The Coronavirus and Our Future | The New Yorker - 0 views
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I’ve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly.
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the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal. It was a change in the way we were looking at things, and it is still ongoing. The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.
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The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.
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Twenty Years After We Shut Down the WTO, the Left Is Finally Resurgent - 0 views
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Activists overestimated the WTO’s sway. As the Columbia economist and militant free-trader Jagdish Bhagwati told Liza Featherstone and me in an interview a couple of years later, the organization’s entire budget was smaller than the IMF’s travel budget, which should give you an idea of the two institutions’ relative importance. But it nonetheless served as something of a home address for global capitalism
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the WTO scheduled its next major meeting for Doha, a site where riots seemed highly improbable, two years later. That 2001 meeting opened a trade round that continues to this day because no one can agree on anything still
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Organized labor had, at least for this event, shunned the nationalist rhetoric of old in favor of international labor solidarity. A South African mineworker quoted Marx by name, urging the workers of the world to unite — to a great cheer from the crowd. There were jingoistic bleats from some Steelworkers and Teamsters, but it was largely contained.
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Adam Tooze on World Order, Then and Now - ChinaTalk - 0 views
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if you're dealing with a bunch of herbivorous Social Democrats, they'll take you in one direction and you'll end up with a welfare state and full employment, but if their same knowledge is in the hands of a group of nationalist militarists, what you've really provided them with is the blueprint for highly efficient mobilization of a military economy in times of peace. So deep in the heart of neoliberal thought and conservative thinking about the modern state and its potential lies a fear of that possibility.
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China’s not the Soviet Union, China's not fascist Italy, China's not Nazi Germany. The growth of China is a phenomenon that dwarfs all of those previous developments and has to be understood on the timeframe that was laid out for us by the economic data of somebody like Angus Maddison, who shows us global GDP all the way back to the birth of Christ. All the way through the beginning of the 19th century, the Asian economies actually dominate once you've adjusted GDP by purchasing power parity and so on.
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It's tempting to say, is there anyone in the United States that could play the role of the British elite after World War One? But America's position of dominance was vastly greater than that ever by enjoyed the British so the psychological challenge of accepting this transition is far greater. And, of course, in key respects America remains an absolutely dominant player, most notably with regard its hard power, its weapons, but also in certain respects with regard to its financial centrality.
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Danes see Greenland security risk amid Arctic tensions - BBC News - 0 views
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Denmark has for the first time put mineral-rich Greenland top of its national security agenda, ahead of terrorism and cybercrime.The Defence Intelligence Service (FE) linked its change in priorities to US interest in Greenland, expressed in President Donald Trump's desire to buy the vast Arctic territory.
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The FE's head Lars Findsen said Greenland was now a top security issue for Denmark because a "power game is unfolding" between the US and other global powers in the Arctic.
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Greenland's strategic importance has grown amid increased Arctic shipping and international competition for rare minerals. Arctic waters are becoming more navigable because of melting ice, linked to global warming.
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Qatar Migrant Workers Battle Coronavirus Outbreak During World Cup Construction - 0 views
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There are more than 2 million migrant workers in Qatar—a significant number given that the country’s overall population is just 2.6 million. In recent years the foreign laborer population in Qatar has swelled as the country has undergone a construction boom ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which is set to be held there.
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Research published last year in the journal Cardiology explored the relationship between heat exposure and the deaths of more than 1,300 Nepali workers over a nine-year period until 2017. The climatologists and cardiologists found a strong correlation between heat stress and young workers dying of cardiovascular problems in the summer months
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abuse—which at times has amounted to forced labor and human trafficking—has been exacerbated by South Asian governments’ inability to successfully lobby for strong protections. (Critics contend there has been scant political will given the huge portion of GDP now made up by remittances from overseas workers.
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Yesterday's Terrorists and Insurgents in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia Are Today's Pu... - 0 views
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The coronavirus pandemic has opened up similar opportunities for a range of terrorists, insurgents, and criminal organizations. Across the world, they are already seeking to acquire political legitimacy through the provision of public health services, especially in countries and regions where the government has been either unwilling or unable to help.
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it is not just terrorist and insurgent groups taking advantage of the crisis to demonstrate an effort toward effective governance. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, drug trafficking organizations and criminal gangs have worked assiduously to enforce a curfew in the notoriously ungoverned slums where they operate.
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In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the term “ungoverned spaces” entered the popular lexicon when discussing areas that terrorist groups sought out in which to train, plan, and conduct operations. Areas that few in the West had ever heard about—South America’s Tri-Border Area, the Sahel in North Africa, and Southeast Asian archipelagos—were all tagged with this label. But the term itself is an unfortunate misnomer. No area is truly ungoverned. Rather, nonstate actors and substate groups provide alternative forms of governance to people in these places. And, more often than not, they do so through provision of services that reinforce their social status and lend them a sense of political legitimacy that governments in faraway capital cities lack altogether.
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The global financial system is collapsing. Here's a three-step plan to take back contro... - 0 views
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In place of stability, what we have today is a ramshackle, largely deregulated system, widely known as “globalisation”. Effectively lobbied for by economic cowboys with no interest in economic justice or environmental sustainability, the result of this system where “the world is governed by market forces”
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the international financial and monetary system is both hard to know of and understand, as it is so intangible and detached from regulatory democracy.
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It is this very idea of self-sufficiency in steady state economies that I argue for in my book, The Case for the Green New Deal,
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No trees: What the landscapes where all recent pandemics originated have in common - 0 views
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yellow fever, zika fever, dengue, chikungunya, ebola, SARS, Nipah virus, Kyasanur Forest disease, MERS, rabies, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, sleeping sickness, hantavirus-caused diseases, Japanese encephalitis, malaria
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All these diseases emerged – or re-emerged, more virulent and dangerous – as a result of human encroachment on forests. Historically, we might trace them to tropical rainforests, but right now we must look closer to home. Because the forest was, till very recently, right here somewhere, in and about your housing colony, around that gated high-rise and its adjacent slum.
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Diseases emerge when we clear forests, cut down trees, flatten hills, dam rivers, and squat on all this usurped territory. Within a 5 km radius of my home are breeding grounds for at least seven of those listed diseases. It’s not something we think about.
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To Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the World Will Have to Think Local - 1 views
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the post-World War II architecture is reaching its structural limits. In particular, it is incompatible with the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which are 17 objectives designed to bring sustainable development to every part of the world—notably the world’s developing nations and, in particular, the world’s least-developed countries. The new goals include completely eliminating global extreme poverty, managing sustainable production and consumption cycles, ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls, and strengthening resilience and adaptivity to hazards tied to climate change.
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the current global financial architecture centers on sovereign states, with international credit and the benefits of such credit—notably the ability to raise capital in order to fund projects, including infrastructure—tending to flow to countries rather than to the neediest local communities themselves.
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even if international donors and investors encourage better national governance, and they should, funding for local projects still competes, often unfavorably, with national government priorities—such as national defense, foreign affairs operations, government salaries, and national budget deficits
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How Extreme Weather Is Pushing Climate Policy Forward - 0 views
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We may well look back upon 2022 as that moment when the global simultaneity of climate calamity finally crossed an epistemic threshold, registering in the mind’s eye the most compelling image of the whole Earth, now in peril, since the marvelous “Blue Marble” photograph taken from space by the Apollo astronauts in 1972.
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sense of an axial shift
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Prompted by a citizens’ assembly on climate in the wake of the 2018 Yellow Jacket uprising, France is implementing a slew of ambitious measures from banning single-use plastic packaging for perishable products to banning short-haul flights where a train or bus trip of two and a half hours or less in an alternative
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The Ukraine War: A Global Crisis? | Crisis Group - 0 views
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The Ukraine conflict may be a matter of global concern, but states’ responses to it continue to be conditioned by internal political debates and foreign policy priorities.
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China has hewed to a non-position on Russian aggression – neither condemning nor supporting the act, and declining to label it as an invasion – while lamenting the current situation as “something we do not want to see”. With an eye to the West, Beijing abstained on rather than vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, and reports indicate that two major Chinese state banks are restricting financing for Russian commodities. Beijing now emphasises the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty in its statements, a point that had either been absent from earlier statements or more ambiguously discussed as “principles of the UN Charter”.
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the worldview that major powers can and do occasionally break the rules
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Less Than a Mile From U.S. Drone Base, Bandits Stole $40,000 Tax Dollars in Broad Daylight - 2 views
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AGADEZ, Niger — Officially, Base Aerienne 201, located in this town on the southern fringe of the Sahara desert, is not a U.S. military outpost. In reality, Air Base 201 — known locally as “Base Americaine” — is the linchpin of the U.S. military’s archipelago of bases in North and West Africa and a key part of America’s wide-ranging intelligence, surveillance, and security efforts in the region.
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AB 201 serves as a Sahelian surveillance hub that’s home to Space Force personnel involved in high-tech satellite communications, Joint Special Operations Air Detachment facilities, and a fleet of drones — including armed MQ-9 Reapers — that scour the surrounding region day and night for terrorist activity. A high-security haven, Air Base 201 sits within a 25-kilometer “base security zone” and is protected by fences, barriers, upgraded air-conditioned guard towers with custom-made firing ports, and military working dogs.
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Late last year, in the shadow of this bastion of American techno-militarism, four men in a pickup truck carried out a daylight armed robbery of defense contractors from the base and drove off with roughly $40,000 in U.S. taxpayer money.
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