The Solution to the Coronavirus Recession Is a Global Green New Deal
▻https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/coronavirus-global-green-new-deal-south-postcolonial
o understand the challenges facing the nations of the Global South as they grapple with COVID-19 and its fallout, we must understand the colonial and postcolonial strictures standing in their way.
While the Global South achieved political independence with the end of colonialism, the West continued to exert control over its former colonies. Rather than directly running other nations, Western countries used what former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah called “neocolonial domination” to get their way through political and economic means.
The figure below lends credence to Nkrumah’s claims: the average North-South gap in per-capita income has grown, not shrunk, since the 1960 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which affirmed the right of all people to self-determination and proclaimed that colonialism should be brought to a speedy and unconditional end. Global inequality is now so high that the global Gini coefficient, which measures the level of inequality across the world, is about the same as South Africa’s — one of the most unequal societies on the planet.