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.