Our government just told polluters they are free to pump deadly chemicals into our air and water. That’s because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has suspended all enforcement indefinitely, until the COVID-19 crisis is over. This terrifies me. I know firsthand that giving polluters free rein will cost thousands, even millions, of lives. As a young mother in Niagara Falls, New York in the 1970s, I watched toxic chemicals bubble up through our lawns, poisoning our children. When my neighbors and I discovered that our neighborhood, Love Canal, was built on a toxic wastedump, our advocacy led to the creation of the first Superfund site by Congress in 1980. There are 1,344 sites targeted for cleanup by Superfund, but there are tens of thousands more communities where the pollution continues unabated. These are known as “sacrifice zones” — places where the health of residents is permanently sacrificed to industrial contamination. Dozens of refinery fires and factory explosions emit toxic chemicals into the environment every year. If we remove penalties and enforcement, there will be more. And right now, because of COVID-19 and our government’s refusal to protect our environment, the residents of sacrifice zones are like sitting ducks. They have no place to go. It is our responsibility to keep them safe.
Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign for president, but his vision could not be more timely. COVID-19 has infected hundreds of thousands of Americans, killed thousands, and left millions unemployed and without health coverage. The crisis has laid bare for all to see the inequities and inadequacies in our health, economic, and political systems. Even the least politicized among us are now asking questions. It is painfully clear how much better off we’d be if the ideas that Senator Sanders champions had already been made into law. So why haven’t they? Over the last 50 years, corporate CEOs and political operatives have run the table on everyday people. To do that, they knew that they had to win the battle of big ideas—advancing a pro-corporate, anti-government, and anti-everyday-people ideology that infected nearly all the dominant institutions in America. It was and continues to be a war against common sense. Some call it neoliberalism, but most of us experience it as a brutal attack on our jobs, families, and communities. The Sanders campaign may be suspending, but the fight to win the agenda that his campaign represented is moving forward full throttle. And in the end a new common sense will prevail, and we’ll be much better off as a country because of it.
At the start of each shift, Eric Jarvis takes a handful of anti-bacterial wipes and sanitizes the equipment he uses at the Packaging Corp. of America mill in Valdosta, Ga. He worries about getting the coronavirus every time he leaves for work, but knows the nation depends on paper workers to produce the cardboard boxes used to ship millions of items to stores and homes each day. Jarvis, president of USW Local 646, may not be on the front lines of the pandemic in the same way as nurses and first responders. But he and other manufacturing workers also fulfill a vital role on the nation’s production lines, ensuring that Americans still have the food, medicine, toiletries and other items crucial for everyday life. Truck drivers, bakers, transit operators, grocery store clerks, warehouse packers and manufacturing workers form the backbone of America’s economy. They show up every day and get the job done, performing so reliably that the nation long took their work for granted. No one questioned, for example, whether stores would have toilet paper and cleaning products. Then the pandemic struck, and surging demand for consumer goods exposed America’s dependence on the blue-collar workers who supply almost every need. Life would grind to a halt without them. “I hope people never forget that,” Jarvis said.
In the early days of the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S., when the number of known cases was barely cresting 1,000, advocates for homeschooling were greeting news of the outbreak as an opportunity to promote their cause. “While the virus has caused illness and hardship for many, keeping children out of school is not a global calamity,” wrote libertarian think tank operative Kerry McDonald in Forbes on March 11, two days before President Trump declared coronavirus a national emergency. McDonald wasn’t the only cheerleader for homeschooling in the face of a pandemic. “Learning can happen anywhere,” Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos enthused on Twitter. School closings were turning parents into “the nation’s teachers,” according to the Washington Times, a consistent advocate for public school privatization. But the current economic crisis the nation faces is unlikely to be helped if, after the recovery gets underway, there is a massive movement of unemployed parents deciding to stay that way in order to homeschool their children. Instead, the massive shuttering of the nation’s public schools should be understood for what it is—a fiasco to be addressed and overcome, as soon as it is safely and reasonably possible, and an opportunity to renew and reinvigorate the nation’s commitment to public education.
It feels like everything is on the line right now for our country, our planet, and for humanity. We have a global pandemic in the middle of a climate emergency. The corporate-conservative Radical Right has taken over country after country. Inequality and inequity are rising. It feels overwhelming. But there is a path toward a green new world if we have the will to win. There’s no better place to start when looking for inspiration than Ella Baker, the trailblazing African-American organizer who over five decades was a driving force in the civil rights movement, at the Young Negro Cooperative League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Let’s get one thing out of the way: Ella Baker was the best community organizer of the last century. She is far less known, but way more influential, than men like Saul Alinsky in shaping the wide field of community organizing. Her example reverberates through nearly every effective grassroots organization today. Baker’s achievements are monumental, and affirm her pivotal role in seeding and tending the development of a revolutionary, grassroots, feminist, Black radical tradition. Baker always challenged those around her to ask, "Who are your people?" and to reach for something larger, greater, more inspirational. What is at stake? What are they really fighting for and why? Still today, she challenges us all to relieve material suffering and win deep structural reforms, guided by a transformational political vision.
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