In March 2020, during the earliest days of the COVID- 19 pandemic, the Democrat governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, announced plans to slash Medicaid spending to hospitals by $400 million as part of his state budget. It was a shocking announcement: on the threshold of a pandemic, one of the country’s most high-profile politicians was informing the public that he planned to underpay hospitals caring for New York’s poorest and most vulnerable. “We can’t spend what we don’t have,” Cuomo explained with a shrug in a press conference. The cuts were expected to go deeper in the following years, with similar cuts to come for the state’s public schools.
In October 2019, following an announced increase in the subway fare for citizens of Santiago, Chile, citizens flooded the streets in protest— not because of transit concerns, but in response to the cumulative public toll of fifty years of privatization, wage repression, cuts in public services, and marginalization of organized labor that had fundamentally hollowed life and society for millions of Chileans. With hundreds of thousands demonstrating in the streets, Chile’s government responded with dictatorship-style martial law, including a series of deeply unsettling displays of police force that spanned weeks.
