Pandemic

The Future Of Pandemic Solidarity

October 25, 2020 Colectiva Sembrar, Red Pepper. Create! Mutual Aid, Pandemic, Solidarity, Transformation

In their recent book Pandemic Solidarity, Colectiva Sembrar (Sowing Seeds Collective) collected first-hand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in our time of global crisis. Red Pepper interviewed members of the collective – carla bergman (she doesn’t capitalise her name), Seyma Ozdemir, Nancy Piñeiro, Emre Sahin and Marina Sitrin – to discuss what unites these diverse experiences, what can be learned, and where they might fit into a broader project of systemic change.

Fascist Culture, Critical Pedagogy, And Resistance In Dark Times

October 24, 2020 Henri Giroux, Counterpunch. Strategize! Capitalism, Education, Fascism, Pandemic

Across the globe, democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions, and higher education are under siege. The promise, if not ideals, of democracy are receding as the barbarians who breathe new life into a fascist past are once again on the move subverting language, values, courage, vision and a critical consciousness. Education has increasingly become a tool of domination as right wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers, the poor, people of color, refugees, immigrants from the south and others considered disposable.

COVID-19: The World Is At A Critical Juncture

October 24, 2020 Benjamin Mateus, WSWS. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Pandemic, World Health Organization

The fall and winter surge of COVID-19 cases, as predicted, has begun. The number of cases across North America and Europe is rising exponentially in some regions. There have been more than 42.4 million cases of COVID-19 globally, with 1.14 million deaths thus far. On Friday, the number of daily new cases reached an unprecedented 500,000-plus new infections. Global deaths have consistently tracked above 6,000 four days running. At the World Health Organization Friday press briefing on the COVID-19 pandemic, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ominously warned...

Bullets Are Not The Seeds Of Life

October 22, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Hunger, Pandemic, Sudan, United Nations

On 9 October 2020, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations’ World Food Programme. In the citation for the award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee pointed to the ‘link between hunger and armed conflict’, noting that ‘war and conflict can cause food insecurity and hunger, just as hunger and food insecurity can cause latent conflicts to flare up and trigger the use of violence’. The demand for zero hunger requires ‘an end to war and armed conflict’, said the Nobel Committee. During the pandemic, the numbers of those who go to bed hungry at night have dramatically escalated, with estimates showing that half the human population has insufficient access to food.

Debt Collectors Have Made A Fortune This Year

October 15, 2020 By Paul Kiel and Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica. Educate! Debt, Debt Collection, Pandemic, Recession

Earlier this year, the pandemic swept across the country, killing 100,000 Americans by the spring, shuttering businesses and schools, and forcing people into their homes. It was a great time to be a debt collector. In August, Encore Capital, the largest debt buyer in the country, announced that it had doubled its previous record for earnings in a quarter. It primarily had the CARES Act to thank: The bill delivered hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stimulus checks and bulked-up unemployment benefits to Americans, while easing pressures on them by halting foreclosures, evictions and student loan payments.

Students Create Free Tutoring Services To Help During The Pandemic

October 13, 2020 Ada Tseng, LA Times. Create! COVID-19, Education, Pandemic, tutoring

When COVID-19 hit, their team of high schoolers quickly transitioned to online tutoring and later banded together with two other student volunteer organizations — Girls Empowering Girls, founded by Annette Yuan, a junior at Irvine High School, which offers one-on-one English conversation practice with language learners, and Code Champion, a coding class Ding started with his sophomore sister Cindy Ding — to form the nonprofit StudySmart Youth Services. While the teens previously served their local community, now they tutor students from Seattle to Toronto.

Activists Who Fought The AIDS Crisis On Organizing During A Pandemic

October 8, 2020 Loretta Graceffo, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! Act Up, Activism, COVID-19, Pandemic

During the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in New York, Avram Finklestein was inundated by the blaring noise of ambulance sirens outside his apartment. “Just day and night … it was constant,” he said. “Even though I’ve been social distancing, I have not been able to escape this pandemic, not for one second.” For Finklestein, a 68-year-old artist and activist who lives in Brooklyn, witnessing the U.S. government stand by as the death toll climbs to over 200,000 is especially painful. As a survivor of the AIDS crisis, the current pandemic has been what he calls “a revisitation of suffering that can only be triggered by America at its most cruel.”

Workers’ Rights In Globalised Industry

September 26, 2020 Ben Chacko, Morning Star Online. Create! Garment workers, Labor Unions, Pandemic, Worker Rights

The Covid-19 crisis and the lockdowns imposed as a result hit the garment industry hard, causing order cancellations and job losses in producer countries. What can trade unions do to press brands to shield suppliers from the risk of a sudden loss of income that they pass onto their workers? “This problem emerged early in the pandemic. In April many brands endorsed a call to action, a tripartite initiative led by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) with a commitment by brands to pay for finished goods and goods in production.

Make Corporate Landlords Pay The Bills During The Pandemic

September 22, 2020 Sofia Lopez and Sara Mycklebust, Inequality.org. Create! Corporate Bailout, Debt, Landlords, Pandemic, Rent Strike

The Covid-19 crisis has both exposed and exacerbated racial and wealth inequality in the United States. As unemployment skyrockets and tens of millions of Americans struggle with a sudden loss of income, many are unable to pay rents or mortgages and are facing eviction, foreclosure, and possible homelessness. We’ve seen this eviction crisis brewing for months, and despite platitudes about racial justice, our elected officials and corporate landlords haven’t taken any meaningful action to prevent it from hitting poor people of color hardest.

UN Assembly Approves Pandemic Resolution; US, Israel Object

September 16, 2020 Edith M. Lederer, AP News. Educate! COVID-19, Global Recession, Pandemic, United Nations

United Nations - The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a wide-ranging resolution on tackling the coronavirus pandemic Friday over objections from the United States and Israel, which protested a successful last-minute Cuban amendment that strongly urged countries to oppose any unilateral economic, financial or trade sanctions. The 193-member world body adopted the resolution by a vote of 169-2, with Ukraine and Hungary abstaining. It was a strong show of unity by the U.N.’s most representative body, though many countries had hoped for adoption by consensus.

America’s Current Jobs ‘Great Depression’

September 11, 2020 Jack Rasmus. Educate! Economic Depression, Labor, Pandemic, Unemployment

“Two well-known and highly respected mainstream economists, Carmen Reinhart, a chief economist for the World Bank, and Vincent Reinhart, chief economist for Morgan Stanley bank, have recently published an article in the widely read capitalist source, Foreign Affairs, entitled ‘The Pandemic Depression’. Arguing primarily from a global perspective, the economists have concluded the US economy as of the 3rd quarter 2020 is not merely now experiencing a ‘great recession’ but now qualifies as another Great Depression.

In The Worst Of Times, The Billionaire Elite Plunder The Working Class

September 4, 2020 Nick Baker, Counterpunch. Educate! Pandemic, Recession, Ruling Class, Working Class

Since March, more than 58 million people in the U.S. have filed for unemployment. The Internal Revenue Service now predicts that the U.S. economy will have almost 40 million fewer jobs in 2021 than they predicted before the pandemic, as a result of the prolonged economic depression. As it becomes widely recognized that the economy is not going to “bounce right back” into full activity – even when coronavirus cases do eventually decline – and that the current depression will continue for a long time, companies are doing anything they can to drive their stock prices higher.

Scheer Intellience: The 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ Was A US Export

September 4, 2020 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. Educate! COVID-19, Pandemic, Podcast, Spanish Flu

Don’t say we weren’t warned. As President Trump’s subversion of science wreaks havoc with American society, the reappearance on bestseller lists of John Barry’s 2004 classic work, “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” is a reminder that presidential irrationality is not unprecedented. On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Barry joins host Robert Scheer to compare the two pandemics and the United States’ response to each. Back in 1918, Woodrow Wilson was deprived of the jingoism card played by Trump in labeling the current worldwide scourge “the China virus” because the first wave of massive fatalities was exported from a huge military base in Kansas.

Dorothy Day Found Her Calling Fighting The 1918 Flu Pandemic

August 21, 2020 Patrick Henry, Waging Nonviolence. Educate! Activism, Dorothy Day, Pandemic, Spanish Flu

In 1917, having dropped out of college and moved to New York with her family, Dorothy Day took her first New York job, with a daily Socialist news paper, The Call, and settled into her own one-room apartment on Cherry Street. She was 19 years old and quickly overcome by the poverty she encountered and the smell of that poverty inside the tenements she frequented. At this point, she mentions, for the first time, in her major autobiography, “The Long Loneliness,” that she could feel “the spell of the long loneliness descend” on her.

Tell The People That The Struggle Must Go On

August 20, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Organize! Basic Necessities, Brazil, Hunger, Pandemic, Police violence, South Africa

Young children marvel at an obvious contradiction in capitalist societies: why do we have shops filled with food, and yet see hungry people on the streets? It is a question of enormous significance; but in time the question dissipates into the fog of moral ambivalence, as various explanations are used to obfuscate the clarity of the youthful mind. The most bewildering explanation is that hungry people cannot eat because they have no money, and somehow this absence of money – the most mystical of all human creations – is enough reason to let people starve.

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