The Free

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”