Truthout: In early April, as much of the East Coast continued to sink into COVID-19 crisis mode, a heavy storm dumped rain across Massachusetts and New Hampshire, overwhelming local wastewater treatment plants. Plant operators would later report that millions of gallons of raw sewage overflowed into the Merrimack River, which supplies drinking water to a half million people and is a popular place to swim and fish.
FROM FANON TO VENTILATORS: FIGHTING FOR OUR RIGHT TO BREATHE (6 MAY 2020)
ROAR Magazine: Ruling elites are pursuing the convergence of two dreams in their response to COVID-19: a state dream and a market dream. The state dream entails emptying public space of unruly populations — the poor, migrants, the racialized, protestors. The market dream is a world governed by market-based algorithms abstracted from human relationships. COVID-19 has provided a pretext for both to be realized. As we come under pressure to live privatized, domesticated, separated lives of docility, underpinned by intensified government repression, we will have to defend not only our right to healthcare but our right to be fully human: our right to breathe — in every sense.
INDIGENOUS LEADERSHIP POINTS THE WAY OUT OF THE COVID CRISIS (5 MAY 2020)
Truthout: The United States is in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 1.2 million people and claimed over 70,000 lives. President Donald Trump has failed the American public, bungling the response while forsaking and targeting vulnerable communities. Meanwhile, the hopes for a progressive insurgency have faded with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s withdrawal from the race for the Democratic nomination for president.
POLITICIANS EXPLOIT COVID-19 IN PERU, BOLIVIA (5 MAY 2020)
CounterVortex: Peru’s right-wing opposition leader Keiko Fujimori, who had been jailed in January while corruption charges are pending against her, was released from pre-trial detention at Lima’s Chorrillos prison on May 4, ostensibly on fears she could be exposed to the coronavirus. Fujimori will be under “restricted release,” meaning she cannot leave Lima without prior authorization and must check in every 30 days with judicial authorities. Of course there has been no general discharge from Peru’s dangerously overcrowded prisons, and one leading anti-corruption prosecutor in the Fujimori case, Rafael Vela, is protesting her release as “illegitimate.”
