VIRUS BECOMES A MAJOR FORCE FOR INEQUALITY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2020, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “VIRUS BECOMES A MAJOR FORCE FOR INEQUALITY”

          Across America, protests and rallies crying “Black Lives Matter” have featured thousands of demonstrators wearing no masks, taking no care to social distance and not bothering to sanitize their hands very often.

          They’re ostensibly pushing for social justice and racial and economic equality, calling for fair treatment and less violence from police and other authorities and in effect demanding more equity in hiring and education.

          But their frequent disregard for the contagion of the ongoing coronavirus plague often accomplishes the opposite: They and others who disregard simple but sometimes inconvenient precautions are very ironically and tragically helping push the greatest force for inequality since Jim Crow.

          That’s the virus, which afflicts low-income minority residents of California in far higher numbers than whites, who are often more affluent.

          Latinos, for the strongest example, make up about 39 percent of California’s population, but account for 56 percent of all COVID-19 diagnoses and 45.7 percent of deaths from the virus. African Americans are 6.5 percent of the populace and about the same percentage of COVID-19 cases, but 8.5 percent of deaths from the virus. Geographic data indicates the virus also strikes disproportionately in lower-income locales, especially those heavily populated by farmworkers.

          So the coronavirus plainly hits minorities with low incomes harder than whites, especially those in the most affluent areas. Which means that the more protesters, partiers, beachgoers and others disregard tactics known to stem viral contagion, the more they promote racial inequality.

          But the inequities encouraged by the pandemic go much deeper than  caseload and death statistics, revealing as those can be.

          It turns out COVID-19’s most lasting effect may be on education, where impacts may affect student performance and achievement for more than a decade. It’s a new form of segregation, based more on economic class than on race – but class lines often coincide with racial ones.

          The reasons for this stem from the vitally necessary decision to keep most public schools closed this fall, the bulk of what used to be classroom teaching now done electronically via services like Zoom and Google Classroom.

          On the surface, this seems to treat rich and poor alike, every public school student seemingly subject to the same pluses and minuses from remote learning. Except that the wealthy can do something about it when their children’s wifi fails, while the poor often cannot. The wealthy are often able to stay home with their children during the pandemic, while a far higher proportion of the poor work in menial jobs now considered essential, from farmworkers to street cleaners.

          So the likelihood of children having adult supervision while they learn via screens is far less among low income minorities than among whites. Whether or not distance learning can be effective, there is no doubt that without adult supervision, children are more likely to wander away from screens or not to sign on at all. Even while they’re online, their attention wanders more if they are not supervised.

          The result inevitably will be that the rich get richer educations while the poor get poorer. Depending on how long this goes on, its effects could be lifelong.

          Other educational advantages are also manifesting from affluence during the pandemic. Besides the large percentage of the wealthy who opt out of public school problems with online schooling by sending their kids to private schools, large numbers of public school parents have already begun setting up “pods” of up to 10 children, with several families combining to hire tutors at $40 per hour or more.

          Newspapers around the state report tutors and former schoolteachers who post notices of their availability are getting multiple calls from groups of parents seeking stable education for their children. Parents also are using social media to find like-minded others, the result being that those who can afford to kick in for better education are buying extra opportunities for their kids.

          That situation led former San Francisco Mayor and ex-state Assembly Speaker Willie Brown to observe the other day that the virus is leading to new forms of segregated education.

          He’s right, and so long as the virus endures, there’s little low-income parents can do about it.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

MASSIVE EARLY FIRES SHOW MERIT IN STATE’S TRUMP RESPONSE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “MASSIVE EARLY FIRES SHOW MERIT IN STATE’S TRUMP RESPONSE”

          No state has been more visible than California in resisting the environmental policies of President Trump, filing 38 lawsuits by the beginning of this month. Now the state’s massive early fire season is demonstrating the merit of those legal actions.

          For every authority analyzing the unprecedented level of early summer blazes here and around the world agrees that one major cause is heat – record heat that has beset almost every place in the world from Switzerland to Hong Kong, from San Francisco to parts of Finland north of the Arctic Circle.

          Yes, Finland, where Trump staged his lugubrious July summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has seen temperatures in the 90s this year, for the first time in recorded history.

          Meanwhile, England sweated through a record heat wave, while Greece saw the deadliest fires in its long history and Europe’s worst since 1900. Several prominent waterfalls in Switzerland fed by Alpine snowmelt stopped flowing months earlier than usual.

          And then there’s California, where at one time in July, 19 wildfires burned simultaneously, taking well over 1,000 homes and some lives.

          Scientists at the state universities of Colorado, Nebraska and Nevada (Reno) report regional temperature averages in the West have increased by 2 degrees since the 1970s, resulting in drier and more combustible plant growth. At the same time, NASA scientists say this climate change helped kill thousands of trees and bushes in California’s mountains, providing unprecedented amounts of tinder.

          Rather than act to help mitigate this crisis, Trump’s administration has taken myriad actions appearing to further it. Trump is trying to roll back automotive emission standards. He’s shrunk several national monuments to make way for mining. The President ended NASA’s climate monitoring program, a head-in-the-sand move that allows him to keep denying climate change. He’s cut programs designed to find new renewable energy sources and shut down instruments on existing satellites that measure heat on the earth’s surface.

          He’s loosened regulations on toxic emissions from industrial sources and dropped climate change from the official list of threats to national security.

          California is resisting some of that, but its lawsuits are likely just a delaying action ultimately doomed to failure when they reach the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Trump has nominated two judges long opposed to environmental regulations.

          That can only help things get worse and hotter before they get cooler and better. But victims of the fires who lose homes and businesses and loved ones will not be able to sue Trump or his appointees for helping cause their woes because it’s difficult to parse out a direct link between, say, enabling toxic emissions in Pennsylvania and the degree of fury in a California fire.

          But there is a connection, and virtually every other government in the world besides ours has seen it and agreed to act on it. Even China, long noted for high levels of smog and other pollutants in its cities and countryside.

          If climate change could cause cool and foggy San Francisco to see record heat reach 106 over last year’s Labor Day weekend, then it likely also is one reason there is less snow on the Alps and the Canadian Rockies now than 10 years ago and also why it’s difficult to see a glacier anymore from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park.

          The lesson of all this is that if Trump and the West Virginia coal miners who overwhelmingly voted for him in the last election see no harm in greenhouse gases they are creating and furthering, California has no choice but to resist.

          The lawsuits at the heart of such resistance won’t end the far longer fire seasons that have become a regular feature of California life, but they may help the world fend off an even bigger crisis than it faces right now, even if Trump and his many supporters choose to ignore what’s before them daily.

          After all, this is a President who exhorted a crowd the other day, “Don’t believe what you see…” It was reminiscent of the joke about the husband, caught in flagrante and denying anything untoward, asking his wife, “Who are you going to believe: me or your lying eyes?”

    -30-
     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net