Tag Archives | coronavirus

The wave of far-right anti-lockdown protests show how capitalist politics can create monsters. Worse might be on the way.

SSER-IDEAS Online Lecture Series — COVID-19 Pandemic: Policy Failures and Their Impact on the Lives of People

Media in the era of an incompetent president.

America’s billionaires have accrued more wealth in the past three weeks alone than they made in total prior to 1980.

In this blog post, I want to connect what we’re currently seeing in the retail sector during this pandemic to deep-seated narratives about the nature of economic exchange, in particular to the notion of “the market”.

But do these assumptions hold up to the test? To find out, we must first take a quick look at some recent history.

Given the exponentially rising death toll from COVID-19 and the devastating social and economic effects of brutal lockdowns, what could a humane and progressive response to the global pandemic look like?

Anti-Cuba zealots in the Trump administration have been enticing Cuban doctors working overseas to defect, paying journalists to write negative stories, slapping sanctions on Cubans in charge of the program, and strong-arming countries to expel Cuban doctors.

The rapidity with which the pandemic has consumed black communities provides an unvarnished look into the dynamics of race and class that existed long before it emerged.

The Trump Administration has spread the conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus came out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This accusation, which seeks to transfer responsibility for the pandemic to the Asian giant, has been rejected by the Chinese authorities for being without foundation.

“ALERT! Please do not ingest, inject, inhale, or otherwise use any disinfectant outside of its labeled instructions. And do not start using tanning beds or sunning without sunscreen.”

This pandemic health crisis exposes the injustices of the global economic order. It must be a turning point towards creating the systems, structures and policies that can always protect those who are marginalised and allow everyone to live with dignity.

More than a dozen health experts working for the WHO in Geneva relayed regular information to Mr Trump about COVID-19, U.S. and international officials have confirmed.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that the Great Lockdown, which has no end date, could very well lead to a loss of $9 trillion to global Gross Domestic Product over the entirety of 2020 and 2021; this number is greater than the combined economies of Japan and Germany. This scenario, the Fund’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva admits, ‘may actually be a more optimistic picture than reality produces’.

Under the guise of protecting workers and the public from the coronavirus, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced two weeks ago that it will not issue fines against companies that violate certain water, air, and hazardous-waste-reporting requirements.

Many people around the world are familiar with this ancient Chinese proverb. Today, this lovely metaphor has materialized and taken the form of a pandemic, wreaking havoc on a system where few felt safe and most had become accustomed to merely surviving.

We live in an era of plagues because of capitalist development, argues socialist author Mike Davis. But he also says coronavirus has exposed the gap between a tiny rich elite and the rest of us—and creates space to put forward socialist ideas

A Perspective from Chinese Dao thinking

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.

Rather than respond by focusing blame for the crisis squarely where it belongs—on Trump’s incompetent, reckless and self-centered management—and working to beat back the dangerously rising anti-Asian sentiment in this country, Biden and some of his supporting super PACs are choosing to adopt rather than challenge the anti-China premise of the attacks.