California: Understanding ‘Stay-At-Home’ When It’s Not In Your Language

2020/03/31 Leave a comment

More on language. Surprising nothing in Spanish among other languages:

Many people scrambled last week to figure out if they could even leave their homes after getting “stay at home” orders from state and local officials.

But for those who don’t speak English, making sure you have the correct information has been even harder.

One problem with the multiple orders that came out of L.A. County, Orange County and the State of California? The actual documents are still only available in English.

While many state and county websites offer Google Translate, there’s an information roadblock once a person has to navigate to an English-only document.

This has some immigrant advocates worried that non-English speakers may be at risk for citations under the new orders if they don’t have the right information.

WHAT’S BEING DONE

Some counties, including Los Angeles, say they’re working on it. In the meantime, some community groups are translating what they can themselves.

Last week, during Orange County’s order confusion, a multicultural press conference was held on Facebook Live by VietRISE, Chíspa and other local activists to address the language issue.

Hairo Cortes, executive director of Chíspa, a Santa Ana-based advocacy group, is one of the many organizers in the area working to get information out to their communities. With a lack of resources from local and state governments, Cortes said people are having to rely on each other for information.

“For Latino communities, at least here in Orange County, broadcast media is a pretty important source of information more than anything else,” said Cortes. “And people are sharing information with each other through social media and one-on-one conversations.”

With people having to stay home now under the new orders, Cortes has seen a drop in the flow of information between communities and local governments.

“With a lot of different things going on, I think at this moment, there’s a big need for just better communication from local government, especially the county and the public health agency,” said Cortes. “That needs to happen.”

Chíspa joined VietRISE, a group for Vietnamese and immigrant communities, at their press conference last Tuesday where they discussed the xenophobic repercussions of COVID-19, and translated health information into Spanish and Vietnamese. (VietRISE also manages thisresource guide.)

VietRISE has called on local governments to make better use of social media to reach out to immigrant communities.

“The county and state governments should be taking more proactive and aggressive measures to make sure that immigrant community members and businesses are getting all updates and orders related to COVID-19,” said VietRISE on their Facebook page. “That means providing it in multiple languages and using more strategies to ensure we receive this information.”

Going forward, the O.C. community groups plan to focus on issues affecting people’s quality of life by working with city governments to address the pandemic through housing moratoriums and outreach, according to Cortes.

TRANSLATIONS

Neighboring areas, such as the San Bernardino and Riverside counties, have made more strides with direct translation and have a few documents available in Spanish or Mandarin.

“We send everything to the translators as soon as they’re complete, and the turnaround seems pretty quick,” said David Wert, San Bernardino County’s public information officer in an email. “Oftentimes the translators are present in the County’s coronavirus Joint Information Center. There might be a lag in getting the documents uploaded because everyone is so busy.”

While San Bernardino County’s latest information on COVID-19 isn’t translated yet, Wert said they are working to get more staff to post the materials online when it’s available.

Currently, Orange County Public Health has an outdated health order and FAQ section with an inconsistent Google Translate ability. The department recommends visitors to refresh their cache to see it. When asked if they would have this site updated, the department provided email saying that they would refer people to the governor’s order. However, there’s no option for this on the website.

Similar to other counties, L.A. County does offer Google Translate on all of its site, except for the orders which officials say are pending translation. A translated FAQ section can be found under the Health Officer Order menu.

“The LA County Public Health Officer Orders are being translated into other languages,” said Steven Frasher, an L.A. County public information officer in an email. “Some are still in approvals processes. There is increasing outreach to Spanish and other ethnic media outlets to increase the reach of official messaging.”

At the state level, the California Department of Public Health said they are, “working continually to translate materials to ensure at-risk populations are receiving information.” Their website offers a dedicated Spanish version of COVID-19 information and translated guides, but as of March 27, the California “stay-at-home” order is not directly available in other languages.

Source: Understanding ‘Stay-At-Home’ When It’s Not In Your Language

Filed under Multiculturalism

Australia: We Need To Get Rid Of Harmony Day

2020/03/31 Leave a comment

The history of Australia’s Harmony Day to replace the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, as part of the Howard government’s more positive historical narratives and opposition to what was called the “black armband” history:

On 21st March 1960, protestors in Sharpeville, South Africa were demonstrating against the country’s discriminatory apartheid laws when police opened fire, killing 69 innocent people and wounding 180 more. Information and photos of what we now refer to as “The Sharpeville Massacre” circulated around the world, demonstrating the brutality of racial discrimination and police militarism that is still echoed in every nation across the globe. In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that March 21st be observed as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This day commemorates the lives of those who died in the fight for equality during apartheid, but it also calls on the international community to continue doubling down on its efforts to eliminate racial discrimination.

If you’re from Australia, you may not have heard of this day before. It’s not because Australia has solved racial discrimination – far from it. It’s because In Australia, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is patronizingly called “Harmony Day”. During this time of celebration, people across the country are encouraged to wear orange clothing to signify “social communication and encouragement of mutual respect” while schools often have children make art with the celebration’s slogan, “Everybody Belongs”. As you can imagine, this is disingenuous for a plethora of reasons.

When Harmony Day celebrations began in 1999, they purposefully coincided with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination so as to “re-centralize a singular and unifying notion of Australian-ness within multicultural policy”, according to the Howard government. But Prime Minister John Howard was himself an active opponent of multiculturalism. In 1988, he helped develop the “One Australia” policy that called for an end to multiculturalism, and this stance never changed. Although Howard eventually commissioned an anti-racism study to “explore the subtleties and nature of racism in Australia”, he actively rejected its findings. The study revealed that 85% of the study’s respondents recognized that racism was widespread and multi-faceted in Australia. These results did not align with Howard’s belief that Australians were not racist, so he rejected them. Instead of creating Harmony Day to focus on eliminating racism, his administration promoted a “living in harmony” approach and suppressed the study’s findings until 2011.

Referring to March 21st as “Harmony Day” acts as a smokescreen that hides the true extent of racism within this country, and conceals the painful yet important history of the date. According to The Secretary for the New South Wales Fabians, “Rather than focusing on tackling racism and the structural barriers that continue to exist, it is instead a self-congratulatory day about how “harmonious” we apparently are.” It almost serves to gaslight the Australian population. Commercial and technology lawyer Dan Ryan states that, “The problem with the harmonious society is not just the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. The truth is, while superficially sweet-sounding, the idea is illusory and utopian.”

The day infers that, in Australia, “Everybody Belongs.” But that simply isn’t true. When we examine how Indigenous Australians and people of colour are treated in this country, we see that peace is a far cry from reality. Research shows that 72% of Indigenous Australians and 70% of the general population believe Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are prejudiced against each other. 27 years since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in Custody, more than 400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody. The indigenous population is still massively over-represented in the Australian prison system. In 2017, 27% of inmates were of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, much more than their 3% share of the population. Proclaiming that “Everybody Belongs” only diverts attention from anti-racism action to an illusory concept of harmony.

Harmony Day needs to be rebranded as International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. That way, it can focus on what is really important: decisive action against racism. Instead of dressing children in orange while they draw stick figures standing hand-in-hand, we can teach them cultural competency and the history of racial discrimination. Rather than hold a “Harmony Day Morning Tea”, we can explore the entrenched racism in contemporary society. As opposed to turning away from the past, we can look right at it, finally acknowledge the mistakes made, and the path we must take.

Source: We Need To Get Rid Of Harmony Day

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New Site Collects Reports Of Racism Against Asian Americans Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

2020/03/31 Leave a comment

Of note. Similar instances in Canada:

As the coronavirus spreads and disrupts life across the country, Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans are facing a secondary threat: racism.

The virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, and some now blame the country for its global spread. In recent weeks, blame has escalated into reports of harassment and even assault in places with large communities of Asian Americans.

Last week Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, started tracking these attacks on a new website he helped launch called Stop AAPI Hate. In the site’s first eight days, it received more than 650 reports of discrimination — largely against the Asian American community.

Jeung spoke with NPR’s Steve Inskeep about this spike in reports. Here is some of what he had to say:

On the need for the site

We recognized early on that people were experiencing a lot of bullying, a lot of shunning, a lot of avoiding when the coronavirus outbreak occurred. And we didn’t have any hard data to document what was going on, so the first thing we did was we looked at news trends, and we counted news stories that had coronavirus and discrimination or xenophobia in it.

We found hundreds of articles about policies that people thought were xenophobic, economic boycotts of Asian businesses and then later on about interactions that Asian Americans were having where people were bullying, taunting, harassing and now attacking.

We had hundreds of accounts to go to the state legislature and say, “This is happening. We need to get it documented. We need to proactively address these trends.” And since the government didn’t have the capacity in California, we started our own website as a reporting center, and it just was launched last week and we’ve been getting over 100 reports every day.

What types of reports the site is receiving

Name-calling and verbal harassment — microaggressions are the most common. It moves up to people having bottles and cans thrown at them, their homes being vandalized, and then … maybe three times a day, we have people actually being physically attacked, assaulted, being hit or punched, pushed on subways.

Are there things that have made it worse?

After [Sept. 11] people were attacking Muslim Americans and President Bush came out and said we have to not discriminate or mistreat Muslim Americans. What President Trump did was he insisted on calling it the “Chinese virus” and labeling coronavirus as a racial disease. And by othering Asians — and it’s not just Chinese, anybody who looks Chinese — it just gave people license to attack us, to blame us for the disease, to say we’re the source of it. And it’s not the people who are the source of the disease, it’s just, you know, a virus that doesn’t discriminate.

On whether President Trump helped this week when he tweeted that the virus is not the fault of the Asian American community

Yeah, we appreciate that. I think that was due to the pressure that we exerted and the complaining. But I think it’s a little too little, too late. He’s already opened the door to this racism. It was already starting even before he made the China virus remarks, and he just sort of exacerbated the situation. He still uses this us vs. them binary that argues that, “Oh, we’re really working with them” and that “We’re protecting them,” that we’re still outsiders and foreigners and not part of the American fabric.

Hear the full interview on Morning Edition here.

Source: New Site Collects Reports Of Racism Against Asian Americans Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

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‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide

2020/03/30 Leave a comment

Not unique to the USA but gaps wider:

For about $80,000, an individual can purchase a six-month plan with Private Health Management, which helps people with serious medical issues navigate the health care system.

Such a plan proved to be a literal lifesaver as the coronavirus pandemic descended. The firm has helped clients arrange tests in Los Angeles for the coronavirus and obtained oxygen concentrators for high-risk patients.

“We know the top lab people and the doctors and nurses and can make the process efficient,” said Leslie Michelson, the firm’s executive chairman.

In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

In New York, well-off city dwellers have abandoned cramped apartments for spacious second homes. In Texas, the rich are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to build safe rooms and bunkers.

And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Some of those catering to the well-off stress that they are trying to be good citizens. Mr. Michelson emphasized that he had obtained coronavirus tests only for patients who met guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rather than the so-called worried well.

Still, a kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.

“I do get that there are haves and have-nots,” said Carolyn Richmond, a Manhattan employment lawyer who is advising restaurant industry clients from her second home, on Long Island, as they engineer layoffs. “Do I feel guilty? No. But I do know that I am very lucky. I understand there’s a big difference between me and the people I work with every day.”

Long before the new coronavirus, another kind of equalizer was being promoted: the internet. For decades, tech evangelists cited the democratizing power of the World Wide Web, which they said would bring high-quality services to strata of society that had previously gone without them.

Some of those predictions have come to pass. In recent days, time spent on the site of the Khan Academy, a well-regarded online curriculum that is free, is up about two and a half times from this time last year.

In March, the federal government broadened its coverage of so-called telemedicine services through Medicare, giving many more people access to a doctor over the web.

Still, the technology that makes these services accessible remains out of reach for many Americans. While data on internet access is inexact, the most recent Federal Communications Commission figures, from 2017, showed that 30 percent of households did not have even a slow broadband connection.

Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic member of the commission, said millions of Americans had only phones, often with strict caps on data usage. “Imagine using a mobile device to look up your class work, type out a paper,” she said. “No parent would choose that as the primary tool for their child’s learning.”

Like many districts around the country, the Brownsville Independent School District in Texas sought to transfer much of its curriculum online when it closed its doors this week. Schools encouraged students to use digital platforms like Google Classroom, Apple Teacher and Seesaw to keep up with their studies.

But unlike wealthier areas, Brownsville has notoriously spotty internet access. Nearly half of households there lacked broadband in 2018, putting it at the top of a list of worst-connected citiescompiled by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, an advocacy group. “We’re limited when it comes to online services in our community,” said the district’s superintendent, René Gutiérrez. “It’s not where it needs to be.”

The situation has sent many families scrambling. Anahi Rubio, 11, and her mother just moved into an apartment that lacks an internet connection. Anahi has struggled with balky access while using a laptop at her aunt’s house, where she couldn’t get the videoconferencing app Zoom to work.

“They’re always telling you to use YouTube to learn multiplication, or to look something up on Google,” said her mother, Betsy Rubio. “Online, everybody gets to be on the same page. But if not everyone has good internet, like my daughter, you don’t. I’m concerned about her falling behind.”

And internet access is far from the only challenge confronting the less affluent. Marc Perrone, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents over one million workers in industries like groceries and meatpacking, said child care was a top concern when the union held a telephone town hall this week with about 5,000 supermarket workers in New York State.

“In some cases, if they’re old enough, they’re latching them — becoming latchkey kids,” Mr. Perrone said, alluding to the option of leaving a child home alone.

Until a few weeks ago, Darlyne Dagrin would drop her 22-month-old son off at a day care facility on her way to work at a nursing home in Cedar Grove, N.J. But the center has closed temporarily amid the pandemic, leaving her with no choice but to skip work when she can’t find a friend or relative to care for him.

“This week I called out twice,” Ms. Dagrin said Wednesday. “They called me and said: ‘We won’t accept no more callouts. If you call out again you’re out of a job.’” She said she didn’t know what she was going to do for the rest of the week.

Unlike Ms. Dagrin, Maggie Russell-Ciardi doesn’t have to choose between going to work and providing child care for her young child. A nonprofit consultant in New York City and part-time yoga teacher, Ms. Russell-Ciardi can slot work around her 3-year-old son’s sleep and play schedule — even if it sometimes requires waking up in the wee hours — and simply makes do when he’s awake and active.

“It’s better for me to do my own practice when he’s sleeping,” she said of the yoga classes she now teaches online. “But it’s nice to have him growing up feeling like he’s part of the yoga community even if it’s now a virtual one. It’s an important teaching for him.”

The ability of the middle class to quickly shift life online has been striking. The Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, where roughly 100 faculty members on site teach several hundred students each week, has shifted its entire music instruction to videoconferencing. Over 95 percent of the students enrolled in private lessons have resumed their classes since the school reopened online last Friday.

By contrast, said Dorothy Savitch, an administrator, the school operates a music education program in 25 local public schools, with large numbers of children below the poverty level. Ms. Savitch said about one-third of those children might take part when the program resumes online next week, though she hopes to reach 60 percent of them eventually.

But the middle class is not free of anxiety in this pandemic moment. Otherwise-privileged people have become acutely aware of the options they lack. “For the first time in my life, I feel the difference between myself and my more affluent friends,” said Deb Huberman, a freelance television producer living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “I desperately want to get out of the city but I can’t afford to rent something.”

Ms. Huberman estimates that half the neighbors in her building have fled to second homes. Many have joined other wealthy New Yorkers in the less densely populated East End of Long Island.

“I feel guilty about friends and colleagues who don’t have the ability to leave,” said Joe Bilman, who moved with his family from Park Slope in Brooklyn to his vacation house in East Hampton. “We knew it would be easier for us to isolate and be part of the quarantine. We have a backyard and the kids can go for bike rides.”

Hamptonites have often managed to recreate the amenities of home, except with more space and beachfront views. Many children enrolled in Manhattan prep schools continue to be taught by teachers in conventional classroom formats, albeit over the internet, while public schools have frequently substituted individual study with materials supplied online.

MyTennisLessons.com advertises that “coaches are continuing to give 1-on-1 lessons” and lists a few pros available in Hamptons ZIP codes. Zabar’s, the Upper West Side food emporium, will deliver an assortment of noshes for a $300 to $400, depending on the distance.

“I don’t even take a markup — it’s whatever the messenger service charges me,” said Scott Goldshine, the general manager. “Obviously, for most of the people out there getting these types of delivery, money is not an issue.”

At some summer retreats, like Martha’s Vineyard and the Jersey Shore, local officials have taken to discouraging second-home owners and renters for fear of overtaxing local infrastructure.

In other cases, the rich aren’t going east or west, but down. Gary Lynch, general manager of Rising S, a Texas maker of safe rooms and bunkers that range in price from $40,000 to several million dollars, said he had added a second shift of 15 workers to handle the flood of new orders, mostly for underground bunkers.

“I’ve never seen interest like there is now,” said Mr. Lynch, who has taken to turning his phone off at night so he can get some sleep. “It has not let up.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/business/economy/coronavirus-inequality.html

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‘They see my blue eyes then jump back’ – China sees a new wave of xenophobia

2020/03/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

Over the past few weeks, as Chinese health officials reported new “imported” coronavirus cases almost every day, foreigners living in the country have noticed a change. They have been turned away from restaurants, shops, gyms and hotels, subjected to further screening, yelled at by locals and avoided in public spaces.

“I’m walking past someone, then they see my blue eyes and jump a foot back,” said Andrew Hoban, 33, who is originally from Ireland and lives in Shanghai.

Experiences range from socially awkward to xenophobic. An American walking with a group of foreigners in a park in Beijing saw a woman grab her child and run the other way. Others have described being called “foreign trash”. A recent online article, under an image of ship stacked with refuse being pushed away from China’s coast, was headlined: “Beware of a second outbreak started by foreign garbage.”

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Medical Expert Who Corrects Trump Is Now a Target of the Far Right

2020/03/30 Leave a comment

Sigh but predictable. A few but appear to be exceptional worrying signs in Canada in questioning expertise (e.g., Conrad Black on COVID-19: The world succumbed to a pandemic of hysteria, more than a virus, MALCOLM: It’s time to double check the experts’ COVID-19 work):

At a White House briefing on the coronavirus on March 20, President Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.

Some thought Dr. Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction. On Twitter and Facebook, a post that falsely claimed he was part of a secret cabal who opposed Mr. Trump was soon shared thousands of times, reaching roughly 1.5 million people.

A week later, Dr. Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak — has become the target of an online conspiracy theory that he is mobilizing to undermine the president.

That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters, even as Dr. Fauci has won a public following for his willingness to contradict the president and correct falsehoods and overly rosy pronouncements about containing the virus.

An analysis by The New York Times found over 70 accounts on Twitter that have promoted the hashtag #FauciFraud, with some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day. The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email.

Many of the anti-Fauci posts, some of which pointed to a seven-year-old email that Dr. Fauci had sent praising Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State, have been retweeted thousands of times. On YouTube, conspiracy-theory videos about Dr. Fauci have racked up hundreds of thousands of views in the past week. In private Facebook groups, posts disparaging him have also been shared hundreds of times and liked by thousands of people, according to the Times analysis.

One anti-Fauci tweet on Tuesday said, “Sorry liberals but we don’t trust Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

The torrent of falsehoods aimed at discrediting Dr. Fauci is another example of the hyperpartisan information flow that has driven a wedge into the way Americans think. For the past few years, far-right supporters of President Trump have regularly vilified those whom they see as opposing him. Even so, the campaign against Dr. Fauci stands out because he is one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts and a member of Mr. Trump’s virus task force, and it is unfolding as the government battles a pathogen that is rapidly spreading in the United States.

It is the latest twist in the ebb and flow of right-wing punditry that for weeks echoed Mr. Trump in minimizing the threat posed by the coronavirus and arguably undercut efforts to alert the public of its dangers. When the president took a more assertive posture against the outbreak, conservative outlets shifted, too — but now accuse Democrats and journalists of trying to use the pandemic to damage Mr. Trump politically.

“There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Trump supporters to spread misinformation about the virus aggressively,” said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who has studied misinformation.

Adding that Dr. Fauci is bearing the brunt of the attacks, Mr. Bergstrom said: “There is this sense that experts are untrustworthy, and have agendas that aren’t aligned with the people. It’s very concerning because the experts in this are being discounted out of hand.”

The Trump administration has previously shown a distaste for relying on scientific expertise, such as when dealing with climate change. But misinformation campaigns during a pandemic carry a unique danger because they may sow distrust in public health officials when accurate information and advice are crucial, said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics.

“What this case will show is that conspiracy theories can kill,” she said.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases did not respond to a request for comment on the misinformation being directed at Dr. Fauci, who has said he plans to keep working to contain the coronavirus.

“When you’re dealing with the White House, sometimes you have to say things one, two, three, four times, and then it happens,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with Science magazine this past week. “So, I’m going to keep pushing.”

The online campaign is an abrupt shift for Dr. Fauci, an immunologist who has led the institute since 1984. He has long been seen as credible by a large section of the public and journalists, advising every president since Ronald Reagan and encouraging action against the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

In recent weeks, much of the online discussion of Dr. Fauci was benign or positive. Zignal Labs, a media analysis company, studied 1.7 million mentions of Dr. Fauci across the web and TV broadcasts from Feb. 27 to Friday and found that through mid-March, he was mainly praised and his comments were straightforwardly reported. Right-wing figures quoted Dr. Fauci approvingly or lauded him for his comments on shutting down travel to and from China, Zignal Labs said.

In the White House briefings on the coronavirus, he often spoke plainly of the severity of the situation, becoming something of a folk hero to some on the left. Then Dr. Fauci, who had been a steady presence at Mr. Trump’s side during the briefings, did not appear at the one on March 18.

A hashtag asking “Where is Dr. Fauci?” began trending on Twitter. Several Facebook fan groups dedicated to praising his medical record called for his return. The first accounts tweeting #FauciFraud also appeared, though their volume of posts was small, according to the Times analysis.

Two days later, Dr. Fauci put his head in his hand at the White House briefing after Mr. Trump’s remark on the “Deep State Department.” His gesture — some called it a face palm — caught the attention of Mr. Trump’s supporters online, who saw it as an insult to the president.

Anti-Fauci posts spiked, according to Zignal Labs. Much of the increase was prompted by a March 21 article in The American Thinker, a conservative blog, which published the seven-year-old email that Dr. Fauci had written to an aide of Mrs. Clinton.

In the email, Dr. Fauci praised Mrs. Clinton for her stamina during the 2013 Benghazi hearings. The American Thinker falsely claimed that the email was evidence that he was part of a secret group who opposed Mr. Trump.

That same day, Mr. Fitton of Judicial Watch posted a tweet linking to a different blog post that showed Dr. Fauci’s email on Mrs. Clinton. In the tweet, Mr. Fitton included a video of himself crossing his arms and saying, “Isn’t that interesting.” It was retweeted more than 1,500 times.

In an interview, Mr. Fitton said, “Dr. Fauci is doing a great job.” He added that Dr. Fauci “wrote very political statements to Hillary Clinton that were odd for an appointee of his nature to send.”

The conspiracy theory was soon shared thousands of times across Facebook and Twitter. It was also taken up by messaging groups on WhatsApp and Facebook run by QAnon, the anonymous group that claims to be privy to government secrets. On YouTube, far-right personalities began spouting that Dr. Fauci was a fraud.

By Tuesday, the online and television mentions of Dr. Fauci had declined but had become consistently negative, Zignal Labs said.

One anti-Fauci tweet last Sunday read: “Dr. Fauci is in love w/ crooked @HillaryClinton. More reasons not to trust him.”

Facebook said it proactively removed misinformation related to the coronavirus. YouTube said that it did not recommend the conspiracy-theory videos on Dr. Fauci to viewers and that it promotes credible virus information. Twitter said it remained “focused on taking down content that can lead to harm.”

Ms. Phillips, the Syracuse assistant professor, said the campaign was part of a long-term conspiracy theory propagated by Mr. Trump’s followers.

“Fauci has just been particularly prominent,” she said. “But any public health official who gets cast in a conspiratorial narrative is going to be subject to those same kinds of suspicions, the same kinds of doubt.”

That has not stopped Dr. Fauci from appearing on the internet. On Thursday, he joined a 30-minute Instagram Live discussion about the coronavirus hosted by the National Basketball Association star Stephen Curry.

In the session, Dr. Fauci, with a miniature basketball hoop behind him, conveyed the same message that he had said for weeks about the outbreak.

“This is serious business,” he said. “We are not overreacting.”

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More Than a Place of Refuge: Meaningful engagement of Government-assisted refugees in the future of work. An Action Canada Task Force report

2020/03/30 Leave a comment

From the recent Action Canada report, on ways to improve participation in the workplace for Government Assisted Refugees. Most of these are reasonable but I would question the need for a national anti-racism strategy specific to former refugees as hard to see that anti-Muslim or anti-Black racism is specific to refugees and former refugees:

Recommendation 1: The Government of Canada should support the development of collaborative options in which GARs can access programs to simultaneously improve their language skills while acquiring Canadian work experience and earning wages.

Recommendation 2: The Government of Canada should support the prioritization of creating enhanced social capital for GARs through an emphasis on social bridging/integration.

Recommendation 3: The Government of Canada should reduce the amount of the claw-back on income above 50 percent of the Resettlement Assistance Program amount from 100 percent to 50 percent to encourage former refugees to find full-time employment.

Recommendation 4: The Government of Canada should extend Resettlement Assistance Program eligibility to 24 months.

Recommendation 5: The Government of Canada should direct Statistics Canada to work with federal ministries, provincial governments and settlement agencies to collect and publicly distribute relevant, updated and on-time data regarding newcomer refugees, and especially relating to uptake of different social programs and employment.

Recommendation 6: The Government of Canada should establish a national strategy to combat discrimination against former refugees, with an emphasis on Islamophobia and anti-black racism.

Source: https://ppforum.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AC-Meaningful-Engagement-Report.pdf

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Immigrant Workers: Vital to the U.S. COVID-19 Response, Disproportionately Vulnerable

2020/03/30 Leave a comment

Of note. Haven’t looked at immigrant status but visible minorities provides a similar picture (mix of immigrants and subsequent generations). Some visible minority groups such as Latin American and Blacks are more concentrated in support positions than other groups:

Six million immigrant workers are at the frontlines of keeping U.S. residents healthy and fed during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the foreign born represented 17 percent of the 156 million civilians working in 2018, they account for larger shares in coronavirus-response frontline occupations: 29 percent of all physicians and 38 percent of home health aides, for example. They also represent significant shares of workers cleaning hospital rooms, staffing grocery stores, and producing food.

The foreign born also are over-represented in sectors most immediately devastated by mass layoffs: Restaurants and hotels, office cleaning services, and in-home child care, among them. All told, another 6 million immigrants work in industries that MPI has identified as some of the hardest hit, meaning that collectively 12 million immigrant workers are at the leading edge of the response to and impacts from the pandemic.

As dramatic economic contraction brings hardship to tens of millions in the coming months, the difficulties will be exacerbated for many immigrant workers because of limited access to safety-net systems and to federal relief, both for those who are unauthorized and some who are legally present. The estimated $2 trillion pandemic aid package makes many immigrants eligible for cash relief payments; others, such as most U.S.-citizen or legal immigrant spouses who file taxes jointly with unauthorized immigrants, will not be eligible.

Noncitizens also face restricted access to existing safety-net programs. While green-card holders, those on a temporary work visa, and individuals with Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals can access unemployment insurance, most noncitizens cannot turn to the federal, means-tested benefits, including food stamps, that other workers tap in times of need. And immigrant workers face additional vulnerabilities, including smaller incomes and lower rates of health insurance coverage.

Source: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigrant-workers-us-covid-19-response

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Cohen: Why Canada’s response to COVID-19 is so different from that of the U.S.

2020/03/28 Leave a comment

Another piece on differences:

Comparing the character of nations is risky and imprecise. In the Age of Contagion, though, it offers a window into how the peoples of the world are coping.

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore have handled the crisis relatively well. We expect that of people we see as highly disciplined, motivated and organized. Italy is reeling from the contagion. Gregarious, unruly, passionate, creative, independent – this is how we see Italians. It suggests why they were slow to respond.

In Washington, Congress struggles to forge an economic response. The president is erratic and unempathetic. He is widely disbelieved, skeptical of expertise and reluctant to accept responsibility.The media send mixed messages. Fox News, with the highest audience, once denied the pandemic, calling it “a hoax.” One host – before she was fired – claimed the coronavirus was a plot by the Democrats to re-impeach Donald Trump.

The danger is that the medical system will be overwhelmed. On the tenth anniversary of Obamacare, universal health care remains contentious in the United States – undermined by the Republicans, who have tried repeatedly to abolish it, and repeatedly challenged in the courts.

In Canada, a country of 37 million, there were some 2,100 cases and 24 deaths as of early Tuesday. The system is holding, for now. Hospitals have enough masks and respirators, for now. The prime minister appears in public every day, alone, outside his residence. He speaks sensibly, with authority, without hyperbole. This has been his finest hour.Canadians trust him. They may not have voted for him – only about one-third did – but that doesn’t matter now. Nor do we question the competence of his ministers who are the other faces of the crisis – Chrystia Freeland, Marc Garneau, Patty Hajdu, Bill Blair. All are calm, competent and professional. This is what we want.

The provincial premiers, most of whom are not Liberals, have lost their congenital instinct to attack Ottawa. Doug Ford, no admirer of Justin Trudeau, now praises his leadership.All provinces have declared states of emergency, and will not object if the national government does, too. If it must, it will – and we won’t complain.

Opposition parties are not posturing. Andrew Scheer, who called Trudeau “a fraud” last autumn, says this is no time for politics. He is right. His fellow Conservatives, vying to succeed him, have put away their popguns. Some want the leadership vote scheduled for August delayed.

Unlike in America, there is consensus in Canada. No one is saying that the aid package is inadequate, that the government is slow, that money unduly favours corporations. Jason Kenney is not talking about western alienation and the Bloc Québécois is not talking sovereignty. Canadians want only freedom from fear.Mercifully, we have no Fox News. Whatever the CBC’s flaws as national broadcaster, its reporting has been thorough and honest, under trying circumstances. Same with CTV and Radio Canada, and the country’s newspapers and websites.

Why is our response different? It may be a case of identity. Americans celebrate independence, individualism, personal liberty. Many distrust government, resent politicians, court conspiracy and dismiss science. This wasn’t always so – the New Deal and the Great Society expanded the state – but it is now.

Canadians accept big government, which is how we built the social welfare state. Two-thirds of us voted for progressives last year. We defer to authority.Yes, we’ve made real mistakes in the crisis. We didn’t secure airports fast enough or test early and widely enough. Too many are treating physical distancing as a snow day. If we ultimately do better in all this – it’s too early to know or crow – it’s not because we are morally superior. It is because we are smaller, organized, well-led, more united, more measured, more of a community.

It’s a question of character.

Source: Cohen: Why Canada’s response to COVID-19 is so different from that of the U.S.

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Terry Glavin: COVID-19: Beware the wartime propaganda as we battle this plague

2020/03/28 Leave a comment

On the lack of checks and balances regarding Chinese government propaganda:

It’s a terribly imperfect metaphor, and it’s already something of a cliché, but fair enough, too. The global struggle with the disaster of the coronavirus that first emerged last December in the Chinese city of Wuhan is, without question, something very much like war. And almost everybody who’s saying so is relying on pretty well the same formulation.

U.S. President Donald Trump has lately fashioned himself as a ‘wartime president,” determined to defeat a “horrible, invisible enemy.” French President Emmanuel Macron: “We are at war. The enemy is invisible and it requires our general mobilization.” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis: “We are at war with an enemy that is invisible, but not invincible.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “This is a battle for public health … We are at war with an invisible enemy.”

So yes, fair enough. But we should be very careful that we don’t allow the confines of approved terminology and the banalities of official diction to leave us unmoored from the objective realities of the crisis we’ve all found ourselves stumbling through. Because that’s how colossally stupid public policy mistakes get made. It’s also how the powerful get away with occluding the truth and telling outright lies.

It’s how the powerful get away with occluding the truth

The official exertions dozens of nation states are taking to deal with the calamity of the virus are of the kind that are ordinarily made only in wartime. After all, in Canada’s case the statutory antecedent of the Emergencies Act, which Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is quite sensibly considering as a “last resort,” is the War Measures Act, which was invoked only once after the Second World War, during the October Crisis of 1970.

Naming the enemy precisely would help. And this is where things have already got off to a shabby and slightly sinister start.

Strictly speaking, the enemy is not COVID-19, as the disease has come to be named by the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases group, “covi” being the short form of coronavirus, and ‘d” for disease, and 19 for 2019. It’s true enough that the herculean medical research efforts required to find effective treatments for the disease, and of course to develop a vaccine — an undertaking which is expected to take at least a year to complete — should put us all on a war footing. And that effort deserves the rapid marshalling of public resources and whatever measures are necessary to keep our hospitals from crashing and ensuring the safety and security of public health workers.

But the “invisible enemy” that’s showing up in the speeches of presidents and prime ministers, the thing that has forced wartime-type lockdowns and curfews and social mobilization, is the virus that causes the disease. The virus was named SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses. The SARS bit in the name comes from the virus’s genetic relation to the virus associated with the SARS outbreak of 2003.

It was perfectly sensible that “Wuhan virus” immediately and quite innocently emerged in the language of common speech, in China and elsewhere, But nobody wants their hometown named after a killer virus, and WHO guidelines are averse to the association of viruses with specific countries. So SARS-CoV-2 it was, and not “China virus.” For naming purposes it didn’t and shouldn’t have mattered that 99 per cent of all the eruptions from the virus at the time were occurring in China.

But then the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machinery kicked in. Faced with a population disaffected to a degree without precedent since the time of the nationwide pro-democracy insurrections that were crushed in the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, the CCP’s braintrust began to circulate lurid fictions to the effect that the virus didn’t originate in China at all, but was rather somehow smuggled into Wuhan by the U.S military.

The CCP’s braintrust began to circulate lurid fictions to the effect that the virus didn’t originate in China at all

The CCP was also keen on following Xi Jinping’s Feb. 3 instruction to recast China’s police-state efficiencies as the solution to the world’s hardships, and to recast Xi himself as a global medical-supply benefactor rather than the cold-blooded villain sensible people understand him to be. Because of all this, the regime’s state media and several senior propaganda ministry officials and diplomats were particularly determined to lay in an ambuscade for Trump over his use of the provocatively vulgar term “China virus.”

This all may seem trivial and petty, but it’s worth taking a moment here to notice a couple of things about the way wartime propaganda works.

The first thing is the classic strategy of exploiting divisions and anxieties in an enemy population in order to weaken public resolve and undermine the enemy’s leadership. If you don’t think the CCP sees the U.S.-led global order and the institutions of liberal democracy as the enemy, you simply haven’t been paying attention. And if you don’t think the Chinese Communist Party intends to exploit the coronavirus disaster as an opportunity to advance its interests against its enemies around the world, you’re not taking the CCP at its own word.

It’s the democratic world’s ill luck that the inflammation of domestic divisions and anxieties just happens to be both the cause and the purpose of Trumpism itself, and a significant body of American opinion will not grant Trump the time of day. Neither does it help matters that the Americans are in the bitter throes of an election year, when they all tend to give the impression of being at one another’s throats at the best of times.

The second thing is that controlling the terminology of the conflict and the subversion of vocabulary are crude wartime propaganda methodologies, and Beijing is taking matters to absurd extremes, with its ambassadors around the world instructing everyone in what we are allowed to say and how we are allowed to say it.

China’s embassy in Peru, for instance, has initiated a thuggish attack on the celebrated Peruvian novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, a former president of PEN International, owing to a March 14 essay Llosa wrote in the Spanish national newspaper El Pais. Llosa merely noted that the coronavirus originated in Wuhan, and that the Chinese authorities had suppressed early efforts to alert the public about the disease — a catastrophic error that a free society would not so readily make.

The embassy went so far as to deny that the virus even originated in China, and admonished Llosa for having the cheek to criticize the Chinese government. Immediately, Llosa’s novels started getting pulled from China’s e-book platforms.

Every reasonable person understands that Donald Trump is a buffoon, but his torrents of false claims and imbecilities are routinely fact-checked and corrected by a robust American news media, and sometimes even by Trump’s own officials. The Chinese people enjoy no such liberties and China’s brutal state-capitalist system allows no such corrections. With the world divided more or less into two camps, with Xi Jinping on one side and Donald Trump on the other, any retreat into a facile “both-sidesism” would be a mistake the democratic world can’t afford to make.

We’ve had quite enough of that already, to disastrous result, and it would be the height of folly to try to salvage the relics of a broken global order that treated China like a normal country. That world is gone. Besides, it would be a peacetime activity, and as crude as the metaphor is, the predicament we face at the moment, in this time of plague, is very much like war.

Source: Terry Glavin: COVID-19: Beware the wartime propaganda as we battle this plague

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