Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
March 24, 2020
Hello All – In an astounding policy reversal, at yesterday evening's news conference President Trump vowed to "very soon" end portions of "social distancing" as a means to contain Covid-19 and "make America open for business" once again. It was only three weeks ago that the Trump Administration made the pivot from denying the dangers of the corona virus toward something approaching the recommendations of medical professionals, personal isolation and social distancing. But at yesterday's news conference, with his top medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci noticeably absent, Trump cautioned that it would be wrong "to make the cure worse than the disease," and projected near-term scenarios by which "younger people" could go back to work, while the old remained in self-isolation.
Needless to say, medical professionals quickly announced that this was exactly the wrong policy and risked allowing the virus to spread out of control. Please look at/listen to what Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has to say on this morning's Democracy Now! [Link]. And here in NYC, Prof. Arthur Caplaln, a professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, said ""You can't call off the best weapon we have, which is social isolation, even out of economic desperation, unless you're willing to be responsible for a mountain of deaths. Thirty days makes more sense than 15 days. Can't we try to put people's lives first for at least a month?" [Link]
Why is Trump doing this? According to the New York Times, "members of Mr. Trump's economic team have said repeatedly in recent months that the virus does not itself pose an extraordinary threat to Americans' lives or the economy, likening it to a common flu season." The Times also cites the "record economic expansion and booming stock market that served as the basis of his re-election campaign evaporated in a matter of weeks. The president became engaged with the discussion on Sunday evening, after watching television reports and hearing from various business officials and outside advisers who were agitating for an end to the shutdown." [Link].
President Trump now says that he wants the economy up and running by Easter (April 12th). Medical experts are nearly unanimous that this is way too early, and that the virus will have many more weeks to run its course. Will Trump's attempt to impose a pro-business agenda on top of a medically driven timetable be met with widespread resistance? Let us hope so; we shall see.
Some useful reading on the crisis
An excellent overview of the insanity of Trump's "business agenda" approach to the medical crisis was broadcast this morning on Democracy Now!: "Economist Jeffrey Sachs: Trump "Understands Nothing, Listens to Nothing" as Pandemic Surges in U.S." [Link]. For another view, read "Trump Toys With a Let-Them-Die Response to the Pandemic" by Jeet Heer, The Nation [March 24, 2020] [Link]. The lack of public-health preparedness is beyond scandalous: for some examples, read "Donald Trump Says America's Ventilator Shortage Was "Unforeseen." Nothing Could Be Further From the Truth" by Nick Turse, The Intercept [[Link]; (Video) "'Hope Is Not a Strategy': Emergency Doctor Asks, Where Are COVID-19 Tests? Where Is Protective Gear?" from Democracy Now! [March 23, 2020] [Link]; and "Why Widespread Coronavirus Testing Isn't Coming Anytime Soon" bd, The New Yorker [March 24, 2020] [Link]. At the time of writing, Congress has not yet finished with its $1.8 trillion economic/bailout program, but useful insights into what is to come can be found in "'An Utter Disgrace': GOP Stimulus Plan Would Cut Taxes for Corporations While Denying Benefits to Poorest" by [Link] and "The Kind of Coronavirus Response Package We Need" b[Link].
News Notes
Scattered until now, virus-related information can be found (for Hastings) in the Mayor's frequent emails; for the county; and state. To get frequent updates from the state about virus news, go here. [h/t MJ Shimsky]
Shortly after 9/11, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, zillions of pages of legislation rolling back civil liberties, authorizing spying on citizens, etc. This was a good example of Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" – the practice by the state and big business of imposing its agenda at a time of crisis. This week we learned of some attempts to use the virus crisis to roll back civil liberties. Read "DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency" by Peter Wade, Rolling Stone [March 22, 2020] [Link] and "Inside The Military's Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government" by William M. Arkin, Newsweek [March 18, 2020] [Link].
There is widespread concern that people in prisons and jails will be highly vulnerable to the coronavirus, with calls to release all but the most dangerous. For the situation on Rikers Island, watch the Democracy Now! segment "'Top Priority Is Release': Will Rikers Island Free More Prisoners as 60+ Test Positive for COVID-19?" [March 24, 2020] [Link] and read this statement by 34 elected prosecutors from throughout the country [Link].
While the presidential primary has been eclipsed in the mainstream media by the virus crisis, Bernie Sanders has been issuing statements that embody some of his fundamental programs. Read "An Emergency Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic," ZNet [March 24, 2020] [Link].
Finally, for several years CFOW stalwarts have followed our Saturday vigil/protests by adjourning to the Hastings Center Restaurant for "meaningful conversation." Like so many stores and restaurants, the Center Restaurant is nearly shut down, with take-out orders only. In appreciation of the many hours of hospitality that we have enjoyed there, CFOW has organized a GoFundMe project to raise a gift/contribution for the waitresses and cooks who have been laid off or work only a few hours. If you would like to contribute to this project, go here. (As of 5 pm, the fund had reached nearly $1,000.)
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Until shut down by the virus, we have been meeting for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for the rallies are usually about war or the climate crisis, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting (by Zoom conference) each Sunday evening at 7 p.m. If you would like to join our meeting, please send a return email to get the meeting's access code. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards
A recent segment from Democracy Now! featured 17-year-old Avi Schiffmann, who developed and runs a coronavirus tracking website used by more than 40 million people around the world. Check out his amazing story. And this is just the right moment to bring back Gordon Gecko, who anticipated the Trump era by 25 years. [h/t GM]
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THIS WEEK'S FEATURED ESSAYS
The Coronavirus Crisis Is a Monster Fueled by Capitalism
By Mike Davis, ZNet [March 24, 2020]
---- The current pandemic expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples' movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare. This requires an independent socialist design for human survival that includes—but goes beyond—a Second New Deal. Since the days of Occupy, progressives have successfully placed the struggle against income and wealth inequality on page one—a great achievement. But now socialists must take the next step and, with the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries as immediate targets, advocate social ownership and the democratization of economic power. We must also make an honest evaluation of our political and moral weaknesses. The leftward evolution of a new generation and the return of the word 'socialism' to political discourse cheers us all, but there's a disturbing element of national solipsism in the progressive movement that is symmetrical with the new nationalism. We talk only about the American working class and America's radical history (perhaps forgetting that Eugene V. Debs was an internationalist to the core). In addressing the pandemic, socialists should find every occasion to remind others of the urgency of international solidarity. [Read More]
Now Is the Time to Fundamentally Transform America
By Doug Henwood, Jacobin Magazine [March 2020]
---- We are facing two crises at once, health and economic, that are related in very important ways. The COVID-19 epidemic has done major damage around the world, but it's highlighting some serious structural problems with the US social model that better-run countries are not so afflicted by. We are plagued by a deep economic polarization complicated by minimal social protections; severely diminished state capacity, with eroded institutional structures and extremely debased quality of personnel at the highest levels; years of underinvestment in basic infrastructure, both broadly and in health care particularly; and decades of neoliberal policies that have shaped a common sense based on competitive individualism, with little sense of social solidarity. That's the longer-term context in which we face the acute crisis of this disease — which is almost certainly a portent of what we'll face as the climate crisis worsens. [Read More]
The Coronavirus Conundrum and Human Rights
---- As governments attempt to address the pandemic, we are beginning to witness a twofold approach characterised by governmental overreach on the one hand and by insufficient governmental reach on the other. Both approaches are likely to have a dramatic effect on basic human rights for hundreds of millions of people. Indeed, it is no hyperbole to say that more people will suffer and even die as a result of the way governments choose to handle the crisis than from contracting the virus. … As the crisis brutally exposes how neoliberal policies implemented over the past 50 years have rendered vast segments of the world's population vulnerable, it can also – and should – be used to launch a global pushback campaign. [Read More]
The Wrong Apocalypse
By Fabian Scheidler, ZNet [March 23, 2020]
---- Industrialized countries are imposing a shock program on their citizens and their economies in order to fight the Corona pandemic. For this purpose, they resort to measures that are unprecedented in recent history: civil rights such as the freedom of assembly and the freedom of movement are suspended in many countries for an indefinite period, as is the right to political asylum. Large parts of the economy are put to a halt, including gastronomy, sports, tourism, the cultural sector and even – unthinkable until recently – the automotive and aviation industry. If one compares these measures to the reaction to another, much more severe crisis, which is the threat to life on earth that is posed by climate chaos and mass species extinction, there is a striking contrast. While in the Corona crisis many governments are now acting swiftly and drastically on behalf of a higher goal – the health of their citizens – regardless of short-term economic interests, there has been hardly any real progress in the climate debate for the past 40 years. … How can this contrast be explained? [Read More]
---- Industrialized countries are imposing a shock program on their citizens and their economies in order to fight the Corona pandemic. For this purpose, they resort to measures that are unprecedented in recent history: civil rights such as the freedom of assembly and the freedom of movement are suspended in many countries for an indefinite period, as is the right to political asylum. Large parts of the economy are put to a halt, including gastronomy, sports, tourism, the cultural sector and even – unthinkable until recently – the automotive and aviation industry. If one compares these measures to the reaction to another, much more severe crisis, which is the threat to life on earth that is posed by climate chaos and mass species extinction, there is a striking contrast. While in the Corona crisis many governments are now acting swiftly and drastically on behalf of a higher goal – the health of their citizens – regardless of short-term economic interests, there has been hardly any real progress in the climate debate for the past 40 years. … How can this contrast be explained? [Read More]
"Mutual Aid"
(Video) Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid & How to Organize in the Age of Coronavirus
From Democracy Now! [March 20, 2020]
----- As lockdowns and layoffs sweep the U.S., mutual aid groups are forming to protect and provide for the vulnerable, including the elderly, incarcerated, undocumented and unhoused. We look at the incredible community networks across the country that are coming together to protect their neighbors during the coronavirus pandemic — and how you can get involved. From Washington state to the Bay Area, Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota and New York City, thousands of mutual aid efforts are aimed at building solidarity, not charity. We speak with two longtime mutual aid organizers and activists in two hot spots of the pandemic. In New York City, Mariame Kaba is a longtime organizer, abolitionist, educator and the founder of the grassroots organization Project NIA, which works to end the incarceration of children and young adults. She has raised tens of thousands of dollars and redistributed it to groups across the country in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and she just did a public conference call with Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on mutual aid. In Seattle, Washington, Dean Spade is an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. He is the creator of mutual aid resource website Big Door Brigade. [Read More]
Read more about solidarity and mutual aid – "From mutual aid to dual power in the state of emergency," from "Woodbine," Roar Magazine [March 22, 2020] [Link]; and "Sara Nelson Says People Are Ready for Solidarity," by Sarah Jaffe, The Nation [March 20, 2020] [Link]. A modern classic about mutual aid is A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, who was interviewed some years ago on Democracy Now!
Our History
What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About
e, The New Yorker, [March 2020]
---- When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies for signs, tokens of the disease: lumps, blisters, black spots. They begged for prophecies; they paid for predictions; they prayed; they yowled. They closed their eyes; they covered their ears. They wept in the street. They read alarming almanacs: "Certain it is, books frighted them terribly." The government, keen to contain the panic, attempted "to suppress the Printing of such Books as terrify'd the People," according to Daniel Defoe, in "A Journal of the Plague Year," a history that he wrote in tandem with an advice manual called "Due Preparations for the Plague," in 1722, a year when people feared that the disease might leap across the English Channel again, after having journeyed from the Middle East to Marseille and points north on a merchant ship. Defoe hoped that his books would be useful "both to us and to posterity, though we should be spared from that portion of this bitter cup." That bitter cup has come out of its cupboard. [Read More] And for more on the literary legacy of Contagions, read "A Tale of Two Plagues: Tips on self-isolation from Daniel Defoe and Giovanni Boccaccio" by Katha Pollitt, The Nation [March 20, 2020] [Link].
Polio, COVID-19, and Socialism
By Louis Proyect [March 14, 2020]
---- For many doctors, the goal of developing a vaccine to prevent polio became paramount. FDR [Roosevelt] founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1938 and promoted the March of Dimes for polio research. … Two research doctors, New York Jews, were instrumental in developing a vaccine. Neither one of them saw this as a way of getting rich. Their goal was only to save the lives of children. Born in New York City in 1914, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine based on dead polio viruses in 1955. Backing for his project was universal, with 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers going around with the iconic collection bank. Salk could have made millions by patenting the vaccine but he preferred to see it made as widely available as possible. When he went on Edward R. Murrow's popular "Person to Person" show, the host asked him who owned the patent. Salk replied, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" (Had it been patented, it would be worth $7 billion.) As it happens, Salk graduated from CCNY, a hotbed of radicalism in the 1930s. It should come as no surprise that J. Edgar Hoover had his number. [Read More]
