Category Archives: Government Oppression

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pushing ahead with a vote on a $3 trillion Democratic-only virus relief bill today despite the misgivings of some liberals and moderates in her party and the fact it has no chance of ever getting signed into law.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) is counting on key parts of the bill aid to states, more payments to individuals and extending unemployment insurance to generate enough public support that the White House and the GOP will be forced into negotiations on another round of stimulus for a hobbled U.S. economy.

I am optimistic that the American people will weigh in and make their views known, the speaker said yesterday, deflecting questions about pressing ahead with a partisan vote without any active negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) or President Donald Trumps administration.

McConnell previously said Congress should wait and see the impact of $3 trillion in stimulus already passed before acting on another package. But last night on Fox News he said there is a high likelihood that there will be another bill.

McConnell said hes spoken with Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about the next phase of stimulus but theyve set no date for getting it done. He dismissed the House Democratic legislation, known as the Heroes Act, as a $3 trillion left-wing wish list.

The White House said Trump would veto it if it ever got to his desk.

The toll of the coronavirus pandemic continues to mount even as some states begin rolling back lockdown orders, allowing businesses to slowly reopen. More than 1.4 million people have been infected and more than 85,000 have died. And since businesses began shutting down in mid-March 36.5 million people have applied for unemployment insurance.

Adding to pressure on lawmakers and the White House is the prospect of an autumn election campaign with the economic hardship continuing. Read more from Billy House and Erik Wasson.

Read an in-depth analysis of the measure in the BGOV Bill Summary.

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

Pelosi at the Capitol on Thursday,

House Plan Bars Lobbyists From PPP: House Democrats added provisions to their proposal to bar lobbyists and political groups from coronavirus relief for small businesses under the popular Paycheck Protection Program. Changes in an amendment to the Democrats plan reflect concerns that the aid money could go to lobbyists while Democrats seek to expand eligibility for the loans to an array of nonprofit groups. It would also disqualify groups that have or intend to spend money on elections or political advocacy in the current election cycle. Ben Brody and Mark Niquette have more.

Stealth Bailout for Oil Companies: Dozens of oil companies and contractors took advantage of a little-noticed provision in the stimulus bill Congress passed in March to claim hundreds of millions of dollars in tax rebates. They are employing a provision of the $2.2 trillion stimulus law, called the CARES act, that gives them more latitude to deduct recent losses. The change wasnt aimed only at the oil industry. However, its structure uniquely benefits energy companies that were raking in record profits in 2018 as crude prices reached $76.41 per barrel, only to see their fortunes flip a year later. Read more from Jennifer A. Dlouhy.

School Choice Groups Seek Tax Credits: Almost 50 school choice groups are calling for lawmakers to provide special tax relief for K-12 private schools that they warn are at risk of closure because of the pandemic. The groups want a 50% tax credit on private school tuition for both the 2019 and 2020 tax years and they want to have tuition payments labeled as contributions to nonprofits for tax deduction purposes. They also calling for emergency grants that states could use for scholarships for private school tuition. Read more from Andrew Kreighbaum.

House Democrats Set to Approve Proxy Voting: Democrats are set to push aside more than 200 years of House precedent with a vote today to let lawmakers serve as proxies for colleagues quarantined or otherwise stuck at home by the coronavirus pandemic. This low-tech version of remote voting is the Democrats temporary answer to health and travel concerns raised by dozens of lawmakers. It would alter House rules to let individual members cast votes on behalf of as many as 10 colleagues. Its been dismissed by Republicans as a way to let lawmakers stay home while other Americans are going to work and as a move that would have constitutional implications. Read more from Billy House.

Senate Passes Uighur Human Rights Measure: The Senate gave unanimous consent to legislation that would impose U.S. sanctions on Chinese officials over human rights abuses against Muslim minorities, an action sure to anger Beijing as anti-China sentiment grows at the Capitol. The bill from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) would condemn the internment of more than 1 million Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region of China and calls for closing the camps where they are being held. It would require the president to impose sanctions on and revoke the visas of any officials found to be responsible for the oppression of the Uighurs. Daniel Flatley has more.

Senators Urge Fed to Buy Long-Term Debt: A bipartisan group of senators want the Federal Reserve to buy longer-term debt issued by state and local governments to help ease the impact of coronavirus on municipal services. State and local governments are on the front lines in the fight against Covid-19, the senators wrote in a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Secretary Mnuchin yesterday. These entities are quickly deploying desperately-needed funds to hospitals, public health departments, nursing homes, water and power utilities, public transit, and other essential services. Read more from Daniel Flatley.

DeFazio Urges Airlines to Create Distance: House Transportation Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) asked U.S. airlines to apply social distancing policies on their planes, citing reports of increasingly full commercial flights. In letters to two airline trade associations, he called on members to ensure that their reservation systems leave at least one seat-width of spacing between passengers and to dynamically adjust fares as needed to account for the effect on load factors. Read more from Ben Livesey.

Business Is Split on Partisan Lines Over Recovery: The politicization of Americans views about the Covid-19 outbreak, including whether to wear a mask, extends to small businesses. Firms in the Northeast and in Democratic-leaning states are more anxious about the future than their peers around the country, with many expecting economic pain from the Covid-19 pandemic to last longer than six months, a new U.S. Census Bureau survey shows.

The survey of around 90,000 firms shows that, while every U.S. region is affected by the outbreak, the extent of financial damage and peoples attitudes toward it vary widely by state. About 40% of respondents in blue-leaning states of Vermont and Hawaii, as well as Washington, D.C., see it taking more than half a year for business to return to normal. However, only 18% of those surveyed in the GOP strongholds of West Virginia and Idaho see it taking so long, the data show. Read more from Michael Sasso and Alex Tanzi.

CDC Posts Reopen Advice for Restaurants, Offices: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published guidance yesterday advising states on how they should reopen bars, restaurants and workplaces. The guidance outlines a series of steps that should be taken to keep their workers and customers safe, such as requiring hand-washing, social distancing measures, and how to check for symptoms. An earlier version of the guidance was held back by the Trump administration for being too prescriptive, particularly for states that have had less intense outbreaks.

The White Houses task force issued broad guidelines for reopening the country on April 16 but largely left the specifics to states on how to restart economic and social activities. Around the U.S., states have begun moving ahead with plans to reopen, even as cases of the disease continue to circulate. But in the absence of guidance from the CDC, providing rules and advice had largely been left to state and local groups, or not dispensed at all. Read more from Jennifer Jacobs, Emma Court and Justin Sink.

Under the newly issued CDC guidelines, businesses would be encouraged to follow a series of steps.

Trump Mulls Made-in-U.S. Order: The Trump administration is also preparing an executive order to require certain essential drugs and medical treatments for a variety of conditions be made in the U.S. The order comes in light of drug and device shortages during the pandemic. A draft of the order is circulating inside the government and was obtained by Bloomberg News. The order would limit any federal contracts for those supplies to manufacturers in the U.S. and would require that production be divided among multiple companies to ensure price competition. Read more from Shira Stein and Tony Capaccio.

Top Court Rejects Texas Inmates on Covid-19 Prevention: The U.S. Supreme Court refused to reinstate a judges order that required a Texas prison for elderly inmates to take more than a dozen specific steps to protect against the coronavirus outbreak. The justices yesterday rejected calls by inmates Laddy Valentine, 69, and Richard King 73, who said the Wallace Pack Unit in southeastern Texas isnt doing enough to protect them from possible infection. The case marked the first time Supreme Court intervention was sought in a dispute over the steps prisons must take to protect inmates from the coronavirus. Read more form Greg Stohr.

Mail Voting Opens Door to Disenfranchisement: Minorities, young adults and those with disabilities face barriers to voting by mail as states rush to prepare for holding elections as safely as possible. The effects of long-existing issues with voting by mail wasnt as perceptible in previous elections because only a fraction of the electorate in most states utilized absentee ballots. The coronavirus is expected to change that in November, but state officials are making decisions now on how voters will cast their ballots in the general election, as well as in dozens of primaries over the next several months. Read more from Emily Wilkins.

Biden Says People Who Believe Tara Reade Shouldnt Vote for Him: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said yesterday that any voter who believes the sexual assault allegations against him shouldnt vote for him, Jennifer Epstein reports. I think they should vote their heart and if they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldnt vote for me, Biden said during an interview on MSNBC. I wouldnt vote for me if I believed Tara Reade.

Biden has denied Reades claim that when she worked for his Senate office in 1993, he pushed her against a wall in a Capitol Hill office building, put his hand up her skirt and sexually assaulted her with his fingers.

Look at Tara Reades story, it changes considerably, he said. Biden was referring to Reades changing descriptions of the episode in media interviews over the past several weeks. Her narrative has also shifted from her initial claims more than a year ago, when she said Biden touched her shoulders in a way that made her uncomfortable, but didnt mention an assault. The truth matters. This is being vetted, its been vetted, Biden said. This is just totally, thoroughly, completely out of character.

Trump Revives Obamagate Conspiracy: Trump has complained from the start of his presidency that Barack Obama and anti-Trump factions in the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies misused their power to undermine him. Now, Ric Grenell, Trumps acting spy chief, and Attorney General William Barr have taken highly unusual steps that are prompting accusations theyre using the same agencies to protect Trump and bolster his Obamagate conspiracy theory against Democrats in the months before the November election.

Amid the dire developments of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump is using the new actions to fire up his political base through renewed attention to what he described in a tweet Thursday as the biggest political crime and scandal in U.S. history. Hes also depicted Biden as a key player in those unspecified crimes. Read more from Chris Strohm.

Jordan Seeks Hunter Biden-Burisma Documents: House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) yesterday called on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to turn over documents related to the Ukrainian natural-gas company where Joe Bidens son served on the board. Jordan, a close ally of Trump, is seeking records specifically tied to Hunter Biden and to Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky. Read more from Billy House.

House Moves May Expose More Trump Rules to Rollbacks: Publication of a new rule governing the divisive issue of sexual misconduct allegations on college campuses has been accelerated just in time to meet an estimated deadline of May 20a move that could prove significant if Democrats sweep the November elections, Cheryl Bolen and Andrew Kreighbaum report.

Trump to Receive Space Force Flag: Trump will be presented with the Space Force flag at the White House today, his latest effort to herald the launch of the new branch of the U.S. military, Jennifer Jacobs and Josh Wingrove report.

Trump Pick to Lead Media Agency Is Under Investigation: Trumps choice to lead the agency in charge of Voice of America is under investigation by the attorney general for the District of Columbia, a Democratic senator said yesterday. The nomination of Michael Pack seemed, after a two-year delay, to be on a path to be cleared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, followed by a likely confirmation vote by the full chamber. Then the D.C. attorney generals office told the committee that Pack was under investigation. Read more from Daniel Flatley.

Virus Revives Worst-Case Scenarios for U.S.-China Relationship: The coronavirus pandemic has revived all the worst-case scenarios about U.S.-China ties, edging them closer to confrontation than at any point since the two sides established relations four decades ago. Read more.

Meanwhile, China said it did not know until Jan. 19 how infectious the new coronavirus is, pushing back against accusations that it intentionally withheld information about the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan from the world. Read more.

WTO Leader Search Begins: The U.S. and European Union signaled they want to move rapidly to replace the head of the World Trade Organization after Director-General Roberto Azevedo unexpectedly announced plans to step down Aug. 31, a year before his term expires. Read more from Bryce Baschuk.

To contact the reporters on this story: Zachary Sherwood in Washington at zsherwood@bgov.com; Brandon Lee in Washington at blee@bgov.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giuseppe Macri at gmacri@bgov.com; Loren Duggan at lduggan@bgov.com

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What to Know in Washington: Pelosi Sets Marker With Virus Vote - Bloomberg Government

By Avner Pariat

I had forgotten how misunderstood and loathed Socialism still is in this state of ours. Most people still consider it to be synonymous with Stalinism, Maoism and other extreme forms of Collectivist Communism. It is easy to hate these ideas for they are often presented to us as cold, lifeless and brutal. And they were in many ways. But Socialism is a much older system than Communism. It is a more universal idea and can shrug off any accusations of being a Western invention. Socialism (much like Feminism) is not some weird and scary disruption to a perfect and well-oiled system. It is a system in itself and must be recognised once again as a valid alternative to the status quo. Maybe people who work in a government job, nine to five, might not think there is a deadly and massive rot around us and in our society but I think most people under 30 can see that inequality and open theft of community resources is taking place right in front of us. When will we act to stop this? When we have attained the age of retirement and got a fat and healthy superannuation package? Will we act when all the skies are choked with ash from unregulated cement factories? Or maybe it is when we are given some time off from our busy lives as useful tools in the machinery of the rich?

Socialism is an old, old system. In many ways it was the only system and we as tribal people lived under it for the longest amount of time. To me, claiming my tribal birthright is also claiming my Socialist birthright! Why do I say this? Because the fact of the matter is that the History of these Hills is a history of Socialism. Of course it is not a simple and easy history to understand, it has other elements as well; oppression, exploitation and poverty were around back in the old days as well. But we seem to have recently forgotten that words like imlang sahlang (live together, stay together) carry with them a deep-seeded meaning about sharing and looking after one another, which is what my idea of Socialism is about. Being a tribal I should think that Socialism would go hand in hand with our ways of living. Do we not pride ourselves in looking after our own? Do we not boast about having better moral values than the Plainsfolk? Or are these just empty hollow declarations that we tell each other to boost our inflated ego?

People in the state are facing a very difficult time under the Covid 19 Pandemic. It has reduced us to a husk but it could have been different. An all-encompassing and inclusive Healthcare system could have rendered calamities like this disease less powerful. It could have brought out the best in everyone with little stress and strain but instead we are chaotically running from pillar to post trying to tend to the new and swiftly emerging contingencies. Yes, it could definitely have been much worse and so far we have managed to act in time. That being said let me not lull you into a false sense of complacency. These events must show us the failures of the old system.

Covid 19 has jolted us from our daydreaming. Had we tended to Public Health issues more religiously from before we as a country might not be in the situation we are in today. If we had prevented the corrupt nepotists from sucking money and authority from our Public Health System we might not be in the situation we are in today. If we had stopped Private companies from buying up our Healthcare system we would not be in the situation we are in today.

Some people will say, Yes, I agree but we need nothing new now, we must simply reform the system. Reforms, alas, have been tried and tested and they can be implemented on paper everyday if a government so wishes but while the corrupt are still powerful these will be empty gestures with no weight in them. Public Health cannot be decided by people who have vested interests and that is why I go back to my advocacy for my version of Tribal Socialism.

I like this word: Tribal Socialism. Maybe it can be my tagline. But what does it mean? Well it might allude to the fact that we must dig deep to reconstitute the vital (and relevant) lessons from our Indigenous past. We must listen to the folk stories once again and go back to the basics of societal interaction that they teach us. These old tales are filled with moments of cooperation and solidarity. For instance, the flight of Syiem Latympang from her enemies was eased by the love and companionship of her subjects, friends and family. On another front, the hunters from the Khyndai Umtong, did not simply rush in to kill Sier Lapalang when he transgressed. They consulted with the Spirits of the Wild first before embarking on their faithful path. Also note that they never thought of themselves as outside of the authority and sway of Nature. They were human beings, yes, but not distinct from other creations.

In reality though there is no such thing as Tribal Socialism. It is just a version of Socialism for us, we few, we Khasi few; we who must decide now how to address the future. Will it be for the few who even in this crisis continue to rake in the big bucks from public coffers? Or will we snatch the whip away and install instead a government for the people, by the people and of the people. These are very widely used words and many a politician throws them around cheaply but no one can rob them of their power. We have lost the plot in the last few decades- consumed as we have with trivial and petty pursuits that make no mark on the world but maybe this disease can bring us out of it and if not at least start the good work by drawing us closer to one another.

(If you want to gossip about these people (maybe thwart them), please reach out to me in email. I can be reached at[emailprotected]which is linked to my Youtube channel, Ban Khan which I hope you will deign to check out!)

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My Idea Of Socialism - The Shillong Times

54-year old street-vendor, Kashem,is a daily basis wage-earner who lives in a congested slum in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He lost his wife 9 years ago. He has a 16-yearold daughter, Kulsum, who is a low paid readymade garment worker. Recently, she lost her job due to the COVID-19. Kashemis also unable to re-open his street shop because of present countywide lockdown. Kashems life now stands on a double-edge sword: outside the house is the fear of rapidly contagious pandemic and inside the house is starvation and half-starvation without any income. Suffering is endless here for Kashem who without any kind of savings or income generation has to pay house-rent and maintain livelihoods.This story of suffering is not only about Kashemand Kulsum, but also about almost half of the population in Bangladesh and across South Asia: a garment worker, a street vendor, a rickshaw puller, a construction worker, a transport worker and it goes on and on. Even the fear of laying off hits the private sector executive level job market also. Recently, at least dozens of prominent mass media houses in Bangladesh sacked their officials and employees as the pandemic ascended. One of the prominent TV channels in the country not to be named fired 3 of its staffson the very day of the World Press Freedom Day this year. This demonstrates the magnitude of the crisis the country is facing today and going to face in coming days.

Researchers from Dhaka Universitys Institute of Health Economics estimate that, around 15 million people of different sectors will become unemployed in Bangladesh due to the slowdown of trade and business caused by deadly virus. Moreover, some Bangladeshi economist and analyst estimated that nearly 20 million people might lose their jobless due to COVID-19 crisis. They estimated that people who are involved in labor-oriented sectors like garment workers, construction workers, transport workers have already become temporarily jobless, which putting serious stress on the economy and it will have a huge adverse impact on livelihoods. Day-laborers, transport workers, hawkers, the employeesof hotels, restaurants, and different shops and other informal workers are the worst victims of the halt in economic activity as they have lost their means to earn bread and butter. According to the Labor Force Survey-2017, around 60.8 million people were involved in various economic activities while informal employment or labor-oriented sectors were dominating as 85.1 percent of the total population in Bangladesh. The contribution of informal jobs to urban areas was 13.1 million and 38.6 million in rural areas.

According to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS),around 34 million people, or 20.5 per cent of the population, live below the poverty line. So, there is no alternative but to provide a huge amount of government assistance to keep this population alive. The government announced the incentive package but its not sufficient for the large number of population. People need basic things at the time of the pandemic. So, the government has to increase health care as well as grass-feeding and keep them alive.

The pandemic has brought much hardship to workers in informal sectors or labor-oriented sectors, including some unnoticed vulnerable class of workers like sex worker and transgender communities. SexWorker Network in Bangladesh, a sex-worker-right monitor, estimated that at least 8,000 of sex workers have already become homeless in Dhaka. About 150,000 sex workers in Bangladesh are one of the worst hit communities following the shutdown. On top of that these communities receive no attention from the government or civil society aid groups leading to exacerbated endurance for these communities.

The unemployment scenario is more or less the same across the South Asia. Similarly, in India, the countrywide lockdown to control the spread of coronavirus has seen 122 million Indians lose their jobs in April alone. Indias unemployment rate is now at a record peak of 27.1%, according to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). Unemployment hits 23.5% in April, a sharp spike from 8.7% in March. And the unemployment rate is the highest in the urban areas. The findings of the survey estimate that the worst situation is in Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, and Bihar. There is an unemployment rate peaking about 50 percent. But hilly States had the lowest incidence of unemployment as of April, the survey said, pointing out that the rate in Himachal Pradesh stood at 2.2%, Sikkim at 2.3% and Uttarakhand at 6.5%.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, the Federal Minister for Planning and Development, Asad Umar, predicted that around 18 million people might lose their jobs as a result of lockdowns. But Pakistan makes a pleasant paradigm to prevent the worst unemployment situation. world fifth populated country Pakistan takes a green stimulus scheme, which is a win-win for the given environment and the overthrown unemployed population. Lahore has created more than 63,000 jobs for unemployed day laborers or labor-oriented workers and by relaunching the nations ambitious 10 billion Tree Tsunami Campaign. This project is a part of Pakistans existing initiative to plant billions of trees to counter the effects of climate change. Similar to other South Asian countries, Pakistan is badly affected by climate change, experiencing more than 150 extreme weather events between 1999 and 2018. Another step is, PM Imran Khan launched a web portal for the victims of lockdown. Those who have lost their jobs, will be able to register themselves on the portal. Under this Ehsaas Emergency Cash program, registered unemployed will be given a maximum RS 12,000.

In Afghanistan, according to data by the Biruni Institute, a local economic think-tank, as a result of the pandemic, 6 million people have already lost their jobs in the country where 80 percent of people live below the poverty line. The political crisis is the other reason for unemployment in the country. The political crisis, security threats, the lockdown of cities, and the reduction of international are the great matter of concern the war-ravaged Afghanistan. The Ministry of Economy had warned earlier that unemployment in Afghanistan will increase by 40% and poverty will increase by 70% because of unemployment and the spread of the COVID-19. But the ray of hope is, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved $220 million in emergency aid for Afghanistan to help cushion the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Other countries in South Asia are also experiencing the rampage of pandemic while poverty was already an embedded part of their economy. Pre-pandemic poverty rate as estimated: 8.2 percent in both Bhutan and the Maldives, 25 percent in Nepal, 33 percent in Sri Lanka.This rate is highly likely to increase in an unprecedented scale.

The International Labour Organization said, nearly half the worlds workers are at immediate risk of losing their jobs. The sobering statement will ring alarm bells in economies around the world, with every nation on the planet likely to be affected by the devastating fallout from the spread of coronavirus. Some 1.6 billion workers in the informal or labor-oriented sectors, almost half of the global labor force, as well as those at the most vulnerable end of the employment ladder are in danger of losing their livelihoods.

South Asia is home to over 1.8 billion people and houses half of the worlds impoverished communities. The region has the potential to become the factory of the world next to China as the world is turning back to China. But uncertainty remains how the region will overcome the upcoming post-pandemic recession and will feed the workforce to remain alive to take over the global labor market. Nonetheless, some employers are taking advantage of pandemic period by soaring the labor oppression which is not a humanistic approach and will lead to the trust-crisis and labor-unrest in the region. That said, South Asian leaders should work together to build the region during the pandemic and post-pandemic recession How was the May Day this year for laborers and working-class people was better understood by laborers and working-class people who lost their earnings or only means of livelihoods due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I wish them a late happy May Day and long-lasting solidarity.

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When India Tested a Nuclear Device on Its Citizens - Modern Diplomacy

As leaders of organizations committed to securing civil and human rights, we have been in constant conversation about the impact of coronavirus on communities of color. The global pandemic has highlighted just how much work is left to be done to build a just and inclusive society and serves as a tragic reminder that we are far from reaching that ideal.

With healthcare, food security and safe housing in jeopardy and job loss attaining levels that may soon exceed unemployment during the Great Depression, we are reminded daily of the structural barriers to justice and inclusivity and the racial inequities highlighted by the pandemic.

Today, the deep relationship in this country between race and povertyand its dire consequencesare inescapable. While no one is immune from the coronavirus pandemic that has quickly spread throughout the nation, the virus's stark, disproportionate impact on communities of color has been painfully clear.

The public health statistics lone are staggering. Thirteen percent of the U.S. population is black, but according to the CDC, black patients make up 33 percent of people who have been hospitalized with COVID-19. Black and Latinx individuals in New York City are twice as likely to die from coronavirus as are their white counterparts. In Chicago and Louisiana, where black people make up about one-third of the population, they account for 70 percent of coronavirus deaths. The Navajo Nation has more confirmed coronavirus cases per capita than every state except New York and New Jersey.

Many of the contributing factors for these gross disparities arise from systems and structures of oppression that have persisted in the U.S. throughout our history. These inequities have been amplified even further by the coronavirus.

It is important to recognize the widespread and deep-rooted systemic issues contributing to the high coronavirus infection and death rates for communities of color. For example: less access to quality and affordable health care, resulting in higher levels of heart disease, diabetes and obesity, which are now increased risk factors for coronavirus. The lack of bilingual, culturally competent information makes it harder for individuals to access facts about coronavirus and seek appropriate medical care during this crisis. And there's also fear of seeking medical care due to immigration policies that cause many marginalized communities to fear ICE enforcement against themselves, family or friends.

Additionally, the ability to practice social distancing is much harder because black people, Latinx people, immigrant and refugees are over-represented in essential, high-contact jobs in the fields of agriculture, transportation, sanitation, grocery stores, maintenance, food processing, and deliverynot to mention those working in health care facilities. In addition, communities of color also suffer from a greater inability to practice social distancing because of closer living conditions caused by historic and pervasive housing discrimination, as well as greater vulnerability due to dangerous living conditions resulting from higher rates of homelessness and incarceration.

The severe economic downturn triggered by the pandemic is also having a bigger impact on communities of color for numerous other reasons. Despite the enormous gains made by the civil rights movementand other movements combating and mitigating the pervasive harms caused by the history of discrimination and racism in this countrythere are still deep and widespread structural barriers to racial equity. We see this in the lack of opportunity and access many people of color have to vitally needed goods and services. Such barriers include lack of access to quality education (which in this country is significantly funded by local property taxes, often relegating children in poorer districts to severely resource-strapped schools), jobs that pay a living wage and good health care. Additionally, both the enormously disparate rates of incarceration we see between white communities and those of color and policies adversely affecting the humane treatment of immigrants and refugees are part of a well-documented connection between the oppressive systems of the past and the realities of today.

We also cannot afford to ignore the uptick in bias-crimes directed at Asian-Americans, the proliferation of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories accusing Jews of creating or spreading the virus and some of the extremist and problematic actors behind recent anti-quarantine protests across the country. The virus that is hate and anti-Semitism thrives and metastasizes in situations such as these, and we have already begun to witness that online and in the real world.

The National Urban League, Unidos US and ADL have long fought against government policies that have maintained these inequities. Further, our organizations have consistently maintained that words matter. When top leadership in this country uses the extraordinary power of bully pulpits to whip up anxiety and fear and to divide rather than unite the country, it leads to an environment of greater willingness to accept and propagate inequities.

In the context of the current pandemic, there are a few things our leaders can do now to address these racial disparities. We believe that states must include demographic data in their public reporting for individuals who have contracted, recovered from and died from coronavirus, that the federal government must take responsibility for mitigating risk to essential workers, that we must advocate for added protections for those in manual essential jobs and that we must ensure stimulus measures focus on increasing testing and economic support for marginalized communities.

Without action, these social inequities will persist and likely will even be exacerbated long after we flatten the coronavirus curve.

Acknowledging, understanding and mitigating oppressive systems and structures is a necessary step towards building a just and inclusive society. The impact of coronavirus is a tragic reminder of what we already knew: We have a long way to go.

Janet Murgua is president and CEO of Unidos US; Marc Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League; and Jonathan Greenblatt is CEO of ADL (the Anti-Defamation League).

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

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Coronavirus Highlights Tragic, Longstanding Racial Inequity in the U.S. | Opinion - Newsweek

THE EDITOR, Madam:

THE COVID-19 pandemic is here to stay for the foreseeable future. This has left the Jamaican Government in a precarious situation in ensuring Jamaicas economy gets back on track and mitigating the social gaps exacerbated by the pandemic.

However, this is also an opportunity for the Jamaican Government to take the socio-economic issues by the horns and work towards developing our human capital and, by extension, create sustainable changes throughout our society.

Interestingly, Prime Minister Holness stated that our survival as a people is often based around small business such as corner or community bars; he called this the economy around bars. Based on ones anecdotal evidence, it could be argued that Jamaica has the largest number of bars per square mile in any developing country, and some argue this as a fact. The point is, Jamaica has a whole lot of bars. We may then ask ourselves the question: why is this a cultural phenomenon in a place like Jamaica? Then, we may start to think that historically we produce rum; we may also agree that bars are the poor mans escape from the harsh realities of Jamaica. The point is, Jamaica has a lot of bars because our society has failed to develop human capital and nurture creativity for the development of other economic ventures outside of bars and small merchant shops across the island.

Jamaicans are talented people, but we must admit that we have failed poor Jamaicans by not investing in their development, as a people, beyond remedial education. We have many bar owners and shopkeepers who had dreams of becoming something else in life, but they have not seen many others like themselves being authentic and successful. So we turn to what we know for survival, being shopkeepers and bartenders.

Our educational institutions need to inspire people to be not just lawyers or doctors, but successful people. For many years, human capital development has lagged behind because we are not able to teach students life skills, to nurture creativity and, ultimately, promote diversity and inclusion in the Jamaican society. Jamaicans are largely descendants of slaves and much like our brothers across the globe who had the same experiences, we are susceptible to poverty and anti-blackness in varied forms. Particularly in Jamaica, we struggle with colourism and classism.

Teach our people to love themselves beyond the vestiges of colonialism and this will inspire Jamaicans to look beyond systems of oppression and cultivate their unique creative spirits into economic powerhouses. But first, the Government must provide room for this growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation in forgotten communities.

Instead, in the year 2020 we are scrambling to register these unregistered bars and shrink our informal economy. This is great; however, Jamaicans are more than unattached bar owners. We are diverse people with many dreams and aspirations. Jamaica needs to create room for this, to enable each Jamaican to be innovative and successful. We can do this by employing meritocracy in our institutions, diversifying educational curriculum and engender critical thinking and, last, we should invest in reducing classism and social exclusion of minorities throughout our society. This will prove beneficial for our future and beyond. Jamaica nice, but it can be nicer for everyone.

@speaknowja

speaknowja1962@outlook. com

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Letter of the Day | We must develop our human capital - Jamaica Gleaner

Andrea Circle Bear, of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation near Eagle Butte, S.D., was the 29th federal inmate to die due to the coronavirus in Bureau of Prisons custody. She was sentenced to serve 26 months. Circle Bear was being held at Tripp County Jail in South Dakota up until March 20. Then, because she was pregnant, she was transferred to Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. FMC Carswell is the only federal medical prison for women in the United States. (Indian Country Today, April 29)

Mural art depicting Indigenous triumph over snake-like colonial destruction of humans and land. Taken outside the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston. Mural by Deanna Santiago of the Estok Gna, also known as the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas.Credit: WW photo: Mirinda Crissman

Upon her arrival, social distancing and quarantine measures for prisoners and guards were not deployed to prevent the spread of coronavirus until after the facility officer of the American Federation of Government Employees Local filed complaints about the minimal guidelines they were given. This delay in implementing safe practices is but a part of the systemic negligence that killed Andrea Circle Bear.

After displaying symptoms for COVID-19, she was sent to a Fort Worth Hospital. Circle Bear was placed on a ventilator to help her breathe. On April 1, she gave birth while on the ventilator via cesarean section, and on April 4 she tested positive for COVID-19, according to the BOP. She died on the ventilator, and her baby was returned to her family in South Dakota. (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 1)

Families Against Mandatory Minimums President Kevin Ring explained in a press release calling for an investigation into Circle Bears execution by the state: Not every prison death is avoidable, but Andrea Circle Bears certainly seems to have been she simply should not have been in a federal prison under these circumstances. In fact, nothing better demonstrates our mindless addiction to punishment more than the fact that, in the midst of a global pandemic, our government moved a 30-year-old, COVID-vulnerable, pregnant woman not to a hospital or to her home, but to a federal prison. (tinyurl.com/y7j258qt)

U.S. perpetrates racial and gender violence

Violence and neglect administered by the U.S. are nothing new to Indigenous nations, as theyve been steadfast in their resistance to ongoing genocide for six centuries. Imperialism and ongoing [settler] colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence. (A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff) This system was constructed, and it can be dismantled.

Legislation has been one of the ways this imposed order has tried to separate Indigenous people in North America. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Dr. Kim Tall Bear explains that the Dawes Act of 1887 and state-sanctioned monogamous marriage functioned as colonial tactics to divide and conquer this land and its people. The act marked the breakup of collective tribal land into individual allotments, which forced Indigenous people into capitalist and proprietary relationships to land, which had not existed previously. (All My Relations podcast, March 19, 2019)

By offering 160 acres to a head of household, 80 acres for a wife, and 40 acres for each kid, there was a real incentive to be monogamously married and to biologically reproduce. Within this structure, women could not be considered heads of household. So women and children became legally codified as the property of those who could. As a man owned and possessed land, he owned and possessed his spouse and children.

Ongoing settler colonialisms and the recent execution of Andrea Circle Bear demonstrate why the U.S. is a central perpetrator of racial and gender violence. Indigenous people are arrested at high rates disproportionate to their percentage of the population. They are the only group that is killed by police at a higher rate than Black people.

At the same time, Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirits people are murdered or reported missing every year. To raise awareness for the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirit people, organizations like Missing Flowers, Native Justice Coalition and the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women raise #MMIWG2S in our collective consciousness.

Violence against this segment of the population remains unbearably high. The Department of Justice found that the murder rate of Native American women is 10 times higher than the national average. And we know this is underreported. The National Crime Information Center reports that, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the U.S. Department of Justices federal missing persons database, NamUs, only logged 116 cases. Human trafficking and mass murder, whether carried out by state or nonstate actors, is in the service of capitalism and white supremacy. (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report, Urban Indian Health Institute, 2018)

Native people have been in reciprocal relationships with the land for generations, despite attempts to disrupt that. Where war is being waged upon the land via fracking for oil, abandoned uranium mines or the construction of the wall across the southern U.S. border First Nations people find themselves in zones sacrificed in the name of profit for a few. Destruction of the environment and other settler-imposed structural inequalities are the reason why infection rates for COVID-19 have been so high on reservations disproportionate to the Native makeup of the population. (Workers World, April 29)

Gov. Noem threatens legal sovereignty of Sioux tribes

As COVID-19 ravages Indigenous communities, we turn to Andrea Circle Bears tribal lands. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is threatening federal legal action against the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe because they refuse to take down highway security checkpoints, which they put up to protect their people from the coronavirus. Native nations understand that self-determination and self-defense are a matter of life or death. (NPR, May 12)

Support for Indigenous sovereignty must be central in our struggle for liberation. We must all change our relationships to this land and to each other. On our way to that not-so-distant future, we must recognize expressions of gendered violence take many forms, including police brutality, mass incarceration, immigration policies and state-imposed reproductive oppression, and we must fight against them. Solidarity with Andrea Circle Bears family and community, both inside and outside prison walls.

Prisons disappear people. We need to end cycles of colonial violence by disappearing prisons. Tear down the walls!

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Andrea Circle Bear and six centuries of genocide - Workers World

Chris Christie, a Trump supporter and a former New Jersey governor, pleaded with Americans on May 5 to risk disease and death by returning to work. Everybody wants to save every life they can, he said, but weve got to let some of these folks get back to work. Otherwise were going to destroy the American way of life in these families.

The American way of life is shaping up to be a battleground.

On one side is the working class. From Amazon warehouse workers to striking sanitation workers in New Orleans, there are limits to what ordinary people are willing to endure to secure their employers bottom line. Resistance to oppression and exploitation is a familiar experience for millions of workers in this country. And when workers have not found justice or relief in mainstream politics, they have turned to more combative ways of mobilizing to secure it.

On the other side is the Republican Party, led by the Trump administration, which has accelerated its call for states to reopen the economy by sending people back to work. While President Trump admits that some people will be affected badly, nonetheless we have to get our country open.

Public health experts disagree. Instead, they argue that testing rates must double or triple and that we need a more intense regime of contact tracing and isolation. This has been the established pattern in countries that managed the coronavirus with success. But without these measures, forecast models predict a sharp rise in fatalities. A conservative model that in mid-April predicted a ghastly death toll of 60,000 by August now estimates 147,000 fatalities by August. Just as the rate of infection drops in cities like New York and Detroit, new outbreaks threaten to emerge elsewhere where restrictions are being relaxed.

But if we expect tens of millions of people to stay at home for even longer, that is possible only if people have access to income, food, stable housing and reliable health care. If people cannot work, then these things will have to be provided by the federal government. It is that simple.

For Republicans, the American way of life as one with big government social welfare programs would be worse than the pandemic. At the core of their vision of the United States is a celebration of supposed rugged individualism and self-sufficiency where hard work is valorized and creates success. Of course, the contrapositive is also believed to be true, that when people have not been successful it is because they did not work hard enough.

Buried within this is the false notion that the U.S. is free from the hierarchies of class. Instead, Republicans and most mainstream Democrats would argue, America has fluid social mobility where a persons fortitude determines the heights of his or her success. This powerful narrative has motivated millions to migrate to this country. But for tens of millions, this view of the American way of life has no bearing on their lives.

Typically, the contradictions of our society are buried beneath the American flag, suffocating hubris and triumphalist claims of exceptionalism. But the pandemic has pushed all of the countrys problems to the center of American life. It has also highlighted how our political class, disproportionately wealthy and white, dithers for weeks, only to produce underwhelming rescue bills that, at best, do no more than barely maintain the status quo.

The median wealth of a U.S. senator was $3.2 million as of 2018, and $900,000 for a member of the House of Representatives. These elected officials voted for one-time stimulus checks of $1,200 as if that was enough to sustain workers, whose median income is $61,973 and who are now nearly two months into various mandates to shelter-in-place and not work outside their homes. As a result, a tale of two pandemics has emerged.

The crisis spotlights the vicious class divide cleaving through our society and the ways it is also permeated with racism and xenophobia. African-Americans endure disproportionate exposure to the disease, and an alarming number of videos show black people being brutalized by the police for not wearing masks or social distancing, while middle-class white people doing the same things are left in peace. In New York City, 92 percent of those arrested for violating rules regarding social distancing and 82 percent of those receiving summons for the same offense have been black or Latino.

Our society imagines itself to be impervious to the rigidities of class, but it is overwhelmed with suffering, deprivation and hunger. Food banks across the country report extraordinary demand, producing an almost shocking rebuke of the image of a country of universal abundance. According to one report, a food bank along the affluent New Jersey shore has set up a text service allowing people to discreetly pick up their food.

Elsewhere, the signs of a crisis that looks like the Great Depression are impossible to hide. In Anaheim, Calif., home to Disneyland, cars formed half-mile-long lines in two different directions, waiting to pick up free food. In San Antonio, 10,000 cars waited for hours to receive food from a food bank. Even still, Republicans balk at expanding access to food stamps while hunger is on the rise. Nearly one in five children 12 and younger dont have enough to eat.

That way of life may also begin to look like mass homelessness. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants nationwide had failed to pay their rent. And while more people paid in May, continued payments seem unsustainable as millions fall into unemployment. Forty-three million households rent in the U.S., but there is no public rental assistance for residents who lose the ability to afford their rent. With only a few weeks left on many eviction moratoriums, there is a thin line between a place to shelter in and homelessness for tens of millions of Americans.

Many elected officials in the Republican Party have access to Covid-19 testing, quality health care and the ultimate cushion of wealth to protect them. Yet they suggest others take the risk of returning to work as an act of patriotism necessary to regenerate the economy. This is duplicitous and obscures the manipulation of U.S. workers.

While the recent stimulus bills doled out trillions of dollars to corporate America and the financial sector, the smallest allocations have provided cash, food, rent or health care for citizens. The gaps in the thin membrane of a safety net for ordinary Americans have made it impossible to do anything other than return to work.

This isnt just malfeasance or incompetence. Part of the American way of life for at least some of these elected officials is keeping workers just poor enough to ensure that the essential work force stays shows up each day. In place of decent wages, hazard pay, robust distribution of personal protective equipment and the simplest guarantees of health and safety, these lawmakers use the threat of starvation and homelessness to keep the work force intact.

In the case of the meatpacking industry, there is not even a veil of choice, as those jobs are inexplicably labeled essential, as if life cannot go on without meat consumption. The largely immigrant and black meatpacking work force has been treated barely better than the carcasses they process. They are completely expendable. Thousands have tested positive, but the plants chug along, while employers offer the bare minimum by way of safety protections, according to workers. If there were any question about the conditions endured in meatpacking plants, consider that 145 meat inspectors have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and three have died.

The statements of the two senators from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, vociferously opposing the extension of $600 supplemental payments to unemployment insurance, offer another stark example of how workers are being compelled to return to unsafe work environments. Mr. Scott referred to the supplement as a perverse incentive to not work. He and Mr. Graham argued that the payments were more than some workers salaries, which is an indictment of the jobs and the companies, not the employees.

This is not the first time Southern politicians have complained that government aid to poor or working-class people would undermine their perverse reliance on low-wage labor. During the Great Depression, Southern leaders opposed new systems of social welfare over fear it would undermine the civilization to which we are accustomed, as a newspaper in Charleston, S.C., described it. The crude version came from an official in Alabama who insisted that welfare payments to African-Americans should be lower because, Negroes just dont want to work. The logic was that if you could pay black men a nickel then white men would celebrate being paid a dime. Meanwhile, the prevailing wages elsewhere were significantly higher than both. This is why wages are still lower across the South than elsewhere in the country.

American progress means that Mr. Scott, an African-American senator from South Carolina, now voices these ideas. But then as now, complaints about social welfare are central to disciplining the labor force. Discipline in the U.S. has always included low and inconsistent unemployment and welfare combined with stark deprivation. Each has resulted in a hyper-productive work force with few benefits in comparison to Americas peer countries.

This is at the heart of the conflict over reopening the country or allowing people to continue to shelter-in-place to suppress the virus. But if the social distancing and closures were ever going to be successful, it would have meant providing all workers with the means to live in comfort at home while they waited out the disease. Instead, they have been offered the choice of hunger and homelessness or death and disease at work.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, made this painfully clear when she announced that not only was Iowa reopening, but that furloughed workers in private or public employment who refused to work out of fear of being infected would lose current unemployment benefits. She described these workers choices as a voluntary quit.

The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services is also instructing employers to report workers who refuse to go to work because of the pandemic. Part of whats going on is the crush of people filing for benefits means state funds are shrinking. This is exacerbated by the reluctance of the Trump administration to bail out state governments. That the U.S. government would funnel trillions to corporate America but balk at sending money to state governments also appears to be part of the American way of life that resembles the financial sector bailout in 2008.

This cannot all be laid at the feet of the Trump administration, though it has undeniably made life worse for millions. These are also the bitter fruits of decades of public policies that have denigrated the need for a social safety net while gambling on growth to keep the heads of U.S. workers above water just enough to ward off any real complaints or protests.

The attacks on welfare, food stamps, public housing and all of the attendant programs that could mitigate the worst aspects of this disaster continue to be bipartisan. The loud praise of Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, in contrast to the poor performance of President Trump, has overshadowed protests against his $400 million cuts to hospitals in New York as the virus was raging through the city.

There will be many more examples of Democrats wielding the ax in response to unprecedented budget shortages in the coming months. With the increasing scale of the crisis as unemployment grows to an otherworldly 36.5 million people while states run out of money and contemplate cutting Medicaid and other already meager kinds of social welfare the vast need for government assistance will test the political classs aversion to such intervention.

During the long and uneven recovery from the Great Recession, the warped distribution of wealth led to protests and labor organizing. The crisis unfolding today is already deeper and much more catastrophic to a wider swath of workers than anything since the 1930s. The status quo is untenable.

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The American Way of Life Is Shaping Up to Be a Battleground - The New York Times

Utilizing cutting-edge technology, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is perfecting the religious oppression of millions at home and exporting the same capabilities abroad. The CCP's ongoing abuse of Christians, Muslims and Buddhists lays bare the stakes for human freedom in the United States' great power competition with China.

In its annual report released last week, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) concluded that the CCP is "engaging in systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations." Thanks to Western media investigations and courageous Chinese whistleblowers, many outside China are familiar with the CCP's deplorable persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang. In the past year, Muslims have suffered "torture, rape, sterilization and other abuses," and authorities have "destroyed or damaged thousands of mosques."

Christians, who make up roughly five percent of China's population, have fared little better. Chinese officials "raided or closed down hundreds of Protestant house churches in 2019." Local officials continue to offer cash bounties for information on underground churches. Chinese authorities have burned unauthorized Bibles, ripped down crucifixes and replaced likenesses of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary with images of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Tibetan Buddhists continue to suffer "forced assimilation and suppression." Monks and nuns unwilling to subordinate their faith to the CCP's dictates have been "expelled from their monasteries, imprisoned and tortured." As an extraordinary sign of the hopelessness and desperation the CCP's oppression has caused, USCIRF noted that at least 156 Tibetans have self-immolated since February 2009.

While authoritarianism and religious persecution are sadly not new, the CCP leads the world in the abuse of advanced technologies to carry out its religious cleansing. In an update last September, USCIRF noted that authorities have often forced religious minorities to provide "blood samples, voice recordings and fingerprints." Government officials then employ "advanced computing platforms and artificial intelligence to collate and recognize patterns in the data on religious and faith communities." Surveillance cameras, sometimes installed inside places of worship, utilize advanced facial recognition software to assist these efforts.

Some may want to dismiss these concerning facts as the unfortunate but isolated plight of Chinese civilians struggling half a world away. But that would miss the true extent of the CCP's global program.

According to USCIRF, "China has exported surveillance technology and systems training to more than 100 countries," allowing them to "target political opponents or oppress religious freedom." With the technology in hand and international opprobrium still at a whisper, repressive regimes will see little downside to following suit.

Some have already made that calculation. The report notes that in August 2019, "Uzbek authorities forced approximately 100 Muslim men to shave their beards, claiming that the beards hindered Chinese facial recognition technology used by the government."

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) summed up the stakes in February. "China is exporting authoritarianism. And they are giving everyone a packageI mean a literal tech package," he said. "The surveillance cameras, the artificial intelligence, the databases, the ways to control a society, just like they do at home."

The technology is hardly safer in democratic hands. Some U.S. allies and partners already use CCP technologies, clinging to dangerously outdated notions of a Chinese private sector. The reality is that no "private" Chinese company will refuse a dictate from Beijing. As free nations become increasingly reliant on Chinese hardware, they give the CCP potential points of access into security infrastructure and sensitive information.

Additionally, the more reliant nations, companies and individuals become on Chinese technology for critical services, investments and trade, the more reluctant each becomes to criticize Beijing's foreign or domestic policiesexpanding Beijing's ability to act with impunity. Some of America's closest European allies are already beginning to suffer from this affliction.

An effective response begins with documenting and disseminating Beijing's violations of religious liberty. The U.S. has taken positive initial steps. In October, the administration imposed restrictions on Chinese companies and officials abusing minorities.

But meaningful relief for China's religious minorities will come quickest if the U.S. recruits other nations with the economic and diplomatic firepower to stand together against Beijing.

This requires buy-in from America's partners. It also means tireless engagement with international organizations and the difficult diplomatic work of coalition-building. If Washington neglects these partnerships or vacates these international fora, Beijing will simply fill the vacuum.

As the USCIRF report makes clear, the competition between the U.S. and the CCP is about more than fleeting economic or political primacy. Hanging in the global balance are the protections of minorities, of conscience, of worship and of a private life beyond the reach of government.

If Beijing displaces the United States as the leader in shaping international rules and norms, one need not wonder the direction they will take: China's minorities already know.

Bradley Bowman is senior director for the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Mikhael Smits is a research analyst.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

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Beijing Hones and Exports Religious Oppression | Opinion - Newsweek

Health and government officials around the globe are slowly and ever-so-tentatively moving to relax lockdowns due to coronavirus.

In Canada, where the possibility of health-care collapse seems to have been averted (for the time being), some are beginning to ask questions other than when will the pandemic end? Instead, theyre turning towards how will we move forward?

Young people have some answers that warrant our attention. Over the past five years, through my collaborative ethnographic research with 250 young people in drama classrooms in Canada, India, Taiwan, Greece and England, I have gained remarkable insight into these young peoples experiences and assessments of the world.

I found crisis after crisis being shouldered by young people. Through their theatre-making, they documented their concerns and hope, and they rallied around common purposes. They did this despite disagreement and difference.

Beyond simply creating art for arts sake, or for school credits, many of the young people I encountered are building social movements and creative projects around a different vision for our planet. And they are calling us in. This is an unprecedented moment for intergenerational justice and we need to seize it.

I have had an up-close look at how seemingly disparate crises around the globe are deeply connected through divisive systems that dont acknowledge or respect youth concerns. I have also learned how young people are disproportionately affected by the misguided politics of a fractured world.

In England, young people were burdened by the divisive rhetoric of the Brexit campaign and its ensuing aftermath.

In India, young women were using their education to build solidarity in the face of dehumanizing gender oppression.

In Greece, young people were shouldering the weight of a decade-long economic crisis compounded by a horrifying refugee crisis.

Read more: Solidarity with refugees cant survive on compassion in crisis-stricken societies of Greece and Italy

In Taiwan, young people on the cusp of adulthood were trying to square the social pressures of traditional culture with their own ambitions in a far-from-hopeful economic landscape.

In Toronto, youth tried to understand why the rhetoric of multiculturalism seemed both true and false, and why racism persists and, in so doing, they spoke from perspectives grounded in their intersectional (white, racialized, sexual- and gender-diverse) identities.

They embraced the reality that everything in popular culture may enter a drama classroom. But they responded to current news stories like the 2016 presidential debates in the United States by saying that they had different and more pressing concerns, like mental health support and transphobia.

Todays young people are a generation that has come of age during a host of global crises. Inequality, environmental destruction, systemic oppression of many kinds weigh heavily.

I found a youth cohort who, despite many not yet having the right to vote, have well-honed political capacities, are birthing countless global hashtag movements and inspiring generations of young and old.

These marginalized youth are aware that their communities have been living with and responding to catastrophic impacts of crises of injustice and inequalities long before now.

How do these youth live with their awareness of global injustices and what these imply for the years ahead? We learned some disturbing things: as young people age and move further away from their primary relationships (parents, teachers, schoolmates), they feel less optimistic about their personal futures.

But in terms of hope, we learned something very recognizable to many of us now: many young people practise hope, even when they feel hopeless. They do this both in social movements they participate in and in creative work they undertake with others.

This is something we can all learn from. In Canada, we are maintaining social distancing as a shared effort. Acting together by keeping apart is how we are flattening the curve, as all the experts continue to tell us.

We know that in communities around the world, government leadership matters enormously. But citizens, social trust and collective will matter at least as much.

In this pandemic, institutions, like universities, businesses and individual citizens have stepped up remarkably in the interests of the common good and our shared fate.

However, Jennifer Welsh, Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University, argues that the defining feature of the last decade is polarization, existing across many different liberal democracies and globally.

Along with this, the value of fairness has been deeply corroded because of growing inequality and persistent historic inequalities we have failed to address, like Indigenous sovereignty and land rights in Canada.

Read more: The road to reconciliation starts with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

In the context of the rise of populist politicians and xenophobic policies globally, and also the rise of the most important progressive social movements in decades, my research has taught me that in this driven-apart, socio-economic landscape, the social value of art has never been more more important.

People are making sense of the inexplicable or the feared through art, using online platforms for public learning. Art has become a point of contact, an urgent communication and a hope.

But some are still without shelter, without food, without community and without proper health care. The differences are stark.

Arundhati Roy has imagined this pandemic as a kind of portal we are walking through: we can walk through it lightly ready to imagine another world. We can choose to be ready to fight for it.

Read more: What is solidarity? During coronavirus and always, it's more than 'we're all in this together'

Its time to put global youth at the centre of our responses to crises. Otherwise, young people will inherit a planet devastated by our uncoordinated efforts to act, worsening a crisis of intergenerational equity.

We should of course develop a vaccine and, in Canada, stop underfunding our public health-care system. But we must also flatten the steep curves we have tolerated for too long. For a start, we could act on wealth disparity and social inequality.

But our response to the pandemic could also illuminate new responses to fundamental problems: disrespect for the diversity of life in all its forms and lack of consideration for future generations.

Youth expression through theatre and in social movements are valuable ways to learn how youth are experiencing, processing and communicating their understandings of the profound challenges our world faces. How powerfully our post-pandemic planning could shift if we changed who is at decision-making tables and listened to youth.

Continued here:

After coronavirus: Global youth reveal that the social value of art has never mattered more - The Conversation CA

A book has hit Kazakhstan like a storm and is exposing the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party there. Turarbek Kusainov, the leader of the independent human rights organization Demos, has just publishedGloom: Sunset on East Turkestan, exposing the CCPs lies on the dreaded transformation through education camps. This is the first, exclusive interview with the author for an international media outlet. The interviewer is Serikzhan Bilash, a leading human rights activist in Kazakhstan.

What is the purpose of your book, exactly?

My book is not a literary work, it is a documentary analysis, characterizing and revealing the ultimate culprit of the brutal repressions the CCP is perpetrating. It is aimed at the forcible destruction of the language, religion, national customs, and traditions of the peoples that have inhabited present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region since ancient times.

The inhuman conditions of detention in the Xinjiang transformation through education camps, which are really concentration camps, the bullying of the inmates, the unspeakable horrors are shown through the real stories of former prisoners thrown into camps for long periods without any court verdict.

Thus, the story of the physical and mental suffering experienced by the prisoners of concentration camps is revealed, and the purpose of the criminal CCP policy is exposed. In addition, on the basis of evidence, the situation of total horror that has developed outside the walls of concentration camps, as well as the current predicament of Xinjiang residents, whose rights are unceremoniously violated, are analyzed.

We all know very well that repression is taking place in Xinjiang. The title of the book itself is bleak, one might even say tragic. And the conclusion of the analysis ends on a terribly sad note. Dont you think that such a book, and even its title, was unexpected in Kazakhstan, which is a country on friendly terms with China?

Everything has its own specific name. The Xinjiang region, now considered a Chinese province, until recently was the eastern edge of the Turkic world. Therefore, I personally believe it should be called East Turkestan. Unfortunately, the Chinese Communists are trying to erase the national uniqueness of the peoples that have inhabited this region for several thousand years, and thus finally destroy East Turkestan.

Let me be clear on one point, however. Even the representatives of the Turkic-speaking people who have become the object of severe pressure in Xinjiang that I know of do not call for a violation of the territorial integrity of the PRC, nor for the separation and creation of an independent state.

No one of those I interviewed has any separatist intentions. Neither do I. The main issue is human rights. You cannot prosecute a person for her national characteristics and religion, or for her political views. This principle is written down in international conventions, and even in the constitution of the Communist PRC. Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist authorities repeat the atrocities of Nazi Germany that shocked the world eighty years ago, as well as of the Stalinist repression.

As for the countries of the Turkic world and the Arab countries, where the overwhelming majority of the population is professing Islam, they are completely under the political and economic influence of China, and pretend that they do not see and do not know about the genocidal policy in Xinjiang.

There are two main minorities in Xinjiang, Uyghurs and Kazakhs. We know that the ethnic Kazakh population is less numerous than the Uyghurs, yet the territory where they are living takes almost half of all the Xinjiang territory and includes some of the best lands and pastures. How did you describe in your book the position of oil-rich Kazakhstan, which is a neighbour of China, towards the ethnic Kazakhs who are living and are persecuted in Xinjiang?

The book clearly describes the position of the authorities in the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan. Kazakhstan is in the sphere of political and economic influence of China. In the early 1990s, to improve its internal demographic situation, Kazakhstan turned to the Kazakh diaspora abroad, with an appeal that they return to their historical homeland. A law on migration was adopted specifically for this.

However, this law has now been sacrificed to Sino-Kazakh economic relations. Moreover, there are a lot of cases when former residents of Xinjiang, who received citizenship of the Republic of Kazakhstan, were detained in the transformation through education camps and subjected to bullying. Several Kazakh citizens still cannot return to their homelandthey are being held under house arrest in Xinjiang. The government of Kazakhstan knows this but did not even send a note of protest to China.

Kazakhstan found itself in a miserable situation, being unable to get out of the influence of China, and also to properly fulfill its obligations to protect human rights. Of course, all this will negatively affect the international image of Kazakhstan.

When, in your opinion, will the repression end?

It will not end. I think the Chinese authorities already took their final decision regarding the fate of the Turkic populations of East Turkestan. Whatever the pressure from international organizations, the plan to force Xinjiang to be sinicized will be implemented in a short time. Some experts believe that at least 400,000 ethnic Kazakhs will try to escape from China, no matter how great the risk.

In general, the CCP repression in Xinjiang will have a negative impact on the socio-economic situation and on the life of the Kazakh people as a whole. Kazakhs wishing to leave China are deprived of their business, they are not given the opportunity to sell their real estate and other property. As a result, those who manage to escape from China join the ranks of the socially vulnerable segments of the population in Kazakhstan. This will undoubtedly aggravate anti-Chinese sentiment in Kazakhstan. All these circumstances will increase the destabilization of the region.

Despite all the above, the reader should pay attention to the positive points noted in the book. Its about the potential of the Kazakh society. Your own human rights organization established in Kazakhstan revealed the truths on human rights violations in Xinjiang and offered evidence, putting this burning issue on the UN agenda. Kazakh society now knows about the existence of concentration camps in Xinjiang and the pursuit of a policy of genocide by the CCP, associated with repression against the local population in order to erase its national identity. This is a big success for human rights activists.

The next step should be legal action: every person who suffered in a concentration camp should apply to Kazakh courts and demand compensation from the Chinese government for moral and material damages, and these cases should also be brought before international courts. Only then will the monstrous intent of the CCP be finally exposed.

This interview has been republished with permission from Bitter Winter.

Excerpt from:

Telling the truth about China's oppression of Uyghurs MercatorNet - MercatorNet