We're all dealing with coronavirus, and so this piece is important:

Coronavirus, capitalism and the forces of nature

Okay so Oakland Socialist initially appears as a booked-up lefty. Please read! It's important. And on top of it, here, I'm going to write about the political consequences of Oakland Socialist's science. I know, the author of this piece is thinking about science when the reading audience is like "OMIGOD I'M GOING TO DIE OF THE CORONAVIRUS!" I suppose this is the prose one gets when intelligent authors have twenty-four hours in the day to write, social isolation in place, nobody to meet, nothing to do but research and write.

Most of the content of Oakland Socialist's essay is about capitalism and its pursuit of a "development" model which creates all sorts of problems for everyone. We'll come back to that. At any rate, one of the most important things Oakland Socialist does is to expose officialdom. One of the reasons our government officials appear so catastrophically stupid in light of the current situation is because those officials were the people who could be found to double down on inappropriate strategies for living, and the possessors of real power cling to those strategies because they are strategies of capital. I told you all already that capital was deadly.

There is specific coronavirus content in Oakland Socialist's essay. Its coronavirus content is as follows: under capitalist models of "development," diseases which would otherwise be preoccupied with infesting wildlife have mutated to attack factory-farmed animals, and from those animals they've mutated to attack people. Factory-farmed animals and large numbers of people, after all, are what is left to populate the resultant ecosystems after vast global dieoffs of wild animals have occurred amidst the capitalist reshaping of landscapes around the globe. One of these diseases that has adapted to these new capitalist ecosystems is the coronavirus. Yeah, that's right, kids, one -- among many. The capitalist models of "development" have conquered, and thus compromised, the whole planet. Should we be surprised, then, that as a result of all this, we get to spend the next month or eight alone in front of our computers while the economy crashes and Nancy Pelosi tries to means-test our chances of survival?

At any rate, one of the side-infestations of capital, one of those sites in which apologists for capital thrive and multiply, is the Democratic Party. And right now the Democratic Party is in such a hurry to get Joe Biden nominated that they held primaries Tuesday despite the CDC warnings about COVID-19. The Powers That Be desperately want us to hurry up and choose. Quick! Ratify our nominee! Hurry the f*ck up! With every word and deed they proclaim that they don't like this discomfort they feel that accompanies their knowledge that Bernie Sanders is still campaigning from his home in Burlington, and so they desperately want him to endorse, and campaign for, Joe Biden, and f*cking GO AWAY. Now!

My proposal in light of all of this is that we create a movement, starting now, that will outlast Bernie Sanders. Create a video, do some planning, lay out a case for future action, anything. The alternative is that, in election after election, we will just be told that we have no choice.

An old video of Jimmy Dore's, from late October, should focus our minds on this matter:

Sure, a lot of stuff has happened since late October. Jimmy Dore's issue is still the same one that confronts us TODAY: we need to create an alternative to these people. They are, like Bill Maher back in October, desperate to tell us we have no choice. WE need to create this alternative. We need to make sure we ALWAYS have a choice. The ecological concerns discussed by Oakland Socialist are not going to go away. Bernie Sanders will not live forever. It is up to us.