Re: [Marxism] Climate experts call for 'dangerous' Michael Moore film to be taken down | Environment | The Guardian

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Project wrote

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-dangerous-documentary-planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-taken-down

Richard Heinberg, who is featured in the film as interviewee but who is 
not identified with its production or construction of its story line, 
gives a more balanced picture in this review 
https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/richard-heinberg-review-planet-of-the-humans/. 
I agree with him that over all, given the limited exposure available for 
any documentary critical of prevailing convention, and the depth of the 
crisis, this documentary is worth watching. It does without question 
open up a lot of areas that most people, if not the more-or-less 
informed who are providing these critiques, are still gulled and totally 
uninformed about.


Of course he's right about facile technofixes and the ominous overtones 
of production for profit taking over the environmental movement; but my 
flesh creeps every time someone brings up overpopulation, as Heinberg 
does here and as also does this documentary, as a main problem, without 
more. It's left up in the air, to float around and collect all kinds of 
toxic reactions.


First of all, the population has increased virtually exponentially for 
reasons that need to be aired and explored, so that the right wing and 
their liberal cohorts (even some on the left) don't prevail in 
identifying victims as cause and being complicit in one way or another 
in elimination of the poor and those least able to protect themselves.


Just to review some of the considerations:

Reasons for the population explosion include of course advances in 
sanitation and healthcare and the fact that, until very recently, most 
of the world's people were in rural, peasant, farm-based communities, 
where the life they lived became increasingly at risk as capital drove 
them to the wall by monopolizing the best land and by producing massive 
quantities of cheap agricultural goods; and with the continuing poverty 
and high mortality rates, historically and concurrently and among other 
cultural reasons they produced more children to provide for reproduction 
of the products of their land and for their old age in regions with no 
public provision for the elderly.


Then it's readily evident that, as more fortunate nations produced more 
adequate foodstuffs for much of their populace, the birth rate in those 
places rapidly dropped, as it would anywhere, given more adequate 
satisfaction of needs.


And needless to say, the poor in the world are not at all the consumers 
of diminishing resources responsible for per capita overconsumption - 
rather, it's the upper and middle classes, who remain largely in denial, 
oblivious and culpable in these and related crimes against humanity.


Distribution of what's now produced is so skewed across the planet, so 
much of the arable land is given over to livestock, biofuels and other 
superfluouscommodities, or otherwise occupied with useless or 
dispensable luxury and sprawling conurban complexes, and is abused by 
mono-cropping, fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides and 
clear-cut forests and dead soil. How would we know how much is enough or 
how many people is really too much? Certainly not by divination or by 
sputtering old Malthusian misconclusions.


That's not covered in the comments on this documentary that I have seen.

And the discussants don't grab on and hold fast to the ineluctable 
conclusion that it is neither technofixes nor even solar and wind 
alternatives nor individual adjustment in consumption that will solve 
our problems; again, it's root and branch extirpation of capital as the 
primary (dis)organizer of production of our needs.


I kind of identify with Vijay Prashad, that we should no longer 
juxtapose ourselves as the "left" against some balancing "right": we 
have proceeded way beyond that - capital as solution is dead, and so 
figuratively are its apologists.

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[Marxism] "hundreds of strikes"

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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Amazing how we miss thisinformation. but I'm not sure how much longer they
will be able to keep it under wraps:

https://paydayreport.com/defying-trumps-order-nebraska-meatpackers-strike-pa-national-guard-replaces-striking-nurses-richmond-threatens-to-fire-striking-nurses/

"Before, we’d see 2-3 strikes in a week; hence a weekly newsletter made
sense. Now, we’re dealing with at least 2-3 strikes a day. So, Payday will
publish regular, often daily afternoon round-ups of the strike and other
major labor activity.

151 Strikes Across the U.S. since March 1st

Our strike tracker is now up to 151 strikes across the U.S. (Check it out
here ).
You’ll see many of the strikes listed here and others.

Trump Orders Meatpacking Plants to Stay Open, but Workers Have Other Ideas

Earlier today, Trump announced that he intended to use the power of the
federal governmen
t
and the Defense Production Act to keep meat processing plants open
throughout the United States.

The move comes as massive outbreaks with hundreds of workers have hit
meatpacking plants throughout the U.S. As a result, scores of meatpacking
plants have closed because of outbreaks.

Strikes and mass sickouts at a dozen meatpacking plants throughout the U.S.
have led to the closure of additional plants.

It’s unclear how Trump intends to use the Defense Production Act to force
meat packing processing workers back into the assembly line.

Organized labor immediately denounced the move.

“We only wish that this administration cared as much about the lives of
working people as it does about meat, pork, and poultry products. When
poultry plants shut down, it’s for deep cleaning and to save workers’
lives,” said Stuart Applebaum, president of Retail, Wholesale, and
Department Store Union. “If the administration had developed meaningful
safety requirements early on as they should have and still must do, this
would not even have become an issue.”

In Defiance of Trump, Nebraska Meatpacker Walks Off the Job at Smithfield

The prospect of meat shortages, which increasingly seem likely according to
experts as dozens of plants have been shut down by outbreaks or strikes,
would be politically embarrassing to Trump. "

See ink for more.
-- 
*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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Re: [Marxism] Meatpacking strikes

[Michael Meeropol via Marxism]

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Am I missing something.  With meat-packing plants becoming killing fields,
shouldn't we ALL be refraining from eating meat until they become paragons
of safety?

Eggs, peanut butter and jelly, soy products --- cheese??

I'm serious --- I think we ought to start doing that --

(and how do we contribute to strike funds??)
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[Marxism] WTF Is Jacobin’s Editor Thinking in Voting Green?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Good for Bhaskar Sunkara.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/sunkara-jacobin-green-party/

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[Marxism] Meatpacking strikes

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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https://mailchi.mp/373696479427/defying-trumps-order-nebraska-meatpackers-strike-pa-national-guard-replaces-striking-nurses-richmond-threatens-to-fire-striking-bus-drivers?e=ac86e841cf
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[Marxism] Meatpacking strikes

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgxwHNCrgTqjRRFwGpxlCkCdHvmXv
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[Marxism] Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Heh-heh, Bouie cites Cedric J. Robinson. The Old Mole is on his way.)

NY Times Op-Ed, April 28, 2020
Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s
By Jamelle Bouie

Class consciousness does not flow automatically out of class identity. 
Being a worker does not necessarily mean you will come to identify as a 
worker. Instead, you can think of class consciousness as a process of 
discovery, of insights derived from events that put the relationships of 
class into stark relief.


Or as the political theorist Cedric J. Robinson observed about the Civil 
War and Emancipation,


"Groups moved to the logic of immediate self-interest and to historical 
paradox. Consciousness, when it did develop, had come later in the 
process of the events. The revolution had caused the formation of 
revolutionary consciousness and had not been caused by it. The 
revolution was spontaneous."


We aren’t yet living through a revolution. But we are seeing how 
self-interest and paradox are shaping the consciousness of an entire 
class of people. The coronavirus pandemic has forced all but the most 
“essential” workers to either leave their jobs or work from home. And 
who are those essential workers? They work in hospitals and grocery 
stores, warehouses and meatpacking plants. They tend to patients and 
cash out customers, clean floors and stock shelves. They drive trucks, 
deliver packages and help sustain this country as it tries to fight off 
a deadly virus.


The close-quarters, public-facing nature of this work mean these workers 
are also more likely to be exposed to disease, and many of them are 
furious with their employers for not doing enough to protect them. To 
protect themselves, they’ve begun to speak out. Some have even decided 
to strike.


At the start of the crisis, in mid-March, bus drivers in Detroit refused 
to drive, citing safety concerns. “The drivers didn’t feel safe going on 
the bus, spreading their germs and getting germs from anybody,” Glenn 
Tolbert, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 26, said in an 
interview with The Detroit News. “We are on the front lines and picking 
up more sick people than doctors see. This was a last resort but drivers 
didn’t feel safe.” Their actions prompted officials to increase 
cleaning, provide masks to passengers and drivers, and eliminate fares 
to keep person-to-person interactions to a minimum.


That same month, at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, a group of 
workers walked out over safety concerns, chanting, “How many cases we 
got? Ten!” in reference to workers there who had tested positive for the 
coronavirus. Amazon fired Chris Smalls, the worker who led the 
demonstration, supposedly for violating the warehouse’s 
social-distancing policy, but this didn’t stop other workers at other 
warehouses from organizing walkouts to protest a lack of protective 
equipment. (Notably, Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, 
has informed Amazon that her office is scrutinizing the firing of Mr. 
Smalls.)


Workers at Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, went on strike to demand paid 
leave and free coronavirus testing, as did workers for the 
grocery-delivery service Instacart, who demanded protective supplies and 
hazard pay. Sanitation workers in Pittsburgh staged a similar strike 
over a lack of protective gear, and workers at America’s meatpacking 
plants are staying home rather than deal with unsafe conditions.


It’s true these actions have been limited in scope and scale. But if 
they continue, and if they increase, they may come to represent the 
first stirrings of something much larger. The consequential strike wave 
of 1934 — which paved the way for the National Labor Relations Act and 
created new political space for serious government action on behalf of 
labor — was presaged by a year of unrest in workplaces across the 
country, from factories and farms to newspaper offices and Hollywood sets.


These workers weren’t just discontented. They were also coming into 
their own as workers, beginning to see themselves as a class that when 
organized properly can work its will on the nation’s economy and 
political system


American labor is at its lowest point since the New Deal era. 
Private-sector unionization is at a historic low, and entire segments of 
the economy are unorganized. Depression-era labor leaders could look to 
President Franklin Roosevelt as an ally — or at least someone open to 
negotiation and bargaining — but labor today must face off against the 
relentlessly anti-union Donald Trump. Organized capital, working through 
the Republican Party, has a powerful grip on the nation’s legal 
institutions, including th

[Marxism] Beware of studies claiming covid-19 death rates are smaller than expected - The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/28/beware-studies-claiming-covid-19-death-rates-are-smaller-than-expected/

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[Marxism] Fired in a Pandemic ‘Because We Tried to Start a Union,’ Workers Say

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, April 28, 2020
Fired in a Pandemic ‘Because We Tried to Start a Union,’ Workers Say
By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Rachel Abrams

Truck drivers and warehouse workers at Cort Furniture Rental in New 
Jersey had spent months trying to unionize in the hopes of securing 
higher wages and better benefits. By early this year, they thought they 
were on the cusp of success.


But when the coronavirus arrived, Cort, which is owned by Warren 
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, laid off its truck drivers and replaced 
them with contractors, workers said. The union-organizing plans were dashed.


“They fired us because we tried to start a union,” said Julio Perez, who 
worked in Cort’s warehouse in North Bergen, N.J.


As American companies lay off millions of workers, some appear to be 
taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis to target workers who are in 
or hope to join unions, according to interviews with more than two dozen 
workers, labor activists and employment lawyers.


Nurses in North Carolina accused Mission Hospital, which is owned by the 
for-profit hospital chain HCA Healthcare, of using the pandemic to delay 
a union election. At Uovo Fine Arts, a company that packages and 
transports art for wealthy individuals and galleries, workers said that 
they were laid off as punishment for trying to unionize last year. 
Everlane, the online clothing company, laid off much of its 
customer-service team four days after a small number of its members 
informed the company’s chief executive that they had enough support to 
form a union. The company that owns The Plain Dealer newspaper in 
Cleveland this month laid off journalists who were in a guild and 
increased its reliance on non-unionized workers.


Companies say the layoffs are legitimate responses to an extraordinary 
economic crisis that has left many businesses on the cusp of collapse, 
not punishment for unionizing. Unionized employees tend to be more 
expensive, and getting rid of them can be an especially potent 
cost-cutting move.


Some big companies have accused workers of trying to exploit the crisis 
to glean public sympathy and gain momentum for unionization. A 
spokeswoman at Mission Hospital, for example, said that National Nurses 
United, the union behind the drive, “is trying to use this crisis to 
advance its own interest — organizing more members.”


There already have been some well-publicized cases of employees at major 
companies agitating for change — and then feeling that they are being 
punished for it.


Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, N.Y., recently accused 
the company of firing employees who complained about working shoulder to 
shoulder in the midst of the pandemic. In a letter sent last week, the 
New York attorney general, Letitia James, said the company may have 
violated federal worker safety laws and the state’s whistle-blower 
protections when it fired one worker.


In Louisville, a worker at Trader Joe’s supermarkets said he was fired 
after he created a Facebook page to discuss working conditions. On March 
31, Trader Joe’s chief executive circulated a letter opposing labor 
unions and calling any attempts to recruit workers “a distraction.” A 
spokeswoman for Trader Joe’s denied that the worker had been fired 
because of his Facebook post. Amazon said that it respected its 
employees’ rights to protest, but that those rights “do not provide 
blanket immunity against bad actions.”


“This is a continuation of behavior that has become all too common, of 
employers being willing to use increasingly aggressive tactics to stop 
unionizing,” said Sharon Block, a former National Labor Relations Board 
member appointed by former President Barack Obama. “The pandemic has 
given them another tool in their toolbox.”


Companies have seized on crises before to target union organizers, said 
Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. During 
the 1918 influenza pandemic, just as organizers were making inroads at 
steel plants and big industrial companies like General Electric, local 
officials, at the behest of big companies, began banning meetings. Their 
stated rationale, Mr. McCartin said, was public health and the risk of 
workers infecting one another at large gatherings. G.E. managed to stall 
union-organizing drives, he said.


During the Great Depression, Mr. McCartin said, companies targeted union 
members for layoffs.


What makes this time even tougher for union organizing, Mr. McCartin 
said, is that it combines a pandemic with a period of mass layoffs. “I 
suspect that just like the pandemic itself, a lot more of this is 
happening than we even realize,” he sai

[Marxism] The Secret Group of Scientists and Billionaires Pushing a Manhattan Project for Covid-19

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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WSJ, April 27, 2020
The Secret Group of Scientists and Billionaires Pushing a Manhattan 
Project for Covid-19

By Rob Copeland

A dozen of America’s top scientists and a collection of billionaires and 
industry titans say they have the answer to the coronavirus pandemic, 
and they found a backdoor to deliver their plan to the White House.


The eclectic group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture 
capitalist, Tom Cahill, who lives far from the public eye in a 
one-bedroom rental near Boston’s Fenway Park. He owns just one suit, but 
he has enough lofty connections to influence government decisions in the 
war against Covid-19.


These scientists and their backers describe their work as a lockdown-era 
Manhattan Project, a nod to the World War II group of scientists who 
helped develop the atomic bomb. This time around, the scientists are 
marshaling brains and money to distill unorthodox ideas gleaned from 
around the globe.


They call themselves Scientists to Stop Covid-19, and they include 
chemical biologists, an immunobiologist, a neurobiologist, a 
chronobiologist, an oncologist, a gastroenterologist, an epidemiologist 
and a nuclear scientist. Of the scientists at the center of the project, 
biologist Michael Rosbash, a 2017 Nobel Prize winner, said, “There’s no 
question that I’m the least qualified.”


This group, whose work hasn’t been previously reported, has acted as the 
go-between for pharmaceutical companies looking for a reputable link to 
Trump administration decision makers. They are working remotely as an ad 
hoc review board for the flood of research on the coronavirus, weeding 
out flawed studies before they reach policy makers.


The group has compiled a confidential 17-page report that calls for a 
number of unorthodox methods against the virus. One big idea is treating 
patients with powerful drugs previously used against Ebola, with far 
heftier dosages than have been tried in the past.


The Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs 
have already implemented specific recommendations, such as slashing 
manufacturing regulations and requirements for specific coronavirus drugs.


National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins told people this 
month that he agreed with most of the recommendations in the report, 
according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people 
familiar with the matter. The report was delivered to cabinet members 
and Vice President Mike Pence, head of the administration’s coronavirus 
task force.


Dr. Cahill’s primary asset is a young lifetime of connections through 
his investment firm. They include such billionaires as Peter Thiel, Jim 
Palotta and Michael Milken—financiers who afforded him the legitimacy to 
reach officials in the middle of the crisis. Dr. Cahill and his group 
have frequently advised Nick Ayers, Mr. Pence’s longtime aide, and 
agency heads through phone calls over the past month.


No one involved with the group stands to gain financially. They say they 
are motivated by the chance to add their own connections and levelheaded 
science to a coronavirus battle effort that has, on both state and 
federal levels, been strained.


“We may fail,” said Stuart Schreiber, a Harvard University chemist and a 
member of the group. “But if it succeeds, it could change the world.”


Steve Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics and the co-chairman of 
Bain Capital—as well as one of Dr. Cahill’s investors—helped copy edit 
drafts of their report, and he passed a version to Goldman Sachs Group 
Inc. Chief Executive David Solomon. Mr. Solomon got it to Treasury 
Secretary Steven Mnuchin.


The group’s members say they are aware that many of their ideas may not 
be implemented, and could be ignored altogether by the Trump administration.


This account is based on interviews with scientists, businesspeople, 
government officials, as well as a review of related documents.


Break out

Only two years ago, Dr. Cahill was studying for his M.D. and PhD. at 
Duke University, conducting research on rare genetic diseases and 
wearing $20 Costco slacks. He assumed he would continue the work after 
graduation.


Instead, he reconnected with a friend who introduced him to a job at his 
father’s company, the blue-chip investment firm the Raptor Group.


Dr. Cahill got hooked on investing, particularly in life sciences. He 
reasoned he could make a bigger impact by identifying promising 
scientists and helping them troubleshoot problems—both scientific and 
financial—than doing research himself.


After a stint at Raptor, he formed his own fund, Newpath Partners, with 
$125 million from a smal

[Marxism] Ukraine: Forest Fires Near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant - a verdict on Ukrainian capitalism

[Zakhyst Pratsi via Marxism]

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https://zahist.wordpress.com/2020/04/21/ukraine-forest-fires-near-the-chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant/
By Oleg Vernik, President of the Independent Union of Ukraine “Zahist Pracі” 
(“Labor Protection”)

For two weeks, a true ecological tragedy unfolded in Ukraine with massive 
forest fires in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The fires swept huge wooded areas 
and closely surrounded the nuclear power plant that was destroyed in 1986. The 
riskiest thing now is a large deposit of radioactive waste, which will 
represent a danger not only for our country, but also for the whole of Europe, 
if the fires reach it .

For two weeks, nationally mobilized fire brigades fought the fire desperately, 
but only the rain and snow that fell on April 14 were able to stop it. On that 
same date, in the evening, President Volodímir Zelensky spoke on television, 
reported on the end of the incident and thanked the weather for the great help 
in extinguishing the fire. But on April 15, the fire resumed and more than 500 
firefighters are still fighting it heroically.

The Chernobyl fire revealed all the direct failures and crimes of Ukraine’s 
capitalist authorities. First, it must be taken into account that the real 
causes of these fires are associated with illegal deforestation in the 
exclusion zone: forests are radioactive and their use is strictly prohibited. 
However, several Ukrainian companies involved in the timber trade have 
indiscriminately cut down the trees and used them in construction, including 
using false documents to export radioactive wood to countries of the European 
Union as firewood or building material. In order to avoid getting caught for 
deforesting illegally, these “businessmen” cover up their crimes year after 
year with large fires that hide their extreme action under water.

Of course, there is a strong corruption actively involved here that has been 
neutralizing the oversight of police and prosecutors for many years. This 
winter there was practically no snow, the dryness in the forests became very 
dangerous and facilitated the spread of fires, but this did not stop the 
Ukrainian bourgeoisie of the forest industry. The arson caused a terrible 
ecological disaster, and to think about what might happen in the near future is 
terrifying.

Second, firefighters do not have adequate technical equipment to deal with the 
fire. Ukraine lacks extinction helicopters. The entrances to the affected areas 
do not even have roads, so water pumping vehicles often cannot enter. The 
fireproof clothing is very old, it does not resist high temperatures. Fire 
trucks are very old, some no longer have job utility and should have been 
scrapped long ago. Even so, they continue in activity, since there is no budget 
in the most corrupt and poorest country in Europe to buy new, more modern 
units. But the authorities always have money to raise the salaries of high 
officials and buy expensive foreign cars.

The fire in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the evident 
inability of the Ukrainian bourgeois government to cope with the Coronavirus 
pandemic, place the task of socialist transformation before the Ukrainian 
people. The peripheral model of Ukrainian capitalism leads to a further 
aggravation of the situation, to the total impoverishment of the workers and to 
the strengthening of foreign governance. Russia’s military aggression against 
Ukraine was compounded by the financial dictates of the International Monetary 
Fund. A growing number of Ukrainian workers, youth and union activists 
understand the need for a decisive rejection of capitalism. The disaster caused 
by the fires, with the threat over Chernobyl, has strengthened and confirmed 
this understanding, as well as our determination.
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[Marxism] Climate experts call for 'dangerous' Michael Moore film to be taken down | Environment | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-dangerous-documentary-planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-taken-down

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[Marxism] "Socialism in the 21st Century?" Zoom panel today i.e. Tues. Apr. 28 7:00PM US Pacific

[Kaiwen Dong via Marxism]

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Dear Marxism Mailing list,

My name is Kaiwen, and I am a student studying math and a member of the
Platypus Affiliated Society. If you are free *today* i.e. *Tuesday April
28th*, I would like to invite you all to attend a virtual panel discussion
over Zoom on "Socialism in the 21st century?" at *7 PM Pacific/8 PM
Mountain/9 PM Central/10 PM Eastern*.

Here's the link to join the panel discussion on Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/98130211938

In the early 21st century, socialism has been invoked as a defense against
neoliberalism by phenomena such as SYRIZA, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, and
Bernie Sanders. Moreover, the recent polarization of politics – manifested
around Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit in the UK, and Bernie Sanders and Trump in
the US – has been welcomed variously as a potential opening for
emancipatory politics, political engagement and a renewed imagination of
socialism. If socialism has become the goal of the Left in the 21st
century, what, then, would be necessary to achieve it? If it has not, what,
then, is the Left’s goal and how does it relate to the struggle for
socialism?

PANELISTS:
Nick Dreidger (a member of the Industrial Workers of the World in Alberta,
Canada)
Paige Kreisman (Candidate, Oregon House District 42, co-chair of the
Portland Democratic Socialists of America and board member of Portland
Tenants United)
Bob Meister (author of Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx, Professor
of Social and Political Thought, UC Santa Cruz)
David Walters (Marxists Internet Archive, co-editor of The Selected Works
of Eugene Debs)

Facebook event page here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2715124552144284/

We hope to see some of those on the Marxism Mailing list there! Hope you
all are safe and well during these uncertain times.

Warmest regards,
Kaiwen
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[Marxism] A recession devastates people’s lives. But there are surprising health benefits when capitalism stops working | Jeff Sparrow | Opinion | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/28/a-recession-devastates-peoples-lives-but-there-are-surprising-health-benefits-when-capitalism-stops-working

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[Marxism] Was Sweden Headed Toward Socialism in the 1970s?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-olof-palme-lo

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[Marxism] Left Politics after Sanders: Think Internationally, Historically and Dialectically - New Politics

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Peter Drucker

https://newpol.org/left-politics-after-sanders-think-internationally-historically-and-dialectically/

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[Marxism] Coronavirus: Top NYC doctor takes her own life - BBC News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52451094

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[Marxism] Columbia TAs who say they can't pay their rent due to COVID-19 launch work stoppage

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/28/columbia-tas-who-say-they-cant-pay-their-rent-due-covid-19-launch-work-stoppage

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[Marxism] Adam Tooze on the pandemic’s consequences for the world economy

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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LRB, Vol. 42 No. 8 · 16 April 2020
Shockwave
Adam Tooze on the pandemic’s consequences for the world economy

In​ March, as Europe and the US began to apprehend the scale of the 
Covid-19 pandemic, investors panicked. Financial markets plunged. The 
rout was so severe that on several occasions in the second and third 
week of March, normal market functioning was in question. The prices of 
US Treasuries, the ultimate safe asset for investors all over the world, 
swung wildly as fund managers, scrambling for cash, sold everything they 
could sell. In the foreign exchange market, through which more than $6 
trillion normally swirl every day, the traffic was all one way: out of 
every currency in the world, into dollars. No market can function for 
long like that. Sterling plunged. Even gold was sold off. This was not a 
banking crisis like the one in 2008, but, had it not been for the 
spectacular intervention carried out by the US Federal Reserve, the Bank 
of England and the European Central Bank, we would now be facing not 
only the ravages of Covid-19 and the disastrous social and economic 
consequences of the lockdown, but a financial heart attack as well. 
Instead, we are experiencing a shockwave of credit contraction. 
Production and employment have shrunk dramatically. Huge programmes of 
government spending have been set in motion, not to create new jobs but 
to sustain the economy on life-support. The challenge isn’t merely 
technical. This is a global crisis, which affects virtually every 
community on the planet. And it has exposed stark differences between 
the major economic blocs, such that it is now more difficult than ever 
to understand how the thing we call the world economy actually fits 
together.


The three great centres of production, exchange and corporate activity 
are the US, China and the Eurozone. These economic hubs are tied 
together through flows of trade, organised through complex supply chains 
that span the globe. Each of the three hubs has a hinterland extending 
into neighbouring regions in Latin America, East Central Europe, Africa 
and across Asia. They are all stitched into a global financial system 
that uses the US dollar as its currency of trade and credit. Each of the 
three hubs has characteristic weaknesses. The worry about China is the 
sustainability of its debt-fuelled economic growth. The basic weaknesses 
of the Eurozone are that it still doesn’t have a backstop for its 
rickety banking system and that it lacks a shared fiscal capacity; 
what’s more, Italy’s finances are so weak that they continually threaten 
to upset European solidarity. In the US, the national institutions of 
economic policy actually work: they demonstrated this in 2008 and are 
doing so again now. The Fed and the Treasury exert a huge influence not 
only over the US economy but the entire global system. The question is 
how they stand in relation to a profoundly divided American society and 
how their technocratic style of policymaking is received by the 
know-nothing nationalist right wing of the Republican Party and its 
champion in the White House.


Over recent years, each of these weaknesses has at various times seized 
the attention of the fund managers and business leaders who direct 
global business, and the experts and technicians who advise them. It 
isn’t a secret that China’s debt bubble, Europe’s divisions and 
America’s irrational political culture pose a challenge to the 
functioning of what we know as the world economy. What caused the panic 
last month was the realisation that Covid-19 has exposed all three 
weaknesses simultaneously. Indeed, in Europe and the US the failure of 
government has been so severe that we now face a public health 
catastrophe and an economic disaster at the same time. And to make 
matters worse, Donald Trump appears tempted to juggle the two.


Since 2008, the world economy has come to depend to a disconcerting 
degree on government stimulus. No one can pretend that our reality bears 
much resemblance to the pristine market models so popular in the 1980s 
and 1990s. But anyone who took those at face value was missing the 
point. All along, the state was actually involved, whether as a creator 
of markets, or as a distributor and enforcer of property rights. What is 
new is that the central banks are now permanently on call, adding 
further stimulus whenever growth flags. And they have been called on 
regularly because productivity growth has been so slow. At the same 
time, in an age of austerity, we have not been able to count on 
politicians to deliver adequate fiscal stimulus. The EU has until the 
current moment been deaf 

[Marxism] Cuba's Unique Model of Medical Internationalism

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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~ T h e B u l l e t ~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2075 ... April 28, 2020
__
Cuba's Unique Model of Medical 
Internationalism
In recent weeks, more than a dozen countries -- including two in Europe -- have 
requested and received Cuban doctors to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic.

John Kirk, a professor at the Latin America program of Dalhousie University in 
Nova Scotia, is author of Healthcare Without Borders and one of the foremost 
experts on Cuba’s medical internationalism. Ten years ago, he spent two months 
embedded with Cuba’s Henry Reeve medical emergency brigade in El Salvador after 
a hurricane, to observe them. In all he has interviewed 270 Cuban doctors and 
nurses during the course of his research. John Kirk was interviewed by Cuba 
Standard.
Cuba Standard (CS): What is the Henry Reeve Brigade?

John Kirk (JK): The Henry Reeve Brigade was formed in 2005. Responding to the 
massive problems in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cuba offered 1,400 medical 
personnel and 32 tons of medicine to help in New Orleans, which was refused by 
the George W. Bush administration. Shortly afterwards, there was a major health 
problem in the Kashmir area of Pakistan after an earthquake. Cuba formed the 
brigade in response, and named it after an American who fought in the first war 
of independence, 1868-1878, against Spanish colonialism.

Since 2005, the Henry Reeve Brigade has been involved in all kinds of natural 
medical emergencies. This is a brigade of several thousand specially-trained 
doctors, nurses and technicians who go to natural emergencies, whether it be 
earthquakes, hurricanes or epidemics. They have been involved in emergencies in 
16 countries, and counting. As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic they have 
sent medical brigades to 16 countries. No. 15 was Trinidad and Tobago; the 
British Virgin Islands were the latest.
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