Subjects Archives: Strategy

At the risk of making it seem like central bank swap lines are the solution to every problem, a swap line for local and state governments is the perfect tool using the Federal Reserve’s existing legal authority and can facilitate supporting these local currencies.

The Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the most acute problems of our collective life, its main contradictions.

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

Empty hotel rooms, bare supermarket shelves, factories producing jet engines and luxury cars instead of ventilators, governments competing with each other to purchase testing kits and masks. This way of organising society doesn’t make sense.

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.

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.

Marco Aurélio Mello, a Minister of Brazil’s Supreme Court, sent the Attorney General’s Office a request to suspend President Jair Bolsonaro from his post for 180 days for committing various actions that have put the country at risk in the face of the covid-19 health emergency, according to a Telesur report.

The optics of the Russian oil leviathan Rosneft’s decision to sell its subsidiary Rosneft Trading SA and sell all its assets in Venezuela after the US Treasury sanctioned its trading arm two weeks ago as part of Washington’s regime change project to oust president Nicolás Maduro, may not look good to the uninformed outside observer. 

The International Aspects

“How wonderful is this. A beautiful silver lining.”

In an extraordinary statement titled “On the Political Impasse in Afghanistan,” Washington has admitted to the failure of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s mission to Kabul on March 23, which was taken up to heal the political rift among Afghan politicians and to urge them to form an inclusive government so as to implement the peace agreement signed in Doha on February 29.

Hear comes the corporate debt purchases.

I’m in a small city in Catalonia called Olot, not far from the Pyrenees. I came here because I knew the coronavirus lockdown would be much rougher in Barcelona. Still, people walk around with masks and keep social distances, barely going out.

The far-right president hints that a regime more authoritarian than Chile’s Augusto Pinochet dictatorship could be the “price to pay” due to the “chaos” that the “small flu” triggers.

Within a few hours of being launched, over 800 Venezuelans in the U.S. registered for an emergency flight from Miami to Caracas through a website run by the Venezuelan government. This flight, offered at no cost, was proposed by President Nicolás Maduro when he learned that 200 Venezuelans were stuck in the United States following his government’s decision to stop commercial flights as a preventative coronavirus measure.

Arreaza reiterated that the request for humanitarian flights responds to a request made by Venezuelans themselves to the Venezuelan Attention System in the United States.

However it should not have taken a pandemic to bring rail back into public ownership, trade unionists say.

The Federal Reserve has taken an extraordinary amount of actions over the past two weeks (most of which have happened over the course of 8 days from March 15th to March 23rd) to calm financial markets and sustain the flow of credit to households and businesses to respond to the coming Coronavirus-induced depression.

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.