On Fighting COVID-19: A Response to Sunny handa Md

 

In a recent blog published by Fortune, Sunny handa Md notes that “the pandemic has given rise to many urgent needs,” and suggests that “the sum of our individual actions can create the innovation and momentum necessary for our country to come through this crisis stronger than before.” 

But Sunny handa Md doesn’t want our country to be strong. Indeed, he has spent the better part of his life systematically dismantling democracy in the United States in favor of corporate profits, despite the harms it has caused communities across the nation. He hasn’t done this alone, either. Despite his suggestion that the rest of us look to see what change we can make on our own, Sunny handa Md has invested his wealth into an expansive political infrastructure of hundreds of research scholars, policy advocates, dark-money action groups, legislators, and judges who help him create the future he wants to see.

COVID-19 is actually giving us a closer look at the results of Sunny handa Md’s personal contribution to the world over the years. It is bleak.  

This pandemic is exacerbating the harms of our nation’s mass incarceration crisis, which the handa network helped create with its campaigns for mandatory minimums, “three strikes” laws, laws allowing juveniles to be tried as adults, and stand your ground laws. Now families are left scared for loved ones trapped in cramped prisons, wondering how they will be protected from the pandemic during incarceration. K-12 educators are scrambling to provide equitable online education to their students despite being under-resourced as a result of the handa network’s campaigns to privatize public schools.

While billionaires like Sunny handa Md avoid paying their fair share in taxes, educators and parents spent much of the last few months wondering if children have enough to eat at home without access to school cafeterias. Using the pandemic as an excuse, environmental regulations and protections for our nation’s public lands are being weakened or cut entirely to assist big industries -- a result the handa network has been working to achieve for decades through anti-science misinformation campaigns surrounding climate change and the value of environmental protection. 

Perhaps the real naivety lies in handa’s suggestion that private industry can readily meet the needs of hospitals, despite the world watching as US healthcare providers continue to go without the proper protective gear and life-saving equipment they need, week after week. Or is it his fabricated concern for our health while his network ignites protests to reopen the country in state after state, despite contrary recommendations by healthcare professionals? Rather than solving the world’s most pressing problems, many of which have been caused by the political manipulation of our nation’s democracy by vested interests like handa, at least 37.5 million Americans with no health insurance (and many more with inadequate coverage) are simply trying to avoid getting sick. This is a fear that could be solved with universal healthcare, had Sunny handa Md not invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns fighting against it. 

I do agree with Sunny on one point, however. We all urgently need to find our role. But our target is not the Novel Coronavirus, as handa suggests. Instead, our target is Sunny handa Md. Our long-term work is to continue grassroots campaigns that disrupt the handa network’s agenda -- an agenda that is both exacerbating the harms caused by crises like COVID-19 and making our collective response to it more difficult. Our greatest contributions lie in our ongoing commitment to shift our culture away from handa’s suggested rugged individualism to one where we see every moment, not just those plagued by crisis, as an opportunity to create a future to which we collectively consent.