06 April 20
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RSN: Norman Solomon | The Pandemic Makes the Bernie 2020 Campaign More Vital Than Ever
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "There's no doubt that Bernie Sanders will do all he can to help defeat Donald Trump. That imperative would not be served by stifling a campaign that continually enhances public understanding of what will be necessary to finally guarantee healthcare as a human right - and create a truly humane society."
ressure on Bernie Sanders to quit the presidential race is intensifying. Over the weekend, The Washington Post splashed a major story under the headline “Some Top Sanders Advisers Urge Him to Consider Withdrawing.” While sheltering at home, comedian Larry David couldn’t curb his enthusiasm for an end to the campaign, telling a New York Times columnist: “I feel he should drop out. Because he’s too far behind. He can’t get the nomination.”
OK, at this point it’s highly unlikely — though still possible — that Sanders can gain enough delegates to become the Democratic nominee. But the Bernie 2020 campaign has never been only about winning. It has always also been about strengthening vital progressive movements while widening public discourse and political space.
Like the movements fueling — and being fueled by — both of the Sanders campaigns for president, those campaigns have organized to challenge the dominant narrow, corporate-power concepts of what is possible or desirable. That has meant continually throwing down gauntlets against systemic injustices that routinely cause preventable catastrophes — individual, social and environmental.
By now, corporate media outlets often acknowledge that the Sanders campaigns brought into the political mainstream many proposals that were commonly labeled as “fringe” or “radical” just a few years ago. Positions like a $15-an-hour minimum wage, free public-college tuition and Medicare for All have reached center stage for the Democratic Party and the country as a whole.
Yet now, to hear mass media and the party establishment tell it, Sanders should immediately cease expanding the public discourse during this election cycle. Demands that Sanders quit the race are getting louder by the day — insisting that he function like a traditional politician rather than a movement candidate.
But those calls for normal political behavior are coming at a time when conditions are anything but normal. The coronavirus pandemic is a truly unprecedented life-and-death emergency on a scale so vast that it’s difficult to comprehend. The conditions — and timeworn assumptions — that have made it so deadly in the United States go far beyond the criminal negligence of top officials in the Trump administration.
For decades, assaults on the public sector, led by Republicans and often abetted by Democrats in Washington, have crippled government capacities to protect public health. While defending for-profit insurance, Democratic leaders have refused to support comprehensive healthcare coverage for all.
At a time when the structural failures of a corporatized society have never been more glaring and deadly, we desperately need Sanders’ voice to be heard far and wide. That can and should happen between now and June — a month when more than a dozen states are scheduled to hold presidential primaries.
The status of “frontrunner” does not change the reality that Joe Biden has failed to step up to the challenge of responding to the pandemic. Biden’s severely limited capacities to speak clearly — or to offer proposals commensurate with the extreme crisis — continue to be on display.
Meanwhile, consistent with his approach over several decades, the Sanders campaign has provided a flood of position statements, online messaging, virtual roundtables, vibrant interviews, and proposals that amount to the “boldest legislation in history.”
Solid reasons for Sanders to stay in the presidential primaries are hardly appreciated by party power brokers and big media outlets that have been hostile toward the Bernie 2020 campaign from the beginning.
There’s no doubt that Bernie Sanders will do all he can to help defeat Donald Trump. That imperative would not be served by stifling a campaign that continually enhances public understanding of what will be necessary to finally guarantee healthcare as a human right — and create a truly humane society.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
The anger of Americans. (illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept/Getty Images)
The Democratic Party Must Harness the Legitimate Rage of Americans. Otherwise, the Right Will Use It With Horrifying Results.
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "The political possibilities of this moment are different than anything we have ever experienced. We possess a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the United States a more humane country. But if we fail to seize it, we will face mortal danger from the right."
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A medical team takes a patient's coronavirus test during a trial run for a new FEMA drive-thru coronavirus testing clinic at CVS at 720 Boston Turnpike in Shrewsbury, MA on March 19, 2020. (photo: John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images)
Health Experts Call for Roosevelt-Style Programs to Kill Virus, Revive Economy
Reid Wilson, The Hill
Wilson writes: "A first-of-its-kind program that will deploy almost a thousand people across Massachusetts may be a small-scale test of what public health experts hope could eventually stamp out the coronavirus even before a vaccine becomes widely available."
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Oil workers walk across the deck of the Agbami floating production, storage and offloading vessel, operated by Chevron, in the Agbami deepwater oil field in the Niger Delta in Nigeria in 2015. (photo: George Osodi/Bloomberg News)
Oil and Mining Companies Should Disclose What They Pay, the Law Says. Critics Say the SEC Is Undermining It.
Will Englund, The Washington Post
Englund writes: "At a moment when the Trump administration is planning significant oil purchases to prop up domestic petroleum prices, and some industry players are asking Washington to impose tariffs or sanctions to keep out imports, the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to make it possible for oil and mining companies to mask their payments to governments at home and around the world."
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Kim Collins, co-founder of MommaArts Pregnancy Care Center, sewing masks in her home in South Orange, N.J. She is part of a 365-member Facebook group of sewing volunteers in South Orange and nearby Maplewood. (photo: Elsa/Getty Images
Facebook Hampers Do-It-Yourself Mask Efforts During Pandemic
Mike Isaac, The New York Times
Isaac writes: "As health workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic plead for personal protective equipment, volunteer efforts to create hand-sewn masks and deliver them to medical professionals have quickly sprung up across the internet."
EXCERPT:
The social network said it had made an “error” in threatening to ban the organizers of hand-sewn masks from posting or commenting on its site.
s health workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic plead for personal protective equipment, volunteer efforts to create hand-sewn masks and deliver them to medical professionals have quickly sprung up across the internet.
But those efforts were hampered by Facebook’s automated content moderation systems over the past week, according to sewing organizers who have used the social network to coordinate donation campaigns.
Facebook’s systems threatened to ban the organizers of hand-sewn masks from posting or commenting, they said, landing them in what is colloquially known as “Facebook Jail.” They said it also threatened to delete the groups. The issue has affected do-it-yourself mask makers in states like Pennsylvania, Illinois and California, they said.
A meeting of Aymara mothers as part of ayllu reconstitution efforts in Ilata, Bolivia, 1985. The group is ritually sharing and chewing coca leaves, which are spread out in the center of the gathering. (photo: Andean Oral History Workshop)
Centuries of Fire: Rebel Memory and Andean Utopias in Bolivia
Benjamin Dangl, NACLA
Dangl writes: "In Bolivia, Indigenous movements' recovery and championing of histories of resistance increased their numbers and appeal, provided a lens to grapple with neocolonialism, and offered strategies and potent symbols for revolts."
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A California newt (Taricha torosa) from Napa County, California. (photo: Connor Long)
Will Climate Change Push These Amphibians to the Brink?
Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "Aerial photos of the Sierra Nevada - the long mountain range stretching down the spine of California - showed rust-colored swathes following the state's record-breaking five-year drought that ended in 2016. Now, a few years later, we're starting to learn about how less noticeable species were affected."
The 100 million dead trees were one of the most visible examples of the ecological toll the drought had wrought.
Now, a few years later, we're starting to learn about how smaller, less noticeable species were affected.
One of those is the California newt (Taricha torosa). These large, colorful amphibians live across the state, from Mendocino County to San Diego County, but newts living in Southern California fared worse during the drought, according to a new study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. And worse, anticipated future changes to the climate are likely to put northern newts in the same boat in coming decades.
Researchers have been surveying populations of these amphibians for decades. By tagging them with transponders and following their movements, they've learned that the newts can live for more than 30 years and return to the same spots year after year as they migrate between freshwater and land.
But as the drought began in 2012, the researchers noticed a change in the Southern Californian populations. There were fewer newts from the tagged population coming back to dozens of breeding sites monitored across the region each year. The researchers also observed fewer egg masses, tadpoles and larvae.
"Here's a long-lived species that we're not seeing individuals that we've seen for the last 10 or 15 years coming back to the sites where they usually breed," says Gary Bucciarelli, the lead author of the report and an assistant adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.
And there was one more piece of bad news: Most of the adult newts that did return in Southern California were in poorer body condition than before the drought began. This negative trend, the researchers concluded, was linked to drier and warmer conditions that were far outside the 100-year average.
At the time the state was experiencing drought conditions not seen there for 1,200 years. You'd expect drought to hurt amphibians, which rely on access to water, but Bucciarelli says the research shows that similarly record-high air temperatures may have played an even greater role than precipitation.
Warmer temperatures remove necessary moisture from the terrestrial environment. But they could also affect food — a shifting climate may mean less prey, says Bucciarelli. Or it could mean that newts spend more time wandering around, burning calories, and less time hunkered down as they normally would.
Whatever exactly happened in this case, "It all was strongly correlated with the extreme deviation in climate," he adds.
Amphibians spend part of the year on land, and we know far less about how they spend their terrestrial days. "When they're on land we don't know if they're underground, moving around, in a deep sleep, or what they're feeding on," he says. "This research suggests there are things happening on land that are impacted by temperature that we don't really understand."
One thing is certain, though: Climate change will bring more severe droughts and higher temperatures to California, and that could push newts in Southern California, which are already a species of conservation concern, closer to extinction.
And in the next 50 years, the northern populations are likely to experience the same change in body condition. That means that the northern range "likely will not provide climate refuge for numerous amphibian communities," the researchers conclude.
That's particularly bad news considering that globally, an estimated 40% of amphibians face extinction. A disease caused by chytrid fungus has devastated many amphibian populations, especially in Australia, Central and South America, and wiped out 90 species already.
But amphibians face other threats, too. And the California newt is no exception.
The species is adapted to drought, but "they haven't dealt with drought coupled with temperature changes that are this rapid and this severe, in conjunction with habitat fragmentation, land use changes and fire frequency changes," Bucciarelli says. "Now we're beginning to see how these combined stressors are acting out ecologically."
So what do we do?
Collecting more data is a good start. Land managers need to begin long-term monitoring surveys of populations of amphibians now, even if the species aren't currently a major concern. "You never know what's going to happen and having baseline data is super important," he says.
Proactively improving habitat is also critical. We can start by ensuring that habitats are free of non-native species, says Bucciarelli, who has also tracked the negative effects of introduced fish and invasive crayfish on amphibians.
Suitable habitat is key, but so is connection. Many newt populations in Southern California have become islands, separated by development that limits their genetic diversity — and in the long run, their capacity to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Ensuring habitat connectivity could help strengthen their resilience.
Even if all of that happens, climate change will continue to be a threat, and Bucciarelli says we may need to develop contingency plans for worsening conditions if we hope to save these newts.
"We'll have to think of different and more creative management strategies to help in years when temperature and precipitation are not in line with the norm."
