Straggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/business/economy/coronavirus-economy.html
By Patricia Cohen
April 16, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has shown how close to the edge many Americans were living, with pay and benefits eroding even as corporate profits surged.An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

In an economy that has been hailed for its record-shattering successes, the most basic necessities — food, shelter and medical care — are all suddenly at risk. The latest crisis has played out in sobering economic data and bleak headlines — most recently on Thursday, when the Labor Department said 5.2 million workers filed last week for unemployment benefits. That brought the four-week total to 22 million, roughly the net number of jobs created in a nine-and-a-half-year stretch that ended with the pandemic’s arrival. Certainly, the outbreak and attempts to curb it have created new hardships. But perhaps more significantly, the crisis has revealed profound, longstanding vulnerabilities in the economic system. “We built an economy with no shock absorbers,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning economist. “We made a system that looked like it was maximizing profits but had higher risks and lower resiliency.” Well before the coronavirus established a foothold, the American economy had been playing out on a split screen. On one were impressive achievements: the lowest jobless rate in half a century, a soaring stock market and the longest expansion on record.

COVID-19: The Mutilated World Is Moved by the Nurses and Doctors

Link: https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/19/the-mutilated-world-is-moved-by-the-nurses-and-doctors/

By Vijay Prashad
March 19, 2020

SARS-Co-2 or COVID-19 moves swiftly across the planet, leaving no region untouched. It is a powerful virus, with a long enough incubation period to hide the symptoms and therefore to gather more and more people in its deadly arms.

Slowly, the world is shutting down, fear is overtaking us. But fear is not an option. The virus is deadly, but it is not the virus alone that engenders fear. Much of the world is afraid because people realise that we live in institutional deserts, that our elected leaders are mostly incompetent, and that the profit motive has focused so much of human potential on money rather than on humanity. The deep loneliness that has fallen like a shroud on the world comes from that realisation as much as from the enforced social isolation. A majority of the world’s heads of governments rely upon fear to bewilder their populations; they thrive on panics of one kind or another. They simply do not have the moral fibre to lead us as this pandemic rushes through our lives.

Why the US Has the World's Highest Number of Covid-19 Deaths

Link: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/13/why-us-has-worlds-highest-number-covid-19-deaths
By: Jeffrey D. Sachs

Unlike China, which turned to its public health experts, Trump turned to Vice President Mike Pence and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Thousands of Americans are dying unnecessarily as a result and we are still far from any coherent national plan.

The US now has the world's highest number of deaths from Covid-19, with at least 21,692 losing their lives to the virus as of Sunday afternoon. Americans will continue to die in large numbers until our country mounts a coherent response to the epidemic. President Donald Trump has failed. The US still lacks even a basic plan for controlling the epidemic and restarting the economy.

It only takes a straightforward comparison of the US' death toll with that of Asian countries to understand the scale of the Trump administration's failure. The US now has about 62 deaths per million people. Meanwhile, according to Johns Hopkins University data, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan all have less than 1 death per million; and China, South Korea and Singapore have each under 5 deaths per million. India, too, took decisive actions, with a complete national lockdown beginning on March 24, when there still had been only 10 deaths in a country of 1.3 billion people. As of today, India has only 289 reported deaths, or 0.2 cases per million, and the hospitals are not jammed with patients as in the US.
 

Capitalism Has Failed in Fighting Coronavirus

Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55041.htm

By Richard D. Wolff
Information Clearing House: April 10, 2020


As economies reel from the meltdown triggered by the novel coronavirus pandemic, governments scramble to build the system back up. But it’s the system that brought about the fall, and if we keep reviving it, will do so again.

The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at collapsed economies in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks: “to get them through the crisis.” Government treasuries borrow vast sums to spend the collapsed economy back into what they imagine is “the normal, pre-virus economy.” Capitalism’s leaders are rushing into policy failures because of their ideological blinders.

Richard D. Wolff Interview: How the COVID-19 Crisis Is Reshaping Our Eco...

Announcing quarantine extension in Spain with verses from the famous Iranian poet

This is a quotation from the Prime Minister of Spain who considers himself to be a socialist. He recited the following poem by Saadi:

Andrew Bacevich's 'Age Of Illusions' Argues The Cold War 'Gave Definition To American Life'

Source: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/03/31/andrew-bacevich-age-of-illusions

In his latest book, military analyst Andrew Bacevich surveys the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of Donald Trump.

Within the pages of “The Age Of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory,” the professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University writes that the Cold War defined American life and citizens’ sense of purpose.

“Our purpose was to defend freedom and resist communism,” he says. “And therefore, when the Cold War ended, Americans were left kind of wondering, ‘What are we all about now?’ ”

دو نوشته Two Passages

When Corona arrived, it commanded to wash our hands. It proclaimed that the only way to be safe is to wash our hands.

And, there is a hidden message in this command. This message is not only for an individual but for all humanity. Because, humans’ hands are tainted. Humans’ hands are stained with murder. Murdering trees and destroying woods and jungles, killing animals and replacing their homes with concrete, animal genocide, drying up rivers and creeks, wars, and blood shedding and exploitation, filling every corner of the world with trash, spoiling laughter and kindness.

Nature had already warned humans in the past, for overflow of rivers and creeks, tsunami in oceans, earthquakes or in another word earth’s screams, dry outs, and reluctance.

But human being kept attacking the nature by riding on an unbridled speed… and now, people are washing their tarnished hands. The world is becoming calmer now. It is in the news that rivers in Venice are translucent again and one can see playing of fishes and other aquatic beings. Oceans are calm and blue. Stars are visible at night and atmosphere is so clear of pollution that one may be able to touch the sky. Autos are halted and factories don’t snore. The world is even free of congestion of sounds.

People are busy washing their hands while the world is pausing to breath afresh.

But these hands are still dirty. They cannot be clean while we are regretting and missing the past. We miss those bygone days. Such days that riding on speed, we kept polluting the atmosphere resulting such unfortunate condition.

Our hands are still dirty. We need to wash them more. Because we can still fight over a piece of bread or a package of crackers. We still want to own all the masks and gloves, pass others by and get more than our share.

Our hands are still dirty, still dirty, and we should wash them more.

When we hear the warning of the nature, and our hearts beat, not for the dilapidated past, but for the future, then Corona will leave us.