Archive | December, 2020

We cannot allow the capitalist ruling class to turn a blind eye to the plight of the incarcerated population — not in general, nor in the particular circumstance of the global pandemic of Covid-19. In the U.S., there are 2.3 million human beings in state, federal, and county jails and more than 52,000 in immigrant detainment camps.

IN RECENT DAYS, President Donald Trump has repeatedly defended his administration against the suggestion that the government is failing to secure enough ventilators – medical devices that help Covid-19 patients breathe and can save the lives of those suffering serious respiratory distress.

The coronavirus attack has so far been much less deadly than the Spanish flu of a century ago. That had affected 500 million people worldwide, about 27 per cent of the world’s population of the time, and had a death rate of about 10 per cent among those affected.

Tax rebates, tax cuts and business bailouts will not solve this crisis. Here’s what’s needed.

When health policy is looked at from the point of view of which issues involve a direct confrontation with ruling-class interest, which involve simply relative benefits to a class, and which are neutral, we can predict which kinds of measures are possible—highlighting the lie in the notion society is trying to improve health for all.

These days we hear a lot about the symptoms of Covid-19 (dry cough, high fever, etc.). Conversely, there is much less discussion of the virus as a symptom. To intervene on the symptoms of the virus it is necessary not only to have specific scientific knowledge, but also to put in place a serious reflection on the structural causes of its global spread and, with them, the possibilities of change.

A man worth over $100 billion, who makes, on average, $230,000 per minute calling on the public to help his own impoverished employees was not met well by many.

It might be easy to forget, given the crisis enveloping the world at the moment, that the United States is scheduled to hold a very important election in November.

In a pandemic, a rational person would much rather live in a society governed by the norms of socialism than of capitalism, a society where people rally together to overcome a virus; than to live in a society where fear pervades and where stigmatization becomes the antidote to collective action.

Capitalist crises are neither predictable nor do they stem from a single cause. Instead, at least as I see it, the possibility of a crisis is always there but the causes and triggers are all historical and therefore multiple and varied.

We are currently in a state of national emergency thanks in no small part to the Trump administration’s muzzling of public health experts and slow response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Venezuela’s most acclaimed contemporary writer talks about the Bolivarian Revolution and its dialectical relation with cultural producers.

In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise. It was codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, as part of the general antipathy towards the NHS in general by the Conservative party. But the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016. The public will now pay with their lives for deliberate government inaction and total disregard towards their primary function – to protect us all.

When trying to interpret, understand and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works. 

How long the COVID-19 crisis will last, and what its immediate economic costs will be, is anyone’s guess. But even if the pandemic’s economic impact is contained, it may have already set the stage for a debt meltdown long in the making, starting in many of the Asian emerging and developing economies on the front lines of the outbreak.

Yanis Varoufakis, DiEM25 co-founder and MeRA25 MP, on the economic and political impact of the coronavirus.

When things get dire enough, the working class fights back. In dealing with the outbreak of the coronavirus, people across the United States have organized at their workplaces, and also won major reforms in the housing sector.

This is the sixth Cuban team to join the fight against the pandemic in the world and the first to travel to Europe, reported Cuban Television.

Raza Naeem sat down with one of the most influential leftists of our world today to discuss politics, history and his new book

Raza Naeem sat down with one of the most influential leftists of our world today to discuss politics, history and his 2017 book