Healing the dual miseries of COVID-19 and economic insecurity requires relief sufficient to ensure that all individuals, their families and their loved ones can live through this pandemic. The time to go big is now.
Researchers worry the pandemic may have severe after-effects, with deaths of despair impacting more distressed and newly-vulnerable populations. Only a serious reform of American capitalism can address the kind of distress and insecurity that kills.
The demand is still, more than ever, #DefundThePolice, #FundThePeople #DefendBlackLives.
It’s urgent not to return to the previous status quo. It’s time for creative thinking and bold action. This is a time for a true pandemic pivot.
Ultimately it is crisis-ravaged real estate where Blackstone seeks to continue to find a goldmine while anchored by generous political contributions and fueled by desperation capital pouring out of central banks and governmental treasuries.
There is work to do—and people who want to work.
The news is filled with “uplifting” human interest tales of workers walking six miles and nurses scrounging up sick leave. Injustice is so normalized that stories that should be enraging indictments of the system pass for heartwarming vignettes.
The bulk of our progressive forces are focused on policy at the local or national level, paying much less attention to global dimensions. But the need for an internationalist agenda will tend to become more and more apparent as they grow in power.
Germany could veer left or right, when countless jobs are gone, small businesses vanish, evictions multiply. Some omens foreshadow grave differences.
As fewer people remain able to afford rent in big cities, more leave those cities for cheaper regions, or simply fall out of the housing market and into homelessness. Think tanks and activist groups are thinking outside the box with solutions.
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