Tag: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo

At long last, what so many have dared to hope and work for has happened with NY’s then Gov. Cuomo’s clemency grant to Political Prisoner, David Gilbert, with the opportunity to take his case before the NY Parole Board and seek long-overdue release from prison.

The COVID-19 emergency underscores longstanding truths about capitalism and socialism. Acting on the most immediate demands that it raises draws us directly into a confrontation with core issues.

Interstitial lung disease occurs in both COVID-19 infections and in people chronically exposed to air pollution. Little focus has been given to the fact that the disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 cases and deaths occurring in densely populated low income communities of color – like San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point 94124 zip code – are contributed to by the co-morbid risk of damage to the same regions of the lung by both toxic air contaminants and the novel coronavirus.

It’s important we avoid using “violent criminal” rhetoric to justify abandoning thousands of elderly people, which endangers us all. And, it is no longer acceptable to put white folks’ fears ahead of the safety of Black and Latinx people.

In the national debate ensuing from Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” some have not given credit to Angela Davis forging national interest in prison abolition with her organizing Critical Resistance campaigns across the country. With the nominal success of the Pelican Bay prisoners’ hunger strike in California, we recognize that when we organize a national determination, we can collectively force institutional change.

The situation in public housing projects in Coney Island, Brooklyn remains a “humanitarian crisis” in which the government and the Red Cross have been nearly completely absent, according to Eric Moed, a volunteer aid worker with Occupy Sandy. The projects in Coney Island remain without power and often without water and necessities in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.