RIP USA CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE 
BORN JANUARY 29, 2020
KILLED BY TRUMP MAY 5, 2020

Politics is why Trump is ending coronavirus task force early ...

https://www.latimes.com › opinion › story › politics-trump-coronavirus-tas...

1 day ago - Opinion: Why shut down his coronavirus task force? Trump wants someone to blame if things get worse. Vice President Mike Pence at a ...

TRUMP DECLARES TO TASK FORCE HE IS LEAVING IT, AND ENDING THEIR DAILY BRIEFINGS, IN NARCISSISTIC SELF PLEASURE HE BLURTS IT OUT AT A MEDIA PRESSER.

White House coronavirus task force to be wound down around ...

https://www.cnn.com › 2020/05/05 › politics › white-house-coronavirus-task... 

1 day ago - News of the plan to phase out the task force comes as the rate of the country's daily new Covid-19 cases and reported deaths plateau, ...

COVID-19 Task Force To End Soon, Scientist Files ... - NPR

https://www.npr.org › 2020/05/06 › covid-19-task-force-to-end-soon-scienti...

16 hours ago - Vice President Pence says the coronavirus task force will wind down in late May or early June. And, a whistleblower alleges the Trump ...

Trump says U.S. coronavirus task force to wind down as focus ...

https://globalnews.ca › news › coronavirus-trump-task-force-wind-down

18 hours ago - Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the task force, told reporters the White ... people in the U.S., including more than 69,000 deaths due to COVID-19. ... doses by the autumn and 300 million doses by the end of the year

OUT CRY LEADS HIM TO DECLARE MAY 6, 2020 THAT THE ZOMBIE TASK FORCE WILL STILL EXIST HAUNTING THE HALLS WHILE HE MOVES ON TO HIS NEW REOPEN AMERICA TASK FORCE

Coronavirus update: Task force stays; 10,000 cases at ...

https://www.usatoday.com › story › news › health › 2020/05/06 › coronav...

5 hours ago - The White House won't wind down the coronavirus task force after all. ... Trumps tweeted his latest vision one day after Vice President Mike ... which ends May 12, the birthday of Florence Nightingale (in 1820). ... If states fully reopened, the death toll would rise to a staggering 466,000 by the same date, the ...

U.S. coronavirus task force will continue, focus on reopening ...

https://globalnews.ca › news › trump-coronavirus-task-force-2

10 hours ago - One day after saying that the COVID-19 task force would be winding ... the factory was “a mask environment,” but in the end he wore only safety ...

Trump: COVID-19 task force not dismantling, just refocusing

https://www.wagmtv.com › content › news › Trump-COVID-19-task-force...

7 hours ago - The Tuesday announcement of ending the task force sparked concerns that they would be sidelined as the outbreak continues amid fears of a ...

Trump clarifies that coronavirus task force will 'continue on ...

https://www.cbc.ca › news › world › trump-coronavirus-task-force-1.5557...

6 hours ago - Dr. Deborah Birx, right, coronavirus task force co-ordinator, and Dr. Anthony ... 3 reasons the COVID-19 death rate is higher in U.S. than Canada ... 100 million doses by the autumn and 300 million doses by the end of the year.

Who the Hell Wants to Buy a Coronavirus Commemorative Coin?

Despite its tactlessness and poor taste, the coronavirus coin seen in the "White House Gift Shop" actually has nothing to do with the President.

By Jelisa Castrodale May 4 2020

IMAGE COURTESY OF WHITEHOUSEGIFTSHOP.COM

Last week, the internet expressed its collective disgust that the White House Gift Shop had just added a terrifically horrible coronavirus-related commemorative coin to its online store. The $125 collectible features an illustration of the coronavirus on one side, has an empty White House press podium on the other, and is engraved with sentence fragments that sound like rejected lines from Starship Troopers. "WORLD Vs. VIRUS," it reads. "Together We FOUGHT The UNSEEN Enemy."

Although it's true that the coin is a real thing, and it's true that it's maybe not great to "commemorate" an ongoing pandemic that is still responsible for thousands of deaths every single day, this piece of on-brand bad taste wasn't commissioned by President Donald Trump. And despite the illustrations of the White House in its header, the $34.95 "Make America Great Again" hats, and the USA.gov logo on its homepage, this White House Gift Shop doesn't actually have anything to do with the president, either—at least not anymore.

First, the White House doesn't even have a gift shop. The White House Historical Association, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that was established by then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961, runs its own retail store adjacent to the White House. That shop is only accessible to those who take the official tour of the presidential residence and, because of its nonpartisanship, it skips the MAGA merch in favor of $85 dessert plates with gilded Presidential seals, pastel Vineyard Vines bow ties, and plush versions of former First Dogs.

The online White House Gift Shop still calls itself the "only original authorized" White House gift shop, although that may be somewhere between an oversimplification and a slight exaggeration. The White House did once have its own gift shop, selling T-shirts, golf balls, and other eventual yard sale fodder out of its own basement. The shop had been established as a way to provide financial support to the U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division Benefit Fund (UDBF). For several decades, it was only available to members of the Secret Service or official guests of the White House, but it moved off-site, launched a website, and opened to the public in the late 1990s.

The UDBF started having some unspecified "financial troubles" in 2011, and the Secret Service contracted Giannini Strategic Enterprises in Lititz, Pennsylvania, to operate the White House Gift Shop website on its behalf. Two years later, the UDBF filed for bankruptcy, and it transferred full ownership of the shop and all of its inventory over to Gianni Strategic Enterprises, which is how the White House Gift Shop ended up in the hands of a married couple in their seventies.

Anthony Giannini trademarked the phrase "White House Gift Shop"—although it took him two tries to get the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to accept it—and now the very-much-for-profit company brags that it "holds all [...] exclusive rights to its names and variants as well as provides unique works for former Presidents of the United States, U.S. Embassies, virtually all Departments of the U.S. Government, film and television studios, and importanty [sic] patriotic Americans and beloved friends of America."

Some of the gift shop's "unique works" include an ongoing collection of coins that have been designed to "Chronicle in Coin and Ornamental Art the Entire Presidency of President Donald J. Trump in World Historic Acts of Peace Making Leadership." The shop has already created coins for Trump's meeting with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, (including the descriptively named "Not the Vietnam Coin") a coin for the Space Force, and one "symbolizing the genius level thinking skills and proven successes of President Donald J. Trump."

"What I’m trying to do—and I’m going to do this for the next president—is tell the story in coins,” Giannini told Lancaster Online last May. “It’s a coin narrative.” It's also a significant moneymaker: He told the outlet that he sold $10 million worth of coins commemorating Trump's summit with Kim Jong-un.

So that brings us to the coronavirus coin, which was released last week in a limited edition of 1,000. As of this writing, the White House Gift Shop says that all proceeds from the sale of the coins will be donated to "COVID and Blood Cancers Research Institutions With No Deductions + Matching Funds by WHGS," although those details have been changed since the item's initial launch.

In an interview earlier this week, Giannini said that the coin was designed as a way to support Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where his wife and business partner, Helen, is being treated for leukemia. "It is for the above reasons that I was moved to create the COVID-19 memorial coin, WORLD vs VIRUS—with every penny of proceeds donated to Johns Hopkins, two other medical research centers, and some donations to [law enforcement] first responders," he told Snopes. "When accounts settle in May, we will donate $100,000.00 of which Johns Hopkins Medical Center will be a principal recipient."

VICE has reached out to Giannini for comment. In the meantime, if you're concerned that you might forget about coronavirus, you can drop $100 for a coin that will be shipped in June by a private company that averages $7 million in annual sales. Or you could send that same amount to an organization that is helping small businesses, restaurants, or local families hang on during this ongoing pandemic. Totally your call.

Why Gen Z Is Turning to Socialism

"It's much more stigmatized to say you're a capitalist, in my experience."

By Marie Solis; illustrated by Hunter French May 4 2020

Thomas Burriel was 13 when he first learned about democratic socialism. It happened on Instagram.

Burriel was scrolling through his feed one day in February after school. At the time—winter 2018—he was still attending Linus Pauling, the middle school in his hometown of Corvallis, which is about two hours outside of Portland, Oregon. Linus Pauling offers a “Human Rights Club” and an “Equal Rights/Safer Space Club” to discuss social justice and world events, but Burriel wasn’t involved in them, or in any political clubs at school. And while he identified as a Democrat, he admitted that he had also sympathized with some Republican talking points “out of ignorance.”

But then Instagram’s algorithm suggested Burriel follow @chs_socialists, the page for Corvallis High School’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Burriel remembers @chs_socialists only having a couple of posts up at the time, and though he had no mutual followers with the account, it sparked his interest: What exactly was democratic socialism?

“When I looked into the problems, I realized the best solution was democratic socialism.”

Burriel googled the term, and after reading a summary on Wikipedia, he found himself on the official Democratic Socialists of America website, and then on the page for the national YDSA, the youth-oriented arm of the organization. The more he read about the groups’ goals and core principles—which include platforms for Medicare for All, tuition-free college, and a Green New Deal—the more he liked the sound of democratic socialism. For Burriel, it was that simple: He agreed that health care was a human right, that politicians should take action on climate change, and that cost shouldn’t be a barrier to receiving a college education. Here was a political ideology that reflected all those things.

“I’ve also learned about a lot of these problems through Bernie Sanders’s [2020] campaign,” Burriel told me over the phone late last year. When we first spoke, Sanders was still trailing Joe Biden in the polls. “When I looked into the problems, I realized the best solution was democratic socialism.”

Burriel is part of a growing group of young people who say they hate capitalism. They’ve come of age amid the ruins of Obama-era liberalism, and their political icons are members of Congress like Sanders or New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They’ve joined walkouts for gun violence and climate change, and are leading groups like the Sunrise Movement to call out corporations and complacent politicians. And now, as lawmakers scramble to respond to a pandemic that has sent the United States economy into free fall, they see obvious solutions to the crisis we’re in, like single-payer health care, universal basic income, and bailouts for everyday Americans, to name a few.

A2018 Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans ages 18-29—no matter their party affiliation—had a positive view of socialism. Americans in that age group were also far less likely than other age groups to view capitalism favorably. When VICE surveyed a group of its Gen Z readers in 2019, six in 10 predicted that the wealth gap would worsen in the next decade; 20 percent believed the United States would pivot to socialism by that point; and 57 percent identified socialism as an economic solution that would help combat violence against marginalized people.

These young people didn’t all come to anti-capitalist thought the same way. Some heard about democratic socialism for the first time by way of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign; some by way of his 2020 one. (In December, in the thick of the Democratic primary, the New York Times reported that Sanders was by far the most recognizable presidential candidate for Gen Z.) Others had their socialist consciousness raised by Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a 10-term incumbent with a campaign platform in Sanders’ mold. Jacob Keller, a high school senior in New Jersey, told me he started developing socialist views much further back: Watching news coverage of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 “radicalized” him, he said. He was just 10 years old.

Like Burriel, many teenagers initially found an outlet for their burgeoning socialist ideals in their campus YDSA chapters. As a freshman in high school, Burriel is now a member of his—before the coronavirus outbreak, he attended meetings every Monday during his lunch period. (Now they take place more sporadically, over Zoom.) To Burriel, democratic socialism means taking power away from corporations and the elite, and returning it to working people. Sometimes, he uses those exact words. Other times, when he’s hanging out with his socialist friends, he’ll put it more bluntly: “Hating rich people,” Burriel told me when I asked what he talks about with other YDSA members. “It’s mostly stuff like ‘Screw Jeff Bezos.’ He has so much illegitimately acquired wealth. It’s incomprehensible how much wealth he has.”



Though there are about 80 YDSA chapters in total, in 2018 just a few of them were high school organizations. That’s changed over the last year: According to Amelia Blair-Smith, an at-large member of the the YDSA National Coordinating Committee, there are now more than 10, a bit of evidence that the massive boom in DSA membership that followed the 2016 election and Ocasio-Cortez’s historic upset reached not just millennials, but members of Gen Z as well.

“Even people as young as high schoolers are dealing with the realities of capitalism and realizing if they stand up and fight against that, they can secure a better future for the next generation.”

Blair-Smith, who, at 20, is herself a member of Gen Z, said many teenagers have discovered democratic socialism through climate activism and teachers’ strikes, two mass movements that have their origins in grade schools across the country. Not every student left these rallies and walkouts as card-carrying socialists, Blair-Smith said; but for some, they marked the beginning of anti-capitalist thinking: At the 2019 YDSA Winter Conference in February, she heard from a group of Denver, Colorado, teens who said they planned on starting a YDSA chapter at their high school after supporting the teachers striking in their city in 2018. In August, a teen went viral after posting a TikTok calling on students in Nevada’s Clark County school district to protest in solidarity with striking teachers.

“The strikes inspired a resistance to capitalism and solidarity with workers, who were their teachers,” Blair-Smith said. “Even people as young as high schoolers are dealing with the realities of capitalism and realizing if they stand up and fight against that, they can secure a better future for the next generation.”




Though students can no longer gather in person for large demonstrations or weekly meetings, YDSA chapters across the country are continuing to grow, in some cases not in spite of quarantine, but because of it. After attending YDSA’s annual convention in February, Keller, who leads the chapter at Montclair High School, got the idea to build a coalition of high school YDSA organizations, since many of the issues they address are specific to high school students, and the vast majority of YDSA is made up of college students. He began reaching out to chapters across the country, but things didn’t start picking up until schools closed and students went into isolation with their families.

“For the first couple weeks of quarantine, we didn’t get any school work really, so people were bored in their house and wanted something to do,” Keller explained. “It can feel very alienating to be a high schooler [during this time]—we’re not professionals, not all of us can work, and we’ve been told just to stay at home and do homework. But we still want to help, so this is a good way for us to show we want to help and use our voices for good.”

The coalition now has around 30 to 40 people in it, which is big for YDSA—most individual high school chapters have just a handful of loyal members—and they’ve been meeting weekly over Zoom. The group has attracted not only those who are already part of established YDSA chapters, but people who have only begun to get curious about democratic socialism as well. And some who, before, had only toyed with the idea of starting a chapter at their school, have begun the official process for starting one, according to Keller.

“The pandemic is a horrible thing, but it can be very radicalizing for people,” Keller said. “I don’t think we turned any Republicans into socialists, but we’ve definitely moved people who were liberal and didn’t know a lot about socialism to being excited about being organizers and activists in our group.”

Young people who belong to Gen Z, sometimes called “zoomers,” may be more predisposed to socialism than previous generations as a result of the way they see the world. Of the Gen Z readers who responded to VICE’s survey, 86 percent said they think the future will be characterized by worsening climate disasters; 68 percent said they believe economic problems will grow more pronounced; and 63 percent said they expect to see more global conflicts in their lifetimes. And they don’t expect the adults in charge to do anything to help— the majority of Gen Z respondents said they had “zero trust” in the country’s leadership.

“I have students who are worried about paying the debt they’re accruing as they sit in class because their parents are still paying off theirs,” said Stephanie Mudge, an associate professor of sociology at University of California, Davis who focuses on leftist politics.. “Socialism says: ‘We have a whole generation of people who have debt before they even hit the labor market—let’s cancel that.’ I imagine that feels like a sensible, clear, and reasonable response to a pretty obvious problem for a lot of young people.”

Mudge said it’s possible more young people will see socialist policies in this light as the coronavirus pandemic exposes the huge gaps between those who are able to work from home and protect themselves and those who must put themselves at risk to perform essential work.

“Many are probably watching their parents go out and expose themselves [to the virus]. Suddenly something like universal health care starts looking like a necessity.”

“Young people are likely going to be heavily conditioned by the experiences they see their parents going through in a time like this,” she continued. “Many are probably watching their parents go out and expose themselves [to the virus]. Suddenly something like universal health care starts looking like a necessity.”

Some teens have already been moving left of prominent democratic socialist politicians like Sanders, whether or not they call themselves socialists. David Oks, an 18-year-old who helped run former presidential candidate Mike Gravel’s 2020 campaign by turning the 89-year-old’s Twitter page into a socialist meme account, said he and many of the young people he knows support the decriminalization of sex work, a policy Sanders has only said is “something that should be considered.” And in the wake of Sanders’ suspended campaign, young people are already looking forward to the candidates who will follow in his footsteps and propose even bolder policies than he did.

“A lot of young people are interested in issues candidates don't touch: stuff that's seen as politically toxic like sex work decriminalization, but also things that candidates just don't think are important,” Oks said. “And a lot of young people who don't even see themselves as leftists think [the Green New Deal] is the most important issue in politics.”

In his social circles, these beliefs are almost taken for granted, Oks said. Among Gen Z "being solidly leftist is the norm," which means it's rare that he encounters any stigma toward democratic socialism. “It's much more stigmatized to say you're a capitalist, in my experience,” he added. “Since you look like a libertarian/TPUSA goofball.”

Still, there are some zoomers who continue to regard socialism with suspicion. Students’ experiences with this stigma were mixed, even when they attended the same school, and even when those schools were located in progressive pockets of the country. When Keller began petitioning to start a YDSA chapter at Montclair, he found everyone seemed “really open” to learning about democratic socialism. But his co-chair had a different read on their peers: Anahita Foroughi, a junior, said some students still harbored the bias against socialism “that’s been drilled into us since we were young, through the media or through our parents.” When she asked one close friend to attend a YDSA meeting with her, the friend declined, telling Foroughi that she worried it would become a problem if she decided to run for political office one day.  


“A few people think socialism is really interesting and want to learn more, but generally people get surprised and then go silent,” she said, describing her classmates’ reaction to any discussion of socialist politics. “Then it becomes a little awkward because I don’t know if they’re onboard with it.”

At YDSA meetings, as well as in casual conversation, Keller tries his best to put socialism in terms his classmates can relate to. He talks about national issues like Medicare for All—one of the most popular programs in the country, he emphasized—as well as issues directly affecting students and the greater Montclair community. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, Montclair is very gentrified, we need housing justice,’” Keller explained. “And I’ll tell them, ‘Even if you don’t agree with all of what democratic socialism is, we’re fighting for certain issues we can all help with.’” One of these issues was bussing: Last year, the Montclair YDSA organized a campaign to help Black students who are still experiencing the effects of red-lining, and therefore must take public transit to get to school.

“I love Marx, but I don’t think you can hand a freshman The Communist Manifesto and expect them to read it—I mean I did, but maybe I’m an outlier,” Keller said. “We don’t need to dumb anything down for people, but we do need to put socialism in context for them. We can do that by talking about class struggle and tying it to climate change, to college tuition, and showing how it matters in their lives.”

The point is to meet other students where they are, and learn more about socialist organizing together. High school YDSA clubs are led by students who themselves are still in the very early stages of socialist education, and many of these students have different ideas of what socialism means and how to practice it, even if they agree on its basic principles.

Socialism may boil down to a mood, or a structure of feeling, rather than a politics to adopt wholesale, for members of Gen Z.

Ella Morton, who is Keller’s co-chair on the YDSA coalition and the head of Corvallis High School’s YDSA chapter, said she doesn’t strongly identify with the “economic part” of democratic socialism—that is, the “hardcore theory element of socialism,” she explained to me on the phone one evening, on the day she took the PSAT for the first time. Morton said that while she knows socialism is, at its core, about a struggle for economic justice, what resonates for her most about the political ideology is its emphasis on community bonds. She also told me she’s averse to reading Marx, whom she believes would “ruin democratic socialism” for her.

“It’s a lot of white guys who are Marxist socialists,” Morton said. “If I wanted that type of socialism, I would follow Bernie Sanders.” (At the time, Morton supported Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren for president.)

Socialism may boil down to a mood, or a structure of feeling, rather than a politics to adopt wholesale, for members of Gen Z. Though they might hold inconsistent positions—as so many of us do—zoomers grasp the core essence of socialism, and are finding that it provides them with an intuitive way of making sense of the world. Viewed in this light, a 15-year-old who is skeptical of Marx and Sanders but identifies with the socialist label isn’t necessarily evidence of the ideology’s dilution: Instead, she might be proof that socialism has become synonymous with a love of justice, and a desire for positive social change.

Many zoomers may still find individual socialist policies more attractive than the broader socialist politics that lie underneath. And many more will find little attractive about either. But students who belong to the country’s burgeoning YDSA chapters aren’t demanding their peers’ political purity—mostly, they’re asking their classmates to keep an open mind, and learn alongside them.

“What we want is workers to have power and for everyone to be able to live a healthy life without fear of lack of medical care or housing,” Keller said. “Socialism is very popular if you break it down.”

Bat 'super immunity' may explain how bats carry coronaviruses -- USask study

Bat-virus adaptation may explain species spillover, researchers say

UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN

 

IMAGE: USASK RESEARCHER VIKRAM MISRA (LEFT) AND FORMER PHD STUDENT ARINJAY BANERJEE POSING WITH A BAT FINGER PUPPET. view more 

CREDIT: DAVE STOBBE FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN.

A University of Saskatchewan (USask) research team has uncovered how bats can carry the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus without getting sick--research that could shed light on how coronaviruses make the jump to humans and other animals.

Coronaviruses such as MERS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and more recently the COVID19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus, are thought to have originated in bats. While these viruses can cause serious and often fatal disease in people, for reasons not previously well understood, bats seem unharmed.

"The bats don't get rid of the virus and yet don't get sick. We wanted to understand why the MERS virus doesn't shut down the bat immune responses as it does in humans," said USask microbiologist Vikram Misra.

In research just published in Scientific Reports, the team has demonstrated for the first time that cells from an insect-eating brown bat can be persistently infected with MERS coronavirus for months, due to important adaptations from both the bat and the virus working together.

"Instead of killing bat cells as the virus does with human cells, the MERS coronavirus enters a long-term relationship with the host, maintained by the bat's unique 'super' immune system," said Misra, corresponding author on the paper. "SARS-CoV-2 is thought to operate in the same way."

Misra says the team's work suggests that stresses on bats--such as wet markets, other diseases, and possibly habitat loss--may have a role in coronavirus spilling over to other species.

"When a bat experiences stress to their immune system, it disrupts this immune system-virus balance and allows the virus to multiply," he said.

The research was carried out at USask's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization--International Vaccine Centre (VIDO-InterVac), one of the world's largest containment level 3 research facilities, by a team of researchers from USask's Western College of Veterinary Medicine and VIDO-InterVac.

"We see that the MERS coronavirus can very quickly adapt itself to a particular niche, and although we do not completely understand what is going on, this demonstrates how coronaviruses are able to jump from species to species so effortlessly," said VIDO-InterVac scientist Darryl Falzarano, who co-led the bat study, developed the first potential treatment for MERS-CoV, and is leading VIDO-InterVac's efforts to develop a vaccine against COVID-19.

So far, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has infected more than 3.5 million people worldwide and killed seven per cent of those infected. In contrast, the MERS virus infected nearly 2,500 people in 2012 but killed one in every three people infected. There is no vaccine for either SARS-CoV-2 or MERS. While camels are the known intermediate hosts of MERS-CoV, bats are suspected to be the ancestral host.

Coronaviruses rapidly adapt to the species they infect, Misra said, but little is known on the molecular interactions of these viruses with their natural bat hosts. A 2017 USask-led study showed that bat coronaviruses can persist in their natural bat host for at least four months of hibernation.

When exposed to the MERS virus, bat cells adapt--not by producing inflammation-causing proteins that are hallmarks of getting sick, but rather by maintaining a natural antiviral response, a function which shuts down in other species, including humans. Simultaneously, the MERS virus also adapts to the bat host cells by very rapidly mutating one specific gene, he said.

Operating together, these adaptations result in the virus remaining long-term in the bat but being rendered harmless until something--such as disease or other stressors--upsets this delicate equilibrium.

Next, the team will turn its focus to understanding how the bat-borne MERS virus adapts to infection and replication in camelid (a group of even-toed ungulates that includes camels) and human cells.

"This information may be critical for predicting the next bat virus that will cause a pandemic," said Misra.

###

Lead researchers on the paper were Misra's former PhD students Arinjay Banerjee and Sonu Subudhi who are now at McMaster University and Massachusetts General Hospital respectively. Other team members included researchers Noreen Rapin and Jocelyne Lew, as well as summer student Richa Jain

There's No Such Thing as Independent Music in the Age of Coronavirus



IMAGE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK |ILLUSTRATION BY DREW MILLARD

America’s original gig workers are suddenly out of a job. Banding together as part of a broader labor movement may be the only move musicians have left.

By Emilie Friedlander Apr 23 2020

Ionce spent six months living in the mailroom of VICE's Brooklyn office. I'm actually not kidding: Back before my long-time employer took over the building, the brick-and-cinder-block warehouse on South Second and Kent was home to numerous artist lofts, along with various now-defunct underground music venues with filthy bathrooms and lax smoking policies, like Death by Audio, Glasslands, and 285 Kent.

Living inside that tunnel-like network of interconnected live/work spaces was probably a health hazard: For about $400 a month, I camped out in a stuffy, windowless crawlspace on the upper level of a two-tiered loft bedroom, pretty much exactly corresponding to where the VICE mailroom is right now. But I needed to get out of the spot where I was staying in Bushwick, and a musician friend, who slept on the bottom level, offered to split the rent with me on the room.

It was the first of a number of small acts of kindness I would experience as a broke, 20-something music writer during my long association with that building—all from music people who lived and practiced in that space, who played shows or built crazy-sounding guitar pedals there.

When the music site I was working for got shut down, a bandmate of mine who gigged there got me a job waiting tables up the street. After I started a publication with a friend who was working at a booker down the hall at 285 Kent, the venue's leaseholder let us set up a big plastic table so we could use it as our office. I returned the favor by letting another 285 Kent employee, who actually lived in the venue, pop over to our apartment in the morning to use our shower.

THE AUTHOR'S OLD APARTMENT ON S 1ST STREET, IN WHAT IS NOW THE VICE BUILDING.

Scenes can be awfully competitive, but if you've ever been a part of one, you probably also have a story about how music provided you with a support system at a time when you desperately needed one. And if you've been paying any attention to the music Internet as the coronavirus crisis grinds live music to a halt, you've likely noticed examples of this sort of mutuality in every corner of the independent music scene, from shuttered venues pivoting to livestreams to raise money for artists with canceled shows, to musicians circulating petitions demanding unemployment benefits, increased streaming royalty rates, and protections against digital copyright infringement. On Friday, March 20, fans spent $4.3 million on Bandcamp after the site declared it was waving its share of music sales for the day—and the NYC Low-Income Artist/Freelancer Relief fund, one of many artist-created fundraisers, has raised over $100,000 so far for BIPOC, Trans/GNC/NB/Queer artists and freelancers whose livelihoods have been cratered by the pandemic.

Independent musicians aren't typically the people who come to mind when you think of the U.S. labor movement. Fans secretly envy them as a class of professional seekers with the luxury of sleeping in on Mondays, traveling the globe, and spending hours just feeling their feelings as the rest of us grind our teeth at a desk. And though their 20th-century counterparts had a proud history of union organizing, we tend to celebrate them less for their civic-mindedness than for the ways they embody a kind of irreverent, outsider approach to life. We love them because they're unashamedly themselves—and, often, for their insistence on quite literally doing it themselves, relying on talent and hustle to build a counter-narrative to an industry that has historically excluded them.

But as the coronavirus obliterates one of the last reliable sources of income that most musicians had left, logging on to music Twitter can feel like watching indie music's conception of itself shatter in slow motion—and something new rising in its place. As writer Liz Pelly has astutely observed, the very notion of "independent music" was already starting to feel pretty hollow in an era where artists are all beholden to streaming services that pay pennies-on-the-dollar per stream. Now, for the first time in our lifetime, and partly because they've been forced to, musicians are collectively voicing the fact that they are not merely exquisite souls, but workers—workers who are now out of a job, and who deserve the same protections that all workers do.


***

Musicians were already in a precarious position before the crisis hit: America's original gig workers, they've been cobbling together a living from touring, music and merch sales, music lessons, and sporadic licensing deals and label advances since long before Silicon Valley repurposed the term to make economic precarity seem desirable.

Like Uber drivers, Instacart workers, and others who subsist primarily on 1099 income, musicians don't typically qualify for unemployment in most states; employer-sponsored health coverage and paid sick leave are for the most part off the table, which is frightening when you consider how little money many of them are making in the first place. In 2018, a survey by the Music Industry Research Association found that the median income for musicians in the U.S. was between $20,000 and $25,000 per year, with 61 percent reporting that the income they made from music was not enough to meet their living expenses.

"Anyone fully dependent on music or mostly dependent on music was completely fucked by this," said Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, a Rhode Island-based musician and organizer probably best known as the guitarist for the punk band Downtown Boys. "You were increasingly only making money via performing, and all of a sudden that one revenue stream is completely and utterly destroyed."

Like most independent musicians in the streaming era, DeFrancesco says the majority of his income comes from touring and playing festivals; in 2019, he estimates, gigging comprised 90 percent. Not surprisingly, once he noticed venue performances and festivals being canceled across the country last month, he found himself logging onto the website for the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training, trying to file for unemployment.

"I spent hours and hours trying to fill out this application, getting on the phone with them, getting weird error messages," he says. "Of course, to finally get to the point where it was like, 'Oh, I still can't apply for unemployment with 1099 income.'"

As the Senate deliberated over a historic $2.2 trillion stimulus package in Washington, he started emailing with other musicians. The group came to a spur-of-the-moment decision to launch an open letter to Congress, demanding an expansion of unemployment and other benefits for musicians, crew members, and other independent contractors. Before long, hundreds of musicians were signing the petition every day; after legacy indie artists like Bikini Kill, Fugazi, and Neutral Milk Hotel jumped on, the music press picked up the story.

Fortunately for millions of people in this country, when the bill passed, it included a provision expanding some unemployment benefits to freelancers and other self-employed people, along with benefits like paid sick leave and paid family leave. While it's hard to say how much of an impact the letter made (DeFrancesco says he did receive a letter from Nancy Pelosi's office, acknowledging receipt and expressing their appreciation), it was a striking show of solidarity from a group of artists who, on the whole, aren't exactly accustomed to openly identifying as part of the working class.

"This group was a group of workers who were not yet organized but who were angry, who were out of work, and suddenly had time," said DeFrancesco, who cut his teeth as an organizer while working in the hotel business. On the day that we spoke, he and a group of Rhode Island-based musicians had launched a similar open letter demanding that the state government distribute federal funding for artists and other gig economy workers "immediately and without undue burden on applicants," along with implementing a rent freeze and the creation of an artist relief fund. (So far, he says, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts has already begun making emergency grant funding available).

***
As the live music shutdown magnifies the damage wrought by a decade-long decline in album sales and a streaming economy that largely benefits artists who are already very successful to begin with (or who happen to land a coveted playlist placement), other musicians have been focusing on putting pressure on platforms to demand a fairer payout.

When a show she was slated to play opening for Anti-Flag in mid-March got canceled, Boston-based singer-songwriter Evan Greer wasn't necessarily fretting over the lost work. She had a day job as the deputy director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization, but she started worrying about how her friends in the queer music community were going to get by. "All of the income they had planned for the next three months just evaporated in a week," she remembers.

When she thought back to the last streaming royalties check she'd received from her label—the amount, she said, was "totally laughable"—she started to get angry. "If we're building a music industry where you can only make a living if you either create music that's designed to game a specific company's algorithm, rather than the music that you want to make—or you tour 300 days a year—then we're creating a music industry that leaves a lot of people out," she said.

On a whim, she logged onto the Action Network and drafted a petition demanding that Spotify immediately—and permanently—triple the amount they pay artists per stream, in addition to donating $500,000 to music charity Sweet Relief. (In 2019, according to one analysis, the company paid artists an average of $0.00318 per stream, which means that in order to make $3180, your song would need to be streamed a million times). The petition has 2001 signatures and counting.

On March 25, about a week after the petition started circulating, Spotify went wide with an announcement: The company was unveiling a new project called Spotify COVID-19 Music Relief, donating funds to five music-related charities and matching outside donations dollar-for-dollar, for a total contribution of $10 million. It also unveiled plans to introduce a controversial new feature that would enable musicians to raise money directly from their artist profile pages, by linking out to a fundraising page of their choice. (When it debuted this week alongside a charitable partnership with CashApp, musicians compared the feature to a "tip jar," with one writer describing it as a "tacit admission that artists are not being paid enough.")

Greer doesn't know what effect, if any, the petition had on Spotify's internal calculus, but she's glad to have contributed to the chorus of voices demanding that Spotify do something in response to the crisis, even if its focus on charitable donations felt a bit like an attempt to paper over the problem. "This is kind of the version of the boss sending everyone a nice fruit basket instead of just like paying you," she said. It didn't help that just a few weeks before, Spotify announced it was teaming with Amazon, Google, and Pandora to appeal a U.S. Copyright Royalty Board ruling mandating that streaming services increase its royalty payments to songwriters by 44%.

That artists aren't simply pulling their catalogs en masse speaks to a truth they know as well as their digital overlords do: Musicians aren't really in a position to opt out of a system that reduces their songs (not to mention the behavior and moods of the people who stream them) to widgets in an ad-revenue machine. As record stores shutter and a formerly robust music journalism scrapes by as a corpse of its former self, listeners looking to discover new music will continue turning to platforms that are designed for that express purpose, especially when that means they can consume nearly every album in the world for less than ten bucks a month. In an industry where attention is everything, there's no fate worse than becoming invisible.

***

Like many gig-economy workers, today's musicians are beholden to the cold logic of invisible algorithms that determine when they will get paid and how much, forgoing the stability that comes with traditional employment for the freedom that comes with being able to make one's own hours and decide how much one will work.

Whether they agree to this arrangement because they find it appealing, or because they feel they have no other choice, they're participants in a system that diminishes the cost of their labor while benefiting the wealthy few. Lest we forget, streaming is an extraordinarily lucrative business: According to the RIAA, last year, the U.S. record industry generated $8.8 billion from streaming alone, more than the total revenue of the entire recorded-music sector in 2017. And as your average independent musician struggles to pay rent, major labels Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group, also known as the "big three," are doing pretty well; in Q4 of 2019, they jointly generated nearly $1 million an hour in streaming, according to a Music Business News analysis of the companies' quarterly financial reports.

Technically speaking, though, most musicians don't actually work for these services; unlike the Instacart shoppers who went on strike earlier this month to demand hazard pay, sick leave, and hand sanitizer, they don't even boast a common employer to rise up against. Instead, they're disconnected actors in an attention economy that operates according to a survival-of-the-fittest logic, forced to compete with each other for each fraction of a penny they receive.

Partly owing to this uncomfortable marriage between counterculture and hustle culture, Mat Dryhurst, an artist and researcher who works as a lecturer at the New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, has spent the past few years arguing that the term "independent music" is no longer fit for purpose. For one thing, the cultural context it describes—that of an alternative musical economy arising out of the indie rock label system of the 1980s and 1990s—no longer applies in a world where underground musicians and pop stars are all competing for attention on the same publicly traded platforms.


Over the phone, Dryhurst was quick to credit that spirit of "irreverent individualism" for powering some of the greatest counter-cultural moments of the 20th century (think: the hippie movement, punk rock and hip-hop and early DJ culture, 1990s "do-it-yourself"). But in the era of platform capitalism, he fears, it may simply have the effect of dividing us.


In an April 2019 editorial for the Guardian, Dryhurst suggested the term "interdependence" as a more appropriate descriptor for what a genuine 21st-century alternative might look like. "[When] people think romantically about the independent music industry, most of the things that they actually like about it can be described as the interdependent components of it," he told me. "Even though the singer is the most prominent person in the press shot, they're going out there in the world, and as a result of them getting paid, the band members get paid, and then the label gets paid, and then the person who made the artwork gets paid, and then the mixing engineer gets paid. That infrastructure, to me, presents an interesting hard contrast [with] the general march toward isolation."

It's tempting to say that the coronavirus will be the thing that pushes music out of the era of independence and into a more interdependent one—though there were signs of this even before the virus ground the entire industry to a halt.

DeFrancesco and Greer are part of an informal network of musicians from across the country who have staged a handful of organizing campaigns over the past few years. (DeFrancesco estimates the group of participating musicians to be about a thousand strong.) In 2017, they convinced SXSW to remove a clause in its artist contract saying that it would work with ICE to deport foreign artists who violated the terms of the agreement. In 2019, they got 40 major music festivals to agree to a ban on facial recognition technology. They've since staged a number of digital direct actions focused on Amazon's ties to U.S. immigration enforcement, working under the banner No Music for Ice.

You could see a similar impulse at work during the first few months of this year, when, for a brief moment, it felt like artists from all over the musical spectrum—from Soccer Mommy and Vampire Weekend to Public Enemy and Cardi B—were collectively leveraging their influence in support of former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, culminating in an eclectic, oddly scene-agnostic traveling music festival the campaign dubbed "BerniePalooza."

The Vermont senator is out of the race and musicians' hope for a self-proclaimed "arts president" has been dashed, but it's hard to imagine musicians losing that taste for collective action any time soon. DeFrancesco sees increased public arts funding as something high on his list of priorities as an organizer, along with musicians lending their support to other causes that support all members of the working class during this time of crisis, such a rent freeze and Medicare for All.

But along with demanding more from our government and large music companies, DeFrancesco, Greer, and Dryhurst expect to see musicians using the crisis as an opportunity to experiment with alternative forms of economic support, from homegrown wealth-sharing initiatives to novel platforms that offer a glimpse of what an independent world without Big Streaming might look like.

In March, musicians Zola Jesus and Devon Welsh unveiled Koir TV, a site that aims to streamline the process for musicians looking to collect revenue while they livestream performances from home. Ampled, a project incubated at the New Museum, is a Patreon-like, artist and worker-owned cooperative that enables musicians to share original audio and other content with fans for a monthly donation. "In today's platform economy, musicians are digital sharecroppers," co-founder Austin Robey told me in an email. "They generate all the value for platforms, yet capture none of it. Our mission is to make music more equitable for artists, and to provide an alternative to extractive investor-owned platforms."

Relying on the goodwill of one's community is no substitute for fair wages and a public safety net, but at times like these, that mutual support system—our fundamental interdependence—may be the only thing we have left. After New York City enacted a moratorium on public gatherings, workers at venues and booking companies all over the city, including the company I co-founded, organized GoFundMe campaigns to offset some of the financial consequences they were facing as a result of their schedule of shows being interrupted.

Watching the names of people I hadn't seen in almost a decade pop up on the GoFundMe dashboard—people I used to party with at 285 Kent, the sort of life-long music lovers I know still buy records as often as they can—I felt a sense of community I hadn't known I had been missing. Somehow, it was the tersest comment that finally caused me to cry: "Thanks for all the list spots."

These Artists Are Organizing a Musicians' Union to Demand COVID-19 Aid

The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers sent a letter of demands to Congress signed by members of Fugazi, Downtown Boys, Speedy Ortiz, and many more.

By Josh Terry May 4 2020

DOWNTOWN BOYS AND SPEEDY ORTIZ ARE TWO OF THE HUNDREDS OF BANDS TO SIGN UMAW'S LETTER. (PHOTO CREDIT: LEFT, FARRAH SHEIKY AND RIGHT, SHERVIN LAINEZ)

A long list of independent artists has formed the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) to respond to the devastating effects the coronavirus pandemic has had on touring musicians and the industry as a whole. On top of efforts to secure more aid for struggling musicians during the crisis, the union will also "address issues facing musicians such as streaming payments, mechanical royalties, relationships between musicians and venues and record labels and more."


In its first action, the UMAW has sent a detailed letter to Congress with a list of demands for extended benefits in the next congressional relief package. "Musicians and all gig workers are struggling hard right now. Rent is due, bills are due, debt is piling up, and many of us still haven’t gotten any financial support. We need more immediately if we’re going to survive," co-organizer and Downtown Boys' Joey La Neve DeFrancesco said in a statement.

As of press time, over 278 artists have signed a letter of demands including members of Fugazi, Speedy Ortiz, Downtown Boys, Diet Cig, Torres, Alice Bag, Sonic Youth, Frankie Cosmos, Eve 6, Mannequin Pussy, Charly Bliss, of Montreal, Half Waif, DIIV, Thursday, La Dispute, and dozens more.



"Many of us have been out of work since early March," the letter reads."Even when we receive the promised benefits, it will be too little and too late to survive the catastrophe facing our industry."

To mitigate the economic catastrophe facing music workers, the UMAW letter lists six demands including an extension of CARES act benefits until the end of 2020, an expansion of Medicare, a national rent and mortgage cancellation, and more funding to the National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the U.S. Postal Service.

"The above include the bare minimum needed to ensure that musicians, self-employed people, and all workers are able to survive the COVID crisis and its devastating economic aftermath with dignity," the letter continues. "Musicians and artists perform labor that provides entertainment, comfort, and meaning, for countless Americans, particularly during quarantine. If we are to continue producing through this crisis and afterward, we must have rights, respect, and immediate economic relief."

You can read the letter in full at UMAW's just-launched website, and if you're a musician, DJ, producer, road crew, or any in any gig related to music, you can sign the letter and join the group. To celebrate its launch, the UMAW will host a livestream concert featuring sets from Algiers, DIIV, and more.