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…
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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….
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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…
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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…
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By Jasper Smith (April 9, 2020) To be in the United States during a pandemic: – People without homes are told to stay home. – People without clean water are told to wash their hands. – People lose their job and with it their healthcare. – Most people don’t have enough savings to cover two weeks of lost income to…
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By Louis Colombo (April 6, 2020) In a properly civilized world, we would view this pandemic as nothing but a reminder of our interconnectedness to nature, a reminder that we are part of, but not above, nature. We would treat this time as a time to pause, retreat, reflect, be with those we love, tend to those we care about….
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By Alexandro Jose Gradilla (April 1, 2020) One of the problems we struggle with in the university is getting a lot of the faculty to honestly see the “whole student”. As I Zoom teach with my students…I see their realties…”attending” class with a phone in a car. In very small cramped rooms. You can tell they are precariously positioned in…
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By Joseph Orosco (March 31, 2020) Some thirty years ago, Cesar Chavez staged his last major hunger fast. This fast went on for thirty-six days. In his statement issued at the end, Chavez said he had begun the fast because he had to do penance; he was ashamed of himself. For all his years as an organizer, he said…
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By Arun Gupta (March 23, 2020) I wrote this days ago saying an economic contraction of 10% or more and an unemployment rate of 20%. Only now are investment banks worth hundreds of billions of dollars considering we are in a depression. I haven’t seen anyone acknowledge what is obvious: The same economic denialism is going on now as in…
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By Joe Lowndes (March 21, 2020) Tucker Carlson is being cheered by some liberals for calling out NC Sen. Richard Burr for insider trading. Burr should be investigated for this, to be sure. But this is consistent with Carlson’s right-wing nationalism more generally – just as it was Pat Buchanan’s before him. However, it will matter in a new way…
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By Astra Taylor (March 20, 2020) If you know me, you know I love etymologically. I love the buried meanings of the word we use, their hidden resonance. The word “crisis” comes from the ancient Greek. It means the turning point in an illness—death or recovery, two stark alternatives. Someone just told me the root of “apocalypse is “to reveal”…
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