Subjects Archives: Strategy

The pandemic has effectively provided a laboratory-like demonstration that people do better when states can plan ahead, apply national resources unequivocally to the public good, put science in the service of the people, and practice international solidarity. These are characteristics of socialist societies.

Bumping elbows at the United Nations.

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.

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.

The political answer is not acceleration but refusal. And this is indeed what is has begun to manifest, in a variety of social rebellions. This includes the strikes of gig economy labor, the protests of Silicon Valley tech workers, anti-surveillance movements, urban protests against the smart city, defections from social media sites, algorithmic-bias busting, and “techlash” against the oligopolistic concentration of digital powers.

Jessica Whyte’s new book, The Morals of the Market, demonstrates the kind of scholarship we all aspire to: insightful, thought-provoking, and, above all, accessible and engaging. In it, she traces the “historical and conceptual relations between human rights and neoliberalism”.

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.

Pulitzer-winning author and host of “On Contact” Chris Hedges joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the influence of lobbyists on establishment media in their coverage of politics and that donors, bankers and billionaires have on the U.S. political process.

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

CLASS struggle occurs in the realm of concepts too. The World Bank for instance systematically counters Left concepts by employing a novel tactic: it uses the very same concepts as are used by the Left, but gives them a wholly different meaning; as a result they either come to mean something entirely different from what the Left had originally meant by them, or, at the very least, they become fuzzy and hence useless to the Left. In either case the power of the Left concept is neutralised.

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.”

In one of the non-stop e-mails that I receive from my hospital administration on a more than daily basis, there was a paragraph on “how to be responsible on social media”, with some recommendations that we all can agree on.

As Naomi Klein laid out in her bestseller “Shock Doctrine,” the wealthy elite use the confusion caused by economic and other disasters to quickly force through pro-free-market legislation.

Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, wants to build an electric car factory in Brazil. He was supposed to meet Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, in Miami in early March, but he was too busy; instead, Musk will go to Brazil sometime this year.

In her recent volume Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2019), Silvia Federici fruitfully brings together feminist reflections with discussions of the commons as a possible way of overcoming capitalism.

On Rosa Luxemburg’s birthday, we present an extract from her 1906 essay “Critique in the Workers’ Movement,” available in English for the first time.

It is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it.