[WSMDiscuss] [Debate-List] US : Armed protesters demand end to Michigan coronavirus lockdown

[Melanie Bush]

Funded by these folks, and of course fueled by racism.
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22477/koch-think-tank-heritage-foundation-alec-americans-for-progress-trump-covid?link_id=3&can_id=fc516b83a71b507a95fe8a5dc501306c&source=email-corporations-are-not-letting-this-crisis-go-to-waste-black-womens-livelihoods-will-be-yet-another-coronavirus-casualty&email_referrer=email_786141&email_subject=would-we-have-already-had-a-covid-19-vaccine-under-socialism-koch-funded-think-tanks-are-lobbying-to-send-workers-to-their-deaths

On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 10:44 AM Fayyaz Baqir <fbaqir at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> Death wish is common among the people on lunatic fringes.
> ------------------------------
> *From:* WSM-Discuss <wsm-discuss-bounces at lists.openspaceforum.net> on
> behalf of Toussaint Losier via WSM-Discuss <
> wsm-discuss at lists.openspaceforum.net>
> *Sent:* Thursday, April 30, 2020 10:49 PM
> *To:* Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net>
> *Cc:* Toussaint Losier <toussaint.losier at gmail.com>; Post WSMDiscuss <
> wsm-discuss at lists.openspaceforum.net>; Post Crisis of Civilisation and
> Alternative Paradigms <
> crisis-de-civilizacion-y-paradigmas-alternativos at googlegroups.com>; Post
> Social Movements Riseup <social-movements at lists.riseup.net>; Post Debate <
> Debate-list at fahamu.org>; Post RED <
> radical_ecological_democracy at googlegroups.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [WSMDiscuss] [Debate-List] US : Armed protesters demand
> end to Michigan coronavirus lockdown
>
> *Attention : courriel externe | external email*
> Here is some useful analysis of what is transpiring here
>
>
> https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america
> The Morbid Ideology Behind the Drive to Reopen America The right has
> mobilized a small army of true believers willing to die in the defense of a
> less just world.
> By JOE LOWNDES <https://newrepublic.com/authors/joe-lowndes>
> April 30, 2020 Add to Pocket
> <https://getpocket.com/edit?url=https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america>
>
> Photos of the small “reopen America” protests, which have made the rounds
> on social media over the past week, have revealed a spectacle as cartoonish
> as it is macabre: a rogue’s gallery of right-wing groups coming together to
> share in the spirit of defiance and, presumably, tiny droplets of mucus and
> saliva. The protests (and their backing by deep-pocketed funders) invited
> many comparisons to the Tea Party movement of a decade ago. Unlike that
> movement, these small protests are likely to die out soon. Nevertheless,
> they have captured something vitally important about how the right is
> responding to this fraught moment in our recent history.
> MOST POPULAR
>
>    1. Give Me Meat and Give Them Death
>    <https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america#>
>    2. Don’t Let Larry Summers Block Climate Progress Again
>    <https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america#>
>    3. The Supreme Court Eyes an Escape Hatch From Trump’s Corruption
>    <https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america#>
>    4. Joe Biden’s Tired Feminist Shield
>    <https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america#>
>    5. A Woman’s Worth in a Pandemic
>    <https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america#>
>
> As jobless claims have soared past an astonishing 26 million with no end
> in sight, the Covid-19 pandemic may well push the United States into a
> profound and long-lasting economic crisis. The countless indices of human
> misery will put enormous pressure on political institutions that are
> ill-equipped to respond adequately. The onset of this immiseration has
> begun to propel bold ideas and movements from the left to demand a
> reorganization of the economy and a fundamental shift in political power.
> But the right is swiftly establishing its own morbid template for how to
> interpret and respond to both the pandemic and its economic effects.
>
> Republican politicians and right-wing pundits endlessly echo a central
> claim: “The cure is worse than the disease.” In other words, you can either
> risk dying from the virus or face certain economic ruin, as if there are no
> other choices. Their hope is that people already conditioned by an ideology
> centered on the marketplace, the individual, and the nation will be more
> likely to believe that their lives and livelihoods are under greater threat
> from state-ordered economic shutdowns and coercive social measures than
> they are from the disease. For them, the idea that Covid-19 could
> ultimately be overcome–even if at great human cost–by working and shopping
> is more appealing, and even more imaginable, than a new politics of
> mutuality that might redistribute power and resources in an egalitarian
> way.
>
> The Covid-19 pandemic amplifies political feelings around health care,
> race, and class that have been growing on the right over the last decade.
> Recall the Tea Party’s origins during the Great Recession. The movement
> emerged and quickly grew in response to first the election of a black
> president and then that president’s proposed health care plan, as
> protesters mobbed town halls across the summer of 2009, loudly declaiming
> against any form of socialized medical coverage. Those two animating
> features of the movement—anti-black racism and opposition to the Affordable
> Care Act—defined a movement that in essence chose investments in whiteness
> over the assurance of at least some semblance of health care.
>
> This was followed in the 2016 election by a Republican candidate who
> surged among voters who had high levels of racial resentment, strong
> feelings of political powerlessness, and growing economic anxiety
> (regardless of income level). Donald Trump, who titled his campaign memoir Crippled
> America, reveled in such terms as “disgust,” “weakness,” “losing,” and
> “pathetic” to describe the country. He poked at the vulnerability of whites
> like a finger in a wound all while demonizing Latinos, immigrants, Muslims,
> black protesters, and foreign rivals. All of this set the stage for how the
> right would come to respond to the current pandemic.
>
> The rhetorical oppositions of work to welfare, self-reliance to
> dependence, individual to state, citizen to foreigner—oppositions animated
> by race, gender, and class—run deep in American political culture. All are
> reflected in the politics of the pandemic right now, making for a grim
> political vision of American freedom.
> TNR Newsletters. Must reads. 5 days a week.
> Sign Up Now <https://mailchi.mp/61665a30a33b/tnrdaily>
>
> In a basic way, this vision of freedom is conveyed by the defiance of
> guidelines to stop the spread of the virus. It isn’t just the protesters.
> The dozen or so Republicans in the House of Representatives refusing to
> wear masks
> <https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/coronavirus-congress-feuding-205773> when
> called to vote on the latest coronavirus relief bill performed precisely
> that kind of political theater for their constituents. It is meant as a
> tough-guy taunt, to show their own robustness and the weakness of their
> opponents. But it also reveals something more pathological. The risky
> behavior demonstrates vitality precisely because it tempts fate, suggestive
> of Freud’s death drive, which he described as a force “whose function is to
> assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death.”
>
> There is now a well-documented relationship between whiteness, status, and
> morbidity. As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have demonstrated
> in their research
> <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism>over
> the last few years, there have been long-term increases in “deaths of
> despair”—overdoses, suicides, alcohol-related fatalities—among middle-aged
> whites without college degrees. There is much yet to be understood about
> reasons for this phenomenon, but a sense of the declining status of
> whiteness appears tightly connected to collective self-harm. It is
> difficult not to think about this while watching mostly middle-aged white
> protesters demand the right to sacrifice their lives instead of joining
> others to demand greater protections for frontline workers, increased
> payments to keep workers at home, rent and mortgage moratoria, debt
> cancellation, federal money for states and municipalities, and more.
>
> Demands to reopen states provide great cover for the Trump administration,
> the Republican Party in Congress, red state governors, and the Federal
> Reserve, who are working to keep current wealth stratifications in place
> and protect the rich from economic harm—and doing so without much pushback
> from Democrats. As conditions become more dire, the right will do all it
> can to enlist the loyalty of middle- and working-class victims of the
> crisis. Here, the logics of race and nation will become increasingly
> important.
>
> Many of the demonstrators at the recent protests, repeating Fox News
> talking points, focused their ire on urban America, claiming that
> communities in less densely populated states and regions were being made to
> suffer for the problems of big cities. This kind of rhetoric maps easily
> onto the growing political divides between rural and urban America—and
> beneath it, the racial demonization of black and brown denizens of cities.
> It is this sentiment that gives cover to Republican resistance to federal
> spending when couched in language like Mitch McConnell’s opposition to
> “blue state bailouts.”
>
> Within the Trump administration, the nationalist tide continues to rise.
> Two weeks ago, Attorney General William Barr told Laura Ingraham that he
> had “felt for a long time—as much as people talk about global warming—that
> the real threat to human beings is microbes and being able to control
> disease, and that starts with controlling your border,” he said. “So, I
> think people will be attuned to more protective measures.” Not long after,
> the Trump administration moved from the threat of foreign microbes to the
> threat of foreign workers by issuing an executive order suspending the
> issuance of new green cards. Meanwhile, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos set
> down policy guidelines to exempt undocumented students from Covid-19 relief
> aid.
>
> Defenders of the current political order will continue to do whatever is
> necessary to protect wealth and privilege. They understand that to address
> the enormity of the economic crisis would upend the neoliberal consensus of
> this second Gilded Age, which has greatly enriched a few while
> systematically dismantling public goods, disempowering workers, and
> diminishing democratic rule. Their hope is that enough Americans go along
> with this resistance, even if it kills them.
>
> Joe Lowndes is a professor of political science at the University of
> Oregon. His most recent book, with Daniel Martinez HoSang, is Producers,
> Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity
> <https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/producers-parasites-patriots> (2019).
> He blogs at JoeLowndes.org <https://www.joelowndes.org/>.
> @joelow <https://twitter.com/joelowndes>
>
> On Thursday, April 30, 2020, Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net> wrote:
>
> Thursday, April 30, 2020
>
> *Viruses in movement…, The US in movement…*
>
> [This is history in the making….  Is there anywhere else in the world
> where this happening ?  Let us not turn our eyes and minds away from what
> is happening in the US, mind numbing though it is; let us also recognise
> that the corona virus is not the only virus around – but that its raw power
> has indeed in turn unleashed others… :
>
> *US : Armed protesters demand end to Michigan coronavirus lockdown*
>
> Dozens of protesters, some with rifles slung around their chests, enter
> the Capitol and demand to be heard
>
> al-Jazeera
>
>
> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/armed-protesters-michigan-demand-coronavirus-lockdown-200430193810902.html
>
> 2-3 hours ago
> [image: A protester at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan on Thursday
> [Paul Sancya/AP Photo]]
>
> A protester at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan on Thursday [Paul
> Sancya/AP Photo]
>
> Hundreds of angry protesters, some carrying firearms, gathered at
> Michigan’s State Capitol in Lansing on Thursday to protest against Governor
> Gretchen Whitmer’s request to extend the state of emergency to combat the
> coronavirus pandemic.
>
> The protests came as state legislators debated a measure refusing the
> governor's request and voted to authorise a lawsuit challenging her
> authority and actions to combat the pandemic.
> More:
>
>    - US doctors go online to reveal 'bold, loud' coronavirus truths
>    <https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/doctors-online-reveal-bold-loud-coronavirus-truths-200401130420720.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_page&utm_campaign=read_more_links>
>    - What and who is behind the US anti-lockdown protests?
>    <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/anti-lockdown-protests-200420180415064.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_page&utm_campaign=read_more_links>
>    - US medical workers stand up to anti-lockdown protesters
>    <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/medical-workers-stand-anti-lockdown-protesters-200420145258308.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_page&utm_campaign=read_more_links>
>
> At one point during the legislative deliberations, dozens of protesters -
> many without face coverings and some with rifles slung around their chests
> - entered the Capitol and demanded to be let into the House chamber, which
> was closed to the public to allow room for representatives and reporters to
> spread apart. The crowd shouted, "Let us in" while mask-wearing sergeants
> and state police blocked them.
>
> Demonstrators were allowed in the state Senate, which has fewer members
> and remained in session to also authorise legal action.
>
> Firearms have been legally allowed in the Michigan state Capitol building
> for some time.
>
> Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us. Some of my colleagues
> who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our
> Sergeants-at-Arms more than today. #mileg
> <https://twitter.com/hashtag/mileg?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
> pic.twitter.com/voOZpPYWOs <https://t.co/voOZpPYWOs>
> — Senator Dayna Polehanki (@SenPolehanki) April 30, 2020
> <https://twitter.com/SenPolehanki/status/1255899318210314241?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
>
>
> The protest appeared to be the largest in the state since April 15, when
> supporters and allies of President Donald Trump organised thousands of
> people for "Operation Gridlock", jamming the streets of Lansing with their
> cars to call out what they said was the overreach of Whitmer’s strict
> stay-at-home order.
>
> It was one of the country’s first major anti-lockdown rallies and helped
> sparked a wave of similar events nationwide.
>
> The slow reopening of state economies around the country has taken on
> political overtones, as Republican politicians and individuals affiliated
> with Trump’s re-election promoted protests in electoral battleground states
> such as Michigan.
>
> "Governor Whitmer, and our state legislature, it’s over with. Open this
> state," Mike Detmer, a Republican candidate for US Congress told the crowd.
> "Let’s get businesses back open again. Let’s make sure there are jobs to go
> back to."
>
> At the MI Capitol pic.twitter.com/IuYoBhstIg <https://t.co/IuYoBhstIg>
> — Anna Liz Nichols (@annaliznichols) April 30, 2020
> <https://twitter.com/annaliznichols/status/1255899730888011777?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
>
> Other speakers at the "American Patriot Rally," which had different
> organisers to the mid-April protest, questioned the deadliness of COVID-19,
> the disease caused by the coronavirus. They also said Whitmer’s
> stay-at-home order violated constitutional rights, and urged people to open
> their businesses on May 1 in disregard of her order.
>
> Protesters, many from more rural parts of Michigan, have argued it has
> crippled the economy statewide even though the majority of deaths from the
> virus are centred on the southeastern Detroit metro area.
>
> Protest moves inside Michigan Capitol. Crowd attempts to get onto Hoise
> floor. Lots of Michigan State Police and House sergeants at arms blocking
> door. pic.twitter.com/4FNQpimP4W <https://t.co/4FNQpimP4W>
> — Rod Meloni (@RodMeloni) April 30, 2020
> <https://twitter.com/RodMeloni/status/1255901755474403328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
>
> Whitmer's stay-at-home order, the strictest in the US, is in effect
> through May 15. House Republicans wanted changes, such as allowing elective
> medical and dental procedures again and certainty on the date she plans to
> reopen the economy on a regional basis. Meanwhile, the governor has allowed
> some businesses, such as lawn-care companies and greenhouses, to resume
> operating.
>
> Many states, including Georgia, Oklahoma, Alaska, South Carolina, and
> Ohio, have already moved to restart parts of their economies following
> weeks of mandatory lockdowns that have thrown nearly one in six American
> workers out of their jobs.
>
> SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies
>
> ____________________________
>
> Jai Sen
>
> Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of
> International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of
> Ottawa
>
> jai.sen at cacim.net
>
> ________________________________________
> ** Inspired by the World Social Forum, WSMDiscuss – the successor to a
> list named ‘WSFDiscuss’ started in 2005 - is an open, unmoderated, and
> self-organising forum for the exchange of information and views on the
> experience, practice, and theory of social and political movement at any
> level (local, national, regional, and global), including the World Social
> Forum.  Join in ! **
> _______________________________________________
> World Social Movement Discuss mailing list
> POST to LIST : Send email to wsm-discuss at lists.openspaceforum.net
> SUBSCRIBE : Send empty email to
> wsm-discuss-subscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net
> UNSUBSCRIBE : Send empty email to
> wsm-discuss-unsubscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net
> LIST ARCHIVES : https://lists.openspaceforum.net/pipermail/wsm-discuss/
> LIST INFORMATION :
> https://lists.openspaceforum.net/mailman/listinfo/wsm-discuss
> POSTING GUIDELINES :
> http://openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=Mailing+List+Posting+Guidelines
> Old / previous WSFDiscuss List Archives :
> http://openspaceforum.net/pipermail/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum.net/
>


-- 

.............................................
Rod Bush: Lessons from a Radical Black Scholar on Liberation, Love, and
Justice
Available for purchase and open access download for teaching purposes
<http://bit.ly/RodBushLessons>

Please consider asking your libraries and bookstores to order the book so
it is publicly available!
https://rodbush.org/

***********************************************************************
Tensions in the American Dream: Rhetoric, Reverie or Reality
<http://tupress.temple.edu/book/0399>
Author proceeds go to Cooperation Jackson <https://cooperationjackson.org/>

..........................................


*Eternal and infinite love for you, yours & the ongoing struggle *

*for dignity, justice, wisdom and peace.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.openspaceforum.net/pipermail/wsm-discuss/attachments/20200502/3776be7d/attachment.htm>