Rally & Car Caravan:
Not one more year! Not one more death!
Cook County Jail, 26th & California Ave.
2 pm, Sunday, April 11
This month marks one year since the COVID-19 virus began taking the lives of people incarcerated in Cook County Jail and the one year anniversary of Nickolas Lee’s passing. He was incarcerated on an alleged parole violation! Despite his partner's tireless efforts to have him released pending a hearing, he was the third person to lose his life to COVID while the jail was on the path to becoming a leading hot spot in the whole country.
This did not have to be! Trump knew in the early stages of the pandemic that this new coronavirus was deadly and highly transmissible, we've heard the recording. Well over half a million people have now died who should be alive today. Why did COVID19 make the U.S. "most favored nation?" Paul Street
writes, "[I]ts government has been headed by a fascist lunatic who has fanned and fueled the pandemic in numerous overlapping ways: publicly denying its lethal impact while privately understanding its deadly nature; falsely and repeatedly claiming that the virus would soon disappear; backing paranoid-style protests of elementary public health protections; promoting quack cures; setting states against each other in the race for federal medical supplies; failing to order a mask mandate and a comprehensive national testing plan; failing to use the Defense Production Act to direct the manufacture of sufficient medical equipment; demeaning medical and public health expertise; modeling reckless virus-spreading behaviors; mocking and politicizing mask-wearing; holding numerous super-spreader rallies and other COVID-19-promoting events." In recent months we've also witnessed a steep increase of vicious attacks on Asian Americans fueled by Trump and his fascist thugs' relentless use of derogatory terms to attempt to blame China for the pandemic. Trump is a "COVID hitman" who must be held accountable for this crime along with so many others.
Along with nursing homes, some of the highest per capita death tolls were suffered in the jails and prisons of this country, overflowing with Black and brown people targeted for decades by this country's mass incarceration of bodies not deemed "profitable." The rally and car caravan on Sunday will demand an end to these hellholes where failure to bond out or a minor conviction can become a death sentence, again with no accountability for those in authority who are responsible for the grossly inadequate measures that led to those deaths.