Subjects Archives: Strategy

As the COVID-19 health crisis deepens, it looks increasingly clear that the short-term collapse in global output is likely to exceed that of any recession in the last 150 years–that is, in the entire history of capitalism. The ILO estimates that the crisis will lead to the destruction of 195 million jobs. Hence, after discussing at length the epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, media attention is now increasingly focused on how to restart the global economic engine.

Developing countries face collapsing international trade, falling remittances, sharp reversals of capital flows, and currency depreciation. Only bold policies—debt relief, international financing, planning, and more—will avert further catastrophe.

With COVID-19 figures flattening downward, Germany is limping back to some kind of normalcy. Auto and bike shops, book dealers, barbers and most shops less than 800 m2 can now re-open (with customers 5 ft apart). Bigger shops and department stores are squabbling: “Why not us?”

After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science, it’s easy to see how epidemiology came next.

Abby Martin breaks down all the hidden acts of US foreign policy aggression under the cover of the COVID19 pandemic.

Oil-producing nations led by Russia, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia reached an unprecedented agreement on Sunday to cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels per day, or nearly 10 percent of what is currently produced, as The New York Times reported.

As Donald Trump and his band of “hacks and grifters” are preparing to prematurely reopen the U.S. economy, they’re also rehearsing the language they’ll use to justify their irresponsible decisions. Here’s how Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, is discussing the terms of the reopening: The unfair China trade shock that hit so many […]

THE current pandemic has brought to the fore, and with exceptional clarity, the fundamental contradiction underlying contemporary globalisation, namely, the contradiction between the interests of finance and those of the people. Indeed this contradiction, which characterizes the era of globalisation as a whole, has now come to a head.

This overlooked region of India is a beacon to the world for taking on the coronavirus, with the leftist government setting the bar for testing, tracing and treatment standards.

Despite a deep economic recession, a profound political crisis and international sanctions that have ravaged its health sector, the South American nation of Venezuela is demonstrating that prioritising lives is possible in the battle against COVID-19.

The President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros , reported this Sunday that 6 new positive cases for Covid -19 were recorded in the country, for a total of 181 infected patients and zero [new] fatalities.

Covid-19 has laid bare a fundamental truth: that capitalist healthcare is a contradiction in terms, since capital–like the killer virus–cares for nothing but reproducing itself.

In only three days, the total fatalities in Sweden due to the current epidemic rose from 477 to 881. While the problem started roughly about the same time in all the Scandinavian countries, Sweden’s stats are among the worst.

While, by April 9, Brazil to its east had registered more than 16,000 cases and 822 deaths and Colombia to its west, had seen its tally climb above 2000 cases and 54 deaths, Venezuela had only recorded 167 cases and 9 deaths.

As COVID-19 grips the world, in country after country, there is socialization of healthcare and of production of some essential goods, which markedly departs from the capitalist norm

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.

There is growing interest in a Green New Deal, but far too little discussion among supporters about the challenging nature of the required economic transformation, the necessary role of public planning and ownership in shaping it, or the strategies necessary to institutionalize a strong worker-community voice in the process and final outcome.

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.