24 March 2020 — Michael Roberts Blog
According to AFP estimates, some 1.7 billion people across the world are now living under some form of lockdown as a result of the coronavirus. That’s almost a quarter of the world population. The world economy has seen nothing like this.
24 March 2020 — Black Agenda Radio
Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Black Trillion Dollar “Buying Power” is a Capitalist Hoax / James Baldwin’s African Awakening / Too Fast to Be a Woman
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24 March 2020 — Jonathan Cook
You can almost smell the fear-laden sweat oozing from the pores of television broadcasts and social media posts as it finally dawns on our political and media establishments what the coronavirus actually means. And I am not talking about the threat posed to our health.
24 March 2020 — Internationalist 360°
In these difficult times for humanity, confronted with the danger of constant predatory action by the greed and boundless ambition of the hegemonic powers in the name of the free market, free enterprise, wild neo-liberalism, the destruction of nature ravaged to extremes never before seen by decadent capitalism, only solidarity and responsibility illuminate our habitat.
24 March 2020 — The Canary
24 March 2020 — Novara Media
@craigoreyt
The vast majority of people first experienced the growing coronavirus crisis for themselves in a supermarket. Almost every store now has at least half a dozen bare aisles, if not more, and social media has been awash with pleas for so-called ‘panic buying’ to stop, which the government is now echoing.
24 March 2020 — True Publica
An editorial piece in The Lancet – the world’s most prestigious, and best known general medical journal warned two months ago of the oncoming conflict between an ill-prepared, under-funded national health service and an indiscriminate invisible killer in the form of the 2019 coronavirus. More recently The Lancet warned again of the problems that health workers would be facing and yet the government took no notice – until it was too late:
24 March, 2020 — Counter Currents
Text and Photos: Andre Vltchek
My last interview in Hong Kong
Imagine that you are in Hong Kong, in a city where “you are actually not supposed to be”, in the first place. You are ready to go home, to South America. But just two days before your departure, via Seoul and Amsterdam, your first Sky Team carrier, Korean Air, unceremoniously decides to cancel all flights from the territory.
24 March 2020 — UNZ Review
China suffered through the H1N1 coronavirus epidemic in 2008 largely because the CDC took 6 months to identify it and, as a result, 300,000 died prematurely. SARS (774 deaths) was the clincher. They created a hair-trigger alarm system, mandated post-mortem pneumonia DNA testing nationwide, and promoted the CDC head, Dr. George F. Gao[1], to Demigod.
17 March 2020 — Grayzone
23 March, 2020 — Counter Currents
Never discount the importance of venality in international relations. While pandemics should provide the glue for a unified front in response – we keep being told of fighting this horrendous “invisible enemy” – it’s business as usual in other respects. The United States, with a disparate, confused medical system that risks being overwhelmed, remains committed against that other country floundering in efforts to combat COVID-19: Iran. Instead of binding the nations, the virus, as with everything else, has served as a political obstacle.
23 March 2020 — Grayzone
Iran has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, and new US sanctions are making it worse. Alfred de Zayas, a former UN Special Rapporteur, says that intensified US sanctions against Iran and Venezuela during the crisis are “insane”, and possibly genocidal.
Guest: Alfred de Zayas, former UN Special Rapporteur and law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy.
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22 March 2020 — theplanningmotivedotcom
The market crash is now four weeks old. The first two weeks registered falls without a liquidity crisis (see pie chart below). The third week registered sharp falls with a liquidity crisis. The fourth week registered the biggest weekly falls with severe dislocation between assets because investors decided to be all out having been all in prior to February the 19th.
20 March 2020 — Left Business Observer
We are facing two crises at once, health and economic, that are related in very important ways. The covid-19 epidemic has done major damage around the world, but it’s highlighting some serious structural problems with the US social model that better-run countries are not so afflicted by. We are plagued by a deep economic polarization complicated by minimal social protections; severely diminished state capacity, with eroded institutional structures and extremely debased quality of personnel at the highest levels; years of underinvestment in basic infrastructure, both broadly and in health care particularly; and decades of neoliberal policies that have shaped a common sense based on competitive individualism, with little sense of social solidarity. That’s the longer-term context in which we face the acute crisis of this disease—which is almost certainly a portent of what we’ll face as the climate crisis worsens.
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
The epidemic reveals the stark truth, that the US dismantled and privatized its public health system, to fatten the pockets of the oligarchy and render working people more helpless and dependent.
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18 March 2020 — Black Agenda Report
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
COVID-19 is not just a health emergency. It has exposed the causes of inequality and suffering in this country.
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22 March 2020 — Internationalist 360°
Photo: Giuliano Salvatore
In our homes, as most Venezuelans are, and as it should be, occupied with the care of our sons, daughters and relatives, the occasion is propitious to think about the world in which we live, instead of becoming absorbed in fear.
21 March 2020 — Climate & Capitalism
Six new books to read while maintaining social distance. Yellow Earth; Socialist Practice; Friedrich Engels; Chicken History; Traveling Plants; Coal and Empire
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is an occasional feature. We can’t review every book we receive, but we will list and link to any that seem relevant to Climate & Capitalism’s mission, along with brief descriptions. Titles listed here may be reviewed in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that we agree with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
19 March 2020 — Edward Curtin
“Two categories of propaganda must be distinguished. The first strives to create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be reinforced. Its goal is to make the masses ‘available,’ by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination. The second category involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects. It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movement are sometimes necessary).” – Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus’ great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning to us today, but a warning in disguise. When he died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six, he had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
