[WSMDiscuss] covid19 and Big Tech Opportunism

[anita]

We did a piece on big ecomm during covid 19 and the need for alternative
models that work for local economies and small actors.


*https://kafila.online/2020/04/13/e-commerce-platforms-corona-warriors-or-disaster-capitalists/*


At IT for Change we have also been thinking through the data connection
to local economies and the solution to data-extractivist colonialism is
not really more extractivism, south style.

However, data nihilism is also not the answer, and life post-covid is
going to need data for a lot of local efforts... economic and social.


Privileging mindful collection (conforming to privacy of sensitive
personal data as well as eschewing relentless ad tech) - effectively,
striving for a new data minimalism and processing data locally -
including through cloud and AI that is based on federated models that
optimize local supply chains and local data accountabilities/ political
oversight are the ways forward. Cloud services and AI models for
MSME-centric and social and solidarity economy based options should be
promoted through publicly supported data infrastructures


anita


On 13/04/20 8:29 am, Brian K Murphy wrote:
> https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/there-is-no-outside/
> <https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/there-is-no-outside/?utm_source=MASTER+LIST+01/06/2020&utm_campaign=e0fc26c044-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b822eb7b82-e0fc26c044-399260131&mc_cid=e0fc26c044&mc_eid=b14beef52d>
> *There Is No Outside*
> */Health workers can respond to this crisis by taking up working-class
> struggles as our own/*
>
> by Karim Sariahmed, April 8, 2020
> <https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/49723286678/target=blank>  /| n+1/
>
> I WORK AT A NEW YORK SAFETY-NET HEALTH SYSTEM that serves poor folks
> who are mostly Black and brown. The primary-care clinic where I am a
> resident closed two weeks ago: like most major hospital systems
> throughout the US, the hospital has put a stop to all non-acute care,
> aside from telemedicine. Most of the primary-care doctors and other
> subspecialists who’d normally see patients for routine checkups have
> been drafted onto the frontlines, into the emergency rooms and
> hospital corridors of what professionals call “the inpatient setting.”
>
> Until recently I was at home as a back-up, waiting to fill in when
> other residents got too sick to work. While I waited, numerous friends
> checked in on me—some of them even sent me masks in the mail. A number
> of those masks, like the ones solicited by my brother and gathered
> from his friends, are real N95 respirators. They’ll do some good for
> me and my fellow emergency room workers as our system continues to
> fail us and our patients. My sister made cloth masks, and those I hope
> never to need.
>
> There is little certainty about how things will look inside the
> emergency room by mid-April, when mortality is projected to peak—much
> less in a month’s time. My hospital recently started giving out new
> N95s every day, but by no means is that the norm: nurses at Harlem
> Hospital recently protested a policy requiring them to use a single
> mask for five twelve-hour shifts. Without sweeping federal, state, and
> local protections, any level of sustained protection is tenuous and
> subject to the whims of administrators and a corrupt and broken supply
> chain. Never mind that there is simply much we don’t know, like how
> the seasonal variation seen in other coronaviruses will play out in
> this case. This moment of crisis is also a moment of extreme uncertainty.
>
> The stereotype about those of us in internal medicine is that we are
> overly scrupulous. It’s not unfounded. The time to think about a
> single patient and reflect on their condition always feels like a
> luxury for me, but it’s an important luxury all the same. Which is to
> say that the emergency room is not a place where I’m very comfortable.
> I’d been assigned to be in the emergency department (the ED) at this
> time since the beginning of the year and showed up last Monday at 7 AM
> after taking twenty-four hours to recover from weekend night coverage
> at a different hospital in the same system. 
>
> The ER is chaotic on a normal day. The last time I entered, a few
> months ago, it was near capacity, with all of the “chair beds” full of
> the less-urgently sick people, many of them chatting on the phone
> while waiting to be seen. Those kinds of patients are now being seen
> in a tent outside. The folks in the actual ER don’t all need
> supplemental oxygen, but all of them look miserable. I noted
> “lethargy” in the documentation for every single patient I saw during
> my first night shift last week.
>
> The emergency room is a smog of coronavirus—and how could it not be? A
> person on a bed deprived of even the modesty of a curtain can’t be
> expected to keep a mask on for the eight or twelve hours they may be
> waiting there, before anyone comes to examine them. Those who end up
> waiting longer, as so many do, may get upgraded to a spot near the
> wall, which helps create the illusion of being in a room. One wall,
> after all, is one more than zero. This is how poor folks experience
> our health care system.
>
> On my second day in the ED, I saw a nursing assistant gently scold an
> older patient for having his mask under his chin. She fixed it for
> him, but less than an hour later I heard his terrible cough disturbing
> his half-sleep. His sheets were askew, and his mask was off. 
>
> Intubation—the process of putting a tube in a person’s airway for
> attachment to a breathing machine—generates small particles that may
> stay airborne for a few hours before settling onto surfaces. People
> get intubated in the ED and in other hospital wards multiple times per
> day, hence the increased demand for—and shortage of—N95 masks. The
> mask protects from airborne infection if it’s been fitted perfectly,
> and if the mask is not contaminated. If you are waiting in line to
> perform chest compressions on someone being intubated, like I was
> recently, it’s hard to imagine being clean afterwards. You could take
> a shower and find yourself an entirely new outfit, or wear some kind
> of hazmat suit. It is self-evident that none of these is anything
> close to an option for most health workers right now.
>
> I’m writing this from home, because a few days into my work at the ED
> I developed upper respiratory symptoms. This wasn’t a surprise.
> Despite modest improvements in PPE availability over the past couple
> weeks, it’s likely that I’ve contracted the virus, as have so many
> other health workers. Though I spent my days in the ED swabbing others
> for the virus and will soon resume this work, I couldn’t get tested
> there myself. For that I had to travel forty minutes on the subway to
> another site, putting myself and other commuters at risk. But even
> that seems better than the ever-worsening status quo: a shortage of
> viral media containers is putting a stop to worker testing. 
>
> In any case, broad testing with epidemiology to guide quarantine is no
> longer an available public-health intervention at this point, though
> we still need broad testing and the roll-out of a serology test (blood
> tests to look for immunity, rather than the nasal test to look for the
> virus) to guide us in the coming months. The test itself has
> significantly reduced clinical usefulness right now. It’s obvious to
> anyone in any hospital in New York that all of us are just walking
> through the smog. There is no outside.
>
> It would be foolish to claim that I don’t feel dread about what is
> happening—about what I’ve seen and what I’ll be a part of again in a
> few days’ time. We all feel that dread. Like everyone else, I have
> friends and family I’m concerned about. My partner is a health worker
> like myself. He’s also an immigrant without family nearby. A few weeks
> ago we introduced each other to our siblings over email, just in case.
>
> Still, despite the ever-growing number of nurses, residents, and other
> young health workers succumbing to this virus, I am not inclined to
> lean into dread. I’m trying to focus on the meaning of this terrible
> moment, and the chain of dysfunctions that has already caused so many
> so much harm. The shortages, the inefficiencies, the discomforts—all
> of these aren’t mere inconveniences to be dealt with, or temporary
> problems to be overcome. Our health system is broken. It has been
> broken for a long time and has been deteriorating steadily, somehow
> under the radar, even as it put increasing strain and burdens on the
> many lives it didn’t simply ruin outright.
>
> You don’t have to spend any time inside an emergency room to
> understand the single most consequential fact about our health system:
> it is built on a foundation of denying care. This is how the poor have
> experienced our health care system, and now that experience is—rightly
> but belatedly—attracting international attention. The pandemic is a
> moment for health workers to reflect on our own work and our own
> position in that same system. We must think about our sick and dying
> patients and appreciate how the nature of our work ties our struggles
> to those of the poor and the dispossessed.
>
> We are losing colleagues just as we continue to lose the uninsured and
> the homeless. Health workers were already stretched thin, yet we
> shoulder most of the burden of the relief effort. Before the pandemic
> began, the New York nurses’ union and a coalition of community
> organizations were fighting a hospital closure in the Bronx, and some
> of the other residents and I had just started trying to think about
> ways to support their campaign. But the onset of the crisis has
> shifted everyone’s priorities. Where we saw the acceleration of
> hospital closures as a central front of the war on poor people, under
> the new dispensation no threat is greater than the pandemic itself. 
>
> Joel Freedman, the owner of the empty building that used to be
> Philadelphia’s Hahnemann University Hospital, refused to reopen it in
> response to this crisis. Freedman is evil, but the pandemic shows us
> that even this extreme form of depravity is just a step or two removed
> from how things work. It is just one way that the ruling class
> expropriates the rest of society.
>
> My understanding of my place in this oppressive system has been shaped
> by my work with /Put People First! PA/, a human-rights organization
> made up of working-class people building power to win universal health
> care.
>
> I began working with PPF-PA before starting medical school in
> Pennsylvania, and since I moved to New York my comrades and I have
> tried to bring the spirit and the strategy of the Poor People’s
> Campaign to health workers. I’m just one of many health workers who
> have been a part of the organization for many years, and the clarity
> of this moment has brought us all closer together. 
>
> Working-class leaders throughout Pennsylvania connected by PPF-PA and
> other PPC organizations in the state share bonds of deep trust and
> commitment across lines of division. We regularly do collective work
> on teams including neighbors and people throughout the state,
> something often neglected by advocacy organizations with more paid
> staff, and this why we thrive even when limited to digital tactics.
> Soon after the crisis began to take shape, the members of PPF-PA wrote
> a list of demands.1
> <https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/there-is-no-outside/?utm_source=MASTER+LIST+01%2F06%2F2020&utm_campaign=e0fc26c044-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b822eb7b82-e0fc26c044-399260131&mc_cid=e0fc26c044&mc_eid=b14beef52d#fn1-12438> We
> want the reopening of closed hospitals, delivery of food to people in
> quarantine, handwashing stations for homeless residents, and much
> more. All this organizing work—over the past few years and especially
> over the past few weeks—has prepared my comrades and me for this
> situation. We understand this moment because it is the awful but
> logical consequence of an unsustainable and inequitable system.
>
> In moments of crisis, we find each other and catch others who are
> falling. The pandemic has strengthened those of us who already
> believed the status quo was untenable and that our basic needs must be
> enshrined as human rights. Advocacy organizations who were fighting
> for crumbs may have a harder time responding to this moment, but
> organizations of those who could barely survive under “normal”
> circumstances are growing and flourishing. 
>
> Groups like the /National Union of the Homeless/are a model and an
> inspiration in these times. If the current moratoriums on eviction in
> New York City and elsewhere are not prolonged and the number of people
> who are homeless increases further, as Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
> predicts, homeless mothers will be teaching more and more people about
> the reclamation of abandoned homes and other righteous survival
> tactics.2
> <https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/there-is-no-outside/?utm_source=MASTER+LIST+01%2F06%2F2020&utm_campaign=e0fc26c044-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b822eb7b82-e0fc26c044-399260131&mc_cid=e0fc26c044&mc_eid=b14beef52d#fn2-12438>
>
> In my very particular context, it hasn’t always been easy to channel
> the spirit of the Poor People’s Campaign to organizing health
> workers—partly because good organizing takes more time and experience
> than I have had, and partly—crucially—because medicine usually
> ignores, reassures, and manages the language of the oppressed into
> silence. Gliding past people’s individual needs and their desperation
> is the mandate of a profit-driven health system. The direness of this
> situation will bring patients and health workers together almost by
> default, but the other thing that can unite working-class people is
> clarity about our shared conditions.
>
> Health workers aren’t just working even longer hours and putting
> ourselves in danger. We are also at the heart of enormous grassroots
> campaigns to gather the PPE that our system failed to provide. All
> this, and hundreds of thousands of people may still die as result of
> our poor preparation. 
>
> The fight for fair working conditions, safe staffing, and dignity for
> health workers has never been more clearly tied to the fight for all
> of our basic needs and, by extension, the fight for a more just and
> habitable planet. Now is a time for health workers to recommit to the
> real heroes—the people and the organizations leading these
> movements—not to cling even more tightly to a narrow conception of
> what we think is winnable.
>
> If cloth masks like the kind my sister made me get any use, I hope
> it’s as an emblem for a mass movement in which the nurses, doctors,
> and environmental workers finally align on the side of the poor. There
> have been medical students and others saying things like “this is what
> I went into medicine for,” clamoring and war-ready like the invincible
> students in /A Separate Peace/. If war imagery is to be unavoidable in
> this moment, let’s instead glorify the working class, cloth-masked and
> garbage-bagged health workers, too. Let’s exalt all of the poor and
> dispossessed warriors organizing for freedom on the frontlines of this
> man-made disaster.
>
> 1.
>
>     https://www.putpeoplefirstpa.org/coronavirus/ ↩
>     <https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/there-is-no-outside/?utm_source=MASTER+LIST+01%2F06%2F2020&utm_campaign=e0fc26c044-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b822eb7b82-e0fc26c044-399260131&mc_cid=e0fc26c044&mc_eid=b14beef52d#rf1-12438>
>
> 2.
>
>     The National Union of the Homeless and PPF-PA unite with many
>     other organizations under the banner of the the Poor People’s
>     Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. It is the rebirth of
>     the original Poor People’s Campaign called for by Martin Luther
>     King, Jr. when he began to speak out against the war in Vietnam
>     and economic injustice, transitioning from a framework of civil
>     rights to human rights. This is the vision that can unite many
>     different parts of the working class. It brings health workers
>     together with homeless folks as movement siblings, rather than as
>     victim and savior. ↩
>     <https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/there-is-no-outside/?utm_source=MASTER+LIST+01%2F06%2F2020&utm_campaign=e0fc26c044-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b822eb7b82-e0fc26c044-399260131&mc_cid=e0fc26c044&mc_eid=b14beef52d#rf2-12438>
>
>     **************
>
>     /*SEE ALSO:*/
>
>     *Amid coronavirus, private equity-backed company slashes benefits
>     for emergency room doctors*
>     Lev Facher <https://www.statnews.com/staff/lev-facher/>  2020/04/01/
>     https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/01/slashes-benefits-for-doctors-coronavirus
>     ****************
>>
>>
>>       Cash-starved hospitals and doctor groups cut staff amid pandemic
>>
>>     Gregory S. Schneider  - /The Washington Post /2020/04/09
>     https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/starved-for-cash-hospitals-and-doctor-groups-cut-staff-amid-pandemic/2020/04/09/d3593f54-79a7-11ea-a130-df573469f094_story.html
>     ******
>     *Many Immigrant Doctors Want to Fight the Coronavirus, but U.S.
>     Visa Rules Make That Illegal*
>     Sharon Lerner </staff/sharonlerner/>, 
>     April 6 2020 
>     https://theintercept.com/2020/04/06/coronavirus-immigrant-physicians-doctors-visa-united-states/
>     <https://theintercept.com/2020/04/06/coronavirus-immigrant-physicians-doctors-visa-united-states/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The
>     Intercept Newsletter>
>     ************
>>
>>
>>       A Private Equity Baron Sitting on an Empty Philadelphia
>>       Hospital Is in Line for Huge Tax Gift in the Covid-19 Stimulus
>>
>     Akela Lacy <https://theintercept.com/staff/akelalacy/>, /The
>     Intercept/, April 1, 2014
>     https://theintercept.com/2020/04/01/philadelphia-hahnemann-hospital-joel-freedman/
>     ************
>     ********************
>     *
>     *
>     *Note: A curated weekly summary of links appearing on this
>     distribution list can be found at:  https://murphyslog.ca*
>
>
>>
>
> ________________________________________
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-- 
- no title specified

Anita Gurumurthy

 

Executive Director IT for Change
In special consultative status with the United Nations ECOSOC
www.ITforChange.net <http://www.itforchange.net/> Phone:
00-91-80-26536890 | T: 080 2653 6890


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