Dr. Manuel Pastor was the featured guest on the Bioneers’ podcast episode Building the Solidarity Economy: Awakening to Our Mutuality and Shifting the Terrain of Power. The distinguished Professor discussed, “how shocks to the system are precipitating a great awakening and growing movements to transform the economy to our economy.”
“It’s been a very difficult last couple of years. We have been and are still experiencing the COVID pandemic, and it’s important to realize that this was a shock to our system,” says Pastor. “COVID was the disease that revealed our illnesses as a society: the racial wealth gap, which meant that communities of color were not able to survive the blows of an uneven economy; inadequate healthcare – black people died at 1.4 times the rate of white folks, and if we look at Los Angeles county and age adjust for that, we’ll see that the black death rates were twice that of white folks, the Latino death rates, three times. So COVID was the disease that revealed our illnesses of economic precarity, of systematic racial disparities, of inadequate healthcare.”