When it comes to rent, it’s usually pay now, or else, but as the crisis deepens in New York City and State – with a square mile of New Rochelle locked down under National Guard patrol, SUNY and CUNY schools slated to go all online at the end of next week, the number of confirmed cases rising precipitously by the day, and, in perhaps the clearest sign, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade cancelled for the first time in more than 200 years – everything comes back, as it often does, to rent. Being too damn high. And who pays it. And who collects it each month.

Cancellation of the Parade will be to COVID-19 (hereafter: the disease; with SARS-CoV-2, hereafter: the virus) and Mayor de Blasio what cancellation of the Marathon was to Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath and Mayor Bloomberg – the moment of reckoning when an elected official confronts and publicly acknowledges the fact that we are no longer in a business-as-usual scenario – and I expect/hope that closure of the public schools will follow, though, in the meantime, significant damage has probably already been done by keeping them open. And why did we keep the schools open? Because they provide essential meals for hundreds of thousands of young people everyday, and otherwise-unaffordable childcare for hundreds of thousands of working New Yorkers. But is that the way it should be? What if we had functioning social welfare systems? A public health system that was properly valued and funded? Universal childcare and paid sick leave? Medicare for All? Would we still be facing the predicament we now face? Great that New York State is offering state employees two weeks paid leave if they are “quarantined or in isolation due to #Coronavirus,” but what about creating opportunities for people to avoid getting sick in the first place?

Pay now, or pay later, and we opted for the latter option.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on rent though. My partner is a gifted business person and entrepreneur, who also happens to have one of the best landlord’s in New York City. We absolutely love him, and have often discussed how fortunate she is to have ended up in his building. My partner is also fortunate that her business model, and the strong community at its core, are insulating her from the worst of the harm currently being inflicted on so many of New York’s vital small businesses. I’ve previously written that, without widespread rent forgiveness, we will likely see a massive wave of business failures, and it is already evident that countless New Yorkers are panicked about the personal and professional financial ramifications of this (now official) pandemic. Evidence of the suffering is everywhere – drivers wearing masks, but still driving; looks of dread on the faces of owners and employees alike at neighborhood restaurants; delivery people expected to keep on delivering but now being treated like bike-bound vectors at many of the luxury buildings to which they ride – and the dire necessity is also making the crisis worse.

It all comes back to rent (and utilities, and phone bills, etc., but especially rent), and in reflecting upon that fact, we can arrive at a deeper truth about what it means to live in a highly-leveraged permanent-growth economy – the same economy that has been driving the marvel that is our planet’s biosphere towards climatic and ecological rupture/collapse. Why don’t all the City’s landlords simply extend rent forgiveness until the pandemic has passed? Greed is the simple answer, and certainly – mixed with contract law – there is some of that. But in many instances, the landlords don’t actually own the buildings outright. In many instances, the landlords have taken large commercial loans against the income streams generated by their buildings, and only the steady flow of rent payments – to landlord and passed along to banks – allows the “owners” to go on “owning” that for which they are, in fact, still paying.

And what happens if many of those landlords cease, for one reason or another, to pay, or be able to pay, the interest on their mortgages and commercial loans? We all remember 2008. Not that this is like that, exactly, but it should have proven more of a cautionary tale than it did, just as SARS and MERS – the latter emerging roughly a decade after the former – should have served as clear signals that another zoonotic coronavirus outbreak was highly likely. (My friend Josh – the founder of Green Top Farms, and among the many business owners currently grappling with the hardships brought on by the spread of this disease – broke down elegantly, based on the work of Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, the connections between climate crisis, food insecurity, zoonosis, and pandemic in his newsletter Food Safety in the Age of Coronaviruses; his use of the  plural is important – this pandemic is not a black swan, and, like the three 500-year floods visited, in three years, upon zoning-averse Houston, it leaves little doubt that we live in non-stationary times and that our “new normal” is chaotic, escalatory, and without clear historical precedents.)

Even if they wanted to, many of the landlords couldn’t forgive rent because, if they did, who would pay the banks? And if no one pays the banks, as we’ve learned, the economy melts down (just like the public markets have been doing in recent weeks). And if the economy melts down – as it seems to be threatening to – countless people suffer. I wish I could say that’s why the President and his cronies, rightly called, are working to cut the payroll tax and bail out select industries, but, alas, these efforts seem to be so much more disaster capitalism – attempts to find a backdoor way to undercut and then privatize Social Security and to distribute patronage to industries, admittedly, in dire straits, but selected with political interests in mind.

As for the people, and their rent, hopefully it trickles down. The money, that is. So goes the logic. Clearly, our system is failing in many respects – chief among them, the human – and the least we can do, beyond doing our part to stem the contagion, is keep clear-eyed perspective on what, why, and how went wrong and owing to actions by whom.

As I’m finishing this piece, news has just broken that the NBA has suspended its season after a player (reportedly Rudy Gobert) tested positive for the virus; earlier this evening, the Post reported that a “Broadway usher who worked two shows [had tested] positive for coronavirus“; and in the only bit of vaguely comic news, also courtesy of the Post, a “Coronavirus conference [was] canceled in New York because of coronavirus.” Strange times, and sadly, much of this is self-inflicted wound, but it’s never too soon to start to stem the bleeding. First, we have to take this as seriously as it is, and arrange our priorities accordingly while always remembering its impacts are distributed highly unevenly (even if the virus itself, having now reached Tom Hanks and his wife, is not) and part of stemming the viral spread is addressing the human suffering.

We are in a desperate struggle for the future, and there is a candidate who must be stopped. He is a serial liar who pathologically distorts his own record. He is hostile to Social Security and Medicare, and a rabid supporter of US militarism around the globe. He has worked hard to make life harder for students, poor people, and people of color. A long-time supporter of mass incarceration, he is a friend to segregationists; many women have come forward to accuse him of misconduct; and if that weren’t enough, there is ample evidence that he is losing his mind. The candidate I am talking about is, of course, Joe Biden.

What exactly differentiates him from the incumbent? Certainly, there are many differences, though few that feel particularly relevant. And yet, as the Democratic establishment and corporate media have moved as one in recent weeks to “stop Bernie Sanders” and resuscitate the candidacy of the former Vice President, it seems now that we are faced with an inevitability. When Andrew Yang comes out and declares that “the math” now makes Biden the “prohibitive nominee,” one has to worry, and if Elizabeth Warren endorses the man who is a “Democratic candidate for the United States Senate” and can’t tell his wife from his sister, well… I don’t think she will, and I haven’t given up.

Sanders has been endorsed by true progressive leaders from Jesse Jackson to AOC, and, more importantly, he has a mass movement behind him and has been endorsed by grassroots groups of Black scholars and feminist organizers. Haven’t read much about these endorsements in the corporate media? That’s because the corporate media is bullshit (corporatist propaganda, if you prefer) and, if you give it your attention, it’s long past time that you stopped.

Short and sweet tonight, as my focus has obviously been on the pandemic, our flat-footed response to it, our failure to grasp the urgency of acting now before it spreads more broadly, and what we can learn from our response to COVID-19 about our failures to adequately confront global climate crisis, but I’ll just add my voice to the chorus: If Biden is the Democratic nominee, I fear he’ll be eaten alive in the general election. If he loses, I’m almost certain the Democratic establishment will, once again, blame Bernie Sanders for the loss rather than look in the mirror.

That lessons were not learned from the 2016 election is a tragedy, but what is playing out now is more of a farce – though one with existential significance for all of us, as for the future of organized human life on Earth – and one could hardly ask for a more fitting image than this: A flailing Party, turning its back on its base in obeisance to its corporate donors, seizing defeat from the jaws of victory by refusing to see that people are demanding a break from 40+ years of failed neoliberal policies, instead going forward with a candidate possessed of “all of Hillary [Clinton]’s weaknesses and very few of her strengths,” a relic of a politician, Yesterday’s Man, in Branko Marcetic’s apt turn of phrase. In short, a failing party, presented an opportunity for a renaissance, has instead, fittingly, put forward a senile old man as their champion, and it now looks increasingly likely that, in the general election, we’ll witness the spectacle of not one, but two white old men in deep mental decline sparring it out to become what used to be the most powerful person on Earth as, around all of us, the world tips closer to burning.

Here’s to Bernie Sanders, and here’s to the movements behind him. We’ve got a world to win, but it gets a lot harder if we lose in November.

Lots of consternation in the US today after another breathtaking loss of value in the financial markets. In the last month, the Dow Jones is down from a record high – just shy of 30,000 – in mid-February to below 24,000 this morning, so roughly a 20% drop. For many everyday people, this means anxiety about their savings or their retirement plans, but no doubt some insiders have managed to benefit from the wild market fluctuations in recent weeks, and one imagines that certain of the more unsavory figures in the New York real estate world are licking their chops at the prospect of a virus that’s especially dangerous to (rent-controlled and rent-stabilized) elders.

Still, perhaps a silver lining of all this turmoil will be that it undercuts financial and corporate support for the President, given the disastrous consequences of his Administration’s incompetence and inaction. More to the point, excellent coverage on today’s Democracy Now! of the contribution of wealth/income inequality, terrorizing immigration policies, mass incarceration, and the Administration’s racist public-charge rule to the risk of spread of COVID-19 (hereafter: the disease). Meanwhile, more locally, New York City has moved to make loans available to small business hit by the pandemic – which is also predictably wreaking havoc, but unevenly, for workers in the so-called gig economy – but there are some questions about the coherence of the City’s response to community spread of SARS-CoV-2 (hereafter: the virus), and, as I’ve written previously, I have deep concerns about the prevailing social response to date, which, from many people, seems to amount to a shrug of the shoulders and the conviction that: It shouldn’t affect me much anyway, so who cares about the old people?

A younger friend sagely observed: “Young people won’t take this seriously until someone famous is affected.”

The Head of the Port Authority became, yesterday, the most prominent New Yorker to date to be diagnosed with the disease, but I don’t think he’s quite the sort of celebrity she had in mind. Farther from home, another prominent Republican lawmaker (who only recently mocked the seriousness of the pandemic by showing up on the House floor in a gas mask) has self-quarantined as the impacts of CPAC and AIPAC attendees being diagnosed with the disease continue to mount. The one-time gas mask-wearer had close contact with the President after being exposed, and may actually have been on Air Force One at the time he received the news that he’d shaken hands with an infected individual. For those requiring reminders, all so many that viruses don’t respect class boundaries.

Italy is now subject to nationwide travel restrictions, and South Korea has tested roughly 200,000 people for the virus (to the US’s ~2,000), but as Dr. Alfredo Morabia outlined on Democracy Now! this morning, the most effective measures to stem spread continue to be basic hygiene and social distancing practices (which I outline below in a quote from this great piece by Trevor Bradford on the genomic epidemiology that allowed him to conclude that the virus was circulating in Washington State from mid-January). These practices start with basic actions like handwashing, but can encompass more onerous measures like school closures. To date, New York City public schools remain open, but an increasing number of private schools and universities have closed/gone to all online classes, and the City has made clear that part of its reasoning in keeping schools open is that closing them puts such a heavy burden on many families. This refusal to close schools strikes me as the municipal version of waiting to go to the doctor until you’re so sick you end up in the emergency room, and I fear that failure to take significant measures now will lead to more suffering (and an even heavier burden) later. But this is a polarizing subject, and I continue to hear many well-informed individuals opine, basically: What’s the big deal? Why is everyone overreacting? And, to be fair, if schools were to be closed, but everyone continued otherwise behaving as normal, the impact on slowing the disease’s spread would likely be limited.

I’d like to dig a little more deeply into this though: Why does school closure burden some families so heavily? Often, it’s because many parents can’t afford childcare and can’t afford to take time off of work. And why is that the case? I’d say it has something to do with our form of capitalism. As I’ve written previously, both about the climate crisis, and our present pandemic, a reliance on market-based mechanisms ensures failure, and success is not possible without some degree of confrontation with the logic of capitalism. As Dr. Morabia put it: “I’m not so worried about the scientific aspect of it, of the response of our medical system. Even though it is really stretched thin because of lack of resources, but I think we can handle this. The problem is our social vulnerability.” Our social vulnerability. I’ll leave the ideological debates to others, but on this Little Super Tuesday, I think it’s worth considering which of the candidates for the Democratic nomination has a record, vision, and worldview that aligns with actually confronting, solving, and preventing such crises. Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, but is, in my view, more of a social democrat. Either way, whereas his opponent has a history of political opportunism and hurting the apocryphal little guy in service to corporate interests (and also has a long, long history of lying about his record on Apartheid, Civil Rights, the Iraq War, etc, etc, as outlined by Mehdi Hasan in this short, funny video for The Intercept), Sanders has been doggedly consistent over the years in identifying the root causes of what ails us. In this case, a virus is spreading, but structural factors – social, economic, and political – are, as much as anything, responsible for its spread, and I believe it is the root-cause thinking and leadership of Sanders that is most up to the challenges, including this pandemic, of our present moment.

As promised, I’m concluding by quoting from Bradford’s piece at length on “non-pharmaceutical interventions” as means of prevention:

This [drastic reduction of new cases in Hubei] suggests that this is controllable. We’re at a critical junction right now, but we can still mitigate this substantially.

Some ways to implement non-pharmaceutical interventions include:

• Practicing social distancing, such as limiting attendance at events with large groups of people
• Working from home, if your job and employer allows it
• Staying home if you are feeling ill
• Take your temperature daily, if you develop a fever, self-isolate and call your doctor
• Implementing good hand washing practices – it is extremely important to wash hands regularly
• Covering coughs and sneezes in your elbow or tissue
• Avoiding touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands
• Disinfecting frequently touched surfaces, such as doorknobs
• Beginning some preparations in anticipation of social distancing or supply chain shortages, such as ensuring you have sufficient supplies of prescription medicines and ensuring you have about a 2 week supply of food and other necessary household goods.
• With these preparation in mind, it is important to not panic buy. Panic buying unnecessarily increases strain on supply chains and can make it difficult to ensure that everyone is able to get supplies that they need.

I’m including this because I think he’s done a nice job of summing up the advice we’ve all read and heard many times by now. Our actions, collectively, will determine if we end up – to oversimplify – with one million cases globally, or one hundred million.

Now that SARS-CoV-2 (hereafter: the virus) has spread widely in the US, I’m hearing and reading a lot of commentary to the effect: Well, it’s really only dangerous to old people. As I’ve written previously, I think the lives of our elders matter, and the same goes for the lives of people with underlying respiratory ailments, autoimmune disorders, and even who are smokers or the type of people who vape in restaurant bathrooms or on crowded public transit. I understand the actuarial/utilitarian case (regarding years left to live, etc, etc), but, of course, that argument goes out the window as soon as we are talking about our own friends and loved ones, just as it would if say, I, as someone who doesn’t have children, expressed no concern whatsoever to my friends (many of whom are parents) about a potentially deadly disease sweeping the country: Please, it only really kills kids!

I’m also continuing to hear people compare this to the flu. I’ve previously done my small part to debunk the idea that COVID-19 (hereafter: the disease) is akin to the seasonal flu, but if people are referring to the flu pandemic of 1918-1920 (that infected something like one quarter of the world’s population and killed a low single digit percentage of the same), then, perhaps, they are closer to correct. We can hope for a different and less dire outcome in this instance, but only to the extent that we take the disease and our efforts to reduce the harm it is causing seriously.

The problem with the argument regarding the lack of risk to children in this particular pandemic is, of course, that children can very easily still serve as vectors. Are you a parent? Does your child ever interact with your parents (that is, the child’s grandparents)? Does your child seem to value that relationship, or does the child see that elder as disposable? Well then, there you go: It’s time to stop making that stupid argument. (To further dispense with this case, you could just imagine that you are an older person. You may even be one.)

Given the alarmingly early unset of spring which we are experiencing – courtesy of global climate crisis, which I continue to hear almost no one make a point of speaking about when they discuss the lovely weather – seasonal allergy season is upon us, which should make for confusing and uncomfortable days ahead for members of the double digit percentage of the population who suffer allergies now that all relevant medical and governmental authorities are advising that anyone experiencing cold- or flu-like symptoms self-quarantine. There goes the spring.

Meanwhile, it’s increasingly clear that – on top of the incompetence and denial about which I’ve written previously – the key element of the White House’s response to the pandemic has been a desperate desire to avoid responsibility. Call it image management or damage control in an election year. Unfortunately, the denialist urge now seems to be fueling hysteria, while the incompetence, in my view, is a key driver of the market implosion. Say what you will, there are a lot of smart people on Wall Street, and when they see an Administration lying, floundering, and generally fucking things up as a pandemic sweeps the country, they do what any savvy investor would and panic.

Sadly for an Administration, which has been built on deceit and artifice, as Charles M. Blow writes, You Can’t Gaslight a Virus. You can trigger an utter lack of public faith in your public health institutions though, and in light of the CDC’s colossal mismanagement of the disease to date, and in view of the (racist) conspiracy theories spreading about the virus having “escaped” or been “let loose” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and our own rabid, anti-science Anti-Vaxxer movement, I find myself reflecting on the harm done to the fight against polio by the CIA and the harm done – as documented in Katherine Eban’s (at times problematic) book, Bottle Full of Lies – to drug safety by capitalism.

Which brings me to my final thought for today: Isn’t it a scandal the way we handle the flu? Every year, tens of thousands of people die of influenza in the United States and tens of millions of people contract it. We are a rich society, unprecedentedly so in the history of the Earth. Tens of millions of people in the US can’t afford healthcare, and countless people every year in this country go to work sick out of fear of losing wages or facing retribution from their employers. And this is the example people keep pointing to in trying (fruitlessly) to dismiss the seriousness of our current predicament. Oh, it’s just like the flu: The disease that we’ve been chronicling mismanaging for decades and that every generation or two kills (tens of) millions of people around the world in a pandemic. Sometimes, the status quo can blind you to its own awfulness – the relevance of this line of thinking to the Democratic primary (in which I’m strongly backing Bernie Sanders and encouraging all Democrats to look deeply into Biden’s record of lies, militarism, hostility to popular social programs, plagiarism (!!), and, of late, general confusion) should be quite obvious, but rather than delving deeply into the need for Medicare for All or its equivalent in this country, let me simply continue to urge: Reject hysteria, and likewise complacency. We should be working towards the least bad outcome the current situation allows, and, as I concluded yesterday, it’s all about the math.

This January was the warmest in the Earth’s recorded history. This winter has been the warmest in Europe’s recorded history. The 12-month period that ended in January 2020 was the warmest such period on record. In New York, some cherry trees are already in full bloom (the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s Sakura Matsuri 2020 is scheduled for the weekend of April 25th), and we confront the strange possibility that, if SARS-CoV-2 (hereafter: the virus) does turn out to be sensitive to warmer temperatures, the extremely anomalous weather brought on by global climate crisis could actually spare those of us in the Northeast of the United States (and elsewhere) the worst of the pandemic – although barring a precipitous and unlikely bypassing of spring, a look at the current weather conditions in Milan, Tehran, and the San Francisco Bay Area – in each of which locations COVID-19 (hereafter: the disease) continues to spread – suggests that we shouldn’t expect, in New York, any immediate respite.

A few scattered observations: I’m betting sphincters are tightening all across the country as word spreads that vaping increases your risk of suffering serious complications from the disease. (They promised me the toxic nicotine juice was safe!) We can hope that fear on this front leads to less reckless (and hence disease-spreading) behavior on behalf of a set of individuals who might otherwise be inclined to take a cavalierly blasé attitude to the pandemic. As a keen observer summed up such an outlook – among young, healthy New Yorkers who seem to be embracing, in large numbers, the idea that this pandemic won’t really affect them, so why bother: “Who cares about old people?”

In the absence of widespread rent forgiveness and active efforts by state and local governments to support people and businesses hit hard, economically, by the spread of the disease, I fear we can expect to see a massive wave of small business closures and wage-starved New Yorkers struggling or unable to cover their basic expenses, and while it’s great that we have paid sick leave, at last, in New York City and State, for the many workers who do not enjoy access to it, I’m not aware of any program, operating at scale, to support them if they fall ill in the coming days and weeks, which poses both a problem of justice and care, as of further risk of contagion.

Very much part of the problem myself yesterday – as I worked a full day, and hence was around town, though, to my credit, observing, for the most part, recommended hygiene and social distancing measures – I saw throngs of people in Central Park, out along the Hudson, and in Washington Square. There was no sign that word of the emergency had reached the general population, and although optimists in my life have been hailing the responsible efforts of government and major employers to stem the disease’s spread, I wonder what effect the cancelled conferences, limited business travel, and working from home will have if people otherwise go about their daily lives as usual. May we not simply be shifting the risk around rather than significantly reducing it? (I have a blanket policy of not photographing strangers without their permission, or I would’ve included dozens of pictures of what the “emergency” looked like yesterday around the City.)

Given that, as I’ve written previously, the opportunity to actually contain the disease has long since been missed, our task now is harm reduction – to slow the spread so that the burden on our healthcare (and economic and social) systems doesn’t become overwhelming, and to work to limit the risk to the people who face the gravest dangers from the virus. As yet, I’m seeing very few signs of a coherent, widely socially-embraced strategy for confronting, here in New York, the pandemic. Fundamentally, the challenge now can be reduced to math (I encourage people to watch the excellent and accessible video, Exponential growth and epidemics), so, certainly, every little bit counts, but if we don’t succeed through disease tracking, quarantine, and widely-adopted social measures to slow the spread of the virus, we can expect this to get much much worse in the near term.

Some final food for thought: From whom did the original identified sufferers of community transmission of the disease in NYC contract the virus? We don’t know, which suggests the disease’s spread is very likely much wider than the current numbers indicate, and that our efforts at containment should be much more concerted.