Is There Any Better Time Than Now For a General Strike?

May Day offers a perfect opportunity to reshape labor relations during this pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the inequalities baked into the U.S.’s capitalist system—one that deems nurses and grocery workers “essential,” but leaves them with just as few rights and privileges as they had before the crisis struck. The scenario before us, where society depends more than ever on the bottom rung of the working class, offers a perfect storm for these “essential workers” to use their leverage and demand better protections for themselves now and in the future. This perfect storm may well unfold on May 1—a day with historic roots in the U.S., marked by workers all around the world to demand their labor rights.

For those of us considered “non-essential workers,” May 1, 2020, also offers an opportunity to say a resounding “no” to President Donald Trump, who is desperate to salvage his flagging shot at reelection and demanding that people return to work at the beginning of May. Trump has made clear that his needs are more important than ours in defying health experts who agree that May 1 is far too early to return to “normal.” He has claimed “total” authority over lifting state and citywide quarantines during the pandemic. A general strike on May 1 would lay waste to his wishful thinking for totalitarianism.

Kali Akuno, the co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, laid out his organization’s call for a May Day strike this year and shared with me in an interview that, “we are calling on all workers to come as one, in particular the essential workers to strike for their lives.” He explained that, “If Trump is calling for businesses to return to normal, if that is allowed to proceed without the personal protective gear being in place for every single one of our essential workers, we’re just going to create a calamity and keep this crisis going further.”

Workers deemed “essential” have been forced to work in order to keep their jobs but offered little recompense or even protection from the virus.

Akuno also sees the pandemic as a turning point where workers can send a message of refusing to “go back to business-as-usual”—the status quo where a massive underclass of working people are living paycheck-to-paycheck without adequate health care, paid leave, childcare for their dependents, or decent wages is no longer acceptable. “It was business-as-usual that allowed this to roll out in the way that it has,” he said.

Workers deemed “essential” have been forced to work in order to keep their jobs but offered little recompense or even protection from the virus. A supermarket worker at Tem’s Food Market in Macon, Mississippi, found my personal mask-making project on social media and begged me to make 20 masks for her colleagues and her. In the early days of the crisis, not only were grocery workers like her not provided with protective gear, but many were also stunningly not allowed to wear their own safety equipment such as masks and gloves. My own cousin, a grocery store manager in Boston, Massachusetts, responded to my worried queries about his health and safety saying that upper management was not permitting him and others to wear masks at work until recently. This was corroborated by supermarket analyst Phil Lempert who told the Washington Post, “One of the biggest mistakes supermarkets made early on was not allowing employees to wear masks and gloves the way they wanted to.”

It is no wonder that the workers we rely on to feed and care for us are falling ill from the virus and dying. Thousands of grocery workers have already tested positive for COVID-19 and as of mid-April more than 40 have died. Although such “essential workers” are naturally terrified of catching the virus in their workplace, their vulnerable socioeconomic status also means they cannot afford to quit. The pressure to conform and fall in line with the demands of corporate America are all too real as workers face a choice between accepting their oppression or being fired. More than 16 million Americans have already lost their jobs, and beyond a $1,200 payout from the federal government and hard-to-access unemployment benefits, there is little else to compensate them.

Still, in the face of such an untenable situation, workers are already agitating for their rights with walkouts and protests. The New York Times’ labor writer Steven Greenhouse explained that, “Fearing retaliation, American workers are generally far more reluctant to stick their necks out and protest working conditions than are workers in other industrial countries.” However, now, “with greater fear of the disease than of their bosses, workers have set off a burst of walkouts, sickouts and wildcat strikes.” Whole Foods workers had planned an action for May Day but moved up their “sick out” to March 31 to demand better conditions and pay. Amazon workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, organized a walkout, but the world’s largest retail giant simply fired the organizer. The person ultimately responsible for overseeing workers at Whole Foods and Amazon is Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man who personally racked up an extra $24 billion this year alone largely as a result of the pandemic. Bezos’s wealth and power, when contrasted with the harsh conditions under which his employees work, are an appropriate symbol for a general strike on May Day as the best chance for workers to demand their rights.

On its website, Akuno’s organization Cooperation Jackson spells out the demands it is making for May Day in encouraging workers to not show up for their jobs, and for all Americans to collectively refuse to shop for a day. These include not only short-term demands for personal protective equipment for all essential workers, but also long-term demands for a Universal Basic Income, health care for all, housing rights, and a Green New Deal.

Americans are perhaps more receptive to the idea of a general strike than they have been in a century. Alongside the hashtag #NotDying4WallStreet are calls on social media for a #GeneralStrike2020. High-profile left thinkers like Naomi Klein have already embraced the idea of a general strike. But Akuno admits that a strike will not work if only small numbers of Americans participate, saying, “we need to reach people in the hundreds of millions,” and “we have to organize in such a way where we change the fundamental dynamics of labor, how it’s valued, how it’s treated.” In other words, there is the potential for transformative change in this crisis—but only if we can seize the moment.

Sonalie Kolhatkar
Independent Media Institute

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Covid-19 and the Wasting Disease of Normalcy

“But what of the price of peace?” asked Jesuit priest and war resister Daniel Berrigan, writing from federal prison in 1969, doing time for his part in the destruction of draft records. “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise.”

From his prison cell in a year of mass movements to end the war in Vietnam and mobilizations for nuclear disarmament, Daniel Berrigan diagnosed normalcy as a disease and labeled it an obstacle to peace.

From his prison cell in a year of mass movements to end the war in Vietnam and mobilizations for nuclear disarmament, Daniel Berrigan diagnosed normalcy as a disease and labeled it an obstacle to peace. “’Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven… because of this we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace.”

Fifty one years later, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the very notion of normalcy is being questioned as never before. While Donald Trump is “chomping on the bit” to return the economy to normal very soon based on a metric in his own head, more reflective voices are saying that a return to normal, now or even in the future, is an intolerable threat to be resisted. “There is a lot of talk about returning to ‘normal’ after the COVID-19 outbreak,” says climate activist Greta Thunberg, “but normal was a crisis.”

In recent days even economists with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and columnists in the New York Times have spoken about the urgent necessity of reordering economic and political priorities to something more human- only the thickest and cruelest minds today speak of a return to normal as a positive outcome.

Early in the pandemic, the Australian journalist John Pilger reminded the world of the baseline normal that COVID-19 exacerbates: “A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America’s blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.”

I was starting high school when Daniel Berrigan asked his question and at the time, while there obviously were wars and injustices in the world, it seemed as though if we did not take them too seriously or protest too strenuously, the American Dream with its limitless potential was spread before us. Play the game, and our hopes would “march on schedule” was an implied promise that in 1969 looked like a sure thing, for us young white North Americans, anyway. A few years later, I abandoned normal life, dropped out after a year of college and joined the Catholic Worker movement where I came under the influence of Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, but these were privileged choices that I made. I did not reject normalcy because I did not think that it could deliver on its promise, but because I wanted something else. As Greta Thunberg and the Friday school strikers for climate convict my generation, few young people, even from previously privileged places, come of age today with such confidence in their futures.

The pandemic has brought home what the threats of global destruction by climate change and nuclear war should have long ago- that the promises of normalcy will never deliver in the end, that they are lies that lead those who trust in them to the ruin. Daniel Berrigan saw this a half century ago, normalcy is an affliction, a wasting disease more dangerous to its victims and to the planet than any viral plague.

Author and human rights activist Arundhati Roy is one of many who recognizes the peril and the promise of the moment: “Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

“Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity,” said Pope Francis about the present situation. “Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. This is the opportunity for conversion. Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were.”

“There are ways forward we never imagined – at huge cost, with great suffering – but there are possibilities and I’m immensely hopeful,” said Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, on Easter. “After so much suffering, so much heroism from key workers and the NHS (National Health Service) in this country and their equivalents all across the globe, once this epidemic is conquered we cannot be content to go back to what was before as if all was normal. There needs to be a resurrection of our common life, a new normal, something that links to the old but is different and more beautiful.”

In these perilous times, it is necessary to use the best social practices and to wisely apply science and technology to survive the present COVID-19 pandemic. The wasting disease of normalcy, though, is the far greater existential threat and our survival requires that we meet it with at least the same courage, generosity and ingenuity.

Brian Terrell

Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and is quarantined on a Catholic Worker farm in Maloy, Iowa

Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism’

Naomi Klein explains how governments and the global elite will exploit a pandemic.

By Marie Solis Mar 13 2020 VICE US

The coronavirus is officially a global pandemic that has so far infected 10 times more people than SARS did. Schools, university systems, museums, and theaters across the U.S. are shutting down, and soon, entire cities may be too. Experts warn that some people who suspect they may be sick with the virus, also known as COVID-19, are going about their daily routines, either because their jobs do not provide paid time off because of systemic failures in our privatized health care system.

Most of us aren’t exactly sure what to do or who to listen to. President Donald Trump has contradicted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and these mixed messages have narrowed our window of time to mitigate harm from the highly contagious virus.

These are the perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren’t all so disoriented. This chain of events isn’t unique to the crisis sparked by the coronavirus; it’s the blueprint politicians and governments have been following for decades known as the “shock doctrine,” a term coined by activist and author Naomi Klein in a 2007 book of the same name.

History is a chronicle of “shocks”—the shocks of wars, natural disasters, and economic crises—and their aftermath. This aftermath is characterized by “disaster capitalism,” calculated, free-market “solutions” to crises that exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities.

Klein says we’re already seeing disaster capitalism play out on the national stage: In response to the coronavirus, Trump has proposed a $700 billion stimulus package that would include cuts to payroll taxes (which would devastate Social Security) and provide assistance to industries that will lose business as a result of the pandemic.

“They’re not doing this because they think it’s the most effective way to alleviate suffering during a pandemic—they have these ideas lying around that they now see an opportunity to implement,” Klein said.

VICE spoke to Klein about how the “shock” of coronavirus is giving way to the chain of events she outlined more than a decade ago in The Shock Doctrine.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the basics. What is disaster capitalism? What is its relationship to the “shock doctrine”?

The way I define disaster capitalism is really straightforward: It describes the way private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises. Disaster profiteering and war profiteering isn’t a new concept, but it really deepened under the Bush administration after 9/11, when the administration declared this sort of never-ending security crisis, and simultaneously privatized it and outsourced it—this included the domestic, privatized security state, as well as the [privatized] invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “shock doctrine” is the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else. In moments of crisis, people tend to focus on the daily emergencies of surviving that crisis, whatever it is, and tend to put too much trust in those in power. We take our eyes off the ball a little bit in moments of crisis.

Where does that political strategy come from? How do you trace its history in American politics?

The shock-doctrine strategy was as a response to the original New Deal under FDR. [Economist] Milton Friedman believes everything went wrong in America under the New Deal: As a response to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a much more activist government emerged in the country, which made it its mission to directly solve the economic crisis of the day by creating government employment and offering direct relief.

If you’re a hard-core free-market economist, you understand that when markets fail it lends itself to progressive change much more organically than it does the kind of deregulatory policies that favor large corporations. So the shock doctrine was developed as a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive policies emerge. Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis is their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth in this country and around the world.

Right now we have multiple crises happening: a pandemic, a lack of infrastructure to manage it, and the crashing stock market. Can you outline how each of these components fit into the schema you outline in The Shock Doctrine ?

The shock really is the virus itself. And it has been managed in a way that is maximizing confusion and minimizing protection. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy, that’s just the way the U.S. government and Trump have utterly mismanaged this crisis. Trump has so far treated this not as a public health crisis but as a crisis of perception, and a potential problem for his reelection.

The shock doctrine was developed as a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive policies emerge.

It’s the worst-case scenario, especially combined with the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a national health care program and its protections for workers are abysmal. This combination of forces has delivered a maximum shock. It’s going to be exploited to bail out industries that are at the heart of most extreme crises that we face, like the climate crisis: the airline industry, the gas and oil industry, the cruise industry—they want to prop all of this up.



How have we seen this play out before?

In The Shock Doctrine I talk about how this happened after Hurricane Katrina. Washington think tanks like the Heritage Foundation met and came up with a wish list of “pro-free market” solutions to Katrina. We can be sure that exactly the same kinds of meetings will happen now— in fact, the person who chaired the Katrina group was Mike Pence. In 2008, you saw this play out in the original [bank] bail out, where countries wrote these blank checks to banks, which eventually added up to many trillions of dollars. But the real cost of that came in the form of economic austerity [later cuts to social services]. So it’s not just about what’s going on right now, but how they’re going to pay for it down the road when the bill for all of this comes due.

Is there anything people can do to mitigate the harm of disaster capitalism we’re already seeing in the response to the coronavirus? Are we in a better or worse position than we were during Hurricane Katrina or the last global recession?

When we’re tested by crisis we either regress and fall apart, or we grow up, and find reserves of strengths and compassion we didn’t know we were capable of. This will be one of those tests. The reason I have some hope that we might choose to evolve is that—unlike in 2008—we have such an actual political alternative that is proposing a different kind of response to the crisis that gets at the root causes behind our vulnerability, and a larger political movement that supports it.

This is what all of the work around the Green New Deal has been about: preparing for a moment like this. We just can’t lose our courage; we have to fight harder than ever before for universal health care, universal child care, paid sick leave—it’s all intimately connected.

If our governments and the global elite are going to exploit this crisis for their own ends, what can people do to take care of each other?

”'I’ll take care of me and my own, we can get the best insurance there is, and if you don't have good insurance it's probably your fault, that's not my problem”: This is what this sort of winners-take-all economy does to our brains. What a moment of crisis like this unveils is our porousness to one another. We’re seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.

We might think we’ll be safe if we have good health care, but if the person making our food, or delivering our food, or packing our boxes doesn’t have health care and can’t afford to get tested—let alone stay home from work because they don’t have paid sick leave—we won’t be safe. If we don’t take care of each other, none of us is cared for. We are enmeshed.

We’re seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.

Different ways of organizing society light up different parts of ourselves. If you’re in a system you know isn’t taking care of people and isn’t distributing resources in an equitable way, then the hoarding part of you is going to be lit up. So be aware of that and think about how, instead of hoarding and thinking about how you can take care of yourself and your family, you can pivot to sharing with your neighbors and checking in on the people who are most vulnerable.

Fascists Impersonate Climate Group to Say Coronavirus is Good for Earth

The white supremacist group Hundred-Handers appears to be impersonating Extinction Rebellion.

By Ben Makuch 26 March 2020


A Twitter account claiming to be the regional arm of climate change activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) tweeted photos of an apparent postering campaign promoting the coronavirus as a natural "cure" to the human "disease", causing a swift backlash online.

The problem: The group says it does not recognize the Twitter account and tweeted "far-right groups have put out stickers with messaging" that is not in line with the group's beliefs. In an email, Extinction Rebellion spokespeople clarified that they don't actually know who is behind the account, but social media posts by a neo-Nazi group viewed by Motherboard shows them gloating about flyers and claiming that the group impersonated Extinction Rebellion in the past.

“Earth is healing. The air and water is clearing,” reads the post by an account going by @xr_east and claiming to be the East Midlands chapter of XR, which rose to prominence last year when the group organized mass climate change protests that brought London to a standstill. “Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease!”

“The Twitter account in question is not recognised by Extinction Rebellion East Midlands or Extinction Rebellion UK and we do not support in any way the positions expressed on that account," spokespeople said in an email. "In terms of the Twitter account, we aren’t aware who is behind it. XR is a decentralised, autonomous movement, with hundreds of groups worldwide. At first glance it looks legitimate – it uses XR branding, and has retweeted a number of XR tweets. But, we have spoken with our regional coordinators and they [knew] nothing about it before today."

Motherboard is aware of an anonymous white supremacist group called the Hundred-Handers, which was recently active in the UK and has already bragged online in the past of impersonating XR posters.

“Be a real shame if our latest archive contained elements and fonts required to create extinction rebellion stickers,” says a January Telegram post from the group viewed over 8,000 times, accompanying a photo with a series of anti-immigrant and racist stickers bearing the XR logo that resemble those tweeted by the @xr_east account.

On the same day the Hundred-Handers channel then posted: “Send us your best XR edits and we'll post them and include them in our archive."

The anonymous Hundred-Handers group, which is known for its stickering campaigns around the UK and the US, takes its name from a many-headed monster in Greek mythology with a hundred hands. Members are required to download racist sticker templates promoting white supremacism and nativist ideologies prevalent among the far-right.

Though Motherboard can’t confirm that the latest posters in the East Midlands were the work of the Hundred-Handers, another recent post by the group points to more impersonations of XR.

On March 7, a photo posted in its Telegram channel shows a sticker posted in what appears to be the London Tube bearing the the XR symbol with the slogan: “White Brits a minority by 2066, preserve an endangered species.”

Some of the propaganda Hundred-Handers espouses centres on the absurd ecofascist principle that overpopulation in countries outside of Europe and North America has caused the brunt of the climate crisis.

Fascists co-opting the novel coronavirus pandemic to their advantage isn’t new. Last week, Motherboard revealed how neo-Nazi accelerationists see the global crisis as an opportunity to hasten the collapse of society, plotting to use the climate of fear surrounding the pandemic to carry out terrorist attacks.

Extinction Rebellion itself is controversial among environmentalists, activists, and leftists, with critics saying that it naturally lends itself to ecofascist ideologies; in the past, ecofascists have used the organization's name to spread their racist views. The group is also overwhelmingly white, with activists of color saying that one of its core mechanisms of action – asking people to get arrested during environmental protests – is inherently unsafe for people of color, who disproportionately have violence perpetrated against them by the police.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Experts Say Neo-Nazi 'Accelerationists' Discuss Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Crisis
"While this is online chatter, the fact that it’s seeking to take advantage of and exacerbate a crisis is alarming."By Ben Makuch Mar 18 2020

AN IMAGE FROM A MILITANT NEO-NAZI TELEGRAM CHANNEL.

While ISIS has instructed its members to steer clear of Europe and to constantly wash their hands in hopes of avoiding contracting the novel coronavirus, far-right extremists are discussing how this could be their moment to capitalize on what they see as a potential collapse of society.

The conversations, many of which are taking place on encrypted and closed Telegram channels, gives a glimpse into how the militant neo-Nazi movement—the organized sections of which have been facing increased pressure from federal law enforcement—is reacting to the global pandemic.



Though a lot of the talk is wrapped in troll culture with users sharing absurd anti-semitic theories for the virus’ origins and memes about the supposed hygienic superiority of Nazis, some online neo-Nazis are openly seeing the potential opportunity the pandemic brings to their movement: the chance for violent insurgency if authorities struggle to maintain control over society during a prolonged lockdown of the public.

“I hope it’s almost time boys,” reads one Telegram post on a known neo-Nazi account viewed hundreds of times and featuring the selfie of a man clad in military attire, combat vest and a skull mask.

Another post from an infamous channel linked to neo-Nazis fighting in eastern Ukraine shows a man with a hazmat suit, gas mask, and carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle with the words (in Ukrainian), “ready for virus and parasite control” while standing with a portrait of the Christchurch shooter hanging to his right.

The same account tells followers in Ukrainian to: “Buy ammo and get ready to rob banks. All is well.”

That neo-Nazis are at least discussing they want to be violent during times of pandemic isn’t altogether surprising nor is it evidence that actual physical violence is likely—online chatter is often purely hypothetical, though disturbing nonetheless.

In recent years, adherents of ultra violent brands of white supremacism have preached ‘accelerationism,’ which holds that western governments are currently teetering on disintegration and vulnerable to operations sowing chaos and creating societal pandemonium. Neo-Nazi movements have always tried to take advantage of times of great uncertainty, and some members of far-right extremist networks see the pressure of coronavirus as a possible trigger for the “boogaloo”; a hypothetical second civil war.

“Extreme right-wing accelerationist and neo-Nazi Telegram chats and channels have increased their frequency of calling for violence related to the coronavirus since the president’s declaration of a national emergency on March 13,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, a research analyst at the Counter Extremism Project, a U.S.-based terrorism watchdog. “The violent rhetoric also increased on March 16 as economic damage from the coronavirus has increased.”

In a post captioned “ACCELERATION REMINDER,” one well known neo-Nazi channel that provides tradecraft to evade authorities online warns followers to beware of the possible presence of National Guard units across the country if the pandemic worsens and the Trump Administration deploys troops inside the U.S.

Some posts are less violent, but recommend things like aimlessly firing off their guns in city centers, without a target, to promote panic among the public.

The many far-right extremists populating these Telegram channels are taking advantage of the moment to ramp up their rhetoric, but as Fisher-Birch cautions that, so far, is only online chatter.

“As more Americans have been reported as infected in the past few days and stock exchanges have fallen, the administrators of these chats and channels seem to have realized that this is a moment to increase their calls for disorder and advocacy for violence, whether it is against the government, against people of color, or against Jews and Muslims,” said Fisher-Birch. “While this is online chatter, the fact that it’s seeking to take advantage of and exacerbate a crisis is alarming.”

Of late, accelerationism has become more organized. For example, members of The Base and Atowmaffen Division, two neo-Nazi terror groups under a recent nationwide FBI probe resulting in several arrests of members who plotted assassinations and mass shootings, are major proponents of accelerationism.

Both groups undertook several paramilitary training camps with dozens of members in the U.S. and preached the values of survivalism in preparation for when, “shit hits the fan”—or a time of complete social decay—and plotted ways to hasten it.

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

Coronavirus Has Transformed the Climate Movement Into Something New

Activists are scrambling to deal with the pandemic while trying to make sure no one forgets about global warming.

By Mike Pearl 07 April 2020
This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Normally, Vishal Chauhan, a 30-year-old in London, would be spending his days organizing and protesting for the radical climate direct action movement Extinction Rebellion (XR), famous for its public spectacles—things like shutting down major streets and blasting the UK Treasury with a fake blood firehose. “I’m in Extinction Rebellion because I think we need a regenerative culture. We need a culture which helps human beings achieve our potential as connected, compassionate, kind beings,” he told me.

But thanks to COVID-19, Chauhan is stuck in his flat in Tottenham, one of the poorest areas of London. Like other climate activists around the world, he's suddenly limited in what he can do for the cause. In some ways, he says, the pandemic is “a blessing in disguise.” He’s used to people saying XR wants to change things too much, or too quickly. “What we're seeing here with the COVID health crisis is how quickly we can transform any part of the way in which we live our lives when we see the threat coming,” he said.

But Chauhan knows all too well how grave the threat of this virus is, because he’s a doctor who used to work in an Accident & Emergency (A&E) department, the British equivalent of an ER. About a year ago, in response to the climate crisis, he bailed on practicing medicine to dedicate himself to activism full-time. In response to this fresh crisis, he is now trying to return to his old job. “I’m starting to get my study books out to go back because…” he told me, pausing, seemingly in search of an explanation, but no explanation seemed necessary. “Yeah, I gotta go back,” he said.

The pandemic has brought the entire world economy to a screeching halt, as states and cities have instituted unprecedented lockdown orders. It's also presented a challenge for activists like Chauhan, who felt that they were finally making progress in the fight against climate change. Just as they were getting the world's attention, they have once again lost it. The question is, can they get it back when this is all over?

“Clearly, like every other human enterprise, the climate movement has had to slow and adjust to the virus,” veteran climate activist Bill McKibben said. “There was a ton of momentum, especially in the fight against financial institutions, and some of that has been lost.” Over the past few years, the European Investment Bank has announced an end to loans for oil company projects, and New York City and oil-rich Norway have divested from fossil fuel investments. Recently, investors in Barclay’s Bank—a huge investor in European fossil fuel projects—began pushing the company to follow suit, and activists are demanding that BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, cut back on fossil fuel investments.

Before the pandemic, there was evidence of a new public focus on climate change. In the early days of the Trump administration, sometime between the publication of David Wallace-Wells’ heart-stopping, viral New York Magazine article “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the IPCC’s pessimistic 2018 report on the vanishing likelihood of our species meeting the targets necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, something seemed to snap in people’s brains. In 2019 the urgency of acting on climate change truly broke through the noise and became the media phenomenon activists had long hoped it would become. Much of humanity responded to the flurry of haunting news stories and scientific reports with despair, but some were moved to thundering rage. It may not have been enough, but it was, at long last, progress.

Margaret Klein Salamon, co-founder of the organization The Climate Mobilization and one of the leaders of the high-profile movement to persuade political leaders to declare climate emergencies, has a book coming out called Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself,and it has an auspicious release date: the day before the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. That April 22 event is now likely to be muted. “The plans going into [Earth Day] were absolutely huge: three days of huge strikes led by youth. I was so excited. I think this was going to be the biggest moment for the climate emergency movement,” she told me. “Instead, it's all going to be virtual. It's going to be a livestream.”

What can the climate movement really accomplish from home? And when this is all over, will it be able to return to its full strength?

A MAN STANDS UNDER A GRETA THUNBERG MURAL IN ROME. THE QUOTE READS, "YOU'RE NEVER TOO YOUNG TO SAVE THE WORLD." PHOTO BY ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP VIA GETTY

“We have actually achieved many things,” Greta Thunberg told a small group of fellow activists in a livestreamed video chat in late March. “Maybe not what we wanted, but at least we have done something, and sometimes you just need to allow yourself to be—I dunno, proud? Or something like that.” One of the activists in the group felt it might be helpful to recount past successes, but Thunberg didn’t seem at ease in self-care mode. Her overall message was that in this moment, climate activists need to do what they always do: “Listen to the science.” During this crisis, that means social distancing, while keeping in mind, as she noted toward the beginning of the conversation, “the climate crisis is not going away.”

But much of the movement’s progress in fighting the fossil fuel industry might go away—and soon. According to the Sunrise Movement's political and legislative coordinator Lauren Maunus—who said on the Hill’s morning show-style livestream Rising that the 2020 election was “the last, best chance” for he U.S. to meaningfully fight climate change—the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists are up their usual tricks. “Employing kind of disaster capitalism, pitting us against each other, using government as a force for bad,” was how she described it.

In the interest of speeding up the return of revenues lost due to the crisis, China’s ministry of the environment has in many cases abandoned inspections of potentially polluting factories. On March 26, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would not enforce any regulations, as long as violations can be connected to the COVID-19 crisis, a decision that followed a massive lobbying effort from oil companies. A similar lobbying effort aimed at restoring the reputation of petroleum-based single-use plastic bags appears to be working. A federal bailout for U.S. fossil fuel companies hasn’t materialized but one is thought to be likely.

Perhaps the most vivid example of all is the effort in Canada to jumpstart construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, as announced by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney on March 31. “To make sure it gets done,” Kenney tweeted, “Alberta is putting our money where our mouth is—with a $1.5 billion equity stake, and a $6 billion loan guarantee backstop. Construction begins immediately—starting tomorrow.” The move came two days after restrictions on gatherings of Alberta residents were tightened from 50 people down to 15—a totally understandable safety measure amid the pandemic that will also guarantee that no effective protest can be legally mounted against the new construction project as it charges ahead.

Montana-based indigenous activist Kandi White, the climate campaign coordinator for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), doesn't plan to just sit around while such pipeline projects move forward. “Everyone’s busier now than we were before, because it's almost like our hands are tied,” she said. “The IEN has been fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, and now they're trying to build it, and try to push it through because we're under this mandate to not be out doing activism.” Protesters can’t employ what is self-evidently their most effective strategy—showing up at construction sites and protesting—but, she said “We have been doing webinars, and we have been doing online platform work to get information out to our people.”

EXTINCTION REBELLION MEMBERS IN BERLIN DELIVERING FOOD TO THE NEEDY. PHOTO BY FABIAN SOMMER/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY

At the same time, climate activists—who often tend to be more science-focused than the general population—are concerned about telling people about the dangers of COVID-19 and helping out with the more pressing crisis now facing the world.

“I have uncles, cousins, and brothers that work in the [oil] industry, which is also why I know how bad it is—how many spills go unreported, how people are getting sick—and it’s the same with this crisis. Getting the information to the people in a way that they understand, so that they have a trustworthy source, has been very difficult,” White said. It’s a role made all the more difficult, she explained, by the three tribal nationalities sharing land on her reservation—Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. “My sister, and people that I know are still going to work, they're still going to the office. They're still going into the tribal building,” she said. “It's like they're not even taking it as seriously as I feel it should be taken.”

But the ways in which the pandemic dovetails with the climate crisis can also be seen as an advantage, according to McKibben. The similarities, he hopes, will bring the climate crisis to life for people who couldn’t previously wrap their heads around it. “We see what Trump's failure to 'flatten the curve' means for the virus; our failure, 30 years ago, to start flattening the carbon curve leaves us in much the same place," he said. "Now we have to work harder and faster, and there will still be huge damage.”

Until the quarantines are lifted and protesters can once again take to the streets, the climate movement can probably coast on momentum to some degree—scoring up a number of wins and PR victories that were long in the works. A federal judge’s ruling effectively rescinded permits for the Dakota Access pipeline on March 25. Marie Newman, a Sunrise-backed candidate, defeated Illinois Democratic Representative Dan Lipinski, one of Congress's most conservative Democrats, in the state’s primary on March 18. With Earth Day coming, the issue of climate change graces the current covers of Rolling Stone, National Geographic and Fortune magazines, even as the pandemic grips the world.

Moreover, terms like “Green New Deal” have recently transformed into everyday inside-the-beltway vernacular, to the point where President Trump referred to some mild pro-environmental policies in the House bailout bill as “green new deal stuff,” and blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for their inclusion. (Pelosi once dismissively referred to the Green New Deal as “the green dream or whatever they call it.”) Amid a growing chorus of calls for a New Deal-sized public works project to help Americans out of the current economic crisis, this sort of confusion could redound to the benefit of the climate movement.

For Maunus and the rest of the Sunrise Movement, which made a name for itself by protesting inside Pelosi’s office in favor of the Green New Deal in 2018, “this is really a moment of unprecedented opportunity for change.” That doesn’t just mean legislation—projects in the works at Sunrise include “free painting of, Green New Deal signs, motor processions, and six-feet group protests,” Maunus said.

In light of the political and economic instability this crisis has brought to light, some activists would rather just toss out the present governmental and economic systems altogether. “A lot of the old-school anarchist people have been dreaming of this kind of anarcho-federalist model,” Chauhan told me. “Going to small communities, or like having assemblies like the Rojava model, where decision-making is devolved to the most local level possible, and people feel empowered because they're making decisions.”

In fact, he told me his Tottenham flat is meant to be his organizing base of operations, “because I thought if there was gonna be a revolution it would be here. Or maybe not revolution, but social upheaval, disenfranchisement of the poor and minority groups, and so I wanted to be organizing here. Meanwhile a lot of my mates all left. So the house I am in usually has eight people in it, only two people are left ‘cause everyone else went back to smaller towns or the countryside to be safer.”

No large-scale uprising has occurred, to be sure, but according to Chauhan, wherever local activists in the UK have begun operating in earnest, XR members—known internally as rebels—are participating as needed, a part of the organizational theory of mutual aid. “In the UK, 3,500 local mutual aidgroups have been set up in the space of three weeks. Fucking amazing! Huge! Nothing to do with XR, but a lot of XR rebels are doing it.” The purpose, he said, is simply, “planting the seeds in those spaces, or making the right interventions.”

Across all the activist organizations I spoke to, the theme of gardening in quarantine appeared again and again. “I’ve been telling folks it's a really good time to get your seeds going and get your gardens going. Spring is coming. My crocuses have bloomed,” White said. “The fact that the whole entire world is waking up to indigenous knowledge now is great, but it's not new. If you go stand on the grass without your socks and shoes on, or if you're in a forest next to a tree, you actually start to feel better.”

“People are so disconnected from these very basic concepts, and that is capitalism,” she continued. “That is colonization—to get your mind off of very basic and true concepts of our relationship with and our connection to the land.”

Mike Pearl is the author of The Day It Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans—and Other Possible Phenomena. Follow him on Twitter.

Young climate activists slowed by pandemic, but not defeated

By MARTHA IRVINE and CHRISTINA LARSON April 19, 2020

1 of 17
FILE - In this Monday, Oct. 29, 2018 file photo, Jamie Margolin, a high school student, speaks during a rally by youth activists and others in Seattle in support of a high-profile climate change lawsuit in federal court in Eugene, Ore. "It's really hard to grow up on a planet full of ifs," said Margolin, a 17-year-old cofounder of This is Zero Hour. "There's always been a sense that everything beautiful in this world is temporary for my generation." (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Jamie Margolin had not expected to be sitting in her bedroom right now.

The high school senior had prom and graduation coming up, but so much more: A multi-state bus campaign with fellow climate activists. A tour for her new book. Attendance at one of the massive marches that had been planned this week for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

Then the pandemic arrived in Seattle, her hometown, and her plans went out the window.

“But still so much to do,” Margolin said, perched in front of her computer for a video interview from that bedroom.

Like many other young activists who’ve helped galvanize what’s become a global climate movement, Margolin is not letting a spreading virus stop her. They are organizing in place, from the United States to Ecuador, Uganda, India and beyond.

And while some fear they’ve lost some momentum in the pandemic, they are determined to keep pushing — and for now, to use technology to their advantage.

Unable to gather en masse as they’d planned this Earth Day, these activists are planning livestreams and webinars to keep the issue of climate front and center on the world stage and in the U.S. presidential race.

One event, Earth Day Live, is being organized by a coalition of youth-led climate groups, including Zero Hour, of which Margolin is a leader (her Twitter profile includes the tag #futurepotus). As is the case with many other young climate activists, she got involved in the movement taking aim at the fossil fuel industry well before Sweden’s Greta Thunberg became a global household name.

Online organizing is not as easy in some countries. In Uganda, activist Mulindwa Moses says only about a third of the population has Wi-Fi. Also under lockdown, the 23-year-old graduate student is waiting for his chance to return to planting trees and speaking to his nation’s youth in person.

Like the original founders of Earth Day, he is among those who were first inspired by local issues — which they came to connect with global climate change.

While traveling in eastern Uganda, Moses met with families who had lost their homes in mudslides caused by torrential rainfall.

“I remember a girl I had a conversation with — she lost her parents and had to take care of her siblings. She was suffering so much,” he said.

So, last year, he began a campaign to encourage citizens to plant “two trees a week” and regrow their forests to combat deforestation and mudslides exacerbated by changing weather patterns.

In Ecuador, 18-year-old Helena Gualinga also has had to pause her world travels.

Born in Ecuador’s indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community — home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon — she says she learned from the example of her parents and her elders how to speak up for the rights of her people. Their fight has been against a government that they believe has given their land too freely to mining and oil companies.

“The energy I remember from my elders growing up” — at community meetings she attended with her parents when she was small — “was that my community was always very worried,” she said.

Full Coverage: Climate change

Now, she added, “I know I have a voice.”

Moses plans to run for his country’s parliament next year. “I want to fight to change the system from the inside,” he said.

So does Max Prestigiacomo, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, who is set to take his seat on the city council of Madison, Wisconsin. While fighting the coronavirus has used up much of local government’s bandwidth, he still plans this fall to push the platform on which he ran – for his city to become fully sustainable by 2030. It is a lofty and some would say unattainable goal, but he is looking for “the impossible yes.”

“Obviously, I wanted the alarm sounded decades ago before I was even born,” the 18-year-old said. “But it’s too late for incremental change.”

Tia Nelson, daughter of the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, founder of Earth Day, said her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success.

Though the senator went to Washington in 1963, and won support from President Kennedy, his daughter said it took several years to find backing for many of his environmental causes. He came up with the idea of Earth Day, first envisioned as a nationwide “teach-in,” after reading a magazine article about college students’ impact on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Later that same year, the Environmental Protection Agency was born.

“The climate youth movement today is having a significant and important impact in doing exactly what my father had hoped on the first Earth Day — that he would get a public demonstration sufficiently robust to shake the political establishment out of their lethargy,” Tia Nelson said. “The youth movement 50 years ago did that. The youth movement today around climate change is doing the same thing.”

Nelson, who is climate director at the Wisconsin-based Outrider Foundation, said she’s particularly excited at polls showing that many young Republicans care just as much about climate change as Democrats.

Peter Nicholson, who helps lead Foresight Prep, a summer environmental justice program at Chicago’s Loyola University, said the coronavirus crisis only highlights the message that “we are all connected.”

“Climate change is no less real,” he said. “The feedback loop is just much longer.”

So for now, Margolin and her peers will use their devices to help foster those connections — something their predecessors could not do remotely.

“Everyone is online anyway,” she said. “Maybe they start on Earth Day. But then with online resources, you click one link that leads you to another, leads to another that leads you to contact info.”

“And then you just start getting involved.”

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Other online Earth Day resources:

Smithsonian Earth Summit: https://earthoptimism.si.edu/2020-summit/

Earth Day 50: http://www.earthdayinitiative.org/

Earth Day for Earthrise: https://earthrise2020.org/

Citizens Climate Lobby virtual Earth Day: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/uniting-from-home-registration-101119077884

___

Martha Irvine is an AP national writer and visual journalist. Christina Larson is an AP global science and environment writer.

Climate activist Jamie Margolin poses for a portrait in a tree in Seattle on April 5, 2020. Margolin, who is finishing her senior year of high school, first took on the issue of climate in 2014, when she was just 14 years old. Two years later, she helped found Zero Hour, a youth-led organization aimed at pushing climate as a political and social justice issue. The group is helping take the climate movement online in the age of coronavirus. “We’re doing webinars, we’re doing livestreams, we’re doing social media content, animations, everything like that to educate folks,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can.” (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

In this Friday, Feb 21, 2020, photo, environmental activist Licypriya Kangujam, 8, stands at Juhu beach in front of a pile of trash during a cleaning drive in Mumbai, India. Kangujam is among the younger climate activists in the world and, beginning two years ago at age 6, began taking on issues ranging from carbon emissions in her home country to ocean pollution. Insistent that children deserve to be heard on these topics, she’s given a TED Talk and attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “I’m strong. I’m brave. I’m intelligent,” she said. “(Addressing) climate change is not only for adults, or just for our leaders.” (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

In this Friday, Feb 21, 2020, photo, environmental activist Licypriya Kangujam, 8, holds a sign at Juhu beach during a cleaning drive in Mumbai, India. Kangujam is among the younger climate activists in the world and, beginning two years ago at age 6, began taking on issues ranging from carbon emissions in her home country to ocean pollution. Insistent that children deserve to be heard on these topics, she’s given a TED Talk and attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “I’m strong. I’m brave. I’m intelligent,” she said. “(Addressing) climate change is not only for adults, or just for our leaders.” (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2020 file photo, climate activist Luisa Neubauer speaks at a demonstration outside the Olympic Hall during the ongoing Siemens annual shareholders' meeting in Munich, Germany. Protesters outside the venue demonstrated against the company's decision to stand by a contract linked to a coal mine in Australia. Sign in the foreground reads "Australia burns" in German. The 23-year old, based in Berlin, and others started the “Fridays for Future” climate protests in Germany after “we as one of the richest economies worldwide were intending to miss our climate targets due to a lack of political will,” she said. “That to me seemed rather unacceptable.” She said decision-makers and all generations need to work together on common-sense solutions. (Peter Kneffel/dpa via AP)

In this Aug. 10, 2019 photo provided by Sebulime Enock, Mulindwa Moses, 23, poses for a portrait in Kampala, Uganda. Moses, a graduate student, has begun a campaign to encourage citizens to plant trees to help prevent deadly mudslides in his country. Before the coronavirus shut down Uganda, he regularly met with adults and schoolchildren to educate them about the impacts of climate change and deforestation. He said he has received death threats because of his work. “I’m not going to stop. If it’s losing my life, I think I’ll die a great man,” said Moses, who plans to run for parliament in 2021. (Sebulime Enock/Blu Monkey Studios via AP)

In this Jan. 13, 2020 photo provided by Sebulime Enock, Mulindwa Moses prepares tree saplings for planting in Naayla, Uganda. Moses, a graduate student, has begun a campaign to encourage citizens to plant trees to help prevent deadly mudslides in his country. Before the coronavirus shut down Uganda, he regularly met with adults and schoolchildren to educate them about the impacts of climate change and deforestation. He said he has received death threats because of his work. “I’m not going to stop. If it’s losing my life, I think I’ll die a great man,” said Moses, who plans to run for parliament in 2021. (Sebulime Enock/Blu Monkey Studios via AP)

In this March 8, 2020 photo provided by Lucas Bustamante, Helena Gualinga marches in the International Women's March in Quito, Ecuador. Gualinga, who is 18, is part of the country's indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community – home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon. “My community had to defend its right to the land,” she says. Following the example other mother and her elders, she says she learned how to be a spokesperson for the rights of her people. She speaks often about the negative impact of climate change, oil drilling and mining on the Amazon rainforest. She does not consider herself an activist. “I just care about the environment." Gualinga has split her time between Ecuador and Scandanavia, where her father grew up. (Lucas Bustamante via AP)

This 1968 photo provided by the family shows Tia Nelson and her father, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, on the campaign trail in Wisconsin. Of her father, the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, Tia says her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success five decades earlier. (Nelson Family via AP)

Tia Nelson, daughter of Earth Day founder, the late U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, looks at photos from her father's archive on Monday, March 2, 2020, in Madison, Wis.. Tia, who has dedicated her own career to environmental work, is a managing director at the Madison-based Outrider Foundation, a nonprofit that works on climate and other issues. Nelson, who was 13 when the first Earth Day happened, says she is heartened by a new generation of young climate activists who've taken up the cause. (AP Photo/Martha Irvine)

THIRD WORLD USA 
11,000 deaths: Ravaged nursing homes plead for more testing

BERNARD CONDON, MATT SEDENSKY AND JIM MUSTIAN
1 of 12In this Friday, April 17, 2020, photo, Dr. Gabrielle Beger, left, prepares to take a nose-swab sample from Lawrence McGee, as she works with a team of University of Washington medical providers conducting testing for the new coronavirus at Queen Anne Healthcare, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility in Seattle. Sending "drop teams" from University of Washington Medicine to conduct universal testing at skilled nursing facilities in collaboration with public health officials is one aspect of the region's approach to controlling the spread of the coronavirus. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)


NEW YORK (AP) — After two months and more than 11,000 deaths that have made the nation’s nursing homes some of the most terrifying places to be during the coronavirus crisis, most of them still don’t have access to enough tests to help control outbreaks among their frail, elderly residents.

Neither the federal government nor the leader in nursing home deaths, New York, has mandated testing for all residents and staff. An industry group says only about a third of the 15,000 nursing homes in the U.S. have ready access to tests that can help isolate the sick and stop the spread. And homes that do manage to get a hold of tests often rely on luck and contacts.


“It just shows that the longer that states lapse in universal testing of all residents and staff, we’re going to see these kinds of stories for a very long time,” said Brian Lee of the advocacy group Families for Better Care. “Once it’s in, there’s no stopping it and by the time you’re aware with testing, too many people have it. And bodies keep piling up.”
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That became clear in some of the nation’s biggest nursing home outbreaks. After a home in Brooklyn reported 55 coronavirus deaths last week, its CEO acknowledged it was based entirely on symptoms and educated guesses the dead had COVID-19 because they were unable to actually test any of the residents or staff.





At a nursing home in suburban Richmond, Virginia, that has so far seen 49 deaths, the medical director said testing of all residents was delayed nearly two weeks because of a shortage of testing supplies and bureaucratic requirements. By the time they did, the spread was out of control, with 92 residents positive.

Mark Parkinson, CEO of the American Health Care Association, which represents long-term care facilities, says “only a very small percentage” of residents and staff have been tested because the federal and state governments have not made nursing homes the top priority.


“We feel like we’ve been ignored,” Parkinson said. “Certainly now that the emphasis has gone away from hospitals to where the real battle is taking place in nursing homes, we should be at a priority level one.”

Two-thirds of U.S. nursing homes still don’t have “easy access to test kits” and are struggling to obtain sufficient resources, said Chris Laxton, executive director of The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.

“Those nursing home leaders who have developed good relationships with their local hospitals and health departments seem to have better luck,” said Laxton, whose organization represents more than 50,000 long-term care professionals. “Those that are not at the table must fend for themselves.”


Public health officials have long argued that current measures like temperature checks aren’t sufficient. They can’t stop workers with the virus who aren’t showing signs from walking in the front door, and they don’t catch such asymptomatic carriers among residents either. What is needed is rigorous and frequent testing — “sentinel surveillance,” White House virus chief Deborah Birx calls it — to find these hidden carriers, isolate them and stop the spread.

The U.S. is currently testing roughly 150,000 people daily, for a total of 4.5 million results reported, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project. Public health experts say that needs to be much higher. “We need likely millions of tests a day,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

The federal Health & Human Services Department told The Associated Press that ”there are plenty of tests and capability for all” priority categories and that all should be tested. The agency also noted one of President Donald Trump’s briefings this week in which he underscored the states’ role in coordinating testing.

Only one governor, West Virginia’s Jim Justice, appears to be mandating testing for all nursing homes without conditions. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan ordered tests at all 26 nursing in the city, using new kits that can spew out results in 15 minutes. Massachusetts abruptly halted a program to send test kits directly to nursing homes this week after 4,000 of them turned out to be faulty. New Hampshire teamed with an urgent-care company to test care workers. Several states including Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee and Wisconsin have dispatched National Guard testing strike teams.

“It’s a snapshot,” New Hampshire Health Care Association President Brendan Williams said of the national piecemeal approach. “We need a motion picture.”

While the federal government promised this week to start tracking and publicly releasing nursing home infections and deaths, which could help identify hotspots, that work was only beginning. In the meantime, The AP’s own tally from state health departments and media reports put the count at 11,260 deaths from outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities nationwide. About a third of those are in New York.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has described COVID-19 in nursing homes as “fire through dry grass,” said he would ideally like to see any resident, staffer or visitor seeking to enter a nursing home take a rapid test that would come back in 20 minutes. But, he said, “that’s millions of tests.”

Dr. Roy Goldberg, medical director of a nursing home in the Bronx that reported 45 deaths, said his facility still can’t test asymptomatic patients because of shortages that have limited testing to those showing fever or a cough.
Full Coverage: Virus Outbreak

“This isn’t what anyone signed up for,” Goldberg said. “It just breaks my heart that the long-term care industry is going to end up being totally scapegoated on this.”

Amid the tragedies have emerged hopeful cases in which early and aggressive testing has made huge difference.

After the first of two deaths at a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, nursing home and other residents and staffers started falling ill, administrator Colinda Nappa got on the phone and pleaded with state officials: “I got to know what is going on.”


A 65-member National Guard testing unit soon showed up, donned head-to-toe protective suits and quickly tested nearly 100 residents and 150 staffers.

In all, 19 residents and staffers tested positive and all are either now housed in a special section of the building or quarantined at home. There have been no more deaths.

In the Seattle area, which had the nation’s first major nursing home outbreak that eventually claimed 43 lives, health officials are targeting their testing efforts on homes that have shown little sign of the disease.


Their plans for testing at 19 such facilities are aimed at trying to head off hotspots by quickly identifying and containing cases. In conjunction with ramped-up capacity for tracing contacts of patients, it’s considered an important prerequisite to reopening he economy.

This past week, medical professionals led by the University of Washington’s Dr. Thuan Ong went room by room through a nursing home in a highly orchestrated ballet of swabbing and bagging. In all, 115 residents were tested and results came back the next day as all negative — a development that drew cheers from the facility’s staff.

“One of the greatest values,” Ong said, “is to catch it before it spreads.”

___

AP investigative news researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report, along with photographer Ted Warren and reporter Gene Johnson in Seattle, reporters Candice Choi and Jennifer Peltz in New York, and Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire. Sedensky reported from Philadelphia.

___

Read AP’s ongoing coverage of how COVID-19 is impacting nursing homes and the elderly in the U.S.:

— Nursing home outbreaks lay bare chronic industry problems

— Nursing home infections, deaths surge amid lockdown measures

— Nursing home deaths soar past 3,600 in alarming surge

— Deaths hit 45 at Virginia care home called ‘virus’s dream’

— Feds under pressure to publicly track nursing home outbreaks

— ’Under siege’: Overwhelmed Brooklyn care home tolls 55 dead




AP

Sizing up Trump’s green-card halt: Is it just temporary?
By ELLIOT SPAGAT APRIL 23, 2020

FILE - In this April 22, 2020, file photo, a man wearing a face mask is reflected in the door of a business closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak in San Antonio. President Donald Trump has hinted that he might extend a 60-day hold on green cards that he has ordered to protect American jobs during the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Pamela Austin, a recruiter at Adventist Health Bakersfield in California, made seven job offers to foreign nurses in February and just finished a first round of interviews with 12 more candidates. They are from all over the world, including the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Australia and Malaysia.

The international candidates fill the private hospital’s critical need for experienced nurses who can work in emergency rooms and intensive care units, Austin said — jobs that can’t be met alone with U.S. nurses, many of whom are recent graduates.

That need could go unfilled, however, if President Donald Trump extends a 60-day hold on green cards he ordered in the name of protecting American jobs amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“It would be a huge setback,” Austin said. “Those are holes I don’t have people to fill.”

Trump says the measure is necessary at a time when unemployment has climbed to levels last seen during the Great Depression.

Critics have dismissed the move as the president’s veiled attempt to achieve cuts to legal immigration that he previously suggested but couldn’t persuade Congress or the courts to accept — and to distract voters from his handling of the pandemic.

But immigrant advocates and political opponents are not the only ones who oppose the measure: Hardliners from Trump’s base say it doesn’t go far enough to limit immigration.

The order “is designed to satisfy powerful business interests that value a steady flow of cheap foreign labor,” Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, wrote in a letter to the president Thursday.

The Center for Immigration Studies, another hardline group, said the 60-day pause “will provide little relief to Americans” and criticized an exemption for foreigners who agree to invest at least $900,000 in the U.S.

The proclamation, signed Wednesday, halts temporary nonimmigrant visas for hundreds of thousands of workers a year, including farm workers, software engineers and others in fields deemed to have labor shortages. It doesn’t apply to green-card applicants already in the United States.

Many families will be barred from immigrating as long as the freeze lasts. Spouses of U.S. citizens and their children under 21 are exempt, but parents, adult children, grandchildren, adult siblings and other relatives aren’t.


Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles immigration attorney who advises hospitals, said he had hoped Trump’s proclamation would provide a blanket exemption for nurses, who often arrive on green cards. Instead, it only exempts health care workers whose work is deemed essential to recovering from the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Embassies and consulates make the decisions,” he said. “They don’t have any special expertise in COVID-19, like none of us do.”

Houston immigration attorney Raed Gonzalez said he doesn’t expect the suspension to have much of an effect — at least in the short term — because embassies and consulates had already halted routine visa processing last month in response to the pandemic.

“This is more of a show from the administration than anything else,” he said.

But other immigrant advocates predict profound changes if the measure becomes permanent.

Doug Rand, co-founder of Boundless, a company that advises families and individuals on green cards, estimates 358,000 applicants a year would be unable to get permanent residency if the order were extended.

He said the casualties would include roughly 50,000 diversity visas each year for countries that send fewer people to the U.S., and that the measure would have a big impact on immigrants from Asia, Central America and eastern Europe.

Rand says Trump is using the pandemic to achieve changes to the immigration system that he couldn’t get past Congress or the courts. He called the 60-day halt a “double fig leaf” to make the measure more palatable.

“I don’t think it takes much guesswork that President Donald Trump is going to use his discretion to extend it 60 days from now and again and again and again,” Rand said.

The edict has similarities to legislation Trump tried unsuccessfully to pass in 2017 that would slash legal immigration, largely through family-based visas that the president has referred to derisively as “chain migration.”

Last month, the administration effectively suspended asylum by rapidly expelling anyone who enters the country along borders with Mexico and Canada. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week extended the policy through May 20 on public health grounds.

Trump told reporters that he may extend the most recent order or modify it next week, in two months or “as we go along” to be “made tougher or made less tough.”

“We don’t want to hurt our businesses, and we don’t want to hurt our farmers,” he said Wednesday. “Very important.”

Joe Biden, Trump’s presumed Democratic rival in November’s election, echoed those who called the measure an attempt to divert attention from the president’s handling of the pandemic.

“Rather than execute a swift and aggressive effort to ramp up testing, Donald Trump is tweeting incendiary rhetoric about immigrants in the hopes that he can distract everyone from the core truth: He’s moved too slowly to contain this virus, and we are all paying the price for it,” Biden said Tuesday.

Matt Hill, a campaign spokesman, said Thursday that Biden would not maintain the policy if elected.

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Associated Press reporter Nomaan Merchant in Houston contributed to this report.