Independent Media Institute

By Sonali Kolhatkar The COVID-19 global pandemic has prompted a major question about leadership in a time of crisis: how to balance the importance of public health with the respecting of individual liberty? The virus respects no borders. It cares…

By Vijay Prashad, Paola Estrada, Ana Maldonado, and Zoe PC Last year, on November 21, the Colombian people took to the streets in massive numbers to reject the policies of the government led by President Iván Duque. In particular, the…

By Richard D. Wolff The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the…

By Thom Hartmann In the 4,000-year-old “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the arrogant eponymous king killed Humbaba, the giant guardian of the forest so that he could cut down the cedar stands in what is now northern Iraq to build his great…

Classical economics helped kill millions in the British Empire’s famines—following economic orthodoxy today could be just as deadly. By Justin Podur I’m writing this at 585,000 worldwide active cases, 26,000 deaths, and with only China and Korea seemingly under some…

In a press conference on March 26, it was almost comical how little evidence the U.S. Department of Justice provided when it accused Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and several of the leaders of his government of narco-trafficking. The U.S. offered…

Quick and widespread testing and quarantine will help tackle the spread of COVID-19, not ultra-nationalism or hyper-capitalism. By Prabir Purkayastha The COVID-19 pandemic is now moving at a speed that the world had not anticipated a few weeks back. It…

By Vijay Prashad and Subin Dennis K.K. Shailaja is the health minister in the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala, the state in the southwest of India that has a population of 35 million people. On January 25, 2020, she…

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has spread to almost every country on the planet earth. The virus will take many lives, disrupt communities and institutions, and leave behind trauma and a devastated world economy. The United Nations Conference on Trade…

Bumping elbows at the United Nations By Evelyn Leopold The United Nations has shut down most of its meetings and all of its conferences, but the world body in New York stays open. There are peacekeeping missions to follow, conflicts…