We’re excited to announce that ZNet ran Paul’s recent essay on a post-coronavirus world:

More than 30 million people in the US are out of work, a similar percentage as in the Great Depression, and for many of them that also means they’ve lost their employer-linked health insurance overnight. More than 30% of all US renters couldn’t (and therefore didn’t!) pay their rent on May 1st. Even before the pandemic, 40% of us could not have managed an unexpected $400 bill without serious personal impact.

Even before the pandemic struck, the two corporatist political parties that share power in the US were already utterly incapable of responding sensibly to the many societal and ecological crises that just keep growing every year. Now we’re already nine weeks into watching the nation falling even faster off the cliff. If our Congress and President haven’t figured out what to do by now, it’s probably time to assume not much is going to change here either. And to add insult to injury, neither of the corporate parties’ presidential candidates has anything relevant to offer in the way of real solutions. Neither favors Medicare For All. Neither favors genuine long-term protections for renters or home owners facing homelessness. Neither favors a guaranteed living wage. Neither favors the Green New Deal.

Before we all went into quarantine to protect ourselves and others, the climate emergency was already breathing down our necks. We were already experiencing an alarming rate of species extinction. We were already on track to dump so much plastic in our oceans to eventually equal the weight of all fish still alive there. (I’m glad someone else did the math on THAT one!) And on and on.

So even if it was a realistic possibility that we could start a full recovery from the pandemic a year or two from now after we’ve all been given a free or inexpensive coronavirus vaccine, would we really want to return to business as usual? A majority of us would very likely say firmly, “No thank you! We want better options.”

Huge numbers of us want to be living very differently than we do now, but the corporate elite who make virtually every key economic and development decision in the US have designed a societal and legal framework that mandates the current way of organizing our lands, our communities, our economies. The corporate elite have so much decision-making authority because the Supreme Court has granted them what is known as intangible property rights of a corporate “person.” If we truly yearn for a different way of living on our living Earth, we need to stop doing conventional single-issue emergency-response activism, and start dismantling these corporate constitutional “rights” (and the state preemption laws that defend them) that make corporate control over our lives and our living Earth inevitable. That’s how we will reclaim our ability to govern ourselves.

In the Community Rights movement trainings, we are always urging participants to think as clearly as possible about what it is folks truly want for their communities. Not just how to stop the latest corporate or government outrage being foisted upon our communities. Not just triangulating a goal or demand in terms of what we think we can get. But what it is that we truly want! And the vast majority of us have become so colonized by spending our entire lives swimming in corporate culture, that we barely even know how to imagine such things.

“Oh you can’t do that. The state won’t permit it,” our own advocacy group attorneys tell us.

“Oh you can’t stop that factory farm or that clearcut or that fracking operation or that new airport runway or that water bottling operation; the corporation has property ‘rights’ and other constitutional protections,” our own state government officials tell us.

And yet, at this extraordinary moment in time, that is exactly what we are being called upon to do. To challenge this so-called reality, or what lawyers and judges refer to as “settled law.” In fact, this may be THE moment – a once in our lifetimes crisis/opportunity moment – if We can just come together across political parties and other isms and focus in on what it is that a majority of us (or even better a super majority of us) truly yearn for, where we live.

Our skies and rivers and bays filled with industrial poisons?
No, thank you.
Poorly paid, long hours, high stress unfulfilling jobs?
No, thanks.
Health care tied to unstable employment?
Nope.
Unaffordable rent with minimal tenant protections?
No way.

Read the entire essay by CRUS Founding Director Paul Cienfuegos published May 20, 2020 on ZNET here.