Like Health care, UBI, free college, climate healing, and COVID relief

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) demanded that Congress pay people to stay home during Corona virus shutdowns, Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, tweeted:

“AOC, Are you suggesting you want to pay people to stay home from the money you take by defunding the police? Or was that for the student debts you wanted to pay off, the Green New Deal or Medicare for All? #WhereIsTheMoney”

Where is the money? What about the deficit? What about inflation? Conservatives always ask those questions to dismiss demands for needed programs like COVID relief pay, universal basic income (UBI,) free public college, and Medicare for all. …

Coronavirus is having a grand old time, exploiting areas where American society is divided and disorganized, problems that have been damaging us for years but went largely ignored. Now, with the pandemic shining light on these dysfunctions, we may have a chance to address them. Here are seven problem areas that prevent our controlling COVID-19, while creating suffering every day.

1. A disorganized government split into federal, state, and local levels, all divided by partisanship, corrupted by lobbyists, not valuing competence

While some Asian countries brought the pandemic under control in a couple of months, as reported by John Power in the South China Morning Post, the U.S., …

My friend Gladys takes care of her 94-year old mother Sylvia, who has Alzheimer’s. Gladys tries to keep mother up with the world and so was telling her about COVID-19. Sylvia said, “I want that.” Thinking she had misunderstood, Gladys replied, “Oh, no, Ma, it’s a terrible disease that kills old people.” And Sylvia said, “Take me to where they have it.”

Sylvia’s request may sound demented or depressed to you, but it would have seemed normal in previous generations. Back then, pneumonia was called “the old person’s friend.” Before antibiotics and medical supports for breathing, like oxygen and respirators, pneumonia in old people had a death rate of 30–40% or more. …

Have you wondered why different people: white and Black, liberal and conservative, American Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims, see the world so differently? It’s because we’re not seeing the same world at all. Each of us sees reality through a series of boxes, made of stories we inherited from our ancestors, have learned since birth, and have had reinforced every day by society and the media.

If we stay inside our boxes, we suffer in two ways. We can’t see the world as it really is, so we keep being hurt by it, and we miss its beauty. Second, everyone else in other boxes seems wrong and dangerous. This separation makes us easy to manipulate and is the source of much of our social conflict. …

Do you ever feel like some unseen force is blocking you? Self-help books, therapists or coaches might help you find a different way forward, but wait! Maybe the world wants you to do something else. That happened to the prophet Balaam, and we can still learn from his 3000-year old story.

Like all Bible stories, Balaam’s is best read as poetry, not as literal truth. You don’t have to believe in God to learn from it. Like other spiritual wisdom, Balaam has several layers of meaning that will speak to us at different stages of our lives. …

Rich people love to tell us about the dangers of giving people money for nothing. If people don’t work for everything they get, they become lazy. Giving them something without work corrupts their morals.

Somehow, that advice only applies to working people. Rich people make nearly all their money without working. A capitalist folk saying goes, “Your money should work for you; you shouldn’t work for your money.” A DuckDuckGo search for that phrase brings up pages of web sites teaching people who already have money how to get more.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah famously alleged that 47% of Americans are “takers,” wanting to be supported by the “makers” like him who create the wealth. This claim helped lose Romney the 2012 presidential election to Barack Obama, when videotape of his talk was leaked to the media. People pointed out that, as CEO of the Bain Capital investment firm, Romney had bought up healthy companies and sold off their assets to pay dividends to Bain customers, a process described in a book by Josh Kosman called The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy. …

Outweigh the benefits

“The lockdown that we have done in the world towards the COVID-19 pandemic is the worst assault on the working class in half a century.” Martin Kulldorff PhD

Since March, we have seen the COVID-19 shutdowns cutting back people’s lives, sinking folks into poverty and desperation. Whether or not these steps are necessary, here are some groups being ground down by these supposed public health measures.

Children

With schools in San Francisco going virtual, my partner Aisha and I have been helping neighbor children with distance learning. (See Zoom School is Like Regular School, Only Worse.) We have observed children cut off from playmates, crying, depressed. …

I used to wonder why conservatives and Republicans called middle-class liberals “elites.” They were usually referring to academics and entertainers, maybe Hollywood celebs, not to people with real power. If professors and actors are ‘elite,’ what do you call billionaires and heads of corporations who actually run the world?

Well, last month, I learned firsthand where conservatives’ anger at the people they call elites comes from. I found myself on the incorrect side of a wedge issue, and I got slammed by my online friends in just the ways I’ve seen liberals and “progressives” slam white Trump supporters. Now I can see one reason the Left/Right divide keeps widening, even while the 0.1% …