World Archives - Page 17 of 107

31May

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Health, Politics, World

From Plague to a Livable World

by EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The 2020 corona virus pandemic is not merely killing countless people. It is also having invisible but deleterious effects: psychological, political, and intellectual. Some people cannot cope with the severe economic effects of the plague, the constant barrage of bad news, and of being alone and isolated. They probably commit suicide. Others enter realms of fantasy and conspiracy. And still others, who know how to oil the wheels of power and influence, are taking advantage of America’s corrupt Trump administration. It’s like we are back to the dark ages when religious superstition, oppression, ignorance and oligarchy dominated life and politics. In 2020, our first sense that things are wrong is our “distancing” fro...

28May

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Health, World

Ebola ’14 vs. Covid ‘19

by: CAROLINE HURLEY Security, claim peace scientists, is the experience and expectation of well-being. Analyzing management of the major 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is instructive given Covid 19’s global rampage. Despite internal UN dysfunction, especially the veto system pitting members at cross-purposes, that organization proved its worth. Moral ambiguity, even disingenuity, about oil and Africom aside, America’s response was particularly stellar. The contrast with supervision of the Covid ‘19 outbreak is stark. Eugene Jarecki stated in a recent Washington Post op-ed, that “had the guidelines been implemented earlier, a crucial period in the exponential spread of the virus would have been mitigated…and approximately 60 percent of American COVID-19 deaths could have been av...

25May

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Human Rights, Politics, World

The Future Is Up for Grabs

History is made, not decreed, which is why on May 11th, activists from dozens of different countries launched Progressive International, a global initiative with a mission to unite, organize and mobilize progressive forces. by: Laura Flanders The future is up for grabs. Let’s not let the kingpins be the only ones reaching for it. (Photo: Screenshot) When it comes to cashing in on Covid-19, the race has just begun. Whether you’re talking about education or contact tracing or medicine or mind control, an anti-democratic, dystopian future is being charted while we the people are locked down, locked up and locked out. Google is grabbing our data, Microsoft is coming for our classrooms and Amazon wants to be our one-stop, only shop. Naomi Klein’s latest piece, “Screen New Deal” in...

Coronavirus and the Constitution: Entering the Not-So-Brave New World

25May

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Health, Politics, World

Coronavirus and the Constitution: Entering the Not-So-Brave New World

By Prof. Lynn Wolfe Two months have passed since the lockdown began, and statistics indicate that the coronavirus death toll hasn’t risen as high as we might have supposed. Yet already we hear rhetoric of a “post-COVID world,” hauntingly reminiscent of the “post-9/11 world.” However, unlike the tangible event of 9/11, COVID is a threat of an entirely different nature, an “invisible enemy.” The enemy isn’t “out there” to defeat in the old-fashioned way, with bombs and machine guns. But all the same, its pervasiveness renders us into a constant state of paranoia. Even our loved ones become potential threats; we all pose a risk to those around us, therefore perpetrating the omnipresent danger. To use the post-9/11 term, we are all terrorists. That’s why we must stay under ...

24May

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Health, Human Rights, Politics, World

Oxfam Report Details 'Catastrophic Failure' of Efforts to Coordinate Global Ceasefire During Covid-19 Crisis

"Managing coronavirus is hard enough when a country is at peace but fueling conflict on top of a pandemic is reprehensible." byJessica Corbett, A woman named Mary at the Mangaten IDP Camp in South Sudan holds up her hands, which bear the message, "Peace will give us our home back." (Photo: Robert Fogarty/Oxfam) Despite efforts from diplomats and world leaders—including United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres—the international community has failed to establish a global ceasefire during the coronavirus pandemic, which advocates argue is essential to help protect two billion people from Covid-19, according to Oxfam International. Conflict in the Time of Coronavirus, an Oxfam report released Tuesday, explains that "at the very moment where we need all of our resources to...

20May

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Health, Politics, World

How Will COVID-19 Change the World?

BYAmy Goodman, Democracy Now Pandemics, like revolution, war and economic crises, are key determinants of historic change. We look at the history of epidemics, from Black Death to smallpox to COVID-19, and discuss how the coronavirus will reshape the world with leading medical historian Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. He is a professor emeritus at Yale University who has been in Italy since the pandemic began, and himself survived a COVID-19 infection. TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Forty-eight states are at least partially reopening this week, even as more th...

Right to repair: a threat to monopoly superprofits

17May

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Health, Politics, World

Right to repair: a threat to monopoly superprofits

Apple are using their monopoly to rob workers by designing their phones and laptops to break. It’s wasteful, anti-environment and anti-worker; it’s capitalism! Proletarian writers Technology repair engineers, hobbyists and farmers have joined together in an unlikely alliance to fight for the right to repair their own machines. Original equipment manufacturers, including laptop and smartphone manufacturer Apple and agricultural machinery producer John Deere, have been making it more and more challenging for their products to be repaired by third parties. These companies are moving to monopolise the repair market for their products. Under the pretence of protecting consumers from unlicensed repairs, they have been using law enforcement, asset seizure and obfuscation to preve...

The corona pandemic and the capitalist world economic crash of 2020

14May

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Health, Politics, World

The corona pandemic and the capitalist world economic crash of 2020

Our rulers are keen to convince us that the deepest depression in the history of capitalism is a random and unpredictable ‘black swan’ event. Ranjeet Brar The onset of lockdown in Italy turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. A crisis that has been brewing for several years, and which has at its root the saturation of global markets that has been worsening since the late 1970s, has finally broken out in full force – and it looks set to be the worst that global capitalism has ever experienced. As this article was being written, in the last week of April 2020, there was already enough information – and disinformation – about the coronavirus pandemic (novel coronavirus disease 2019, SARS-Cov-2 or Covid-19) to fill an encyclopaedia. It is an all-encompassing topi...

14May

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Health, Politics, World

The economic crisis and coronavirus

In fighting capitalist exploitation and the war danger, workers will ultimately seek a way out through socialist revolution. Ella Rule As is abundantly obvious, the coronavirus pandemic is wreaking untold damage on the world economy, and on the national economies of every country on the planet. What the coronavirus has done is to act as the catalyst for the re-emergence with even greater force of the 2008 capitalist crisis of overproduction. The world was already teetering on the brink of economic collapse, and the coronavirus has given it the kick that has sent it spiralling into the abyss. As Eric Toussaint pointed out in a recent article aptly entitled No, the coronavirus is not responsible for the fall of stock prices: “Over the past two yea...

13May

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Health, Politics, UN, World

UN Labor Agency Warns 1.6 Billion Workers at Risk of Having Their ‘Livelihoods Destroyed’ by Pandemic

"As the pandemic and the jobs crisis evolve, the need to protect the most vulnerable becomes even more urgent," says International Labor Organization Director-General Guy Ryder. by: Jessica Corbett, Alex Hernandez prepares sells a "torta de tamal" in his tamales stand at Baja California Avenue on April 17, 2020 in Mexico City, Mexico. After the government suspended nonessential activities to halt Covid-19 spread, the informal food street industry suffered a drastic reduction of customers, between 60% and 80%, according to merchants. (Photo: Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images) The United Nations labor agency warned Wednesday that "1.6 billion workers in the informal economy—that is nearly half of the global workforce—stand in immediate danger of having their livelihoods ...