Organizing in place?

In an ordinary year, a lot of AFSC’s work in West Virginia revolves around the state’s legislative session, when we advocate with partners and community members on issues affecting low-income and working families. The session lasts 60 days from early January to early March. After that, we usually catch our breath a bit before gearing up for the next round.

This isn’t an ordinary year.

It now seems like an eon since the legislative session ended at midnight on March 7. And, while we made a lot of progress in working for economic justice, those wins have since been eclipsed in our memories as we face the COVID-19 pandemic. And there hasn’t been a lot of breath catching.

So how do you respond to a pandemic in a poor and rural state when you’re sheltering in place? We’re still trying to figure that out, but here’s what we’ve come up with so far. In the past few weeks, AFSC has worked with partners and community members to:

Call for immediate action to strengthen safety net programs. Along with allies, we reached out to government officials to streamline and remove barriers to accessing benefits such as SNAP food assistance, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance. Several of the recommendations have already been implemented, including ending waiting periods, work requirements, time limits, and eligibility redeterminations for these critical assistance programs during the outbreak. Earlier on, AFSC joined several other groups in a joint letter to Gov. Jim Justice making several immediate and longer term policy recommendations.

Reduce crowding in correctional institutions as a humanitarian and public health measure. In the legislative session, we joined with community members and partners in winning passage of several bills to reduce mass incarceration in our state. We built on this success to advocate for the early release of incarcerated people who did not pose a serious threat to public safety (see this press release and joint letter from a wide range of organizations, including some unusual allies, such as Americans for Prosperity).

As of a week ago at least 616 people have been released from jails, in addition to 70 held on technical violations and around 70 furloughed to their homes from work release centers. Those numbers have doubtless gone up in the meantime. The West Virginia Supreme Court has also issued guidelines to judges and magistrates to release people in jail who are awaiting trial.

Feed people—especially kids! Child nutrition has been an AFSC priority in West Virginia as far back as 1922. Our programs have worked to expand free school breakfasts and lunches statewide, but what happens when school is cancelled indefinitely? Ironically, a bill we supported to address this issue didn’t pass during the session.

With schools closed and stay-at-home orders in place, many children and seniors were at risk of going hungry. When the crisis hit, Liz Brunello of AFSC’s Appalachian Center for Equality (ACE) program teamed up with ally Jenny Anderson of Our Future WV to create a Facebook group called WV Food ER to provide information and identify needs, volunteers, and resources. The group now has over 3,100 members.

This quickly led to the creation of Rapid Response WV, made of several organizations and individuals around the state. The website allows people to donate, request assistance, or learn about volunteer opportunities and is organizing both the purchase and delivery of food products and hygienic necessities.

Thanks to the generosity of donors, this effort had helped more than 200 families and had over 260 volunteers by the end of last week. Demand for this kind of assistance is only going to increase. The One Foundation, a key funder of AFSC's WV programs, has recently dedicated $20,000 to this effort.

Call for accountability. Along with direct food assistance, AFSC and allies in the WV Food for All coalition have called on the governor to issue another executive order requiring county boards of education to come up with comprehensive food delivery systems for the duration of the crisis.

Unfortunately, it seems that we’re still in the early phase of this crisis. While we don’t know what the future will require of us, we know it will involve a combination of direct assistance and advocacy, organizing, and agitation at multiple levels.

In any unjust system, there will always be a need for direct assistance and acts of compassion. However, these are no substitutes for justice, for the right of all people to a decent standard of living.

Thoughts on getting through these days

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

Stephen King…what can I say? I grew up reading his books and watching the movies.

I sometimes go years without going there. Other times, I binge on book after book. By King’s own admission, some are more gripping and substantial than others.

One that stuck with me over the years is The Stand. In case you missed it, the book starts with a super flu epidemic nicknamed Captain Trips that wipes out most of the human race.

Then things really get bad.

On a more literary level, one of my favorite novels is The Plague by Albert Camus, which I’ve often mentioned. It’s about an epidemic in Oran, Algeria around 1940, when the country was still under French control. And the disease is a metaphor for life in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The plague takes over the lives of everyone. People are separated from loved ones and feel totally confined and cut off from the rest of the world. Everything changes, including the sense of time.

In both books, the epidemic requires people to make moral decisions. In The Stand, it’s a pretty stark choice between good and evil. In The Plague, it’s interesting to see the different ways people respond to the situation. Some respond with quiet heroism, while others seem to profit or thrive from the epidemic.

For obvious reasons, those books have been on my mind lately. First though, let me say that the current situation is nowhere near these literary extremes and I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere close to them.

But I think the situation does require a response from us. Probably the worst things we can do now are either to politicize the Coronavirus outbreak (as in “Fake news. SAD”) or spread hysteria…which may entail taking a deep breath or two and stepping away from the TV every now and then.

So how should individuals and communities respond to the latest developments? And what can we learn from it? I have a few ideas:

*take reasonable, evidence-based steps to protect ourselves and pay attention to the latest recommendations and cooperate with the reasonable directions of health authorities, even if it can be a pain in the rear;

*if necessary, do what you can to nudge public officials to step up and do all they can to respond and prepare for the future if the virus spreads. Also, encourage them to take steps to ease the economic impact. We've already had some success with this in WV;

*take Mr. Rogers advice and “look for the helpers.”

*put things in perspective: it’s not like we were immortal before Coronavirus came around. We don’t know how bad the hit is going to be, but it’s not the only threat out there. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between Oct. 1 2019 and Feb. 29 2020, there have been an estimated 20,000 to 52,000 deaths from “regular” flu in the US. Worldwide, somewhere between 291,000 and 646,000 die annually from seasonal flu.

In a normal year, 40,000 Americans die from auto accidents. It’s been estimated that sugary drinks kill over 180,000 people per year in the US. According to the DHHR website, 300,000 deaths per year are related to obesity. The CDC reports that 480,000 Americans die each year due to cigarette smoking. Worldwide, tobacco kills around seven million people per year.

We don’t notice what we get used to.

*let’s not recreate past mistakes. Sometimes events like this make people search for someone to blame or some vulnerable group to target. During the Black Death of the mid 1300s, Christians blamed the plague on Jews, who were accused of poisoning wells. This unleashed horrific persecution throughout Europe. The “enemy” is a virus, not other people.

*this could be a reminder of how interconnected people are all over the world. Sometimes I think that very wealthy people, for example, think they can insulate themselves and their children from the effects of their actions on others, whether it’s the damage done by extreme inequality or climate change.

Sticking with the literature of epidemics, that was a theme of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero and his aristocratic friends party in apparent safety while an epidemic raged outside their walls. It didn’t work out very well for them. 

There may be a lesson in that. As Bob Marley sang, “When the rain falls, it don’t fall on one man’s house.”

*this could also be a reminder of how important things like paid sick days, universal health care, universal basic income and out of school food programs for children are. We have a lot of unfinished business.

*but the main one is, after taking all reasonable precautions, not to stop living or being human or showing compassion to others out of fear. Shakespeare’s Henry V observed that “we owe God a death,” but let’s not die while we’re still breathing.

That’s the message of a Buddhist parable about a man chased by a tiger. When he comes to the edge of a cliff, he climbs down a vine. The tiger is waiting. At the bottom of the cliff, there’s another tiger. Meanwhile, two mice just out of reach start gnawing at the vine. Then he notices a ripe strawberry. He plucked it and took a bite. It tasted great. The end.

That’s pretty much the human condition.

I’m not suggesting that people should crank up the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

But if you do, enjoy the cowbell.

(This is an updated version of an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail last week.)

Hands up

One argument often made in defense of slashing programs for low income and working people is that these discourage or "disincentivize" work. However, as Neil Irwin makes clear in this New York Times article, it's often the other way around.

According to Irwin, "Certain social welfare policies, according to an emerging body of research, may actually encourage more people to work and enable them to do so more productively."

For example the Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable credit for workers with low and moderate (by WV standards), is a huge boon to millions of families. Studies suggest that the EITC encourages workforce participation by rewarding work. One study found that by 1999, 460,000 more women heads of household were working that would have been the case without the EITC.

(There's been an effort in WV for several years to create a state version, but that hasn't happened yet.)

Child care subsidies are another case in point. Costs for this can easily exceed college expenses. And they usually hit families at a time when their earnings haven't peaked. We've had several scrapes in West Virginia aimed at holding the line on these subsidies.

It only makes sense in a state with the lowest workforce participation rates to do what we can to make work affordable.

Research also supports the long term benefit of SNAP (formerly food stamps). A study of the early days of food stamps, a program that was rolled out at different times around. the country, found that those children who received this kind of nutritional support were more likely to be working decades later than those who didn't.

Specifically, a study titled "Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net" by
Hilary W. Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach  and Douglas Almond concluded that 

access to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes) in adulthood and, for women, increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, income, and decreases in welfare participation).

This is another reason why expanding access to free school breakfasts and lunches to everyone is so important. This is one area in which West Virginia is a national leader.

Another intervention that pays huge dividends is early childhood education. Nobel economics laureate James Heckman assets that "Evidence shows that supplementing the family environments of disadvantaged children with educational resources is an effective and cost-efficient way to provide equal opportunity, achievement, and economic success."

These kinds of investments offer more promise of promoting shared prosperity than the current slash and burn approach to federal and state budgets.

A poetical Puritan

I would have been pretty useless in the English Civil War of the 1640s. Politically, I'd probably be sympathetic with some of the Roundheads. Theologically, cradle Episcopalian that I am, I'd be with the Cavaliers. And Puritanism just plain gives me the creeps.

However, I must say the Puritan poet John Milton had his moments. I just came across these lines from his Comus:

If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly pampered luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature's full blessings would be well dispensed
In unsuperfluous even proportion...

LESSONS LEARNED? Here's economist Jared Bernstein on how safety net programs performed during the Great Recession.

THIS OUGHT TO BE JUST THE THING to start another ruling class  hissy fit in West Virginia.

THIS IS SOOO GROSS. Have you watched a lamprey video lately?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED