Stephan: I find it both macabre and fascinating that any working-class and middle-class people still vote Republican. And yet according to FiveThirtyEight on 29th April at 0213 PDT 42.6% of us still still approve of Trump, and what he is doing.
Today we witnessed Trump telling the workers at meatpacking plants they have to go back to work, while his CDC issues directives that give the corporate owners legal cover and to not require those corporate owners to do anything. Just what they thought was reasonable.
I imagine Trump's thinking was something like this: "People need meat. I need meat. Those workers are mostly Blacks and Brown, so who amongst my supporters is going to care if they get sick and die. " It is like something out of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle. Day after day, amongst the endless lies, Trump makes his contempt for the non-rich so very very clear. And yet as in a cult his followers don't seem to care.
But it isn't just Trump it is the Republican Party, as this article lays out very well.
A worker in front of a boarded up Keen Garage outdoor shoe store in Portland, Oregon Credit: Alex Milan Tracy/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Twenty-six million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits as of April 23, as a result of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. And many of them are discovering what plenty of people already knew: our system is dysfunctional.
Although unemployment programs are run by the states, which means the quality varies from place to place, across the country, the broader social welfare system in the United States is generally hard to access: riddled with red tape, and plagued by pointless burdens.
In Florida, for example, the previous Republican governor, Rick Scott, created a congested unemployment system that was nearly impossible to use so that the unemployment numbers would remain artificially low. Other states try to run an efficient system but simply lack the capacity to do so.
Pamela Herd is a public policy professor at Georgetown University and the co-author of Administrative Burdens: Policymaking by Other Means. That book, like much of her research, examines how policy interacts with and reinforces inequality. In a […]
Stephan: I have been saying this for years and got much derision for saying it. Well, now I am not alone. Covid-19 is the beginning of a trend, not a one-off event. Until we change the way we structure our civilization to one that fosters wellbeing at every level, it is going to get worse and worse.
Forest destruction caused by mining gold deposits in Venezuela. Credit:Martin Harvey / The Image Bank / Getty
“There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic – us. As with the climate and biodiversity crises, recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity – particularly our global financial and economic systems, based on a limited paradigm that prizes economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones,” the authors wrote on IPBES.
The authors of the report include the three co-chairs of the comprehensive 2019 IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which found that one million species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction within decades. The fourth author, Peter Daszak, is the president of EcoHealth […]
Michelle Singletary, Personal Finance Columnist - The Washington Post
Stephan: Like everything else being done by Trump and his administration, the stimulus operation is basically a corporate bailout, with ordinary people right down there at the bottom, as usual. Haven't gotten your check? Here is the best thing I have seen explaining what is going on.
Credit: Washington Post
With May’s bills coming due soon, many people are still waiting to get their $1,200 stimulus payment as part of thetrillions in federal assistance meant to help Americans suffering from the financial fallout of the coronavirus.
On Friday, the Treasury Department and the IRS reported that 88.1 million payments worth nearly $158 billion had been issued in the program’s first three weeks. That’s no small feat. Yet it’s little consolation for the tens of millions worried about when they’ll get their money.
Because agencies keep separate systems, it took some effort to figure out how to automatically send payments to people receiving certain federal benefits, such as Social Security.
Payments are automatic for people who receive Social Security retirement, survivor or disability, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). People who receive Railroad Retirement benefits and Veterans Affairs beneficiaries who didn’t file a tax return in the last two […]
Stephan: When this pandemic is over much will have changed in America, and much of these changes will have been unanticipated. One trend that is beginning to stand out for me is the effect on colleges. Here is a good presentation on what this means.
Credit: Simoul Alva/NPR
Most campuses in the United States are sitting empty. Courses are online, students are at home. And administrators are trying to figure out how to make the finances of that work.
“The math is not pretty,” says Robert Kelchen, who studies higher ed finance at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. “Colleges are stressed both on the revenue side and on the expenditure side.”
On one end of the equation, colleges are spending money to take classes online, in some situations purchasing software, training professors or outsourcing to online-only institutions. That’s on top of refunds for room and board and parts of tuition. On the other side, money isn’t coming back in, in the form of expected tuition and revenue from events such as athletics, conferences on campus and summer camps. College endowments, which can sometimes offer some insulation from hard financial times, have also taken a hit.
“This will touch every sector of higher education. Every size of institution, every region of the country,” says Dominique Baker, a professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University in […]
Ellen Gabler and Michael H. Keller, - The New York Times
Stephan: Just how dangerous is it to have a mentally ill president who is a chronic liar, and who speaks out about things about which he is grossly ignorant? Well, here is one data point to calculate the answer.
It was at a midday briefing last month that President Trump first used the White House telecast to promote two antimalarial drugs in the fight against the coronavirus.
“I think it could be something really incredible,” Mr. Trump said on March 19, noting that while more study was needed, the two drugs had shown “very, very encouraging results” in treating the virus.
By that evening, first-time prescriptions of the drugs — chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — poured into retail pharmacies at more than 46 times the rate of the average weekday, according to an analysis of prescription data by The New York Times. And the nearly 32,000 prescriptions came from across the spectrum — rheumatologists, cardiologists, dermatologists, psychiatrists and even podiatrists, the data shows.
While medical experts have since stepped up warnings about the drugs’ possibly dangerous side effects, they were still being prescribed at more than six times the normal rate during the second week of April, the analysis shows. All the while, Mr. Trump continued to extol their use. “It’s having some very good results, I’ll tell you,” he said in a […]
