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Dear Readers, this is a very important list of demands crafted by the group, Socialist Resurgence, that appears at the end of their statement on the COVID-19 pandemic. The article itself is quite long but the most comprehensive statement I've seen and well worth reading at the URL below.
—Bonnie Weinstein
STATEMENT BY SOCIALIST RESURGENCE ON COVID-19
https://socialistresurgence.org/2020/03/24/statement-by-socialist-resurgence-on-covid-19/
A program of action and solidarity
Capitalism stands totally disgraced. Even amidst a global pandemic and the coming ecological collapse, the ruling class in every country is trying to save its own profits at the expense of humanity. Workers have nothing at all to gain from supporting the capitalists, their programs, or their parties. Instead, working people must put forward our own solutions to the crisis and struggle with every weapon we have to achieve them. We call for:
- Centralized, international commissions of doctors and engineers to coordinate a global response to the pandemic!
- Retool all non-essential production to provide medical and safety equipment and begin a massive build-out of green infrastructure!
- No bans, no walls, amnesty for all immigrants and refugees, with full citizenship rights now!
- Democratic decision-making carried out through public discussion on all restrictions of movement!
- Free housing, food, and medical care throughout the crisis! Pay for it through the military budgets, with 100% tax on all income over $250,000!
- Hazard pay of at least 200% for all workers and full implementation of workplace safety measures! Completely free child care now! Stop all foreclosures, freeze all rents and mortgages, and stop all evictions for the duration of this crisis!
- Evacuate the prisons! Free all non-violent, immuno-compromised, and elderly prisoners, and provide quality housing!
- Drastically increase funding for domestic violence resources and education! No one stuck in quarantine with an abuser!
- Decrease hours without a decrease in pay for all who must work! All the necessities for those who are not working!
- Abortion is an essential service! Free and safe access for all who need it!
- Aid, not sanctions! Reparations for colonized countries now! Cancel all imperialist debt!
- Removal of all imperialist troops from the neo-colonial world; re-assign them for immediate use in aid efforts!
- No bailouts for big business or the banks! Nationalize production and finance under democratic workers’ control!
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To the initiators of the “Letter of
Dissent”: Antiwar Commemoration of the
Kent State Massacre, May 4, 2020
Dissent”: Antiwar Commemoration of the
Kent State Massacre, May 4, 2020
March 24, 2020
To the initiators of the “Letter of Dissent”
Dear Friends,
Much has happened since last September when we initiated the Open Letter Calling for an ANTI-WAR COMMEMORATION of the KENT MASSACRE, May 4, 2020. It’s an entirely new world - and not the most copacetic of times.
Yet even in the midst of the unfolding social and economic crisis, it’s heartening to see an organic, working-class solidarity begin to emerge. People are pitching in to help one another and are beginning to organize - demanding that human needs come before corporate profits.
Ultimately, overcoming the ongoing disasters will require all of society’s means – and for that we must dismantle the insatiable war machine and use those vast resources to heal the planet. We must continue the fight to end US wars, occupations and sanctions.
This letter goes out to the 59 original signers of the Letter of Dissent. Over 1000 additional antiwar activists have signed, making our initiative an authoritative statement from the antiwar community.
The KSU administration refused to respond to our concerns, proceeding instead with a corporate, celebrity-filled program designed to cover up the truth of the massacres and the war. The university has now cancelled the official planned program. An online event is being developed, but it will undoubtedly have the same sanitized character.
As antiwar activists under quarantine, we cannot use traditional marches, pickets and rallies - we will need to create new forms of struggle. That has already begun, with protests of empty shoes, spaced out picket lines, car caravans and internet actions.
I’m writing to ask you to help form an online commemoration of the massacres at Kent, Augusta and Jackson.
We can encourage groups and individuals to initiate memorial events or include May ‘70 in other planned actions. Some sites already exist, notably the Kent State Truth Tribunal, which has carried on activities for years and created a large video collection of personal narratives about May 4. They are here: https://www.truthtribunal.org/about
For my part, using a previously established blog, there is now a temporary site for individuals to contribute written experiences from May 1970, the national student strike, the GI antiwar movement and similar antiwar experiences.
This is an open venue for anyone and everyone to help write our rich history. You can share your stories on the Kent Massacre Wall (Click on Share Your Stories): https://kentmassacre.wordpress.com/author/mikealewitz/
Most importantly, this letter is also an invitation to help begin a new Facebook group, KENT MASSACRE ONLINE ANTIWAR COMMEMORATION – a place to post news of events, photos, articles, videos, comments and discussion related to the 50-year commemoration. Please join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2850853628362946/
Today’s social media discussions are focused on issues of staggering importance, such as the elections, pandemics and mass extinctions. But the civil rights, labor, antiwar and other great movements of the past contain valuable lessons of how to fight and win. We need to spread the collective consciousness and history of the massacres, the national student strike and the antiwar movement.
Humanity faces unprecedented challenges in the times ahead - but we know that the creative power of the working class is a mighty force when it is unleashed.
In Solidarity,
Mike Alewitz
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A slightly altered version of this letter will go out to the 1000+ signers on the Change.org site: http://chng.it/QTLkTvX6
____________________________________
MIKE ALEWITZ
Professor Emeritus
Art Department / Mural ProgramCentral CT State University
1615 Stanley Street/ New Britain, CT 06050
___________________________________
__________________________________
Art Department / Mural ProgramCentral CT State University
1615 Stanley Street/ New Britain, CT 06050
___________________________________
Red Square
116 Federal Street
New London, CT 06320
___________________________________
New London, CT 06320
___________________________________
Mobile: 860.518.4046
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 Dear Eleanor, Check out the following webinars that we will be hosting in the coming days/weeks:
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Chiapas: EZLN Closes Caracoles Due to
Coronavirus and Calls on People to Continue Struggle
https://sipazen.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/chiapas-ezln-closes-caracoles-due-to-coronavirus-and-asks-to-continue-struggle/
On March 16th, 2020, the EZLN published a communiqué about the actions that they are going to take against the Coronavirus and a strong call not to give up the struggle:
“CONSIDERING THE REAL, SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN THREAT TO HUMAN LIFE THAT COVID-19, ALSO KNOWN AS “CORONAVIRUS” PRESENTS;
CONSIDERING THE FRIVOLOUS IRRESPONSIBILITY AND THE LACK OF SERIOUSNESS OF THE BAD GOVERNMENTS AND OF THE POLITICAL CLASS IN ITS ENTIRETY, THAT MAKE USE OF A HUMANITARIAN PROBLEM TO ATTACK EACH OTHER, INSTEAD OF TAKING THE NECESSARY MEASURES TO CONFRONT THE LIFE-THREATENING VIRUS, WHICH ENDANGERS EVERYONE IRREGARDLESS OF NATIONALITY, GENDER, RACE, LANGUAGE, RELIGIOUS BELIEF, POLITICAL AFFILIATION, SOCIAL CONDITION OR HISTORY;
CONSIDERING THE LACK OF TRUE AND TIMELY INFORMATION ABOUT THE SCOPE AND GRAVITY OF THE VIRUS, AS WELL AS THE ABSENCE OF A REAL PLAN TO CONFRONT THE THREAT;
CONSIDERING THE ZAPATISTA COMMITMENT IN OUR FIGHT FOR LIFE;
WE HAVE DECIDED:
FIRST.- DECLARE A RED ALERT IN OUR VILLAGES, COMMUNITIES AND NEIGHBORHOODS, AND IN ALL THE ZAPATIST ORGANIZATIONAL BODIES.
SECOND.- TO GOOD GOVERNMENT COUNCILS AND AUTONOMOUS REBEL ZAPATISTA MUNICIPALITIES, WE RECOMMEND THE TOTAL AND IMMEDIATE CLOSURE OF THE CARACOLES AND CENTERS OF RESISTANCE AND REBELLION.
THIRD.- WE RECOMMEND THE SUPPORT BASES AND ALL THE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE TO FOLLOW A SERIES OF SPECIAL RECOMMENDATIONS AND HYGIENE MEASURES THAT WILL BE SENT TO THE ZAPATIST COMMUNITIES, TOWNS AND NEIGHBORHOODS.
FOURTH.- IN THE ABSENCE OF THE BAD GOVERNMENTS, WE URGE EVERYONE, IN MEXICO AND THE WORLD, TO TAKE THE NECESSARY WITH SCIENTIFICALLY-BASED SANITARY MEASURES THAT WILL ALLOW US TO SURVIVE THIS PANDEMIC.
FIFTH.- WE CALL ON YOU NOT TO CEASE THE STRUGGLE AGAINST FEMICIDAL VIOLENCE, TO CONTINUE THE STRUGGLE IN DEFENSE OF TERRITORY AND MOTHER EARTH, TO KEEP UP THE STRUGGLE FOR THE DISAPPEARED, MURDERED, AND IMPRISONED, AND KEEP THE FLAG OF THE FIGHT FOR HUMANITY RAISED HIGH.
SIXTH.- WE CALL ON YOU NOT TO LOSE HUMAN CONTACT, BUT TO TEMPORARILY CHANGE THE WAYS WE RELATE TO EACH OTHER AS COMRADES, SISTERS, BROTHERS, SISTERS.
THE WORD, THE EAR, AND THE HEART, HAVE MANY ROADS, MANY WAYS, MANY CALENDARS AND MANY GEOGRAPHIES TO MEET. THIS FIGHT FOR LIFE MAY BE ONE OF THEM.”
For more information in Spanish:
POR CORONAVIRUS EL EZLN CIERRA CARACOLES Y LLAMA A NO ABANDONAR LAS LUCHAS ACTUALES, Enlace Zapatista, 16 de marzo de 2020
EZLN decreta “alerta roja” por coronavirus y cierra sus centros de autogobierno en Chiapas, Aristeguinoticias, 17 de marzo de 2020
EZLN cierra sus centros de reunión, por COVID-19, Chiapasparalelo, 16 de marzo de 2020
EZLN decreta “alerta roja” en sus pueblos, comunidades por Covid-19, La Jornada, 17 de marzo de 2020
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https://myemail.constantcontact.com/3-16-2020---anniversary-of-betrayal-of-Al-Amin.html?soid=1109359583686&aid=pWjZtJNlqg8
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org
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Chelsea Manning Ordered Free From Prison
Natasha Lennard - March 12, 2020
Chelsea Manning, photographed in Washington, D.C., in January 2018.
Photo: Jesse Dittmar/Redux
On Thursday afternoon,a District Court judge in Virginia ordered that Chelsea Manning be released from jail, where she has been held since last May for refusing to testify before a grand jury.
The ruling itself is striking in what it fails to recognize. “The court finds Ms. Manning’s appearance before the Grand Jury is no longer needed, in light of which her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose,” the judge noted. The fact that the coercive purpose of Manning’s detention had long been shown to be absent — Manning has proven herself incoercible beyond any doubt — was not mentioned. Nor was the fact that on Wednesday, Manning attempted suicide. It was the most absolute evidence that she could not be coerced: She would sooner die.
The ruling itself is striking in what it fails to recognize. “The court finds Ms. Manning’s appearance before the Grand Jury is no longer needed, in light of which her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose,” the judge noted. The fact that the coercive purpose of Manning’s detention had long been shown to be absent — Manning has proven herself incoercible beyond any doubt — was not mentioned. Nor was the fact that on Wednesday, Manning attempted suicide. It was the most absolute evidence that she could not be coerced: She would sooner die.
She endured months of extreme suffering, driving her to near death, but never wavered on her principled refusal to speak.
While Manning’s release is vastly long overdue and most welcome, the framing and timing of the decision are galling. On Friday, Manning was scheduled to appear at a court hearing on a motion to end her continued imprisonment, predicated on her unshakeable resistance proving coercion to be impossible, and her incarceration therefore illegal. She endured months of extreme suffering, driving her to near death, but never wavered on her principled refusal to speak.
The day before this hearing — and the day after she made an attempt on her own life — the judge ruled that Manning is “no longer needed” by the grand jury. The court did not recognize that she is incoercible, nor that her detainment had become punitive. Indeed, a profoundly punitive element of her treatment will remain, even after her release: The judge denied a motion to vacate the exorbitant fines Manning faces. She owes the state $256,000, which she is expected to pay, even though the fines were only accrued on the condition that they might coerce her to speak.
The day before this hearing — and the day after she made an attempt on her own life — the judge ruled that Manning is “no longer needed” by the grand jury. The court did not recognize that she is incoercible, nor that her detainment had become punitive. Indeed, a profoundly punitive element of her treatment will remain, even after her release: The judge denied a motion to vacate the exorbitant fines Manning faces. She owes the state $256,000, which she is expected to pay, even though the fines were only accrued on the condition that they might coerce her to speak.
Again and again, Manning and her legal team showed that her imprisonment was nothing but punitive, and thus unjustifiable under the legal statutes governing federal grand juries. Yet for nearly a year, Manning has been caged and fined $1,000 per day. Ever since she was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, which is investigating WikiLeaks, Manning has also insisted that there was never any justifiable purpose to asking her to testify.
As her support committee noted in a statement last May, “Chelsea gave voluminous testimony during her court martial. She has stood by the truth of her prior statements, and there is no legitimate purpose to having her rehash them before a hostile grand jury.”
For the court to admit, after nearly a year of torturous treatment, that further testimony from her is unnecessary adds insult to very real injury.
The government’s treatment of Manning has been putrid and continues to be — especially as she remains under the yoke of state-enforced financial ruin. For her unwavering resistance to government oppression, in the name of social justice struggle and press freedom, Manning is owed our deepest admiration and all the support we can muster.
As her support committee noted in a statement last May, “Chelsea gave voluminous testimony during her court martial. She has stood by the truth of her prior statements, and there is no legitimate purpose to having her rehash them before a hostile grand jury.”
For the court to admit, after nearly a year of torturous treatment, that further testimony from her is unnecessary adds insult to very real injury.
The government’s treatment of Manning has been putrid and continues to be — especially as she remains under the yoke of state-enforced financial ruin. For her unwavering resistance to government oppression, in the name of social justice struggle and press freedom, Manning is owed our deepest admiration and all the support we can muster.
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Friday post
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The American way of life was designed by white supremacists in favor patriarchal white supremacy, who have had at least a 400 year head start accumulating wealth, out of generations filled with blood sweat and tears of oppressed people. The same people who are still on the front lines and in the crosshairs of patriarchal white-supremacist capitalism today. There's no such thing as equality without a united revolutionary front to dismantle capitalism and design a worldwide socialist society.
—Johnny Gould
(Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)
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Please forward widely
The Prosecution of Julian Assange and the Fight for Free Speech
Sunday, April 19, 2:00 - 5:00 pm Humanist Hall 390 27th Street, Oakland
Donation: $20 -$10 sliding scale; Student $5, No one turned away for lack of funds
Benefit for the Courage Foundation, for Julian Assange's defense
Join us for a panel discussion of leading attorneys, human rights defenders and social justice activists as the London trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is underway. If Assange is extradicted to the United States, he faces the first-ever charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 for the publication of truthful information in the public interest. Speakers will present the ctitical legal and policy issues involved as well as rebut government efforts to undermine the reputation and credibility of Assange. In these difficult times for civil liberties and democratic rights we demand: Free Julian Assange! Defend Free Speech and the First Amendment!
Panel Speakers: Jim Lafferty, Executive Director for three decades, National Lawyers Guild, Los Angeles
Representative, Bay Area National Lawyers Guild
Jennifer Robinson, Julian Assange's London attorney (message)
Joe Lombardo, National Coordinator, United National Antiwar Coalition
Nathan Fuller, Executive Director, Courage Foundation*
Nozomi Hayase, author, contributor to the new book, In Defense of Julian Assange
Margaret Kunstler, editor, In Defense of Julian Assange (tentative)
Moderator: Jeff Mackler, author, Obama's National Security State: The Meaning of the Edward Snowden Revelations
*Courage Foundation www.couragefound.org, an international whistleblower support network, campaigning for the public and legal defense of Julian Assange and for the protection of truthtellers and the public's right to know, internationally.
Sponsors: Bay Area Julian Assange Defense Committee • National Lawyers Guild Bay Area • Courage Foundation • United National Antiwar Coalition
Initial co-sponsors: CodePink Bay Area • Social Justice Center of Marin • Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, US Section • Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance, advisory board, Courage Foundation, past Steering Committee member Chelsea Manning Support Committee, Venezuelan Embassy defender • Marin Peace and Justice Center • Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Contact information and to co-sponsor: Event coordinator, Jeff Mackler, jmackler@lmi.net
With video messages from Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
National Solidarity Events to Amplify Prisoners Human Rights
AUGUST 21 - SEPTEMBER 9th
To all in solidarity with the Prisoners Human Rights Movement:
We are reaching out to those that have been amplifying our voices in these state, federal, or immigration jails and prisons, and to allies that uplifted the national prison strike demands in 2018. We call on you again to organize the communities from August 21st - September 9th, 2020, by hosting actions, events, and demonstrations that call for prisoner human rights and the end to prison slavery.
We must remind the people and legal powers in this nation that prisoners' human rights are a priority. If we aren't moving forward, we're moving backward. For those of us in chains, backward is not an option. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Some people claim that prisoners' human rights have advanced since the last national prison strike in 2018. We strongly disagree. But due to prisoners organizing inside and allies organizing beyond the walls, solidarity with our movement has increased. The only reason we hear conversations referencing prison reforms in every political campaign today is because of the work of prison organizers and our allies! But as organizers in prisons, we understand this is not enough. Just as quickly as we've gained ground, others are already funding projects and talking points to set back those advances. Our only way to hold our ground while moving forward is to remind people where we are and where we are headed.
On August 21 - September 9, we call on everyone in solidarity with us to organize an action, a panel discussion, a rally, an art event, a film screening, or another kind of demonstration to promote prisoners' human rights. Whatever is within your ability, we ask that you shake the nation out of any fog they may be in about prisoners' human rights and the criminal legal system (legalized enslavement).
During these solidarity events, we request that organizers amplify immediate issues prisoners in your state face, the demands from the National Prison Strike of 2018, and uplift Jailhouse Lawyers Speak new International Law Project.
We've started the International Law Project to engage the international community with a formal complaint about human rights abuses in U.S. prisons. This project will seek prisoners' testimonials from across the country to establish a case against the United States Prison Industrial Slave Complex on international human rights grounds.
Presently working on this legally is the National Lawyers Guild's Prisoners Rights Committee, and another attorney, Anne Labarbera. Members of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP), and I am We Prisoners Advocacy Network/Millions For Prisoners are also working to support these efforts. The National Lawyers Guild Prisoners' Rights Committee (Jenipher R. Jones, Esq. and Audrey Bomse) will be taking the lead on this project.
The National Prison Strike Demands of 2018 have not changed.. As reflected publicly by the recent deaths of Mississippi prisoners, the crisis in this nation's prisons persist. Mississippi prisons are on national display at the moment of this writing, and we know shortly afterward there will be another Parchman in another state with the same issues. The U.S. has demonstrated a reckless disregard for human lives in cages.
The prison strike demands were drafted as a path to alleviate the dehumanizing process and conditions people are subjected to while going through this nation's judicial system. Following up on these demands communicates to the world that prisoners are heard and that prisoners' human rights are a priority.
In the spirit of Attica, will you be in the fight to dismantle the prison industrial slave complex by pushing agendas that will shut down jails and prisons like Rikers Island or Attica? Read the Attica Rebellion demands and read the National Prison Strike 2018 demands. Ask yourself what can you do to see the 2018 National Prison Strike demands through.
SHARE THIS RELEASE FAR AND WIDE WITH ALL YOUR CONTACTS!
We rage with George Jackson's "Blood in my eyes" and move in the spirit of the Attica Rebellion!
August 21st - September 9th, 2020
AGITATE, EDUCATE, ORGANIZE
Dare to struggle, Dare to win!
We are--
"Jailhouse Lawyers Speak"
NLG EMAIL CONTACT FOR LAWYERS AND LAW STUDENTS INTERESTED IN JOINING THE INTERNATIONAL LAW PROJECT: micjlsnlg@gmail.com
PRISON STRIKE DEMANDS: https://jailhouselawyerspeak.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/prisoners-national-demands-for-human-rights/
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Courage to Resist Newsletter
 Podcast: “I would not carry a weapon anymore” – Ray Cage
Ray Cage is a combat vet and Agent Orange vet. He deployed to Vietnam in 1969 and later participated in the illegal invasion of Cambodia. "I just started to have some misgivings about what I was doing as a human being. ... There was a big movement of that going on all amongst the ranks in the war machine in Vietnam, that people were refusing to participate.” Listen to Ray's story
Appeals court heard arguments on draft registration, congressional report coming March 25th
As Congress prepares to debate the issue of the military draft, Courage to Resist and other anti-draft activists and organizations are calling on Congress to enact legislation to end draft registration entirely. Learn more
Join the Pilgrimage to Close the Camps, June 5-7, Washington DC
Courage to Resist is a proud endorser of the National Pilgrimage to Close the Camps, “A chance to join thousands of Japanese Americans and other communities for programs, protest, and healing together,” lead by Tsuru for Solidarity. Learn more
"No regrets" for resister who dumped human dung on draft files
Nearly forgotten history: At his draft board, they asked where Barry’s other ten brothers were. When Barry and his parents got home they thought about what had happened. “Oh, you mean rest, as in residue? Like what’s left behind in a bathroom stall?" The family could oblige, they decided. For the next few days, all of the brothers collected their business in a pail. Learn more
The above Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — “Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam.” This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured. If you believe this history is important, please ...
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COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Stop Kevin Cooper's Abuse by San Quentin Prison Guards!
https://www.change.org/p/san-quentin-warden-ronald-davis-stop-kevin-cooper-s-abuse-by-san-quentin-prison-guards-2ace89a7-a13e-44ab-b70c-c18acbbfeb59?recruiter=747387046&recruited_by_id=3ea6ecd0-69ba-11e7-b7ef-51d8e2da53ef&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard&use_react=false 
On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young. The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates.. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned: "This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. .... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .... .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!" A bucket was eventually brought over and: "I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush." Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!" A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A... Young. Kevin has never met Officer A...... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse... Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration. No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect................. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young.. Please: 1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.. 2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated........ 3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037 4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at: Main Street San Quentin, CA 94964 5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.......................ca.gov
On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young. The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates.. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned: "This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. .... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .... .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!" A bucket was eventually brought over and: "I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush." Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!" A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A... Young. Kevin has never met Officer A...... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse... Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration. No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect................. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young.. Please: 1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.. 2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated........ 3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037 4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at: Main Street San Quentin, CA 94964 5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.......................ca.gov*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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Eddie Conway's Update on Forgotten Political Prisoners
November 19, 2019
https://therealnews........com/stories/eddie-conway-update-forgotten-political-prisoners
EDDIE CONWAY: I'm Eddie Conway, host of Rattling the Bars. As many well-known political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal continue to suffer in prison…
MUMIA ABU JAMAL: In an area where there is corporate downsizing and there are no jobs and there is only a service economy and education is being cut, which is the only rung by which people can climb, the only growth industry in this part of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern United States, in the Southern United States, in the Western United States is "corrections," for want of a better word. The corrections industry is booming. I mean, this joint here ain't five years old.
EDDIE CONWAY: …The media brings their stories to the masses.. But there are many lesser-known activists that have dropped out of the spotlight, grown old in prison, or just been forgotten.............. For Rattling the Bars, we are spotlighting a few of their stories........ There was a thriving Black Panther party in Omaha, Nebraska, headed by David Rice and Ed Poindexter...... By 1968, the FBI had began plans to eliminate the Omaha Black Panthers by making an example of Rice and Poindexter. It would take a couple of years, but the FBI would frame them for murder..
KIETRYN ZYCHAL: In the 90s, Ed and Mondo both applied to the parole board. There are two different things you do in Nebraska, the parole board would grant you parole, but because they have life sentences, they were told that they have to apply to the pardons board, which is the governor, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, and ask that their life sentences be commuted to a specific number of years before they would be eligible for parole.
And so there was a movement in the 90s to try to get them out on parole...... The parole board would recommend them for parole because they were exemplary prisoners, and then the pardons board would not give them a hearing. They wouldn't even meet to determine whether they would commute their sentence..
EDDIE CONWAY: They served 45 years before Rice died in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. After several appeals, earning a master's degree, writing several books and helping other inmates, Poindexter is still serving time at the age of 75.
KEITRYN ZYCHAL: Ed Poindexter has been in jail or prison since August of 1970. He was accused of making a suitcase bomb and giving it to a 16-year-old boy named Duane Peak, and Duane Peak was supposed to take the bomb to a vacant house and call 911, and report that a woman was dragged screaming into a vacant house, and when police officers showed up, one of those police officers was killed when the suitcase bomb exploded............
Ed and his late co-defendant, Mondo we Langa, who was David Rice at the time of the trial, they have always insisted that they had absolutely nothing to do with this murderous plot, and they tried to get back into court for 50 years, and they have never been able to get back into court to prove their innocence. Mondo died in March of 2016 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Ed is going to turn 75 this year, I think............. And he has spent the majority of his life in prison... It will be 50 years in 2020 that he will be in prison..
EDDIE CONWAY: There are at least 20 Black Panthers still in prison across the United States.. One is one of the most revered is H. Rap Brown, known by his Islamic name, Jamil Al-Amin.
KAIRI AL-AMIN: My father has been a target for many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years of the federal government, and I think him being housed these last 10 years in federal penitentiaries without federal charges show that the vendetta is still strong. The federal government has not forgotten who he was as H.. Rap Brown, or who he is as Imam Jamil Al-Amin...
JAMIL AL-AMIN: See, it's no in between.. You are either free or you're a slave. There's no such thing as second-class citizenship.
EDDIE CONWAY: Most people don't realize he's still in prison. He's serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson...
KAIRI AL-AMIN: Our campaign is twofold.. One, how can egregious constitutional rights violations not warrant a new trial, especially when they were done by the prosecution........ And two, my father is innocent. The facts point to him being innocent, which is why we're pushing for a new trial.. We know that they can't win this trial twice... The reason they won the first time was because of the gag order that was placed on my father which didn't allow us to fight in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law... And so when you don't have anyone watching, anything can be done without any repercussion..
EDDIE CONWAY: Another well-known political prisoner that has been forgotten in the media and in the public arena is Leonard Peltier. Leonard Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement and has been in prison for over 40 years and is now 75 years old..
SPEAKER: Leonard Peltier represents, in a very real sense, the effort, the struggle by indigenous peoples within the United States to exercise their rights as sovereign nations, recognized as such in treaties with the United States.. For the government of the United States, which has colonized all indigenous peoples to claim boundaries, keeping Leonard in prison demonstrates the costs and consequences of asserting those rights.
EDDIE CONWAY: Leonard Peltier suffers from a host of medical issues including suffering from a stroke... And if he is not released, he will die in prison...
LEONARD PELTIER: I'll be an old man when I get out, if I get out.
PAULETTE D'AUTEUIL: His wellbeing is that he rarely gets a family visit. His children live in California and North Dakota. Both places are a good 2000 miles from where he's at in Florida, so it makes it time consuming as well as expensive to come and see him. He is, health-wise, we are still working on trying to get some help for his prostate, and there has been some development of some spots on his lungs, which we are trying to get resolved....... There's an incredible mold issue in the prison, especially because in Florida it's so humid and it builds up. So we're also dealing with that...
EDDIE CONWAY: These are just a few of the almost 20 political prisoners that has remained in American prisons for 30 and 40 years, some even longer. Mutulu Shakur has been in jail for long, long decades.... Assata Shakur has been hiding and forced into exile in Cuba......... Sundiata has been in prison for decades; Veronza Bower, The Move Nine........... And there's just a number of political prisoners that's done 30 or 40 years.
They need to be released and they need to have an opportunity to be back with their family, their children, their grandchildren, whoever is still alive. Any other prisoners in the United States that have the same sort of charges as those people that are being held has been released up to 15 or 20 years ago. That same justice system should work for the political prisoners also.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Rattling the Bars. I'm Eddie Conway.....
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Letters of support for clemency needed for Reality Winner
Reality Winner, a whistleblower who helped expose foreign hacking of US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election, has been behind bars since June 2017. Supporters are preparing to file a petition of clemency in hopes of an early release... Reality's five year prison sentence is by far the longest ever given for leaking information to the media about a matter of public interest.............. Stand with Reality shirts, stickers, and more available. Please take a moment to sign the letter SIGN THE LETTER Support Reality Podcast: "Veterans need to tell their stories" – Dan Shea Vietnam War combat veteran Daniel Shea on his time in Vietnam and the impact that Agent Orange and post traumatic stress had on him and his family since... Listen now This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — "Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam." This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured.. If you believe this history is important, please ... DONATE NOW to support these podcasts |
COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT! 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559 www.....................couragetoresist..org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Mobilization4Mumia
215-724-1618 Mobilizatio4Mumia.com mobilization4mumia@gmail.com PRESS RELEASE Contact Sophia Williams 917-806-0521, Ted Kelly 610-715-6924 or Joe Piette 610-931-2615
215-724-1618 Mobilizatio4Mumia.com mobilization4mumia@gmail.com PRESS RELEASE Contact Sophia Williams 917-806-0521, Ted Kelly 610-715-6924 or Joe Piette 610-931-2615
Philadelphia, Jan. 30 - Mumia Abu-Jamal has always insisted on his innocence in the death of police officer Daniel Faulkner, blaming police, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct for his politically-tainted conviction. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is expected to announce his response this week to the legal briefs for Post Conviction Relief Act hearings and the request to remand Abu-Jamal's case back to Common Pleas court, filed by his attorneys in early September 2019. Abu-Jamal's supporters will rally outside DA Krasner's office at 4:30 on Friday, January 31, whether or not he challenges Mumia's appeals. We call for Mumia's release...
Recent exonerations of 10 Philadelphia residents unfairly convicted for crimes they did not commit reveal a simple truth - the Philadelphia police, courts and prosecutors convicted innocent Black men based on gross violations of their constitutional rights. The same patterns of constitutional violations plague the case of Abu-Jamal. Since Jan. 2018, Sherman McCoy, James Frazier, Dwayne Thorpe, Terrance Lewis, Jamaal Simmons, Dontia Patterson, John Miller, Willie Veasey, Johnny Berry and Chester Holmann III have all been exonerated by DA Larry Krasner's Conviction Integrity Unit. Philadelphia is not alone. The National Registry of Exonerations counted 165 exonerations last year. The registry has tallied 2,500 wrongful convictions since 1989, costing defendants more than 22,000 years of incarceration. Seven of the ten men released in Philadelphia were convicted by longtime district attorney Lynne Abraham, a "tough-on-crime" prosecutor who regularly sought maximum punishments and death spentences. Abraham as Common Pleas Court Judge arraigned Abu-Jamal in 1981and years later as District Attorney fought his post conviction relief hearings... Ineffective counsel, false witness testimony, witness coercion and intimidation, phony ballistics evidence, prosecution failure to turn over evidence to the defense as required by law, racist jury selections -- these and other legal errors led to the exoneration of these innocent defendants after decades in prison.. These are the same police, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct practices Abu-Jamal's attorneys and supporters have been citing since 1982. In the late 1970s and early 80s, Abu-Jamal was a daily radio reporter for WHYY and NPR who earned acclaim for his award-winning reporting. As a journalist who reported fairly on the MOVE organization's resistance against state repression, he drew the ire of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police and the notoriously racist Police Commissioner and later Mayor Frank Rizzo. On Dec. 9, 1981, while driving a cab to supplement his income, Abu-Jamal happened upon his brother in an altercation with Faulkner. Faulkner was killed. Abu-Jamal, who was shot and severely beaten by police, was charged in Faulkner's death, even though witnesses reported seeing another man, most probably the passenger in Abu-Jamal's brother's car, running from the scene. Imprisoned for nearly four decades, Abu-Jamal has maintained his innocence. He successfully won his release from Pennsylvania's death row in 2011.. In December 2018 he won the right to appeal his 1982 conviction because of biased judicial oversight by PA Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille In early January 2019, DA Krasner reported finding six boxes of previously undisclosed evidence held by prosecutors in the case and allowed Abu-Jamal's attorneys to review the files. In September 2019 Abu-Jamal's lawyers filed new appellate briefs, including a request that the case be returned for a hearing before the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court based on finding of concrete evidence of prosecutorial misconduct by the DA's office in his 1982 trial. A Sept.. 9, 2019 Abu-Jamal's attorneys Judith Ritter and Sam Spital filed a brief in PA Superior Court to support his claim that his 1982 trial was fundamentally unfair and violated the Constitution. They argue the prosecution failed to disclose evidence as required and discriminated against African Americans when selecting the jury. And, his 1982 lawyer did not adequately challenge the State's witnesses. The attorneys also filed a motion revealing new evidence of constitutional violations such as promises by the prosecutor to pay or give leniency to two witnesses. There is also new evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection. Attorney Ritter contends that the new evidence shows Abu-Jamal's trial was "fundamentally unfair and tainted by serious constitutional violations." https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZgI0jvcWY5soAh_DXKdNnJJZSY0HEftuRwthQMurgd8/edit?usp=sharing
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Mumia Abu-Jamal: New Chance for Freedom
Police and State Frame-Up Must Be Fully Exposed!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. Courts have ignored and suppressed evidence of his innocence for decades.... But now, one court has thrown out all the decisions of the PA Supreme Court that denied Mumia's appeals against his unjust conviction during the years of 1998 to 2012!
This ruling, by Judge Leon Tucker, was made because one judge on the PA Supreme Court during those years, Ronald Castille, was lacking the "appearance of impartiality." In plain English, he was clearly biased against Mumia. Before sitting on the PA Supreme Court, Castille had been District Attorney (or assistant DA) during the time of Mumia's frame-up and conviction, and had used his office to express a special interest in pursuing the death penalty for "cop-killers." Mumia was in the cross-hairs. Soon he was wrongly convicted and sent to death row for killing a police officer.....
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning and intrepid journalist, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter, and a critic of police brutality and murder. Mumia was framed by police, prosecutors, and leading elements of both Democratic and Republican parties, for the shooting of a police officer.. The US Justice Department targeted him as well... A racist judge helped convict him, and corrupt courts have kept him locked up despite much evidence that should have freed him. He continues his commentary and journalism from behind bars. As of 2019, he has been imprisoned for 37 years for a crime he did not commit.
Time is up! FREE MUMIA NOW!
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DA's Hidden Files Show Frame-Up of Mumia
In the midst of Mumia's fight for his right to challenge the state Supreme Court's negative rulings, a new twist was revealed: six boxes of files on Mumia's case--with many more still hidden--were surreptitiously concealed for decades in a back room at the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia. The very fact that these files on Mumia's case were hidden away for decades is damning in the extreme, and their revelations confirm what we have known for decades: Mumia was framed for a crime he did not commit!
So far, the newly revealed evidence confirms that, at the time of Mumia's 1982 trial, chief prosecutor Joe McGill illegally removed black jurors from the jury, violating the Batson decision. Also revealed: The prosecution bribed witnesses into testifying that they saw Mumia shoot the slain police officer when they hadn't seen any such thing.... Taxi driver Robert Chobert, who was on probation for fire-bombing a school yard at the time, had sent a letter demanding his money for lying on the stand....... Very important, but the newly revealed evidence is just the tip of the iceberg!
All Evidence of Mumia's Innocence Must Be Brought Forward Now!
Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was rigged against him from beginning to end........ All of the evidence of Mumia's innocence--which was earlier suppressed or rejected--must now be heard:
• Mumia was framed - The judge at Mumia's trial, Albert Sabo, was overheard to say, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n____r." And he proceeded to do just that.... Mumia was thrown out of his own trial for defending himself! Prosecution "witnesses" were coerced or bribed at trial to lie against Mumia.. In addition to Chobert, this included key witness Cynthia White, a prostitute who testified that she saw Mumia shoot Faulkner... White's statements had to be rewritten under intense pressure from the cops, because she was around the corner and out of sight of the shooting at the time! Police bribed her with promises of being allowed to work her corner, and not sent to state prison for her many prostitution charges.
• Mumia only arrived on the scene after Officer Faulkner was shot - William Singletary, a tow-truck business owner who had no reason to lie against the police, said he had been on the scene the whole time, that Mumia was not the shooter, and that Mumia had arrived only after the shooting of Faulkner. Singletary's statements were torn up, his business was wrecked, and he was threatened by police to be out of town for the trial (which, unfortunately, he was)...
• There is no evidence that Mumia fired a gun - Mumia was shot on the scene by an arriving police officer and arrested. But the cops did not test his hands for gun-powder residue--a standard procedure in shootings! They also did not test Faulkner's hands. The prosecution nevertheless claimed Mumia was the shooter, and that he was shot by Faulkner as the officer fell to the ground. Ballistics evidence was corrupted to falsely show that Mumia's gun was the murder weapon, when his gun was reportedly still in his taxi cab, which was in police custody days after the shooting!
• The real shooter fled the scene and was never charged - Veronica Jones was a witness who said that after hearing the shots from a block away, she had seen two people fleeing the scene of the shooting.... This could not have included Mumia, who had been shot and almost killed at the scene. Jones was threatened by the police with arrest and loss of custody of her children. She then lied on the stand at trial to say she had seen no one running away.
• Abu-Jamal never made a confession - Mumia has always maintained his innocence. But police twice concocted confessions that Mumia never made. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the senior officer at the crime scene, made up a confession for Mumia. But Giordano was not allowed to testify at trial, because he was top on the FBI's list of corrupt cops in the Philadelphia police force... At the DA's request, another cop handily provided a second "confession," allegedly heard by a security guard in the hospital......... But at neither time was Mumia--almost fatally shot--able to speak.. And an earlier police report by cops in the hospital said that, referring to Mumia: "the negro male made no comment"!
• The crime scene was tampered with by police - Police officers at the scene rearranged some evidence, and handled what was alleged to be Mumia's gun with their bare hands... A journalist's photos revealed this misconduct. The cops then left the scene unattended for hours.. All of this indicates a frame-up in progress....
• The real shooter confessed, and revealed the reason for the crime - Arnold Beverly came forward in the 1990s. He said in a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, that he, not Mumia, had been the actual shooter. He said that he, along with "another guy," had been hired to do the hit, because Faulkner was "a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area"! (affidavit of Arnold Beverly).
• The corruption of Philadelphia police is documented and well known - This includes that of Giordano, who was the first cop to manufacture a "confession" by Mumia... Meanwhile, Faulkner's cooperation with the federal anti-corruption investigations of Philadelphia police is strongly suggested by his lengthy and heavily redacted FBI file......
• Do cops kill other cops? There are other cases in Philadelphia that look that way. Frank Serpico, an NYC cop who investigated and reported on police corruption, was abandoned by fellow cops after being shot in a drug bust. Mumia was clearly made a scape-goat for the crimes of corrupt Philadelphia cops who were protecting their ill-gotten gains.
• Politicians and US DOJ helped the frame-up - Ed Rendell, former DA, PA governor, and head of the Democratic National Committee--and now a senior advisor to crime-bill author Joe Biden--is complicit in the frame-up of Mumia. The US Justice Department targeted Mumia for his anti-racist activities when he was a teenager, and later secretly warned then-prosecutor Rendell not to use Giordano as a witness against Mumia because he was an FBI target for corruption..
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All this should lead to an immediate freeing of Mumia! But we are still a ways away from that, and we have no confidence in the capitalist courts to finish the job. We must act! This victory in local court allowing new appeals must now lead to a full-court press on all the rejected and suppressed evidence of Mumia's innocence!
Mass Movement Needed To Free Mumia!
Mumia's persecution by local, state and federal authorities of both political parties has been on-going, and has generated a world-wide movement in his defense... This movement has seen that Mumia, as a radio journalist who exposed the brutal attacks on the black community by the police in Philadelphia, has spoken out as a defender of working people of all colors and all nationalities in his ongoing commentaries (now on KPFA/Pacifica radio), despite being on death row, and now while serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)...
In 1999, Oakland Teachers for Mumia held unauthorized teach-ins in Oakland schools on Mumia and the death penalty, despite the rabid hysteria in the bourgeois media. Teachers in Rio de Janeiro held similar actions. Letters of support came in from maritime workers and trade unions around the world.. Later in 1999, longshore workers shut down all the ports on the West Coast to free Mumia, and led a mass march of 25,000 Mumia supporters in San Francisco................
A year later, a federal court lifted Mumia's death sentence, based on improper instructions to the jury by trial judge Albert Sabo.. The federal court ordered the local court to hold a new sentencing hearing... Fearing their frame-up of Mumia could be revealed in any new hearing, even if only on sentencing, state officials passed. Much to the chagrin of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)--which still seeks Mumia's death--this left Mumia with LWOP, death by life in prison..
Mumia supporters waged a struggle to get him the cure for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, which he had likely contracted through a blood transfusion in hospital after he was shot by a cop at the 1981 crime scene. The Labor Action Committee conducted demonstrations against Gilead Sciences, the Foster City CA corporation that owns the cure, and charged $1,000 per pill! The Metalworkers Union of South Africa wrote a letter excoriating Governor Wolf for allowing untreated sick freedom fighters to die in prison as the apartheid government had done. Finally, Mumia did get the cure.. Now, more than ever, struggle is needed to free Mumia!
Now is the Time: Mobilize Again for Mumia's Freedom!
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.laboractionmumia...........org
Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal | Mumia Abu-Jamal is an I.....
November 2019
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Board Game
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/race-for-solidarity
Solidarity against racism has existed from the 1600's and continues until today
An exciting board game of chance, empathy and wisdom, that entertains and educates as it builds solidarity through learning about the destructive history of American racism and those who always fought back. Appreciate the anti-racist solidarity of working people, who built and are still building, the great progressive movements of history.. There are over 200 questions, with answers and references.
Spread the word!!
By Dr.... Nayvin Gordon
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50 years in prison: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!! FREE Chip Fitzgerald Grandfather, Father, Elder, Friend former Black Panther
Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald has been in prison since he was locked up 50 years ago...... A former member of the Black Panther Party, Chip is now 70 years old, and suffering the consequences of a serious stroke. He depends on a wheelchair for his mobility. He has appeared before the parole board 17 times, but they refuse to release him.. NOW is the time for Chip to come home! In September 1969, Chip and two other Panthers were stopped by a highway patrolman..... During the traffic stop, a shooting broke out, leaving Chip and a police officer both wounded. Chip was arrested a month later and charged with attempted murder of the police and an unrelated murder of a security guard. Though the evidence against him was weak and Chip denied any involvement, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1972, the California Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.......... Chip and others on Death Row had their sentences commuted to Life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. All of them became eligible for parole after serving 7 more years...... But Chip was rejected for parole, as he has been ever since. Parole for Lifers basically stopped under Governors Deukmajian, Wilson, and Davis (1983-2003), resulting in increasing numbers of people in prison and 23 new prisons. People in prison filed lawsuits in federal courts: people were dying as a result of the overcrowding.. To rapidly reduce the number of people in prison, the court mandated new parole hearings: · for anyone 60 years or older who had served 25 years or more; · for anyone convicted before they were 23 years old; · for anyone with disabilities Chip qualified for a new parole hearing by meeting all three criteria. But the California Board of Parole Hearings has used other methods to keep Chip locked up. Although the courts ordered that prison rule infractions should not be used in parole considerations, Chip has been denied parole because he had a cellphone.......... Throughout his 50 years in prison, Chip has been denied his right to due process – a new parole hearing as ordered by Federal courts. He is now 70, and addressing the challenges of a stroke victim. His recent rules violation of cellphone possession were non-violent and posed no threat to anyone. He has never been found likely to commit any crimes if released to the community – a community of his children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues who are ready to support him and welcome him home. The California Board of Parole Hearings is holding Chip hostage..... We call on Governor Newsom to release Chip immediately. What YOU can do to support this campaign to FREE CHIP: 1) Sign and circulate the petition to FREE Chip. Download it at https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald Print out the petition and get signatures at your workplace, community meeting, or next social gathering. 2) Write an email to Governor Newsom's office (sample message at:https://docs..google.com/document/d/1iwbP_eQEg2J1T2h-tLKE-Dn2ZfpuLx9MuNv2z605DMc/edit?usp=sharing 3) Write to Chip: Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald #B27527, CSP-LAC P.O. Box 4490 B-4-150 Lancaster, CA 93539 -- Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863...................9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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On Abortion: From Facebook
Best explanation I've heard so far......., Copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied..................., "Last night, I was in a debate about these new abortion laws being passed in red states. My son stepped in with this comment which was a show stopper. One of the best explanations I have read:, , 'Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question.... However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not..., , Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v.. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973).. Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you.. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent..... It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional.... This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or how many lives they would save...., , That's the law.., , Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily.............. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong............ That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees....... But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy..., , She may choose to carry the baby to term..... She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between... But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side... Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means....", , Feel free to copy/paste and re-post., y Sent from my iPhone
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Celebrating the release of Janet and Janine Africa 
Take action now to support Jalil A. Muntaqim's release
Jalil A...... Muntaqim was a member of the Black Panther Party and has been a political prisoner for 48 years since he was arrested at the age of 19 in 1971. He has been denied parole 11 times since he was first eligible in 2002, and is now scheduled for his 12th parole hearing... Additionally, Jalil has filed to have his sentence commuted to time served by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Visit Jalil's support page, check out his writing and poetry, and Join Critical Resistance in supporting a vibrant intergenerational movement of freedom fighters in demanding his release. 48 years is enough. Write, email, call, and tweet at Governor Cuomo in support of Jalil's commutation and sign this petition demanding his release. http://freedomarchives.org/Support...Jalil/Campaign.html
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
https://www.gofundme.....com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108 For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.. Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here ..... In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov..... Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.. The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings ......... Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls........ Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
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Don't extradite Assange!
To the government of the UK Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state.......... Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority... We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested. Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning... The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West..... Sign now! The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible... They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him........... Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger... The world is still watching. Sign now! [1] https://www..nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.....html [2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/ Sign this petition: https://internal.diem25.....org/en/petitions/1
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Words of Wisdom 
Louis Robinson Jr., 77 Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.
"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill...... All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No.... We aren't going for this......... Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did.. It happened... It doesn't feel good..." [On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019.........] https://www.......nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant...html
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1) Search for Coronavirus Vaccine Becomes a Global Competition
The United States, China and Europe are battling to be the first to find a cure, bringing a nationalist element to a worldwide crisis.
By David E. Sanger, David D. Kirkpatrick, Sui-Lee Wee and Katrin Bennhold
Bing Guan/Reuters
WASHINGTON—A global arms race for a coronavirus vaccine is underway.
In the three months since the virus began its deadly spread, China, Europe and the United States have all set off at a sprint to become the first to produce a vaccine. But while there is cooperation on many levels—including among companies that are ordinarily fierce competitors—hanging over the effort is the shadow of a nationalistic approach that could give the winner the chance to favor its own population and potentially gain the upper hand in dealing with the economic and geostrategic fallout from the crisis.
What began as a question of who would get the scientific accolades, the patents and ultimately the revenues from a successful vaccine is suddenly a broader issue of urgent national security. And behind the scramble is a harsh reality: Any new vaccine that proves potent against the coronavirus—clinical trials are underway in the United States, China and Europe already—is sure to be in short supply as governments try to ensure that their own people are the first in line.
In China, 1,000 scientists are at work on a vaccine, and the issue has already been militarized: Researchers affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences have developed what is considered the nation’s front-runner candidate for success and is recruiting volunteers for clinical trials.
China “will not be slower than other countries,” Wang Junzhi, a biological products quality control expert with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said Tuesday at a news conference in Beijing.
The effort has taken on propaganda qualities. Already, a widely circulated photograph of Chen Wei, a virologist in the People’s Liberation Army, receiving an injection of what was advertised to be the first vaccine, has been exposed as a fake, taken before a trip she made to Wuhan, where the virus began.
President Trump has talked in meetings with pharmaceutical executives about making sure a vaccine is produced on American soil, to assure the United States controls its supplies. German government officials said they believed he tried to lure a German company, CureVac, to do its research and production, if it comes to that, in the United States.
The company has denied it received a takeover offer, but its lead investor made clear there was some kind of approach.
Asked by the German magazine Sport 1 about how the contact with Mr. Trump had unfolded, Dietmar Hopp, whose Dievini Hopp BioTech Holding owns 80 percent of the company, said: “I personally didn’t speak to Mr. Trump. He spoke to the company and they immediately told me about it and asked what I thought of it, and I knew immediately that it was out of the question.”
The report of the approach was enough to prompt the European Commission to pledge another $85 million to the firm, which has already had support from a European vaccine consortium.
The same day, a Chinese company offered $133.3 million for an equity stake and other consideration from another German firm in the vaccine race, BioNTech.
“There has been a global wake-up call that biotechnology is a strategic industry for our societies,” Friedrich von Bohlen, the managing director of the holding company that owns 82 percent of CureVac.
And just as nations have insisted on building their own drones, their own stealth fighters and their own cyberweapons, they do not want to be beholden to a foreign power for access to the drugs that are needed in a crisis.
After two decades of farming out drug production to China and India, “you want the whole production process close to home,” Mr. von Bohlen said.
Some experts view the geopolitical competition as healthy, as long as any successes are shared with the world—which government officials routinely assure they will be.
But they do not say how, or more important, when. And many analysts recall what happened during the swine flu epidemic in 2009, when a company in Australia that was among the first to develop a single-dose vaccine was required to satisfy demand in Australia before fulfilling export orders to the United States and elsewhere.
That spurred outrage, conspiracy theories and congressional hearings into the reasons for the shortfall.
“You want everybody to cooperate, everybody to race as quickly as they can to a vaccine and the best candidates to move forward,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University.
But if those showing signs of success are wondering if their companies will be nationalized, he said, it creates a complication that “you don’t want to have when you are trying to get a vaccine made as quickly as possible.”
Executives of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies said on Thursday that they were working together and with governments to assure that a vaccine is developed as quickly as possible and distributed equitably. But they implored governments not to hoard a vaccine once it is developed, saying that to do so would be devastating for the broader goal of stamping out the coronavirus pandemic.
“I would encourage everyone not to get into this trap of saying we have to get everything into our countries now and close the borders,” said Severin Schwan, the chief executive of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche. “It would be completely wrong to fall into nationalist behavior that would actually disrupt supply chains and be detrimental to people around the world.”
Adding to the pressure is Mr. Trump’s near-daily assurance that breakthroughs are on the way. While antiviral drugs to treat the effects of the coronavirus may be tested under “compassionate use” guidelines that allow experimentation on desperately ill patients, a vaccine remains at least 12 to 18 months away, both American officials and the leaders of major pharmaceutical companies say.
“Vaccines are injected into healthy people, so we need to ensure safety,” a process that takes time, David Loew, an executive vice president of Sanofi Pasteur of France, said on Thursday. His firm is working with Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson in the United States, Roche and Takeda in Japan.
In normal times, there is always an element of national competition to the development of drugs. In the months before the coronavirus began breaking out in Wuhan, the F.B.I. began an effort to root out scientists they believed were stealing biomedical research from the United States, mostly focused on scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, on behalf of China. There were 180 cases under investigation last year.
But the fear is that the urgency to come up with a usable vaccine will inflame nationalistic tendencies.
China has made clear it is looking for a national champion—an equivalent to the role that Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant, plays in the race to build 5G networks around the world. If the Huawei pattern holds, China could make deals to increase its influence over poorer or less developed countries, which might otherwise might not get affordable access to a vaccine.
There are already signs that China is using the moment for geopolitical advantage, delivering help to countries that once would have looked to Europe or the United States. Its decision to ship diagnostic kits to the Philippines, an ally of the United States, and to help Serbia was a leading indicator of what may come with drugs and vaccines, when they are available.
Speaking in a teleconference on Thursday, executives from the five biggest pharmaceutical companies said they were working to increase the industry’s manufacturing abilities by sharing available capacity to ramp up production once a successful vaccine or antiviral is identified. They argued for multiple testing programs to increase the chances of success, and then for immediate licensing to allow a quick scaling up of production.
Once a vaccine is approved, “we’ll need to vaccinate billions of people around the world, so we are looking at alternatives to where and how we produce,” Mr. Loew said.
But it is governments that get to decide how a vaccine is approved, and where it can be sold.
“If countries say, ‘Gee, let’s try to lock up a supply so we can protect our populations,’ then it can be a challenge to get the vaccine to the places where it can make the most difference epidemiologically,” said Seth Berkley, the chief executive of GAVI, a nonprofit organization that supplies vaccines to developing countries.
Mindful of those dangers, though, several European governments and nonprofit groups have already taken steps to prevent either the United States or China from capturing a monopoly on a potential vaccine against the coronavirus.
In the aftermath of the Ebola plague that flared across West Africa from 2014 to 2016, Norway, Britain and other mostly European countries as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began contributing millions of dollars to a multinational organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives, to fund vaccine research.
All of its funding agreements included provisions for equal access to assure that “appropriate vaccines are first available to populations when and where they are needed to end an outbreak or curtail an epidemic, regardless of ability to pay,” the organization said in a statement.
In the past two months, the coalition has funded research into eight of the most promising candidates to block the coronavirus—including CureVac, the Germany company.
All of which left unclear exactly what Mr. Trump sought from CureVac, if anything, and why the company ousted its American chief executive, Daniel Menichella, days after he met with the White House coronavirus task force, in a session where Mr. Trump dropped by. The White House declined to comment.
The company itself has issued carefully drafted denials of a takeover offer. “Maybe someone said something,” Mr. Von Bohlen said. “But there is no written offer from the United States.”
There did not need to be. The mere hint of it was enough to get European officials to offer more funding.
“The fact that other countries tried to buy that company shows that they are the front-runner in the research,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. “It is a European company—we wanted to keep it in Europe, it wanted to stay in Europe. It was very important to give it the necessary funding, and that has happened.”*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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2) Gov. Gavin Newsom of California Orders Californians to Stay at Home
In making the announcement, Mr. Newsom has taken the most drastic step of any state leader to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
By Tim Arango and Jill Cowan, March 19, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/California-stay-at-home-order-virus.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Rich Pedroncelli, via Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — America’s most populous state is ordering its residents to stay indoors.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Thursday ordered Californians — all 40 million of them — to stay in their houses as much as possible in the coming weeks as the state confronts the escalating coronavirus outbreak. The order represents the most drastic measure any governor has taken to control the virus, and a decision that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, which has far more cases than California, has resisted taking.
Mr. Newsom made the announcement from the state’s emergency operations center in Sacramento, normally a place where emergency workers coordinate responses to wildfires and earthquakes, and spoke in stark terms of the risk that the coronavirus posed to the population.
Citing a model that state planners have been using, suggesting that 56 percent of Californians, or more than 25 million people, could be infected over eight weeks, Mr. Newsom said, “I think it’s time I tell you what I tell my family.”
“This is not a permanent state, this is a moment in time,” he said. “We will look back at these decisions as pivotal.”
Mr. Newsom said that most retail shops, including indoor malls, are being ordered shut across the state. Also closed are most corporate offices. Banks, grocery stores, pharmacies, laundromats and some other businesses are exempted.
Officials emphasized that the orders did not bar residents from leaving their homes, and they encouraged people to take walks, as long as they stay six feet apart, and visit grocery stores.
Health care workers, essential municipal workers such as bus drivers and others will still be working.
Earlier in the week several counties in the Bay Area, along with Sacramento, issued orders that residents essentially shelter in place, although there are several exceptions — which also apply to the state order.
The new rules were the most drastic ones so far in the country for the population size covered, and follow similar crackdowns in Europe, most notably in Italy, where the death toll from the relentless virus on Thursday surpassed that of China.
Just before Mr. Newsom spoke, officials in Los Angeles County held a news conference to announce their own stay at home order, which they are calling “safer at home.”
How the orders will be enforced is unclear, but officials said that they expected residents to follow them and that there would enormous social pressure to do so on those who disobey them.
“People will self-regulate their behavior,” he said. “We’ll have social pressure to encourage people to do the right thing.”
A Los Angeles County sheriff’s official said on Twitter that the department did not plan on making arrests to enforce the order.
Mr. Newsom did, however, say that the state would be “more aggressively” policing xenophobic attacks against Asians. “We are better than that,” Mr. Newsom said.
Thursday’s directives in Los Angeles and from the governor come after several days in which California leaders, both at the state and local level, gradually tightened public life, closing bars, wineries, gyms and movie theaters and ordering restaurants to halt in-housing dining and shift to takeout and delivery. On Sunday night, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles announced that all bars would close and restaurants would be allowed only to do takeout or delivery. In recent days he has also been urging people to stay home from work.
Officials have described the stay at home orders as an aggressive way to reduce infections and buy time to stock up on medical supplies like ventilators and masks to confront what they expect to be a surge in need for hospital beds.
Also on Thursday, Mr. Newsom released a letter he had sent to President Trump asking him to deploy a hospital ship to the Port of Los Angeles to be on standby for an expected surge in hospitalizations because of the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak. In making his plea, the governor cited the alarming statistic that roughly 56 percent of the state’s population, or 25.5 million people — in line with some national projections about how severe the outbreak could become — will be infected with the virus over an eight-week period.
“In some parts of our state, our case rate is doubling every four days,” he wrote.
But on Thursday night, he said he hoped that the extraordinary measures would stop those projections from becoming real.
“The point of the stay at home order is to make those numbers moot,” Mr. Newsom said.
California’s Department of Public Health on Thursday reported that the state had 675 confirmed cases and 16 deaths, up from 598 cases and 13 deaths the day before. One of the new deaths came in Los Angeles County, where officials said the region had 231 cases — they reported 40 new cases on Thursday. The most recent death, the county’s public health department said, was a 30-something who had underlying conditions and lived near Pasadena.
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3) Coronavirus and Poverty: A Mother Skips Meals So Her Children Can Eat
Americans with tight financial resources have fewer options as they navigate coronavirus closures and layoffs.
By Manny Fernandez, March 20, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/coronavirus-poverty-school-lunch.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
BRENHAM, Texas — With her six hungry children in the car, Summer Mossbarger was one of the first in line for lunch at the drive-through. Not at a fast-food restaurant, but outside Alton Elementary School.
Alton was closed — all the public schools in Brenham, a rural Texas town of 17,000 about 90 miles east of Austin, have shut for the coronavirus — but one vital piece of the school day lived on: free lunch. Ms. Mossbarger rolled down the window of her used, 15-year-old S.U.V. as school employees handed her six Styrofoam containers.
Even as the carnival aroma of mini corn dogs filled the vehicle on the drive back home, and even as the children sat on the porch and ate from their flipped-open containers with the family dogs running around, Ms. Mossbarger ate nothing.
She skipped breakfast and lunch, taking her first bite of food — food-pantry fried chicken — at about 5:30 p.m. All she consumed from the time she awoke that morning until she ate dinner were sips from a cherry Dr Pepper.
Money was tight. Ms. Mossbarger, 33, a disabled Army veteran, does not work. Her husband’s job as a carpenter has slowed in recent days and gotten more unpredictable as people cancel or delay residential construction jobs. She had plenty of worries — paying the $1,000 rent was at the top of the list — but lunch for her children was not one of them.
“If we didn’t have this, I probably would have a mental breakdown with stress,” she said of the free meals at Alton. “I’m not going to let my kids go hungry. If I have to just eat once a day, that’s what I have to do.”
The power of the coronavirus to produce upheaval in people’s lives depends in part on income. Americans with fewer financial resources have fewer options as they navigate the new normal of school closings, shuttered businesses and shelter-in-place orders.
Poverty experts said that in times of natural disasters and large-scale emergencies, low-income families who are already living on tight budgets with overdue bills, unstable housing, poor health care and unsteady employment often bear the brunt of the pain.
“They tend to be the first hit when things go wrong and then also to take the longest time to recover,” said H. Luke Shaefer, a professor of social work and public policy at the University of Michigan and the faculty director of its Poverty Solutions initiative.
Ms. Mossbarger’s self-imposed starvation was one quiet, anonymous moment amid a national crisis, and one sign of the depth of the virus’s impact on the working poor.
The Brenham Independent School District’s free-lunch drive-through was one of many underway this week in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Oregon and other states attempting to ensure that schoolchildren continue to receive free meals Monday through Friday during weekslong virus-related closures. Educators and school nutritionists said that for some impoverished children, the free breakfast and free lunch at school are the only substantial meals they will eat in a day.
Albuquerque Public Schools, New Mexico’s largest district, where about 69 percent of students receive free or reduced-price meals, began passing out free breakfasts and lunches at dozens of its schools starting Monday. In California, the Elk Grove school system in Sacramento has since last week provided nearly 11,000 students with two daily meals, lunch and tomorrow’s breakfast.
In Brenham, where 60 percent of the 5,000 public-school students qualify for free or low-cost meals, the school district handed out more than 1,000 lunches and more than 800 breakfasts to children over the program’s first three days this week.
Brenham is a working-class town, known in Texas as the home of Blue Bell ice cream. Cattle and horses graze in the pastures that line the roads and highways, and the cowboys don’t bother to take off their hats when they climb into their trucks. The town is the uncredited backdrop of countless postcards, posters and Instagram accounts — the bluebonnets are bright and ubiquitous, and even color the grassy medians. But beneath its rustic beauty and ice-cream-company charm lies financial hardship. Brenham has a median household income of roughly $44,000, and a poverty rate of 18.6 percent.
On Tuesday, the long, tranquil driveway outside Alton Elementary was the coronavirus equivalent of an old-fashioned soup line, roughly 10 cars deep. District employees who volunteered to pass out meals recognized some of the drivers — they worked for the district, too, and had brought their children to get a free lunch.
The nation’s free or reduced-price lunch program has long been used as an indicator of a community’s poverty level, but there was no sign of embarrassment, resentment or shame in the drive-through line. Some drivers hollered a loud thank you to the volunteers as they pulled away, and most didn’t even bother to ask what was inside the lunch containers: mini corn dogs, baked beans, baby carrots, an orange. People seemed more concerned with social distancing than any social stigma. One woman kept her driver-side window rolled up as she interacted with the volunteers, to avoid having them get too close to her.
They pulled up in beat-up cars with rattling engines, newly washed trucks, sleek Cadillacs, old minivans. They were white, black, Hispanic. Mothers were behind the wheel of most of the vehicles, but there were a few fathers, too, and high-school students with their younger siblings inside. The only requirement was that children under 18 had to be inside the vehicle to receive the meal, but no one was asked to prove the children attended a district school.
For many of the families, the free meals were not the difference between their children eating or not eating. Instead, they said they viewed it as a way to stretch their budgets a little longer, so that the money they would have spent on that day’s lunch could instead go to tomorrow’s dinner or next week’s bill. Word had spread while families idled in line that the Texas governor was activating the National Guard, that some of the shelves at a local grocery store were still barren. The drive-through at Alton was one small bright spot at an anxious time, even though their county had no confirmed cases of coronavirus.
Gabbie Salazar, 28, made two trips to the drive-through, each time with different sets of nieces, nephews and cousins in her car. She knows Alton well: She manages the school cafeteria. She is a single mother who works two jobs, at the school and at a day care, and makes a total of about $2,000 a month, with a rent of about $800 monthly.
“Save a little money, you know?” Ms. Salazar said of the free meals. “I’m a single mom. I only have to do one meal at night, so that helps a lot.”
Before Ms. Mossbarger pulled up in the drive-through line on Tuesday, she took her six children to the H-E-B grocery store. She went to the aisle for paper towels and toilet paper, but there was nothing left — the shelves were empty, and customers were crowding around to grab whatever they could. She gathered the children, left the cart in the middle of the aisle and walked out, frustrated that she had wasted gas in her Chevrolet Suburban.
“I couldn’t deal with it,” she said of the grocery store. “It stresses me out. Because me as a mother, it makes me feel like I’m not going to be able to provide for my kids.”
Her husband, Jordan Spahn, 47, said they do not have the luxury of stockpiling. When he found out he didn’t have any carpentry jobs on Tuesday — usually, he makes about $180 daily — he worked on a friend’s patio-furniture set to make a few extra dollars.
“We live check to check,” Mr. Spahn said. “We’ve seen those that have more than others be the first ones to get everything they could get their hands on. It shows a little bit of the state of society these days. What if it gets 20 times worse next week, and now we don’t have nothing to get?”
The family moved into a rental home a few weeks ago. Empty fields sprinkled with bluebonnets gave the children space to run around, ride their bicycles and swing from the tire hooked to a tree branch and from the hammock on the porch. Ms. Mossbarger thinks of her military training when she thinks about mealtime for her four boys and two girls — Tristan Spahn, 5; Layla Ray, 6; Stasy Spahn, 7; Hayden Brown, 9; Gavin Brown, 9; and Joseph Brown, 10. “I was a cook in the military, so I’m used to feeding the masses,” she said.
Ms. Mossbarger was raised in Brenham. Years ago, her father was one of her husband’s high school teachers. They laugh about it now and said that’s just how things work in a small town. She wears her devotion to her children on her skin. The tattoo of the Teddy bear on her arm was for 10-year-old Joseph, the initials on her chest for 6-year-old Layla, who is named for the Eric Clapton song.
The spread of the virus, for Ms. Mossbarger and Mr. Spahn, was one struggle in a lifetime of them. Ms. Mossbarger said that years ago, there was a time when she was homeless. Two of Mr. Spahn’s older sons — Matthew, 21, and Jonah, 24 — were both struck by vehicles in separate accidents and killed in the past year and a half. Their pictures and track jerseys cover the walls of the living room.
“We’ve been through some hard times in these past 16, 17 months,” Mr. Spahn said. “We’ve had heartache, heartbreak and now with this coming on, it’s kind of like, all right, bring it.”
Dinner, like lunch, was served on Styrofoam.
The entire meal was provided by Ms. Mossbarger’s sister-in-law and by a food-distribution nonprofit, Bread Partners of Washington County. The children ate leftover spaghetti, canned vegetables, microwave biscuits and Goldfish crackers. Ms. Mossbarger and her husband ate fried chicken with rice and the canned vegetables. The children said grace before their parents even sat down.
Ms. Mossbarger hardly mentioned it, but she was starving. “I honestly wasn’t going to eat, but Jordan was like, ‘You got to eat something,’” she said.
The next morning, she again skipped breakfast and was sipping a Monster Energy drink. She was tired and her head hurt.
“I feel it,” she said.
Her husband’s job was called off yet again, heightening her financial concerns about the coming days and weeks. “I’m constantly thinking what’s the next move going to be,” Ms. Mossbarger said. “Basically, if he’s not working, I’m going to eat as little as possible because I know that’s less food in my kids’ mouths.”
Soon, it was almost 11 a.m. She packed the children into the Suburban. She was headed again to the drive-through at Alton.
Simon Romero contributed reporting from Albuquerque, N.M.
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4) Coronavirus Tests Are Now Free, but Treatment Could Still Cost You
Congress passed legislation covering people’s costs for getting tested for the virus, but you could still face high bills for everything else.
By Reed Abelson, March 19, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/health/coronavirus-tests-bills.html
Johnny Milano for The New York Times
Even if they shouldn’t, people may think twice about seeking testing or treatment for the coronavirus if they are worried about getting large medical bills, even when they have health insurance.
“The problem is we have reams and reams of evidence that if people know they face hundreds or thousands of dollars in bills, they’ll hesitate, they’ll wait and see,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University.
Policies regarding your out-of-pocket costs for testing and treatment are changing rapidly. State insurance regulators are taking steps to limit how much you might eventually owe, and Congress just passed legislation that would cover the cost of the test. Insurance companies and employers also changed the rules for most plans to eliminate deductibles or co-payments for testing.
“Almost every relevant person or entity has said something about holding consumers harmless,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
With the caveat that things are shifting, here’s what you should know:
Is the test for coronavirus free? I have health insurance, but my plan has a high deductible.
Under the legislation just passed by Congress, testing for coronavirus is free, including the cost of a doctor’s visit or trip to the emergency room to get the test.
Worried that residents might hesitate because of the potential bills, many states, including California, New York and Washington, had already required the insurance companies they regulate to cover the cost of a test, according to a recent analysis from Georgetown University.
Private insurance companies had also generally volunteered to waive any costs their members might face for the actual test. Employers who offer plans and are self-insured followed suit.
Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid are also covering the test, which isn’t that expensive — Medicare is paying anywhere from $36 to $51 for the actual test.
People without insurance, or those enrolled in so-called junk plans that don’t meet the standards for insurance under the Affordable Care Act, should also be able to get tested at no cost, said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which recently released an issue brief on private insurance coverage of coronavirus.
But could I still end up with bills to pay?
It’s possible, especially if you go somewhere that isn’t in your health plan’s network or undergo an array of unrelated tests. “There are still questions about the battery of testing people may receive and out-of-network testing,” said Cheryl Fish-Parcham, the director of access initiatives at Families USA, a consumer advocacy group.
You could also face sizable out-of-pocket costs if you have something that looks like coronavirus, like the garden-variety flu, but isn’t. While New Mexico is requiring insurers to cover the testing for flu and pneumonia, so far it’s an exception.
What if I need hospital care?
President Trump told the nation earlier this month that health insurers had “agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent surprise medical billings,” but he misspoke. Your health plan is generally going to view treatment for Covid-19 like the treatment for any other illness, just as if you developed a bad pneumonia or have a chronic condition like diabetes.
“Treatment is still a gigantic problem,” said Ms. Fish-Parcham, who said federal lawmakers were talking about another wave of legislation that could potentially address the cost-sharing.
The federal government has made it easier for people in certain high deductible plans. The Internal Revenue Service recently allowed people in those plans to have coronavirus testing and treatment covered by the plan before they meet their deductibles.
It’s hard to estimate how much you could owe, but the Kaiser Family Foundation provided some ballpark estimates for a pneumonia hospitalization and concluded the total cost could be over $20,000 — with an individual’s out-of-pocket costs running around $1,300. All of those figures depend on what plan you have, where you get care and how serious a case you have.
No one knows whether employers, insurers or the federal government will move to completely cover these costs, although Joseph R. Biden Jr., the leading Democratic contender for president, has suggested providing emergency funds to cover treatment.
Some plans are taking steps to limit their members’ exposure to high medical bills. The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Federal Employee Program, which covers nearly six million federal employees, retirees and their families, said it would waive any co-pays or deductibles regarding medically necessary treatment.
And some hospital systems are putting a pause on collections. CommonSpirit Health, a Catholic chain of hospitals and clinics, says it is suspending patient billing for coronavirus testing and treatment as it sorts out how the various parties will handle patients’ out-of-pocket costs.
What about surprise medical bills?
You may be at risk if you get care from someone, like an emergency room doctor or anesthesiologist, who is out of network, even if the hospital is in your plan’s network. When Kaiser did its analysis, it found that nearly one in five patients admitted to the hospital with a serious case of pneumonia faced out-of-network bills.
Should I worry about my health insurer being able to pay for the costs?
Probably not. Even if they don’t like them, “insurers are used to surprises,” said Gregory Fann, an actuary in Temecula, Calif. “That’s what they are there for.”
Most insurers have plenty of capital, and state regulators also keep an eye on them to make sure the companies can pay their medical claims.
And your premiums won’t go up during the current year — insurers set their prices for a whole year so you don’t have to worry about any immediate jumps in costs. It’s impossible to predict what may happen to prices for the following year, although insurers could seek higher rates — and consumers might face higher premiums — depending on the costs of caring for the seriously ill and the length of the epidemic.
Should I worry about my employer coverage?
It’s difficult to predict what will happen to businesses, which are under a lot of strain right now, and their ability to cover your medical claims. Individual companies that experience a surge in health care costs just as sales plummet could face a financial crisis in which they can’t pay medical claims.
What if I don’t have insurance?
You should be able to get covered. If you lose your job, you may qualify for Medicaid or be able to sign up for a health plan under the Affordable Care Act.
A growing number of states are also creating a special enrollment period for residents if they want to sign up, and there is even some talk of the federal government making a similar decision for the marketplaces they operate. There’s also talk of using the Medicaid program much more broadly to cover the uninsured.
What if I end up with a big bill?
“Don’t whip out your checkbook,” said Ms. Fish-Parcham, who also warned that you shouldn’t ignore any medical bills. Contact your insurer as well as the hospital or doctor to find out if you really owe what they say you owe. Be sure to check with your state insurance department as well. You may have been billed in error.
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5) Why Doctors and Nurses Are Anxious and Angry
We’re treating coronavirus patients. We don’t have time for politics.
By Danielle Ofri, March 20, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-hospitals-doctors.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
It’s only when both you and your patient are wearing a mask that you realize how much of medical care depends on facial expression and nonverbal communication. As I swabbed my first patients for the coronavirus here at Bellevue Hospital last week, it became apparent that assuaging their anxiety was just as critical as probing their nasopharynxes.
A library hush now reigns in our normally bursting-at-the-seams outpatient clinic because all regular medical care is being conducted by phone. But our new “Covid Clinic” — in a snazzy white party tent in the hospital courtyard — is one of the hottest tickets in town. Like the tent of Abraham, all of its sides are open, allowing the crisp March breezes to minimize the risk of infection. Despite the seriousness of the operation, there’s no denying the invigorating uplift of sweet spring air and a resplendent magnolia tree flowering within grasping distance. The only downside of al fresco medicine is that my fingers are numb from the chill, because you can’t wear gloves under your gloves.
The patients offer friendly small talk while I juggle the swabs and vials and specimen bags, garbed in my groovy space-age outfit, with its battery-powered helmet fan blowing filtered air through my head casing. But anxiety seems to emanate from behind their surgical masks, like the billowing waves you might see on an infrared map. The fear is particularly acute for those who also have to bring their children along for testing.
It would be a lie to say that we’re not nervous, too. The news from Italy suggests that 20 percent of health care workers have been infected, and several have died. Thousands of Chinese health care workers became sick with the coronavirus. Our job is not without risk, one we debate every day as we balance our family obligations with professional duties. The memories of medical workers who contracted H.I.V., Ebola, hepatitis C and tuberculosis over the years are never far from our minds. As a co-worker said ruefully to me, “Our colleagues could soon be our patients.”
Hospitals aren’t known for fleet-footed bureaucracy — don’t even ask how long it took to get a water cooler for the staff lunch area — but they do know how to mobilize in a crunch.
When Hurricane Sandy flooded Bellevue in 2012, the staff formed a bucket brigade to haul 500 gallons of fuel — hand to hand in small containers — up to the 13th floor to keep the generators running. Later, those same hands helped carry the patients down those same stairs when we eventually had to evacuate. The vast Northeast blackout of 2003 left hundreds of hospitals without power. A doctor or nurse was planted at the bedside of every patient on a ventilator, ready to start pumping oxygen manually should the generators fail. And of course there was Sept. 11. Within an hour of the attacks, staffing in the emergency departments of New York City’s hospitals were overrun with medical volunteers. Most, sadly, ended up spending that day idle.
History offers balm and jitters in equal doses. Most of those orchestrating the coronavirus response today cut their teeth on the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, played a comparable steadying role during the AIDS crisis, delivering sober statistics, enumerating medical priorities and maintaining much-needed intellectual humility.
In some ways, AIDS was scarier than the coronavirus because we operated in the dark for so many years. We remember the (mostly) all-hands-on-deck attitude, especially in the public hospitals and local health departments. We remember the critical role of public activism in moving the needle when medical progress faltered. When I was a resident training at Bellevue in the 1990s, the hospital created a dedicated AIDS ward, a specialized H.I.V. team, an outpatient virology clinic and — in the darkest of those days — “the dying ward” on 12-East, where patients could have private rooms for their final days.
In our hospital now, the entire I.C.U. wing of the emergency department has been converted to a respiratory unit for patients with suspected coronavirus infections who are too ill to remain at home. All elective surgeries have been canceled, freeing up surgical staff, operating rooms and post-op units. Expedited discharges have opened up scores of inpatient beds. Every available corner of the hospital is being repurposed for patient care, to prepare for the onslaught that is already beginning. And every other hospital is doing the same.
These colossal rejiggerings have created a breathless feel to our work. Every day things are different, but there’s comfort in the concreteness and agility of the process. No doubt there will be miscalculations along the way — even when you hew to solid science, logistics always require improvisation — but the ground troops are moving purposefully.
And thank goodness for that, because on the personal side of the coronavirus crisis, we doctors and nurses feel just as baffled as everyone else. Could rubbing alcohol and aloe gel really substitute for hand sanitizer? Will tissues be flushable if toilet paper runs out? Is it safe to go to the bagel store? What do we do about our older parents? Is it even possible to keep our kids from touching their faces?
We watch the news with just as much anxiety as the general public. We’re relieved that one of our trusted own is up there, though we wish Dr. Fauci had the authority to quarantine the less evidence-based politicians. The way in which this public health crisis is continuously being refracted through a political lens — playing down risks for the sake of ratings, worrying more about the stock market than about lives — leaves medical professionals steaming with anger. We want rational policy, not meaningless fluff. We don’t have time for this.
We remember the precious years — and the tens of thousands of lives — lost while President Ronald Reagan pointedly ignored the AIDS epidemic. We remember how the administration attempted to muzzle Surgeon General C. Everett Koop when he tried to tell the truth about the nature and extent of the disease.
There’s a point at which those without relevant knowledge simply need to stand down. From the perspective of the medical community today, we’ve long since passed it.
History infuses our daily interaction with patients in other ways. Every single day for the past six months, I have recommended the flu shot for my patients, and every day a good chunk decline. When I ask why, most can’t articulate an answer. They offer only an inchoate distaste for vaccines, fomented by the oddly contagious anti-vaccine movement. I remind them that their grandparents would have given their eyeteeth for the vaccines they blithely shrug off. I point out the entirely unnecessary resurgence of measles resulting from a falloff in vaccination rates.
Next month is the 65th anniversary of Jonas Salk’s announcement that his polio vaccine trial was successful, news that was greeted with almost the same depth of emotion as the end of World War II. Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine followed in 1961. I wonder how cavalier my vaccine-resistant patients will be if and when a coronavirus vaccine becomes available.
If nothing else, the outbreak gives us a taste of the bone-deep fears our grandparents wrestled with, as well as an appreciation of their profound reverence for science and facts. It shouldn’t escape our recollection that Dr. Sabin was an immigrant and Dr. Salk the son of an immigrant, and that both were effectively barred from many medical schools because they were Jews. If New York University had employed a quota system in the 1930s like Cornell, Yale, Columbia and Harvard, the story of polio might have played out quite differently.
The story of the coronavirus is still being written. South Korea, Italy and China offer possibilities of how Chapter 1 might play out. But make no mistake, there will certainly be Chapters 2, 3, 4 and more. (Here in the United States we’re only belatedly stumbling out from a meandering prologue.)
The epilogues of polio, Ebola, H.I.V. and measles — all, alas, still in progress — remind us that public health is an ongoing, never-let-’em-up-from-the-mat effort. Narrow vision, data ignorance, image-conscious decision-making and truncated memory are the very elements of contagion. No amount of Purell can sanitize that.
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6) Statement of Socialist Action National Committee…
Coronavirus threatens the lives of billions
By James Fortin and Jeff Mackler
As the devastating novel coronavirus (COVID-19) literally threatens the lives of billions of the earth’s people, two truths about the contagion remain unchallenged: All nations are ill prepared for the arrival of the virus and once it lands, despite herculean efforts in some cases, little can be done to stop its spread.
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) tabulations as of March 18 indicate that more than 221,000 individuals in 100 countries, spread across all continents, have contracted the disease. As we go to press it appears that the number of countries with reported COVID-19 cases now exceeds 150. While over 9,000 deaths have been reported worldwide the actual number of people who have contracted the virus and remain asymptomatic is unknown as is the actual number of deaths.
In addition to China, one of the hardest hit nations is Iran, where scientists estimate the rate and number of infections won’t peak until May and by which time some 3.5 million people could die. Officially, Iran has reported just under a thousand deaths, but WHO officials believe the actual death toll could be five times higher.
Italy reported 375 new cases in the last 24 hours, with the death toll topping 3,000. A record 475 of these were reported in a single day, March 18!
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, addressing a mostly empty parliament last week, stated that 533 had died among nearly 12,000 confirmed cases. Spain, like an increasing number of nations, is under a nationwide lockdown.
All schools in the United Kingdom have been closed as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has discarded his previous spectacularly unscientific position, partially echoed by Donald Trump, wherein Johnson proposed allowing COVID-19 to take its “natural” course, as with the common flu, without government intervention -- a moronic thesis that the contagion would soon burn out leaving behind a “naturally” immunized population!
In Latin America, where just a few days ago zero cases were reported, the Guatemalan government has temporarily suspended the arrival of U.S. deportation flights transporting Central American asylum seekers as part of an asylum agreement with the U.S. Needless to say the current racist ICE raids and mass deportations conducted against some 19 million undocumented immigrants must be stopped immediately, if for no other reason than to allow all afflicted people full and free access to treatment and to eliminate the need of immigrants to lead lives in a semi-underground manner.
In Africa, at least 30 nations — covering more than half the continent — have confirmed COVID-19 cases. Tunisia’s president ordered a 12-hour nightly curfew. Ivory Coast has closed schools and joined other West African nations in barring flights from affected countries.
In the U.S. as of March 17, where some 5,000 cases have been reported as well as 108 deaths, researchers have warned that left unchecked COVID-19 could kill some one to two million people in the months ahead.
Germany’s Angela Merkel reported last week that as many as 80 percent of the entire German population could be afflicted.
At an estimated fatality rate of one to two percent tens of millions could die in a relatively brief period of time. In a single month, October 1918, 195,000 Americans died during the worldwide influenza pandemic, the deadliest month in U.S. history. Some 500 million worldwide fell sick during this 15-month horror, which reduced the earth’s population by 3.5 percent.
Epicenter of the health crisis.
The epicenter of the viral contagion, the city of Wuhan in south Central China, has been the focus of ongoing urgent research by Chinese and international health authorities. At the onset of the epidemic efforts by the Chinese government to unlock the genome of the virus – the virus’ complete set of genetic instructions found in its DNA – were successful. In the spirit of international cooperation China provided their findings to the entire scientific world. This will ultimately allow for the development of a vaccine, a likelihood still 6 to 12 months away. Seeking to corner the market on profits from the pandemic, however, President Trump is reported to have met with officials from a leading German research corporation to entice them to move to the U.S. where their expected vaccine profits would be under the exclusive control of the U.S.
Many unanswered questions remain regarding the virus and its spread. Data so far supports an incubation period of 5 to 14 days before infected parties show symptoms – a major challenge to keeping the disease contained. The viral impact and its mortality rate are greatest among older adults, the obese, and those with underlying conditions such as diabetes, cancer or other diseases that impair one’s immune system.
After initial hesitation, the Chinese government began a mobilization of doctors, government workers, Communist Party members, and units of the Peoples Liberation Army and local police to carry out widespread screening of the population in the heavily impacted zones of Wuhan and its province, Hubei. Simultaneously, an initial quarantine of the town and province was implemented followed soon after by a near lockdown of the entire nation.
A prioritized, unprecedented effort began to construct hospitals for quarantine and treatment purposes using prefabricated sections. A workforce approaching 10,000 has been mobilized to work 24 hours a day. In this effort the 1,000-bed Huoshenshan Hospital was constructed and made operational in just 10 days. At another site 25 miles distant the Leishenshan Hospital with 1600 beds was built in two weeks. Numerous additional hospitals ranging from 50 to 1,000 beds have been built or are under construction. Hundreds of other public spaces across China have been converted for quarantine purposes as well.
So exhaustive has been the response to keep the virus contained that the head of the WHO has praised China for having “bought the world time” and that other nations should make the most of it. To date the reported number of new cases has been slowed to the point where a number of the new hospitals have been closed for lack of patients. The graphic “curve” registering the initial rapid rise in reported COVID-19 cases in China has been “flattened,” according to some reports, but a crisis of major proportions remains.
Slanted coverage, revisited tropes in mainline news and right-wing social media.
Despite the massive campaign by the Chinese government to stop the spread of the virus, its efforts were met by the U.S. mainstream media with bias and derision. Day after day New York Times and Washington Post reporters criticized the Chinese government’s strict quarantine measures as authoritarian. Yet a few weeks after pillorying China for these “draconian” measures, the U.S. government itself along with virtually all fifty states, if not the entire world, has recommended and is increasingly implementing similar measures.
Nature of the current virus.
At this moment the WHO reports that the new coronavirus is a “close cousin” of viruses previously found in bats and likely transferred to small animals. The WHO thinks the current contagion in China possibly originated from people who came into contact with such animals being sold in a food market in Wuhan, and who in turn became transmitters of the virus to other humans. Still other evidence suggests that the earliest infections were in people not associated with the market and the viral jump from animals to humans occurred elsewhere.
This places the COVID-19 outbreak within the category of zoonotic diseases–those that can be transmitted between animals and humans. Scientists estimate this class of disease represents three-quarters of the newly emerging diseases currently affecting people. As with the Avian Influenza, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Influenza H1N1, the new coronavirus spreads rapidly in an era of globalization and its accompanying travel and trade.
World science does not yet fully grasp the underlying causes of virus formation. It is suggested that ongoing deforestation around the world, including China, has been the result of the expanding need of capitalist-based industrial agriculture to find sufficient lands to grow crops profitably in that mode of production. The deforestation in turn, combined with human encroachment, has altered the existing ecosystems and displaced numerous species. This greater interaction between animals and people is occurring and with it a more serious opportunity for disease transmission.
At the same time a connection is being made between the origin and spread of infectious diseases and an international agribusiness that has bent science to its quest for greater, faster profits. Millions of industrial animals – poultry and pigs, particularly — are being produced with altered genetics, cramped into factory-like quarters, and then slaughtered and shipped long distances in ever-shorter periods of time. Accompanying these industrial farming practices of contemporary capitalist agriculture are the deadly pathogens that mutate and come out of the agri-factories. Today, science has already linked some of the most dangerous viral diseases in humans to modern day food systems, notwithstanding efforts by the U.S. government, which rushed to conceal such evidence during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, shielding American agribusiness from charges of complicity
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Capitalist agribusiness has shown no interest in alternatives to its profitable production models. Only small segments of modern-day farming operations have experimented with alternatives promoting safety firewalls around our food supply. These include integrated pathogen management, mixed crop-livestock environments, strategic re-wilding and other tactics intended to keep pathogens from developing in the first place.
And Big Pharma, the giant largely monopolized conglomerates that dominate agribusiness and pharmaceutical manufacturing, has no interest in participating in efforts to find healthy and sustainable environmental solution when antiviral vaccines provide a handsome profit in their own right with orders from captive buyers such as governments, hospitals, and drug store chains. Big Pharma’s need to advertise for customers, as they do with all sorts of other ailments identified on television, would be minimal with regard to COVID-19-like pandemics where expected profit rates can be expected to rise to unprecedented heights.
Cuba sets the example and leads the way.
Most noteworthy, Cuba, even with its resources severely constrained by the U.S. embargo/blockade, can justly claim the moral high ground for cooperation and solidarity with victims of the coronavirus. Several years ago Cuba entered into a joint Chinese-Cuban effort to produce antivirals, a class of drugs that fight a virus’s ability to replicate, while awaiting the development of actual vaccines. Sharing their technology with the Chinese a jointly operated facility was built and opened in China. One of the drugs, IFNrec, is now being employed by the Chinese National Health Commission to fight the coronavirus based on its effectiveness shown previously against viruses with characteristics similar to those of the COVID-19. Cuba’s biomedical technology and social goals, unlike so much of the pharmaceutical world, is focused on the need to help viral victims, not the drive to make a profit.
Science at the service of society.
In a socialist society government institutions such as a National Institute for Health in the U.S. would gather and coordinate research scientists under its own roof. Scientific research would be conducted for the common good, not capitalist profit. All discoveries would be immediately made known to the scientific community worldwide. International collaboration and coordination as opposed to competition would be the norm. Patents and related measures to protect “intellectual property rights” would be deemed absurd and inimical to the interests of society. Funding and coordinating research would be public and massive with the resulting solutions and vaccines the common property of all humanity.
Free vaccines would be available to all via hospitals and clinics, workplaces, schools, and community centers. Gone would be the televised advertising bombardment for high-priced drugs from the U.S. pharmaceutical cartel where critical breakthroughs are sometimes suppressed because a healthy population is not conducive to profits!
In the past week alone reports from officials at the prestigious medical research institutions at the University of California San Francisco and Stanford University indicated that the concerted and coordinated efforts of scientists there had managed to test some 50 known and approved drugs as to their possible effectiveness on COVID-19 in a matter of days, as opposed to a project that in the past would have taken over one year. While the axiom, “Necessity is the mother of invention” seems to apply without qualification in this particular instance, its operation in a profit driven capitalism system, where war and disease are good for profits, is flouted daily.
Growing national and international economic impact.
In addition to the human tragedy widely unfolding, the domestic economy of China, and now the entire world, is taking major hits. The quarantines and lockdowns across Hubei province are preventing business-related travel as well as the movement of goods and workers. Areas where there has been infection, or the possibility of exposures, have kept people in their homes. Restaurants, amusements, shopping malls, transport providers and virtually most other establishments are experiencing a major negative impact. Within weeks China’s experience has been increasingly replicated worldwide.
China is the world’s largest manufacturer, and because of this role the entire world supply chain is being impacted, often in complex ways. With the globalization of capitalism many international companies are doubly affected, first by reduction of products being made for them in China where wages are lower, and then by reduced sales of finished goods to the up-to-now burgeoning Chinese domestic markets. China’s exports range from parts and finished goods to the world’s electronics sector, to every sort of part for the global motor industry, including assembled BMWs, to household furnishings and medical supplies, deliveries for all of which have been largely suspended.
Raw materials purchased overseas by China are being placed on hold as well causing additional disruption. Machine tool and construction equipment orders are significantly lagging. Oceanic transport has been stifled and air travel to and from China has been severely curtailed, with flights canceled by Delta, United, Lufthansa and British Airways.
Trump’s March COVID-19 economic proposals.
The various loopholes in last week’s bi-partisan House of Representatives bill that supposedly provides extended relief for everyone, effectively excludes 80 percent from coverage. The aid package guarantees paid sick leave to less than 20 percent of American workers. It does not apply to companies with 500 or more employees, and workplaces with fewer than 50 employees can request to opt out. On March 17, the White House also ordered the suspension of evictions and foreclosures through April although whether the president’s decree has the force of law is questionable to say the least.
On March 18, now more aware of its previous passivity in the face of an imminent social disaster, the Trump administration announced a $500 billion proposal to grant all U.S. households a $1,000 payment, or perhaps two such payments. But Trump was quick to add that literally trillions of dollars more were in the government’s immediate hopper in an effort to forestall what appears to be yet another great depression, exceeding in magnitude the financial collapse of 2008.
Economists are increasingly pointing to likely Eurozone, Japanese and U.S. recessions together with declining economies elsewhere. The U.S. casino capitalist stock market has taken its greatest hit since the Great Depression of 2008, with the Dow Jones industrial index losing some 9,000 points, or thirty percent, to date. The market’s wild swings portend drastic declines in the world’s GDP and massive layoffs of tens and hundreds of millions workers.
The closure of all U.S. auto plants with no guarantees to laid off workers was met by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka with a demand that all laid off workers receive their full wages and benefits. Trumka’s demand represented a substantial break with the AFL-CIO’s past “partnership/collaboration” with the barons of industry that always subordinated workers’ interests to capitalist profits. His new demand will undoubtedly be carefully scrutinized by union workers when future opportunities for effective fightbacks inevitably appear.
Ruling class bailouts continue with abandon.
As with the Great Depression of 2008, governments worldwide, at the behest of their ruling classes have reduced borrowing interest rates to near zero. Allowing corporations to borrow virtually free money they reinvest once again in speculative financial ventures having little or nothing to do with improved infrastructure projects associated with job creation, hoping to pocket greater profits. Incredibly, these billions and trillions of dollars pumped into financial markets are matched by multi-trillion dollar bailouts and tax breaks to the same corporate elites. Each near-daily announcement of these government pledges to the rich, based on the issuance of computer-generated government bonds, is aimed to stem the panic of the elite whose paper fortunes evaporate to the tune of $trillions, sometimes daily. Meanwhile the most elementary aspects of survival for the vast majority from the pathogenic onslaught are largely absent – from the availability of protective gloves, to face masks, sanitizing hand swipes, and mass testing, to basic life-saving medical devices like ventilators.
The unpredictable future.
The proverbial chickens have come home to roost. The international capitalist system has registered only minimal efforts to solve the problem of infectious viral diseases. In this century alone the planet has encountered over two dozen new strains and “near nothing real was done about any of them,” according to Dr. Rob Wallace, author of the groundbreaking book, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. Monthly Review Press, 2016.
How long it will take to bring the current pandemic to a halt is the major social, political and economic question posed before the entire world. It is doubtful that the world capitalist-imperialist behemoth will prove capable, amassing the resources to once and for all tame these terrible contagions. Indeed, the Trump administration cut funding for pandemics like COVID-19 to the tune of $15 billion! At a time when the combined scientific research capacities of the world are overwhelmingly allocated to endless varieties of military research, to the detriment of health and medical investigation, prospects for rapid progress are dim to say the least.
In the context of a highly monopolized military-industrial complex, endless wars are the most profitable of all capitalist enterprises. Mass destruction of nations’ entire infrastructure in the ongoing seven wars presently waged by the U.S., along with drone wars, Special Operations death squad wars, privatized mercenary army wars, and militarily-enforced sanction wars, make for the highest profit rates on earth. The U.S. sanctions on Venezuela alone cost the lives of an estimated 50,000 Venezuelans. And this was before the present COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S. trillion dollar annual military expenditures accounts for 68 percent of the all government discretionary spending. This undeniable insanity was recently evidenced when the Trump administration waited until just a few days ago to scale back on sending 30,000 U.S. troops to participate in European Union “war games,” that is, practice for anticipated real wars to come. When most nations on earth are imposing absolutely necessary travel restrictions, the U.S. imperialist beast, ignoring the potential to expose additional millions to contamination of COVID-19, only recently and in the face of worldwide condemnation, decided to “scale back” its war games.
The right to be free from infectious diseases is a prime expectation of all humanity. When governments fail in this critical arena their excuses no longer find receptive ears. Anger, voiced rightful indignation, and civil outbursts begin to occur. How this pandemic will play out amidst the growing international radicalization is a question on the table for all of us.
Serious socialist activists and working class fighters will prioritize the following demands:
• Free quality healthcare for all.
• Nationalize the health care system and scientific research institutions and place them under the control of working people not the corporate profiteers.
• $Trillions now for critical medical supplies and equipment, free COVID-19 tests, food for the hungry and housing and care for the homeless.
• Bail out the working class not the corporate elite. $Trillions for full pay and benefits for all workers who lose their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• A national moratorium on all evictions, foreclosures, rent, mortgage and utility payments and debt payments.
• Abolish ICE and close all deportation centers. No deportations. No human being is illegal.
• Empty the prisons. Rehabilitation, not racist and classist mass incarceration.
• Not one penny for imperialist war, deadly sanctions, embargos and blockades.
• $Trillions for a rapid conversion from the present deadly fossil fuel-based energy system to a clean sustainable nationalized system under workers control to preserve life on earth itself.
• Close all military bases and convert them to free hospitals for all.
• End racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, LGBTQI and senior citizen discrimination.
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7) Colorado Abolishes Death Penalty and Commutes Sentences of Death Row Inmates
The state had executed just one person since reinstating the death penalty in the 1970s.
By Neil Vigdor, March 23.2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/colorado-death-penalty-repeal.html
David Zalubowski/Associated Press
Colorado abolished its seldom-used death penalty on Monday, joining a growing number of states that have eschewed capital punishment as a deterrent to the most serious crimes.
Gov. Jared S. Polis, a Democrat, signed the repeal into law after it had reached his desk from the state legislature. It had passed the Senate in January and the House in February after several failed attempts to end capital punishment in the state.
Colorado had executed just one person since reinstating the death penalty in the mid-1970s: Gary Davis, who had been convicted of the rape and murder of Virginia May, was given a lethal injection in 1997.
On Monday, Mr. Polis also commuted the sentences of three men on death row — Robert Ray, Sir Mario Owens and Nathan Dunlap — to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He said in a statement that he wanted the law to be applied consistently.
“Commutations are typically granted to reflect evidence of extraordinary change in the offender,” Mr. Polis said, noting that this was not the reason he was commuting the three sentences.
“Rather, the commutations of these despicable and guilty individuals are consistent with the abolition of the death penalty in the state of Colorado,” he said, “and consistent with the recognition that the death penalty cannot be, and never has been, administered equitably in the state of Colorado.”
Colorado joined 21 other states that have repealed the death penalty, according to the advocacy group Equal Justice USA, which had campaigned for the end of capital punishment in the state. The organization mounted similar efforts in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland and Illinois, which have all abolished the death penalty.
Shari Silberstein, the group’s executive director, said in a statement that it was a proud moment for Colorado.
“With Gov. Polis’s signature, the state liberated itself from one of the most glaring failures of the legal system and is charting a new path toward justice,” she said. “Instead of wasting millions of dollars every year, the state can focus on the healing that survivors of violence need while also working toward making families and communities safe by preventing future violence.”
George Brauchler, a Republican district attorney in Colorado, criticized the repeal in a statement on Monday.
“There are a few in Colorado today who will cheer the sparing of the lives of these coldblooded murderers,” he said. “For the rest of Colorado, make no mistake: We will save no money. We are not safer. We are not a better people. And the only lives spared are those who commit the ultimate acts of evil against us.”
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8) Five Key Things in the $2 Trillion Coronavirus Stimulus Package
The largest economic stimulus measure in modern history would authorize direct payments to taxpayers and loans to small businesses, and create a $500 billion corporate bailout fund.
By Catie Edmondson, March 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/us/politics/whats-in-coronavirus-stimulus-bill.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Jordan Gale for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials and top Democrats finalized an agreement early Wednesday morning on a roughly $2 trillion rescue package to confront the coronavirus pandemic, the largest economic stimulus measure in modern history.
After days of partisan bickering and closed-door haggling, negotiators emerged from their final huddle and announced that they had struck a deal to send relief to workers, businesses and hospitals devastated by the pandemic and the economic disruption it has caused. The Senate is expected to pass the mammoth bill later on Wednesday and send it over to the House, which is also planning to move quickly to send it to President Trump for swift enactment.
The sheer size and scope of the package would have been unthinkable only a couple of weeks ago in a deeply polarized Congress that has found it impossible in recent years to agree on major new policy initiatives.
“In effect, this is a wartime level of investment into our nation,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said on the Senate floor in announcing the deal.
Here’s what’s in the package.
The government will send direct payments to taxpayers.
Lawmakers agreed to provide $1,200 in direct payments to taxpayers with incomes up to $75,000 per year before starting to phase out and ending altogether for those earning more than $99,000. Families would receive an additional $500 per child, in an attempt to create a safety net for those whose jobs and businesses are affected by the pandemic.
Unemployment benefits will grow substantially, and go to many more Americans.
Lawmakers agreed to a significant expansion of unemployment benefits that would extend jobless insurance by 13 weeks and include a four-month enhancement of benefits. At the insistence of Democrats, the program was broadened to include freelancers, furloughed employees and gig workers, such as Uber drivers.
Small businesses will receive emergency loans if they keep their workers.
The bill provides federally guaranteed loans available at community banks to small businesses that pledge not to lay off their workers. The loans would be available during an emergency period ending June 30, and would be forgiven if the employer continued to pay workers for the duration of the crisis.
“There is broad general agreement that small businesses in this country will not be able to survive unless there is extraordinary assistance,” said Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and the chairman of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, who worked with Democrats to create the program. “The goal is to keep employees connected to their employers, so that people aren’t just having to stay home and aren’t just feeling the stress of being laid off, but the uncertainty of whether they’ll even have a job to go back to.”
Distressed companies can receive government bailouts — but with strings attached.
Loans for distressed companies would come from a $425 billion fund controlled by the Federal Reserve, and an additional $75 billion would be available for industry-specific loans — including to airlines and hotels.
The creation of the Federal Reserve fund was one of the chief sticking points in the negotiations, as grim memories of the 2008 Wall Street bailout — which activists in both parties came to regard as a flawed program that benefited rich corporations at the expense of American workers — hung over the negotiations. Democrats successfully pressed for immediate disclosure of the recipients and stronger oversight, including installing an inspector general and congressionally appointed board to monitor it. Companies that benefit could not engage in stock buybacks while they received government assistance, and for an additional year after that.
Democrats also secured a provision ensuring that Trump family businesses — or those of any other senior government officials — cannot receive loan money through that fund, though they could potentially still benefit from other parts of the bill.
Hospitals staggering under the burden of the coronavirus would receive aid.
The agreement includes $100 billion for hospitals and health systems across the nation, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, told Democrats in an early morning letter. It also includes billions more, he said, to furnish personal and protective equipment and increased for health care workers, testing supplies, and new construction to house patients.
Lawmakers also agreed to increase Medicare payment increases to all hospitals and providers, the letter said.
Emily Cochrane and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
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9) A $2 Trillion Lifeline Will Help, but More May Be Needed
The coronavirus response deal set to pass Congress is more than twice as big as the 2009 stimulus bill to ease the Great Recession, but it will soothe a shutdown economy for only a few months.
By Tom Tankersley, March 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/stimulus-impact-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — If you want to shut down an economy to fight a pandemic without driving millions of people and businesses into bankruptcy, you need the government to cut some checks. The coronavirus response deal that congressional leaders struck early Wednesday morning will get a lot of checks in the mail, but they’ll soothe only a few months of financial pain.
If the outbreak and the disruptions continue through summer, lawmakers will need to spend even more.
The bill, a compromise between the Trump administration and Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, includes loans and grants for corporations and small businesses, increased unemployment benefits for workers laid off or working fewer hours amid the outbreak, and direct payments to low- and middle-income individuals and families. Negotiators estimate its cost at $2 trillion.
It is more than double the size of the roughly $800 billion stimulus package that Congress passed in 2009 to ease the Great Recession. Yet it may not actually be large enough, given the enormous economic challenge the United States faces today.
The economy, which has been shuttered to control the spread of the virus, does not need a jump-start to get moving again. The government is just trying to tide people and firms over until it is safe to start back up again.
Viewed through that particular set of circumstances, the deal announced early Wednesday isn’t economic stimulus at all. It’s a series of survival payments. And those payments will only last a few months.
President Trump said Tuesday that he hopes the economy will have “reopened” by Easter, in two and a half weeks. Public health experts and a wide range of economists say that’s both unlikely and inadvisable. The country still lacks widespread testing for the virus. Confirmed infections and deaths continue to climb rapidly.
The extraordinary measures that mayors and governors have taken to restrict economic activity, which at their most extreme include shutting down all nonessential businesses and ordering people to shelter in the homes, are unlikely to show success in “bending the curve” of the virus for at least another week. If they prove effective, and the infection rate slows dramatically, activity could be back to normal — or at least something that reasonably resembles it — within a few months for many businesses and workers.
If the measures don’t prove effective, or if they are relaxed under orders from Mr. Trump or defied en masse, experts warn the crisis could stretch much longer, under the growing cloud of a recession. That’s why it’s hard to say if the congressional deal will be enough to keep families from going hungry and businesses from going under.
Still, economists hailed the emerging agreement as a good start — one that works on multiple fronts to keep money flowing through the parts of the economy that have been suddenly rendered inactive.
“The response looks to be proportionate to the extent of the problem,” said Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist who has pushed for a large fiscal response to sustain the economy through the virus shutdown. But, he said, “we have no idea what the extent of the problem is.”
The bill includes $350 billion in loans for small businesses to help bridge their expenses for up to 10 weeks. Firms would not need to repay up to eight weeks of the loans if they refrain from laying off employees, or move by June to rehire employees they have already laid off. Supporters of the measure say those loans, if rapidly deployed, could help thousands of firms survive, at least temporarily.
“It is incredibly important that policymakers credibly convince business owners that these conditional loans will indeed be forgiven and that firms’ owners will be treated equitably,” said Stan Veuger, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But, he said, “I am skeptical that the size of the package is large enough to cover the entire shutdown-slowdown period.”
The bill also includes $500 billion in aid to airlines and other large corporations that have been hurt by a cratering of consumer demand amid the crisis. Much of the money would be used to backstop loans and other assistance that the Federal Reserve said it plans to extend to companies.
Those programs are in part meant to encourage companies to keep workers on their payrolls. Even if workers are furloughed without pay, the government will essentially step in and assume paying their salaries while the workers continue to be covered by any health insurance provided by their employers.
For workers who lose their jobs, the bill supplies expanded unemployment benefits for up to four months. For many, those payments will match or even exceed the wages they were earning before the outbreak.
The bill also includes a $1,200 payment for each adult — and $500 per child — in households that earn up to $75,000 per year for individuals or $150,000 for couples. The assistance phases out for people who earn more. Senate Democratic aides said on Wednesday that eligible Americans with direct-deposit bank account information on file with the Internal Revenue Service for tax refunds — about 70 million people — should see their payments arrive within a few weeks of the bill being signed into law. Eligible Americans who do not have such information on file, and thus will be waiting for a check in the mail from the I.R.S., will need to wait up to four months to receive one, the aides said.
The latest version of the bill, which has not been finalized, said that the Treasury Department would make payments “as rapidly as possible.”
Neither Republicans nor Democrats love the bill, which was the product of frenzied negotiations punctuated by often bitter partisan anger. Some liberal groups denounced it as a slush fund for corporations. Some conservatives warned that the large amount of borrowed money it would plow into the economy could stoke rampant inflation.
Business groups celebrated it as a late but necessary intervention, and so did many lawmakers and policy advocates.
“Nothing is perfect around here,” Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said in a Tuesday speech on the Senate floor. “But if you make perfect the enemy of the good, you’re going to hurt more people, more small businesses will shut, more people will be out on their own and there will be more and more people who will be infected with this virus who otherwise could have been saved.”
Jacob Leibenluft, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said Congress “will need much more over the coming months, but the crucial thing the bill appears to do is begin providing relief to families and communities through channels that can get it out quickly, like expanded unemployment insurance, direct payments and state aid.”
Policy experts and business lobbyists have been warning for days that congressional failure to reach a deal was causing more companies to shutter and workers to lose their jobs. Some said on Tuesday that lawmakers needed to be ready to start work on another plan to avoid any additional losses if the outbreak effects stretch into summer and fall.
“Much of the small business community is facing an extinction-level event,” said John Lettieri, the chief of the Economic Innovation Group think tank in Washington, who pushed heavily for a package of small business loans in the agreement. “Will this bill help? Absolutely. But the lending capacity needed to prevent mass closures and layoffs could be four or five times larger than what is being provided.”
“Congress,” Mr. Lettieri said, “needs to be prepared now for how quickly these resources are going to evaporate.”
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10) How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask
A very American story about capitalism consuming our national preparedness and resiliency.
By Farhad Manjoo, March 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-face-mask.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times
Why is the United States running out of face masks for medical workers? How does the world’s wealthiest country find itself in such a tragic and avoidable mess? And how long will it take to get enough protective gear, if that’s even possible now?
I’ve spent the last few days digging into these questions, because the shortages of protective gear, particularly face masks, has struck me as one of the more disturbing absurdities in America’s response to this pandemic.
Yes, it would have been nice to have had early, widespread testing for the coronavirus, the strategy South Korea used to contain its outbreak. It would be amazing if we can avoid running out of ventilators and hospital space, the catastrophe that has befallen parts of Italy. But neither matters much — in fact, no significant intervention is possible — if health care workers cannot even come into contact with coronavirus patients without getting sick themselves.
That’s where cheap, disposable face masks, eye protection, gloves and gowns come in. That we failed to procure enough safety gear for medical workers — not to mention for sick people and for the public, as some health experts might have recommended if masks were not in such low supply — seems astoundingly negligent.
What a small, shameful way for a strong nation to falter: For want of a 75-cent face mask, the kingdom was lost.
I am sorry to say that digging into the mask shortage does little to assuage one’s sense of outrage. The answer to why we’re running out of protective gear involves a very American set of capitalist pathologies — the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing, and a strategic failure, at the national level and in the health care industry, to consider seriously the cascading vulnerabilities that flowed from the incentives to reduce costs.
Perhaps the only way to address the shortfall now is to recognize that the market is broken, and to have the government step in to immediately spur global and domestic production. President Trump, bizarrely, has so far resisted ordering companies to produce more supplies and equipment. In the case of masks, manufacturers say they are moving mountains to ramp up production, and some large companies are donating millions of masks from their own reserves.
But given the vast global need for masks — in the United States alone, fighting the coronavirus will consume 3.5 billion face masks, according to an estimate by the Department of Health and Human Services — corporate generosity will fall short. People in the mask business say it will take a few months, at a minimum, to significantly expand production.
“We are at full capacity today, and increased production by building another factory or extending further will take anywhere between three to four months,” said Guillaume Laverdure, the chief operating officer of Medicom, a Canadian company that makes masks and other protective equipment in factories around the world.
And though some nontraditional manufacturers like T-shirt factories and other apparel makers have announced plans to rush-produce masks, it’s unclear that they will be able to meet required safety standards or shift over production in time to answer demand.
Few in the protective equipment industry are surprised by the shortages, because they’ve been predicted for years. In 2005, the George W. Bush administration called for the coordination of domestic production and stockpiling of protective gear in preparation for pandemic influenza. In 2006, Congress approved funds to add protective gear to a national strategic stockpile — among other things, the stockpile collected 52 million surgical face masks and 104 million N95 respirator masks.
But about 100 million masks in the stockpile were deployed in 2009 in the fight against the H1N1 flu pandemic, and the government never bothered to replace them. This month, Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, testified that there are only about 40 million masks in the stockpile — around 1 percent of the projected national need.
As the coronavirus began to spread in China early this year, a global shortage of protective equipment began to look inevitable. But by then it was too late for the American government to do much about the problem. Two decades ago, most hospital protective gear was made domestically. But like much of the rest of the apparel and consumer products business, face mask manufacturing has since shifted nearly entirely overseas. “China is a producer of 80 percent of masks worldwide,” Laverdure said.
Hospitals began to run out of masks for the same reason that supermarkets ran out of toilet paper — because their “just-in-time” supply chains, which call for holding as little inventory as possible to meet demand, are built to optimize efficiency, not resiliency.
“You’re talking about a commodity item,” said Michael J. Alkire, president of Premier, a company that purchases medical supplies for hospitals and health systems. In the supply chain, he said, “by definition, there’s not going to be a lot of redundancy, because everyone wants the low cost.”
In January, the brittle supply chain began to crack under pressure. To deal with its own outbreak, China began to restrict exports of protective equipment. Then other countries did as well — Taiwan, Germany, France and India took steps to stop exports of medical equipment. That left American hospitals to seek more and more masks from fewer and fewer producers.
People in the industry assured me they would prepare better next time. “We are laserlike focused to ensure that our health care systems are never in this scenario again,” Alkire told me. “There will be a lot more domestic manufacturing of these products going forward.”
I don’t doubt it — but that we did not plan, as a nation, for this entirely predictable shortage makes me wonder what other inevitable pothole is lurking out there for all to trip over. Getting enough protective gear was among the cheapest, most effective things we could have done to slow down the pandemic. That we failed on such an obvious thing reveals an alarming national incapacity to imagine and prepare for the worst.
We will get enough masks in time for the next disaster. But wouldn’t it be nice, for once, if we prepared for trouble before it hit us in the face?
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11) How Coronavirus Exposes the Great Lie of Modern Motherhood
For too long, mothers have been held responsible for every aspect of their children’s well-being.
By Jessica Grose, March 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-parenting.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Elizabeth Catlett, Mother and Child. lithograph, 1944.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, via Art Resource, NY
I couldn’t sleep on the night of March 12. New York City public schools were still open, and many of my peers were choosing to pull their children out. I couldn’t decide whether to keep mine in class. My friends in Hong Kong had been home with their kids for months, but the schools never closed in Singapore.
Even though I was speaking to infectious disease pediatricians every day as part of my reporting, there wasn’t consensus among them about how parents should proceed. The local mom message boards were lit up with shaming and countershaming: You’re hysterical for pulling them out! No, you’re crazy for keeping them in!
I was relieved when the city announced schools were shuttering on March 15, so I didn’t have to decide.
Since that night, the other decisions I have made as a mother came rushing back — the ones I have been judged for getting wrong, either overtly or through brightly exclaimed, passive-aggressive jabs like, “Well, whatever works for you!” These are the kinds of choices that as a well-resourced white woman living in a big city, I am supposed to agonize over: Does that chicken really need to be organic? Do all these toys really need to be wooden, even though my toddler likes to use them to bludgeon her sister?
And then there are the more universal choices: Can I send my son to day care if he has a runny nose but no fever, knowing that keeping him home means I have to miss work? How much screen time is too much when there’s no other way to keep my kids calm while I put dinner together?
Even after a massive governmental failure like the water crisis in Flint, Mich., mothers blamed themselves. When LeeAnne Walter, a mom of four turned activist, found out that all of her children had been exposed to lead and that one of her children, whose immune system was compromised, had lead poisoning, her instinct was to castigate herself. “I was hysterical,” Ms. Walters told Mother Jones in 2016. “At first, it was self-blame. And then there’s that anger: How are they letting them do this?”
The coronavirus pandemic reminds us that mothers have been unfairly blamed for their children’s illnesses, even in the face of public health crises, for decades. Mothers are held responsible for every detail — large and small — of their children’s well-being. That didn’t happen overnight.
Women’s diaries from the pre-Civil War era, when raising children was a much more collective endeavor, tell a different story. Women did not write very much about child care and they did not blame themselves when children got sick, even though epidemics of diphtheria, smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough and many other infectious diseases swept through communities without warning. (Almost all the diaries and letters we have from this time are from literate upper-class white women.)
The historians Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, in a paper published in 1986 and called “Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920,” pointed out that the household structure in early America was “permeable” — neighbors, friends and relatives all helped with caretaking. Watching over children was not seen as an individual mother’s job. And though the child mortality rate was high, mothers did not feel a sense of personal responsibility for their children’s deaths. They felt it was God’s hand.
Of course, they grieved for their children deeply, sometimes permanently. But these women also accepted death as part of life, as something ultimately beyond their control. “It may with truth be said the ways of Providence are dark and mysterious far beyond our comprehension,” wrote one Louisiana mother, whose fourth child died after a brief illness in 1836.
But sometime in the middle of the 19th century, there was a marked change, Ms. Dye and Mr. Smith wrote. “Individual mothers slowly came to replace God as the most important guarantors of their children’s welfare.”
This was part of a larger shift in the conception of gender responsibilities in the 1800s, according to Stephanie Coontz, the author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” As economic production moved outside homes and into cities and factories, middle- and upper-class women’s sphere of influence became entirely domestic. “Women began to be responsible for making the home a sanctuary,” Ms. Coontz told me. “Morally, emotionally and yes, physically.”
Though much of the American population was still deeply religious, mothers began to blame themselves when their children got sick. One woman, whose toddler died after a short illness thought to be brought on by teething in 1848, was forever “haunted by thoughts of what might have been avoided, the most pitiless of all.” There was nothing that mother could have done with the knowledge she had at the time. And yet she tortured herself for years after her child’s death.
In the early 1900s, mothers and activists banded together to pressure doctors, the federal government and public health officials to take action on infant deaths. They were relatively successful: In the 20th century, it became culturally accepted that the state had a role in keeping children healthy. But American society, Dr. Dye and Dr. Smith wrote, “has continued to define mothering almost entirely as an individual, private experience and to assign to individual mothers the primary responsibility for their children’s care and welfare.”
So what can we do? Some things are obvious. Children should be loved, have enough food to eat, clean water to drink and places to play outside; they should be vaccinated, and get enough sleep. Parents should heed public health recommendations about staying inside.
If nothing else, the pandemic teaches those privileged enough to worry about the little things the truth: We never had complete control in the first place. We have no way of knowing which of the tiny choices we’re making every day about what kinds of greens to buy and whether the kids watched an hour too much “Paw Patrol” yesterday mean anything in the long run.
Instead of worrying about the micro-decisions in our individual well-heeled families, we — dads included — should be putting our energies and efforts into keeping institutions accountable for everyone’s well-being.
To paraphrase that Louisiana mother, the pandemic is dark and mysterious far beyond our comprehension. But it also gives us the opportunity to make lasting moves away from the ethos of individual responsibility for children’s health and toward community support. We should take it.
Jessica Grose (@JessGrose) is the lead editor of NYT Parenting.
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12) Seven Medical Leaders to Politicians: Save Lives, Not Wall Street
Don’t open businesses and schools. The economy won’t recover until this pandemic ends.
By J. Larry Jameson, March 24, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/opinion/social-distancing-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
I’m writing on behalf of six other leaders of large academic health systems in some of America’s Covid-19 “hot spots” to urge our national leadership to resist pressure to lift tough social restrictions intended to subdue this outbreak and save thousands of lives.
While some say the economic damage of these measures will cause more harm than the disease itself, these steps will actually ensure our economic health, since commerce cannot thrive until we have substantially contained the virus.
If we waver in our commitment to the public health, the consequences will devastate our families, friends, co-workers and neighbors, medically and financially.
The statistical modeling of the viral spread is highly predictable, locally and globally, as the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus map shows. Each of us has run best- and worst-case scenarios based upon the number of infected patients we have, the doubling time of viral spread, and the predicted number of patients who will be admitted to hospitals and require an intensive care unit and a ventilator. For example, if today we have 25 Covid-19 patients in the hospital, with two in intensive care and one on a ventilator, the model predicts that with a three-day doubling rate, there will be a surge of about 800 I.C.U. patients in 30 days.
The most important way to prevent an uncontrolled demand for hospital care is to slow the spread of the disease, lengthening the time it takes for infections to double.
Proper hand washing, disinfecting common areas and coughing into elbows are important. But physical separation is the best way to slow the spread. The fewer contacts, and the greater distance between people, the better. That’s why nonessential businesses need to be closed, especially in outbreak areas. This virus is spread person to person and it spreads explosively.
By acting now, we can buy time to amass resources, devise strategies to rebuild our health system and our economy, and develop treatments, vaccines and, ultimately, population herd immunity.
If we don’t, hospitals will be stretched beyond their capacity. In Italy and China, the health care providers were disproportionately infected because of their brave work on the front lines. When hospitals are short-staffed and undersupplied, we cannot save lives. We are setting up tents in the streets and preparing to reopen old hospitals to prepare for the predicted surge of patients if this viral spread goes unchecked.
We know the costs of social distancing are profound — these steps are rewriting the way we bond with friends and loved ones, the way our children learn, the way we work together in jobs of all kinds. But physical isolation does not have to mean total isolation.
Call your friends. Use social media. Spend time with family within your household. When you go out for essential reasons such as food, supplies and medicine, be smart about your distance from others and sanitize your hands before and after handling items.
Our doctors and nurses are ready to care for you. Our research teams are constantly working to find new treatments. But they need your help. Be a health care hero by respecting these recommendations for conscientious and sustained physical isolation.
The cure is not worse than the disease. Our country has made strides to enforce social distancing and this is not the time to let up.
The job before us as health care workers is clear: Save lives. Please, help us ensure that we can.
J. Larry Jameson is dean of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote this in collaboration with Gianrico Farrugia, president and chief executive of the Mayo Clinic; Robert I. Grossman, chief executive of NYU Langone Health and dean of NYU Grossman School of Medicine; Sam Hawgood, chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco; Paul Klotman, president and chief executive of the Baylor College of Medicine; Paul Rothman, chief executive of Johns Hopkins Medicine; and Peter Slavin, president and chief executive of Massachusetts General Hospital.
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13) ‘Unworthy Republic’ Takes an Unflinching Look at Indian Removal in the 1830s
By Jennifer Szalal, March 24, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/books/review-unworthy-republic-claudio-saunt.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage
Unworthy Republic
The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
By Claudio Saunt
Illustrated. 396 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
By Claudio Saunt
Illustrated. 396 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
The steamboat: For many Americans in the 19th century, it was a symbol of power and progress, a triumph of technology that ferried goods and people upriver with impressive speed.
But for certain passengers, it represented something less glorious and more terrifying. In “Unworthy Republic,” the historian Claudio Saunt describes how the boats functioned as instruments of American expansion and — for the slaves and Indigenous people forced to travel on them — “as floating prisons.” The policy known as Indian Removal was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1830. Transporting so many people up western rivers entailed squeezing them into cramped quarters, where diseases proliferated and a burst boiler could scald hundreds to death in an instant.
Saunt’s book traces the expulsion of 80,000 Native Americans over the course of the 1830s, from their homes in the eastern United States to territories west of the Mississippi River. This was one episode in a long history of colonial conquest that included waging war and spreading disease, but Saunt argues that Indian Removal was truly “unprecedented”; it was a “formal, state-administered process” designed to eliminate every native person to the east of the Mississippi — a systematic expulsion that would later serve as an ignominious model for other regimes around the world. The French in Algeria looked to it as an example, as did the Nazis in Eastern Europe. “The Volga,” Hitler announced in 1941, “must be our Mississippi.”
“Unworthy Republic” is a powerful and lucid account, weaving together events with the people who experienced them up close. President Jackson is an inevitable presence, but he’s relegated mostly to the background, expounding his policy in high-flown terms (“It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy”) while gloating in his private letters (“I have in the chickisaw treaty destroyed the serpent”). Previously, as a general in the Tennessee militia and later the United States Army, Jackson had led brutal campaigns against the Creeks and the Seminoles. His election to the highest office, in 1828, meant that state governments in the South would get what they had long clamored for — federal resources to move Indigenous residents from the land, so that slaveholders could expand their cotton empire.
The entwined history of slavery and the expulsion of Indigenous people is a central theme in Saunt’s book. In antebellum America, both Native Americans and African-Americans were “subjects but not citizens.” Southern planters and politicians loudly declaimed states’ rights in defense of their “peculiar institution,” but they needed federal help to clear the land of native residents. Particularly enticing for slavers was the Black Prairie — a crescent-shaped swath of dark, rich soil through Mississippi and Alabama, where Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks lived.
But the unvarnished language of profits and exploitation wouldn’t be enough to get the Indian Removal Act passed in Congress, where some Northern representatives were already suspicious of Southern motives. Just as central to the cause of removal was the gauzy humanitarianism used to justify it. Essential to this effort was the work of Isaac McCoy, described by Saunt as a “sincere” and “naïve” Baptist missionary who envisioned a land uniting all the native peoples in “one body politic” called “Aboriginia.” Politicians learned to present expulsion as a protective policy, a benevolent program to rescue native people from “extinction.”
The Jackson administration had tacitly encouraged white settlers to move onto native land; having helped to stoke the problem, Saunt writes, the administration “was asked to provide a solution.” Jackson offered a “grand scheme,” but no proper plan. As Saunt meticulously documents, combing through government records and contemporaneous testimony, Indigenous people were caught in the teeth of a vast bureaucracy that combined penny-pinching austerity with terrible management, corruption and chaos on the ground.
Tens of thousands of people were supposed to be transferred “on the cheap,” with expired vaccines and imprecise maps. One drunken U.S. agent entrusted with the Choctaw removal recorded names on loose slips of paper that he then lost. During the ensuing war with the Seminoles, some officials became increasingly disillusioned; in the words of one Army officer, the treaty that arranged for the deportation of the Seminoles was made in “hard and unconscionable terms” that had been “extorted.”
Saunt doesn’t try to smooth over the knottier parts of his narrative, which include Northern financiers and Indigenous slave owners who profited from expulsion; families that withstood “compulsion, enticement and duplicity” to stay on their homelands in the east; and the violent punishments carried out by tribes in order to quell dissent. He’s also aware that the documentary record overrepresents the voices of those who left a paper trail. His account acknowledges the diverse experiences within and across Indigenous communities.
Having originally budgeted the meager sum of $500,000 for the enormous policy of Indian Removal, the federal government ended up spending about $75 million — the equivalent, Saunt says, of about a trillion dollars today. The cost to the government may have been dear, but for the native peoples who were moved to Indian Territory, being on the outside of the expanding republic proved to be deadly.
In 1869, after a spate of massacres of Indigenous communities in the West, Frederick Douglass told an antislavery audience: “The only reason why the Negro has not been killed off, as the Indians have been, is that he is so close under your arm that you cannot get at him.” Saunt has written an unflinching book that reckons with this history and its legacy. “Expulsion,” he writes, “was the war the slaveholders won.”
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14) Women Should Have to Register for Military Draft, Too, Commission Tells Congress
A commission appointed by Congress will recommend that expanding selective service registration to women is a “necessary and fair step.”
By sarah Mervosh and John Ismay, March 24, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/us/women-military-draft-selective-service.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=US%20News
Melissa Golden for The New York Times
Women have been serving the United States military for generations, sewing uniforms during the Revolutionary War and nursing the wounded during World War II. They have flown fighter jets, commanded warships and more recently fought in combat on the front lines.
But they have never been required to register for a military draft.
That could soon change. Under a new recommendation to Congress by a national commission, all Americans ages 18 to 25 — not just young men as currently required — would have to register with the government in case of a military draft.
The recommendation, part of a report that will be released to Congress on Wednesday, represents the final stage in a divisive debate that has been simmering for decades: Should the United States have a military draft, and should it include women?
“The biggest piece of opposition was, we are not going to draft our mother and daughters, our sisters and aunts to fight in hand-to-hand combat,” said Dr. Joseph Heck, chairman of the commission, which held dozens of public meetings and considered more than 4,000 public comments over the past two years.
But as women have increasingly taken on a larger presence in military life and culture — making up about 17 percent of active-duty troops — commissioners concluded that expanding the registration process to include all Americans in the event of a draft was a “necessary and fair step.”
It was not immediately clear when the House or Senate might consider such a measure. A representative for the Pentagon declined to comment.
Should Congress adopt the recommendations, it would mean that women ages 18 to 25, like young men, would be asked to register with the Selective Service System, the independent government agency that maintains a database of Americans eligible for a potential draft.
Instead of requiring a trip to the post office, registration today often happens automatically when a young adult applies for a driver’s license or federal financial aid. But no one can be required to serve unless a draft is enacted, a step that would require an act of Congress and approval by the president.
“Women bring a whole host of different perspectives, different experiences,” said Debra Wada, a former assistant secretary for the Army who served on the commission, noting that being drafted does not necessarily mean serving in combat. In a time of national crisis, the government could draft people to a variety of positions, from clerical work to cybersecurity.
“If the threat is to our very existence,” she said, “wouldn’t you want women as part of that group?” To many, the draft itself may seem moot: No one has been forced into military service in more than 40 years. The modern-day military has been successful as an all-volunteer force, with about 1.2 million active-duty troops.
Still, the draft has been a controversial topic since the Vietnam era, when thousands of young men were conscripted into military service, sparking protests as the war dragged on. President Trump himself received five draft deferments. Not registering with the Selective Service can come with a lifetime of penalties, including exclusion from student loans or the chance to work for the federal government.
“Congress should end draft registration for all, not try to expand it to young women as well as young men,” a group of activists who oppose the draft said in a joint statement on Tuesday. It added, “Even more women than men would resist if the government tried to draft them.”
The commission recommended that the United States keep a draft option in place as a “low-cost insurance policy against an existential national security threat,” Dr. Heck said.
The question of whether to include women in a potential draft became more urgent in recent years, after the Pentagon announced in 2015 that it would open all combat jobs to women. Since then, more than 2,000 women have served in Army combat positions, and today, more than 224,000 women serve on active duty.
“Women have proven themselves since 9/11 as pilots, medics, military police, engineers, and as part of the special operations and intelligence communities,” said Phillip Carter, a former Army officer and veteran of the Iraq war who is now a scholar at the RAND Corporation. “If America resorts to a draft to mobilize for war again, the experience of the past 18 years shows that the nation can and should rely on women to fight too.”
In 2016, some military leaders openly advocated for requiring women to register with the Selective Service. The same year, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said he supported making the change. The Senate briefly considered the question, but a provision for it was ultimately removed before it reached President Barack Obama.
While reinstating the draft is generally unpopular and seen as a last resort, polls show that the American public is split about whether women should be eligible, with about 52 percent of Americans in favor. More women than men were opposed to making the change, according to a 2013 poll by Quinnipiac University.
Mr. Heck, the commission chairman and a former Nevada congressman, said he was confident that the issue would be taken up in both the Senate and the House. “Where it goes from there,” he said, “is a matter of debate.”
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