Yes, the U.S. Response to COVID-19 is a Genocide

[PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Ontiveroz/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Image]

By Alex Harley

Republished from Emphasis Added.

A Yale epidemiologist was castigated for equating the virus to a genocide in a series of tweets. Why? The answer lies in a foundational understanding of white supremacist capitalism: death for profit isn’t murder.

As hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people living in the U.S. protest racist police violence in all fifty states, another act of racist violence is being perpetrated through governmental policy and business practice: The COVID-19 Genocide.

While scientists agree that the virus itself was a natural, and not lab-created phenomenon, its handling in the US is an unequivocal disaster. As of June 29, 2020, the crises is forty-two times the size of 9/11 casualties: 128,000 deaths. So where are the calls for accountability and justice?

It is not despicable to characterize the U.S. response to COVID-19 a genocide. It is imperative. It is an assertion that clarifies U.S. behavior. Unfortunately, MacLeod’s hesitance to call it genocide is no outlier. It is the default reaction from defenders of the status quo.

One British legal authority agrees that the case for genocide is weak, citing “specific intent” (Heieck, 2020).

But it is no insult to victims of state and vigilante violence to call it genocide. It is the acknowledgement of historical record.

The capitalist ideological foundations of the U.S., and all modern states built on settler-colonialism, do not frame death through exploitation as a crime. It’s the price of doing business. They’ve been in excess of deadly business for over four centuries now, and it hasn’t stopped.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder.

But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

- Fredrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England

The (predominantly white) federal government and the (predominantly white) business elites are both guilty of sacrificing working people to profit from and during the COVID-19 crisis. Their (predominantly white) adherents, with their anti-lockdown demos, anti-mask violence, victim blaming, hoax conspiracy theories, and scapegoating of China, are equally culpable.

The rulers of the U.S. do not recognize their own extant record of mass murder: not in illegal military operations; not at the hands of police; not in the workplace; not in the streets. The nation socializes its citizens to normalize systemic murder, successfully. It is a critical piece of settler-colonial ideology. Deception is another key piece.

From “Heroes” to Fodder

Early on in the crisis, front-line workers were heralded for their bravery. They were called “heroes”. But in reality, the fanfare was a just nice way to say “Get back to work!” And this, of course, was reserved for those who weren’t laid off.

Corporations were quick to slash their rosters as soon as the crisis reared its head. The Federal Government acted just as quickly to “bolster the economy” by pouring trillions directly into corporate pockets. Corporations, and especially their rich executives, made out handily.

Between March 18 and April 10, 2020, over 22 million people lost their jobs as the unemployment rate surged toward 15 percent. Over the same three weeks, U.S. billionaire wealth increased by $282 billion, an almost 10 percent gain. (Institute for Policy Studies, 2020)

To secure the fortunes of the wealthy, businesses must stay open, with severely reduced staff (and overhead!). Retail and service employees must relent to exposing themselves to infection by interacting with large, diverse segments of the population. They must take on new duties, including enforcing social distancing measures, which exposes them to violent reaction. Doctors and nurses must work without enough equipment, beds, or sometimes even space. And all the while, protests against police violence must be brutally repressed with the billy club, rubber bullet, sound cannon, and tear gas canister. In some cases, the police have directly targeted children and the elderly. And, the police continue to murder civilians.

The connection between racist policing and racist capitalism must be highlighted. They are thoroughly enmeshed.

COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups, CDC

Nationally, hospitalizations show a rate 15 times higher for oppressed nation’s peoples as opposed to whites. The statistics of death rates among them are equally disparate (Ford, 2020).

Race gaps in COVID-19 deaths are even bigger than they appear. Brookings.

Reservations have been some of the hardest hit areas in the nation. But instead of aid, the federal government sent body bags to the Seattle Indian Health Board (Grande, 2020).

What is this brazen attitude, if not dripping with intent? The intent is to make money, whatever sacrifice working and oppressed people must make.

How do you characterize a nation which denies its people access to a functional, modern health system by means of predatory business practices and fiscal austerity? And when centuries of racist capitalist underdevelopment magnify the crisis within the oppressed and working class communities of the US?

This is not by accident, but design. Uneven capitalist development and sheer disregard for human life have proven “profitable” time and time again; and, will continue to do so. Theft and murder are profitable. But who are the murderers? Can we see them clearly?

Responsible Parties

The virus is not the main agent; willful, deliberate neglect is; the result of governmental policies and business operations which have identifiable delegates. There are responsible parties. We must not lose sight of that.

Working solutions were and are available to solve this crisis. This is illustrated by the disparity in how effective certain responses have shown to be across the globe. Nations who took the crisis seriously have fared demonstrably better than the US. They mustered human and material capital to create solutions, during the time they bought through strict containment policies.

Instead, the U.S. flouted scientific consensus and advice from other nations. The U.S. eventually locked down, but did nothing substantial with the time bought. All of the states which re-opened under business and right-wing popular pressure have all surged again (Hawkins, 2020). The infection curve should look like a bell by now; instead, it looks like an insurmountable mountain. And until a vaccine is found, it will continue to do so, if the U.S. ruling class continues its regime of denial.

They withheld vital aid through confiscation of protective equipment and economic sanction. They continued high-tech military operations during a global viral outbreak. In May, the U.S blocked a vote in the UN for a global ceasefire (Borger, 2020). The rulers of the U.S. do not seek peace, but war. War with the world’s oppressed people, domestically and abroad. War for profit.

At every turn, American bourgeoisie will try to make money, no matter how insidious it may seem. As reported by Qiao Collective, US corporation Gilead’s vaccine is slated to cost the American public “$3,120 per [patient] with private insurance.” If China finds a vaccine, they will make it a “global public good” (Qiao Collective, Twitter).

While the ruling class can largely isolate themselves in their lavish homes, padded from infection by layers of workers, the crisis outside is just a complication. The deaths of workers are simply inconvenient, when there is a surplus of unemployed laborers from which to draw. Our deaths truly mean nothing to them. If a guardian‘s charge dies by neglect, it is considered murder. What about when a nation allows its subjects to die?

We should consider it murder.

Taken independently, the historical abuses perpetuated by the leaders and ruling class of the United States are reprehensible. When viewed as a singular phenomenon, they amount to genocide. COVID-19 is just another blood-soaked chapter in the American project of unlimited exploitation.

Group Violence as it Relates to Lynching and Police Violence

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

By V. Alexis

What is Group Violence?

Collective or group violence is a type of violence enacted by people who identify as members of a group (Hawdon). In all the literature on group violence, there is little written on lynching. This piece will cover the basic features of group violence, or more specifically how people who are considered “ordinary” are capable of committing atrocities. The atrocities discussed in this piece are police violence and lynching. This piece will also propose that police violence is a form of group violence and functions similar to lynch mobs. 

There are three main features of group violence as it relates to lynching and police violence. These features include strongly identifying with said group, dehumanizing outside groups, and fear mongering. Group membership boosts self-esteem and provides a sense of self and pride. These groups create members and non-members. People tend to define themselves in contrast of other groups. This creates and “us” versus “them” mentality towards other people outside of the group. Discriminating against people outside of the group is often a way to elevate one’s position within the group. As the difference between “us” and “them” grows, there is more of a chance for violence against the outside group(s).

When people who are not experienced with violence do engage in violent behavior, they typically experience physiological and psychological distress. The proposed reason for why this occurs is that the person who committed an act of violence experiences outcome aversion. This outcome aversion is distress from considering the negative outcomes associated with harming others. These negative outcomes can come from knowing that the victim is likely experiencing distress or from expecting punitive consequences.

Motivation for Engaging in Group Violence and the Manifestation of White Supremacy

One way groups will decrease the aversive effects of committing acts of violence is through creating more social distance between them and the outside group. A common way to increase this social distance is through dehumanization. Strong social ties in the group make it easier for dehumanization to occur. Having strong social ties within groups decrease the need for making connections with people in outside groups.

One example of dehumanization is the history of claiming that black people have more proximity to animals than any other race of humans. Early scientists used to examine every part of the black body, but specifically facial angles to prove their theory that black people are less human. These practices and ideas have evolved but have never gone away (Hund). In modern times, there are studies which show that even many medical professionals have the preconceived notion that black people feel less pain (Hoffman). Just last year, there were a few female Track and Field athletes who were subjected to constant scrutiny of their bodies in an effort to figure out why they were so successful in their respective events. Some officials and scientists employed to conduct studies even went as far as insisting these women either take medicine to decrease their testosterone levels or compete with men.

The strategy of fear mongering entails claiming the outside group poses a threat. This threat can be economic, social, or a threat to survival. After the civil war, black veterans were targeted for lynching because white people thought black participation in the war meant that black people were getting “too much power” within the broader society. When lynching was prominent, there was a trend that as prices of cotton went up, the number of lynchings went down (Dutton). One could presume that this trend meant that when black and white people were closer to being financially equal, white people felt threatened economically. Or that black people were only worthy of living when being productive for white owners. Current studies show that black children are viewed as older and black names evoke threatening images in white minds. Black people are viewed as inherently dangerous.

How this Applies to Lynching

Lynch mobs included three main groups of people; instigators, participants, and spectators. Instigators are the group leaders. They are the people who motivate others to lynch people. Participants are the people who participate in the brutalizing of the victim. The spectators are people who would come to watch and pass around limbs like it was some festival. Even children were spectators and celebrated these brutal deaths. The in-group in the case of lynch mobs are “white conservatives.” I specify conservative because white people with progressive ideas were also lynched. They were not, however, as nearly as vulnerable to lynching as black people.

How this Applies to Police Violence

One could argue that the violence of the U.S police force should be considered as group violence instead of individual isolated incidents or “bad apples.” Following the same framework as previously laid out, the U.S police force has a collective identity characterized as an in-group. This in-group would be considered “the good guys.” The outside group or out-group would perhaps be considered “the bad guys.” The bad guys are disproportionately black, brown, and indigenous people.

The use of dehumanization is arguably the same as during chattel slavery and the time of frequent lynching (Goff). The description of Michael Brown, who was murdered by the police in Ferguson, is one additional example of modern-day dehumanization of black people. The cop Darren Wilson’s account of the murder described Michael Brown as “superhuman.” He was quoted saying, “The only way I can describe it is I felt like a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.” Wilson also said, Brown looked like a “demon.” The idea that black people are simultaneously in bad health and superhuman has been around since at least the Jim-Crow era.

This idea that black people are superhuman also falls under the category of fear mongering – having ideas that black and indigenous people are inherently dangerous and thus must be controlled or dominated. The three groups in lynch mobs can all be applied to police violence: The instigators are the cops who start the aggression; the participants are those who are physically involved in the brutality and or murder; and the spectators are the so called “good cops” who do nothing to stop the “bad cops.”

Thinking of police violence as collective or group violence is important because all too often it is blamed on one “maniac” or “psychotic” individual. This type of language takes away from the fact that these cops are simply racist and/or are working in a racist system, performing in-group duties within a racist group (institution) with violent tendencies. It’s worth noting that this type of language is also ableist, as it further stigmatizes people with mental illnesses. Not everyone who is psychotic or who has any mental illness is violent and not every violent person is mentally ill or has psychotic traits. The only way to stop these acts of group violence, both lynching and police violence, is to abolish the in-groups.

References

Dutton, Donald G. The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why "Normal" People Come to Commit Atrocities. Praeger Security International, 2007.

Goff, Phillip Atiba, et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2014, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24564373.

Hawdon, James. “Group Violence Revisited: Common Themes across Types of Group Violence.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/20265986/Group_Violence_Revisited_Common_Themes_across_Types_of_Group_Violence.

Hoffman, Kelly M, et al. “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, National Academy of Sciences, 19 Apr. 2016, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27044069.

Hund, Wulf D., et al. Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class, and Race. Lit Verlag, 2016.

Here Comes the Second Wave

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Originally published at Empire and Economics.

As the pandemic spread across the world, unprecedented lockdowns followed. Now, as many of those countries are in the early weeks of lifting restrictions, we see signs of what may be the start of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we cannot rule out a second wave of lockdowns.

The spread of the viral pandemic resulted in one country after another beginning the process of shutting down its society. It began in Asia, spread to Europe, then to North America and across much of the rest of the world. By early April, half of humanity was living under lockdown.

The lockdowns were incredibly controversial. This time period will be seared into the collective human memory for as long as we all live. Its significance to our societies, our economies, our political systems and our own individual experiences cannot be overstated.

People have grown tired of the lockdowns, and understandably so. But business leaders and politicians feel worried about the economy most of all, and want to reopen in order to revive the economy.

Countries in Asia began the process of lifting the lockdowns last month. With the earliest cases of the pandemic and some of the more effective means of handling it, everyone was keeping a close eye on these countries as they emerged from restrictions.

South Korea marked the ending of the most strict social distancing measures last week. Within days, numbers of the infected began to spike. The spike in South Korea’s numbers resulted entirely from one man’s night out going to clubs. South Korean President Moon Jae-in warned Koreans to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave.”

The Chinese province of Wuhan, where the COVID19 outbreak first began and where the lockdown ended the previous month, experienced its first cluster of new infections.

Iran – one of the early epicentres of the epidemic – had lifted its lockdown. But on May 10, Iran put a region of the country under a second lockdown after a sharp increase of cases in the province.

Lebanon, after emerging from the virus and the restrictions nearly two weeks ago, has put the entire country again under a lockdown as infections started to spike. Just ten days after reopening, Lebanon announced a four-day lockdown of the country, prompting grocery stores to once again be quickly emptied of essential items. This is all taking place in the midst of the country experiencing a brutal economic and financial crisis, one which began prior to the pandemic, and resulted in massive protests and social unrest that began late last year and continued even in the midst of the pandemic, as hunger and desperation spread. (Meanwhile, many Americans were protesting because they want haircuts, to go golfing, and for their favourite restaurants to be opened again.)

Europe followed Asia’s example in the lifting of restrictions and ending of lockdowns. This is a slow process that looks different in different countries. Ultimately, however, it follows the same course of slowly removing restrictions and opening public spaces, schools, businesses and borders, and incrementally easing social distancing measures.

At the start of April, virtually all of Europe except for Sweden was under lockdown. By the second week of May, most of the continent had started easing restrictions. The United Kingdom was the only large European country to not be easing (as it was one of the last to impose a lockdown).

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned about proceeding “extremely carefully” in seeking to emerge from the lockdowns in order to avoid another spike in infections.

“The risk of returning to lockdown remains very real if countries do not manage the transition extremely carefully and in a planned approach.” – WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

“If lockdown measures are lifted too quickly, the virus can take off.” – Maria Ban Kerkhove, WHO epidemiologist

Within days of Germany starting the process of easing restrictions, cases began to spike. Not only the largest country in Europe (by population, economic weight and political power), Germany is also one of the more successful models of countries in dealing with the pandemic. Despite its size, deaths from the virus in Germany were fractions of those witnessed in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and France. Thus, with German infection rates starting to increase, fears grow of a second wave.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned, “We always have to be aware that we are still at the beginning of the pandemic… And there’s still a long way in dealing with this virus in front of us.”

The United States, with the most known cases of COVID19 in the world, has witnessed many individual states begin to reopen their societies in the past weeks. As businesses opened and people started to go to public places, infection rates began to spike in multiple U.S. states. The actual effects of reopening will take weeks to know, however. Though various official models suggest that we can expect a spike in cases and deaths over the coming weeks as a result.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the leading experts in the fight against COVID19 in the United States, warned on May 12 that if U.S. states reopened too quickly and ignored guidelines from public health authorities, “you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control,” which would lead “to some suffering and death that could be avoided.” But, he added, “that could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery.” Doing so, he added, “could almost turn the clock back rather than going forward.”

A research paper from a Harvard economist examined the past Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, looking at the various successes and failures of lockdowns and openings. He concluded that an assortment of restrictions and lockdowns failed to save as many lives in the past because the duration of the lockdowns was for too short a period: four weeks (one month), on average. The lesson from this, he concluded, was that restrictions and lockdowns “have to be maintained for substantially longer than a few weeks. Most likely, 12 weeks work much better than 4-6 weeks.”

People have entered into a state of mental lockdown. Many have shut down to the overconsumption of information and simply grasp onto the hope that things seem to be opening and that, therefore, the worst is behind us and the future is simply a slow decline from present extremes. This is a very hopeful – and one might say naive – perspective. It is fine to hope for miracles, or even to wish them into being, but misguided to plan for them.

Instead, we should mentally prepare ourselves for a second wave of the pandemic and the potential for future lockdowns as a result. South Korea and Germany are among the most successful and advanced nations in dealing with the pandemic, and when their leaders are saying to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave” and that “we are still at the beginning,” we should take these claims seriously.

We are still in the early stages and months of this pandemic and in understanding the virus itself, so nothing can be said of the near and medium-term future with any certainty. Well, except for one thing: the virus is here now.

“Exactly how long remains to be seen… It’s going to be a matter of managing it over months to a couple of years. It’s not a matter of getting past the peak, as some people seem to believe.” – Marc Lipsitch, infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health

One wave of lockdowns and social distancing is not going to be enough in the long term. Thus, it is important to manage our expectations and understandings. The virus comes in waves and so we must become like liquid, more able to adapt to the contours of the wave and outlast its peaks and crashes.

Our societies must also become more adaptive. This means that we will need to be more willing to spend and support large segments of the population for extended durations of time. If our politicians and leaders do not meet these standards, widespread (unnecessary) suffering will result. But we can and we must adapt to the necessities and realities of the pandemic.

The pandemic does not have to be hopeless. We can and will get through this. But it is a test of our society and our civilization as to how we get through it. Do we prioritize reopening economies or do we prioritize keeping people safe? If we maintain or return to lockdowns, how do we address and meet the needs of the population confined to their homes? How do we meet the needs of those who don’t have the option to stay home?

There is hope in how we answer these questions and how we move forward through the pandemic and emerge from it. But it is important to not waste our hope on the empty notions that this is over or near its end. We are still in the beginning. There is more to come. Prepare yourselves mentally, arm yourselves intellectually, and plan accordingly.

Put your hope in the right places. But plan according to reality. Yes, we all want haircuts and to spend time with our friends and go out for a drink (or ten). But if the cost of that is to see tens of thousands more infections and thousands more deaths, I can make peace with some out-of-control hair. This “sacrifice” is nothing compared to the lives that will be sacrificed from reopening too early.

This is still the beginning. Plan accordingly.

Coronavirus Capitalism and the Neoliberal Crisis Playbook

Illustration by Ajay Mohanty

By Gaspar Zapata

While much of the ongoing global pandemic remains unpredictable, the response of the current administration suggests a future of violent economic insecurity, especially for the working class. Covid-19 has ushered in death and destruction as well an economic crisis the scale of which continues to expand. Unemployment figures are now double the levels of joblessness during the peak of the 2007-8 Great Recession and are only expected to rise. The basic needs of working people (food, shelter, healthcare) seem increasingly unattainable. An estimated one-third of tenants could not pay rent last month and an already weak social safety net means that the number of food insecure Americans is set to surpass 40 million. Yet, the U.S. is home to nearly half of the world’s high-net worth individuals.

This extraordinary wealth combined with generalized poverty is not by accident; it was historically created by decades of neoliberal policies that yielded socialism for the rich and predatory financial capitalism for the working class. The Trump administration will only intensify this social stratification if it continues along its current path.

Neoliberalism refers to a set of ideas, beliefs and practices that promote improving human well-being through individual freedom, free markets and free trade. Since the 1970s this utopian vision has served to justify attacks on organized labor and to build support for waves of corporate deregulation. It has also been used to legitimize the destruction of welfare programs. Reagan advanced neoliberalism by tapping into racist and sexist tales of “welfare queens” to rationalize cutting programs for the poor. Clinton did his part by deregulating banking and finance and thereby set the stage for the predation of middle- and low-income households during the sub-prime crisis twelve years ago.

Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Gradually, workers have seen wages stagnate while the cost of living keeps rising. Overall economic productivity and GDP have risen but workers have not been given a fair share of this output. The rich, on the other hand, have enjoyed historically low tax bills. These trends have generated a “double squeeze” on workers where their livelihoods are being directly exploited through low-wage, insecure work while their social safety nets have eroded and their debts have accumulated.

For the past forty years government officials, corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, and free-market intellectuals armed with neoliberal ideas have led us into a world of grave inequality, mass incarceration and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called organized abandonment. They have designed a political-economic system where the richest 1% own half of the wealth in the world and where the rest of us are saddled with trillions of dollars in student and credit card debt because our wages our low and our benefits practically non-existent.

During times of crisis the internal contradictions of this system become glaringly clear, but leaders dogmatically continue to apply the same inadequate solutions.

In 2008 we witnessed the neoliberal crisis playbook in action as Congress authorized billions upon billions of relief funds to rescue a collapsing financial sector. In a strategy consistent with neoliberal philosophy, experts and politicians made the protection of troubled markets their top priority. What we must remember, however, is that “markets” are people; they are ordinary borrowers and workers but also CEOs, top executives and elite investors.

Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asset-ownership-and-the-uneven-recovery-from-the-great-recession-20180913.htm

When the Great Recession was said and done, distressed working-class homeowners saw only an insignificant slither of those relief funds. It should be no shock, then, that the only income group who gained wealth since the crash has been the top ten percent income bracket. To say that “we” have recovered from the subprime crash is misleading. Only the very wealthy recovered; the rest of us are struggling to keep up.

Covid-19 is revealing the persistence of neoliberal thinking and the colossal failures of our present and past political leadership. In this cruel historical drama politicians have embraced neoliberal solutions to solve social problems created by decades of neoliberal policies to begin with. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act is more of the same.

A provision in the CARES Act includes a potential $1.7 million tax break for high-earning individuals, or an estimated 43,000 U.S. taxpayers. Individuals with annual incomes below $75,000 will only receive a one-time $1,200 stimulus check. For those most in need of immediate relief the stimulus check pales in comparison to the relief being offered to the millionaire class. Moreover, the billions potentially lost through these tax breaks could be used to support hospitals, schools and other social services.

The Trump administration is fiercely embracing neoliberal solutions to the pandemic, even using it to deregulate environmental protections. This approach has not and will not work. The global pandemic and its aftermath will not be solved by extending aid to the rich while leaving the rest of us vulnerable to the brutal cycles of finance capitalism. It is already worsening food insecurity for working families and disproportionately claiming Black, Indigenous and Latinx lives. It will require bold actions like nation-wide rent strikes and pro-worker legislation like the proposal for a rent and mortgage freeze and the bill proposed to forgive student debt. Finding a way out of our shared predicament requires waging a united struggle against the murderous system which threatens our collective well-being.

All power to the people!

COVID-19 Discussions Over The U.S. Healthcare System

Pictured: Volunteers from the International Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse set up an Emergency Field Hospital for patients suffering from the coronavirus in Central Park across Fifth Avenue from Mt. Sinai Hospital on March 30, 2020 in New York. (Bryan R. Smith / AFP)

By Ekim Kılıç

Since the beginning of January 2020, COVID-19, aka Coronavirus, has continued to devastate peoples’ lives, specifically working classes across the world. Internationally, a prominent aspect of the pandemic is that all working people feel a similar level of fear and anxiety, even to some extent petty-bourgeois classes despite their considerable economic privileges. It has created an unprecedented platform in which more working people and intellectuals tend to see and discuss the inability of capitalist political economic system to address itself to a health crisis and its understanding of public health system.

One of the most affected countries is the United States, which has almost one-third of the international cases, with 815,491 as an outcome of 4,162,922 tests by April 21. On this date, the number of death reached 45,097. The total number of recovered patients is 82,620. This means that there are 2,464 cases and 136 deaths per 1M people.[1] One-third of the national cases are from the State of New York.[2] In the U.S., the primary reason that the epidemic spread like a wildfire is the weak healthcare system along with several other political and social problems here. Especially, the pandemic shook the base, revealed lack of organized working class, fetishism over individualism combined with puritan work ethic, a healthcare system abandoned at the mercy of banks and companies, widespread and dire mental health problems, homelessness, structural racism, a violent prison-industrial complex, a divided American political system over extremely libertarian federal system, and the discourses of nationalist functionalism and blind petty bourgeois ethicism.

The pandemic came as if a “god’s gift” in a time when economic measures have been taken by and for capital to prevent the deepening consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and the present galvanizing crisis. The extortion of abortion rights in several states and the elimination of union elections by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), escalating interventionist moves against Venezuela, cutting financial support to World Health Organization (WHO), and expectation for the presidential executive order to suspend immigration reveals for whose benefit the pandemic process was used.[3][4][5][6][7] Even American exceptionalists face stark contradictions, as countries such as China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Cuba have effective attitudes towards the epidemic, Russia’s military aircraft to aid the US with medical equipment, then from Vietnam, and the US’s seizure of medical equipment to Barbados, called modern piracy.[8][9][10][11][12]Also, President Trump’s attempts to blame the pandemic on Chinese conspiracy remark their unpreparedness and desperation to get away with their responsibilities, later framed COVID-19 as “Chinese Virus.”[13]

Although unions, which have a strong bureaucracy, cannot lead the workers, and the government disregards urgent measures for “essential workers,” they, especially healthcare and logistics workers, feel compelled to struggle for vital, urgent demands.[14] In that sense, the working class politics’ wave of the last years definitely shows its effect. Coinciding with the Bernie Sanders campaign in a country where even the limited healthcare demand of “Medicare for All” was almost a joke, universal healthcare became a major part of public agenda. However, in a country where nurses have to make protective uniforms out of big garbage bags due to lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), it turned out that the lives of workers and laborers, who are called “essentials,” hypocritically, are worthless. One has to remember that political elites have always been shamelessly outspoken with their disdain for workers.[15][16][17]

Even after the $2 trillion stimulus package is distributed, details reveal the gap between what was promised and what the reality is. For example, $1,200 aid for individuals and $2,400 for couples is much more meaningful in the Southern states, where the taxes are lower than the states like New York and California. It has to be said that these checks will almost certainly go for student loans, and rent, besides given the fact that almost 1/3 of the country didn’t pay rent for the last month and has that rent due.[18] Students that were graduated last summer or winter, are not be able to get checks. In this regard, and in these new and challenging times, it is a calamity that will trigger millennials and generation Z to question “meaning, morality and mortality in ways they never did before.” This generation has experienced life-altering disruptions, such as 9/11, the Great Recession, the decline of American prestige to a housing affordability crisis, global warming to crushing student debt according to academics at the University of Southern California.[19]

An Overview of the U.S. Healthcare System

The U.S. has always been named as the most developed capitalist country with a liberal democracy that has been perceived alongside western European liberal democracies.[20] Relying on individual liberty in a libertarian sense, the U.S. understanding and structure of organizing daily affairs leave everything to the individual, including healthcare services. Healthcare is a responsibility of the individual, not the state and society. Because of this individualistic conception, it can be said that the U.S. is the most developed country with the worst skewed and insufficient healthcare system.

Becoming an emergent discussion in the wake of former Democratic 2020 presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign, healthcare has been a privilege in the U.S. for a long time except for some reforms called Obamacare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which became law on March 23, 2010. Nevertheless, the main requirement of having health insurance with sufficient coverage is to have a full-time employment.

After emerging from the 1929 Great Depression, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) government and state institutions utilized the conditions of World War II to provide opportunities for the social democratic expansion of capital. In 1942, the Stabilization Act “limited the amount of wage increases employers could grant, but at the same time permitted the adoption of employee insurance plans.”[21] By 1949, employers benefits programs became common in collective bargaining agreements.[22] In the meantime, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) decided that, “employer contributions to health insurance premiums were tax free, which meant workers paid less out of their pocket.”[23] After FDR, President Harry Truman signed the National Mental Health Act, which called for the establishment of a National Institute of Mental Health.[24] Under the Johnson presidency, Medicare and Medicaid programs were set up in 1965. By accepting the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, the Nixon government unleashed healthcare as a profitable industry.[25]

The Obama presidency evoked hope among the US people over the crumbling healthcare system. However, insurance companies were the one which benefited from a developing market, although his reforms alleviated the situation a little by extending children on their parents coverage and mandating mental health coverage one very plan, those without insurance were burdened with the tax penalties and forced into high deductible plans.[26] Since 2016, the Trump government began to repeal Obamacare by redoing the enabling acts.[27] While it is claimed that it lessens the tax burden coming from healthcare payments, it is also constricting the accessibility to healthcare.[28]

Recently, there were around 800,000 people with “freelance contracts” working in New York. According to the contract, the employer does not have to make a person’s health insurance because the character of their job is temporary and in a limited time. If the person works at or above the 32-33 hour limit, it is considered full-time. Therefore, bosses are able to force flexible employment without any reservations, being aware of the fear of unemployment or underemployment that dominates the US job market. This exemplifies how the messy system has worsened the crisis substantially.

federal As another example, unemployment climbed by another 5 million people this week, increasing the total number of people who have applied for unemployment to 22 million in the last month. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “approximately 9.2 million workers have likely lost their employer-provided health care coverage in the past four weeks.”[29]

Neo-liberal policies in the healthcare system have left the working class and laborers vulnerable to the epidemic. However, the Trump administration focused on the economy to function as smoothly as possible, rather than taking measures that could be taken more or less against approaching epidemic. They refrained from taking the necessary precautions. Even then, for example, the statements of Trump continue to insist for reopening country on May 1, despite major obstacles from authorities.[30] His persistence on reopening the country was also a matter on April 12.[31] Several expressions of political and economic elites are supportive of this: “I’d rather die’ from coronavirus ‘than kill the country.”[32][33][34] As one of the countries that experienced the 2008 crisis deeply, the sensitivity of the USA to the capitalist capital accumulation in the face of the epidemic caused more people to die.

 An article from the American prospect addresses, for example, the share in the stimulus package for businesses. Out of $2 Trillion package, $500 billion will be used for companies. $75 billion goes to the airline industry and the mysteriously named “businesses critical to national security.” The rest $425 will be used to capitalize a $4.25 trillion, leveraged lending facility at the Federal Reserve.[35] Additionally, seven other industries are lobbying for more stimulus, such as tourism, restaurants, mortgage servicers, hotels, airlines, franchises, and distillers.[36]

Other Aspects of the Crisis

Although we have listed the other problems that have accelerated the severity of the crisis, once again, those have to be elaborated to make sense in their context. To begin with, fetish over individualism elicits an “I don’t care, no-one can decides for me” mentality, which disregards social well-being and solidarity. This fundamental bourgeois idea frustrated many people at the beginning due to its ignorance of the crisis, and refusal to heed the advice of healthcare workers. Different aspects of this same idea might be felt over the larger, individual based healthcare system: “It is every (hu)man for himself.”

Similar to this “I don’t care” individualism, even the excessive mental health problems have been treated “as an individual’s incapacity to function normally within a given setting” by serious academic researches. These problems can be found mostly among poor whites and blacks who are more prone to mental disorders than richer classes.[37] Combining with homelessness, and other problems stemming from unemployment, the mental health question requires urgent social attention, especially during the crisis. People, who are relying on social circles, families, and solidarity, are isolated, trapped, and helpless. On the other hand, homelessness, specifically student one, made states hesitate to cancel schools at the beginning. Many college students were also thrown out of their dorm, with nowhere else to go.

Over all these, as another aspect of “American” values, nowadays, right-wing demonstrators have called to end quarantine by blocking roads with caravans, carrying Confederation and Nazi flags, utilizing the 18th century American revolutionary slogan of “Give me liberty, or give me death!” The other, “liberal” side of American nationalism is not innocent in weaponizing the crisis and its human costs, framing healthcare workers as “heroes,” food and workers from other vital industries as “essentials,” “frontliners,” “soldiers,” who are, fundamentally, expendable. Even the liberal call for “stay home” and “practice social distancing” is full of lack of consideration and clarity, solely blind ethicism, a performative virtue.

Workers’ and the lives of the poor are at the stake, which involves racial and gender issues, too.[38] In the center of epidemic in the country, New York City, most of cases and deaths are coming from poor working class neighborhoods.[39] According to formal data, those who have died have been 34% Hispanic, 28% blacks, 27% white and 7% Asian.[40] Economically and racially segregated neighborhoods are particularly vulnerable in this crisis. These groups’ share in the population are 29%, 22%, 32%, and 14%, respectively. The prison-industrial complex also has figured prominently in the crisis. According to activist and journalist Shaun King, the U.S. is the only nation in the world with 250% more prison cells than hospital beds.[41] That complex is another example of structural racism: “These racial disparities are particularly stark for Black Americans, who make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13% of U.S residents.”[42] In other words, it is not surprising that places where COVID-19 has been most devastating, are generally black neighborhoods and towns.[43] Beyond racial lines, the rate of incarceration for women incarceration follows that of the black population: “The same is true for women, whose incarceration rates have for decades risen faster than men’s, and who are often behind bars because of financial obstacles such as an inability to pay bail.”[44] During the pandemic, the issue of rising domestic abuse of women trapped at their home receive almost no public or media attention. Additionally, the LGBTQ population is not independent from same abusive behavior. They are also vulnerable to discrimination, homelessness and other economic problems that increase the likelihood of contracting COVID-19.[45]

There are a considerable amount of cases and deaths especially among transportation, food and market workers.[46] Lack of protective equipment and the government’s token appreciation to workers has pushed many workers to take several actions, from warehouses to hospitals. Until now, over 100 workers’ actions are recorded since the beginning of the pandemic.[47] The most unique one is that General Electric workers’ struggle for their company to shift to produce ventilators.[48] Beyond all, the common quality of workers actions are mostly led by millennial generations. In that sense, it can be counted as a sign which generation of the working class might lead advanced struggles post-pandemic. However, in terms of youth struggle, it is hard to say what might happen, because online education may continue in fall 2020, and beyond.

All in all, other aspects of the crisis are complex and entangled, and reflect all the emergent demands of the US people and working class. However, the struggle against pandemic has been shaped by the political struggle between democrats and republicans towards the 2020 Presidential Elections. The governors of Illinois, New York and several other state governors’ have critiqued president Trump for not utilizing the Defense Production Act exemplifies the tension between democrats and republicans along with federal and state fault lines.[49] For instance, while some smaller states have made commitments to end quarantine on May 1, New York and California are against that, and the federal government doesn’t necessarily intend for imposing an extension to quarantine.

Conclusion

It has been discussed that the working class as we know it is gone, especially by the liberal intellectuals of all spectrum in defense of cold war theories. There was also an illusive reality, in which public spaces has been dominated by petty bourgeoisie and some upper sections of working class. It should be noted that another reason to this for the USA and Western Europe is the surplus value they transfer from the dependent countries through the imperialist exploitation mechanism. While this post-cold war argument has lost credibility for a long time now, it is shattered with the COVID-19 crisis.

The U.S. is experiencing a moment of “the king is naked,” where petty bourgeois classes retreated from streets, and left working class people to fulfill busses, train cars, factories, warehouses, workplaces, and unemployment lines. On the one hand, framing some sections of working class as “essentials,” primarily “hero” healthcare workers, and on the other, failing to provide essential protective equipment to these “essentials,” shows one certain aspect in the contradictions of classes: “Workers’ lives do not matter.”

Due to the same reason, it can be said that president Donald Trump is backing up right-wing demonstrators, who wants to lift the quarantine. Concurrent with deepening polarization of the U.S. political system through several impasses between the Democrats and Republicans, the presidency plays with the libertarian positioned citizen-against-the-government to take advantage of the crisis to gather and energize its avid supporter base for the upcoming elections. However, the statements of the government to end quarantine aim to make people reconcile the situation, while continuing to infuriate workers and saturate the air with fear and resentment.

Ekim Kilic is a Kurdish journalist from Turkey, and regularly reporting to the daily working-class newspaper of Turkey, Evrensel Daily. He also takes an active role as a member of the NY steering committee at the National Writers' Union UAW Local 1981. He is an MA graduate from International Affairs and Global Justice major at CUNY Brooklyn College / New York. He wrote a master thesis on a comparative analysis of working class support for right-wing nationalism in the U.S. and Turkey.

Notes

[1]  United States. (n.d.). Retrieved April 21, 2020, from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Smith, K. (2020, March 25). Abortion-rights groups sue Texas over abortion ban amid coronavirus outbreak. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/abortion-rights-planned-parenthood-lawsuit-texas-non-essential-ban/?fbclid=IwAR2biSYvfz_dejWzV5P1bzlwQBCm24yeV5zmrmt9klpVFcoE8-tpUynR8hI

[4] In Midst of a Pandemic, Trump’s NLRB Makes it Nearly Impossible for Workers to Organize a Union. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://portside.org/2020-04-02/midst-pandemic-trumps-nlrb-makes-it-nearly-impossible-workers-organize-union?fbclid=IwAR24Xbuzw2sHuLdM155e96xVuX6RntvpQgsDLOMIxbMhLM57Z2H570q8M7I

[5] Borger, J. (2020, March 31). US ignores calls to suspend Venezuela and Iran sanctions amid coronavirus pandemic. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/us-ignores-global-appeals-suspend-sanctions-coronavirus-pandemic-iran-venezuela

[6] Sullivan, P. (2020, April 15). Trump WHO cuts meet with furious blowback. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492997-trump-who-cuts-meet-with-furious-blowback

[7] Stelloh, T., Welker, K., Pettypiece, S., & Bennett, G. (2020, April 21). Trump says he is suspending immigration over coronavirus, need to protect jobs. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-suspending-immigration-over-coronavirus-need-protect-jobs-n1188416?fbclid=IwAR1GpqyKHb9TJHPDs4f5yQSq8jAu9ui4N-S2CByFRp9mdVE_qGy9sADrYwM

[8] Lisnoff, H. (2020, April 6). American Exceptionalism in the Face of Covid-19. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/09/american-exceptionalism-in-the-face-of-covid-19/

[9] Kuttner, R. (2020, March 24). The End of American Exceptionalism. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://prospect.org/coronavirus/the-end-of-american-exceptionalism/

[10] (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/putin-sends-military-plane-with-coronavirus-aid-to-help-u-s

[11] Sweeney, S. (2020, April 16). Vietnam ships 450,000 protective suits for U.S. health care workers. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/vietnam-ships-450000-protective-suits-for-u-s-health-care-workers/?fbclid=IwAR3cV9CBQMWO-TS1ehCi_rXl5jhmqXDO31gv35qz9P9oSYupMg6Ki6a49Lg

[12] Steve SweeneyMonday, A. 6. (2020, April 6). US accused of ‘modern piracy’ after seizing ventilators bound for Barbados. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/us-accused-modern-piracy-after-seizing-ventilators-bound-barbados

[13] Tisdall, S. (2020, April 19). Trump is playing a deadly game in deflecting Covid-19 blame to China. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2020/apr/19/trump-is-playing-a-deadly-game-in-deflecting-covid-19-blame-to-china

[14] Chediac, J. (2020, April 20). Essential worker strike wave: ‘We fight COVID-19 for ourselves &… Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.liberationnews.org/essential-worker-strike-wave-we-fight-for-ourselves-and-for-the-public/?fbclid=IwAR3aVocvBL2JZCLrY04peKRVpMR3UyHc2fbgqfw6OATRFp7IYc0JVWONzz4

[15] Montanaro, D. (2016, September 10). Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket Of Deplorables,’ In Full Context Of This Ugly Campaign. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2016/09/10/493427601/hillary-clintons-basket-of-deplorables-in-full-context-of-this-ugly-campaign

[16] Gruenberg, M. (2019, April 25). GOP lawmaker’s idiotic remark about nurses goes viral and backfires. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/gop-lawmakers-idiotic-remark-about-nurses-goes-viral-and-backfires/

[17] Alternet. (2019, April 9). When the GOP uses the word “bartender” to mock Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it shows its ugly classism. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.salon.com/2019/04/09/when-the-gop-uses-the-word-bartender-to-mock-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-it-shows-its-ugly-classism_partner/

[18] Bahney, A. (2020, April 11). New data shows more Americans are having trouble paying their rent. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/business/americans-rent-payment-trnd/index.html

[19] Polakovic, G. (2020, April 3). How does coronavirus affect young people’s psyches? Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://news.usc.edu/167275/how-does-coronavirus-affect-young-people-psyches/

[20] The Economist Intelligence Unit. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index

[21] Scofea, L. A. (1994). The development and growth of employer-provided health insurance. Monthly Labor Review, 3–10. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1994/03/art1full.pdf

[22] Ibid.

[23] How did we end up with health insurance being tied to our jobs? (2019, April 29). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.marketplace.org/2017/06/28/how-did-we-end-health-insurance-being-tied-our-jobs/

[24] National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). (2017, February 17). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/national-institute-mental-health-nimh

[25] Gruber, L. R., Maureen, S., & Polich, C. L. (n.d.). From Movement To Industry: The Growth Of HMOs. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.7.3.197

[26] Amadeo, K. (n.d.). Pros and Cons of Obamacare. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.thebalance.com/obamacare-pros-and-cons-3306059

[27] Simmons-Duffin, S. (2019, October 14). Trump Is Trying Hard To Thwart Obamacare. How’s That Going? Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/14/768731628/trump-is-trying-hard-to-thwart-obamacare-hows-that-going

[28] Gonzales, R. (2019, October 5). Trump Bars Immigrants Who Cannot Pay For Health Care. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2019/10/04/767453276/trump-bars-immigrants-who-cannot-pay-for-health-care

[29] 9.2 million workers likely lost their employer-provided health insurance in the past four weeks. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.epi.org/blog/9-2-million-workers-likely-lost-their-employer-provided-health-insurance-in-the-past-four-weeks/

[30] Trump’s plans to reopen the country face major obstacles. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/18/trump-reopen-country-coronavirus-193182

[31] Harris, J. F. (n.d.). ‘I’d love to have it open by Easter’: Trump says he wants to restart economy by mid-April. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/24/trump-wants-to-restart-economy-by-mid-april-146398

[32] Samuels, A. (2020, April 21). Dan Patrick says “there are more important things than living and that’s saving this country”. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/21/texas-dan-patrick-economy-coronavirus/

[33] Fredericks, B. (2020, April 15). Congressman says US should reopen economy – even if more would die. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://nypost.com/2020/04/15/lawmaker-says-us-should-reopen-economy-even-if-more-will-die/

[34] Concha, J. (2020, March 25). Glenn Beck: ‘I’d rather die’ from coronavirus ‘than kill the country’ from economic shutdown. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://thehill.com/homenews/media/489472-glenn-beck-id-rather-die-from-coronavirus-than-kill-the-country-from-economic

[35] Dayen, D. (2020, March 25). Unsanitized: Bailouts, A Tradition Unlike Any Other. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://prospect.org/api/amp/coronavirus/unsanitized-bailouts-tradition-unlike-any-other/

[36] Gangitano, A. (2020, April 2). 7 industries lobbying for more stimulus. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/490736-7-industries-lobbying-for-more-stimulus

[37] Baran, P. A. & Sweezy P. M. (2020, March). The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Mental Health. Monthly Review. Volume 71. Pg. 41-43.

[38] Conn, M., Kelly, J., & Heimpel, D. (2020, April 3). Lack of Shelter Beds in New York for LGBTQ Youth During Pandemic. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/coronavirus/lgbtq-youth-struggle-for-shelter-from-coronavirus/41999?fbclid=IwAR0Rko479SG4K9eBvZZTWNXVZxo0Xa4HYpxoyUSNYc-xhWUD2Ri0GO35B80

[39] Virus Hits NYC Hardest in a Few Working-Class Neighborhoods. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-04-02/coronavirus-hits-harder-in-poorer-nyc-neighborhoods

[40] Workbook: NYS-COVID19-Tracker. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities?:embed=yes&:toolbar=no&:tabs=n

[41] SHAUN KING: The United States is the Only Nation in the World with 250% More Prison Cells Than Hospital Beds. (2020, March 30). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.thenorthstar.com/shaun-king-the-united-states-is-the-only-nation-in-the-world-with-250-more-prison-cells-than-hospital-beds/

[42] Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (n.d.). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

[43] Johnson, A., & Buford, T. (n.d.). Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of… Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.propublica.org/article/early-data-shows-african-americans-have-contracted-and-died-of-coronavirus-at-an-alarming-rate

[44] Ibid.

[45] Conn, M., Kelly, J., & Heimpel, D. (2020, April 3). Lack of Shelter Beds in New York for LGBTQ Youth During Pandemic. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/coronavirus/lgbtq-youth-struggle-for-shelter-from-coronavirus/41999?fbclid=IwAR0Rko479SG4K9eBvZZTWNXVZxo0Xa4HYpxoyUSNYc-xhWUD2Ri0GO35B80

[46] Chediac, J. (2020, April 20). Essential worker strike wave: ‘We fight COVID-19 for ourselves &… Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.liberationnews.org/essential-worker-strike-wave-we-fight-for-ourselves-and-for-the-public/?fbclid=IwAR3aVocvBL2JZCLrY04peKRVpMR3UyHc2fbgqfw6OATRFp7IYc0JVWONzz4

[47] Elk, M. (2020, April 23). COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://paydayreport.com/covid-19-strike-wave-interactive-map/?fbclid=IwAR0hqgq8wEeYT-Y8VRFcaJocbzRNd4vb_13bd32_3fZFxqYv3OO7gf6uynQ

[48] GE Workers Protest, Demand to Make Ventilators. (2020, April 16). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://labornotes.org/blogs/2020/04/ge-workers-protest-demand-make-ventilators?fbclid=IwAR2_qnmATx97jmyVzESlZ_B7KGce1YtQV4uH86rHXxHEOs3s1G0r-ygXF1w

[49] Trump, Facing Criticism, Says He Will Increase Swab Production. (2020, April 19). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/coronavirus-updates.html

The Portent of a Pandemic

By Kenn Orphan

Just months ago, few would have thought it possible that a submicroscopic ball of genetic coding could bring the world’s wealthiest powers to their knees. But it has. In the space of a few months the Covid-19 virus projected its spiky arms not only into the delicate cells of the human lung, but into the very membrane of the global economic and political order itself. The United States, being the emblem of this order, has also become the biggest example of its enormous failure. In desperation, the American Empire, the wealthiest and most powerful one humanity has ever known, is flailing in spasms and fits of insanity, denial and outright cruelty. It is robbing from its allies and client states masks and ventilators, as it lashes out even more furiously at nations which have defied its hegemonic control. And, while it bails out corporations and the richest industries, it has abandoned its citizenry to fend for themselves amidst a raging storm where nearly every “non-essential” business has been shut down, the for-profit healthcare system is beginning to buckle, the bodies of the dead are mounting, and the mass graves are being dug. Amidst this assault on humanity, there is a growing assault on the living earth itself. The US is rapidly stripping the last meager protections for the environment, accelerating climate change and the collapse of the biosphere itself.

Donald Trump, a leader that is rapidly approaching the malevolence of Caligula, presides over this plague-ridden stage of the American Empire. On his watch, nurses and doctors are left to wrap themselves in garbage bags as their only defense against the microbe’s merciless rampage. Governors are reduced to a bidding war against other governors for life saving medical equipment. Workers that are considered “non-essential” are left to figure out how to navigate the brutal landscape of capitalist predation, with few options available to them to maintain their health, food security or home. Immigrants and prisoners are being left in cages to die without any adequate medical assistance. Most Americans are now left in an impossible situation. “Shelter in place” even though they may lose their livelihoods and homes in a very short time. Millions are unemployed with millions more on the way. Millions have or will lose their health insurance since this fundamental human right has been tethered to employment and whims of the market economy, one that has been built on the mercurial and shifting sands of the so-called free market. Now that marketplace is in shambles. The government’s answer to their plight has been to toss them a laughable, one-time pittance of $1200, while hundreds of billions of dollars are allotted to the wealthiest corporations and industries.

As the United States outdoes the rest of the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths, the Trump administration is rapidly dismantling the last, anemic protections for its beleaguered ecosystems. Lands that protect besieged endangered species are now open to hunters and poachers. The largely defanged Environmental Protection Agency has, for all intents and purposes, been shuttered amidst this pandemic. Now corporations are free to pollute without fear of oversight or penalty. The air and water, so integral to human health, are in open season for these industries. Indeed, even as the pandemic seems to be clearing skies and waterways around the planet, the “titans of industry” seek to rapidly cloud them again with toxins for their profit margin. It is an omnicide for profit, encouraged by the corporate state, on full display. And as if to add yet another layer to this absurdity, Trump recently signed an executive order announcing that the US will mine the moon for minerals. Apparently, plundering our own celestial sphere isn’t enough.

With little doubt, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed painful truths about the nature of capitalism itself. The sacrosanct liturgy of the “free market,” for so long lauded by its faithful adherents, now comes across as a vulgar joke in the face of the inhumanity we are witnessing. This should come as little surprise since it possesses no mechanisms to cope mercifully with the calamity of a pandemic in the first place, let alone the existential threats of climate change or nuclear war for that matter. It understands only mindless expansion of the accumulation of capital for a select few. But it is also encroaching even more aggressively into habitats where few human beings have been before. Forests are being felled at record pace, the ocean floor is being scraped away for minerals as I write this, along with a myriad of species we may never even see, and ships now ply the once frozen waters of the Arctic circle in search for petrol.  And with this reckless abandon comes our inevitable encounter with pathogens that are likely to be far more deadly and with which we will have no defense.

Indeed, as horrifying as it is, Covid-19 could have been a far more lethal plague, eviscerating any vestige of civilization in a matter of weeks. We may have been spared this time around. But with the ice caps and glaciers melting, coral reefs bleaching, locust swarms blanketing crops in Africa, and fires burning forests and fields to ash with more ferocity each year in Australia and California and along the Mediterranean, we are facing an even greater menace than a microbial killer. Climate change is an existential threat on a global scale, and it does not just threaten the human species, but all life in the biosphere. And given what we have witnessed in the past couple months, we should not hold any assurances that the economic and political order that runs the world’s affairs will be any better suited at addressing the harrowing predicament of a rapidly warming planet. True to form, they will continue business as usual only, as things get worse, they will ramp up brutal repression of civil rights and accelerate toward outright fascism.

Just this month, the US stopped issuing passports except in matter of “life or death,” a move that echoes past authoritarian regimes limits on the freedom of movement. While its population is reeling from a collapsing healthcare system and the economic aftershocks, it is continuing its cruel sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, even as it threatens military action against those countries. And the echoes of its influence can be seen in many of its allies and client states. In India, Narendra Modi has ignored and sometimes encouraged the police who have persecuted and beaten the poor, Muslims and Dalits for non-compliance to quarantine restrictions which ignore their socioeconomic plight. It continues to ravage occupied Kashmir. In Israel, draconian surveillance technology is being used to track citizen’s movements. And it continues to collectively punish the open-air prison of Gaza. In Hungary, democracy has all but been dissolved, giving far right Victor Orban sweeping, dictatorial powers for an indefinite time period. In the Philippines, Duterte has ordered police and soldiers to shoot people who break the lock down, even if they are desperately searching for food. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro has flouted the urging of health officials, endangering the lives and health of millions of people, and has encouraged radical Christian evangelicals in their genocidal aspirations to minister to uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who have no immunity to most western diseases, let alone Covid-19. Indeed, this pandemic has demonstrated the incompetence, cruelty, and despotism of the today’s global economic and political arrangement in stark ways, and it has indicated how this order will respond to the escalating nuclear arms race, continuing destruction of ecosystems through habitat loss and pollution, and the climate change catastrophes that loom on the horizon.

If there is anything to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, it would be that it is a portent. A miniscule sphere packed with laces of genetic strands that perhaps symbolize the power of knowledge itself.  It offers us a glimpse at how some governments are acting responsibly, like Cuba, for instance, who has sent medical teams to China, Italy and Spain. And how others, ones driven by the despotism of the so-called “free market,” are incapable of responding in any manner that is even remotely humane. The United States being the prime example. It also gives us insight into the power of nature and its ability to halt the very machinery of human society. But in addition to this, it offers us an opportunity to organize and act collectively as a species, even in isolation.

From the streets of Paris and Santiago, to the rainforests and wetlands of the Amazon and the Niger Delta, we have seen how ordinary people can arise and unite in solidarity against the barbarism of the global corporate state, whose omnicidal demeanor endangers us and the living earth itself. They continue to fight for the world we all deserve, the world we desperately need. We should take note of them now because, without a doubt, their struggle will become everyone’s in the years to come.

Post-Pandemic America: Prelude to Socialism or Fascism?

By Werner Lange

May 8 marks the 75th anniversary of the defeat of fascism in Europe, a historic victory over modern despotism that catapulted American capitalism to world domination by default. As the only combatant country with its cities and infrastructure left intact, the United States emerged from this colossal bloodbath as the single most potent economy on earth. Europe, especially Germany, lay in utter ruins and tens of millions, half of them civilians, lay in early graves. By contrast, the US economy flourished adding some 11 million jobs within the seven years following the war; the minimum wage increased; the poverty rate fell; farm incomes, dividends and corporate profits hit all-time highs; and bank failures along with unemployment had all but disappeared. American capitalism entered a Golden Age.

Fast forward to 2020, and suddenly everything has changed with the explosive advent of another worldwide war, an unprecedented and unforeseen one against an invisible enemy wreaking havoc upon the health and welfare of nearly every nation on earth, especially the USA. The tables have turned, irrevocably. No nation has been hit harder by this insidious invasive enemy than America; and none has suffered more from gross government malfunction and dire social dysfunction. The glittering structure built by American capital since its brief golden age exposed itself in this pandemic to be a top- heavy house of cards on the verge of collapse. What follows the coming collapse is open to debate. Objective forces favor socialism, but subjective ones point toward fascism.

The US economy suddenly hit a solid brick wall this fateful year bringing large sectors to a virtual standstill and driving countless small businesses into bankruptcy. The GDP fell by nearly 5% in the first quarter and is conservatively estimated to minimally shrink at annual rate of 30%, a disastrous decline not experienced since the Great Depression. As of early May, well over 30 million American workers have applied for unemployment insurance, and overwhelmed agencies are hard-pressed to deliver the desperately needed relief on time. Millions more, those either ineligible for such temporary survival compensation or blocked from applying, are also jobless and face destitution. The official unemployment rate, a gross underestimate of actual joblessness, stands at 17% and will likely skyrocket to well over 30% by summer, exceeding Great Depression levels. Loss of a job translates into loss of health insurance for millions of Americans who are now only one medical problem away from family bankruptcy. Soup lines common during the Great Depression now increasingly appear as miles-long stretches of cars lined up for emergency food supplies.

Whatever safety net there once was to absorb such economic shocks, inhumane concentration of wealth without work and politics without principle, both grave social sins, evaporated it. After some 50 years of steadily increasing class inequality, the richest 400 Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us; the 5% at the top of our grossly stratified society own 66% of the nation’s wealth, while nearly 70% of US adults have less than $1,000 in savings and 20% have more credit-card debt than emergency savings; over 16 million Americans have negative net worth and one in four African-American families have zero net wealth. Such obscene concentrations of wealth and glaring gaps of inequality have not been experienced since 1928, right before the Great Depression.

Rather than enhance assistance to victims of this drastic decline, the Trump regime proposed massive cuts to America’s meager welfare programs - SNAP, TANF and WIC - which help keep millions of impoverished citizens from utter destitution. However, when it comes to corporate welfare, the flood gates of public funds are thrown wide open. The recently enacted CARES legislation is a thinly disguised gargantuan gift to America’s super-rich; some $500 billion in so-called loans are simply given to America’s largest corporations with no meaningful oversight or accountability. Because of a tax loophole an additional $1.2 million goes, on average, to 43,000 millionaires each, while struggling Americans may receive a one-time $1200 check. That generous gift to the super-rich comes on top of the $1 trillion generated for them by the 2017 statutory corporate tax rate cut and largely deposited in lucrative stock buybacks. Even during this pandemic billionaire wealth increased by nearly 10% and continues to do so.

At the other end of this unsustainable and unstable pyramid of parasitism are 150 million Americans living from paycheck to paycheck and 40 million officially poor Americans living day from day. An astounding 52% of US children are impoverished or low-income and 11 million children live in food insecure households; 50% of renters spend one-third of their modest income on housing; and some 49 million families carry a collective debt of $1.5 trillion in student loans. The richest country on earth harbors highly volatile levels of toxic financial insecurity on a pandemic trajectory toward eruption.

These objective conditions of unprecedented inequality and insecurity have generated subjective conditions of unprecedented mass frustration increasingly giving rise to displaced aggression, scapegoating directed against the victims not victimizers of the crisis. Every economic decline is coupled with a rise in racism to some degree. Yet the looming collapse of our failing capitalist economy carries with it the potential to unleash and empower even more nefarious social forces. Fascism in America is a possibility, thanks to the openly racist Trump regime and mass false consciousness among its rabid base. To prevent this calamity, defeat of Trump this November is necessary, but not sufficient. The social and psychological roots giving rise to his pathetic presidency and sustained popularity despite its abysmal failures need to be addressed. And these run deep within the American psyche and society. Racism, a stepping stone to fascism when unchecked, remains securely at home within the American social fabric, far beyond Trump’s nationalist base. So does its uterine twin, social darwinism. The coronavirus pandemic has stimulated this ideological virus in forms not witnessed since the heyday of the eugenics movement.

Inspired by resurgent social darwinist thought, there is an expanding willingness to let select populations die from the pandemic just so the ailing capitalist economy may be restored to health. According to the barbaric billionaire in the White House, the cure must not be worse than the disease and holding the pandemic death count to 100,000 would be a “great win”; according to one of his cheerleaders in elected office in Texas, grandparents are willing to die to save the economy; according to a popular right-wing pundit, those dying from the pandemic were on their last legs anyway; and another conservative commentator claims everyone is making “actuarial deductions about the costs” in human lives by lifting lockdown orders. Precious little institutional concern is expressed over the rising body count of prisoners, like the 30 year-old Lakota woman who died in federal custody after giving birth while on a ventilator in late April. To accelerate re-opening the country for business, a group of former health officials recently urged Congress to pay infected low-income Americans $50 per day to self- isolate in empty hotel rooms.

Such passive measures in thinning out the herd, a plan straight out of the social darwinist handbook, are slowly and steadily taking their toll in prisons, jails, nursing homes, VA facilities, warehouses, and food-processing plants throughout our troubled land. A more active approach to thinning and targeting certain cohorts manifested itself recently at several state capitals. Angry protestors, many armed with military assault weapons, demanded an immediate end to pandemic containment policies wisely imposed by state governments. Some invaded state capital buildings brandishing their weapons motivating some legislators to wear bullet-proof vests; others vociferously called for select governors to be locked up or even strung up; and among the ubiquitous Trump/Pence flags were occasional swastikas. While not officially a gang of brown shirts, the armed thugs of intimidation at these right-wing rallies, embraced as “good people” by Trump, are their functional equivalent.

Our embattled country is deeply divided and its political polarization grows with each passing day. Yet there is a way out of the current crisis, one decisively declared by a courageous group of American revolutionaries facing another bitter tyranny: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security”. If Americans heed this historic patriotic call to duty during this despotism, then a new America, a socialist one, will eventually emerge from the coming collapse of capitalism. If not, the despotism will intensify diabolically and decay into fascism. The struggle continues, and the fate of a people caught in the belly of a wounded beast hangs in the balance.

COVID-19 and the Global Pandemic of Anti-Blackness

By Ewuare X. Osayande

Originally published at the author’s website.

The initial word was that Black folks couldn’t catch it. Rumors began spreading that Black people were immune to the virus. But what we have learned and continue to learn with each passing day as the global death toll rises is that Black life is quite susceptible to this virus. But not in a way that makes sense biologically. Black people are not genetically predisposed to this novel coronavirus. What we are is generationally predisposed to an anti-Black discrimination that has weakened our communal immune system leaving each of us vulnerable to this virus in ways people in other communities are not.

Wherever Black people are in this world, we exist mostly on the social margins, isolated and disproportionately impacted by policies and social practices rooted in notions of white supremacy that undermine our collective capacity for health, wealth and safety. Whether on the continent of Africa or throughout the Black Diaspora, our health and safety have been severely hampered by a global social order that has rested upon a racialized ranking that necessitates Black existence be fixed at its bottom to enable and justify whiteness to exist at its apex. Since the 1500s, this arrangement has had deadly implications for Black people. As the bodies pile in over-crowded morgues, hospital rooms and rented trailers in the US and in all the places where Black people live, this virus is exposing the pillars of that structure in ways that are as horrific as when European slave ships set sail from Africa to the Americas.

For the first month or so most of the news coverage in the United States addressed the issue without consideration of race. This was touted as a virus that was wreaking havoc on all segments of the population equally. Then Milwaukee happened. The first casualties in that predominantly white working-class city were all Black men. And when more Black people continued to die, the community there began to ask questions that forced a narrative change. Initial reports claimed that the upsurge in the Black community was due to Black people not heeding the warnings and precautions. Then as activists began to call out the contradictions in the news coverage, more honest reports emerged identifying racial disparities in all areas of life as the true underlying conditions that account for the sky rocketing rates of infection and death in Black communities.

Yet, scant attention had been paid to the impact that generations of discrimination in health care, housing, education, employment — the fundamental pillars of the society — has had on Black people’s overall health. Even less attention has been given to the need for strategies to redress the underlying social and economic constraints that continue to suffocate the life of Black possibilities and opportunity. That Black people in Flint are forced to tackle this pandemic without clean water is a telling indictment. Black communities have already been dealing with pandemic-like concerns for decades in the US. And as much as we would want to believe that money solves all problems, this virus is showing us that wealth or its lack is not much of a deciding factor.

Less than a week after Milwaukee, officials in the wealthiest predominantly Black county in the country, Prince George’s County in Maryland, were rushing to meet the surge in expected hospitalizations as a result of the virus spread. A few days later, the county had amassed the largest concentration of positive cases in the state.

These disparate conditions facing African Americans are further compounded by the everyday racism that puts Black life at risk. Despite the directives from all levels of government for every person to cover their nose and mouth when in public, video footage of Black people being accosted and harassed by police are seen with a regularity that is beyond baffling. Some show Black persons escorted out of grocery stores under claims of looking suspicious. In the videos we see them being followed by police as they exit stores as white customers enter wearing the exact same masks on their faces. The very racism that is responsible for the weakened immune systems of Black people due to stress and anxiety have not shown any signs of reprieve in this time of extreme grieving.

For most Black people, there is no sanctuary. There is no salvage from the turmoil of being turned away at the very places established to provide care. Each week new stories emerge on social media and national news outlets of Black people dying just days after being denied admission at hospitals despite showing symptoms of the virus.

At the time of this writing, the Black mortality rate from this Corona-virus is more than twice that of Latinos and Asians and almost three times the rate of white mortality in the US. According to the APM Research Lab, “in some places, the multiple between Black and White mortality rates greatly exceeds the 2.6 overall figure that we’ve constructed from all available data for the nation. In Kansas and Wisconsin, Black residents are 7 times more likely to die than White residents. In Washington D.C., the rate among Blacks is 6 times higher than Whites, while in Michigan and Missouri, it is 5 times greater. In Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, New York State, Oregon and South Carolina, Blacks are 3–4 times more likely to die of the virus than Whites.” This is incomprehensible.

African-Americans represent approximately 13 percent of the US population. In the UK, the Black population is less than 5 percent, yet the Black mortality rate from the coronavirus is running at more than three times the rate of whites there, far outdistancing other minority and immigrant groups in the process. The London-based Institute of Fiscal Studies has released a study that attempts to get at an explanation for these stark disparities. What the researchers are clear on is that Black workers in Britain are over-represented in “key worker roles,” what here in the US would be considered essential and front-line workers. What these studies have yet to get clear on is how anti-black racism, itself, is a key factor.

Britain’s own prime minister, Boris Johnson, whom many consider a Trump knock-off, recently recovered from a COVID-19 infection that had him on life-support. Yet, even his near-death experience has not led to the creation of a plan for the most impacted communities. In the land that not too long ago tried to remove its Black citizens, British leaders are lax in their concern for Black life.

Back here in the states, all concern for Black life has been overlooked as attention has been focused on the spectacle of armed white militias and white evangelicals storming Democratically-run state capitols demanding that their governors reopen the economy. Trump, for his part, calls these noose-wielding, swastika wearing, confederate flag waving Americans “very good people” and encourages governors to “give a little.” Yet Trump has not given much of any support to communities ransacked by this virus. In fact, the governor of Maryland has reportedly put the national guard on watch of essential PPE stockpiles to block Trump’s efforts at intercepting state supply. Re-opening state economies and public facilities en masse right now would amount to a national death sentence for Black America.

That death sentence has already been enacted unofficially in Brazil. In the country with the highest population of Black people in the diaspora, Black people are dying at rates that dwarf all other communities there. First brought to the country by the wealthy returning to major cities where Black people work in menial jobs and as house servants, the virus has now spread into the over-crowded favelas where residents live without running water and proper sanitation.

In many ways, the Brazilian government mirrors that of the US response. Both nations are led by capitalists who came to power with claims to clean up government corruption with campaigns mired in rightwing conservative rhetoric with winks to white nationalists and militia groups. Both nations have class-based economies that keep Black and Brown workers locked in poverty, discrimination, intimidation and violence, where police regularly engage in flagrant acts of brutality, assault and abuse. None of this coincidence. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro flaunt their friendship before the world. Their strategic alliance as political leaders are linked in a whiteness that revels in anti-black violence that is both rhetorical and real. Both men have dismissed the guidance of medical experts on how to reduce the spread in their respective countries. Touting a tough-guy image reminiscent of Mussolini, Bolsonaro has gone as far as making impromptu appearances in densely populated areas as public acts of disregard of the pandemic. But this is not about lack of understanding or ignorance. Both leaders were receiving briefs months before the virus’ arrival on their respective shores. These are malicious acts representative of a political class that seeks to coddle a Christian evangelical base that has long kept social distance from science as they await the return of their white savior. For them, this pandemic is prophecy fulfilled.

Yet, even science has not been the friend of Black people during this pandemic. At the height of the crisis, when governments were desperate to find potential cures, two French “medical experts” went on live TV with one, Dr. Jean-Paul Mira (who heads up an intensive care unit in a Paris hospital), saying, “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” Although this was met with some criticism from various sectors, the fact that two esteemed doctors would casually call for experimenting on a population of people is more than revolting. It speaks to the kind of anti-blackness that has plagued African populations since France colonized most of the continent. It speaks to a world that is willing to promote experts and leaders willing to push the envelope of acceptable parameters of denigration of Black lives. It shows us how little progress has been made since the 1921 publication of René Maran’s classic anti-colonial novel, Batouala, in which the lead character says, “We are nothing but flesh out of which taxes may be ground. … The white men are killing us slowly.”

But perhaps nothing shows the inhumane levels of anti-blackness in this time of COVID-19 than the experiences of Africans in China.

Despite being the target of Trump’s racist campaigns that seek to deflect blame for his abysmal failures to curtail this virus’ impact onto the Chinese government, China has concocted its own racist narrative which has targeted Africans throughout China. Video footage of Africans kicked out of their places of residence onto the streets without any means of support from local or national agencies sent shock-waves of anger throughout Africa. In Guangzhou there have been cases of Africans having their passports taken by police further jeopardizing their safety. Conditions deteriorated so terribly that rumors began to spread of African officials planning to send planes to return their countrymen and women back home.

The African presence in China is a direct result of the strategic inroads the Chinese government has made with African countries such as Kenya and Nigeria. Since becoming Africa’s largest trade partner more than a decade ago, China has invested billions in infrastructure development with an emphasis on port and railroad construction. Yet, what is clear is that these investments will do little to change the excessive class-stratification and extreme levels of income disparity that exist throughout Africa.

These recent events suggest a pattern of abuse all too familiar to African workers and migrants in search of a financial foothold in a global economy predicated on an exploitation that disregards their humanity to the point of death. The world may have shuttered when Trump compared countries in African to excrement, but shitty is a most accurate term to describe the response around the world to the Black COVID-19 mortality rate.

At the time of this writing, more Black people have now died in the US from this coronavirus than were lynched during segregation. Never in a white supremacist’s wildest dreams could they have imagined a plague that would wipe out thousands of Black lives in a matter of a couple of months. When the germs clear and the air is breathable again without fear, this moment in human history will be marked by the toll it has taken on Black life. It will reveal a turbulent world economic order crumbling on the backs of an essential Black labor pool kept at subsistence levels of health with no sufficient safeguards in place. Will all that may be uncertain and unknowable about our world right now, one thing is for sure — the pandemic of anti-blackness, its symptoms and effects, will remain long after the coronavirus COVID-19 has come and gone.

Ewuare X. Osayande is a writer and activist. The author of several books, his latest is a collection of poetry entitled Black Phoenix Uprising. Learn more about his work at Osayande.org.

Donald Trump Is Going To Win. Now What?

By J.E. Karla

If we have a scientific view of history we can make confident predictions about the world of politics. It was easy to predict that Bernie Sanders would lose, and even an unrivaled crisis of capitalism couldn’t save his “movement.” Here’s another safe bet: Donald Trump is almost certainly going to be re-elected in November. We know this the same way we know how the coronavirus spreads — with a principled observation of material conditions.

This is depressing, but knowing that Trump has a nearly unbeatable edge frees us up to work on something more useful than the same “lesser evil” strategy we’ve been duped into over and over again.

We are prone to getting duped because most political observers in the US are liberals with an idealist outlook as superstitious as a creationist or fortune teller. Many of them suspect the truth about Trump’s impending victory, but they think it’s because Fox News and other right wing media have somehow hypnotized “working class” voters into ignoring their true self-interest.

The truth is actually the complete opposite. Right wing ideology secures political unity among its subjects precisely because Donald Trump best serves their interests. Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest broadcast alibis for his supporters — highlighting the roles played by non-Trump actors in the coronavirus crisis, for example, a disaster caused by every part of the ruling class, including Trump. The alibis, however, are secondary to the material interests at play, and if Fox and their friends didn’t exist, some other voices would step in to justify reactionary rule.

The basic interests at hand are settler colonialism and white supremacy. The liberal system that the elections ratify actually invented the white middle class — small-scale white capitalists and landowners, managers, technicians, professionals, functionaries, and favored workers. Europe industrialized, destroyed its peasantry and found itself with more people than it could feed. Its ruling class armed this excess population, shipped them to the “New World” and empowered them to secure their existence by expropriating Native people and the enslaved. The resulting political surplus granted to even the poorest “white trash” was both the cheapest social program ever launched and a chief obstacle to any mass mobilization against the large bourgeoisie.

But falling rates of profit have eroded the surplus that made the order work, and the white middle class has been in big trouble since at least 2008. Middle-aged white men have experienced an unprecedented increase in mortality since then, driven by drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. They got laid off from managerial positions or bankrupted during the last economic crisis and never got those jobs or businesses back. Where they didn’t swell the growing ranks of the homeless they landed in dead-end service-industry jobs, took up gig economy piecework, or ended up dependent on disability checks and the painkiller prescriptions that come with them.

Donald Trump’s appeal — Make America Great Again — has always been an unsubtle promise to restore that white supremacist premium. As soon as white voters bought into the plan, he had a nearly insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College — an institution explicitly designed to favor white supremacist parties. Only a nominee that swamps him in popular support could overcome this structural advantage.

Instead, the Democrats are going to nominate Joe Biden. It seems like a blunder on their part, but let’s take a materialist look at this decision too. Between tax cuts, canceled environmental protections, attacks on labor, and gutted social programs Donald Trump has done gangbusters for the bourgeoisie. They made trillions before the coronavirus struck, and they know that he’s the guy most likely to let them kill as many people as they need to for the stock market to get going again.

Most of the liberal class shares these interests; they too benefit from a Trump victory. That’s why they have only opposed him with conspiracy theories or West Wing-style bullshit about “America’s place in the world.” They even downplay the very real harms of his racist policies — they don’t want to stir up the people under attack, their class enemies. Fox News gives viewers a reason to stick with Trump, MSNBC gives viewers arguments they know won’t stick. Liberals don’t really mind if he’s in charge, he just embarrasses them.

The best irony of all: they ended up with the one nominee more embarrassing than Trump.

So the system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and its major players are acting like they’ve always acted. We can anticipate that it will keep rolling right along no matter how many doors we knock on or how many of us hold our noses and vote for the other rapist. Biden’s long history of reactionary corruption is the only source of any real uncertainty about November’s outcome, as maybe the ruling class will decide to switch horses — they are both going the same direction, after all.

One thing we do know for sure is that the bleeding won’t stop until we cauterize the wound. We can’t heal our disease until we cut the capitalism out of us once and for all. Anything else is superstition, and we now have experimental proof — again — that electoral politics is the worst kind of faith healing, at best.

Prison Pandemic Pending

By Werner Lange

“Many people who are dying both here and around the world were on their last legs anyway’. There in a nutshell is the misanthropic mindset of one right-wing pundit, Bill O’Reilly, who gave voice to this nefarious notion on an April day in which some 2,000 Americans, many of them in the prime of their life, died from the coronavirus pandemic. Tragically that inhumane attitude is not restricted to heartless individuals with warped minds. At least one major institution of our dysfunctional criminal justice system, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, seems to harbor a similar operative ideology when it comes to explaining coronavirus deaths on its watch.

Within its 122 prisons over the course of the past few weeks, well over 200 inmates and nearly 90 employees of the BOP have tested positive for the coronavirus. As of Good Friday, the body count of federal inmates dying from that vicious viral infection officially stood at 8 men, ranging in age from 43 to 76, and limited to two prisons, Elkton in NE Ohio with about 2500 inmates and Oakdale in SE Louisiana with nearly 1000 inmates. The BOP issued a press release regarding each of these dead inmates identifying the nature of their conviction (all, save one on armed robbery, for nonviolent offenses); the length of their sentence; their age and date of death.  But what jumps out in these 8 press reports is the callous boilerplate language used to describe their deaths and health conditions prior to death. Every single report provides the date of their hospitalization and then uniformly continues with “his condition declined and he was placed on a ventilator. “On (insert date of death), Mr. (insert family name), who had long-term, pre-existing medical conditions which the CDC lists as risk factors for developing more severe COVID-19 disease, was pronounced dead by hospital staff”.  Eight deaths and eight letters with eight identical texts regarding “long-term, pre-existing medical conditions” each inmate allegedly had.

The daughter of one of the victimized inmates, Margarito Garcia-Fragoso, vigorously disputed the official characterization of her father’s health in an article published on April 9 in The Progressive. “He exercised every single morning”, Olivia Garcia stated, “That was so important to him to be strong and to be healthy”…He was so physically fit and healthy and when I read that, what a defamation of character.”  It is highly unlikely that clear answers regarding his actual physical condition and medical treatment will be forthcoming any time soon. As stated on the Elkton webpage “all visiting at this facility has been suspended until further notice”. The same message appears on the Oakdale page and all other BOP prisons. Recently imposed communication restrictions have made it increasingly difficult for anxiety-ridden family members to contact incarcerated loved ones and get an accurate accounting about their condition.

Since April 4, no press releases announcing inmate deaths from the coronavirus have been released by the BOP. According to its April 8 update regarding COVID-19 cases, there are 253 federal inmates and 85 BOP staff with confirmed cases of COVID-19; 14 inmates and 7 staff have recovered; and allegedly there have been no new deaths since the 5 inmate deaths on April 2, 3 at Elkton and 2 at Oakdale. Yet the credibility of these official health statistics is increasingly suspect. At Elkton, for instance, the president of the union representing correction officers claims at least 100 prisoners are symptomatic, whereas the official number by the BOP is 10. Only five testing kits have been sent to Elkton by the BOP, and a recently released video taken surreptitiously on a contraband phone by an inmate describes horrific conditions. They are “leaving us in here to die” states 31-year old Aaron Campbell of Detroit, who desperately pleas for help including prayers. However, aside from the added presence of 35 Ohio National Guardsmen to Elkton for about a week, precious little help or compassionate release has materialized. An unmitigated disaster looms.

Federal inmates by the tens of thousands face the coronavirus deprived of the one defense which has proven effective in mitigating its ferocity and velocity. Social distancing is not an option for prisoners. Consequently, there will be more deaths, perhaps exponentially so, and likely more official press releases, in effect, shamelessly shifting the blame to standardized pre-existing medical conditions which put them all standing on their last legs anyway in a new death row.