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Capitalism

Capitalism Has Never Really Worked Out For The Earth

As we gather in Glasgow for two weeks of deliberations for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties #26, (COP26) otherwise known as the “Conference of Polluters” or the “Conference of Profiteers,” we must be like Jesus in the temple overturning the tables of the money changers. We can no longer accept business as usual in the vein of moneyed interests suppressing ambition and holding us back from the bold commitments necessary to turn the tide of climate change. Too often, we members of frontline communities convene at these meetings, raise our voices and demands, yet find ourselves unwitting spectators to the parade of dominating capitalists who are more concerned with maintaining the status quo and corporate interests than saving the planet.

World Gathering Of Peoples For Our Mother Earth

The climate crisis is one of the gravest global threats that we face in the defense of life, which places our own existence and of our Mother Earth’s at risk. The current anthropocentric model, which places human beings above nature and other living beings, has produced the current climate crisis and it is modifying the vital cycles of Mother Earth, causing the collapse of many ecosystems, the extinction of species, the change of ways of life of hundreds of millions of people all over the world, expanding hunger and poverty in the world and an increasing climate migration. We express the urgency of building a new civilizing horizon based on Living Well cosmo-biocentric vision where human beings live in harmony with all living beings of our Mother Earth and the need to put forward a new civilizing horizon that defends the community of life and the coexisting in harmony with nature.

Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way For Surveillance Capitalism

The death by starvation of Etwariya Devi, a 67-year-old widow from the rural Indian state of Jharkhand, might have passed without notice had it not been part of a more widespread trend. Like 1.3 billion of her fellow Indians, Devi had been pushed to enroll in a biometric digital ID system called Aadhaar in order to access public services, including her monthly allotment of 25kg of rice. When her fingerprint failed to register with the shoddy system, Devi was denied her food ration. Throughout the course of the following three months in 2017, she was repeatedly refused food until she succumbed to hunger, alone in her home. Premani Kumar, a 64-year-old woman also from Jharkhand, met the same demise as Devi, dying of hunger and exhaustion the same year after the Aadhaar system transferred her pension payments to another person without her permission, while cutting off her monthly food rations.

US Intervention And Capitalism Have Created A Monster In Honduras

Chilean author and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman recently memorialized Orlando Letelier, President Allende’s foreign minister. Agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet murdered Letelier in Washington in 1976. Dorfman noted that Chile and the United States were “on excellent, indeed obscenely excellent, terms (like they are today, shamefully, between the United States and the corrupt regime in Honduras).” The Honduran government headed by president Juan Orlando Hernández does have excellent relations with the United States. The alliance is toxic, however, what with the continued hold of capitalism on an already unjust, dysfunctional society. Hondurans will choose a new president on November 28.

Supply Chain Crisis: Workers’ Health And Safety Vs. Capitalists’ Profits

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, panic buying seemed to create a shortage of different necessities, including toilet paper. Midway through the COVID-19 pandemic, housing prices started rising drastically, as demand surpassed supply due to shortages of construction materials. As students returned to in-person learning, schools found nutritious food for school lunches more difficult to get, and the U.S. relaxed requirements that schools must comply with federal nutrition standards. Visit any grocery store recently and you are likely to find shelves bare of any number of items. A global shortage of computer chips has created a drastic reduction in the production of cars, computers and appliances.

Decolonization Or Extinction – Indigenous People’s Day 2021

In 2015, The Red Nation and a coalition of Native and non-Native organizations led a successful campaign to rename the second Monday of October Indigenous Peoples’ Day (IPD) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Albuquerque City Council issued a proclamation abolishing Columbus Day that was signed by Rey Garduño, Ken Sanchez, Klarissa Peña, Isaac Benton, Brad Winter, and Diane Gibson, with three council members abstaining.  The proclamation declared that the day “shall be used to reflect upon the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples on this land.”  For the first time this year, the city and their nefarious initiative “One Albuquerque,” are hosting an alternative to our annual IPD march and rally, with Albuquerque’s Mayor Tim Keller as the keynote speaker. 

Teaching Politically and the Problem of Afropessimism

In education, as in so many other disciplines, one of the increasingly dominant phrases is “anti-Blackness” and the theory of Afropessimism. The two foundational theorists here are Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism contends that “Blackness cannot be separated from slavery,” and that “the Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint,” whereas “the human’s relationship to violence is always contingent.”

On Contact: Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Part 2

On the show, the second of a two-part interview, Chris Hedges discusses with Professor David Harvey the social, political, and economic consequences of neoliberalism and globalization, exploring alienation, the rise of authoritarianism, the significance of China in the world economy, the geopolitics of capitalism, carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, and our collective response. In our previous show, we discussed central themes raised in ‘The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles’ by Professor David Harvey, who is distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Library Journal calls Professor Harvey “one of the most influential geographers of the later 20th century.”

On Contact: Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Part 1

On the show, the first of a two-part interview, Chris Hedges discusses with Professor David Harvey the reconfiguration of global capitalism, the contradictions of neoliberalism, the financialization of power, the commodification of spectacle, rate versus mass of surplus value, and other issues fundamental to economic theory. David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is a leading theorist in the field of urban studies. Library Journal calls Professor Harvey “one of the most influential geographers of the later 20th century.” Professor Harvey earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford.

Marxist Epidemiologist Calls Bullsh*t On Antivaxxers

Anti-scientific conspiracy theories are spreading, not just among the right, but even even among some segments of the left. To address this issue from a Marxist perspective, Rania Khalek spoke with Rob Wallace, an evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St. Paul and author of “Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19.” Rania asks "How do we as leftists deal with the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is the one that has the infrastructure to really rapidly produce these vaccines even if they're motivated by profit and not public good but at the same time they are making a massive profit? How do we deal with that contradiction?"

Understanding The Basics Of 21st-Century Democracy, Autocracy, And Capitalism

Democracy exists if and when a community organizes its self-governance around the full participation, on an equal basis, of all the members of the community. Its other, autocracy, exists when a community organizes (or allows) its governance by an individual or subgroup of that community, a ruler. Universal suffrage is clearly a step toward at least formal democracy because voters elect leaders. How real this formal democracy is depends on the inclusivity of the population voting and the concrete reality of voters’ equal influence on the election’s outcome. Residential communities in many parts of the modern world operate in formal democracies. However, they usually allow individuals with high levels of income and wealth to use these means to influence others in their voting, whereas individuals with low levels of income and wealth can and usually do wield less influence.

The Race Class Narrative Can Win

We’re glad to be at a point in American political discourse where the question being posed is how to talk about race and class, rather than whether to do so. For too long, many on the left, especially white progressives, have shied away from talking directly about race and racism. Talking about race, they have argued, is divisive and costs us electoral victories. This approach centers the experiences of white voters, who don’t feel the direct impact of racism in our economy or democracy, and neglects the concerns of people of color, who make up a large portion of our base. It also ignores the fact that race is always being discussed by our opponents. By not responding to the racial sentiments of their narratives, we leave their potent messages unopposed. As a result, we lose persuadable voters and fail to mobilize our base.

A Unified Story For A Divided World

Wars of position rage between “race reductionists” who insist on the political primacy of race and their “class reductionist” counterparts. But some of us, especially those of us who make use of racial capitalism as a set of frameworks, insist that such debate is tired. In Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers an intricate definition of racism: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” It follows that races are divisions of populations into hierarchies of vulnerability to premature death (the likely fate of the materially insecure). What’s the difference between “race” and “class,” then? They are two, compatible ways of explaining how society is split into strata of material security.

Decolonise The Green New Deal

The median person in the US consumes 44 million calories per day. The human body requires intake of 2 thousand calories per day. Exo-somatic consumption of energy – for non-metabolic purposes, such as transport or appliances – of the average citizen of the North is several hundred times larger than that of a poor citizen of the South. But even endosomatic consumption of energy – bodily calorie intake – is substantially less in the South. Hunger and undernourishment are still a reality for one-seventh of the planet’s human population. But working households in the North are not to blame for these differences; bio-ignorant capitalism is to blame. And these households are suffering its effects, too.

Amazon And The Destruction Of Competition And Livelihoods

Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods. Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.
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