Crisis

In the U.S., the abandonment of the poor and downtrodden to their fate has forged not a society worth living in, but a growing dystopia to be escaped, writes John Wight.
John WIGHT
In his 1948 classic novel “The Plague,” which tells the story of the fictional outbreak of a rat-borne plague in the Algerian port city of Oran under French colonialism, French writer and thinker Albert Camus explores the way the plague and ensuing crisis taps into the very best and worst of the human condition.

Caitlin JOHNSTONE
As 2020 gets crazier and crazier, emotional self-care is getting more and more important. A lot of people, especially the “plugged-in” types who like to pay close attention to what’s going on in the world, are getting into some looping stress patterns over the Covid-19 pandemic that are unnecessary, unhealthy, and unhelpful.

Justin PODUR

This pandemic has been made worse and continues to be made worse by toxic nationalism, ironic considering the virus truly doesn’t give a shit about our borders, says Lee Camp, CN’s newest columnist.

Signs, especially in the United States, are that the post-coronavirus-plagued world will have even more inequality of wealth, within each nation, than existed prior to the plague. Billionaires are demanding to be included in the bailouts by their governments; and, because billionaires financed the careers of the successful politicians who won seats in their country’s legislature, those demands are almost certain to be complied with. Only the least-corrupt nations will be able to recover fully from the current plague.

Some global elites have been intrigued by the idea of a new plague.

History in truth never repeats, but it very often reverses itself. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bet heavily on repeating history when he tried to bankrupt Russia by opening the gates of unlimited oil production and exports: He will only ruin his own Kingdom of Saudi Arabia instead.

We are at a critical moment in the history of politics and markets. Everyday the U.S. government stares into the fiscal and monetary abyss and chucks trillions in hoping that will be enough to finally fill it.
We stand by hoping that it will work to reflate markets collapsing from a catastrophic mispricing of assets. At least some of us do. I don’t.
I hope it fails and it’s because those inflated prices fuel the very global political order that is anathema to human advancement.

Western society has long been gripped by a deep seeded belief in money. Trillions of dollars of bank notes tied to ever-growing mountains of un-payable national debts has taken on a life of its own over the years. As the post-1971 years rolled by, society increasingly lost a sense that this human invention called “money” was created to serve humanity rather than rule it, and with that lost sense, money became an idol of worship.

In matter of just a few weeks the novel coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated the argument for strong government intervention in economics to maintain society, as well as for nation states to cooperate in a spirit of solidarity and internationalism.
Over recent decades it has become fashionable among Western ideologues to dismiss the role of government as a “socialist” appendage impeding the efficiency of private capital and supposed free markets.