The history of the United States in the postwar era is replete with American efforts to change other nations. These projects often failed to achieve their goals, but few so completely as the recent one in Afghanistan. After 20 years, a great many lives lost, and untold billions spent, the Taliban—the very same group that the United States had intervened to remove at the outset—returned to power while U.S. personnel were still mid-evacuation.
Les actes de piraterie et de brigandage ont reculé de manière “notable” dans le monde en 2021, alors que leur nombre était stable depuis 2016, révèle vendredi dans son bilan annuel le pôle d’expertise français dédié à la sûreté maritime MICA Center.
Au total, 317 actes ont été dénombrés en 2021, contre 375 l’année précédente, soit une baisse “notable” de 15%, selon le Maritime Information Cooperation & Awareness Center, situé à Brest.
Even though Marx’s well-acknowledged truth that capitalism creates two classes is over 160 years old, class remains a much debated issue. Marx’s idea is relatively straightforward. In capitalism, there are two classes: firstly, there are workers or proletariat. Workers need to sell their ability to work as workers don’t own any means of production, or the ability to purchase the labor power of others.
Secondly, there is the class of capitalists. They own the means of production – companies and corporations – and purchase labor’s work while paying wages. Turbo-charged since the birth of neoliberalism during the 1980s, profits and productivity have left wages behind during the last 40 years. As a consequence, the rich get richer while the working class’ income has grown at a much lower rate, and for some, it has stagnated.
Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.
This is the future that big agritech and agribusiness envisage: a future of ‘data-driven’ and ‘climate-friendly’ agriculture that they say is essential if we are to feed a growing global population.
In July, British Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that the U.K. had agreed to pay France roughly $72 million to fund border personnel and equipment that would be used to stop asylum-seekers from crossing the English Channel. The deal came amid a dramatic rise in the number of channel crossings. In the first half of 2021, more than 8,000 asylum-seekers completed the voyage to land on England’s southern shore.
Terrorist Groups Have Doubled Since the Passage of the 2001 AUMF
It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.
The Doomsday Clock has been sitting the past year at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse. The United States has done little to quell doomsday apprehensions by ratcheting up tensions with China over Taiwan and its warships in the South China Sea, as well as with Russia over Ukraine, further NATO expansion, and missile deployment in eastern Europe. Will the first-ever Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races help to put a damper on any potential conflagration?
On December 15, the Federal Reserve announced numerous quantitative tightening measures that have the intended goal of combating the rising inflation that has been bogging down the American economy. As of November 2021, the rate of inflation has reached 6.8 percent, the highest since 1982, and is unlikely to have peaked yet.
Troubling undercurrents in 2021 – from the U.S. to Afghanistan, Ethiopia or the climate emergency – didn’t send battle deaths soaring or set the world ablaze. But as our look ahead to 2022 shows, many bad situations round the world could easily get worse.
” Foreign involvement in conflicts creates the risk that local clashes light bigger fires. “
After a year that saw an assault on the U.S. Capitol, horrific bloodshed in Ethiopia, a Taliban triumph in Afghanistan, great-power showdowns over Ukraine and Taiwan amid dwindling U.S. ambition on the global stage, COVID-19, and a climate emergency, it’s easy to see a world careening off the tracks.
In a recent Op-Ed, I had outlined the causes and ramifications of a looming supply chain crisis. Shortfalls in fundamental goods and services, however, are just the surface symptoms of a silent, protracted war against human merit.
Throughout history, the most universal and indispensable asset has been human resource. Civilizations were built on human ingenuity. Yet, despite the 21st century hoopla over smart cities, smart workers and smart futures of every kind, it is ironic that talent shortages persist in nearly every critical sector. In the United States alone, labour productivity recently hit a 40-year low even as unemployment claims dropped. How does one explain this anomaly? Perhaps, the “no jabs no jobs” mandate has crushed worker morale?