There seems to be some confusion regarding Governor Cuomo’s latest executive order. The following, from PIX11, should clarify:

In the new executive order, issued late Thursday, Cuomo extended New York On PAUSE until May 28, for regions that do not meet the criteria to begin reopening. The order also extended the governor’s emergency powers to June 13.

As I discussed on Tuesday, starting from today, New York State will pursue a region-by-region reopening strategy (five of the states ten regions have thus far met all seven of the benchmarks to enter Phase One), and should New York City – or any of the other four regions yet to qualify to begin reopening, namely: Western New York, the Capital District, the Hudson Valley, and Long Island – meet all seven of the benchmarks before May 28th, it will be able to begin phased reopening immediately. Technically, the statewide shutdown is over; effectively, New York City will almost certainly remain shut down at least until June, and given our slow and tenuous progress, it is hard to foresee when the City will begin to reopen. I remain cautiously optimistic that we may be in a position to by the time the Governor’s renewed emergency powers are slated to expire (on June 13th), but will, sadly, not be surprised if this condition of municipal suspended animation extends into July, though I certainly hope it doesn’t.

Why is my optimism cautious? Construction companies have been extensively violating the PAUSE order across the City [paywalled]. Our neighborhood has felt like a block party on recent weekends. It’s starting to feel like summer, and people are understandably desperate to live a little.

At least regarding New York (and the greater Northeast), it’s optimism I hold, though. Looking to much of the rest of the United States, my concern deepens by the day. To quote from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before a Senate committee on Tuesday:

There is a real risk that [by prematurely reopening] you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control, which, in fact, paradoxically, will set you back, not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided, but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery.

Yesterday, whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright testified before a House Committee and said, among other things:

Americans yearn to get back, to work, to open their businesses and to provide for their families. I get that. However, what we do must be done carefully and with guidance from the best scientific minds. Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to improve our response now, based on science, I fear the pandemic will get worse and be prolonged. There will be likely a resurgence of COVID-19 this fall. It will be greatly compounded by the challenges of seasonal influenza. Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.

Both Fauci and Bright were subsequently attacked by the President for their service to the country. (As an aside, as the President attacks public health experts and courageous public servants, his Secretary of Education is using the disaster-capitalist discretion granted her by the CARES Act – which name I’m scare quoting in my mind – to direct millions of dollars to private schools that are definitely not cults.)

Meanwhile, New Zealand has reopened its economy after new COVID-19 cases fell “to zero,” while many US states have now reopened their economies even as their new case counts remain well above zero. In Wisconsin, the state’s majority-Republican “Supreme Court has struck down a remain-at-home order backed by Democratic Governor Tony Evers” and some bars promptly “reopened and [were] filled with patrons for the first time since nonessential businesses were closed on March 25.”

(Regarding the above, I’ll direct you to the wisdom of Xi Jinping, whom I quoted last week: “(We) must not let all our previous work be wasted.”)

In New York, we have reasons to worry. Our Mayor, it must now simply be said, is an asshole. A colossal asshole, and not a competent one either. As a recent New York Times lede reads:

The head of New York City’s public hospitals pushed to keep the city open in early March. Now the mayor has put him in charge of contact tracing, deepening a rift with the Health Department [which warned the mayor repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the emergence of a full-blown crisis in the city that his actions were misguided and tragically insufficient].

That same Mayor has submitted a budget that cuts all funding for municipal organics recycling (i.e., composting), and, understandably, “New Yorkers [are] Opt[ing] For Cars Over Public Transport Due To [the] Pandemic”; austerity and retreat from public space/goods were to be expected, but that doesn’t make this reactionary turn any less disheartening. Nonetheless, I continue to expect that we here in New York – chastened as we’ve been by these past two months – will weather what’s to come with relative grace, though how we do so as much of the country melts down is anyone’s guess.

Albert Wenger has a good piece up on “Resetting Our Priorities” in which he posits:

Now lots of people are asking how will we bring these jobs back? But the more fundamental question to ask is: what can people spend their time and attention on if they don’t need to have that specific job? Or possibly any paid job [because Albert is a believer in UBI]?

And half answer his own questions:

So here too our question shouldn’t be, how can we bail out all the businesses and keep making more stuff, but rather what is it that we need and won’t get from the market? We know some of these areas already and the crucial one of course is solving the climate crisis.

I continue to find the NEJM‘s new COVID-19-themed podcast excellent, informative, gently humorous, and admirably succinct, and finally, if you’re looking for a less-gently-humorous, but also half-heartwarming story (or inspiration for a play), David Dayen linked – in yesterday’s Unsanitized newsletter – to this article, the title of which speaks for itself: “US man tries to sneak into Germany dressed as a janitor to see his girlfriend during [the] pandemic.” The following passage is just gold, and we can only hope that German immigration finds it in their hearts to quarantine the young man as they see fit and then reunite him with his lover (if being reunited is something in which she, herself, is at this point interested):

However, border security officials stopped him after he tried to empty the bins multiple times despite being denied entry. One officer noticed that he was also not wearing an identification pass, and the man was also unable to speak German.

We’re in this for the long haul, and unfortunately, we haven’t come all that far yet. Finding ways to stay healthy, engaged, sane, and connected; to make meaning; to make rent and stay well and healthfully fed; to care for ourselves and each other; not to utterly cede the future to the reactionaries and fascists – these are the tasks for the weeks and months ahead. I’m still searching for the right image, but the best I’ve conjured to date is that of climbing to a high place. I think most of us, at some point, have come, winded, to what we’re certain most be the peak, the crest, the hilltop, the ridge, only to round a corner and see, far in the distance, and much higher up, our actual destination. That’s where we are right now, and patience, perspective, determination, and imagination will be necessary to carry us to the point where we can actually see the other side of this.

We are living through a time of great sorrow, although even that sorrow is distributed unevenly. According to an Australian “authority on confinement and reintegration,” for those of us ensconced comfortably at home, “the dreaded third quarter of isolation, when […] things get weird” has begun. Simultaneously, the NEJM writes of “clinicians dying by suicide amid the pandemic,” and warns, starkly: “We are now facing a surge of physical and emotional harm [to healthcare workers] that amounts to a parallel pandemic.” Meanwhile – as Vijay Prashad writes in a Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research newsletter entitled “Hunger Gnaws at the Edges of the World” – “Half of the world’s population fears going hungry as a result of the pandemic.” (If you appreciate Prashad’s work, you may also be interested in the recent Tricontinental dossier, “CoronaShock: A Virus and the World.”)

Yesterday, I tried (but perhaps failed) to make sense of the motivations of the sociopathic kleptocrats in DC responsible for our disastrous national COVID-19 non-response, and once again sought to make modest but salient connections between the related, though profoundly different, crises of pandemic and global climate disruption. In particular, I reflected, grimly, on the exterminationist logic underlying both neo-fascist exploitation of the pandemic and neoliberal procrastination of desperately-necessary climate action.

Today, building on this horrible idea of exterminationism, I’m going to briefly reflect back through both personal and scholarly lenses, on the deep roots of genocide and sociopathy in the capitalist project that still structures and rules the world.

As Prashad writes in the above-linked newsletter:

Hunger is a bitter reality that modern civilisation should have expelled a century ago. What did it mean for human beings to learn how to build a car or fly a plane and not at the same time abolish the indignity of hunger?

Sadly, that hunger which we “should have expelled” still stalks, haunts, and gnaws as it long has. Some of my own ancestors came to the United States from Ireland in the decades after the Great Famine in Ireland (and in the years immediately following the Fenian Rising, though what influence either event had on their migration is lost to history). During the roughly four years of the Famine, out of a total Irish population of approximately eight million people, one million died, and another million emigrated. Under the subheading “The Period of Extermination” in the excellent Monthly Review article, “The Rift of Éire,” the authors explain:

In 1845, the potato blight caused by Phytopthora infestans, a fungus-like pathogen, which first appeared in the United States and the European Continent, broke out in Ireland. By 1846, it generated a general famine, known in Ireland as the Great Hunger or Great Famine, which lasted for three to four years, with failures of the potato crop occurring partially in 1847 and then more generally in 1848–49. A million people died and more than a million people emigrated. Ireland at the time was especially vulnerable to the effects of the blight because of the destitute condition of the population, given that its subsistence diet was based entirely on the potato and the reliance on a monoculture consisting of only one variety, the “lumper” potato. The British government, based in Westminster, responded to the famine inconsistently and inadequately. Grain continued to be exported from Ireland to feed England.

What else can we call the actions but evil of a British government that, in the face of famine and mass deaths “continued to […] [export grain] from Ireland to feed England”?

And yet, such was the consistent policy of the rulers of the British Empire. Around the same time as the Great Famine in Ireland – and on many occasions before and after – hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of Indians died of starvation under British rule. For example, the Great Bengal Famine in 1770 “is estimated to have caused the deaths of about 10 million people,” while in the Bengal Famine of 1943, “it is estimated up to two million died.” In the 173 years intervening between these bookending horrors of British colonization of India, tens of millions of Indians died in dozens of separate episodes of mass starvation (viz., see Mike Davis’s excellent, overwhelming Late Victorian Holocausts). Since independence in 1947, India has experience no major famines (although this is not to forgive the many great injustices perpetrated by the Indian State), and, unsurprisingly, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

Again, it is hard to characterize these British colonial policies as anything but evil (even as I don’t believe the British State has ever formally apologized for the many atrocities for which it was responsible), and it is not a coincidence that Davis’s book is subtitled “El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World”; this subtitular connection of climate and poverty should give us all pause as we confront a 21st century increasingly being posited as “a century of crisis” and a “spreading wasteland.” Layer unto the global climatic and economic strains pandemic disease (for, as Davis and others have made clear, something like a quarter of all deaths globally during the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic occurred in then-British India, for reasons much the same as those laid out above regarding why Ireland “was especially vulnerable to the effects of the blight” in the 1840s), and we confront a perfect storm of civilizational, if not species-level, proportions.

Fittingly, the very next article in the April Monthly Review questions, in its title: “How Long Can Neoliberalism Withstand Climate Crisis?” A good question, and one the answer of which, according to the piece, centers on a shift towards logic “constrained by ecology and not the market,” and a reversal of priorities, in which we cease to see ourselves as “expendable,” but corporations and their profits as “essential.”

I’ll end today by pointing to the remarkable work of Anne-Emmanuel Birn (to which I came only recently through my friend Emily). In comments made on a virtual panel on “Globalization and the History of Epidemics in Latin America,” Birn points to the “original pandemic of imperialism” (which she suggests calling “smallpox-19, for 1519”). The apocalyptic convergence of disease, violence, and colonization that accompanied the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere has not been the central historical point of reference in popular discourse (at least in this country, where I’d say people – myself included to some extent – have primarily looked to the aforementioned flu pandemic) as stricken populations try to make sense of our extraordinary circumstances, but perhaps the Columbian Exchange should be the starting point for discussion about where we go from here. The genocidal and exterminationist project that was unleashed in that unequal Exchange cannot be said ever really to have ended, and it is the defining work of the present to chart a new course for the next 500 years, or else suffer – and inflict on the future – the consequences.

Postscript: I am the descendant of Irish immigrants to the United States. My partner was born and raised in India before coming to this country as a young adult. We are both, in our own ways, participants in the settler colonial project in North America. And it was these at once divergent and convergent (personal) histories I had in mind in writing this piece.

A good friend of mine whose parents came to this country from Vietnam during the genocidal US war on that country has been waiting months for his partner to receive a spousal visa so she can join him in Texas. COVID-19 has complicated their plans to be reunited, but he maintains a sense of humor and patience in the face of this hardship, writing, “It’s alright. […] [S]he’s safer there than in the US,” and, expanding on this thought, “[I]n Vietnam no one really messes with the police or wants to die. Here though, people are more selfish and put freedom above safety.”

Critics might claim that his comments subtly vindicate authoritarianism, but I’d say his key point is actually about solidarity, and the divergence between the Vietnamese response to the pandemic and our own in the US could not be more stark. In Vietnam, the disease has thus far been contained, and mortality has been extremely limited. In this country, its spread continues to be explosive, and the death toll is astronomical and rapidly rising.

What more is there to say?

We know what we need to do, and we’re not doing it – or, to be more precise, our kleptocratic, cronyist government is not. Instead, the President and his administration have been pressuring conscientious government employees to “spend millions of taxpayer dollars purchasing a drug that […] hadn’t undergone basic safety testing in humans [when] similar drugs in the same class had caused serious reproductive problems in animals, with animals exposed in the womb born without teeth and with partially formed skulls,” and shielding political allies from justified prosecution.

What more can we do?

The President knows his policies are driving dramatic spikes in COVID-19 cases across much of the country (in fact, he’s bringing the disease to his base), and is, simply, unsurprisingly, lying about this truth.

In NYC, we’ve had empirical evidence since early April that City and State figures on COVID-19 mortality drastically understate the death toll, and yet major media outlets continue to dutifully quote the official numbers (or else roll out “breaking news” that the death toll is higher than officially reported). For example, here’s the New York Post declaring yesterday morning that “Over 20,000 people have died from coronavirus in NYC,” when basic arithmetic suggested the death toll had already crossed 20,000 in the City in April (as this post of mine from April 24th makes clear).

Meanwhile, on a political vendetta against his own world-class Health Department, Mayor de Blasio threatens to bungle yet another key piece – this time, contact tracing – of our pandemic response. As my partner and I can attest personally, the City’s Department of Small Business Services is not doing a very good job of serving small businesses [paywalled]. And the (undocumented) New Yorkers hardest hit by the pandemic continue to be largely left, by governments, to fend for themselves, as this powerful piece by Adriana Gallardo and Ariel Goodman makes clear. (For a moving three-part interview with Gallardo, who just won a Pulitzer, check out yesterday’s Democracy Now!)

Last night, my partner asked, regarding the negligence of the Federal COVID-19 response, “But why are they doing it?”

At first, I failed to follow her meaning, and half thought she was hinting at some deeper conspiracy afoot (eg, the conceivable explanations: That, Reichstag Fire-like, the pandemic – the President hopes – might be used to justify cancellation of the November election; or that class warfare-wise, the people who control the economy are happy to drive the majority of the population into deeper desperation; or that eschatologically-speaking, Pence, Pompeo, and others withhin the Administration are ready for the end of days and see the pandemic as a promising harbinger), but upon clarification, I got it.

It reminded me of a funny interaction we had shortly after meeting, in fact. We were at Corner Bistro with friends, and she asked, seemingly in earnest, “What is Google+?”

And I was like, “I mean, you know, right? Google’s attempt at a social network.”

And she was like, “But what is Google+?”

Clearly, given the failure of Google+, she had a point, and was asking a question that the people at Google probably should’ve asked themselves. As in 2012, so yesterday, her attempt to discern a deeper meaning – in this instance, the motivations moving beneath the surface of public declarations and round-the-clock media coverage – set my mind moving. We know that the reopenings of state economies are, at root, misguided and cruel attempts to salvage already ravaged state budgets. Why, then, are the people in power in DC driving us inevitably into ever deeper national trauma and catastrophe?

Try though I have to discern a deeper pattern at work, I continue to circle back to the explanation I’ve given from the start. Here’s the post, from February 27th, in which I first mention COVID-19:

It seems we’re now living in a pandemic.

As COVID-19 spreads, I have an eerie feeling of watching, in fast forward, the global response to the climate crisis to date. The denials and macho posturing, followed by the panicky responses, are coming from much the same quarters, and I have to confess that – as with anthropogenic climate change – I was slower than I’d like to admit in acknowledging the level of threat posed by this disease. Just as Irene lulled us into a false sense of security about Sandy here in New York, the lessons of SARS and MERS-CoV led me to believe that COVID-19 would be, in the end, contained. Increasingly, it seems like that will not be the case, and as hysteria and profiteerism move to center stage, we witness a disconcerting spectacle that calls into question our social, institutional, and political capacities to deal with the global crises engendered by neoliberal corporate globalization: Suddenly, air travel is our enemy (as if it wasn’t already, from a climate perspective) and just-in-time supply chains look like so many weakest links strung together around the globe…

My focus here will not be a hot take on the novel coronavirus, however; credit to Bill Bishop’s Sinocism, I’d heard before the news broke globally that the virus was spreading in Wuhan (a city that I visited and loved as a collegiate teenager who’d barely had the opportunity before that to leave the United States), and courtesy of the excellent coverage on Democracy Now! of the unfolding crisis (featuring Laurie Garrett), this turn towards pandemic does not come altogether as a surprise.

I’ll admit that if there is one thing I hope to take away from this pandemic personally – beyond hard-earned humility and sense of perspective, and a deepened appreciation for all that is beautiful in life – it is credibility. As I went on to write on March 7th, as I properly shifted to writing about the pandemic:

As with climate crisis, so with pandemic: We’ve waited until it’s too late to do anything at all, and now that the crisis is upon us – and as the rich and the kleptocrats, for the most part, shelter themselves and ask how, from this, they can profit – we’re panicking and scrambling to salvage from the worst-case scenario, something less bad. It’s a worthy goal, and (on the climate side), what I see as my life’s work.

The explanation to which I circle back for the unfathomable cruelty and incompetence issuing from DC centers less on grand plans (though, of course, McConnell and others certainly have those, as the reconvening of the Senate to appoint Federal judges makes clear) and more on opportunism, greed, ignorance, and incompetence. I believe the strategy which has now taken shape among the people in power is to rob and upwardly redistribute to the fullest extent the intersecting crises allow, while making token gestures to the population at large, resting assured that not nearly enough has been given to prevent most working people from being starved, prematurely, back to work. It is a strategy that is already badly backfiring, but has enabled a great deal of wealth transfer, and – from the perspective of people who don’t care at all about mass death of the poor – may yet work out “favorably”.

I started today by quoting one set of text messages, and will end by quoting another – these from someone who, like my partner, owns a storefront business in the neighborhood. On my way home after a short walk last weekend, I heard an alarm going off and took a brief detour to investigate. At the storefront from which the shrill sounds were emanating, there was no visible sign of trouble, so when I got home, I simply left a courtesy message at the number listed on the business’s website. Subsequently, I heard from the owner that “rodents in the basement” were responsible for triggering the alarm, for which she was very sorry. Our exchange culminated in the following texts, from her:

Thank you Tom for your note. Much appreciated. And thank you for letting me know. If anything this crisis has permitted [my business] to be more part of the […] community and I like that. Unfortunately the crisis has eliminated food sources for rodents. Cities nationwide are dealing with this issue. I just wish they would leave the building. Laugh out loud I’m sure you understand and agree. We cannot share the space with them ha ha Ha

And me: “Even the poor rodents getting hit by this thing…”

As the hardship of the rats makes clear, every city is an ecology – not metaphorically, but actually – an ecology which sits in the wider world (which itself sits in the vastness of the universe), subject to biogeochemical dynamics and universal physical laws. We, indeed, actually have to “share the space with [the rats],” although perhaps the current food shortages for urban rodents confirm the obvious, that hygiene and sanitation are more powerful than any poison in combating infestation.

We can be confident that, even handled with the utmost cruelty and stupidity, this pandemic will eventually pass, if with a criminal abundance of unnecessary suffering. Climate crisis, too – handled thusly – will pass in a sense, but not on a human time horizon, and likely not with a lasting human presence on Earth, and while it is awful to have to say it, as eco-fascism and zombie neoliberalism increasingly come to look like not-so-strange bedfellows, I fear that the same callous de facto exterminationist logic at play in the President’s pandemic non-response will move – with geoengineering – center stage in the elite response to climate disruption.

Like the President’s disastrous, failed COVID-19 non-strategy, I think the automate-everything and/or escape-to-Mars fantasy of an increasingly-obviously-villainous Silicon Valley subset is just that – a fantasy, and a puerile one – but such dreams of not having to “share the space” of the Earth with the majority of the human population, in addition to being obviously evil, can lead us towards a cataclysmic dead-end. Just as lies and conflations cost as precious, unrecoverable weeks and months as we failed to confront the pandemic, techno-futurist delusions and Kurtzian ideation can cost us our last chances to avert the worst of global climate paradigm shift.

As a human being, I’m comfortable trying to drive rats out of our cities. As a human being, I’m not comfortable with planetary genocide. Such are the value decisions we now confront. If you think I’m being hyperbolic, just do nothing and wait.

As I wrote above, what I hope to take from this immediate crisis is credibility to address the slower moving, much bigger one unfolding still and always in the background. If you prefer not to wait and see, and you’re looking for a worthy life’s work, I invite you to join me in the struggle to make sure that the cruelty, incompetence, racism, and violence that have characterized handling of COVID-19 in this country are not the touchstones of post-pandemic climate policy. The fight for climate sanity and justice, after all, is the fight of all of our lifetimes.

Short piece today.

New York State is inching towards a phased, region-by-region reopening. (For readers unfamiliar, as I was until recently, with the ten official regions of New York State, here’s a helpful Wiki.) It’s too early to infer much from the nascent reopening experiences of hard-hit European countries; there have been a number of reports in the media about upticks in new cases and/or deaths (eg, in France and Germany) as countries lift lockdowns, but its unclear to me if these data are significant, or if they simply reflect, for example, the jagged variations that are to be expected when testing and reporting drop off over the weekend, then spike early in the work week. (Here’s the Our World in Data tracker of country-wise COVID-19 cases and deaths; it’s set for France but you can change the country by clicking in the lower left of the graph.)

Meanwhile, the United States is lurching into an epochal crisis, and I expect that the country will be in a state of meltdown/mass outcry/upheaval/paralysis by the end of this month. Painful stuff, and as we approach the nominal May 15th end of New York’s stay-at-home order (and I prepare to finally shave my beard), I increasingly feel the need to be involved in more organizing and action than I already am. Perhaps these posts will become weekly, or at least somewhat less frequent.

Yesterday, I mentioned both the good examples and cautionary tales to be found in the experiences of other countries around the world. Here’s a heartening Lancet one-pager on New Zealand’s to-date effective “elimination approach.” And here are a few worrying articles on what increasingly looks like Sweden’s failed “personal freedom” strategy (which as late as mid-April was still being covered ambivalently by some corporate media outlets); today, Sweden has 10x more COVID-19 deaths than either Norway or Finland (each of which has ~half of Sweden’s population). Interestingly, Sweden only has three to four times more confirmed cases than its neighboring countries though, suggesting that not only has Sweden taken insufficient preventive measures in the face of the pandemic, but that it is also radically under-testing. For those of us in the US, this description should, of course, sound eerily and ominously familiar.

As another sign of the dismal state of truth-telling in our mass media, an AP article – out this morning and entitled “Study: Virus death toll in NYC worse than official tally” – has been garnering significant attention. It’s conclusion? “Between March 11 and May 2, about 24,000” died of COVID-19 in NYC, so “about 5,300 more deaths than were blamed on the coronavirus in official tallies during those weeks.” Tragic, heartbreaking, hard-hitting reporting. Except today is May 12th, and on May 3rd (that is, the day after May 2nd), I wrote the following: “adding up the State’s figures for “Confirmed” deaths (13,538) with the City’s figure for “Probable” deaths (5,387) with my own figure for “Still-ignored” deaths (~4,500) yields ~23,500 COVID-19 deaths in NYC.” Factor in lags in reporting, and I’d say I was pretty close.

The Associated Press has 3,200 employees. I’ve been sitting around in my apartment for the last eight weeks. Why am I scooping them by 10 days on stories that only take doing basic arithmetic to report?

Finally, Ross Barkan has a long newsletter out that seeks to answer the question: “Is Andrew Cuomo actually doing a good job?” Short answer: No. (Viz., see the mortality figure above). But I encourage you to go read the whole piece, especially if you’re still fetishizing our tough guy Governor. Remember, at the same time that Robert Moses was taking the proverbial “meat ax” to immigrant and working class neighborhoods across New York City and building up a hyper-corrupt patronage system that, among other things, starved our mass transit of necessary funds, locked the City into its current destructive and anti-human dependence on automobiles, and concretized racial and class bias in the built environment on a monumental scale, he remained a widely beloved figure in New York, owing largely to his strangle-hold on/power over elected officials and the media.

It’s easy to forget that the subtitle of Robert Caro’s compendious, scathing biography – The Power Broker – is “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”; looking back to January 15th – when Governor Cuomo should have been preparing for COVID-19 hitting New York, but wasn’t – here’s a Politico piece on Philip Mark Plotch’s Last Subway that summed up Ploch’s thesis thusly:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s full-throttled push to complete the Second Avenue Subway by 2017 had a deleterious effect on the rest of New York City’s subway system, culminating in his decision that same summer to declare a subway state of emergency, argues a new book by a respected urban planner.

We could be here all day if I start to, once again, make the case against Cuomo, so let me just make the point that – as with the Second Avenue Subway debacle and the questionable L Train miracle fix that the Governor forced, unilaterally and last-minute, down the MTA’s throat – the Governor may not be living (and we can hope will not still be in power) when the consequences of his actions during this crisis come into focus, but that doesn’t mean that many of the rest of us won’t be. While we bang our kitchenware at the Governor’s behest, the future is being shaped before our grief-blinded eyes, and, sadly, that future – which the Governor is shaping – is not looking pretty.

As is so often the case, the chasm between possible and actual gapes today like a wound.

A man well on his way to drinking himself to death has taken up temporary residence on the scaffolding-sheltered steps of a residential construction site in our neighborhood. The scaffolding under which he has been – like many of the more properly sheltered and well-heeled residents of the West Village – heavily day-drinking has stood for years now at the corner where, rumor has it, the former CEO of Chipotle is having three former residential buildings converted into one obscene mega-mansion. Now, with fast casual (and especially buffet-style) restaurants getting hammered by the crisis, one wonders if the ChipMcMansion will ever be completed.

Why can’t we house the unhoused in New York City?

Even in the best of times, one wonders, but now, in the midst of a pandemic – when pragmatism, if not humanitarianism, should dictate the preeminence of hygiene, and the vast majority of the City’s hotel rooms sit vacant – the question becomes a howling scream of indignation. Pre-pandemic, something like 70,000 to 80,000 New Yorkers were reported to be homeless at any given time, of whom ~4,000 slept on the street on any given night. Meanwhile, reports have consistently put the number of vacant hotel rooms in NYC since the onset of COVID-19 over 100,000.

The math is simple, but a different calculus outweighs this simple arithmetic.

Why can’t we exercise our right to vote?

The short answer: Because Andrew Cuomo said so. The slightly longer: Because powerful interests within the state and national Democratic Parties would prefer that we not. The longer still: There is an important court case scheduled for Friday that will decide whether or not the first canceled (by Cuomo’s Board of Elections), then reinstated (after a court ruling in response to a lawsuit brought by Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders) Democratic presidential primary will actually be held in New York.

You may ask why it matters, given that, after all, only one serious candidate remains on the ballot. First and foremost, it matters because now is the last time that the Democratic Party should be setting a precedent for the pandemic-based cancellation of any elections…

Further, when only coup-style machinations by the Democratic Party establishment (in concert with the corporate media) managed to deliver Biden presumptive nominee-ship, and only high-handed and deadly reckless maneuvering by the Biden campaign and the DNC forced Sanders’ to withdraw from the primary (rather than stay in and risk that Biden and the Party would continue to call for/attempt to force in-person voting), its galling that the Party’s man in Albany would then look to rob Sanders of the opportunity to amass – as is his stated intention, given that he remains on the ballot – more delegates in the lead up to the convention. With Tara Reade’s credible accusations, against Biden, of sexual assault; Biden’s uncertain health and mental faculties; and our nationally deteriorating condition of pandemic stricken-ness, I certainly don’t feel certain about what the eventual outcome of the Democratic selection process will be.

(By the way, here’s a graph that gives a clear sense of what happens when you – that is, the State of Wisconsin – hold in-person voting during a pandemic. Spoiler: About 14-days after the voting, you see a pronounced spike in cases in spite of your state-wide stay-at-home order.)

You may also ask if it’s safe or reasonable or cost-effective to hold elections during a pandemic. Addressing the last point first, it’s only as cost-effective as preserving our democracy. On the other points, thankfully, we have the United States Postal Service! For now. So again, it’s simple – just send every registered voter a ballot by mail (just like California has now committed to doing in enacting “automatic vote-by-mail for the November election”) – but superseded by Machiavellian concerns, which are more complex.

Speaking of complexity, New Zealand has “brought new coronavirus cases down to zero” and Australia has largely succeeded in suppressing the virus (in the process, employing a problematic surveillance app), but news out of China and South Korea points to just how provisional these successes are. There is no victory so long as the SARS-CoV-2 is in circulation and much of the population remains vulnerable to it. Meanwhile, the news out of the United States reads like a (sometimes darkly comical) catalogue of horrors: Cases mounting as “States Reopen Economies”; children mysteriously dying; hospitals investigating healthcare workers for calling for adequate PPE; state governments undermining attempts of tribal governments to protect against spread of the virus; prisoners dying from COVID-19; detainees hunger striking in desperate attempts not to be exposed to it; deportation (including of COVID-19-positive people) proceeding apace; and, to top it all off, a growing number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the White House.

We’re facing the hardest of hard problems, and the President thinks we should drink bleach and is denying, as a matter of political expediency, the validity of even our radically understated COVID-19 fatality numbers rather than even attempt to confront the unfolding disaster. The Vice President went to the Mayo Clinic and refused, against all posted and clearly communicated regulations, to wear a mask. His explanation? He wanted to “be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you.” One worries he doesn’t understand how a mask works.

All of this is old news, so I’ll share with you some new news instead: I saw a very beautiful bird outside my window this afternoon. My neighbor, a former professional flautist, was practicing his scales outside, or out the window, in one of the sunny interludes between sudden torrid bursts of downpour, and amidst the lime green young leaves of the honey locust tree, this bird – if I’m not mistaken, an oriole, with electric orange breast and black and orange back – hopped from branch to branch, pecking at I’m not sure what.

Today, I’m worried about losing what remains of our democracy and worried about the colossal trauma into which we’re sailing, Titanic, with our “leaders” – Washington-esque – defiantly wearing their masks like blindfolds – sans sight, sans sense, sans everything.