Capitalism

Disunited States: Government Failure To Address Coronavirus Is Sparking A Mutual Aid Revolution

April 14, 2020 Eleanor Goldfield, Mintpress News. Create! Capitalism, COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Recession

I‘m not from DC, but I live here. I’m now a part of this living, breathing being that is a city. This city. It helps me to think of cities that way, even ones that I don’t fully feel at home in – like a body. And I’m like a blood transfusion. I know this isn’t my city, my body, but it’s where my life flows now, and so I best flow with it. This body holds me – it is my literal and figurative structure. I am one of the millions of cells rushing through the veins of this place, and although I’m a relative newcomer, I can feel that this body is not well. I can feel that familiar illness – it’s the same as any city I’ve ever lived in.. Every body is weakened and bowed under the weight of capitalism. Yet, there is a new illness – one that found a foothold in our immunocompromised bones and at the same time exposes the severity of that underlying sickness so old it’s etched in our souls.

The Coronavirus Crisis Exposes How Fragile Capitalism Already Was

April 13, 2020 By Stephanie Luce, Labor Notes. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Pandemic, Recession

When this is all over, will we be able to patch up the economy and get things back to normal? Trump certainly claims so. But he’s wrong. Weak attempts to patch up the problems of capitalism—as much as the coronavirus itself—are what got us into the current economic meltdown in the first place. Let’s define some terms. When we talk about the health of the economy, there are two parts: the “real economy,” which includes all the goods and services that we produce, and the “financial economy”: money, stock markets, banks, and credit. The coronavirus has affected the economy in stages: First, we saw the impact on the real economy as the spread of the virus in China led to slowed production in January 2020.

In Times Of Pandemic, Peasants Are United To Feed The People

April 13, 2020 La Via Campesina. Resist! Capitalism, COVID-19, International Solidarity, Peasants

On April 17, La Via Campesina will commemorate the International Day of Peasants’ Struggle in a context that once again validates the historical role of the peasantry in societies and their fundamental task of feeding the people, even in times of war, fascism, authoritarianism and pandemics. COVID-19 has crippled the world. This deadly virus has exposed the vulnerability of the current globalised food system dominated by industrial agriculture, and the dangers it poses to all life forms. We should learn from this crisis and invest in building local, resilient and diverse food systems. States must begin by implementing ‘food sovereignty’ through agroecological production and enabled by popular agrarian reforms.

Capitalism Has Failed In Fighting Coronavirus

April 10, 2020 Richard D. Wolff, Brave New Europe. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Economic collapse, Socialism

The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks “to get them through the crisis.” Government treasuries borrow vast sums to get the collapsed economy back into what they imagine is “the normal, pre-virus economy.” Capitalism’s leaders are rushing into policy failures because of their ideological blinders. The problem of policies aimed to return the economy to what it was before the virus hit is this: Global capitalism, by 2019, was itself a major cause of the collapse in 2020. Capitalism’s scars from the crashes of 2000 and 2008-2009 had not healed.

The US Is A Failed State, And COVID-19 Proves It

April 8, 2020 Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Failed State, United States

U.S. imperialism has a long-standing habit of imposing the most brutal forms of war and torture onto nations under the pretext of so-called humanitarian grounds. Humanitarian intervention and the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) have been used to destroy Libya, Syria, and Somalia and turn them into “failed states.” In many cases, however, these states were declared failures prior to U.S. intervention. Failure in the eyes of U.S. imperialism and its legion of profiteers is defined as any oppressed nation’s refusal to bow down to the economic and political dictates of a foreign imperial power. To be a “failed state” has always been a declaration of war by the U.S. and its imperial allies on the most oppressed and downtrodden nations of the world.

COVID-19: The Capitalist Emperor Has No Clothes

April 6, 2020 Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. Educate! American Exceptionalism, Capitalism, COVID-19, Global Recession

As the capitalist emperor strolls down the avenue of U.S. public opinion butt-naked but for the first time since the 1930s, more and more people are starting to realize that they were not crazy. The brutal failures of the capitalist system that they saw were not a figment of their imagination or a diversion from their own personal failures. Instead, they were the awful reality of degradation, dehumanization and social insecurity embedded in the system. Many could see that reality but wouldn’t allow themselves to believe their own eyes and experiences. They couldn’t call it out like the kid in the fable – until now. The claim that the U.S. was an exceptional nation and that the capitalist order represented the highest expression of human development has been shattered by the second global collapse of the capitalist order within twelve years.

Taxpayers Paid Millions To Design A Low-Cost Ventilator For A Pandemic

April 5, 2020 Patricia Callahan, Sebastian Rotella and Tim Golden, ProPublica. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, HHS, Ventilators

Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to plug a crucial hole in its preparations for a global pandemic, signing a $13.8 million contract with a Pennsylvania manufacturer to create a low-cost, portable, easy-to-use ventilator that could be stockpiled for emergencies. This past September, with the design of the new Trilogy Evo Universal finally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, HHS ordered 10,000 of the ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each. But as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe, there is still not a single Trilogy Evo Universal in the stockpile. Instead, last summer, soon after the FDA’s approval, the Pennsylvania company that designed the device — a subsidiary of the Dutch appliance and technology giant Royal Philips N.V. — began selling two higher-priced commercial versions of the same ventilator around the world.

On Market Solutions To The Covid-19 Crisis

April 4, 2020 Jack Rasmus, Znet. Educate! Big Banks, Capitalism, Corporate Bailout, Federal Reserve, Recession

In 2008 the Federal Reserve provided more than $4 trillion to bail out the banks. Now it is providing more than $6 trillion (thus far)—and this time the banks haven’t even failed yet! The Fed has opened a free money spigot to investors, bankers, and to big business of all types, and has simply declared ‘come on in and take it’. And if the $6 trillion to date isn’t enough, we’ll provide more. For the first time ever the Fed is now providing free money not only to bankers, but to credit card companies, mortgage companies, corporate bondholders, and even to investors in derivatives like Exchange Traded Funds, or ETFs. Next, it will start buying stocks to prop up those markets. Its cousin central bank, the Bank of Japan, has been doing that for years now.

When The Invisible Hand Gives You The Finger

April 4, 2020 Dorothee Benz, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Media, Politics

Since the days of Adam Smith, capitalists have been arguing that unfettered markets are the best way to organize the economy. Smith famously said that the rich are “led by an invisible hand” to, “without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.” The rise of the welfare state in the wake of the Great Depression tempered such magical thinking for a few decades, but the ascent of neoliberalism in the last half-century has brought a resurgence in market fundamentalism, in both theory (very much including the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post) as well as practice. Yet none of the steady stream of articles from these outlets attesting to heartbreaking shortages of medical equipment in coronavirus-ravaged areas in the US—“A NY Nurse Dies. Angry Co-Workers Blame a Lack of Protective Gear” (New York Times, 3/26/20), “Unprotected and Unprepared: Home Health Aides Who Care for Sick, Elderly Brace for Covid-19” (Washington Post, 3/24/20), “NY May Need 18,000 Ventilators Very Soon. It Is Far Short of That” (New York Times, 3/17/20), or “The Hardest Questions Doctors May Face: Who Will Be Saved? Who Won’t? “ (New York Times, 3/21/20), for instance—have stopped to ask why the laws of supply and demand have so catastrophically failed in this crisis.

Coronavirus Opens The Door To Big Changes, The Left Faces Pushback

April 2, 2020 George Lakey, Waging Nonviolence. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Democratic Socialism, Nordic Model

Emergencies have a way of shaking up old, limiting beliefs. The coronavirus pandemic is pushing people back to the drawing board. In the United States, many are noticing the institutional failures forced on us in recent decades, during what billionaire Warren Buffett calls the “class warfare” waged by the economic elite. The health crisis opens the door to bolder thinking. Even establishment politicians today consider moves that cost trillions, but their motivation is to save the existing system, not to transition to a better one. For many Americans, however, it’s time for a system change. Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch. The American left in recent years has been shaking off its vision-aversion that began in the Reagan presidency.

On The Front Line Of COVID-19: Doctor Calls For System Change

March 31, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast Capitalism, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Medicare for all, New York City (NYC)

New York is the area hardest hit by the coronavirus currently in the United States with over 60,000 cases and over 1,000 deaths, ranking it as the sixth highest number of cases in the world. The area in and around New York City has the most cases. Governor Cuomo is scrambling for hospital beds and equipment. The Army Corps of Engineers has been called in to convert convention centers and other large spaces into temporary hospitals. A naval hospital ship is heading up from southern Virginia to provide support. The city is bringing in refrigerated trucks to store dead bodies and China is sending planeloads of medical supplies. We speak with Dr. Mike Pappas, who is working on the front line of this crisis about COVID-19, how health professionals are handling it, how it is exposing the flaws in our healthcare and economic systems and what systems would protect people.

The Wall Street Journal’s Pitch For Mass Murder

March 29, 2020 J. E. Karla, HamptonThink.org. Educate! Capitalism, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Trump

Not even two weeks into an extraordinary response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, the upper echelons of capital are wondering whether saving millions of lives is really worth the damage being done to their investment portfolios. According to reports, the debate among the ruling class is over whether or not to walk back some of the measures taken to slow the spread of the virus -- efforts already considered tardy and inadequate by public health experts -- in order to minimize business losses. Like many elite notions, this idea was first launched in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. An unsigned editorial there is the most visible the vanguard of the bourgeoisie ever really make their deliberations, and (behind a paywall, of course) was especially candid.

The Pathogenic Profits System: Beyond Begging, Praying, And Capital

March 27, 2020 Paul Street, Counterpunch.org Educate! Capitalism, Ideology, Profit

We live in an age of Orwellian untruth where falsehood is the norm. One key falsehood worth unmasking is the claim that the current COVID-19 stock market decline, soon to usher in a full-on recession, is a “black swan” – an unpredictable (and supposedly unpredicted) “surprise” event with great and negative consequences outside the normal operations of capitalism. Nonsense. The new coronavirus is not really a surprise to those who know anything about the history of disease. Epidemics, like financial crises, have been a recurrent occurrence in the record of human civilization. Hundreds of epidemics have killed countless millions of people across a vast swath of human history. Wikipedia lists at least 80 epidemics, including 13 pandemics (a disease prevalent over a whole country or the world) since the onset of the modern world system in the 16th Century.

We Won’t Go Back To Normal, Because Normal Was The Problem

March 27, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental Institute Educate! Capitalism, China, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Neoliberalism

It is hard to remember that just a few weeks ago, the planet was in motion. There were protests in Delhi (India) and Quito (Ecuador), eruptions against the old order that ranged from anger at the economic policies of austerity and neoliberalism to frustration with the cultural policies of misogyny and racism. Ingeniously, in Santiago (Chile), during its wave after wave of protests, someone projected a powerful slogan onto the side of a building: ‘we won’t go back to normal, because normal was the problem’. Now, in the midst of the novel coronavirus, it seems impossible to imagine a return to the old world, the world that left us so helpless before the arrival of these deadly microscopic particles. Waves of anxiety prevail; death continues to stalk us. If there is a future, we say to each other, it cannot mimic the past.

Capitalism Is An Incubator For Pandemics. Socialism Is The Solution.

March 20, 2020 Mike Pappas and Tatiana Cozzarelli, Leftvoice.org Create! Capitalism, Coronavirus COVID-19

Coronavirus is wreaking havoc across the world. Capitalism cannot adequately respond to a global health crisis. That’s why we need socialism. Anew coronavirus called “SARS-CoV-2” — known colloquially by the name of the disease it causes called “coronavirus disease 2019” or “COVID-19” — is wreaking havoc around the world. In Italy, the death toll has risen to 366 today and the country just extended its quarantine measures nationwide.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

assetto corsa mods

Daily movement news and resources