2020 – Page 2 – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

Public Transit is a Human Rights Issue Under Covid19

By Teka Lark (May 7, 2020)

More women take public transit than men, and more Black people are in car FREE households than anyone else. Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American households are more likely to be in a car FREE household than white people. So it has always troubled me that upper-middle- and middle-class white men have continued to dominate this conversation. This conversation is intersectional. Open streets, human transit movement should be feminist. It should be Feminist with a capital F, but no it is far from that. The women in the human-centric transportation field seem to rather be viewed as the “cool girls” than stand up for other women and children. On Twitter, FB, in the media I keep hearing praises for carFREE BUSINESS initiatives that put people at risk and women at risk so that predominantly white business owners can make money. And I see women, with children co-signing on it, because of the pack dog mentality of movements that are male-dominated.

If you care about women and children, you need to speak up about the irresponsibility and selfishness of opening up businesses now —even if a bicycle is pasted on to it.

You need to say something about the vile new practice by urbanplanning/alttransit/bigdevelopment funded media trying to find the silver linings on opening up nonessential businesses, just because the streets are blocked off from cars. The workers that SERVE you and the public employees that bring them to work don’t live on the open street and often have to come on the train, the bus from FAR AWAY owing to redlining and racism to serve, work, so others can have fun.

There is no bright side to Florida (with horrible public transit) opening up because the streets with businesses happen to be blocked off from cars. The servers don’t live in the businesses, does that entire concept escape you?! If you’re Black, Latinx or white working class, you’ve probably experienced a two-hour commute for a piece of shit job, if you’re white, metropolitan and middle class, understand this: that is how the rest of us get to to work to serve you a coffee.

People are going to die because of this shortsightedness. Do people understand that people don’t live at their workplaces, that they have to travel, and all kinds of things can happen between home in East NY and serving a coffee on the Lower Eastside of Manhattan?

Men fine, I can see how middle-class white men don’t see this, but women in the carFREE movement–Black and Latina women are trying to eat, so I get why they are quiet, but white women — I’m not getting your silence on this madness? Being a feminist means sometimes being unpopular with guys.

This is a picture of Maryland of your essential retail workers getting to work, so maybe you can think about this before you co-sign on to some dude’s awesome idea of opening things back up.

Covid19 is Not the Flu and Requires a People’s Bailout for Working People

By Zakk Flash (April 28, 2020)

It took 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, for the United States to lose 58,220 men and women — 47,434 in combat — in Vietnam.

In less than four months, just as many Americans will have died from the #Covid19 pandemic — the toll, on April 26, stood at 55,383, a few thousand shy of the total number killed in Southeast Asia.

This is not a hoax.

Do people really think that they’d shut everything down if this was comparable to the flu? The NBA, Olympics, Oktoberfest, the greasy spoon diner on Main Street — all closed.

This isn’t media hype, y’all. The number of people in this country who have died from #coronavirus is, for easy Oklahoma comparison, approximately the same as the number of people who live in Midwest City, our 8th most populous city.

I understand the concerns of people out of work. It sucks. The government is printing trillions of dollars right now; working people need that money. Instead, that money — your tax money — is going to bail out landlords, the cruise ship industry, and a whole bunch of rich assholes who were rich and assholes before the pandemic.

We need to demand a people’s bailout.

What the Left Should Know about Opening the Economy

By Louis Colombo (April 27, 2020)

I’ve seen too many posts implying that opening up the economy/getting back to work is simply an effort to boost the profits of the rich. Invariably, these posts come from folks on “the left.”

I won’t debate the truth in that claim, but if this is all that gets posted, seen, shared, communicated, then no wonder that many folks who don’t have the relative “luxury” of working from home, who are weighing the differences between food, housing, medicine, etc, get turned off. For many people, the need/desire to get back to work is about survival, and probably on another level, about self respect. We ignore this at our own peril.

Certainly, there are important questions that we should be asking about what is and should be normal, and I know many people, also on the “left” who are asking those questions and really doing the work.

Let’s not obscure that and push people to the right with a meme or post that’s too glib by half.

We Were Never Lazy, We Were Living in a Culture that Sapped Our Time and Energy

By Beth Strano (April 27, 2020)

This is also me seeing so many folks embracing gardens, new cooking skills, mutual aid, bartering, and mending as healthy ways to rebuild the feeling that we have some control over our lives. We were never lazy, we were living in a culture that demands so much of our time and energy to survive. Along the way, the things that make us feel happy and proud got labeled as “hobbies.”

Remember, when this is all over, that we all had this power collectively all along, and that we always knew what we needed and could accomplish when we’re looking out for each other.

With any luck, we are planting more seeds than we will see grow in our lifetime.

Astroturf Protests Have Some Grassroots Backing

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Aoril 23, 2020)

The face of US fascism/white nationalism, a right wing populist element to it, but also the major Republican party donors, Koch, DeVoss, Coors, etc.

The Republican Party has become a US-style Fascist organization with its storm troopers and radical ideology, the price worth paying apparently for the billionaire donors, themselves libertarian and neoliberal (privatize everything).

But, it’s important to understand that it is not all top down; it does have a popular base that is not in it for the money, and in fundamental ways, the foundation of the fiscal military state (a state designed for war) that is the United States, supports their ideology. And, hey, they control every branch of the federal government, except the House of Representative, which is powerless with a fascist Senate; more than half of the states are Republican, and most of the former Confederate states plus several others are solidly right wing. Democratic Party functionaries and most office holding Democrats do not challenge the content of US patriotism but present a candy coated version of it.

Democrats equally strongly support the military, polls show that 75 percent of the US people “strongly support” the military; no other institution comes close (except the post office).

We Are At Risk with Business as Usual: A Tale from Taos

By Rivera Sun (April 21, 2020)

I want to share a story. It’s personal.

Here in Taos, NM, our governor was on the early side of the stay-at-home orders. Our businesses closed, the town turned into a ghost town. We even have a nightly curfew. But here’s the thing: our total COVID-19 cases are 15. They have plateaued for two weeks. Our county’s population is around 30,000 (many of whom use Taos as the main commercial hub). That means our rate is around 40 per 100,000, vs. other counties that have 1500+ per 100,000.

But there’s more to this story. Taos, NM, is a destination spot. People come to the ski valley. We were the highest rate in New Mexico until the stay-at-home orders began. The stay-at-home orders stopped the spread and the influx of people with COVID-19. We know first hand that orders were necessary to stop this. We saw people not cancelling their vacations, trying to book Airbnbs, and fulfilling their non-essential interests when the warnings first started to be issued. It took the orders to get people to stay home.

By comparison, there are places in New Mexico where essential services have included things like oil and gas, where a higher rate of activity is continuing, where people are still out and about. And the rate of infection has climbed along with it. You can almost track it on a map. The highest rate of infection (and deaths, btw) in New Mexico is in the Four Corners region at Navajo Nation. They reported that tourists were still coming even as the pandemic arrived and started to spread in the US. You know what else still going on there? Fracking. Oil & Gas is considered an essential service. So, thousands of gas workers are still out and about doing their work. They’re coming in from other places, too.

Meanwhile, Taos Pueblo, upon whose traditional territory the Town of Taos sits, has completely shut its doors and is preventing non-residents (people who are not tribal members and their immediate family) from entering. One of the reasons I support the continued shut-downs, social-distancing, and stay at home orders is because the Town of Taos has a responsibility to limit the risk to Taos Pueblo. If we open up too early, if our tourists return and bring the disease with them, we expose ourselves and Taos Pueblo in ways that are eerily reminiscent of genocidal pandemics.

There’s this, too: as a rural region with a large incoming tourist group, we are not equipped with hospital beds, respirators, or supplies to care for a sudden and sharp influx of cases. Our doctors and nurses have told us this repeatedly. I believe we have 30 hospital beds in our local hospital. One of the reasons we are trying to flatten the curve is not just to save lives, but to keep our case numbers at a rate our hospitals can handle.

I hope you will consider my personal observations on the efficacy of social distancing in my community. We are very at risk if we try to return to business-as-usual. For us, that means an influx of people from places of higher infection rates. It means exposing our town and Taos Pueblo to those higher rates of infection. It means possibly overloading our limited hospital capacity. I would like to see us avoid all of those tragedies. We can do it. But we have to care deeply and stay home.

“Open the Economy” is a Right Wing Attempt to Doom Working People

By Zakk Flash (April 20, 2020)

They don’t want to “open the economy.”

That’s bullshit language, cooked up in some think tank and seized upon by the media as a neutral descriptor instead of a right-wing euphemism for dooming hundreds of thousands of immunocompromised, elderly, homeless, imprisoned, and marginalized people to an early, painful death.

These folks need our support. The folks gathering at state houses around the country do too. They need a comprehensive social safety net that would allow them to stay healthy, pay their bills, and live with a decent quality of life. We all do.

The White House and its cadre of corporate goons isn’t working to make that happen. They want a return to the status quo.

The plan to ‘reopen the economy’ is dumping the bodies of service and industrial workers in front of a global pandemic so the wealthy can profit.

What If You Opened the Economy and Nobody Came?

By Mark Naison (April 20, 2020)

As protests against state wide shutdowns to prevent the spread of COVID-19 continue to erupt in many states, people are missing one key point. So long as people continue to die in large numbers from COVID-19 and our health care system is stressed well beyond capacity, a large percentage of the population will continue to voluntarily quarantine themselves and avoid situations which put them and their families at risk.

Given the legitimate level of fear people have of devastating consequences to their health if they resume “normal” ( pre-pandemic) activity in the absence of widespread testing and a vaccine, there will be no sudden rush to take advantage of openings of stores, restaurants, theaters, ball parks, hotels and amusement parks without the most extreme precautions being followed

You can change what governments impose , but you can’t change people’s behavior when it has been reinforced by trauma and death. Enough people now know of people who have been hospitalized or died as a result of COVID-19 that they are going to be extremely resistant to resuming activities where social distancing isn’t rigorously enforced.

The “Liberate America” protesters are a far smaller percentage of the population than those who have been traumatized by COVID-19 and fear what it could do to themselves and their families

If you “open the economy” without taking the necessary precautions, the surge in consumer behavior required to make a dent in unemployment will simply not take place.

When people have been traumatized my something real, they will not change their behavior until the source of the trauma has been removed.

Unless the “Liberate America” protesters are ready to drag people out of their homes and force them to shop, go to school and go to work, their protests will have limited impact on the level of economic activity in the country.

We Need a People’s Bailout

By Red Corbeau (April 19, 2020)

It is difficult to argue for a ‘stay at home’ strategy to limit the deaths when so many unemployed people are now wondering where the money is going to come from for food and rent. I understand the temptation to deny the severity of this pandemic and, out of fear, clamor for an immediate re-opening of the economy.

What would make ‘sheltering in place’ more workable for the long term would be:

-to provide adequate and welcoming shelters for those who don’t have them; strengthen and expand the social safety net, including a people’s bailout of at least $2,000.00 a month or more for each household (we know the money is there – and remember? collectively we created all that wealth now held by so few), at least until the pandemic passes (I’d rather see this part of the “bailout” continued);

-across the board forgiveness of debt;

-and a moratorium on rent at least until people can safely return to work.

-We need to also recognize that the entire planet is connected, and unless we want to see the pandemic recurring, we need coordinated international efforts.

All of these things have been proposed, but none of them are likely to happen under this Administration (and maybe the next). So the growing fear of destitution and impoverishment has already been mobilized by the powers that be for a disastrously early “reopening” of the economy, and as the pandemic continues, people are more and more caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

We should be protesting for a People’s Bailout, rather than for the chance to die or kill others to make money for the oligarchy. Ultimately, of course, we need to create a people’s economy that works for all of us.

Structural Racism is the Reason People of Color Are Dying of Covid-19

By Teka Lark (April 13, 2020)

The Surgeon General, Dr. Adams, stated, to paraphrase, that we people of color (Black people and Latinos) need to lay off the alcohol and healthfully eat so that we won’t die of the COVID-19. People were quite (understandably) outraged, but I also found something similar in the Chicago Defender that also outraged me:

“If it was in place now, it would be issuing nutritional, dietary and lifestyle advice to Blacks that emerging research is beginning to suggest that may minimize the effect of the epigenetic damage.”

Respectability politics sometimes comes dressed in a three-piece suit and other times, it comes dressed in kente cloth. Still, regardless of its uniform, in the end, it blames Black people for our oppression, and it refuses to attack the root cause directly (fewer grants in that).

For many reasons, I don’t like the historical trauma argument. It implies that we’re damaged when we are born and that gives alive racists a get out of jail free card. I’m not willing to do that. I’m not throwing it out, but I feel it’s a dangerous game to play with white institutions, because white institutions are always looking at ways to pathologize Blackness and wiggle out of fixing themselves. Fixing themselves would involve no longer existing.

The disparity in care is a massive problem for Black people. It takes us twice as long to get help, and once we get help, it takes us twice as long to convince medical professionals to understand or rather, care what we ware saying. And once we do all that, we’re dead.

From NPR “All Things Considered” from 2016 Analysis by NYC Health

“Five years of data found that black, college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.”

This analysis and other studies point to a disparity of care.

Another challenge is that Black people live farther from their jobs. Black people and Latinos typically live farther from work and are farther away from good public transit options. That means Black and Latino people generally are walking more than a mile and transferring at least once to get to work. The 2015 “It’s About Time: The Transit Time Penalty and It’s Racial Implications” study of the Minneapolis and Twin Cities area stated that people of color communities were spending 11-46 more hours a year on their commute than white people.

You lose nearly two days of your life just for not being white.

More time commuting means more time being exposed to illness, disease, and just the elements and being in cold weather in addition to stressful commutes lower the immune system.

Another huge issue for Black people is that we typically work in the public sector and the service industry. In July 2010, the Center for Labor Research and Education released a report examining the state of Black workers in the years 2005 – 2007. It found that the public sector is the most critical source of employment for African Americans, and it is the sector that provides us with the highest paying jobs.

Those jobs include education, transportation, sanitation, the postal service. Even when we have degrees, we’re going to be working with the public, owing to the dynamics of race and access in the US.

In 2020 this is still the case.

Outside the public sector, we work in retail services and parts of the health care sector, including home health aides and nursing home workers, jobs that also expose you to the public.

And also the kind of jobs we have outside the public sector tend to be last hired, first fired. Jobs that you can’t do at home, that are at-will employment.

The cemented institutions of racism is the reason that Black people are disproportionately —exposed and dying from COVID-19.

There are no buts here. There are no if we just…no, it’s structural racism, that’s why and that is the only reason why.

References

Nelson, A. (2002). Unequal treatment: Confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Journal of the National Medical Association, 94(8), 666-8.

Conspiracy Theories of the Left: 5G, Corona Virus, and Aliens

By Arun Gupta (April 10, 2020)

I am on a listserve of leftists who are debating the role of 5G and chemtrails in the pandemic, with some claiming there is no virus at all. One person is even trotting out anti-semite conspiracist David “lizard aliens rule us” Icke.

This isn’t coming out of thin air. These conspiracies on the Left are an updated version of JFK conspiracy theories (one person even raised that, “You no doubt believe the official story of the JFK assassination”).The same people think HIV does not cause AIDS, Lyme disease is a bioweapon gone amok, 9/11 was an inside job, the US invaded Iraq because they were no longer trading oil in dollars, the Bilderberg group runs the world. They also tend to be enthusiastic consumers of quackery, such as reiki, Hellerwork, cupping, craniosacral therapy, homeopathy, and so on.

This isn’t politics. It’s a cultish religion. These ideas take hold among people who are desperate to believe there are omnipotent, omnimalevolent forces who control all society, and indeed all of history. But they are the visionary prophets who can see the glorious truth and are trying to bring the good word that if we just eliminate the 5G chemtrails the coronavirus will disappear like magic. They want and need an all-powerful father figure to rage against and to overthrow, and only then can human potential be unleashed.

While I think it’s a mistake to see them as equivalent as Trumpkins, who are genuinely genocidal, there is a parallel with them in terms of lack of basic understanding of science. The pathologies of American society are not purely partisan. There are self-destructive and frankly moronic ideas that manifest themselves in different ways across the spectrum, among fascists, the right, the center, liberals, and the Left.

See below for some choice examples:

***

“If COVID-19 is not a virus and the cause of the ailment is 5G 60GHz, then wouldn’t it make sense to stay away from hospitals, other buildings, and cruise ships that have 5G installed? What possible vaccine could be developed for this except for another phony pharmaceutical prize, how could someene contract the ailment from droplets of fluid from someone who has it, and how could there be an incubation period? And is all this social distancing, hand washing, wearing face masks, and sheltering-in-place just distractions? Lots of unanswered questions.

“With the relatively recent roll out of 5G 60 GHz in various parts of the world, including near Wuhan, and all the damage it has and will be doing, one has to wonder if we humans are being used as guinea pigs for some nefarious forces. And what might they be up to going forward? What are they planning, building, putting in place right now, in plain sight (if only we were permitted to be outside and watch them)?

“This for me is about connecting the dots, the coronavirus/5G-60/chemtrails (the “aerosolized spraying” of “metallized particulates”)/bio-weapon connection. I appreciate all the contributions folks have been making to this issue”

***

“We may be looking at several different illnesses, some being caused by a virus, some by 5G and so on. But they’re all being called COVID19.”

***

David Icke presents interesting thorough discussion of why the tests are bullshit, false positives–in first 30 minutes.
https://londonreal.tv/the-coronavirus-conspiracy-how-covi…/…
A lot of leftists become furious whenever I post ICKE(he is NOT alt- right so I’m not sure why), so ignore this if you hate Icke.
Icke contradicts himself. Later he says people are getting VERY sick
but it’s from 5 G. Whether it is or not they are rolling out 5G while we are distracted