The coronavirus pandemic is hitting communities of color hard. From alarming death rates for Black, Latinx and Indigenous people to the fact that women of color make up an astonishing percentage of the essential workers putting their health on the line, we may all be facing this virus together, but we are not all at equal risk. And the coronavirus pandemic is exposing a long-standing truth: people of color face deadly health disparities in the U.S. Enduring structural factors such as long term pollution exposure, living in communities with less hospital beds, the inability to afford health coverage, high rates of chronic illnesses and high maternal mortality rates have contributed to worse health outcomes for people of color in nearly every measurable way. We can’t just let our broken healthcare system return to “normal.” The old “normal” left millions of our families struggling to survive, let alone thrive. Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal end this discrimination in their new bill -- the Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act. This emergency legislation covers immediate no-cost healthcare for all medically necessary health services for everyone, including undocumented immigrants for the duration of the pandemic. This bill must be signed into law to save lives and we must continue the fight to guarantee health coverage for all through Medicare for All. Now is the time to rewrite the rules and unrig our system so that it works for everyone, no matter where we were born, how we look, or how much money we make.
COVID-19 has killed more than 100,000 Americans, and due to his numerous lies and mistakes, Donald Trump is substantially to blame. Let us focus on one particular catastrophic mistake, discouraging Americans from using masks in public, which is one of the simplest and most effective ways to fight the virus and save lives. If everyone wears a mask when in a public place indoors, on public transportation, or within six feet of someone outdoors (ten feet to be polite!), the infection would be very greatly reduced in just weeks. Have you heard this basic information from the Trump Administration? No! Yet, at any time, Trump could have rallied both red and blue Americans to wear masks in public. If he had done so several weeks ago, it would have prevented thousands of deaths and enabled economic activity to safely resume much sooner than it will. But he believes he benefits from sowing confusion and dissent. In sum, at a critical time when truth and competence were and are a matter of life and death, Trump has been an ignorant, grossly incompetent liar.
Trump’s first national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, had a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, just after President Obama had imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump. Flynn “urged Mr. Kislyak in a phone call not to escalate tensions with a retaliatory move against the United States—perhaps by kicking American diplomats and spies out of Russia.” Flynn denied that the call was about sanctions, but it has become pretty clear based on new reports that what took place was “a back-channel discussion with a top Russian official that might lead to the new Trump administration gutting the sanctions its predecessor put in place to punish the Russians.” In any other time, a national security adviser who acted this way would be considered a traitor. But not in Bill Barr’s America. We now stand at a historical fork in the road: In one direction, Barr has gone too far in supporting naked treason by a former military official and the politician he served, and will be held accountable by Congress, the Courts and the press. In the other direction, future Democratic presidents are only willing to “look forward instead of looking backward,” the press develops amnesia, and another act of Republican treason for political purposes goes unpunished and eventually fades from memory. Will the “winner” be Trump and Barr, or American democracy?
The failure of the White House to respond to the Coronavirus pandemic has given Andrew Cuomo an unlikely turn in the spotlight. Cuomo, for his part, has taken the opportunity and run with it: hosting daily news briefings and running comedy routines with his younger brother on CNN. But when the cameras are off, Cuomo—in true Machiavellian fashion—is using his newfound celebrity to grant himself sweeping new powers, silence his critics, and cut vital programs that working families are counting on during this pandemic. Cuomo has gifted himself “rolling budget adjustment” powers, which allows him to make cuts on a quarterly basis with little to no oversight. These would be on top of the billions in cuts he has already made to health care and public education. If that wasn’t enough, he also slipped into the budget a new ballot threshold for third parties to exact revenge on the Working Families Party for challenging him in 2018. And at a time when even Republican Governors are releasing people from jails and prisons to curb the spread of COVID-19, Cuomo has refused to grant clemencies to people in prison, and chose to increase the jail population by rolling back landmark civil rights protections for defendants.
COVID-19 has shuttered public schools across the nation, state governments are threatening to slash education budgets due to the economic collapse caused by the outbreak. But the charter school industry may benefit from its unique status to seek public funding from multiple sources and expand these schools into many more communities traumatized by the pandemic and financial fallout. As school districts reported huge problems with converting classroom learning into online instruction delivered to students’ homes, often due to lack of funding, charter operators rolled out new marketing campaigns to lure families to enroll in their schools. Teachers have urged their districts to stop charter school expansions and co-locations, which they believe worsen the trauma that children in their communities are experiencing due to the virus. But the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have shown no signs of easing up their campaigns to further privatize public schools. “This is an opportunity,” said DeVos in an interview with right-wing radio talk show host Glenn Beck, “to collectively look very seriously at the fact that K-12 education for too long has been very static and very stuck in one method of delivering and making instruction available.”
Thousands of workers across America begged the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to investigate when their employers failed to take steps to protect them from COVID-19. They reported a lack of face masks, gloves, soap and hand sanitizer. They warned of having to share desks and stand right next to one another on production lines, despite the need for social distancing to slow the spread of the disease. They put their faith in OSHA and waited for the agency to come to their aid. But help never came. OSHA—the agency responsible for America’s workplace safety—left workers to fend for themselves during the biggest health crisis in recent history. There’s a reason for the agency’s dereliction of duty. The agency’s boss, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, is the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse. He’s a longtime corporate lawyer who’s never cared about workers’ welfare. Scalia—the son of the late right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia— made a fortune at a Beltway law firm helping greedy corporations cheat workers out of decent pay and skimp on safety. Workplace infections and deaths from the coronavirus can be prevented, if only Scalia would live up to his title as Labor Secretary and empower OSHA to do its job.
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