GLOBAL ECONOMY 

“Global carbon emissions are set to jump by 1.5 billion tonnes this year. This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate,” said Dr Fatih Birol, International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director.

Global Energy Review, the new IEA report, sees global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rising by 1.5 billion tonnes in 2021, driven by a strong rebound in demand for coal in electricity generation. The CO2 emissions’ surge by 1.5 billion tonnes in 2021 is the second-largest increase in history, which reverses most of last year’s decline caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. This would be the biggest annual rise in emissions since 2010, during the carbon-intensive recovery from the global financial crisis.

The IEA’s Global Energy Review 2021 estimates that CO2 emissions will increase by almost 5% this year to 33 billion tonnes, based on the latest national data from around the world as well as real-time analysis of economic growth trends and new energy projects that are set to come online.

We Can Defeat the Corporate Media’s War to Snuff Out Independent Journalism

MEDIA

 

Jonathan Cook

My talk at the International Festival of Whistleblowing, Dissent and Accountability on May 8. Transcript below.

I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about my experiences over the past two decades working with new technology as an independent freelance journalist, one who abandoned — or maybe more accurately, was abandoned by — what we usually call the “mainstream” media.

Looking back over that period, I have come to appreciate that I was among the first generation of journalists to break free of the corporate media — in my case, the Guardian — and ride this wave of new technology. In doing so, we liberated ourselves from the narrow editorial restrictions such media imposes on us as journalists and were still able to find an audience, even if a diminished one.

ULTRA-RICH 

The ultra-rich group is today an issue of public interest, because people are getting aware about the wealth the group controls. People are getting aware that the group’s source of wealth should be known, because identifying the source helps identify the method of amassing such wealth within such short time. Identifying the source also helps expose source of people’s misery and suffering, poverty and exploitation.

One member of this group is Bill Gates. His private life has recently come into public. But that part may be ignored. But the private side of life that acts with public life comes into discussion, because there the private life impacts public life. These expose the super-rich, the characteristics of the group. These expose the lifestyle the super-rich live with, the character of philanthropy they spread around the world, and the values they uphold.

MILITANTS OF CHAOS

IMPERIALISM AGAINST VENEZUELA 

Carola Chávez

MISION VERDAD | May 02, 2021

Iván Simonovis junto a Carlos Vecchio, miembros del clan Guaidó (Foto: Alexander Drago / Reuters)

After millions of attempts to overthrow Chavismo have failed, it is now the turn of the Colombian paramilitaries and their local franchises.  To create chaos, explains Ivan Simonovis in a video, choked with sadism, like a Batman villain, where he tells his secret plan like chickens before hatching, celebrating a victory that will never come.

Chaos.  That has been the objective of a group of psychopaths recruited by Washington as their political hit men.  Chaos for a country they despise, which is nothing but a teat to suck dry, to sell it off, broken in pieces, as long as there’s a slice left for them.  It’s always been that way, since that one fine day that Chavez never went away.

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

IMPERIALISM AGAINST VENEZUELA 

Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs

Center for Economic and Policy Research | April 2019

Executive Summary

This paper looks at some of the most important impacts of the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the US government since August of 2017. It finds that most of the impact of these sanctions has not been on the government but on the civilian population. The sanctions reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation. They exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis and made it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans. Even more severe and destructive than the broad economic sanctions of August 2017 were the sanctions imposed by executive order on January 28, 2019 and subsequent executive orders this year; and the recognition of a parallel government, which as shown below, created a whole new set of financial and trade sanctions that are even more constricting than the executive orders themselves. We find that the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory. They are also illegal under international law and treaties which the US has signed, and would appear to violate US law as
well.

The US Plan to Imprison Businesspeople in Other Countries for “Violating” Illegal US Sanctions: The Cases of Alex Saab, Meng Wanzhou, Mun Chol Myong

US IMPERIALISM 

Stansfield Smith

Orinoco Tribune | April 27, 2021

The US uses economic sanctions as a weapon against states which choose a development path independent of US global domination. Sanctions can take the form of blocking a nation’s financial and trade transactions, not allowing financial institutions to process them. The US can also freeze the assets of another country.

The US uses sanctions as a tool to overthrow governments that do not kow-tow to it. Sanctions are a weapon of war on civilians. They destroy the economy of a country (“make the economy scream”) by causing hyperinflation, unemployment, preventing the import of necessities such as food, medicine, and equipment to keep infrastructure and industries running. They drive capital flight from countries as corporations and financial institutions seek to distance themselves and avoid being targeted themselves. These result in deadly consequences for the civilian population.

Venezuela denounces international complicit silence on the massacre in Colombia

VENEZUELAN SOLIDARITY WITH COLOMBIAN PEOPLE 

Blanco Narkys

Ultimas Noticias | May 18, 2021

“The cause of the massacred youth in Colombia is also a problem for Venezuela because we are brothers,” said the President of the Republic, Nicolás Maduro, on Tuesday, referring to the protests taking place in Colombia.

During a working day dedicated to the National University Entrance System “Bicentennial 2021”, the head of state expressed solidarity with the Colombian youth, in the face of the massacre carried out by the Colombian police force.

“When we see how they are murdered, raped young women and denied the right to education is when one says that Venezuela must be defended,” he said.

Latin America finds its own answers to produce COVID-19 vaccines and save lives

COVID-19 VACCINE IN LATIN AMERICA

Rubén Sierra

Council on Hemispheric Affairs | February 18, 2021

In a world harmed by the severe COVID-19 pandemic, the access to vaccines is being distorted by the rules of the open market and the deep gap between rich and poor nations. As the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), doctor Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recently said, “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure – and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.” In a formal declaration the WHO warns that “in the majority of low and middle-income countries, vaccination has not even started which is a catastrophe as hospitals fill up.”^[1]

The People’s Vaccine Alliance (a coalition of organizations such as Oxfam, UNAIDS and Global Justice Now) accused the three biggest COVID-19 vaccine producers, Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, of strangling the global supply of vaccines because of their intellectual-property protections. The coalition denounces that these companies plan to produce enough vaccines to cover just 1.5% of the global population during 2021 while they remain “prohibitively expensive for many poor nations.”^[2]

The Early Communist Women’s Movement with Daria Dyakonova

WOMEN AND COMMUNISM 

Lydia and Anne sit down with Daria Dyakonova to discuss the often neglected history of the Communist Women’s Movement (1920-22). They talk about the origins of the movement, its most important figures, the debates around what the base of the CWM would be, and what would be the main issues it tackled, its changing relationship to the Comintern and its recurring fight against male chauvinism within the communist and broader workers movement. The discussion finishes with the slow eclipse of the CWM until its final demise and how that affected the future generations of communist women.

Daria and Mike Taber have an upcoming book on this topic through Brill’s Historical Materialism series.

Marx on the colonization of Irish soil

MARXIST THEORY 

Eamonn Slater

Irish Metabolic Rifts

Abstract

This paper explores how Marx conceptualised the presence of soil exhaustion within the first half of nineteenth century Ireland. It is a period of Irish history, according to Marx, that was itself divided by two stages of colonial domination. What determined soil depletion in the first period (1800-1846) were the excessive demands of the white crop rotation regime which had to operate under the social process of rackrenting. And this rental system was itself determined by the dominant position held by the colonial landowning elite. Maintaining the soil condition involved the tenantry, both peasants and cottiers, attempting to replace the traded (and therefore lost) nutrients to the Irish soil without adequate capital investments in improvements of the soil. This colonial rental regime came to its end with the occurrence of the potato blight in 1846 and the subsequent Famine.

The new emerging stage of the colonial process (1846-1867 onwards) was what Marx titled ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’, where the landlords ‘cleared’ their estates of the small peasantry and the cottiers. And in eliminating the peasant restorers of the soil’s fertility, soil exhaustion occurred in the Post-famine period. Marx therefore highlights how the soil of the colonised can itself be colonised by that same process.

‘Man is distinguished from all other animals by the limitless and flexible nature of his needs. But it is equally true that no animal is able to restrict his needs to the same unbelievable degree as to reduce the conditions of his life to the absolute minimum. In a word, there is no animal with the same talent for ‘Irishing’ himself’ (Marx, Capital, vol.1 Appendix: 1068).