Thread by @MesMitch

New York’s governor
@NYGovCuomo
, announced that Bill Gates would be responsible for “re-imagining” New York’s education system. Cuomo also asked former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to lead a panel planning New York’s post-#Covid tech infrastructure.

theintercept.com/2020/05/08/and…

As Naomi Klein writes, the appointments of Schmidt and Gates represent a “Pandemic Shock Doctrine … that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up [and] treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to

save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future”.

From California to Florida, states are turning to big corporations, CEOs and trade associations to not only decide when and how these states should “reopen”, but also what the post-virus economy should look like.

latimes.com/california/sto…

Even if Schmidt and Gates had good policies, Cuomo’s knighting of them is offensive to American self-government. Nobody voted for them and they are accountable to no one.

Cuomo, often accused of being too close to big campaign donors, is tripling down: he is simply allowing billionaires to plan our future directly, taking out the middlemen.

democratandchronicle.com/story/news/pol…

In case you had any doubt that this is a new form of government worming its way into our old democratic ways, Cuomo anointed these tsars at the exact same time that he took vast new powers away from the state legislature, which has not been holding regular legislative hearings

Turning away from locally-elected representatives, and towards billionaires with no accountability, represents a terrible erosion of democratic decision-making: Cuomo is quite literally replacing elected representatives with private, unaccountable monopolists.

And too many other lawmakers across the US are doing the same thing.

Meanwhile, the Cares Act, Congress’ coronavirus rescue package, is an authoritarian, top-down, big business restructuring of the already monopolized American economy. It gives extraordinary powers to the treasury secretary to reshape manufacturing, retail and banking in America,

with almost no oversight, via easy access to trillions of dollars from the Federal Reserve.Too many decision-makers are ceding their policy to corporate power and private sector privilege
economicliberties.us/press-release/…

The WH has trotted out a steady stream of WS bankers, pharma executives and big-box store CEOs to make promises about pandemic recovery measures. (Which haven’t been kept – for instance, weeks later, the promised Target and Walmart parking lot testing sites hadn’t materialized.)

it doesn’t have to be this way. We must build a post-pandemic economy that is not only more resilient to external shocks but also fairer for the workers who bear the brunt of downturns.

That’s a lesson everyone - from the president to Andrew Cuomo to your local city council member – needs to learn, fast.
epi.org/blog/workers-o…

Even before this terrible pandemic, turning first to big businesses and their wealthy owners was a common condition of American policy making. When federal lawmakers want to juice the economy, they pass tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy.

When state and city lawmakers want to promote economic development, they dole out giveaways to big companies, providing them a leg up over smaller, more local competitors, often without letting constituents know until the contracts have all been signed.

When those deals become well-publicized enough – like Amazon’s HQ2 deal with New York – local communities have shown they can fight back and stop them. These battles aren’t just about subsidies and inequality, they are about democracy: who governs us?

boondoggle.substack.com/p/aoc-was-righ…

Deference to big business isn’t smart. The extremely concentrated, too-smart-to-fail medical industry failed; monopolization and bad trade policy, championed by the very men who now want to govern us, has led to mass death and suffering

economicliberties.us/wp-content/upl…

The medical system couldn’t take the shock of the pandemic, thanks to outsourced supply chains and a rotting for-profit hospital system.

#Coronavirus has created a constitutional crisis of sorts, one where the rules of representation, power and decision-making are up for grabs. As during the Great Depression, the fundamental facets of power – who has it, what constrains its use – are changing before our eyes.

Monopolists are seizing power and market share for themselves, setting themselves up as the arbiters of our collective futures.

The pandemic has revealed just how far apart the incentives of big business and workers and community members are: big business wants to acquire power and profit. Owners get to stay at one of their many homes, sanitized, safe, while employees face terrible choices about

the risks they create for their family members by going to work.The stock market is booming while low-wage, and disproportionately female and minority, employees get sick and die in the name of economic recovery👇npr.org/2020/05/09/853…

Just let the herd suffer and the weak to be left behind, while the rich carve into rump steak.
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Its an attitude called 'Social Darwinism' and its been around a long time, nearly as long as biological Darwinism

This virus has highlighted the inequality levels in the different countries and the failings of certain models. In France, for example, where the government implemented short - time work schemes, very few have become unemployed.

Workers have continued to be paid 80% of their salary and companies haven't lost their workforce. A universal health system has also proved its worth. And we have Orange guy LIES over and OVER again this virus was a HOAX ,,,150K People died 48m Unemployed We're SCREWED

Desertion, Debilitation, Destruction, Decadence, Deception, Denial, Denigration, Dog-whistling, and now Death.... Donald has now proven he has all the ingredients to make up one evil and nasty individual.

It’s time to ask ourselves, as it is always time to ask ourselves, what kind of nation do we want to live in? That answer requires moral leadership. So take it upon yourself to be a leader and set an example for the kind of country you want to live in.@SenKamalaHarris @JoeBiden

The number of #Covid19 deaths per capita in Sweden was the highest in the world in a rolling seven-day average to 2 June. The country’s rate of 5.29 deaths per million inhabitants a day was well above the UK’s 4.48.

According to data tracked by the Washington Post, since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have experienced their highest seven-day average of new #coronavirus cases since the pandemic began.#HerdImmunity

Either protect EVERYONE and get society back to normal or make everyone wear masks and gloves but just stop dithering and achieving nothing. I've no idea why we're listening to that crank Trump either, he called it HOAX, under control, I don't take responsibility at all...