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U.S. declares a vaccine war on the World
Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against the world.
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Teaching Marx in a pandemic
Barnaby Raine writes to mark the launch of a new class on Marx and his writing, as part of The Brooklyn Institute summer season
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Facing the ecosocial crisis: Is a socialist planning of the economy feasible?
The current ecological and social crisis, a crisis which has seen its effects increased by a public health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a crisis which raises serious concerns over environmental sustainability and social polarization and which has a fundamental cause: the blind logic pursued by our economy system, where everything is secondary to profits.
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Apocalypse never: what coronavirus teaches us about doomsday denial
he current pandemic is giving humanity a crash course in apocalypse management. Whether COVID-19 is actually apocalyptic or not is debatable, but the pandemic has many of the characteristics that we associate with something of that scale.
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The power of propaganda: Americans think Trump’s COVID-19 performance better than China’s
Americans rate their own government’s response, along with that of the UK and Italy, higher than that of China despite those countries having much higher death and infection rates.
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Victory: Ohio’s plan to deny workers their unemployment insurance is shelved
In early May, Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine began reopening the state economy. And to support business and slash state expenses, both at worker expense, he had a “COVID-19 Fraud” form put up on the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services website where employers could confidentially report employees “who quit or refuse work when it is available due to COVID-19.”
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COVID-19 adds new dimensions to U.S.-China trade war
The Trump regime is ratcheting up its protectionist rhetoric vis-à-vis China. If this leads to new sanctions, it would worsen the COVID-induced trade crisis rather than help the U.S.
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Cuba applies very efficient national drugs to save critical and severe COVID-19 patients
The CIGB-258, a peptide designed to reduce inflammatory processes, and the monoclonal antibody Itolizumab (Anti-CD6) have shown great effectiveness for the survival of critical and severe COVID-19 patients in Cuba, announced Friday Francisco Duran, national director of epidemiology at the ministry of public health.
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Chart of the day
All told, 38.6 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past nine weeks.
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How to understand all this China stuff
The notion of “pre-crime” is the purview of dystopian horror fiction when applied to individual people, and there’s no reason we should find the prospect of attacking and destroying for hypothetical future offenses any less insane on an international scale.
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Why factory farming needs a fresh look following the COVID-19 pandemic
Taking a fresh look at animal production also involves considering its effect on world hunger.
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American exceptionalism and the American Left’s China double standard
The threat that the American Left sees in China aligns with the white supremacist underpinnings of American exceptionalism.
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What are the three concurrent crises of the coronavirus depression?
The Keynes crisis, the Minsky crisis and the Means crisis
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Mercenaries, pandemic and riots in Venezuela: A grassroots perspective
Venezuela is confronting COVID-19 amid foreign sanctions and mercenary incursions. Complicating matters further is the explosive combination of deep recession and a nationwide lockdown, which has triggered incidents of looting and riots.
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The lockdown protestors are not working class
Sarah Jones, in The Coronavirus Class War in New York Magazine, does a neat, tidy job of kneecapping the notion that the anti-lockdown protests are manned by workers who want to get back to their jobs so they can start making money again.
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The role of the state in Venezuela
Venezuelan former Vice President Elias Jaua calls for the government to rebuild the state and retake the reins of the economy.
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How the United States Government failed to prepare for the Global Pandemic
On March 20, just after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) sent a cable to U.S. State Department instructing officials how they should speak about China and the novel coronavirus, according to the Daily Beast, which obtained the cable.
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The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread, and as of 11 March 2020, 121,564 cases have been confirmed in more than 110 countries, with 4,373 deaths.
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Pandemic: How big banks and big AG share blame
Here in the U.S., agribusiness lines up with pharmaceutical and military contractors in terms of being a political force to be reckoned with and, in effect, help run the country. Their needs are protected so that these pathogens have the best lawyers on the planet.
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The COVID-19 crisis and the end of the ‘low-skilled’ worker
IN A PANDEMIC, “ESSENTIAL” LABORERS ARE WORKING, BUT THE LABOR MARKET ISN’T.