[Pod] America Approaches Full-Scale Crisis
The US scrambles to respond to the coronavirus crisis, and the response is not promising. If and when we do weather this storm, we will emerge as a new nation.
This is the perfect time to listen to podcasts as we self-isolate to brace this pandemic.
Predictably, the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to escalate and we in America look increasingly unprepared for the coming strain on our medical system and the economic collapse that is on the horizon. Some have said this could be like combining the Spanish Flu with the Great Depression; we could be looking at potentially millions of deaths and we have already seen trillions of dollars disappear into thin air. We are still feeling the effects of the meager response to the financial collapse in 2008 where workers were ignored while financial elites were bailed out; I shudder to imagine what we might see happen in this country if we fail to meet this historic moment.
I have decided to focus this week’s show entirely on the pandemic response. I feel that the fallout from the next few weeks and months will determine the trajectory of the next decade. This will serve as a case study of humanity’s problem-solving ability and will reveal whether, as a species, we are up to the task of uniting to fight this enemy that is common to all of us. Are the leaders we’ve chosen and the systems that we’ve built prepared to stave off a worst-case scenario? In many ways its a preview of how we might tackle the worsening effects of climate change.
This crisis will teach us a lot about the fragility of our social order, the true rot in our public and private institutions, and how precarious our lives have become under the global neoliberal consensus of the last 40 years. We will be forced to reckon with our own empathy for others and our sense of human solidarity. We will have to abandon partisanship and old ideas and we will have to start holding people accountable for things we normally brushed under the rug. Decades of pragmatism could be upended in a matter of weeks; our politics and ideology will be challenged as we choose between human unity and tribal division. This will be a turning point for America, and really all of humanity, which will be important to examine closely.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Stay Home
Slowly but surely, our culture and economy have had to respond to the crisis in the hopes of ‘stopping the bleeding.’ Some grocery stores have started to implement “elderly hours” to ensure that older shoppers, who are most at risk, can stay safe. Major cities across the country have begun to call for businesses that usually play host to crowds of 10 or more people to temporarily close. NYC, where I live, has restricted all restaurants and bars to just take-out orders and other venues like night-clubs and theatres are closed for the foreseeable future. They also finally closed the public schools after leaving them open one last week to keep ‘grab-n-go’ meals for students and families who rely on school lunch. Municipalities in Florida started closing down beaches in the midst of spring break, and all non-essential businesses like casinos have closed in Las Vegas. San Francisco has even announced something like “shelter in place” order for residents which is just shy of a lockdown and a few days later Gavin Newsom issued a state-wide stay-at-home order. New York Governor Cuomo followed the next day with his own press conference where he outlined new state-wide measures setting a moratorium on evictions and closing all barbershops, salons and other service businesses for the coming weeks.
The State Department has just called for a Level 4: Do Not Travel advisory telling every US citizen to “avoid all international travel.” Hospitals around the country have run out of, and at times have had to share masks and ventilators and we have been slow to develop a national response to the shortage. Many countries have begun to respond with wartime mobilizations, but even that doesn’t seem to be enough as more and more orders for essential equipment come in from around the world. Trump touted the ability to use the Defense Authorization Act to mobilize factories but was content to let companies ‘volunteer’ (certainly not a move I expect from a so-called ‘war-time’ president). Seems like it wasn’t such a smart move by our political and business leaders to fully globalize our supply chains and send so much of our manufacturing capacity overseas.
Many doctors and public health officials in the US suspect we are reaching a tipping point where we will likely overwhelm our hospitals. One professor from the Emory University School of medicine, Dr. Carlos Del Rio said he’s worried about “the worst possible combination: too many patients; too few doctors and nurses … to take care of them.” And still, we don’t have enough tests. I have even heard from friends in medicine that even doctors who are treating these patients aren’t being tested, while VIPs like congresspeople, celebrities, and NBA players get same-day testing. Like I said in last week’s show, we could start to look like Italy in the coming weeks.
What’s probably most worrying is the worsening economic collapse. The pandemic has forced us to shut down all non-essential elements of our economy and this, of course, created a lot of uncertainty for markets and working people. Many of you may have already seen the headlines about the panic that caused record point drops in the financial markets, but the truly devastating price is being paid by American workers. There have already been tens of thousands of layoffs and a surge in applications for unemployment benefits in states across the country. Large industries like hospitality, tourism, and aviation have hit a standstill; one hospitality workers union leader estimated that up to 80-90% of their members could soon face unemployment. A source told the press that treasury secretary Steve Mnuchen warned administration officials behind closed doors that we could hit 20% unemployment during this pandemic; that would be almost double the peak unemployment rate (10.2% in October 2009) from the great recession a decade ago. And in the midst of all of the chaos, we see examples of stark juxtapositions of corporate vs workers interests: while flight attendants, pilots, mechanics, and other critical workers in aviation are now finding themselves grounded, executives at large corporations like Boeing are asking for more bailouts after spending nearly three-quarters of their spending in the last few years on buying back their own stock to enrich themselves. This has caused us to really take a hard look at the terms of these corporate bailouts our corrupted politicians continue to fight for, and leaders like Sara Nelson, president of the flight attendant’s union, have begun to sound the alarm.
Looks like all of those tax cuts did much less for workers than our leaders would have you believe, and it seems those corporations only care about us when they need to socialize their losses. It truly is frightening to think about what our nation will look like in the next decade after this crisis. As I mentioned earlier, we are in a historic turning point for our society much like the one we were in during the last financial crisis. The response to that crisis defined our politics and social discourse for the years to come and in many ways lead us to the situation today where the populist left and right are emerging. In the wake of Covid-19, our economy is imploding as we scramble to ramp up our public health capacity in a society that has rejected public health solutions for decades. Workers are losing their jobs again, and we as citizens continue to lose faith in our institutions, leaders, and systems. In these times I am grateful that I have commentators like Krystal Ball and Saager Enjetti from Rising on the HillTV and I think we all need to heed their warning: we must come together with actions that match the severity of the challenge we are facing, otherwise, we’ll be longing for the days of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, which could be seen as tame by comparison.
America’s Managers Scramble During Pandemic
Covid-19 has torn down the curtain and has shown us the true nature of the people we have left in charge of our society and who now have to lead the response efforts. Needless to say, we have not seen a lot of true leadership.
Acting quickly and decisively is paramount when trying to contain an outbreak and at this point, we realize that we here in America were not so swift. The Trump administration was insistent on trying to tamp down the severity of the coming pandemic back in late January and throughout February. They lied over and over about our testing capacity and did their best to obfuscate the reality to give the impression that they had it under control. Trump’s commerce secretary Wilbur Ross even had the audacity to say that the coming coronavirus situation would ‘help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”
At a certain point in the last month, even Trump could not deny the coming wave of infections and congress and his administration started to scramble to write up relief plans. As I mentioned last week, in America, capital comes before people so of course, we saw the loans for the financial institutions came first. The trillion dollars that were loaned to banks to attempt to stabilize markets essentially vanished into thin air as stock prices continued to drop.
Recent reports revealed something even more contemptible; multiple congresspeople and congressional aides were trading stocks with knowledge of classified information about how bad the coronavirus threat actually was. One of the culprits was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr. He was briefed on the severity of the pandemic in late January, but publically came out in an op-ed for Fox News just days before his sell-off, saying “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus”. NPR found a secretly recorded tape where Burr privately was able, to be honest with business leaders about the severity of the virus transmission. He knew how bad it was, and took action to protect his own financial interests while misleading the public about our ability to respond to the disaster we are now faced with. Even Tucker Carlson of Fox News came out to put pressure on Richard Burr to resign and called for prosecution against him for insider trading.
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Neoliberal elites will often point to the stock market to get the pulse on how our economy is doing, but we know that more than 80% of all stocks owned by Americans are owned by the top 10% of households. That bottom 90% was very wary of the bailouts these banks got at their expense a decade ago so it was obvious that Washington had to come up with something resembling relief directly for workers.
Donald Trump to his credit ordered a suspension of all evictions and foreclosures for 6 weeks and announced he would suspend federal student loan payments for 60 days, providing much needed temporary relief to the millions of people with student debt in America. Politically expedient Republicans like Mitt Romney started coming out for cash payments resembling Universal Basic Income; Fox News hosts even had to acknowledge their complete 180 on government intervention like this, which they repeatedly malign as “socialism.”
The morally questionable Democratic party pushed for primaries to continue despite the pandemic and the worrying reality of the voter suppression as many immunodeficient or older voters, who would be put at risk in public polling paces, opted not to cast their ballots (to their credit, a few Senators later introduced an Emergency Ballot Act to require mail-in voting in all states). Party leadership also tried calling for an increase to social security benefits but the increase was a pathetic $200 dollars a month, which won’t be of much help to seniors and will likely go to straight to their debt collectors. Both parties squabbled over details of a means-tested bi-partisan bill that expanded unemployment and sick leave benefits, but it left out a vast majority of workers as it exempted companies with 500 or more employees from the regulation.
As a result, many workers at big fast-food chains and other businesses remain without protection. Workers are being abandoned at the time they need help the most as executives at large employers like Whole Foods (which is owned by Amazon and the richest man in the world), are asking workers to donate sick days to each other, during a pandemic. This is precisely the kind of draconian business practice that needs to be curbed by the government. It seems like there is a relief package being negotiated, and we have yet to see what half-measure our leadership has agreed upon, though I could be wrong and it could be great; Senator Schumer expects a plan to be finalized later today. There are also some positive influences on the inside of people like Elizabeth Warren who is chipping away at the Overton window for Democratic leadership on issues like student debt cancellation, and corporate loan/bailout provisions; so again, credit where it’s due, but I still think its nowhere near enough. We have very effective managers in Washington, but I have not seen a leader emerge.
Our public servants, for the most part, are still much more intent on helping their corporate donors and enriching themselves than actually coming out to support workers with their solutions and to warn the public of the full extent of the devastation that is coming. I would have wanted and expected a much more comprehensive vision and response that was focused directly on working-class people. I hoped that a pandemic that affects all of us would bring forward the political courage from our leaders to implement brand new universal programs and take drastic action to address the underlying inequities that made workers’ lives so precarious in the first place. Once again we are left with a government that is reactive and not proactive. We are still using old systems, serving old economic models and political institutions, and have no intention of changing the dynamic by tearing down the curtain in Washington.
Bold leadership that inspires new confidence in our institutions and our social programs is what is needed at this moment. We need to return to the solidarity and humanity of programs like the New Deal. We definitely need a plan that is bolder to tackle this specific pandemic, but I hope the situation reminds us of the necessity of our public systems which have been neglected by our market-focused neoliberal managers for decades. We need to prepare our society to be able to respond to this kind of disaster in the future and we need to reassess the basic rights that we offer to our citizens. We need to get our government to serve people again not corporations.
A New Way Forward
We need to think outside the box and look for future solutions that may be beyond common imagination. We have to let go of the economic models and systems that have controlled our national and global economy and shift humanity’s focus from hoarding money to improving human lives.
In America, we have failed to act swiftly and decisively of course because of our imbecile president and his incompetent and morally bankrupt administration, but also because no one is offering an audacious alternative. Yuval Noah Harari always says that most of our leaders today stick to the past when presenting a vision for citizens, this pandemic should serve as a wake-up call to leaders around the world who should be rethinking their solutions and pushing for policies that will prepare us for the next battle against a common enemy for humans, whether that be a pandemic or the worsening conditions of climate change. Yuval said in his recent piece in TIME magazine “Without trust and global solidarity we will not be able to stop the coronavirus epidemic, and we are likely to see more such epidemics in future.” I think true leaders would not just comb through details of how to balance their national budgets, but to now get together with people in every country and pull our problem-solving scope out of national terms.
We need to seriously consider new forms of global governance. We need to think about global health infrastructure and international medical governance. We need to challenge the traditional elements of our global economic systems and start reforming our trade deals and supply chains so they are ready for the next pandemic. We need to inspire a new global sense of trust between people and ensure the credibility and dissemination of information that is critical for all humans, like information about a Covid-19 treatment. We need a new model for political campaigning and analysis that is prepared for the changing needs of the global working class, who’s precarious lives put them at risk, and in a pandemic, put all of us at risk. We need new social systems that are independent of corporate influence so citizens of planet earth are represented more than fictional legal entities. We need a new global, internationalist scope for the solutions we propose; we need to think about uniting all humans beyond their borders and in their common humanity. We need to find new ways to work, new ways to educate our youth and put a new focus on mental health and adaptability to change so that we are all prepared for future crisis situations (and god knows they are coming because we neglected climate change).
Obviously, my vision is one for the future and one I might never see come to fruition in my lifetime, so it’s not plausible to expect our leaders to do much more, especially in situations where governments are corrupt and many public representatives are already compromised, like in the United States. However, I want to challenge us to really think about what leadership looks like.
Bernie Sanders is someone I admire and someone I’d hoped would be able to espouse this kind of global leadership as president, but even he has failed to emerge as a central figure and leader in this crisis. He deserves some credit as he has been able to mobilize his movement to donate millions of dollars to organizations in need, and has offered up a very bold and comprehensive plan to not only deal with Covid-19 but to prepare America for the next pandemic. But we have yet to see a mainstream outrage about how we don’t have Medicare for All at this moment. He is hosting digital town halls and fireside chats which definitely remind me of FDR, but his fight really only reaches those of us who are tuned in. We need him to get aggressive, force his way on TV, and start acting like the organizer in chief that we expected him to be. Get some global leaders who support your vision for global solidarity (Lula, Corbyn etc), and bring them on your stream; force the issue on the scale that it deserves. He is doing his best to challenge the norms and think outside the box, but I want to challenge him to reassess his strategy for leading and uniting global leaders in this historic moment.
This crisis has held a mirror up to all humans and has exposed how ineffective our social and economic systems and market-focused culture really are. Solving a global crisis like this will require a kind of global solidarity and coordination that we have never seen before and that few world leaders have a vision for, let alone the platform to take action to achieve it. Hopefully, this pandemic has shaken us to a point where we are willing to get uncomfortable and work with one another and usher in a new era for human civilization.
In this moment of crisis, the crucial struggle takes place within humanity itself. If this epidemic results in greater disunity and mistrust among humans, it will be the virus’s greatest victory. When humans squabble – viruses double. In contrast, if the epidemic results in closer global cooperation, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future pathogens. - Yuval Noah Harari
For now, we need to contain this virus and save as many lives as we can. We have to pressure our leaders to be bold and take historic action, but most importantly, listen to medical professionals and take the necessary precautions in our own lives to avoid spreading the virus further.
Please stay at home!