Across the world, Covid-19 has triggered community action on a vast scale. It’s a powerful riposte to both government and private money
You can watch neoliberalism collapsing in real time. Governments whose mission was to shrink the state, to cut taxes and borrowing and dismantle public services, are discovering that the market forces they fetishised cannot defend us from this crisis. The theory has been tested, and almost everywhere abandoned. It may not be true that there were no atheists in the trenches, but there are no neoliberals in a pandemic.
The shift is even more interesting than it first appears. Power has migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilised where governments have failed.
In India, young people have self-organised on a massive scale to provide aid packages for “daily wagers”: people without savings or stores, who rely entirely on cash flow that has now been cut off. In Wuhan, in China, as soon as public transport was suspended, volunteer drivers created a community fleet, transporting medical workers between their homes and hospitals.
In South Africa, communities in Johannesburg have made survival packs for people in informal settlements: hand sanitiser, toilet paper, bottled water and food. In Cape Town, a local group has GIS mapped all the district’s households, surveyed the occupants, and assembled local people with medical expertise, ready to step in if the hospitals are overwhelmed. Another community in the city has built washstands in the train station and is working to turn a pottery studio into a factory making sanitiser.
In the US, HospitalHero connects healthcare workers who don’t have time to meet their own needs with people who can offer meals and accommodation. A group called WePals, created by an eight-year-old, sets up virtual play dates for children. A new website, schoolclosures.org, finds teaching, meals and emergency childcare for overstretched parents. A network called Money During Corona texts news of job opportunities to people looking for work […]
Via https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/31/virus-neighbours-covid-19
The Most Revolutionary Act 
California’s governor advised us today in his daily update that his Coronavirus team is also working with non-profit organizations who are tapping their overseas networks to get us the protective materials that we desperately need for our doctors, nurses, and other front-line workers.
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Excellent, Rosaliene. I am especially pleased to see all the ordinary people stepping up to help one another out.
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Nothing like a good scare to bring people back to basics.. I am noticing, even school aged children doing what they can to help out while ‘social distancing’… Pleasantly SURPRISED in Minnesota!
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I wish that this turning from basic selfishness to focus on helping others becomes the new pandemic… and please don’t let them develop a vaccine against that.
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Let’s hope so, Sha’Tara. From what I hear good old disaster capitalism is already kicking in. Big oil has just used the pandemic economic crisis to push through approval of the Keystone Pipeline: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/05/climate-crisis-villains-oil-industry-big-banks-pipelines
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Deb, any state that can elect Jesse Ventura as governor clearly has something right going for them.
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RIGHT!!… What was sooo amazing about Jesse is he entered the race LATE without any campaign funds to speak of… He was kind of odd but I liked him – and he did a pretty fair job.. Not bad for a wrestler.. Bumper stickers everywhere read “My Governor can beat-up your governor”… Wish he would have run again but he had this thing about ‘term limits’.. ALMOST as shocking as when a high school basket ball team, from a town of less than 600 people, beat (Big City elitist) Edina high school in state tournaments!!.. The team was soo SMALL they had NO replacements and still won!.. Just some Minnesota Trivia – other than that, we just have ALOT of WATER this time of year!… Stay HEALTHY!
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