The U.S. debate over pandemic unemployment benefits serves as archetypal cause and effect first, for how structural inequalities asphyxiate victims, and second, how forty-four million and rising unemployed plus over thirty million about to be evicted from their homes form a critical mass organizing opportunity to renegotiate. This second story, the overriding socioeconomic “elephant in the room” proves that demand for…
Author Archive for Michael A. Peck
Michael A. Peck, MAPA Group
Let Them Eat Masks
Hard to imagine one news cycle completely capturing the existential “reducto absurdam” of our self-infected times. How America’s tone-deaf, tin-ear and tin-pot elected, appointed, self-appointed and anointed “influencers” mirror the “winners take all” culture they serve starting with its virus twins: lethal socioeconomic inequalities and omnipresent COVID-19. Within twelve hours and seven time zones of each other, the mountain toppers and…
Celebrating the Seventh Bankruptcy on July 4th 2020
Independence Day, July 4th, 2020: this year an oxymoron commemorating freedom to infect others. How to celebrate a country self-captured and self-defeated first by its big pharma-induced opioid crisis mostly impacting lower economic caste victims and now by a mutating bio-virus intravenously self-injected with elected and appointed leaders using polarizing civic tissue and cell cultures? A capitalist autocracy, liberal democracy no…
How to Hope to Breathe in America’s Epicenter Pandemic Economy
In normal times, the average adult human tries to breathe twenty times per minute. Under the pandemic’s lung-crushing shadow, exacerbated by reoccurring acts of white police violence resulting in more unarmed and undeserved black deaths, the simple act of breathing cannot be taken for granted. America’s Epicenter Pandemic Economy (EPE) inextricably links embedded economic inequality and racial injustice. It repurposes the most economically vulnerable from…
“The Right Normal” – From Russia with Partisan Love
For more context, start with How Trump’s Idea for a Photo Op Led to Havoc in a Park from the New York Times. Recent events show that the current and impeached President of the United States not only takes the word of Russia’s Caudillo over the word of all U.S. intelligence services, but also prefers his counsel to America’s elected…
Staying Alive in “Do It Yourself” (DIY) America
Fake or mainstream, “the truth will set us free.” America’s White House, “the People’s House,” benefitting from “daily temperature checks, daily tests, unlimited hand sanitizers and regular deep cleaning of all workspaces,” still gets jacked at highest staff levels by coronavirus. So much so that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s most respected infectious diseases official, is working from home…
Those Fifth Avenue Bodies on Main Street
During these still early days of the biomedical pandemic, the President-America-has continues to show the federal buck goes directly to his political bank account without stopping at his desk. How else to explain the actions of his Treasury Secretary, an unrepentant private sector” foreclosure king on the backs of poor people and active duty veterans serving overseas, up-managing billions in special interest…
MAHA 2020
Ironically, the virus is breaking the nation’s fever. Now, in full lock-down pandemic-panic, stock markets give up inflated gains by tweet, mirroring traumatized investors’ daily rising and falling temperatures. Yesterday’s history becomes tomorrow’s COVID-19 reoccurring nightmare from which America in cold sweat is structurally unable to awaken. Dave Leonhardt/NYT lists five simultaneously streaming, domestic horror reality shows (“curve not flattening,…
COVID-19 & America’s Extreme Solidarity Deficit
“…we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.” – Bong Joon-ho, director of the 2020 Oscar Best Picture Award film, “Parasite” “Mr. Trump has declined to use his authority to commandeer private industry to produce medical supplies, counting instead on a market-driven response. – New York Times “We learned from the AIDS epidemic that infection traces the…
Bipartisan Mortal Apologies to Gettysburg
The John Roberts U.S. Supreme Court has much to answer for ideologically twisting the rule of law to disserve a rising majority-minority country, and in the process lower America’s shared democracy common denominators. Abraham Lincoln’s hoped-for inclusive, transparent, regenerative and representative “e pluribus Unum”, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, earned through selfless-spilled blue and…
