Geography Archives: Global

In December 2019, doctors in Wuhan (China) began to see patients with a kind of viral pneumonia. By the end of the month, an investigation began and China’s health authorities sent out a public warning and notified the World Health Organisation (WHO).

With nearly everyone trapped at home for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, Michael Moore released a film that picks apart the U.S. environmental movement as it may have looked ten years ago, and then misleadingly presents it as breaking news.

Sub-Saharan Africa is facing its greatest crisis in generations. The continent thus far has been less affected by the pandemic than other parts of the world. But the impact of the global economic crisis is already enormous.

The article seeks to re-emphasise that as capitalism exploits society and nature for its own expanded reproduction, it cannot but revolutionise the productive forces, in terms of science and technology. On the other hand, however, it also creates fetters to the realisation of the ­potential that it creates, by making it a slave to the logic of profit.

As experts try to model the true number of coronavirus deaths, and some random ‘surveillance’ studies have suggested that–at least in some badly hit areas–the number of confirmed coronavirus cases might be many multiples of the official count, the FT has published its latest attempt at trying to ‘model’ the true coronavirus death toll.

More than 1,450 men and women in white lab coats from Cuba’s Henry Reeve Contingent have traveled to 22 nations in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East to battle the pandemic.

In the absence of strong support measures by governments across the world, the estimated loss of mostly informal jobs would result in rising poverty, starvation and inequality, an ILO report says.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

This pandemic health crisis exposes the injustices of the global economic order. It must be a turning point towards creating the systems, structures and policies that can always protect those who are marginalised and allow everyone to live with dignity.

To marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lenin we’re sharing the latest installment of Paul LeBlanc’s series Revolutionaries Reviewed, on Vladimir Lenin – a central leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew tsarist rule and attempted to bring about a new socialist society.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that the Great Lockdown, which has no end date, could very well lead to a loss of $9 trillion to global Gross Domestic Product over the entirety of 2020 and 2021; this number is greater than the combined economies of Japan and Germany. This scenario, the Fund’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva admits, ‘may actually be a more optimistic picture than reality produces’.

Many people around the world are familiar with this ancient Chinese proverb. Today, this lovely metaphor has materialized and taken the form of a pandemic, wreaking havoc on a system where few felt safe and most had become accustomed to merely surviving.

A Perspective from Chinese Dao thinking