Rethinking 'Back to Normal' in the Pandemicine

 

I really want Left organizations to rethink "back to normal" in the pandemicine. 

I can't tell you how demoralizing it is to see announcements of meetings or other events that I might want to go to, but for which I  see no information about Covid precautions.  Is it virtual? or hybrid?  Will people be wearing respirators?  What's the ventilation like in that indoor venue?  Are we living on separate planets? 

Nate Holdren, writing recently in Peste Magazine, has described this feeling as "Broken Sociality":

"Experiences of community are offered but not actually present, in that they're present only via serious risks which are often un- or under-acknowledged." Holdren calls this "social loneliness,"  because it means "reduced time doing things and seeing people compared to pre-pandemic -- because fewer places are doing anything (let alone enough) to mitigate covid exposure"  and it can also mean feeling alone in a crowd because one is the only person wearing a respirator.   

 This "social loneliness," Holdren notes,  "blurs into another facet of broken sociality. . . political loneliness. This is the sense of a gulf in values or in understanding of some very important aspects of the world. Knowing that the [supposed] return to normal means even more dying and life-altering suffering is terrible. Knowing that many people seem not to realize this, that people in officially respected positions seem to find this acceptable, that fellow travelers on the left don’t treat this as a priority, that all feels isolating to a degree I find hard to overstate."

 

As Holdren notes, this affective experience is of course less awful than the  "suffering, inequality, disablement, and death" that the "pseudo-return" to normal is creating. 

But it's not unrelated, and it all bodes ill for our collective future.  

 

I have harped on some of these concerns before, and I still find it demoralizing to see announcements of supposedly progressive meetings or events that show not a bit of concern about the continuing  social murder.  

 

But as Holdren notes, it would be wrong to hold any of this against the powerless folks just trying to make it though.  The problem lies with the ruling class--capitalist, government, and mainstream media--who have been trying to enforce back to normal for years now.  

But despite that sociological construction of the end of the pandemic emergency, the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has of course not really ended. Covid is still killing hundreds of people each day in the US, and debilitating and disabling even more. 

 

Wastewater levels--one of the only reliable measures of transmission still available now that tests are less available, less accurate, and less reported--have since last summer remained persistently higher than they were any time before the January '22 Omicron wave.  Although vaccines have massively reduced the death toll during the initial, acute phase of illness, their efficacy wanes in a few months, and even at their best they do relatively little to reduce transmission, long covid, or other health impacts.  

 

And the long term damage for survivors can be severe.  The CDC acknowledges that about 20% of those infected get long covid, and other estimates are much higher.  Even among the asymptomatic, each infection increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, brain damage, diabetes, and other bodily damage. The virus seems to increase the risk and progression of cancer.  It impairs the immune system, making people more vulnerable to other illnesses.

 

Moreover, each transmission increases the chances for the virus to mutate again and potentially to become more harmful--it has already become more immune resistant and undermined previously useful treatments like Evusheld and monoclonal antibodies--and there is no indication the virus is getting milder, despite a common myth about how viruses tend to evolve.

 

We can also note that the impact of the pandemic disproportionately harms workers and poor people  and people of color  and  incarcerated people and of course the swelling ranks of people with disabilities.

 

Some of groups have, unsurprisingly, been among the most thoughtful about maintaining precautions.

 

Here in Portland, for instance, The Cascade Festival of African Films offered opportunities for viewing films online--which also came in handy during the late February snowstorms.  

 

Disability justice groups have created helpful guides to planning events with an eye to inclusion as well as to crip survival.   Pandemic research for the people has a primer on mutual aid inthe pandemic. And the Death Panel Podcast has two episodes about organizing and Covid.

 

So, here are some tips on Practicing Inclusion in the Time of COVID from the group Strategies for High Impact.  

When your group organizes a meeting or other event, think about how to make it genuinely inclusive.  Think about how welcoming it might be, or not, to those who can't afford to take time off from work if they get sick, or how welcoming it is to those who are immune-suppressed, or immune-compromised, or already suffering Long Covid, or otherwise debilitated or disabled, or who have family members who are.

 

And if you really want to welcome those folks, then ask yourself and your fellow organizers,  Can we hold our gathering online? If not, how about providing, wearing, and requiring KN95 masks or N95 respirators? (Because yes, respirators do work!) 

 

How about having a hybrid meeting option? How about meeting outdoors or creating more airflow indoors?  

 

If you are using an indoor venue, can you find out what the ventilation is like?  Can the owners or managers of the space tell you how many air changes per hour the HVAC system provides?  Can you test the space to see what the Carbon Dioxide levels are like when it's filled with people?  Can you build DIY air filters to help clear the air?

 

When you annouce your meeting or event, let people know what kinds of precautions are in place.  Show that you've thought about it.  And plan ahead to follow through.

 

What are you willing to do as a group to protect people from COVID exposure? How can you ensure that agreed-upon practices will be followed?

 

So let's do what we can to mitigate the harms of a failed or failing system of public health, to build solidarity, and to keep ourselves, our allies, our accomplices, and our movements as strong and sharp as possible for the long struggle ahead.

See also:

 

Let them eat plague

 

Able-bodied leftists cannot abandon disabled solidarity to move on from covid

 

Why has the left deproritized covid?

The revolution will not be ableist

 

Disability justice organizers dream big and resist a culture of disposability

Social Reproduction and Trans Liberation

 

A speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month called for the eradication of "transgenderism," but said that doesn't mean he's calling for the elimination of transgender people.  If we take him at his word about eradicating the category but not the people, maybe he wants to eliminate cis people.  Transition for all! 

 

Yeah, you know that's not what he meant.  You may have heard that Tennessee legislators recently looked around at the collapsing climate and collapsing banks and exploding trains and raging pandemic and rising hunger and revival of child labor and decided that the important thing to do was to ...ban drag shows? 

You will have noticed the enormous number of anti-LGBTQ bills floated in recent years, and particularly the number directed against Trans people--hundreds of them, and the number of bills seems to grow every year. 

 

 In Oregon the ACLU is tracking seven such bills affecting healthcare and education. 

Clearly, like attacks on abortion access and reproductive freedom, or measures against immigrants, or against African-American Studies (or what Chris Rufo has called Critical Race Theory), these are forms of scapegoating, measures that divide the working class, deflect attention from the dangers posed by the owning class, and help rally a distressed population in the service of a right wing agenda. 

 

Also clearly, they do not spring out of nowhere. Cultural campaigns are funded by think tanks and dark money, but the messages proliferate not only on alt-right websites and right-wing television, but also in mainstream venues like The New York Times, which in February received open letters from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and from Times contributors, among others.  Not all of these attacks operate in the same ways, or even perhaps from entirely the same motives, but they all contribute to a cumulative effect of making the world more dangerous for trans people--and for all of us. 

 

Moreover, like attacks on abortion rights, attacks on trans rights and queer sociality "aim to enforce the bourgeois family by any means necessary." As Noah Zazanis noted last year in Spectre magazine, 

 

"much like the anti-abortion movement, the anti-trans movement situates children’s bodily autonomy as a gateway to sexual abuse and sex trafficking, despite research showing that a sense of ownership/agentic control over one’s own body protects against such victimization. While most children who experience sexual abuse are victimized by someone close to the family, the heterosexual family never faces such “groomer” accusations. “Grooming” libel is not actually about sexual abuse, but instead targets trans and queer adults as sources of “social contagion.” Providing support and historical or cultural context for trans/queer youth is suspect precisely because it models possibilities outside of cisgender/heterosexual expectations. As such, these attacks are a core tactic of right-wing organizing." 

 

But why do the bourgeois family and cisgender identity--forms so very natural and innate  that they must be enforced through ideological propaganda and state legislation--why do challenges to these forms generate such panic?

 

In Feminism for the 99 Percent, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser argue that “Gender oppression in capitalist societies is rooted in the subordination of social reproduction to production for profit."  "Social Reproduction" is all the work of "people-making": not only all of the "activity [to] create and sustain life in the biological sense" but also . . . fashioning people with the “right” attitudes, dispositions, and values—abilities, competences, and skills. All told, people-making work supplies some fundamental preconditions—material, social, cultural—for human society in general and for capitalist production in particular. Without it neither life nor labor power could be embodied in human beings." 

 

Under capitalism, this work has been largely separated from the work of profit making, assigned to women, and subordinated to profit-making. "disguised and disavowed." "Because capital avoids paying for this work to the extent that it can, . . . it relegates those who perform social-reproductive labor to a position of subordination—not only to the owners of capital, but also to those more advantaged waged workers who can offload the responsibility for it onto others. Those “others” are largely female." But they are also often people of color, poor, and immigrant workers, who usually also perform this labor, unpaid, for their own families. Social reproduction in capitalism is thus an issue of gender, but also one "shot through at every point by the fault lines of class, race, sexuality, and nation." 

 

The work of people making has historically been enhanced by public social supports; the basic needs for food, housing, healthcare, and education are part of social reproduction. And, you may have noticed, those are increasingly difficult to come by in the US.  Even pre-pandemic figures look bad; according to US government figures, in 2020, 38.3 million US households were food insecure, and on an average night in 2020, 580 thousand U.S. residents were unhoused. 

 

Back in 2006, the Beyond Marriage statement pointed out that  

 

"the Right has mounted a long-term strategic battle to dismantle all public service and benefit programs and civic values that were established beginning in the 1930s, initially as a response to widening poverty and the Great Depression. The push to privatize Social Security and many other human needs benefits, programs, and resources that serve as lifelines for many . . . is at the center of this attack. …All but the most privileged households and families are in jeopardy as a result of a wholesale right-wing assault on funding for human needs, including Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, HIV-AIDS research and treatment, public education, affordable housing, and more. [The] broader conservative agenda of coercive, patriarchal marriage promotion … plays out in … a variety of ways – all of which disproportionately impact poor, immigrant, and people-of-color communities. The purpose is not only to enforce narrow, heterosexist definitions of marriage and coerce conformity, but also to slash to the bone governmental funding for a wide array of family programs, including childcare, healthcare and reproductive services, and nutrition, and transfer responsibility for financial survival to families themselves." 

 

 But we are in a period of realignment and transition, and the picture is complicated by both the differences and the congruence between what at first sight look like forces of sexual reaction and sexual liberalism. One side want to outlaw what they claim are violations of divine or natural law; the other supports legal rights like gay marriage and military participation. As Eric Maroney notes in Tempest, "The ruling class and its ideologues do not agree on how to maintain profitability while also addressing the crisis of care." The authors of Feminism for the 99% likewise point out that "Increasingly financialized, globalized, and de-familialized, capital is no longer implacably opposed to queer and non-cis sex/gender formations. Nor do large corporations still insist on one and only one normative form of family or sex; many of them are now willing to permit significant numbers of their employees to live outside heterosexual families—that is, provided they toe the line, both at the workplace and at the mall." 

 

Thus we have corporations like Amazon, Dow, Shell, Google, and Pfizer signing on to a petition opposing the wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation, in the belief that queer "workers have assimilated into capital and can be conscripted to provide the same social reproductive labor that cis/hetero families do."  

 

So while the "political Left identifies the source of familial precarity as an intentional set of socioeconomic policies, the Right identifies the source as a lapse in values" and, Maroney suggests, the right has some basis, however misguided, for their thinking. 

 

"Not only has the nature and wages of work changed, but that change has also coincided with a corporate identity politics which can be interpreted as undermining the family and traditional sex roles. Neoliberalism is defined as both a set of market policies and a cultural project that disrupts social patterns. Traditional gender roles then become the political right’s antidote to the alienation and individualism of neoliberalism. . . . the anti-gender movement is not a simple backlash to the relative advances achieved by LGBTQ people and cisgender women; it is also bound up in rejection to the neoliberal order wherein “western liberal elites are equated with global economic elites.” 

 

 We might speculate, too, that increasing precarity heightens the need for scapegoats even as the scramble for profit means "sexual dissidence finds a niche as a source of ... advertising images, product lines, lifestyle commodities, and prepackaged pleasures." We might speculate that the New York Times and similar neoliberal forces are willing to go along with some of the anti-trans panic insofar as they interpret it as serving their interests, in the same way that the anger-fueling algorithms of YouTube  or Fox News generate attention, eyeballs, and thus profit.

 

The ruling class is internally divided, but not so much that it offers any way out. The rollback of Roe v Wade pleases misogynists, for instance, but also,"Regulating and surveilling childbearing bodies leads to greater precarity, and precarious bodies are more vulnerable to both productive and reproductive exploitation." Or, again, extensions of criminalization both divide populations and help fuel the for-profit punishment industries. Attacks on public education and on what children are allowed to read or teachers to teach not only move toward making for a less-educated, more prejudiced, potentially more docile public, but also help surveil and de-professionalize the work of teaching, foster union busting, and create further openings for the privatization of schooling and the extraction of profit from it. 

 

In short, there are some complexities to these attacks and their motives and goals, but we need to recognize that "attacks on transgender and gender nonconforming people are part of the ruling-class offensive against social provisioning." As Maroney concludes, "Queer liberation is not just about rolling back the most recent legislative attacks, but also about progressive tax reform, state-funded healthcare, state-funded childcare, and elder care. All these material preconditions are required for the bodily sovereignty of all working people, trans-bodied and cis-bodied people alike." Leftists need to support these goals "in a non-reductive way that acknowledges . . . the unique exploitative conditions that trans people face" and we cannot settle "for a politics of representation that situates trans identities in the context of corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion campaigns" because that "not only fails to meet the material needs of trans people, but also [may provide] further credibility to the [right-wing] claim that trans and queer liberation are the conjuring of a wealthy elite." 

 

"The far-right attacks on transgender people stem from profound social anxiety over the crises posed by neoliberal capitalism, which ruthlessly privatizes care and imperils ordinary people’s lives. Scapegoating transgender and gender nonconforming people for transgressing essentialist definitions of gendered family values is thus part and parcel of the privatization of social reproduction necessary for neoliberal capitalism to sustain itself. Every fight against exploitation and oppression is thus a fight for trans liberation, and ...trans liberation struggles [are] fundamental to . . . anti-capitalist politics."

Health Communism on an Inflamed Planet

Two recent books, Health Communism and Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, offer counterarguments to the abandonment of public health, calling for more expansive understandings of human well-being and its interconnection with all of our social and environmental conditions. 

~~ 

The Biden Administration's plans to end the pandemic emergency declaration and related programs means not only the end to free vaccines and tests and the chance for Big Pharma to raise vaccine prices exorbitantly. It also means ending telehealth options and depriving some 15 million Americans of access to Medicaid--including nearly seven million who will still be poor enough to qualify but are unlikely to be able to meet the paperwork requirements.  It means ending supplemental food support programs, even though food banks have been hard pressed to meet people's needs even with the additional federal support.

 It continues a process of abandoning the spirit of public health that has been under attack from officials at least since the CDC told us that those who are vaccinated need not wear a mask and that one-way masking will protect individuals. 

To be clear, the end of the emergency declaration does not mean the end of the pandemic, which is likely to become even more damaging, as it continues to spread with even fewer checks, and thus to evolve ever more variants of unpredictable severity. What we can predict is that the effects of this pandemic--and the next ones sure to come--will inflict most damage on those already disadvantaged. 

As is well known, people of color have experienced higher levels of infection and death from Covid-19. Women and trans people have been more likely to experience long covid--the persistent symptoms that can last week, months, or years after the initial infection.  These disparities are not the effects of some inherent weakness or failure in oppressed groups (despite what fascist health supremacists might suggest), but the cumulative impact of suffering that oppression. 

In their 2021 book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, authors Rupa Marya and Raj Patel draw a series of analogies between the body and the planet as they explore the systemic inflammation resulting from capitalism and colonialism. The book explains that when tissues are damaged or threatened, our immune system sends cells and molecular messengers that attack invaders, repair damage, and restore the body to health. Sometimes, “the response doesn’t switch off, and the result is a chronic inflammatory state. When that happens, the body’s healing mechanism is transformed into a smoldering fire that creates ongoing harm.” Leading causes of this chronic inflammation include malnutrition, environmental toxins, and stress. That is, lack of adequate food; proximity to toxins, for instance, because of dangerous workplaces or the siting of toxic dumps near black, brown, indigenous homes; and stress--the result of suffering the effects of structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism, sexism, and other oppressions--lead to chronic inflammation, which contributes to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, colitis, asthma, and other illness. Marya and Patel argue that individuals can be healthy “only when the entire community is also healthy…this is achievable only through social, economic, political, ecological, and cosmological spheres working in an integrated fashion for the benefit of all.” 

As the pandemic has continued, some have suggested that the impact on the labor market and the increasing difficulty of reliably staffing any business with an ever-more debilitated population will eventually cause a shift in public policy toward ensuring a healthy workforce. That argument might have stronger historical basis if we look at the military, since, for instance, some of the nutrition programs in western nations resulted from the discovery of how much of the population was too malnourished from the Great Depression to fight World War II.

But I think a more persuasive account of the current political economy of healthcare can be found in Health Communism, the recent book by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Arnie Vierkant, co-hosts of the Death Panel podcast. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that capitalism makes a fuzzy and unstable but crucial distinction between two populations: the workers and the surplus, and capitalist healthcare is the system of managing the surplus, the “unwanted, discarded bodies viewed as waste.” We can see this division being made in the way that disability is defined, for instance, when Social Security Disability Insurance uses the simplified metric of how a particular illness or condition impacts an individual’s capacity to work. 

Moreover, those in the “worker” category constantly face the threat of falling into the latter category, as they will, since the surplus includes ex-workers who are no longer able to produce capital, whether because of age or other factors. But while this system treats certain populations as surplus, as waste, it also depends on these populations to exist. The surplus also become a source of extraction and profit, with various industries developing to extract value from them, whether through policing or through care. 

In April 2020 as the pandemic took hold in the US, as hospitals were overwhelmed with covid patients and health workers were hailed as essential and heroic, 1.4 million hospital workers were laid off.  As the New York Times put it at the time, "plunging revenues from canceled nonemergency medical appointments have forced hospitals to furlough or cut the pay of doctors, nurses and other staff" (and I note that "forced" is the language of the Times) tossing many of those workers into the surplus category. Meanwhile, as Eric Reinhart recently noted in a Times opinion piece about the demoralization of medical workers,  "ostensibly nonprofit charity hospitals have illegally saddled poor patients with debt for receiving care to which they were entitled without cost and have turned large profits by exploiting tax incentives meant to promote care for poor communities. Hospitals are deliberately understaffing themselves and undercutting patient care while sitting on billions of dollars in cash reserves." 

Adler-Bolton and Vierkant describe this process as "extractive abandonment," a concept they develop by drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work on imprisonment and the notion of "organized state abandonment" and Marta Russell's work on Capitalism and Disability. For Wilson Gilmore, this abandonment appears as a withdrawal of the state but is actually a strategy of racial capitalist state formation to exploit vulnerable communities, and it signals the process of governing populations through callous yet purposeful neglect, framing many humans and other lifeforms as surplus to the contemporary political economic order. 

Health Communism also draws on “Marta Russell’s money model of disability" which "theorizes that while the disabled—the surplus population—are widely regarded as a “drain” on the economy, in truth over time capital and the state have constructed systems to reclaim this lost population as a source of financial production. Russell situates these systems as manifesting through charity fundraising, the prioritization of care aimed toward the “repair” of disabled people to become workers, and through policies that grow the private sector through for-profit private nursing home care paid for by publicly funded, means-tested state health care programs.” 

Ultimately, the authors of Health Communism call for left projects to center the "waste," because “deviants, the surplus, and the sick form the central class that can bring about the fall of capital.” They argue that “It is not necessarily the case that we are all sick. But none of us is well." "Health" is "a biological fascist fantasy" "a subjective dream of an unattenuated 'wellness,' a body state [they] deny any being has ever known." "Capital has emphasized and corrupted the delineations between surplus classes for its convenience; it is immeasurably threatening to capital to see a group of those it has deemed to be waste come together in solidarity. ” "The truth of the distinction that capitalist states draw in their demarcations of worker/surplus is that in the eyes of capital, we are all surplus." 

 

Happy Superb Owl Sunday

VDOC003-004 from Joel Sartore on Vimeo.

denouncing the horrors

 

So, the US House passed a resolution "denouncing the horrors of socialism."   

 

Note that it came from the Finance Committee, and that

Several Democrats who voted against the resolution expressed concerns regarding the future of Social Security and Medicare. They noted that Republicans on the Rules Committee rejected an amendment proposed by Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) which sought to clarify that opposition to the implementation of socialist policies in the U.S. does not include federal programs like Medicare and Social Security.

 

(Emphasis added).  Or, as someone suggested on social media, when they denounce socialism it means they are coming for your pension.  

 

It's also an example of how bourgeois liberalism facilitates the rise of fascism (more on that another time, probably).

Some years ago, my older brother was in town visiting, and we went to some socialist event, and he made some disparaging comment about socialism.  Now, my brother is a good guy, and I figure he grew up in a more intense phase of the cold war than I, and there was no point in debating whether the merits of things like "liberation theology" or "catholic worker" derived from the first or the last word in the term.  

 

And I imagine that dissecting that wacky resolution is kind of pointless, in that those who see the problems with it don't need them spelled out, and those who don't see the problems will not be convinced.  But some of it is truly stunning.  It's got distortion, questionable selectivity, and lots of pot-meet-kettle. So here goes. 

 

They write:

"Whereas socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships;"

 

l "Socialist ideology" encompasses a very diverse set of beliefs, as indicated, for instance, by the sheer volume of texts available via the Marxists Internet Archive.

 

l  Socialist ideology does not necessitate concentration of power, as we can see outlined, e.g., in Hal Draper's Socialism From Below. 

 

l On the other hand, capitalism does tend to involve concentration of power, and has also collapsed into brutal regimes of fascism, and we now increasingly face the brutal inequality that was briefly alleviated during the "30 glorious years" (See Piketty and glosses thereon) after WW2, created by capitalist regimes' need to stave off revolution through providing some of the social supports people were seeing in socialist countries  (See Klein, The Shock Doctrine).

 

They write,

    "Whereas socialism has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide;"

l  Capitalism has of course also led to mass murder.  Indigenous people of the Americas, the Africans kept in chattel slavery, colonized people around the globe, and anyone with resources desired by multinational corporations might have a very different assessment than the House does of the relative body counts. 

 

l We might also note that it is capitalism, with its structural drive for profit above all, that has led to the climate crisis that now threatens all planetary life.  That's a very massive murder.

 

They write:

   "Whereas many of the greatest crimes in history were committed by socialist ideologues, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolás Maduro;"

l This heterogeneous list lumps together figures with quite different ideologies and histories, and of course omits world criminals of other stripes (e.g., Hitler, Pinochet) as well as socialist (even mildly socialist or redistributionist) victims of the CIA and allies (Allende, Mosaddegh).

 

They write: 

    "Whereas tens of millions died in the Bolshevik Revolution, at least 10,000,000 people were sent to the gulags in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and millions more starved in the Terror-Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine;

    Whereas between 15,000,000 and 55,000,000 people starved to death in the wake of famine and devastation caused by the Great Leap Forward in China;

    Whereas the socialist experiment in Cambodia led to the killing fields in which over a million people were gruesomely murdered;

    Whereas up to 3,500,000 people have starved in North Korea, dividing a land of freedom from a land of destitution;"

 

l On gulags, consider the rate of incarceration in the US and the horrific conditions faced by those incarcerated. 

l On starvation, see also the Irish Potato famine and the rate of hunger in the USA.  

 

l  On murders, see also the rate of US police killings, the murders of environmental activists at the behest of fossil fuel and other industries, and the general incidence of gun violence in the USA.

 

l And again, it's capitalism, with its structural drive for profit above all, that has led to the climate crisis that now threatens all planetary life.

 

l  More rebuttal to the numbers via WSWS.

 

They write:

    "Whereas the Castro regime in Cuba expropriated the land of Cuban farmers and the businesses of Cuban entrepreneurs, stealing their possessions and their livelihoods, and exiling millions with nothing but the clothes on their backs;"

 

l Woah, why is the expropriation of land listed here as though it is the same as starvation and murder?

 

In the pre-revolution latifundo model, much of the land was owned by US investors, and 1.5% of landowners held almost half the agricultural land.  Much of the Cuban population were sharecroppers.  Under land reform after the revolution, 70% of farm land was taken from foreign and large to medium sized landowners and returned to the population who actually worked the land. 

 

Nota bene,  "In 1974, the General Assembly of the United Nations affirmed the right of states to nationalize properties, declaring that nationalization is an indispensable precondition for national sovereignty over natural resources.  It further declared that no state should be subjected to coercion in response to its exercising this right of nationalization." 

 

They write: 

    "Whereas the implementation of socialism in Venezuela has turned a once-prosperous nation into a failed State with the world’s highest rate of inflation;"

 

l Even USAToday knows there's more to this story.

 

They write:  

    "Whereas the author of the Declaration of Independence, President Thomas Jefferson, wrote, “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.”; 

    "Whereas the “Father of the Constitution”, President James Madison, wrote that it “is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest”; and"

 

l   It's worth noting here that Jefferson owned over 600 enslaved people, Madison owned over 100 enslaved people, and both men also supported the project of "indian removal." So the "industry and skill" these guys exercised was in seizing the land and bodies and labor of others. 

 

They write:

    "Whereas the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it

         Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America."

 

l When the United States was founded, the only individuals granted sanctity were adult white men who owned land.  Details of voting requirements varied by state, but there were also often religious requirements.  Maryland, for instance, waited until 1828 before allowing Jewish men to vote. Chattel slavery was legal, and even white women could not own property, vote, control their own money, or sign legal documents.

l Policies that have been denounced as socialist include the New Deal, Social Security, farm price supports, bank deposit insurance, independent labor organizations, and progressive taxation. And, as even Harry Truman noted, "almost anything that helps all the people."

(Truman  understated the case, in fact, since many social  programs were designed not to help all the people --the Social Security act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were mostly brown and Black, but it was still called socialist).

 

So, yeah, when they denounce socialism, they are coming for your pension, your health care, your public school, your county library, your liveable environment. 

 

I am in favor of all those socialist things (and then some).