The PANDEMIC: Famine of Biblical Proportions Looms over Humanity, warns WFP

COVID-19 PANDEMIC

A Journal of People report

The Covid-19 pandemic may lead to a calamity of epic scale, with millions facing starvation worldwide, warned the head of the World Food Program (WFP).

“All the data we have, including WFP forecast that the number of people experiencing malnutrition will grow by 80 percent by the end of the year,… points to a real disaster,” said David Beasley, Executive Director of the WFP, the UN’s hunger-fighting body.

The WFP chief said: “We are risking a famine of biblical proportions.”

The UN official said: “The price of inaction will be incredibly high.”

FACE OF A POLITICS: U.S.: Companies and CEOs Supporting Trump and Biden, and Actors’ Feud

FACE OF A POLITICS

A Journal of People report

Elections in capitalist economies are connected to capital. A closer look reveals this fact, which is very often ignored by many observers of politics in capitalist countries.

A YahooFinance report on August 22, 2020 said:

“As we take a breather between the Democratic National Convention (this week) and the Republican National Convention (next week), I thought it would be a good time to look into big business and the candidates, which executives and companies were supporting and donating to Trump, which to Biden and why.”

FACE OF AN ECONOMY: U.S.: Land: This Land is Not Your Land, This Land is My Land

FACE OF AN ECONOMY

A Journal of People report

By landmass, the U.S. is the third largest country in the world. It spans over 3.5 million square miles – a huge landmass. In size, the U.S. trails behind China and Russia.

The federal government owns over a quarter of all land in the U.S. However, a vast chunk of this landmass is owned by just a handful of individuals and families.

On the basis of The Land Report magazine’s 2018 Land Report, the 50 largest private landholders in the U.S. as mentioned in this report own a huge mass of land.

Notes on Lenin at 150: Theoretical Preparation for Revolution in the Time of COVID-19

LENIN AT 150

Kevin B. Anderson

The International Marxist Humanist | May 04, 2020

Two weeks ago, April 22, was the 150th anniversary V.I. Lenin’s birth. What does it mean to consider Lenin 150 years after his birth and at the time of COVID-19? To many on the global left — from anarchists to social democrats — the answer would be a resounding, “He means nothing at all to us,” or, “We reject his legacy.” I believe that this would be misguided, as we still have a lot to learn from the Russian revolutionary thinker, even today, and in spite of the many valid criticisms of his politics and the fate of the USSR that he founded.

I will not rehearse those flaws here in any detail, except to mention briefly his establishment of a single-party state after the revolution and his elitist concept of the vanguard party, both of these criticized from the left early on by Rosa Luxemburg and others. Most of the criticisms relate to his organizational practice before the 1917 revolution and his conduct as leader of that revolution after his Bolsheviks came to power in the second revolution of November 1917.

Venezuelan Army and Militia on Alert for a New Mercenary Operation

IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION AGAINST VENEZUELA 

Orinoco Tribune | August 22, 2020

The commander of the Integral Defense Zone (Zodi) “Marítima Insular Oriental” Vice Admiral, Jorge Tajan Rodríguez, has warned about the presence of an irregular boat in Venezuelan waters, which would carry armed persons on board.

In a message sent to fishermen in the eastern part of the country, the military chief specified that the ship is white and would carry no less than 10 people carrying rifles. The civic military union in Venezuela as well as the Militias allow this level of interaction between ordinary Venezuelans and the Army for the defense of the homeland.

The Hard Truths of Climate Change — by the Numbers

CLIMATE CRISIS

A set of troubling charts shows how little progress nations have made toward limiting greenhouse-gas emissions.

Jeff  Tollefson

Nature | September 18, 2019

Bruno Rodriguez is only 18, but he has seen enough in his time on Earth to know that he must to do something for the planet. Inspired by the student climate strikes in Europe, he founded Youth for Climate Argentina in his home country. The group drew more than 8,000 demonstrators to the national congress in May, and its leaders worked with senators to pass a resolution on 17 July, declaring a climate emergency.

Argentina is responsible for less than 1% of annual global emissions, but Rodriguez says the science is clear: everyone must take aggressive action if the world is to avoid a massive environmental and humanitarian crisis. “There is no middle ground,” says Rodriguez. “We need radical industrial transformation.”

Labour Aristocracy: Lenin, Modern Theories, Cliff’s Critique

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Remembering Colin Barker | August 01, 2020

The Tragedy of Spaceship Earth

ENVIRONMENT AND EARTH

Troy Vettese

VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE | August 14, 2020

Masterplan, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

In the 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” EM Forster imagined a future where the atmosphere had become poisonous, leaving little life at the surface apart from a few ferns. Humans had all moved to a network of vast subterranean cities—the Machine—where they lived physically isolated from each other but digitally linked via an internet-like device to communicate with friends, listen to short lectures, and play music. Few bothered to ramble at the surface with a respirator or fly to other colonies via airship, for civilization was structured on “bringing things to people” rather than “people to things.” One of the denizens of this sedentary future, Vashti (“a swaddled lump of flesh […] with a face as white as a fungus”), recalled “those funny old days, when men went for a change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!” Vashti and her peers abhorred intimacy with others or communion with nature, and preferred their utter dependence on the Machine. Vashti’s son Kuno was unusual in his desire to escape, but he could not venture far from the Machine given his need for its artificial air.

Taking Responsibility for Front-line Health-care Workers

HEALTH-CARE WORKERS 

Linda McCauley and Rose Hayes

The Lancet | July 31, 2020

Inspiring stories about the bravery and resilience of health-care workers in the fight against COVID-19 are touted in news coverage around the world. However, little attention is paid to the factors that undermine global efforts to protect front-line health-care workers.

In The Lancet Public Health, Long H Nguyen and colleagues report findings of a study

¹

in which demographic data, medical histories, and symptoms of COVID-19 were gathered from the general community and front-line health-care workers in the UK and the USA. This reporting was done via the COVID-19 Symptom Study smartphone application, its data used to compare the risk of COVID-19 between health-care workers and the general community. Front-line health-care workers were at increased risk for reporting a positive COVID-19 test compared with the general community, after adjustment for the likelihood of receiving a COVID-19 test (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 3·40, 95% CI 3·37–3·43). Health-care workers were additionally asked to report week-by-week availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the results of any COVID-19 tests they underwent. Although Nguyen and colleagues acknowledged the limitations of their study, the increased risk for COVID-19 identified among health-care workers who reported inadequate PPE (adjusted HR 1·31, 95% CI 1·10–1·56) is concerning.

The History of the Universe in the Blink of an Eye

SCIENCE AND HISTORY

Shamini Bundell

Nature | August 14, 2020

The history of our Universe is written in the skies. Radio astronomers can detect ancient signals from the dawn of time as well as light from our nearest neighbours. Separating out these layers of time and space allows them to reconstruct the evolution of the Universe. This film reveals how thirteen billion years of history can be captured in a single moment.

doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-02459-x