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COVID-19

Leonard Peltier Pleads For Help Amid Constant COVID Lockdowns

January 24, 2022 Jennifer Bendery, Huff Post. , , ,
Never mind that he shouldn’t be in a federal prison at all. Leonard Peltier, the Native American rights activist whom the FBI put behind bars decades ago without any evidence that he committed a crime, tells HuffPost that his facility’s prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns and failure to provide at least some inmates with booster shots has left him ― and likely others ― unbearably isolated and preparing for death. “I’m in hell,” Peltier said in a Friday statement, “and there is no way to deal with it but to take it as long as you can.” Peltier, who is 77 and has serious health problems including diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm, said “fear and stress” from the prison’s intense coronavirus lockdowns are taking a toll on everyone, including staff.

What Students Walking Out Over Covid Can Learn From Student Movements

January 23, 2022 Rose Lemlich, Left Voice. , , , ,
Fed up with mandatory in-person school attendance policies that fail to keep them safe, students are marching out of classrooms and into the streets. Last week, hundreds of students from over 30 public high schools in New York City walked out of class to protest the unsafe conditions in city schools. Despite the latest Covid-19 wave, during which over 38,000 students and teachers tested positive COVID, school officials have insisted on in-person classes. That same week, students from a group called the Chicago Public Schools Radical Youth Alliance (Chi-Rads), formed days prior, led a walkout followed by a protest at Chicago Public Schools headquarters. Their demands included masks, tests, laptops for remote learning, and a voice at the negotiating table for COVID safety plans.

Capitalists Only ‘Trust The Science’ When It Suits Their Agenda

January 22, 2022 Olivia Wood And B.C. Daurelle, Left Voice. , , ,
During the Trump presidency, slogans like “Facts Matter” and “#BelieveTheScience” abounded. The idea was that, unlike the outright denial espoused by Republicans, Democrats recognize basic scientific truths about the world, such as the existence of climate change and the dangers of Covid-19. Because they “take science seriously,” it’s implied, Democrats will propose and enact more scientifically-informed policies. It’s been a year since Joe Biden took office on the promise that his respect for science would manifest in more rational policy solutions. So, now is a good time to ask: how’s that going? “Follow the science” was an effective campaign slogan during the Trump years, but it was only ever a slogan. On September 20, 2020, Joe Biden tweeted, “Unlike Trump, I’ll listen to the experts and heed their advice — especially when it comes to matters of health and safety.”

Bereft Of Sick Leave, Millions Of Americans Forced To Work With Covid

January 22, 2022 Morgan Artyukhina, Sputnik News. , , ,
In the last 10 days, 7.6 million new COVID-19 cases have been detected in the United States. Before mid-December, that’s the time period for which the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would have required Americans to quarantine once they test positive for COVID-19 - a practice intended to limit the spread of the highly contagious virus. However, a sudden policy change on December 27 halved that time, with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of Biden’s coronavirus response team, telling CNN that “We want to get people back to their jobs, particularly those with essential jobs, to keep our society running smoothly.” Having no national paid leave program, Americans have long worked sick despite better wisdom telling them to stay home in bed.

Biden And His Promises, Promises

January 21, 2022 Jacqueline Luqman, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Every time I watch or read news updates on another promise that Joe Biden has reneged on, I hear this song in my head, jaunty synthesizer music and all. Because I seriously cannot figure out why people believed this guy and all his promises. Remember the promise he made to cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for everyone? Has it happened? Nope. What he has done instead was to extend the loan payment suspension first until January 2022, with payments originally set to resume in February 2022. Then after a nationwide outcry from those burdened with student loans that were coming due in the new year with no relief in sight from a pandemic that continues to ravage the nation, the federal student loan forbearance program was extended again to May 2022 .

School Privatization Groups Are Exploiting COVID Closure Debates

January 20, 2022 Molly Shah, The Real News Network. , , ,
Schools around the country have once again been forced to make tough decisions about returning to remote learning due to the explosion of new COVID-19 infections resulting from the highly contagious omicron variant. Despite a recent poll showing that 56% of parents support the suspension of in-person learning to slow the spread of the disease, a counter-narrative has emerged, pushed hard by the mainstream media, that pits teachers (and particularly teachers’ unions) against parents. Earlier this week, in fact, in New York Magazine, liberal pundit Jonathan Chait defended Nate Silver’s widely criticized argument that likened schools moving to remote learning during a deadly pandemic to the Iraq War and placed the blame on “The Democratic Party’s left-wing vanguard” and teachers’ unions.

Bank Blocks Donations Supporting Cuban Effort To Vaccinate World

January 20, 2022 Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams. , , ,
Progressive International recently asked for contributions so they can send a delegation to Havana next week to promote Cuba's effort to vaccinate the world against Covid-19. But in an apparent genuflection to the illegal U.S. embargo against the island, Dutch multinational bank ING has blocked all donations supporting the trip, the group said Tuesday. "This is scandalous," said Progressive International (PI) general coordinator David Adler. "The U.S. wields unparalleled power over our global financial system," Adler continued. "Yesterday, a message received by our supporter revealed the far-reaching consequences of the U.S. embargo on Cuba: a European bank, established in the Netherlands, has decided to put the interests of the U.S. government above the lives of millions of people."

New York Times Equates China’s Health Care Workers To Adolph Eichmann

January 19, 2022 John V. Walsh, Popular Resistance. , , ,
In a lead article, on page one of the New York Times on January 13, Li Yuan an NYT reporter, has equated the public health and medical personnel behind China’s successful battle against Covid-19 in the city of Xi’an to Adolph Eichmann, a princiapal architect of the Holocaust.  The article’s opening sentence views them as typical of “the millions of people who work diligently toward” containing Covid-19 in China.  The anti-Covid campaign in Xi’an, a city of 13 million has now terminated the spread of Covid-19 without a single death and limited its spread to about 2000 cases.  The Nazi Holocaust designed and managed by Eichmann resulted in the extermination of millions of Jews. 

Wisconsin’s Rural Schools In ‘Crisis Mode’

January 17, 2022 Steven Potter, In These Times. , , ,
No matter who you ask, whether it’s education association officials, university professors, researchers or the teachers themselves, they’ll all tell you the same thing: The number one problem facing Wisconsin’s rural school districts is finding — and keeping — enough teachers to teach in those districts. “The teacher shortage is an issue all across the country,” says Kim Kaukl, who worked for more than 30 years as a school administrator before becoming the executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance (WIRSA). “But it’s really exasperated out in the rural areas because of the location of many of our rural districts, especially when you’re trying to attract young people to come out to more remote areas.”

Biden Urged To Fire Covid Response Chief Over ‘Damning’ Failures

January 17, 2022 Jake Johnson, Commondreams. , , ,
President Joe Biden is coming under growing pressure to fire White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients—a former private equity executive with no public health background—as the administration continues to face criticism over its slow-moving and inadequate efforts to combat Covid-19. Watchdog groups have long warned that Zients is not qualified to take on the massive task of leading the federal government’s pandemic response given both his lack of scientific and medical experience as well as his record in the private sector, where his firm invested in a company accused of exploitative surprise billing. Early critics of Biden’s decision to appoint Zients to the key post believe their fears have been realized during the Omicron surge, which has laid bare the administration’s failure to prepare for a highly contagious variant that experts warned was all but inevitable.

As Omicron Rages, Teachers And Students Fight For Safety Measures

January 16, 2022 Barbara Madeloni, Labor Notes. , , , ,
Chicago Teachers Union members voted by 77 percent on January 4 to go fully remote until effective Covid mitigations to protect educators and students were approved by members and enacted, or until the current Covid surge subsided. Within a week they had a tentative agreement on mitigation measures. Members ratified it January 12 by 56 percent and returned to in-person teaching. With citywide positivity rates over 20 percent and hospitals overwhelmed, Chicago Public Schools had already faced staffing shortages the first few days of the year. When the district failed to implement adequate testing protocols, CTU members determined that the safety of students and educators once again required remote learning.

New York’s Eviction Moratorium Ends Today

January 16, 2022 Emma Lee, Left Voice. , , ,
New York’s pandemic eviction moratorium expires today; it began in March 2020 when then-governor Andrew Cuomo ordered a temporary ban on eviction proceedings in response to eviction protests and calls for action to protect tenants. Hundreds of thousands of households across the state owe back rent and now face eviction. Forty-one percent of these households include children, and 72 percent of the affected renters are people of color. According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, there have been 81,530 eviction filings in New York City alone since March 2020. Many are now set to proceed amidst a new Covid surge and sub-freezing temperatures. After Cuomo’s executive order, the Covid-19 Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Prevention Act was enacted in December 2020, putting a temporary stay on eviction proceedings if tenants filed a form demonstrating they had suffered pandemic-related financial hardship.

Biden’s Failure To Provide At-Home Covid Tests Looks Extra Ridiculous

January 15, 2022 Natasha Hakimi Zapata, Scheer Post. , , , ,
After two years without being able to travel home from London, England to Los Angeles, Cali. to see my family, I finally arrived in a chaotic U.S. in time for the holidays amid the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although I’d been preparing for a difficult return thanks to the new variant, I had been eager to see my family now that I’m finally vaccinated against Covid-19 and that my partner, who holds a British passport, was able to visit alongside me after more than a year of travel restrictions barring Europeans. What I hadn’t been expecting, however, was to find family and friends desperately trying to procure rapid antigen tests as many of them developed Covid symptoms and wanted to protect their loved ones and community over the holidays.

Australian Trade Unions Demand Free COVID Testing For All

January 15, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , , ,
In a scathing condemnation of the Scott Morrison government, Australian trade unions criticized its inability to make testing for COVID-19 freely available for all. The country’s largest apex trade union body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), released a statement on Thursday, January 13, criticizing the failure to make Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) free and accessible for all. “The ACTU condemns in the strongest possible terms the Prime Minister’s failure at National Cabinet to ensure Rapid Antigen Tests be made free and accessible for all to protect worker and community safety and get the economy moving again,” reads the ACTU statement. The statement also criticized the announcement made on Thursday to relax quarantine rules for close contact workers in transport, education and emergency services.

Supreme Court Leaves Workers Without COVID-19 Protection

January 15, 2022 Jordan Barab, Confined Space. , , ,
The Supreme Court, in a predictable 6-3 decision, blocked OSHA’s Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) that required employees in businesses with 100 or more employees to either be vaccinated or regularly tested and masked. Dissenting were the three Justices appointed by Democratic Presidents: Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. The majority stated that the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHAct) “plainly” does not authorize the vaccine or masking requirements.  Calling the OSHA standard no “everyday exercise of federal power” they labeled it “instead a significant encroachment into the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees.”  The argued that in a situation where an agency is authorized to “exercise powers of vast economic and political significance,” Congress must “speak clearly.” 
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