Month: February 2021

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Politics

COVID-19 Vaccination Inequality

These are a few stories about how vaccination efforts to focus on the groups facing the most infection were undermined, and led to privileged people getting vaccinated.

Los Angeles TL;DR: California and Los Angeles need to focus on getting vaccinations to working class Latino communities, which are extremely under-vaccinated.

Los Angeles Times: Work-at-Homers Got Appointment Codes Intended for Impacted Populations

Los Angeles Times: Rich People Get Vaccinated Way More Than Working Class Essential Workers’ Communities (my paraphrase)

CNN: A vaccination site meant to serve a hard-hit Latino neighborhood in New York instead serviced more Whites from other areas

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/30/us/new-york-vaccine-disparities/index.html

My comment about this:

Yeah, it’s like the world forgot the digital divide. It was never really addressed. It seemed like a rhetorical device to give telcos money to address it.

Telecom’s now like the most neoliberal, market-centered utility, and it’s helping to kill people. It kills people with barriers to medical care. It kills people with ewaste. It kills people through labor abuse. It’s killing all these people who are “invisible”.

Meanwhile, Americans are worried about being tracked for ads, and privacy, and a raft of other individualistic issues that, while very important, are not as important as not-harming-people.

Kaiser Family Foundation

This has a chart where you can filter by race. In California, vaccination rates mostly match population, and cases, except for Latinos, who are seeing huge numbers of cases, but not much vaccination.

https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/

My Take: On High Rates of Infection in the Latino Communities

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Archive Posts History

Henry George’s Racist Screed Against Chinese People in California, New York Tribune, May 1, 1869

I was forwarded a paper that was published in a journal. I wondered what the journal was about, and found that they were looking to preserve the intellectual lineage of Henry George, a late 19th century philosopher and early Progressive reformer of capitalism. He wanted land to be held in common, and was known for the “Single Tax” of a 100% land tax. His ideas went out of fashion, but has always found a following, including a renewed one online, and at one point, I spent a while reading some of his old texts.

Continue reading “Henry George’s Racist Screed Against Chinese People in California, New York Tribune, May 1, 1869”
Categories
Politics

On High Rates of Infection in the Latino Communities

The management of this pandemic is racist as hell. I looked back over my emails and some posts, and I was going off on the issue of essential workers and crowded housing back in April of 2020.

This barely ever came up in the media as an important factor in the spread of COVID-19, until very recently. I just saw it on ABC 7. IT TOOK 10 FREAKING MONTHS.

They had to wait until so many Latinos died that it created a statistical anomaly, and then it had to be explained.

Un freaking real.

The only other places I saw this discussed were in some East LA and Boyle Heights groups, and even there, it wasn’t that widespread, and rarely got into any depth. I actually remember one conversation I had about it, because it wasn’t that common.

Also, now, there’s a whole other problem: it’s being treated like a race issue, when it’s really an issue of labor and housing. People are being forced to work, and they are in crowded homes.

So, we’re going to find out that this problem has probably affected all communities, but we just didn’t see it because of statistics: white people who are in crowded situations are a tiny minority of the white population; Asian working class people in crowded situations are more common, but there’s also these upper-middle-class people who have plenty of space, and throw off the stats – there’s no middle there; Black people are seeing the same situation as Latinos, but they have their own dynamics that might mitigate the effects a little bit.

This post was originally on Facebook, and it generated some discussion there, so I posted it here.