2/ We launched with a mission as simple as it was radical: to unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces all over the world in a common front. roarmag.org/essays/progres…
3/ And in a difficult year of lockdowns, isolation, and economic hardship, we have managed to accomplish so much together.
On this day in 1975, Vietnam’s National Liberation Front defeated the invading US forces, paving the road to the reunification of Vietnam — and liberating its people from over a century of imperialist rule.
“Our resistance will be long and painful, but whatever the sacrifices, however long the struggle, we shall fight to the end, until Vietnam is fully independent and reunified,” Ho Chi Minh warned in 1946 as Vietnam struggled for independence from French colonial rule.
US involvement, which began after World War II and intensified from November 1955, would lead to a ten-thousand day war. It claimed an estimated 3.1 million Vietnamese lives — including 2 million civilians.
BREAKING: A shock poll by @DataProgress and @ProgIntl finds that 60% of US voters want @POTUS to temporarily waive patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization. Only 28% disagreed.
In October 2020, 100 lower-income countries presented the WTO with a proposal to waive patent protections on the Covid-19 vaccine for the duration of the pandemic.
But a coalition of rich countries, led by the United States, opposed the waiver.
Today, 86% of all vaccines dispensed worldwide have been administered in rich countries.
Only 0.1% have been administered in poor countries.
As @IlhanMN says, the current WTO rules are a death sentence for millions around the world.
BREAKING: While the World Bank & IMF hosted their Spring Meetings, a new international collective — including @ingridharvold, @Jayati1609, and @KatharinaPistor — was preparing a blueprint for Debt Justice.
2/ We begin from a simple premise: We live now in a world of debt.
In the US, household debt tops $14tn, more than 3x the combined economies of South America.
In the Global South, meanwhile, private-sector debt has doubled in the last decade — and quintupled since 1970.
3/ All that was before Covid-19. The pandemic has since amplified the global debt wave into a virtual “tsunami”.
In the first nine months of 2020 alone, governments and companies worldwide took on $15 trillion of additional borrowing — $5 trillion more than during all of 2019.