuban doctors working overseas to defect, paying journalists to write negative stories, slapping sanctions on Cubans in charge of the program, and strong-arming countries to expel Cuban doctors.

Mostly, Planet of the Humans is just so fucking bad. So bad that its good points are useless. It does have some good points–there seem to be a lot of rock festivals in Vermont that claim, incorrectly, to be running on solar.

Van Dyke I is a series of 22 hulking brick apartment blocks in Brownsville, the poorest part of Brooklyn, New York. At least 10 people have died there from COVID-19, including a mother and son whose bodies were discovered only after neighbours reported the smell to city officials.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers,” reveals that the wealth of U.S. billionaires is indeed staying at home.