Month: May 2020

What will happen when Covid finally dies down and the Mega Depression winds up? Can ‘Dog Eat Dog’ Capitalism be replaced with a humane and simpler system and avoid Climate and Environment meltdown?

Early signs say NO WAY. Governments are happy to just print money.. but prefer to use it to prop up obsolete money spinners like aviation and petroleum.. We are angry and suffering but governments have used Lockdowns to practice total police and military control. First attempts at solidarity to stop wars were sabotaged by the US Bully State. The unions are weaker than ever and people more divided… Will we be branded as traitors for defying nationalist goals to restore neoliberalism on ‘The Long Road Back’..?’

What we need is a massive movement to spring up, horizontally organized without Parties and Conmen. Enough is enough, we have all the resources to create a new and sustainable world. Now it’s time to cancel the debts, scrap the weapons and THROW OUT THE 1%.

The Race to Replace a Dying Neoliberalism

CounterPunch.org Walden Bello Web site view

The morning will come
When the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs to me!

From Cabaret

In response to the cataclysm occasioned by the coronavirus, three lines of thinking are emerging.

One is that the emergency necessitates extraordinary measures, but the basic structure of production and consumption is sound, and the problem lies only in determining the moment when things can return to “normal.”

One might say that this is the dominant opinion among political and business elites. Representative of this outlook is the infamous Goldman Sachs-sponsored teleconference involving scores of stock market players in mid-March of this year, which concluded that “there is no systemic risk. No one is even talking about that. Governments are intervening in the markets to stabilize them, and the private banking sector is well capitalized. It feels more like 9/11 than it does 2008.”

A second line of thinking is that we are now in the “new normal,” and while the global economic system is not significantly out of kilter, important changes must be made to some of its elements, such as redesigning the workplace to accommodate the need for social distancing, strengthening public health systems (something even Boris Johnson now advocates after Britain’s National Health System saved his life), and even moving towards a “universal basic income.”

A third response is that the pandemic provides an opportunity for transforming a system that is ridden with deep economic and political inequalities and is profoundly destabilizing ecologically. One must not simply talk about accommodating a “new normal” or expanding social safety nets, but of decisively moving toward a qualitatively new economic system.

Continue reading “The Race to Replace Dying Neoliberalism.. Another World is Possible”

The culling of the herd – is this what is happening in Brazil, UK and USA?

Pro-Trump Media’s New Chorus On Coronavirus: Let People Die After first downplaying the coronavirus crisis, right-wing media briefly began to take it seriously. But now that President Donald Trump has vowed to defy health officials and reopen businesses, his favorite pundits have settled on a new message: Let people die.

Where did an investment fund economist get this knowledge and authority in order to reach that kind of conclusion? In other words: what is the disease that has been driving and legitimizing these people to mobilize for the reopening of Brazil’s economy while death rates only increase? Who produced this? Where did it come from? How does it reproduce? The answer is: we are dealing with 21st century Nazism with “natural selection” varnish. Systematic extermination as an ideology.

Act 1

“Following our numbers a little, I would say that Brazil is doing well”, says Guilherme Benchimol, economist at XP Investimentos, “the peak of the disease has passed when we analyze the middle class, the upper class”. The declaration day was May 5 – we had 7,321 deaths officially registered in the country.

Continue reading “Capitalists say ‘Let Them Die’ .. Covid Culling of the herd?”

Sprawling urban areas in Brazil, Nigeria and Bangladesh are all seeing COVID-19 infections rise rapidly.

Having ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest cities, the coronavirus pandemic is now spreading into the megacities of developing countries.

— County Sustainability Group


A market area in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, crowded with people despite the coronavirus pandemic, May 12, 2020. [Photo: Ahmed Salahuddin/NurPhoto]
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Sprawling urban areas in Brazil, Nigeria, and Bangladesh are all seeing COVID-19 infections rise rapidly.
We study the fragility and resilience of such cities and their urban peripheries, with the aim of encouraging data-driven policy decisions. Given its deadly trajectory in marginalized communities of hard-hit New York and London, coronavirus may well devastate much poorer cities.

Particularly concerning are the slum areas that are home to roughly a billion people— one in seven people on Earth. Characterized by insecure property rights, low-quality housing, limited basic services, and poor sanitation, these informal settlements aggregate risk factors that accelerate the spread of infection.

Yet, our research finds, many residents of slums and squatter settlements are not getting the help they need to survive the coronavirus pandemic.

DENSITY AND POVERTY
Overcrowding is one reason slums are known incubators of disease. Informal settlements are typically 10 times denser than neighboring areas of the same city.
The Dharavi slum in central Mumbai, for example, has some 97,000 residents per square mile, compared to 11,500 people per square mile elsewhere in the city. It is far harder to practice physical distancing, at home or on the street, in such close quarters.

Continue reading “A Billion of us Living in the Slums of World’s Megacities— missed by coronavirus plans”

LA TARCOTECA contrainfo via Pablo Heraklio Web site view

shared with thanks.. English translation thefreeonline. pics added.. note> the term ‘libertaria’ translated from Spanish is a synonym for ‘anarchist’ and doesn’t imply US right wingers!

ORIGINAL EN CASTELLANO ABAJO

We rescue a brief text that lists both reforms as well as transformations that our society must undertake in pursuit of a libertarian economy, respectful of people, other societies and the environment. It leaves us a question in the air. Can anarchism be globalized, or will we be chained forever to the designs of armies and hierarchs? Will this be our crossroads?

Your Health! _ Source – The transition to an anarchist economy 09/30/2015 by Jose Luis Carretero

A very respectable comrade asked me a while ago for contribution to a possible “economic program” for the libertarian movement. I had little time to write it, but what was basically sought was to open the debate for the writing of a book. This is, basically, what I sent, I think that, now, it can also serve, more than as a closed guide or dogmatic apparatus of things that I am not entirely clear about, as a text that drives an increasingly urgent debate on post-capitalism .

The social transformation necessary to start an economy entirely focused on an anarchist socialist paradigm requires a process of consolidation and development that involves several, temporarily delimited, stages. The construction of a new society and a new economy needs a gradual development, and at the same time entrenched in moments of revolutionary rupture of the preceding order.

It is a transition process that begins with social advances that empower the forces that obtain them, and the classes involved in the fight for their achievement. These advances are unfolding their effects, varying the previous status quo, reinforcing anarchist positions, and accumulating the necessary forces that must be fully expressed in moments of open revolutionary bankruptcy, in which the advancement processes will accelerate.

This dynamic vision of the process of building a transformed society, compared to the purely static conceptualizations that draw the desired scenario, but refuse to imagine and unravel how to achieve it from the current situation, begins with the delimitation of a minimum program to pose at the current moment.

Continue reading “The transition to an Anarchist Economy”