Subjects Archives: Inequality

On March 16, 2020, the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva wrote a blog post on the Fund’s website; it represents the kind of generosity necessary in the midst of a global pandemic. “The IMF stands ready to mobilize its $1 trillion lending capacity to help our membership,” she wrote.

It sounds like science fiction: A research program funded by the U.S. government plans to create virus-carrying insects that, released in vast numbers, could help crops fight threats such as pests, drought, or pollution.

Engels was just 24 years old when he wrote the Condition. He had already developed left-wing ideas when he was despatched to England at the end of 1842 to work in the family firm of Ermen and Engels, manufacturers of sewing thread in Manchester.

The White House held dozens of meetings about coronavirus response that excluded government experts because the discussions were unnecessarily classified over the objections of HHS Secretary Alex Azar, reports Reuters. Experts were not just barred from speaking openly about what we knew about the emerging pandemic. Apparently, they weren’t even allowed in the room.

COVID-19 surged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December 2019, and by January 2020 it had hit Hubei province like a tidal wave, swirling over China and rippling out overseas. The Chinese state rolled into action to combat the spread and to care for those infected.

In April 2012, at the White House on her first visit to the United States since her election in 2010, Brazilian president Brazil Dilma Rousseff scolded advanced capitalist economies for unleashing a ‘tsunami de liquidez’, a ‘liquidity tsunami’, onto the developing world.

As the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis comes to dominate headlines, little media attention has been given to the federal government’s decision to classify top-level meetings on domestic coronavirus response and lean heavily “behind the scenes” on U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon in planning for an allegedly imminent explosion of cases.

What are the underlying structural reasons for the coronavirus outbreak? According to Monthly Review Press author Rob Wallace, you have to look at global agriculture if you really want to understand the nature of global outbreaks.

In the midst of a pandemic, one would expect all countries to collaborate; that a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude would provide ample opportunity to end (or suspend) inhumane economic sanctions. Is this not the time for the imperialist bloc, led by the U.S., to end the sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and a series of other countries?

Decades of neoliberal austerity will make it harder to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, we must rebuild our social safety net and forge a New Deal for public health.

Slick operatives among the Black Misleadership Class have made an electoral pact with big capitalists that is totally against the interests of the Black working class.

There are so many wheels coming off that analysts and the business press is on coronavirus crisis overload. And unlike 2008, the Fed can’t save anyone from the Grim Reaper.

It will be hard to decide the most Trumpian moment in his dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, but my nomination is Trump’s meeting with executives from several pharmaceutical companies, where he discussed developing a vaccine. According to Trump, he asked them to “speed it up,” and they said that they would.

Red Lines host Anya Parampil provides a global Coronavirus update, explaining how China suppressed the pandemic with a determined and centralized strategy that was heavily criticized in the West.

The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure or—better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to the proliferation of capitalist food production and distribution.

If the U.S. government succeeds in extraditing Julian Assange, it will be a major victory for U.S. imperialism–a promise that anyone getting in its way will ultimately pay the price.

The United States has none of the systems or infrastructure that would allow it to accomplish what China has done to fight mass infection.

When 60 Minutes (2/24/20) asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about his past support for aspects of Cuba’s socialist revolution, as well as for Nicaragua’s 1979–90 leftist Sandinista government, Sanders responded by saying he opposes what he described as the “authoritarian” features of the Cuban government, while noting that after the 1959 revolution,  Cuba launched “a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”

I am old enough to remember that shortly after the 1968 election of Richard Nixon to the presidency, his campaign manager (and future U.S. Attorney General) John Mitchell said, “Watch what we do not what we say.”

The money trail of U.S. Sanctions leads to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which—behind the shadow of secrecy laws that effectively prohibit any form of public accountability—facilitates the theft of public wealth from targeted countries on a scale only previously accomplished through military invasion and occupation.