Imagining A New World on the Other Side of the Pandemic
Truthdig
by Truthdig
3y ago
At The Nation, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has a provocative piece that imagines how future historians may come to write the story of the Covid-19 pandemic. The speculative history takes the form of a “best-case” scenario that serves as both a challenge and a salve, an inspirational fantasy to help balance out the more easily imagined dystopias with a tantalizing vision of a civilization transformed. In Abrahamian’s telling, every aspect of society ends up being made better by the current crisis, including deliverance of the long-sought goal of world peace. “[All] wars’ [were] put on hold thanks ..read more
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Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness
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by Robert Faturechi and Derek Willis / ProPublica
3y ago
Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters s ..read more
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If Trump Declares Martial Law Due to Coronavirus, Can He Suspend the Election?
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by Martina Moneke / Truthdig
3y ago
There is no dearth of examples suggesting that President Donald Trump lives in an alternate reality. But his belief that the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world”—even though public health experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years—may be the reason why the United States is so unprepared to deal with the crisis. In 2018, he weakened the country’s ability to respond to pandemics when he decided to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for them. His Interior Department failed to update a pandemic plan th ..read more
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Not Giving Up on Happiness: Care of the Self and Well-Being in a Plague Year
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by Juan Cole / Informed Comment
3y ago
The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the Great Depression and World War II). My father is 90 and when I called him a child of the depression once, he pointed out to me that as someone born in 1929, he really didn’t come to political consciousness until the Depression had ended. He was too young to fight in the war, though he joined the army three years after it ended. So you’d really have to be 95 or older to have fully experienced those ..read more
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The Dem Primary is Over, and We Need Bernie Sanders to Lead on Health Care From the Senate
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by David Faris / Informed Comment
3y ago
On Tuesday, I cast a joyless vote for the very much politically doomed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Illinois primary, in an elementary school where hushed whispers and fearful glances had replaced the normal din of an election day. There was no one standing just outside the perimeter hustling me to vote for this or that candidate. There were no throngs of voters with whom to share that elusory joy in exercising your basic democratic rights. It was the first, and I hope the last, ballot that I ever cast wearing latex gloves. There are, I think, very good and important questions about whet ..read more
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These Are the 51 GOP Senators Who Just Voted Against Expanding Paid Sick Leave to Protect Americans
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by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams
3y ago
Republican senators on Wednesday teamed up to kill an amendment introduced by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray that would have expanded paid sick leave to millions of U.S. workers left out of a bipartisan coronavirus relief package. Every Republican present for the vote, 51 in total, voted against the amendment while every Senate Democrat voted in favor. Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) were the only senators who did not vote on the amendment, which would have guaranteed two weeks of paid sick leave as well as 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to all U.S. employees ..read more
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Elections May Have to Change During the Coronavirus Outbreak. Here’s How.
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by Rachel Glickhouse / ProPublica
3y ago
As the novel coronavirus spreads through the U.S. during presidential primaries, election and government officials are scrambling to figure out how to allow voters to cast their ballots safely ― or postpone primaries altogether. Managing in-person voting during an unprecedented pandemic has forced authorities to overcome new virus-related hurdles: providing sufficient cleaning supplies to polling places, moving polling places out of nursing homes and ensuring there are enough poll workers. There’s also a huge open question: If the virus continues to infect large numbers of people, how can the ..read more
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17 Years Later: The Consequences of Invading Iraq
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by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
3y ago
While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near Baghdad on March 11, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory strikes against five of the militia’s weapons factories and announced it is sending two more aircraft carriers to the region, as well as new Patriot missile systems and hundreds more troops to operate them. This contradicts the January vote ..read more
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Trump Uses Coronavirus to Spread Racism
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by Sonali Kolhatkar
3y ago
There is nothing like a global pandemic to unleash the forces of racism in society. In the United States, with a virulently racist administration already in power before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we might not even notice the offensive rhetoric and policy emanating from President Donald Trump, given how much he has normalized xenophobia. But it bears identifying, for if ever there was a need for solidarity among Americans, it is now.  For a while, Trump seemed unsure of what to do as news of the virus became more serious. He was deeply worried about the economic impact of the virus on his ..read more
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Here’s Why Americans Need a Basic Income During the Coronavirus Outbreak
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by Anne Kim / The Washington Monthly
3y ago
As the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic escalates, support is growing for immediate economic relief for the millions of Americans whose lives have been upended. Utah Senator Mitt Romney has proposed sending a one-time infusion of $1,000 to every American adult during the crisis, while Trump Administration officials are also weighing the idea of direct cash payments to Americans. While one-time “stimulus checks” are an option— as they were in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—many Americans are going to need longer-term support to weather the coming financial storm ..read more
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