The Covid-19 Class Divide

The pandemic is putting America’s deepening class divide into stark relief. Four classes are emerging.

The Remotes: These are professional, managerial, and technical workers – an estimated 35 percent of the workforce – who are putting in long hours at their laptops, Zooming into conferences, scanning electronic documents, and collecting about the same pay as before the crisis.

Many are bored or anxious, but they’re well off compared to the three other classes.

The Essentials. They’re about 30 percent of workers, including nurses, homecare and childcare workers, group home workers, farm workers, food processors, truck drivers, warehouse and transit workers, drug store employees, sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, and the military.

Too many essentials lack adequate protective gear, paid sick leave, health insurance, and childcare, which is especially important now that schools are shuttered. They also deserve hazard pay.

Their vulnerability is generating a wave of worker activism at businesses such as Instacart, Amazon, Walmart, and Whole Foods. Mass-transit workers are organizing work stoppages.

Trump’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has the legal authority to require private employers provide essential workers with protective gear. Don’t hold your breath.

The Unpaid. They’re an even larger group that the unemployed – whose ranks could soon reach 25 percent, the same as in the Great Depression. Some of the unpaid are furloughed or have used up their paid leave. So far in this crisis, 43 percent of adults report they or someone in their household has lost jobs or pay, according to the Pew Research Center.

An estimated 9.2 million have lost their employer-provided health insurance.

Many of these jobs had been in personal services that can’t be done remotely, such as retail, restaurant, and hospitality work. But as consumers rein in spending, layoffs are spreading to news organizations, tech companies, consumer-goods manufacturers.  

The unpaid most need cash to feed their families and pay the rent. Fewer than half say they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month Pew.

So far, government has failed them, too. Checks mailed out by the Treasury last week are a pittance. Extra benefits could help, but unemployment offices are so overwhelmed with claims that they can’t get money out the door. Loans to small businesses have gone largely to big, well-connected businesses, with banks collecting fat fees.

On Wednesday, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said he opposed to any further federal aid to state and local governments, suggesting states declare bankruptcy instead. Which means even less money for unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and everything else the unpaid need.

The resulting desperation is fueling demands to “reopen the economy” long before it’s safe. If it comes down to a choice between risking one’s health and putting food on the table, many will take latter.

The Forgotten. This group includes everyone for whom social distancing is nearly impossible because they’re packed tightly into places most Americans don’t see – prisons, jails for undocumented immigrants, group homes for the severely disabled, camps for migrant farmworkers, Native American reservations, homeless shelters, and nursing homes.

While much of New York City is sheltering at home, for example, more than 17,000 men and women, many already in poor health, are sleeping in roughly 100 shelters for single adults.

All such places are becoming hot spots for the virus. These people need safe spaces with proper medical care, adequate social distancing, testing for the virus and isolation of those who have contracted it. Few are getting any of this.

Not surprisingly, the Essentials, the Unpaid, and the Forgotten are disproportionately poor, black, and Latino. And they are disproportionately becoming infected.

An Associated Press breakdown of available state and local data showed close to 33 percent of coronavirus deaths so far are African-American, despite representing only 14 percent of the total population in areas surveyed. The Navajo Nation already has lost more to coronavirus than have 13 states. Four of the 10 largest-known sources of infection in the United States have been correctional facilities.

These three groups aren’t getting what they need to survive this crisis because they don’t have lobbyists and political action committees to do their bidding in Washington or state capitals.  

The Remotes among us should be concerned, and not just because of the unfairness of the Covid-19 class divide. If the Essentials aren’t sufficiently protected, the Unpaid are forced back to work earlier than is safe, and the Forgotten remain forgotten, no one can be secure. Covid-19 will continue to spread sickness and death for months, if not years to come.

‪Yo are straight people okay?‬

straight attraction works through magnets apparently

an advertisement for cats: this SOFT, SMALL, sleeping MACHINE, will commit CRIMES in your home in the the name of zoomies, hatred of toilet paper, love of crashing sounds, and SPITING GOD

with a rough tongue, no regard for the laws of man, and a body made of the concept of liquids it WILL vibrate happily next to you for free

AND all of this can be yours for the small price of money

BUY CAT TODAY

This is really nice work……..                                                                                via Art LOVER

THAT’S how you make lace??

And THIS is why lace was a worn primarily by royalty and aristocracy for so many centuries..  It was expensive and time-consuming to produce.  Wearing it, and wearing LOTS of it was a blatant show of wealth and excessive consumption.  

Mechanically-produced lace wasn’t really a thing until well into the 20th century, but there remains a wide gap between the quality of  mass-produced and hand crafted

In general textile arts are highly underated considering the amount of skill and time needed to execute pretty much anything.

this is the one piece of cred that I will give chris paolini bc his “make lace with magic and ruin the economy” subplot was one of the first and only times I’ve seen an author understand the economic power and labor intensity of textiles

Great dad. A+ for trauma.

this is supposed to animate. let’s see if it does. Give it like 5 seconds

I cannot stop thinking about the irrevocable damage that liberals supporting Biden is going to do to the Me Too movement. One of the right’s favorite strategies for winning people over is the narrative of liberal hypocrisy, and everyone who supported Biden has just handed them the easiest possible win, and the worst thing is: we won’t even be able to say they’re wrong. Biden supporters have become so immersed in their echo chamber of acting like Bernie and his supporters are their ultimate enemy, to the point where they literally don’t know how to respond to criticism with anything other than “you bernie supporters better be willing to suck it up and vote for biden in november!”, and I don’t think they fully understand yet how that response is no longer going to be an applicable defense. Because when people, all across the political spectrum, start asking “you condemned Trump for sexual assault. you condemned Kavanaugh for sexual assault. why are you supporting Biden then? why are you asking me to support Biden? why is rape wrong and unforgivable when committed by Republicans, but we have to ignore it when it’s committed by a Democrat?”… when people start asking that, whining about “Bernie Bros” isn’t going to be a sufficient defense. There will be no moral high-ground in finger-wagging about non-voters.

Because here’s the plain fact: liberals have put themselves (and the rest of us, for that matter) in a position where they will be literally unable to advocate for Biden without becoming the exact kind of self-serving hypocrites the right always accused them of being. For many years to come, all conservatives will have to do is point to Biden as proof that liberals only care about rape when it’s committed by their political enemies, but they’re willing to ignore it in order to win and get the policies they prefer (which, for the record, Trump & Kavanaugh supporters also chose to ignore rape in order to get their preferred policies; that’s the company you now keep; you can no longer claim to be different from them).

So to everyone who chose to support Biden instead of Bernie, congratulations: you not only cost us the election, but you’ve dealt a massive blow to the Me Too movement from which we may not be able to recover. And before you get huffy and keep parroting the same talking point about “but we still need to vote for him! his policies are better than Trump’s!”, you need to fully understand and internalize this fact: you saying that is irrefutable proof that you only cared about rape when you disagreed with the person’s politics, and that you’ve always been willing to ignore or downplay rape when it’s someone you like more. If you supported Biden over Bernie, this is something that you will have to live with for the rest of your life. You will never be able to tell yourself that you’re any different than the rape apologists you condemn. You had a choice between someone who was a rapist and someone who wasn’t, and you chose the rapist. And now you’re forcing the rest of us to do the same.

The libs really have NOTHING huh

They don’t even have arguments anymore, they know there’s no argument that can excuse this, they know they’re hypocrites and I can just SEE this motherfucker crouched in a corner, hiding their face and shaking their head and whisper-sobbing “Russian psyop…” over and over again

hijabi knight 🌙

I laughed at this for a solid 5 minutes

big brain move

Parfum

dont let this flop tumblr, don’t do it

Read the above and not that her brother, who helped her testify with the abused children, is saying that there is no way she killed herself like this.

She was found overdosed and naked at a party that she was never supposed to go to at the first place. They stole this woman’s dignity. murdered her, and orphaned her children.

Here is a list of people she exposed:

Spanish source for list 

English source for list 

(note: information on her is hard to find, but she apparently made several other busts, I just can’t find the names she released because fucking google is evil)

Significant links:

Here is an English source for the pedophile ring that she exposed

Abuse tracker- an archive holding the church accountable 

Here are the 4chan users with information on the case. (Thread has interesting links and information)

Don’t forget what this woman did, and what they did to her. 

She knew she was putting herself at risk. She knew she was going to die. She didn’t care, she wanted this story out. She wanted the victims to see justice. Remember this. 

Wait a minute…

This is what American politics is like