Subjects Archives: Inequality

The principal deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs (SCA) in the U.S. State Department, Alice Wells, dropped a bombshell on the Afghan government and the country’s political elites on April 4—and caught the international donors by surprise, too—by linking all aid to Afghanistan to the formation of an inclusive government in Kabul.

Ten days after the last central bank swap line announcement, the Federal Reserve followed up with an announcement of another facility meant to help a lower tier of central banks. In this facility the Federal Reserve would make a standing offer to temporarily purchase U.S. treasury securities from central banks (and supranational monetary institutions) and sell them back to them the following day.

M. WAS MIDWAY through her 12-hour shift in late March, sorting financial documents in a cavernous Long Island warehouse, when a supervisor stopped by and handed her a flyer. Several days earlier, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had signed an executive order shutting down most businesses, but M.’s warehouse had remained open because its purpose–mailing and shipping–was defined as essential.

Days, weeks, months, an indeterminate amount of time as the world seems paralysed by the journey of SARS-CoV-2. The lack of certainty increases the anxiety. This virus, as Arundhati Roy writes, ‘seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow [of capital].

Socialist ideas have been jeered and sneered at by the same establishment now faced with the consequences of their profit driven contempt. We should be done with those bellowing cheerleaders of capitalism, argues Eamonn McCann.

In the midst of a desolate scenario, when the United States has become the country with the highest number of those infected by the Coronavirus, President Donald Trump and his team of serial criminals like Elliott Abrams, Cuban-American Mauricio Claver-Carone, Marco Rubio and others, announced that their country and 22 other nations would launch a far-reaching operation against drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, deploying naval and air force military reinforcements in the Caribbean Sea and the South Pacific.

Killers rule us. Trump, Pence, Kushner, and all the others. What can we call them but murderers? If actions speak louder than words, then they are screaming at us, “Die, we don’t care.”

The land question is central to understanding political life and society in Brazil. The country has enormous landed estates, known as latifundios, which have their roots in the beginning of the Portuguese occupation of this part of South America at the start of the 16th century. The Portuguese seizure of this land and its conversion into large latifundios–together with the mono-cultivation of crops for export and the enslavement of human beings–established the roots of social inequality that persist to this day.

In the early weeks when the virus emerged in Wuhan, the Chinese government neither suppressed evidence nor did their warning systems fail.

Comparisons between the toll of COVID-19 and climate change are not helpful because they view each as two separate “things”

The coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming to comprehend. There are now hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases. Tens of thousands have died. Nations are on lockdown as the disease continues to spread. The planet is in crisis.

In greeting you, with affection, I take the liberty of addressing you on the occasion of denouncing the severe events taking place against the peace and stability of Venezuela, at a time when the concern of the States and Governments should be focused on the protection of the life and health of their citizens, due to the acceleration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fifteen years ago, in his prescient book, The Monster At Our Door, Mike Davis warned that a viral catastrophe was being cooked up in the toxic vat built by the combined dangers of global capitalist production, ecological devastation, and the intentional, politically motivated neglect of public services the world over.

Ali raps in his verses that America is not the great place people make it out to be. He reminds us that slavery was present only two generations ago and extremely violent hate crimes occurred in the country. He also compares paying taxes to paying a homeless man for crack. Tax money is just supporting the war in the Middle East.

The crisis that COVID-19 has provoked globally presents a crossroads to the peoples of Abya Yala – Latin America. The popular organizations are the first line of resistance against the worst expressions of the decomposing system.

On April’s Fools Day, U.S. President Donald Trump gave a press conference where he announced a new “counter-narcotics effort” by U.S. Southern Command. “We’re deploying additional Navy destroyers, combat ships, aircrafts and helicopters, Coast Guard cutters…doubling our capabilities in the region,” he said

Why did apparently stigmatizing names like Chinese virus or Wuhan virus keep making headlines? How have the Western media shaped the narrative of China’s response to the novel coronavirus? As the virus continues to wreck havoc, China Daily investigates how the Western version of propaganda plays out in the global battle against coronavirus.

In a move seemingly reserved only for cartoonish villains, one of Austria’s best-known millionaires, Attila Doğudan, CEO of DO &CO—one of the largest culinary companies in Austria, and who employs over 11,000 people worldwide—has used the COVID-19 crisis to orchestrate a widespread layoff campaign against all restaurant employees within Austria.

A review of Donny Gluckstein and Terry Sullivan, Hegel and Revolution (Bookmarks, 2020), £7.

Madness engulfs the planet. Hundreds of millions of people are in lockdown in their homes, millions of people who work in essential jobs–or who cannot afford to stay home without state assistance–continue to go to work, thousands of people lie in intensive-care beds taken care of by tens of thousands of medical professionals and caregivers who face shortages of equipment and time.