Virus cuts through Mexican factories snubbing shutdown

20/04/2020

Commuters walk past a sign warning about the COVID-19 at San Ysidro port of entry, in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico Guillermo Arias AFP/File

Mexico City (AFP)

When Ana Lilia Gonzalez fell ill with flu-like symptoms, she went to the infirmary at her factory in a Mexican city on the US border, where the doctor told her she could carry on working. Two weeks later, she was dead.

Her name has been added to the growing list of COVID-19 deaths among factory workers in Ciudad Juarez, located in the poor, densely populated northern region of Chihuahua.

"A fortnight ago, she was fine. At the infirmary, they didn't want to send her home until her condition got worse," one of her colleagues, who has since quarantined herself because of the illness, told AFP by phone.

The 24-year-old, who declined to reveal her name because she feared being stigmatized, has developed a cough and has lost her sense of taste -- two of the symptoms of the coronavirus. She said that she had recently attended a wedding with Gonzalez, who was 45.

Syncreon, where both women worked repairing ATM machines for US banks, was deemed a non-essential company and ordered by the government to suspend work at the end of March.

- Cheap labor pool -

However, thousands of Mexicans continued last week to work there and in similar "maquiladoras" -- factories set up mainly by US companies to avail of cheap labor -- all along the 3,100-kilometer (2,000-mile) border with the United States.

Other countries have forced non-essential industries to shut down to help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

In Juarez alone, among the 160 largest maquiladoras -- which together employ 300,000 workers -- nearly 30 factories deemed non-essential by the government were still operating last Friday, according to Chihuahua Labor Secretary Ana Luisa Herrera.

So far, at least 13 workers in the city's factories have died from COVID-19, local health officials reported.

Herrera said that she complained to the federal government about factories ignoring the shutdown order. But inspectors to enforce the shutdown are scarce on the ground. Only 18 have been assigned to the task of monitoring industrial activity across the state.

According to official figures, Mexico had more than 8,200 COVID-19 cases late Sunday, and more than 680 people had died.

"The northern Mexican states are going to be the most affected by the pandemic," warned senior government health official Hugo Lopez-Gatell, adding that "some companies are continuing to operate" despite the restrictions.

Lear Corporation, a company that produces auto seats in Ciudad Juarez, said in a statement last week: "We learned of the hospitalization of some of our employees at our operation in Ciudad Juarez and the regrettable death of several of them."

But Susana Prieto, a labor rights lawyer in Ciudad Juarez, said that in general, factory owners cared little for their workers. She accused them of lying to their employees by claiming they were on a list of companies authorized to continue working during the shutdown.

"The owners of capital do not care about the lives of their employees. They know they have a ready supply of cheap labor at their disposal," said Prieto.

- 'General psychosis' -

During the past week, workers increasingly worried about the spread of COVID-19 held protests at several factories to demand greater protection in the workplace.

One such protest forced a halt at Syncreon, which has ordered workers to turn up at the factory again on Monday.

Employers have defended the need to keep industry running.

"All the factories -- even the essential ones -- are going to have to close soon because of the general psychosis and the nervousness of the staff. The employees simply don't want to work anymore," local National Maquiladora Industry Council official Pedro Chavira told AFP.

"We blame the industry when the enemy here is the virus," he said.

Chavira declined to comment on what happened at Syncreon but insisted that most of the companies that continue to operate have taken measures to mitigate the spread of the virus: offering clean-up facilities, distributing protective masks and sanitizing gels, checking temperatures and slowing production in order to reduce the number of on-site employees needed.

But at Syncreon, the reality is different, according to factory technician Alexis Flores, 22, who was participated in last week's protests.

"Until this week, they gave us masks that we had to sew on the elastic ourselves, temperature checks were never done, and I don't think they really disinfected. Everything is very dirty," said Flores.

Syncreon declined to comment.

Unemployed and now in confinement, his main fear is that he could infect his father, who suffers from hypertension.

Flores said at least five of his colleagues died, all of whom displayed COVID-19 symptoms.

Most of them were under 50 years old, like Ana Lilia Gonzalez, who earned $7.50 a day.

In Europe, Covid-19 puts idea of universal income back into welfare debate
Issued on: 19/04/2020

Alessandro, a homeless man, asks for alms as a woman wearing a protective face mask gives him money at the entrance to a supermarket in Barcelona, Spain on March 24, 2020. © Nacho Doce, Reuters

Text by:Melissa Barra

Hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, Spain is the first European country to lay the foundation for universal income. The health crisis has also reopened the debate about a living wage or unconditional living allowance in France and elsewhere.


Before the pandemic, the question of universal income was at the heart of the agreement between Spain’s ruling socialist party and the radical left-wing Podemos party to form a coalition. Faced with the health and social crisis of the country’s Covid-19 outbreak, the government announced the gradual implementation of a minimum subsistence income: a safety net of a yet-to-be-determined amount for all families with an income of less than €450.The measure will take effect in May. “Many families don’t have the means to refill their refrigerators right now,” said Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s minister of social rights and Podemos’s leader, to the Spanish press on April 16.
Unemployment figures have reached record levels in Spain since the beginning of the outbreak: according to the ministry of social security, 900,000 people have lost work between mid-March and April 1, which surpasses the number from the 2008 financial crisis. “The minimum living wage will be permanent, as provided for in the coalition agreement,” said José Luis Escrivá, the ministry’s head, on the Spanish channel Cadena SER.

“From the start, universal income has been one of Podemos’s campaign themes. Today, we are somewhat in a minimum income model, which is intended to cover the essential needs of life. They are not the same thing,” explained Joan Cortinas-Munoz, a researcher at the Centre of Sociology at Sciences Po Paris and a specialist in Spanish social politics, to FRANCE 24.

Cortinas-Munoz also points out that Spanish regions, which enjoy administrative autonomy, have established their own minimum allowance programs, with the requirement that recipients are looking for work, since the late 1980s. The Spanish government has announced that its universal income program will complement these regional systems.

The universal income debate

Will the measure suffice? “In some regions of Spain, the amounts of money in these programs are ridiculous. They provide around €500 for a single person, while the poverty line for an individual is about €750,” Cortinas-Munoz said.

“What’s more, this health crisis will be an economic crisis. The worst since World War Two. With soaring unemployment, many people will face a social welfare system that’s been hardened by 30 years of reforms. Many will be excluded from accessing it,” he said.

Numerous voices are calling for a universal income mechanism. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey announced a donation of $1 billion to help manage the pandemic and the post-lockdown period by establishing a “universal basic income”. In Germany, the designer Tonia Merz started a petition that gained more than 460,000 signatures and was sent to the Bundestag. In the UK, 170 members of parliament called for unconditional aid for all for the duration of the Covid-19 crisis, but Finance Minister Rishi Sunak dismissed the idea.

In an open letter circulated on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis wrote in favor of a universal basic wage to “honor the essential and noble work” of low-income workers. “Street vendors, scrap merchants, stall keepers, small farmers, construction workers, garment workers, various caregivers” are “totally invisible in the system”, said the head of the Catholic Church.

In France, rethinking the post-crisis period

In France, the idea of universal basic income is not new. But it is newly resonant as the health crisis has demonstrated the vulnerability of workers in precarious jobs. “Those without access to partial unemployment or retirement benefits, like deliverers for digital platforms such as Deliveroo, have no financial guarantees if they stop working to protect their health,” said Nicole Teke, the spokeswoman for the Mouvement Français pour un Revenu de Base (French Movement for Basic Income, or MFRB), an organisation created in 2013.

“There are holes in social security, we want a real security base for everyone,” the activist, who welcomes Spain’s initiative to install a living wage, told FRANCE 24.

Universal income could be at the core of a philosophical debate about a post-Covid-19 model for society “for reasserting the value of essential jobs, such as home healthcare aide, which are the most poorly paid, and also to put an end to constant suspicion towards the unemployed within the administrations that pay social benefits in France,” she said.

Economic recovery could hamper social justice

In June 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron launched a dialogue around a universal activity income to merge welfare, housing allowances and the state’s activity bonus. According to its contours, which are still unclear, beneficiaries will commit to not refusing more than two job offers. “Universal income, as we understand it, will not be implemented by the current government,” said Trek.

“In the crisis scenario before us, I don’t see how a government could embark on a logic of universal income, with the pressure of financial markets, banks and international financial institutions on countries’ budgets,” Cortinas-Munoz said.

In its forecast of April 15, the International Monetary Fund’s expected Spain’s public debt to increase to 113 percent from 95 percent in 2019. In France, where more than nine million employees are on partial unemployment, the debt is expected to jump 17 points to 115 percent of gross domestic product in 2020.

"There are two opposing visions of society,” Trek said. “That which wants to take this opportunity brought by the crisis for rethinking our system on the basis of social justice, and that which wants to save businesses and the economy, tightening the belt.”

Why Germany can't quit its racist Native American problem

More than 40,000 Germans participate in "Indian hobbyism" — reductive reenactments of Native life in the past. This form of appropriation is excused as well-meaning affection as Native voices are systematically silenced.

Across the country, Germans spent the past week celebrating Carnival, known for its parades, drinking, and colorful costumes ahead of the Lenten fast. There is a pervasive attitude that for these five days, Germans can shed their rigid cultural norms and adopt an "anything goes" policy.

Every year, pictures of some of the more racist trappings of Carnival, such as the use of blackface or "Chinese" costumes complete with conical hat, tend to face backlash both from mainstream culture and the country’s growing Asian and Afro-German communities.

However, the same cannot be said of the abundance of "Native American" costumes, a wildly popular choice in a country that has had a robust infatuation with Native stereotypes since the 1800s, made more popular by the works of beloved writer Karl May and his Winnetou character, the archetypal 'noble savage, 'and the 20th-century films depicting the character.

With no significant Indigenous population to resist these stereotypes, even well-educated and open-minded Germans will defend both the Carnival costumes and Native hobbyism as "honoring" a group of people with whom they have usually never come in contact.

LeAndra Nephin, an Omaha activist living in the UK, explained: "As we only represent less than 2% of the total population in the United States, here in Britain and throughout Europe we experience even greater invisibility."

When asked if such Native hobbyism is indeed a racist fetishization, Nephin noted that "what would be met with uproar in the United States is met with indifference here in Europe. Fetishizing goes unchecked, because there is a lack of representation, education, and awareness."

Stuck in the past
In Germany, storybooks about Native people (always set in the past and usually about Plains nations) are much beloved, and so widespread is the interest that people often consider themselves experts. Hobbyists may spend decades researching a particular nation during a particular time period, dressing in highly accurate handmade costumes and spending entire weeks in the countryside living out their fantasies in like-minded groups. There are also people who refer to themselves as "plastic shamans" who may have spent months or even years learning different Indigenous religion practices and then claim to be healers and spiritual guides.

These practices "relegate us to a historical myth and is a disavowal of the differences," among the hundreds of Indigenous nations in North America, Nephin said.

Shea Vassar, a Cherokee writer, agreed, saying "it places us forever in a historical and mythical context."

"The biggest issue is the overall simplification of our cultures and the erasure inherent in 'playing Indian,' as if we were something mystical like a wizard. It's not like dressing up like an ancient Roman. We still exist."

Nephin agreed, calling cultural misappropration "nostalgia" that functions like a "pick and mix — they highlight the positives but not the oppression. It's very reductive, our modern realities are being erased."

Indeed, Native people are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the United States, with a population of about 5 million people. But in Germany, Indigenous North Americans remain relegated to the past, riding horses and shooting bows and arrows. The limited coverage of modern Native realities in Germany only portrays more up-to-date stereotypes, describing issues related to alcoholism or the hardships of life on some reservations.

Vassar sees this as a larger problem of representation in popular culture, saying that it by and large propagates the idea that Native people exist only in the past. Often, even in the very rare instance that Native characters are played by Indigenous actors, the story takes places in the past. This is of course the case with the Winnetou films (in which the Native characters are played almost exclusively by European and some Middle Eastern actors), the most recent of which came out in 2016.


Winnetou was traditionally played by French actor Pierre Brice, and in the 2016 made-for-TV revival by Albanian Nik Xhelilaj. The chief's daughter character pictured here, Ribanna, was played by German actress Karin Dor. Vassar says the over-sexualization of Native female characters is another painful stereotype that needs to be addressed.

Why Germany? Color-blind racism and trauma

So why is Native cultural misappropriation so much more common in Germany than other nations that do not have a direct connection to the genocide commited against Indigenous North Americans?

D.S. Red Haircrow is an Apache and Cherokee writer, educator, and psychologist who has lived in Germany for 17 years. He recently released the documentary Forget Winnetou: Loving in the Wrong Way, an exploration of the particular psycho-societal issues behind Germany's racist infatuation.

Haircrow puts it down, in part, to Germans fulfilling a desire to return to something they lost when Christianity swept through Europe destroying many ancient pagan traditions, a wish to be close to nature, to be perceived as brave and able to take on the wilderness. It is also indicative, he says, of "a desire to step outside of the problematic issues of their German identity and history."

If that is how the passion began, then why has it continued so long after the end of World War II, when Germany declared that "never again" would it return to racist ideologies?

Many expats across the country note that talking about race in Germany is generally considered taboo. Sociologists say that as a result, a sort of color-blind racism has sprung up and become a widespread phenomenon. In mainstream culture, many people like to declare that they don't see race or religious differences. While this may be well-intentioned or an instinctive reaction to right the wrongs of the past, it has led not only to a silencing of minority voices but to allowing those who consider themselves progressive to take their eye off the ball.



Researchers estimate that between 40,000 and 100,000 people across Germany participate in Native hobbyism in some capacity. Millions more read Native stories, often written by Germans, as children and develop a lifelong interest.
According to Haircrow, there is a deep "lack of understanding of racial categories," because of this.

"An intense effort to prove that they are over racism and anti-Semitism has led to a lot of erasure that is still going on within German society, which creates an even bigger divide between people of color and people of European ancestry. It's made a whole generation believe there is no such thing as race anymore," Haircrow said.

Compounding this issue is a resistance to being told that behavior such as the wearing of "Native headdresses" and the historicizing of a living group of people is harmful and wrong.

"There is an almost hysterical reaction to criticism, because they have been criticized for so long, and subjected to stereotyping themselves as Nazis," Haircrow added, "they think because they have been traumatized, they are allowed to say what they want now."

German history, Haircrow says, has made people compassionate and empathetic, and their interest in Native cultures "is sometimes an honest love and sympathy to our plight...but too often for their own advantage."

For Haircrow, hobbyism and plastic shamanism are "teaching white supremacist behavior in an indirect way," and for Nephin, "a form of modern day colonization, taking our arts, our beliefs, our traditions, and now saying it's a part of your identity too."

So deeply does it become part of the identity of some hobbyists, Haircrow said he has received immense resistance and even death threats from enthusiasts who consider themselves experts on Native traditions and feel he is taking away something they think they deserve to have, and sets them apart from other people.. Furthermore, many people, hobbyists and enthusiasts alike, do not want to travel to North America or engage with real Indigenous groups, lest it shatter their illusions.

A possible end for cultural appropriation

Nephin, Vassar and Haircrow all agree that education, particularly for young people, should be the foundation of a path away from cultural misappropriation and toward more respectful cultural exchange. Nephin and Vassar also stressed the importance of ally-ship from non-Natives, and the need to empower Native voices.

"First, though," Haircrow said, "Germany has to face the truth about itself, which it is so far refusing to do."

Nephin said she is hopeful, as the reaction she gets when she gives talks has been largely positive. "People are becoming more aware that we're not historical relics people want to learn more, want to live in a mutually respectful space."

Vassar believes that programs "putting young Native people behind the camera and the keyboard," might help both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, regardless of location, realize "we have so much going on in our communities right now that people don't even know about."

"There are so many wonderful people in the world," Haircrow said, "but they've been taught so many wrong things and they don't know how to be better. Those are the people that need to be reached, so they can learn it is possible and necessary to improve."

Sacred stone returns to Venezuela after decades in Berlin

The Kueka stone was taken from Venezuela more than two decades ago to be part of a public exhibition in the German capital. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has described the stone as "spiritual treasure."

   

A sacred stone for the indigenous Pemon community arrived in Venezuela on Thursday, more than two decades after it was taken for a public art exhibition in the German capital, Berlin.

Bavarian artist Wolfgang Kraker von Schwarzenfeld removed the so-called Kueka stone from Venezuela in 1998. He claimed that the Venezuelan government had given him permission to use it for an exhibition, saying it would symbolize love.

Von Schwarzenfeld's Global Stones Project brought together five large stones from across the globe, with the others symbolizing awakening, hope, forgiveness and peace.

"I spoke with ministers, indigenous people, managers and the man on the street, and learned about Venezuelans' ambitions and problems," von Schwarzenfeld said. "I filed an application and started the project. South of the Orinoco River, I found a red granite boulder to be the first stone for my project."

Read more: Brazil's Amazon rainforest has become the Wild West for illegal gold miners

'Spiritual treasure'

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Thursday said the sacred stone was a "spiritual and cultural treasure" for the country.

"The Kueka stone begins its journey back to the place it had always been for thousands of years," Maduro said in a televised speech.

The 30-ton (27-metric ton) stone will now be transferred from a Caribbean port to Venezuela's Gran Sabana grasslands region, home to the world's tallest waterfall.

The Pemon community believes the Kueka stone represents the story of two lovers from different tribes who defied the gods to marry, only to be turned to separate stones as punishment. The Kueka stone is described as the Pemons' grandmother.

Germany had returned the stone as a sign of "goodwill and willingness to respect the peoples' cultural rights," according to Venezuelan officials.

Novelist Arundhati Roy claims pandemic exposes India's 'crisis of hatred against Muslims'

The Man Booker Prize winner has said the Indian government is exploiting COVID-19 to ramp up suppression of Muslims, comparing the tactic to one used by the Nazis. The BJP rejected the claim as "false" and "misleading

Arundhati Roy on coronavirus: 'Situation in India is approaching genocidal'
VIDEO AT THE ENDPolitical activist Arundhati Roy accused the Indian government on Friday of exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims.

She told DW that this alleged strategy on the part of the Hindu nationalist government would "dovetail with this illness to create something which the world should really keep its eyes on," adding that "the situation is approaching genocidal."
"I think what has happened is COVID-19 has exposed things about India that all of us knew," said Roy. "We are suffering, not just from COVID, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger."

India's 1.3 billion people are currently in the midst of a six-week nationwide lockdown. The world's second-most populous nation has so far confirmed 13,835 infections of the novel coronavirus, resulting in 452 deaths, according to figures from the Johns Hopkins Institute. It's often cited as a country where the gap between official numbers and real case numbers could be particularly high.

"This crisis of hatred against Muslims," she continued, "comes on the back of a massacre in Delhi, which was the result of people protesting against the anti-Muslim citizenship law. Under the cover of COVID-19 the government is moving to arrest young students, to fight cases against lawyers, against senior editors, against activists and intellectuals. Some of them have recently been put in jail."

Contentious typhus comparison

Roy claimed the government was exploiting the virus in a tactic reminiscent of one used by the Nazis during the Holocaust. "The whole of the organization, the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group — Editor's note] to which Modi belongs, which is the mother ship of the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], has long said that India should be a Hindu nation. Its ideologues have likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. And if you look at the way in which they are using COVID, it was very much like typhus was used against the Jews to ghettoize them, to stigmatize them."

Read more: Crowd of migrant workers chased out of Mumbai station

Roy's theory that the pandemic has been used as an opportunity to maginalize Muslims in India has subsequently been met with opposition from supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Nalin Kohli, a BJP spokesman, told DW that he rejects Roy's viewpoint "in its totality" and that the claims are " misleading, false and completely racist."

"Not one decision or policy of Narendra Modi’s government distinguishes between Indians on the basis of religion, caste or creed but under due process of law," he stated.

Meanwhile Rakesh Sinha, a member of parliament for the BJP, tweeted that Modi's government is "free from any bias," and that the prime minister "has been tirelessly working to save Indians from coronacrisis" but that "useless idiots, like Arundhati Roy are trying to pour communal poison in public discourse."

Another BJP member tweeted that Roy "should be put on trial", adding that her accusations "amounts to sedition."

AUDIOS AND VIDEOS ON THE TOPIC
Arundhati Roy on coronavirus: 'Situation in India is approaching genocidal'

Germany: Coronavirus aid resumes after scammers clone state website
Fraudsters cloned official government sites, hoping victims would apply there by mistake, allowing them to then claim the money in the victims' names. The scheme forced one state to shut down its website for a week.


Self-employed individuals and small businesses in Germany will again be eligible to apply online for coronavirus-related state emergency aid in North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW), the state's economic ministry said on Friday.

Applications had been halted shortly before the Easter holiday, when it was found that thieves had made a copy of the website which they were using for fraudulent activities.

NRW Economy Minister Andreas Pinkwart said the process to receive the aid would continue to be digital and that the money would be paid out next week.

As the coronavirus lockdown began, the German government swiftly approved a total of €50 billion ($54.382 billion) for rapid support to the self-employed and the smallest businesses with 10 or fewer employees.

Website cloned

Pinkwart had promised that the emergency aid would be "as simple, lean and unbureaucratic as possible," insisting that the office would "not accept printed applications."

Fraudsters moved quickly and intercepted prospective applicants by cloning the state's official website. When users entered their data into the fake site unwittingly, it was the fraudsters and not the government that was receiving it.

Scammers then took the data — including things like name, address, employer information, tax details and bank details — and then used it to apply for the money themselves on the real website, albeit with different bank details.

A state prosecutor's office told German news agency DPA last week that it was suspected the scams were being run by "a professional criminal organization" that appeared to cross national borders.

To protect from fraud, Pinkwart announced that tax officials would now check the applicants' data and compare it with the state's official information.

NRW is not the only state to have been affected. On Friday, Hamburg, Berlin, Saxony and Bremen all reported similar cases of fraud with their state aid websites.

Europe-wide scams

Last month, the European law enforcement agency Europol warned that criminals were taking advantage of the coronavirus emergency, doing everything from selling counterfeit products, impersonating health workers and hacking computers as many citizens do their jobs online at home.

"Criminals have quickly seized the opportunities to exploit the crisis by adapting their modes of operation or developing new criminal activities," Europol Executive Director, Catherine de Bolle said in a statement.

Europol's report found that the top illicit activities were cybercrime, fraud, counterfeit and substandard goods, and organized property crime.

jcg/msh (AFP, dpa)

AMERICAN RIGHT WING PROTESTERS R DUM

Christian Christensen

@ChrChristensen

Right-wingers in the US holding up signs saying "Be Like Sweden!" re #COVID19 might want to consider that Sweden also has universal healthcare, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave, paid parental leave, paid vacations and subsidized daycare and after-school care. #COVID19

What AOC Gets that Bernie Didn’tProgressive pot-stirrer Sean McElwee has some thoughts about what went wrong for Sanders supporters, and how they can get what they want (eventually).

Brittany Greeson/Getty Images
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD 04/16/2020
Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

The 27-year-old progressive activist Sean McElwee made the POLITICO 50 list of influential thinkers in 2017 for “Abolish ICE,” a pithy slogan that more liberal Democrats adapted into a quixotic campaign to dismantle the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

It didn’t succeed, of course, and President Donald Trump gleefully elevated it into a symbol of out-of-touch Democratic extremism. But it stretched the limits of the immigration debate—and it became a rallying cry for young lefty insurgents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Latina bartender from the Bronx who embraced it on the way to her out-of-nowhere upset of an establishment Democratic congressman.

McElwee, founder of the polling and policy group Data for Progress, is one of those young lefty insurgents, a proud limit-stretcher from the AOC-Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. But he’s a data guy as well as a progress guy, and he has some thoughts about why Sanders lost so handily to Joe Biden, an avatar of the old-school centrist Democratic thinking that McElwee yearns to disrupt.

The American left is at a crossroads, with some leading activists defiantly refusing to support Biden. McElwee thinks that’s a huge strategic mistake, and he doesn’t expect many progressives to make it in November; this week, Sanders and fellow liberal icon Elizabeth Warren endorsed Biden, and AOC also called for a united front against Trump. McElwee may be an ideologue, but he’s a pragmatic big-tent ideologue who believes the left can best advance its agenda from inside the Democratic Party—and can eventually come to control it.

First, though, McElwee believes the left needs to stop making other huge strategic mistakes. He’s a millennial with some surprisingly old-school ideas about politics, and he worries that his fellow young lefties will marginalize their movement if they think they can change the world without realistic compromise, serious policy work, transactional coalition-building and the kind of public opinion research that by one measure made Data for Progress the most accurate pollster of the 2020 primary.

He obviously grasps the allure of a slogan like Abolish ICE, but he also grasps the dangers of purism; he quips that he always advises politicians, like the patients in prescription drug ads, to ask their campaign managers if Abolish ICE is right for their districts. McElwee is big on metrics and policy details, and he wishes the rest of the left was, too.

In this conversation with POLITICO Magazine’s Michael Grunwald, McElwee shared his critical thoughts about the future of the left, its recent defeats at the polls, its reliance on mobilization rather than persuasion, its relationship with Biden and the Democratic Party, and why its politicians need to care about cheese as well as health care. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

***

GRUNWALD: Establishment sellout Joe Biden is the nominee! Is the left vanquished?

MCELWEE: Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way. The next generation of Democrats is much closer to the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth-Warren-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez view of the world than the Joe Biden view, and over time they’ll age into higher voting rates. Remember, Sanders became a senator at the height of the neoliberal-Third Way backlash to the New Deal-Great Society era, when it seemed like that centrist consensus had an eternal stranglehold over the party. AOC is entering politics at a very different time where progressives are winning more and more battles. Just a decade ago, 64 Democrats in the House wanted to attach a ban on abortion funding to Obamacare! Today, that would never happen. Today, we’re fighting about how ambitious the public option should be. Even with Biden as the nominee, the Democratic agenda is more progressive than ever.

But yeah, we lost a battle, and there were severe strategic missteps that people on the left are still underestimating. The media narrative was that Sanders was poised to win, but the early states were disproportionately caucus states and disproportionately white, which papered over some worrying political weaknesses for progressives. If Iowa and Nevada had been primaries, we would have seen those weaknesses earlier.

GRUNWALD: But Sanders seemed to do great for a socialist; he raised so much money and generated so much excitement. What do you mean by “severe strategic missteps”?

MCELWEE: If you had to boil it down to one problem, it was the belief the Sanders people articulated early on that in a big field, they could win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote. You know, elections tend to be won with 50 percent of the vote. If you’re not even trying to attract 50 percent to your vision, it leads to this view that you don’t need to persuade anyone, you just need to lock in the base and mobilize new voters. That’s setting yourself up for failure. And it’s inspired some very pernicious thinking in the progressive world: Those people who don’t believe what we believe, we can’t win them, so fuck them. You saw this most aggressively on Twitter, where you saw people say: “We need to crush these people, they’re forever lost to us.”

GRUNWALD: Bend the knee!

MCELWEE: Some people are like oh, Twitter, that’s not real. But the campaign articulated the same strategy! When we shut ourselves off from conversations about how to persuade voters, we’re making it a lot harder for progressives to win elections and deliver on progressive policy goals. Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.

Look, one problem with running a campaign as a movement is that movements exist outside public opinion. It’s notable to me that Sanders and Warren both chose not to rely too much on pollsters. They got a lot of praise for that, but politics is about creating a nervous system for public opinion. You need constant feedback on your issues. I think one reason South Carolina and Super Tuesday came as such massive surprises was the campaigns focused on what moves small-dollar donors on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Yeah, a viral ad with heated rhetoric can raise millions of dollars, but you don’t see the Americans who get turned off by it. There’s no emoji for that. They just go about their daily lives and don’t vote for you; you’re not even trying to reach them.

GRUNWALD: Right, a lot of progressives made fun of Biden’s boring message that America is a good country full of good people, kind of “Make America Decent Again.” But it worked.

MCELWEE: Again, Warren and Sanders chose not to invest heavily in polling or focus groups. They crafted powerful messages, and they executed well, but those messages didn’t hit the Democratic electorate. That’s why we do message testing and survey research! I’m a college-educated 18-to-34-year-old urban professional, so I’m a tiny percentage of the electorate. I’d be pretty surprised if what appealed to me appealed to the modal American voter. The modal American voter is noncollege and over 50. People like me have to stop trusting our instincts. We should make ads that nonpolitical voters want to see, not ads that we want to see. Go look at the ads by [Alabama Democratic senator] Doug Jones or [Michigan Democratic governor] Gretchen Whitmer; they might not seem appealing on social media but they move votes.

GRUNWALD: People always trash poll-tested, focused-grouped finger-in-the-wind politicians, but you’re suggesting it wouldn’t hurt the left to at least check which way the wind is blowing. Can you give an example of how refusing to do that hurt Sanders?

MCELWEE: Sanders did well with more independent nontraditional Democrats in 2016, and that convinced a lot of progressive leaders that his white working-class voters were supporting a progressive agenda, not just voting against Hillary Clinton. That led to some huge missteps in 2018, when the left was focused on knocking on doors in rural Wisconsin, while the center of the party targeted the so-called professional managerial class in the suburbs and turned a lot of districts from red to blue.

It turns out that noncollege whites are pretty conservative, while the much-derided “suburban wine moms” are much more supportive of a progressive agenda. The Republican agenda of tax cuts doesn’t really benefit them anymore, while Republican cuts to services like childcare and public higher education really hurt them. Jesse Ferguson told us in your magazine that the suburbs would be fertile ground, but we said fuck you, and we saw again in 2020 that the left is way behind in engaging with those voters.

GRUNWALD: But was it really just bad targeting? I mean, it’s hard to win a Democratic primary when you’re not a Democrat, and you’re expressing contempt for Democrats.

MCELWEE: It was smart of AOC to identify as a Democrat, because most Democrats do believe the things that progressives believe. And most Democrats have quite intense party loyalty. One of the biggest misunderstandings on the left is the idea that the Democratic brand is bad. In fact, the Democratic Party brand is one of the strongest brands in the country. It’s something millions of Americans trust. That includes the African American and Latino voters who are sympathetic to progressive ideas, and are voters we need to persuade to support our candidates. Running as an independent outsider would have helped Sanders in a general election, but it was definitely a problem in the primary.

Look, the Democratic Party is a coalition party with five partners: African American groups, Latino groups, women’s groups, unions and progressive groups. If you’re only one of five factions, maybe one-fourth of the party, you should only expect to win about one-fourth or one-fifth of the victories. You need to work with other groups in the coalition to achieve political success. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose, that’s how life works. Ocasio-Cortez has figured that out, but not all progressives have.

GRUNWALD: Bernie is arguing that progressives won the ideas primary. Is that even true?

MCELWEE: It’s certainly true that most Democrats believe in very progressive ideas. It’s hard to find a progressive policy that doesn’t have strong support among Democrats. But this primary was about electability, and progressives weren’t able to persuade a majority of Democrats that their ideas are shared by a majority of the country. And that’s partly because Sanders and Warren didn’t emphasize the most popular progressive policies.

I mean, look at the Blue Dog Democrats. They don’t campaign on how Wall Street and pharma should be free to do whatever the fuck they want. They run on giving small-business loans to the troops, and protecting people with pre-existing conditions, and then after they win they vote to deregulate Wall Street and protect pharma. We should be talking about the parts of our agenda that are winners with voters, because there are progressive ideas that can fire up the base and persuade general election voters.

GRUNWALD: Like what?

MCELWEE: I’d propose a focus on paid family leave and childcare; ambitious climate action and clean energy; and lowering drug prices. You’ve got to narrow your agenda, because it’s hard to get voters to focus on too much. They have a lot going on their lives, from the Vanderpump Rules to getting their kids to school. With just those three priorities, you can show voters an agenda that will make their lives better, weaken major industries that are harming them, and put more money in their pockets. Why not focus on things that are popular?

GRUNWALD: It’s funny to hear you say that, because you came up with the idea of “Abolish ICE.” I remember it was your Twitter handle for a while. And that seems like a classic example of a lefty position that might be worthy to do but is terribly unpopular politically.

MCELWEE: We always saw it as left of the left spectrum, and that’s fine in some districts. One of the goals of activism and politics is to stretch the political imagination to understand the fundamental inhumanity of many of our institutions. “Abolish ICE” did that. Candidates like AOC who ran on it were representing their constituents. I don’t think we should be afraid to say that some Democrats in some districts are going to represent much more progressive interests than country as a whole. Nobody said “Abolish ICE” was a winning persuasion message. Not everything has to be a winning persuasion message. I’m just saying we need some winning persuasion messages to win nationwide.

GRUNWALD: Medicare for All was also seen as a far-left position that hurt Warren, and maybe Bernie too. And then Biden said, that’s a bit much, how about a public option? We’ll do more, just not everything. Apparently Democratic voters thought that was more realistic.

MCELWEE: It’s clear there’s significant Democratic support for a single-payer system. And the polling data didn’t show that Medicare for All was a wildly unpopular albatross. But voters were voting based on who was perceived as electable, and Medicare for All received significant amounts of negative earned media that made it seem like a problem. I think a candidate who embraced Medicare for All could defeat Trump, because Medicare is popular, and people understand the intuitive goal of expanding it to all Americans. But there was never much effort to explain what exactly it was. Was it an ideal? Was it a plan? What was the theory of the case for how would it be passed and implemented? This was an electability election, defined by competence and the ability to move an agenda, and voters didn’t believe progressives could do that.

GRUNWALD: Well, today Bernie endorsed Biden, so of course he’s a neoliberal sellout, too, at least on Twitter. A lot of lefties say they’re Never Biden, he’s just as bad as Trump.

MCELWEE: I think there are 50,000 Bernie-to-Trump voters, and they all have Twitter accounts. They’re an incredibly small portion of the electorate.

GRUNWALD: Fair enough, but it’s important for Biden to make sure the left comes out to support him. Are there policies he can adopt that would help?

MCELWEE: Again, I think the first thing the left and Biden need to understand is that the progressive agenda isn’t just a mobilization agenda; it can be a persuasion agenda. There are core groups with progressive voters but also persuadable voters, and I think those policies I mentioned can really help.

Take young people, A lot of young independents and Republicans who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016 are worried about core elements of Trump’s agenda, especially climate change. I think a strong climate agenda that emphasizes job creation as well as equity issues can be a central element of a persuasion agenda. And remember, not all African Americans and Latinos are Democrats. We need to hit those voters with compelling messages that fit with their lived experiences, and a focus on environmental justice and clean water and clean air can be very persuasive.

The next group I’d look at are suburban women. They’re not all Democrats, either, and plenty of the ones who voted for Trump are now persuadable. A paid leave and childcare agenda could really speak to the rising economic costs they’re facing. And then you’ve got older persuadables. Trump has absolutely failed to deliver pharmaceutical reform or reduce drug prices, and Democrats could make inroads on those issues. So I’ve named you a bunch of progressive policies that poll at 70 to 80 percent. Those would be some great issues where Biden could be looking to embrace the left.

GRUNWALD: You’re talking about policies that can persuade less progressive voters. But what about the hardcore left? I always saw Bernie as a cool and fun cause for young rebels; supporting Biden obviously isn’t cool or fun. But I saw Cornel West said he’s not going to vote third party this year because the left needs to join an anti-fascist coalition against Trump — that makes it sound kind of cool and fun! Could that mobilize the left?

MCELWEE: I think the vast majority of progressives will come out for Biden. Right now, we’re still in a period of mourning, and frankly, Biden will never drive a lot of enthusiasm. But at the end of the day, we have Donald Trump on the ballot, and every day he does something worse. There are some media personalities who would benefit from Biden losing, but no one who cares about progressive values would see Trump’s reelection as a victory. You also have far less compelling third-party candidates than you had in 2016. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were both effective politicians, whether or not you liked them. This time, you’re not seeing that kind of third-party candidate, and I think you’ll see a pretty dramatic decline in third-party voters. Candidate quality matters!

Still, as I said, there are a lot of progressive policies Biden could adopt that would make him more attractive to progressives while also helping to persuade the unpersuaded.

GRUNWALD: He just endorsed Medicare for 60-year-olds. He’s come out for student loan relief, some of Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy reforms. Will the left meet him halfway?

MCELWEE: Sure. Remember, Biden is viewed a bit more favorably with the left than Hillary Clinton was. We can have a long conversation about why, but it’s a fact. And Bernie Sanders has a closer relationship with Biden than he had with Clinton in 2016. Also, Clinton was deep in the weeds on policy, which made it harder for her to make concessions to the left. With Biden, you see a real interest in finding areas where there could be unity, and I think there’s more interest from all the wings of the party in having unity in 2020. I remain optimistic about a united front.

GRUNWALD: You may be a wacko radical, but you’re a pretty pragmatic dude.

MCELWEE: My view is that politics is the slow boring of hard boards. Really, that view almost overstates how quickly political change happens. Look, in 2020, mistakes were made, but the basic problem was that the progressive movement wasn’t yet powerful enough to win a Democratic primary. We’ll be back at it in four or eight years. Eventually, we will be powerful enough, and we’ll have the opportunity to pass a lot of laws.

I’d like to see progressives focus on building the infrastructure and policy support for our priorities. I do worry about the lack of dedication to learning the nitty-gritty details of how the process works. I’ve worked on legislation in New York state, and I’ve seen how the simplest thing, like changing voter registration from opt-in to opt-out at the DMV, can require an incredible amount of bureaucratic competence, technical capacity, things like that. Progressives need to dedicate ourselves to learning how those bureaucracies function, or we’re going to be woefully unprepared to implement our agenda.

I also think progressives need to focus on building power down ballot. We always complain that Obama failed to do this, but we seem to forget it the second we start thinking about our own movement: This year, a progressive came within 4 points of beating [conservative Democratic Texas congressman] Henry Cuellar. Every progressive who’s doing an autopsy of the presidential primary should be doing an autopsy of why we didn’t invest more in that race. There’s been an utter neglect of down-ballot work.

GRUNWALD: You mentioned ways that Biden can reach out to the left, and also the need for progressives to get deeper into the weeds. The Green New Deal seems to be right in the intersection of those two concepts, where Biden seems open to real climate action, and progressive groups like yours have done a lot of work on a real agenda that’s helped change the conversation in America. But not always in a good way; Republicans have started trashing all climate action as Green New Deal radicalism, banning cows and airplanes. What have you learned from the Green New Deal process?

MCELWEE: I think we’ve learned to understand how our agendas are going to be attacked, and how we can prepare for those attacks. For example, there needs to be a cost estimate, because otherwise the right will make up its own. We came up with a cost estimate for AOC’s Green New Deal for Public Housing, and even when Republicans would attack it, they would use our estimates for costs and jobs. That’s better than letting them fill in blanks. We also did polling ahead of time, so we could show it was a popular idea. Otherwise, if an idea becomes tarred as unpopular, it actually becomes unpopular. Our internal research found that merely showing people evidence that an idea was popular increased support for that idea.

Again, these are procedural matters. They’re not big ideas. This is the blocking and tackling that we need to get down tighter. Look, we’ve found that you can’t get voters, particularly black and Latino voters, to care about climate change if you don’t connect it to their communities, issues like toxic mold and clean water. But it turns out that’s a very popular approach with the entire public.

GRUNWALD: But the Green New Deal itself has become kind of toxic itself. Now it’s seen as cow farts and the eleventy-trillion-dollar Republican cost estimate and banning airplanes, which I guess ended up happening anyway. Is that reversible?

MCELWEE: Again, the things at the edge of public consciousness are always going to be unpopular. If they were popular, they wouldn’t be at the edge of public consciousness and political reality. But the Green New Deal has pretty dramatically expanded what Democrats want to do on climate without impacting our partisan advantage on climate.

GRUNWALD: The slow boring of hard boards, right? You want the left to do less of the sexy stuff and more of the unglamorous stuff.

MCELWEE: A lot of leftists don’t think of Data for Progress as a leftist organization—not because they don’t think we’re leftists, but because we started an organization! We’re engaging in politics! And yeah, we’re engaging with Democrats; we gave advice to every primary candidate except Tulsi Gabbard. I always say we love all Democrats, just in different amounts. Working and pushing inside the Democratic Party is the way that progressive gains will happen. They’ll never be exactly what we want, but that’s life.

GRUNWALD: You’re kind of saying: Trust the process.

MCELWEE: Well, a lot of progressives were upset about the Affordable Care Act. And yeah, we wish there was a public option. But look what happened: The Medicaid expansion has been a big success, while the private exchanges have struggled, and that’s helped make our case that delivering concrete benefits through the public sector works, and it’s undermined the neoliberal policy strategy. My view is that the Democratic Party is moving every day towards a place where young progressives should feel comfortable. AOC is going to be the moral center of the party in a decade, and it’s not just her.

It’s going to take some time. You saw how long it took movement conservatism to take over the Republican Party. And we’re going to have to do the hard work of reaching out to nonideological Democrats who don’t see the world our way. I mean, look at [conservative Democratic congressman] Dan Lipinski, we finally beat him, and that’s great, but he still got nearly 50 percent of Democratic voters—not because he’s pro-life, but because he sits on the transportation committee and works with local unions to represent their interests. We can’t forget about that kind of basic politics. Bernie Sanders always made sure to deliver for Vermont. [Wisconsin Senator] Tammy Baldwin is a great progressive, and she’s got a big interest in single-payer health care, but she also has a big interest in cheese. It’s OK for progressives to care about cheese.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=AOC

WATCH: John Oliver tries to ‘cast out’ right-wing media like a televangelist

April 20, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver appeared Sunday while still quarantining from what he refers to as his “white void.”

He returned to talk about coronavirus, noting that it’s hard to keep up with the information and misinformation about COVID-19. For example, microwaving your mail doesn’t save you and don’t buy breast milk, it isn’t a cure.

Oliver turned to bash the protesters that were outside of state capitols over the weekend, demanding an end to the lockdown during the pandemic.

“It will force us to stay at home longer!” Oliver exclaimed. “How could people possibly believe sh*t like that?”

But the bad information people are absorbing is coming from three major sources, he explained.

His first example: TV preacher Kenneth Copeland, who “took care” of COVID-19 weeks ago by “blowing the wind of God from you.” He explained that his spell would destroy it forever, and it would “never be back.”

“Spitting all over the place is not going to cure anything unless your goal is to give the coronavirus the coronavirus,” said Oliver.

Televangelists are just one of the many places people can get information. There was the conspiracy theory that 5G gives it to you, prompting people in the UK to set fire to cellular towers. Such BS comes from lies on the internet that people read on message boards and somehow believe are true.

But the main cause of misinformation is conservative news, Oliver explained.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, has been saying that the coronavirus was nothing more than “the common cold.” He claimed that it was the 19th coronavirus and that there have been 18 before it. As Kellyanne Conway learned this week, COVID-19 stands for corona-virus-2019.

Oliver noted that it has been easy for people in conservative media to fold COVID into their conspiracy theories they’ve been sowing for years. Fox News, for example, tried to downplay the warnings and deaths, claiming that it was all a lie from the liberal media. The problem, of course, is that as the virus spread, the numbers are spiking, and their own viewers are dying.

The network welcoming on Dr. Phil, who was trending on Twitter for almost two days after he claimed coronavirus, wasn’t as dangerous as car crashes, smoking deaths, or drownings. He didn’t even get the number right for the people who die of drowning, which he claimed was over 300,000. In fact, it’s only 4,000.

Now Fox is on the move for promoting an unproven drug used to help cure Malaria and to treat things like Lupus. Tucker Carlson welcomed on a guest who was an “adviser to Stanford University,” which proved to be news to Stanford, who said they’d never heard of the guy. But Carlson touted him as some kind of expert on the drug hydroxychloroquine.

Oliver said it’s easy to write off people like Limbaugh or Fox News, but they draw a massive million-person audience to hear the nonsense. Sean Hannity similarly has been spreading lies like claiming hydroxychloroquine can save people’s lives because after taking the drug, they got over coronavirus. Oliver explained that someone he knows ate a hotdog and didn’t even get COVID, so it clearly is the miracle cure people have been waiting for.

“I get Trump, Fox, and those protesters want this to be over, and I do too,” Oliver said. “But for what it’s worth, I know people who’ve died from this. And I know people who are taking hydroxychloroquine because they think it will save them. And I know people with Lupus who are down to their last pills.”

One trick Oliver hasn’t tried to get rid of the right-wing media is to blow on them like Kenneth Copeland did to banish the coronavirus. So, he gave it a shot. It’s unclear if it will work.

Watch his takedown below

Here’s what Christian farmers I know think about COVID-19 — and how it might bring America together
 April 18, 2020 Salon- Commentary


Eric Wolgemuth, a 58-year-old farmer who lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, called me at my home in San Francisco to check in not long after the school that my son attends officially closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. “You know what folks are saying around here, don’t you?” Eric’s voice is low, with a touch of a drawl.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a Democratic conspiracy,” he said, referring to the maelstrom in the news surrounding the virus.

Eric and I hail from completely different worlds. He is a devout Christian, from a largely white and rural community where many never go to college; I’m a biracial city dweller and a member of the coastal elite. We might have never crossed paths but for the farm that my family has long owned in Nebraska. Eric is what’s known as a “custom harvester”: Every year, he hires a crew of young men to work as independent contractors, and they drive semi trucks, tractors and combine equipment hundreds of miles from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains to cut wheat for farmers—including my family.

A job on Eric’s crew is competitive. This year Eric had chosen two new men to operate trucks, but they had not received their CDL licenses before the DMV shut down in mid-March. In early April, Eric usually drives to Grand Island, Nebraska, to pick up freshly manufactured combine harvesters. But the order is delayed this year and it’s unclear if the machines will be ready for harvest in May.

Other harvesters he knew had even worse problems; Jim Deibert, based in Colby, Kansas, usually hires men from Australia and South Africa. Travel restrictions have made it impossible to bring in international travel workers this year, leaving men like Jim without a team.

As we talked about the changes that COVID-19 was bringing to our two worlds, I thought back to a trip I took with Eric and his crew during the 2017 harvest. He had invited me to come along so I could better understand the world of agriculture.

On the road, religion had been a constant. Eric has always recruited from Amish, Mennonite and other Anabaptist families in his community. Each Sunday, we went to church, and Eric prayed before every meal. And one unexpected subject recurred with a tenacious intensity: What would happen, the crew liked to muse, during the apocalypse?

One time, the fantasy involved all satellites world-wide breaking down. The people in the city — who couldn’t hunt, farm or fix their own machinery — would go hungry. They would need help from men like the harvesters to repair all the equipment.

Then the crew pondered an even bigger problem: the food supply. “Won’t take long for them to show up and take your food, Eric,” said Amos, another member of the crew. Amos was referring to the immense grain bins that Eric has on his property in Pennsylvania, filled with wheat, corn and soybeans; successful farmers like Eric store grain and wait to sell it when the price is opportune. Other farmers must either sell right after harvest or pay rent to pool their grain in a cooperative storage facility.

Eric insisted there would be no problem. “We’d feed the people. We’d have a soup kitchen,” he said. Feeding people was, for Eric, part of being a Christian — and a farmer.

The fantasy persisted. “Do you think God will deliver a message soon? To show that social media is a deviation from God’s message and show city people how selfish they are?” Amos asked.

Eric’s 23-year-old son, Juston, frequently interjected during these heated conversations. City people, he said, shouldn’t be so easily dismissed: “Who do you think buys the food we grow?”

Another time, I brought up a U.N. report that projected that by 2050, Earth would be home to 9.8 billion people. To feed them, we would either need to get more food out of the planet or make more arable land by clearing forests, perhaps even the Amazon. Eric thought instead that we ought to try to colonize Mars: Men like the harvesters were well equipped for the loneliness of space and the daily work of planting and harvesting.

Michael didn’t see the point. “Revelation is coming,” he said. God would soon judge us, and there was no reason to extend our lives through space exploration.

Another harvester, Samuel, agreed. He had traveled to Israel to study the Book of Revelation — the final book in the Protestant Bible — and had concluded that the end times were indeed coming.

So ingrained were such ideas that it became impossible for me to enter the world of the harvesters fully without contending with the idea of an apocalypse. But over time, I began to suspect that, at least for these men, the end-times fantasies weren’t solely about “city people” getting their comeuppance.

“People don’t understand how much heart and soul goes into farming,” Amos said to me sorrowfully on more than one occasion. He wanted city dwellers to know that his work mattered. He, like the other harvesters, wanted to be seen.

That summer, I spent more time with the Bible than I ever had. I reread Revelation, which indeed contains quite a lot about precisely how the world would end. But one thing is often left out when Revelation is discussed: At the end of the world, things aren’t completely destroyed. There are no farms, but there is a city. The tree of life, not seen since Genesis, stands in the middle of this city and — like some replicator from “Star Trek” — makes enough food so people will never go hungry.

I sometimes asked the farmers about the implications of all of us ending up in a city, the place many of them regarded with such suspicion. Samuel, who had read Revelation so carefully, said, “She’s right,” and offered nothing more.

Back on the phone just days ago, Eric and I reminisced about these conversations. He said he has been staying at home with his family and attending church over the Internet. But come April 15, he will begin planting corn on his own farmland. The first week of May, he will drive out to Texas with his crew to start the wheat harvest. “This is the real deal,” he said of the virus. But quarantine or no, the grain won’t wait and will need to be taken from the field. “I had hoped this would bring us together.”

“It still might,” I said. “We kind of have no choice.”

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of the book “American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland,” out now from Graywolf Press.

France says no evidence Covid-19 linked to Wuhan research lab set up with French help

April 18, 2020 By Agence France-Presse


France on Friday said there was no factual evidence so far of a link between the Covid-19 outbreak and the work of the P4 research laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which France helped set up and where the current pandemic started.

“We would like to make it clear that there is to this day no factual evidence corroborating recent reports in the US press linking the origins of Covid-19 and the work of the P4 laboratory of Wuhan, China,” an official at President Emmanuel Macron‘s office said.

The broad scientific consensus holds that SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the coronavirus, originated in bats.

In 2004, France signed an agreement with China to establish a research lab on infectious diseases of biosafety level 4, the highest level, in Wuhan, according to a French decree signed by then-foreign minister Michel Barnier.

US trying to determine if virus originated in lab
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday his government was trying to determine whether the coronavirus emanated from a lab in Wuhan, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what they know.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that US intelligence indicates that the coronavirus likely occurred naturally, as opposed to being created in a laboratory in China, but there is no certainty either way.

The Washington Post said this week that national security officials in the Trump administration have long suspected research facilities in Wuhan to be the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

As far back as February, the Chinese state-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology dismissed rumours that the virus may have been artificially synthesised at one of its laboratories or perhaps escaped from such a facility.

The allegations came amid mounting international criticism of China’s initial cover-up of the virus and suspicions that Beijing had not revealed the extent of the public health crisis due to economic concerns.

China on Friday revised its pandemic toll again, this time by a major 50 percent increase in the total death toll. But Chinese authorities denied it was due to a cover-up, maintaining the revision was due to insufficient capacity during the peak of the pandemic.

The lab at the heart of the controversy
The Wuhan research laboratory at the heart of the controversy is home to the China Centre for Virus Culture Collection, the largest virus bank in Asia which, preserves more than 1,500 strains, according to its website.

The complex contains Asia’s first maximum security lab equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) — dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission, such as Ebola.

The 300 million yuan ($42 million) lab was completed in 2015, and finally opened in 2018, with the founder of a French bio-industrial firm, Alain Merieux, acting as a consultant in its construction. The institute also has a P3 laboratory that has been in operation since 2012.

The 3,000-square-metre P4 lab, located in a square building with a cylindrical annex, lies near a pond at the foot of a forested hill in Wuhan’s remote outskirts.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)