The following post comes via Patti Crane of Indivisible Beach Cities/ISBLA and Michelle Maniere Fowle of The Resistance Northridge:

California Indivisibles: Tell Congress to fund #VirusFreeVoting and to protect the Post Office!

Here’s the toolkit for Thursday’s Virtual Protest: http://bit.ly/vfvdigitaltk  

Join Indivisibles and others nationwide in our #VirusFreeVoting Virtual Protest on Thursday from 3-5 pm PT!

We ask Congress to fund $4 billion for Vote at Home and we insist on protecting the Post Office. Show that NO ONE can take away our vote and our voice.

Please tag your electeds and get the #VirusFreeVoting hashtag trending.

Click the online toolkit so you can take a selfie with a sign, make a video, post a tweet or an Instagram message, share a message on Facebook. You can also send a letter to your electeds, trigger phone calls to Congress, and do even more for two straight hours of digital activism.

The Alameda County BOS agenda item to consider Sheriff Ahern’s outrageous funding proposal has been postponed because of the death of Supervisor Valle’s father. Valle is the current BOS chair and the swing vote on the 5-member BOS. Thanks for whatever emails and calls you already submitted. We will need to mobilize again when the item is rescheduled.

We hear a lot about how successful Sweden’s more relaxed isolation measures are. So far in April, they have 33% excess deaths compared to 2015–19. (In fairness, after we get the US figures, which for some reason are compiled much more slowly, we may be there too. Sweden, however, seems to have rising daily deaths while we appear to have peaked.)

The best article on how we got here:

We Are Living in a Failed State by George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. …

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost [in the 2008 financial meltdown]. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist [what a phrase! —AJL].

We Are Living in a Failed State by George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020

In somewhat the same vein, Ezra Klein at Vox argues why our governments have become incompetent, well-manifested by our inability to ramp up production of medical equipment. The provocative part of the story is blaming not only the Right wanting government to do nothing, but also the Left worried the government will work to injure the relatively powerless.

The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.

Why we can’t build by Ezra Klein

California’s meandering High Speed Rail plan that purports to link San Francisco and Los Angeles gets its due mention.

The empty shelves and government lies remind Emily Gioielli and Leslie Waters at Slate of Eastern Europe 1980, and the danger, especially to our Ruling Party, is that like the faltering dinosaurs of the Warsaw Pact, they broke the social contract made by the paternalist autocrats and the passive citizensof adequate material goods. This seems a little far-fetched to me, but we can never have too much citation of Vaclav Havel.

“Human beings are compelled to live within a lie,” he explained in his treatise, “The Power of the Powerless,” and mimic the meaningless platitudes of state leaders. He explained that the average person went along with this system because they “surrender[ed] higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization.” He further suggested that Eastern Europe should serve as a “warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies.”

Is America Becoming Eastern Europe by Emily Gioielli and Leslie Waters

And for a day-by-day analysis of how Xi Jinping and Donald Trump imitated each other in using denial and muzzling the press to squander valuable time to prevent disease, The New Republic has them on the cover, with an article by Laurie Garrett, a journalist of epidemics.

Both Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping instinctively sought to repress news of the true danger of their countries’ outbreaks, and the reach of their infection zones, so as to minimize potential political damage to their regimes. Both leaders, displaying parallel if historically distinct brands of authoritarian rule in a crisis, sought to dismiss the counsel of suspect health professionals and other experts. … The larger political story of the 2020 coronavirus crisis, in other words, may well prove to be a powerful case study in the way that governments controlled by leaders prone to unilateral decision-making, and the top-down information regimes they rely on to perpetuate their rule, are all but guaranteed to create maximum conditions of public health breakdown.

Grim Reapers by Laurie Garrett, The New Republic May 2020 [possible paywalled; audioversion also available]

This week is critical because it may be our last chance to demand that Congress ensure relief to every person in this country, regardless of tax or immigration status, age, or disability. 

Here’s the solution: demand your representatives pledge to vote ‘no’ on the next coronavirus package unless it prioritizes the People First Agenda

The package must include these four policies:

• Keep people on payrolls: Stop mass layoffs, and preserve employment relationships for all businesses, including small businesses. Ensure federal dollars go to workers and small businesses, not enriching CEOs and Wall Street.
• Provide financial relief: Expand aid for the most vulnerable in the COVID-19 epidemic, including direct cash assistance, increased food aid, debt relief, and eviction protections.
• Protect public health: Guarantee full health coverage for all COVID-19 care and protections for all frontline workers.
• Defend elections: Enact a vote-by-mail requirement for 2020 federal elections while maintaining access to in-person voting for those who do not have access to mail voting.

If it doesn’t, representatives must vote no. 

The full minutes will go up later, but we wanted everyone to have a chance for an Action Item today.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors meets tomorrow and the agenda again includes a continuation of the previous meetings’ request from (how-did-we-get-this-fascist?) Sheriff Ahern for more money for Santa Rita Jail as the major component of COVID–19 response.

Judy Stacey posted the full story earlier. Board Prez Richard Valle is the swing vote. His contact details are below. A sample script is at the earlier link.

District 2: Richard Valle (Board President, everyone contact) richard.valle@acgov.org ; 510- 272-6692

Agenda:

Update from Bruce about national and state Indivisible

Update from Bill about the internship program and how we can support it

Update from Judy on Sheriff Ahern actions

Update from Naomi about political actions: 1) high-value postcarding, 2) activating texting (my adventures this week with Commit to Flip) and 3) low hanging fruit fundraising to support the Sister District campaigns–time for our auction? Also, short report on voting issues for upcoming election.

Analysis by Andy of how Sara Kendizor’s analysis and a few topflight media articles help us organize our political actions for maximal efficiency

Link:Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83424254779?pwd=NGIwOUwvVm16MkVvWkJ4SEhtcVNTdz09

Meeting ID: 834 2425 4779
Password: 616432
One tap mobile
+16699006833,,83424254779#,,#,616432# US (San Jose)
+13462487799,,83424254779#,,#,616432# US (Houston)

To Indivisible Elmwood

I have been working with East Bay Activist Alliance (https://www.eastbayactivistalliance.org/) on developing an intern program to support state legislative races in critical states.

We choose states and races based on impact at multiple levels as follows: an eye to flipping legislature to end gerrymandering, to support up-ballot races within the state like Governor or Attorney General, to support up-ballot federal races like for the US House or US Senate (either to hold a seat or flip one), and to support the Democratic presidential candidate with a significant number of electoral college votes. We are picking the state races by whether or not they are conceivably flippable. We aim to help push them ahead in the end. We do not pick sides in primaries because we want to support local choices.

We have chosen to work in Michigan because we have relationships there from work two years ago when we helped flip a state senate seat and a state house seat in Oakland County, a formerly segregated county immediately outside of Detroit. We will be working directly with four campaigns there, two holds and two flips. We are currently helping two other campaigns to flip, but only in the early part of their campaigns. We will work with two campaigns in North Carolina and one in Arizona (AZ legislative district 6 which includes Flagstaff).

In each of the past two years, we have had one intern, first in Michigan then in Virginia. Thus far this year we have seven interns who are working now because of the Covid quarantine. They are all working in Michigan on 5 legislative races, helping StateWide Indivisible Michigan (SWIM), and a national campaign, One Fair Wage (https://onefairwage.com/about/). They are working remotely to help campaigns. Some of the work is phone banking, other actions involve research for the campaign or data gathering of one type or another. The interns are very enthusiastic and want to learn about political campaigning and flip things Democratic.

Our Michigan candidates at this time are Padma Kuppa (https://www.electpadmakuppa.com/), Laurie Pohutsky (https://housedems.com/pohutsky), and Julia Pulver (https://www.juliapulver.com/). Our Arizona candidate is Coral Evans (https://www.coralevansaz.com/). We have not finalized the NC races that we will support, but we plan on taking on two.

EBAA has a new website, and it offers a broad view of what we do. It connects to all Bay Area political activities some of which may be of interest to some of you. Our full service offer to campaigns is our expertise and our structures for fundraising, phone banking, text banking, post carding, canvassing, and supplying an intern.

EBAA is a completely volunteer organization, no paid staff, but a lot of very talented and knowledgeable activists. We can also use any local support, funding and actions that you and others can offer. So please, check out the website and see what’s there. If you have questions, feel free to contact me (bill.activist@gmail.com or 510-220-5239). I think that the fundraising link will take you to the Giving Circles effort that we are using to replace the activity-based fundraising was used before.

Thanks for all that you all do!

Bill Marthinsen

I haven’t pasted the Financial Times graphic for deaths recently.

Basically, no country except the USA still has accelerating (positive slope) daily death count 42 days into the epidemic. Sweden, Canada, and Brazil (which are three of the grey lines on the chart) are accelerating, but only on about day 30. They have a chance to turn the corner in the next 12 days. Whether they will, given the wretched response of Sweden and Brazil, is another question.