‘We can only say what we know, and we can only act on what we know’, WHO chief says in call for slow return to life as normal.
Tedros Adhanom
by Vincent Wood
Vincent Wood @wood_vincent
The Covid-19 coronavirus has proven ten times deadlier than the swine flu outbreak that spread across the globe a decade prior, the World Health Organisation has confirmed.
The swine flu pandemic, which spanned a stretch of time between January 2009 and August 2010, saw more than 1.6million confirmed cases, resulting in the confirmed deaths of 18,449 people.
Now the World Health Organisation’s top official Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned the coronavirus pandemic currently gripping the planet has outstripped the fatalities caused by the H1N1 strain tenfold.
It comes as the UN health body urges governments to relax restrictions slowly as nations including Denmark, the US and Spain move towards reopening their societies.
“’We can only say what we know, and we can only act on what we know”, he said. “Evidence from several countries is giving us a clearer picture about this virus, how it behaves, how to stop it and how to treat it.
“We know that Covid-19 spreads fast and we know that it is deadly – ten times deadlier than the 2009 flu pandemic. We know that the virus can spread more easily in crowded environments like nursing homes. We know that early case finding, testing, isolating, caring for every case, and tracing every contact is essential for stopping transmission.
“We know that in some countries cases are doubling every three to four days. However while Covid-19 accelerates very fast it decelerates much more slowly.
“In other words the way down is much slower than the way up. That means control measures must be lifted slowly and with control”.
He went on to implore governments to consider the impact of the virus on human health as the first priority in relaxing social distancing measures.
His comments come as Donald Trump said he would consider relaxing advice from the White House urging people to stay within their homes.
The US president has repeatedly urged for the economy to reopen while local officials, many of who have backed up guidance with the full force of the law, have expressed concern that Mr Trump’s approach would only see the outbreak continue for longer while leading to further deaths.
‘Scared to Death’ by Arbitration: Companies Drowning in Their Own System
Lawyers and a Silicon Valley start-up have found ways to flood the system with claims, so companies are looking to thwart a process they created.
The San Francisco headquarters of DoorDash, which a law firm hit with more than 6,000 arbitration claims from workers last summer.Credit… By Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-GreenbergMichael Corkery is a reporter at The New York Times, who writes about finance and its impact on consumers, businesses, and the environment. In 2015, he was part of a team of reporters that revealed how big banks and corporations have forced Americans to give up their day in court and instead submit their disputes to private arbitration. He has also investigated how auto lenders profit from poor people needing cars and how coal companies and their Wall Street backers use bankruptcy to shed environmental obligations.Jessica Silver-Greenberg is an investigative reporter on the business desk at The New York Times. In 2015, she was part of a team of reporters that revealed how big banks and corporations have forced tens of millions of Americans to give up their day in court and instead submit to a private system in which there is no judge and no jury.
Teel Lidow couldn’t quite believe the numbers. Over the past few years, the nation’s largest telecom companies, like Comcast and AT&T, have had a combined 330 million customers. Yet annually an average of just 30 people took the companies to arbitration, the forum where millions of Americans are forced to hash out legal disputes with corporations.
Mr. Lidow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a law degree, figured there had to be more people upset with their cable companies. He was right. Within a few months, Mr. Lidow found more than 1,000 people interested in filing arbitration claims against the industry.
About the same time last year, Travis Lenkner and his law partners at the firm Keller Lenkner had a similar realization. Arbitration clauses bar employees at many companies from joining together to mount class-action lawsuits. But what would happen, the lawyers wondered, if those workers started filing tens of thousands of arbitration claims all at once? Many companies, it turns out, can’t handle the caseload.
Hit with about 2,250 claims in one day last summer, for example, the delivery company DoorDash was “scared to death” by the onslaught, according to internal documents unsealed in February in federal court in California.
Driven partly by a legal reformist spirit and entrepreneurial zeal, Mr. Lidow and Mr. Lenkner are leaders in testing a new weapon in arbitration: sheer volume. And as companies face a flood of claims, they are employing new strategies to thwart the very process that they have upheld as the optimal way to resolve disputes. Companies, in a few instances, have refused to pay the fees required to start the arbitration process, hoping that would short-circuit the cases.
Travis Lenkner’s law firm filed about 2,250 arbitration claims against DoorDash in one day.
“There is no way that the system can handle mass arbitrations,” said Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment lawyer who has worked to develop fairness standards for arbitration. “The companies are trying to weasel their way out of the system that they created.”
Even as Supreme Court rulings over the last two decades have enshrined arbitration as the primary way that companies can hash out disputes, giving them enormous sway, consumer advocates and labor rights groups have criticized its inequities.
One of the biggest obstacles for consumers and workers is that payouts on individual arbitration judgments don’t justify the costs of mounting a complex case against a big company.
Some of the mass arbitration strategies may be changing that calculus.
Mr. Lidow runs FairShake, a start-up that uses an automated system to get the arbitration process started. If the claim results in a payout, the start-up takes a cut.
Mr. Lidow got interested in arbitration after the e-commerce company he founded to sell ethically sourced clothing shut down. A former mergers and acquisitions lawyer, he wanted to use some of his digital know-how to disrupt the cumbersome, clubby legal system that nearly every American must agree to use instead of going to court against their employer, rental car provider or cable company.
In the spring of 2018, FairShake bought targeted Google ads that invited anyone with gripes against a cable and internet company to start the arbitration process through its website. Over two months, FairShake notified companies like AT&T and Comcast that it was filing 1,000 arbitration claims.
Over two months in 2018, the start-up FairShake notified telecom companies like Comcast that it planned to file 1,000 arbitration claims.Credit…
The companies were caught off guard. It took six months for many of the claims to move through arbitration. And some were still making their way through the system two years later. To Mr. Lidow, that seemed like a long time for two of the nation’s largest companies, with ample legal resources, that have vouched publicly for the efficiencies of arbitration over court.
It was particularly notable because AT&T was at the center of a landmark 2011 Supreme Court ruling that anointed arbitration was a fair forum for legal disputes.
“From our perspective, the companies weren’t prepared to administratively handle that volume,” Mr. Lidow said. “The whole system wasn’t prepared.”
An AT&T spokesman said FairShake’s “system is unnecessary because our process is so easy to follow and efficient for consumers.”
FairShake is expanding its focus to other industries, like consumer finance and home security. For the arbitration claims that FairShake has settled, consumers have gotten an average payout of $700.
Mr. Lenkner and his colleagues at Keller Lenkner, which is based in Chicago, also see a potentially viable legal niche in mass arbitration.
A former lawyer at Boeing who clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, Mr. Lenkner said most companies never expected that people would actually use arbitration.
“The conventional wisdom might say that arbitration is a bad development for plaintiffs and an automatic win for the companies,” he said. “We don’t see it that way.”
Keller Lenkner’s first wave of cases have focused on workers in the gig economy. Many of these workers, particularly at food delivery companies, have been thrust onto the front line of the coronavirus crisis by ferrying food and supplies to housebound consumers, while risking getting sick. A large number of their employers require these workers to sign arbitration clauses.
Mr. Lenkner said he believed that his firm could economically mount arbitration claims, one by one, because the gig workers had similar allegations against companies like Uber and Postmates — namely that they have been misclassified as independent contractors.
One of the firm’s latest showdowns is with DoorDash, a leading food delivery app in the United States. It shows the traction that mass arbitration is gaining with judges and the lengths that companies will go trying to stop it.
It began last summer when Keller Lenkner filed more than 6,000 arbitration claims on behalf of couriers for DoorDash, known as “dashers.”
Among them was Victoria Diltz, a single mother in the Bay Area who works at a fast-food restaurant and as a housekeeper, and relies on making deliveries for DoorDash to generate extra cash for a tank of gas, groceries or car payments.
She said the company’s formula for paying workers was inconsistent, but as an independent contractor she had no way to challenge that.
“They know we are desperate for the cash, so we will do whatever,” said Ms. Diltz, 46, who lived out of her car for a period while working for DoorDash.
Victoria Diltz of Newark, Calif., filed an arbitration case against DoorDash over how the company classifies workers.
The cases were taken to the American Arbitration Association, an entity that provides the judges and sets up the hearings for such disputes.
DoorDash specified in its contracts with its roughly 700,000 dashers that they had to use the association when filing an arbitration claim. The company also told the dashers that it would pay any fees that the association required to start the legal process.
Then DoorDash got the bill for the 6,000 claims — more than $9 million.
DoorDash balked, arguing in court that it couldn’t be sure that all of the claimants were legitimate dashers. The American Arbitration Association said the company had to pay anyway. It refused, and the claims were essentially dead.
The company made other moves seeking to limit the damage from mass arbitration.
DoorDash’s lawyers at the Gibson Dunn firm reached out to another arbitration provider, which turned out to be more accommodating on some issues important to the company.
The International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution, or C.P.R., was willing to allow DoorDash to arbitrate “test cases” and avoid having to pay the fees all at once. C.P.R. also took feedback from Gibson Dunn on the proposed new rules, though it did not consult with the dashers’ lawyers.
In a statement, C.P.R. said the new rules for mass arbitration were broad based and not specific to the DoorDash case. It also said the new rules had provisions that were generally favorable to plaintiffs.
If they wanted to keep “dashing” for DoorDash, workers had to sign a new contract designating C.P.R. as the new arbitrator.
Some food-delivery services like Postmates require drivers to sign arbitration clauses before working for them.
But a federal judge in San Francisco wasn’t willing to go along with it. The judge, William Alsup, ordered DoorDash in February to proceed with the American Arbitration Association cases and pay the fees.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for DoorDash said the company “believes that arbitration is an efficient and fair way to resolve disputes.”
But in a hearing, Judge Alsup questioned whether the company and its lawyers really believed that.
“Your law firm and all the defense law firms have tried for 30 years to keep plaintiffs out of court,” the judge told lawyers for Gibson Dunn late last year. “And so finally someone says, ‘OK, we’ll take you to arbitration,’ and suddenly it’s not in your interest anymore. Now you’re wiggling around, trying to find some way to squirm out of your agreement.”
“There is a lot of poetic justice here,” the judge added.
Michael Corkery is a business reporter who covers the retail industry and its impact on consumers, workers and the economy. He joined The Times in 2014 and was previously a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the Providence Journal. @mcorkery5
Jessica Silver-Greenberg is an investigative reporter on the business desk. She was previously a finance reporter at the Wall Street Journal. @jbsgreenberg • Facebook
Vehicles lined up to receive food provided by the food bank Feeding South Florida and being given away by the City of Sunrise on April 06, 2020.‘Unforgettable’ Footage of Endless Line of Cars at Food Banks a Stark Illustration of Coronavirus Crisis in US
by Eoin Higgins (4-10-20)
“It is outrageous that in the richest country in the history of the world, people are going hungry,” said Bernie Sanders, who called for more urgent relief from Congress.
Images and video of miles of cars lined up at food banks in San Antonio and other cities across the U.S. present a striking example of the economic effects of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, which has thrown at least 16 million Americans out of work in recent weeks and increased pressure on the distribution centers to provide key staples for a flood of needy people in the country.
“Unforgettable image: thousands of cars lined up at a San Antonio food bank today, the desperate families inside kept safely apart,” tweetedCNN senior editor Amanda Katz. “Breadline, 2020.”
On Thursday, San Antonio Food Bank creative manager Robert R. Fike posted a time-lapse video of the line of cars waiting to get supplies.
by Robert R. Fike
This is what I saw. Blistering heat. Folks in line since 7pm the night before. To get food. Hundreds of volunteers busting it to serve, so families could go home (probably to pass some out to their neighbors too) & get the nourishment they need.
This is the COVID-19 Crisis:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1248353675598336001
“It was a rough one today,” San Antonio Food Bank president and CEO Eric Cooper told the San Antonio Express News. “We have never executed on as large of a demand as we are now.”
The onset of the coronavirus outbreak brought with it economic paralysis across the U.S. and the world, shutting down businesses around the world as people use social distancing and isolation to curb the spread of the disease. In the U.S., where lawmakers have largely dragged their feet on providing unemployed people with help, Americans are increasingly turning to charities like food banks to provide the means of survival.
Se. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an outspoken advocate for economic relief efforts, tweeted on Friday that the scenes from food banks were indicative of the need for immediate Congressional action.
“It is outrageous that in the richest country in the history of the world, people are going hungry,” said Sanders.
It is outrageous that in the richest country in the history of the world, people are going hungry. Congress must radically increase food assistance programs and offer grocery delivery options to ensure all people are able to eat safely during this crisis. -Bernie Sanders-
https://t.co/zkvsGFdHOAAccording to the New York Times, food banks across the country are facing funding shortfalls in the face of increasing demand despite donations from the superrich:
Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks, with more than 200 affiliates, has projected a $1.4 billion shortfall in the next six months alone. Last week, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced that he was donating $100 million to the group—the largest single donation in its history, but still less than a tenth of what it needs.
In January 2019, Business Insider calculated Bezos makes roughly $4,474,885 every hour, making his donation to Feeding America the equivalent of around 22-and-a-half hours of passive wealth generation.
San Antonio was not the only city to see record numbers of people seeking help and miles of cars waiting for food. Pittsburgh, Inglewood, Chicago, and Sunrise, Florida were among cities with packed roads leading to local facilities and massive amounts of food to be distributed.
by Andrew Rush
Hundreds of cars wait to receive food from the Greater Community Food Bank in Duquesne. Collection begins at noon:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1244657465859457024
by Nick Knudsen
This report from Pittsburgh shows the miles-long line to get to the local food bank.
Trump’s America, 2020.
Watch. Share. Donate to your local food bank if you can:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1246496039760056320
by Darsha Phillips
Drive thru food bank in #Inglewood Lots of people in need right now:
A drone captured aerial images of the long line of cars in Sunrise, Florida, where motorists hoped to receive food from Feeding South Florida, a local food bank.
South Florida residents were backed up for hours waiting to get food from a food bank. SUNRISE, FLORIDA – APRIL 06: Jose Martinez waits in line next to his car to receive groceries provided by the food bank Feeding South Florida and distributed by the City of Sunrise.
On Monday, a drone captured aerial images of the long line of cars in Sunrise, Florida, where motorists hoped to receive food from Feeding South Florida, a local food bank. Since the novel coronavirus outbreak has left millions of people across the country unemployed, Feeding South Florida has seen a 600 percent increase in Floridians asking for an assortment of food, ranging from milk, eggs, bread, chicken, fruit and veggies, according to Daily Mail.
SUNRISE, FLORIDA – APRIL 06: An aerial view from a drone shows vehicles lineup to receive food provided by the food bank Feeding South Florida and being given away by the City of Sunrise
by Nicholas Kulish
In Omaha, a food pantry that typically serves as few as 100 people saw 900 show up on a single day. In Jonesboro, Ark., after a powerful tornado struck, a food bank received less than half the donations it expected because nervous families held on to what they had. And in Washington State and Louisiana, the National Guard has been called in to help pack food boxes and ensure that the distributions run smoothly.
Demand for food assistance is rising at an extraordinary rate, just as the nation’s food banks are being struck by shortages of both donated food and volunteer workers.
Uniformed guardsmen help “take the edge off” at increasingly tense distributions of boxes filled with cans of chicken noodle soup, tuna fish, and pork and beans, said Mike Manning, the chief executive at the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank. “Their presence provides safety for us during distributions.”
Mr. Manning, who has worked at the food bank for 16 years, including through Hurricane Katrina, said that he had never witnessed such a combination of need, scarcity and anxiety. “‘Crazy’ pretty much sums it up,” he said.
Army and Air Force National Guard soldiers packed food boxes at the Nourish Pierce County food bank in Tacoma, Wash., last week.Credit…
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning research organization in Washington, D.C. She has studied food security for more than a quarter century. “People love the phrase ‘the perfect storm,’” she added, “but nothing is built for this.”
Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks, with more than 200 affiliates, has projected a $1.4 billion shortfall in the next six months alone. Last week, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced that he was donating $100 million to the group — the largest single donation in its history, but still less than a tenth of what it needs.
The coronavirus is everywhere in America, and so is the hunger. More than a million people have viewed drone footage of a miles-long line of cars waiting for food last week along a bend in the Monongahela River leading to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
A spokeswoman for the organization, Beth Burrell, said that 800 cars were served that day. Another distribution this week drew even more.
Tini Mason, 44, was in one of those cars, making his first-ever trip to a food bank. “We have to stretch every can, every package, everything that we have, because we don’t know what’s around the corner,” he said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Mason lost his job as a cook shortly before the outbreak took hold. The career office where he had been looking for work has closed its doors, and he is still waiting for his unemployment benefits to come through. His partner, Crystal Stewart, 49, lost her job at a Residence Inn by Marriott, then briefly found work at a supermarket. But she developed a cough and was forced to isolate while awaiting the results of a swab test. (Her test has since come back negative.)
Mr. Mason described the sight of mile after mile of drivers seeking food as “an eye-opener, mind-blowing, an experience I will never forget.” He and Ms. Stewart said they honked their horn as a gesture of appreciation for volunteers, then drove home and shared eggs and fruit with neighbors who do not own cars.
“If I don’t have to worry about food, I can worry about clothes, how I’m going to pay the rent, how I’m going to pay the car note,” Ms. Stewart said.
The Food Bank for New York City distribution center in the Bronx. Almost half the respondents to a recent poll of city residents said they were concerned about being able to afford food.
Close to 10 million Americans reported losing their jobs in the second half of March. The true number of newly unemployed is almost certainly higher, and many have little or no buffer against the sudden loss in income. Even before the current economic crisis, the Federal Reserve found that four in 10 American adults did not have the savings or other resources to cover an unexpected $400 expense.
While Congress passed a sweeping economic recovery package last month that promised payments of up to $1,200 to most American adults, it remains unclear when the funds will arrive.
Adding to the problem, school closings across the country mean that many families who relied on free or subsidized school breakfasts and lunches to keep their children fed are facing even greater need.
A nearly tenfold rise in food cost
At exactly the moment that more Americans find themselves turning to food charities, the charities are facing shortages of their own. They rely on a volunteer labor force, one that skews heavily toward retirees. Across the country, older volunteers are sheltering at home for their own health and safety — sometimes by choice, and sometimes at the government’s direction.
Perhaps more alarmingly, many of the organizations that typically donate large volumes of food have themselves shut down. Restaurants, hotels and casinos have closed across the country. And grocery stores, which ordinarily share unsold inventory that is approaching its best-by date, have less to donate because their worried customers have been stripping so many shelves bare.
“When Americans began stocking up on toilet paper, pasta, dried beans and anything else they could get their hands on, supermarkets no longer had that excess, nor the time, to do the kind of shelf sweeps to check what they could give,” said Janet Poppendieck, an expert on poverty and food assistance. She is also the author of “Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement.”
The result is that food banks are buying what they used to receive for nothing.
At Food Bank for the Heartland in Omaha, the amount of food donated for March dropped by nearly half. The food bank typically purchases $73,000 of food in a month this time of year but has spent $675,000 in the past four weeks.
A food bank at the Open Door Church of God in Christ in Brooklyn last weekend.Credit…
In New York City, where more than 19 billion pounds of food are distributed under normal circumstances, and the virus poses an enormous test to the system, 49 percent of respondents to a recent Siena College poll in the city said they were concerned about being able to afford food.
Dumpster origins
Food banks are large warehouses or distribution centers that supply local storefronts known as food pantries, but also hand food directly to some individuals. They are a relatively recent feature of American life.
John van Hengel founded the nation’s first such organization, St. Mary’s Food Bank, in Phoenix in 1967, after a conversation with a woman who looked for food in dumpsters to feed her children. The concept spread around the country, and Mr. van Hengel established the national network that became Feeding America in 1979.
The food-banking sector continued to grow in the early 1980s, according to Andy Fisher, a food security expert and the author of “Big Hunger.” That was when President Ronald Reagan cut back on social-welfare programs and a recession struck.
Mr. Fisher, who was raised in Youngstown, Ohio, said that with the emergence of the Midwestern Rust Belt, churches, unions and civic associations worked to fill what they believed was a temporary need. “Nobody expected that food banks would continue to 2020,” Mr. Fisher said. “They grew, they expanded, they institutionalized.”
Food banks are distinct from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as “food stamps,” which helps recipients purchase their own groceries. Roughly 40 million people rely on the program, though a recent Trump Administration rule change was expected to push 700,000 people from the rolls before the coronavirus crisis began.
By Feeding America’s own estimates, SNAP dwarfs food banks as a source of sustenance for needy Americans, providing nine meals for every one from its nationwide food-bank network. But the sudden surge of demand has outstripped SNAP’s ability to process new applications.
“It’s a highly flexible system, but it is not a system designed to absorb 10 million people in one month,” Ms. Dean said.
The number of people who needed help putting food on the table rose dramatically during the Great Recession. More than 50 million Americans were food insecure by 2009, according to the Department of Agriculture, but the numbers had improved significantly as the unemployment rate declined in recent years, falling to 37 million by 2018.
The most challenging events often come in the wake of natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes or wildfires. But those affect a particular region, and food banks in other parts of the country can step up with immediate aid from their inventory. The latest crisis, with layoffs soaring everywhere simultaneously, will probably test the nation’s food banks like none before.
‘Hungry people are hungry each and every day’
Christina Wong, director of public policy and advocacy at Northwest Harvest, an independent food bank in Seattle, said that the group was using up the food in its warehouse, down to what it had secured during a holiday food drive. The food bank’s bulk purchasing operation, used to paying 25 cents on the dollar, is having to compete on the open market with grocery stores and is starting to have to pay full cost.
Her group estimated that Washington State had gone from 800,000 people struggling to put food on the table to 1.6 million since the outbreak began. Before the crisis, Northwest Harvest had tried to create a dignified experience for clients, as close as possible to shopping at a conventional grocery store, with an emphasis on fresh, local food.
“We’ve reverted to handing out a box of food,” Ms. Wong said, with macaroni and cheese, canned chicken and peanut butter in a typical container.
Since the sudden closing of nearly all of the gambling and tourism attractions in Las Vegas, the Three Square Food Bank in the city is spending an extra $300,000 to $400,000 a week in cash to buy food.
Based in Las Vegas, Three Square Food Bank previously distributed food through 180 pantries across Clark County. Since the outbreak — and the sudden closing of nearly all of the city’s gambling and tourism attractions — the organization has restructured, with 10 pantries and 21 new drive-through distribution sites.
Larry Scott, Three Square’s chief operating officer, said that the group had expected 200 to 250 cars a day at each drive-through. They’re getting up to 500 to 600 cars instead, with lines up to four miles long. “Every day, we distribute everything that we bring to a site,” Mr. Scott said.
An initial glut of high-quality food from shuttered casinos is basically gone, Mr. Scott said. Now his food bank is burning through an extra $300,000 to $400,000 a week in cash to buy food.
He said that he saw no relief in sight. “What we do today has to be repeated again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day,” Mr. Scott said. “Hungry people are hungry each and every day.”
Ericka Smrcka, an official at Food Bank for the Heartland in Nebraska, went to a recent mobile food distribution at a middle school in neighboring Council Bluffs, Iowa. She and a colleague arrived nearly an hour before it was scheduled to start to find the streets jammed in every direction and the police directing traffic.
“We were overwhelmed with tears,” Ms. Smrcka said. “Oh, my gosh. Everywhere we looked, there were just cars.”
The delivery truck had enough boxes of food — produce, bread and milk — for 200 vehicles. Some 400 showed up. Ms. Smrcka recalled feeling apprehensive at the prospect of walking car to car with nothing more than a flier describing alternative resources, thinking she might get yelled at.
But that’s not what happened. “After sitting in their car for an hour and not receiving any food, they still said thank you,” she said, recalling in particular a father who had left work early and picked up his three daughters, and who departed empty-handed.
Over 1,000 vehicles received food today at PPG Pants Arena thanks to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank:
PPG Pants Arena, Pittsburgh
Feeding South Florida executive vice president Sari Vatske noted in an interview with the Daily Mail that with stay-at-home orders in her state curtailing the available workforce to handle an unprecedented surge in those needing aid, there may be trouble ahead in how to efficiently distribute the food.
“The math is not on our side,” said Vatske.
No Classis an op-ed column by writer and radical organizer Kim Kelly that connects worker struggles and the current state of the American labor movement with its storied — and sometimes bloodied — past.
Box office numbers have long proven that U.S. moviegoers love a dystopia (even as the country has begun to resemble a real-life version of one), and in 2020, it turns out that the most relevant cinematic profile of our current moment came out seven years ago. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi blockbuster Elysium introduced us to a stratified world in which the rich elite have decamped to a fabulous floating paradise called Elysium, where no one ever gets sick, while poor people labor and rot on the radioactive remnants of Earth below. The plot is not that important, but the stark image of the healthy haves and suffering have-nots was a perfect avatar for the United States’ profit-driven, hypercapitalist health-care system. The rich have never had to suffer the way the rest of us do; even before the advent of modern medicine, the wealthy have always had a leg up (even if that just meant facing the Black Death with a full stomach).
Tesla founder and Silicon Valley vampire Elon Musk broke the fourth wall to show the world (or at least his Twitter feed) how some of the ultra-rich really feel about the looming epidemic. “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” he tweeted on Friday, amid news of elderly Washington State residents dying at their nursing home and cases spreading throughout Italy. He may as well have been wearing First Lady Melania Trump’s notorious “I really don’t care do u?” jacket. To someone like Musk, though, it would seem absurd to worry about something like the coronavirus; in his mind, it will never impact him or anyone in his immediate orbit beyond perhaps a canceled conference or two, so why should he care? The 48-year-old CEO is a billionaire who owns a number of mansions in and outside Los Angeles; neither he nor his family need to take public transit, or do their own grocery shopping, or leave their house for any reason. Thanks to his riches, Musk is living in a real-life Elysium.
And if by chance he does contract the virus, he can likely just pay for a level of health care that people like you and me cannot even fathom. His partner, musician Grimes, is currently pregnant, but thanks to the couple’s wealth and the unlimited resources it affords them, she will be spared from much of the coronavirus-related anxiety faced by less-privileged mothers-to-be.
The same goes for anthropomorphic blobfish Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who announced that because he was exposed to the coronavirus at a recent right-wing conference, he will be self-quarantining for 14 days. He has been praised for taking these precautions, but it bears mentioning that Cruz and his wife, Heidi, a longtime Goldman Sachs executive, have assets worth an estimated $2 million to $5 million, access to a gold-plated congressional health-care plan — and the option to work from home. Cruz, a 1 percenter with taxpayer-funded health insurance, has the luxury of choice, something that the vast majority of people in the U.S. will never experience. He and Musk and their families may not be in the same tax bracket, but as wealthy white people, they can breathe easy, secure in the knowledge that they can buy their way out of any potential problem.
Must be nice, right? Unfortunately for the overwhelming majority of people in the U.S., this reality is utterly out of reach. And there is a notable disparity between those who can afford to stockpile supplies (even in the case of rampant price-gouging) and those who struggle to afford the basics at the best of times. Location matters too: If supply chains are disrupted, people in rural or isolated communities will have an even harder time getting what they need or getting to the hospital if they fall ill, and those who lack internet access (like nearly one-third of rural households do) will have more difficulty participating in remote work or keeping track of a rapidly developing news situation.
Those with white-collar jobs may be able to stay home with zero consequences — and many are actively being encouraged by their employers to do so, but for many U.S. workers, this is simply not an option. Retail workers, hospitality workers, transit workers, fast food workers, delivery workers, home health-care workers, and drivers are only some of the public-facing professionals who are at risk during an epidemic, yet they also have the hardest time taking time off work thanks to the precarity of their hourly wage and lack of benefits, such as paid sick leave. Labor unions like SEIU, AFSCME, AFT, and UNITE HERE have been pressuring for the federal government to take decisive action to protect workers, while worker-led organizations like Gig Workers Rising have been calling upon employers to lessen the financial burdens faced by gig workers deciding between going to work sick or losing income by staying home.
People experiencing housing instability are at increased risk of infection due to a number of factors. A lack of access to running water and soap plus crowded camp environments in many houseless communities has officials on the West Coast — where the outbreak has hit hardest — fearing the worst. For incarcerated people, the situation is even more dire. In many instances, they are packed into overcrowded environments, lack access to basic hygiene products or decent health care, and are denied the autonomy to take steps to avoid infection. In New York City, prisoners at the city’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex are being tasked with manufacturing hand sanitizer — and if the epidemic reaches critical proportions, they will even be forced to dig graves for its victims.
The number of uninsured people is rising, and those who have coverage are still at the mercy of a predatory health insurance system and a government that isn’t doing nearly enough to help them. Universal health care remains, incredibly, a controversial proposition. In places where coronavirus testing is available or even free, the costs associated with the test can be prohibitive. The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak has been wildly incompetent even by today’s standards, and people will continue to die because of its cruel games. The rich may not care, but we do — and it’s up to us to take care of one another and our communities, in sickness and in health, because we know for damn sure that the wealthy elite won’t.
Coronavirus can ‘reactivate’ in recovered patients, experts say. What does that mean?
by Brooke Wolford (4-10-20)
People who were thought to have recovered from the coronavirus tested positive again, indicating that patients can relapse, South Korean officials say.
South Korea reported nearly 7,000 COVID-19 recoveries, but after 91 patients re-tested positive, officials are worried it’s just the tip of the iceberg, and far more people will likely relapse as well, Reuters reported. China also found more than 100 people, who were thought to have recovered, tested positive for the virus a second time, revealing what could be a sinister global trend, McClatchy reported.
“The number will only increase, 91 is just the beginning now,” Kim Woo-Joo, professor of infectious diseases at Korea University Guro Hospital, told Reuters.
Officials say that the virus likely “reactivated” in coronavirus patients, rather than re-infecting them, Bloomberg reported. A confirmed case of coronavirus is considered to be recovered after the patient tests negative for COVID-19 twice within 24 hours, according to Bloomberg.
“While we are putting more weight on reactivation as the possible cause, we are conducting a comprehensive study on this,” Jeong Eun-kyeong, director-general of the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Bloomberg. “There have been many cases when a patient during treatment will test negative one day and positive another.”
Although the trend was also found in China back in mid-March, scientists believed that the second time patients tested positive for the virus was due to errors in testing and not reinfection, McClatchy reported.
“If you get an infection, your immune system is revved up against that virus,” Dr. Keiji Fukuda, director of Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times. “To get re-infected again when you’re in that situation would be quite unusual unless your immune system was not functioning right.”
That’s why South Korean officials believe it’s about reactivation, not reinfection, according to Reuters. But they also theorized that false test results could be to blame “or remnants of the virus could still be in patients’ systems but not be infectious or of danger to the host or others,” Reuters reported.
Still, the possibility of coronavirus patients relapsing is of international concern, since many countries hope previously infected patients will develop immunity, Reuters said.
by David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery (4-11-20)
David Yaffe-Bellany reports on the food industry and general business news. He graduated from Yale University and previously reported in Texas, Ohio and Connecticut. @yaffebellany
Michael Corkery is a business reporter who covers the retail industry and its impact on consumers, workers and the economy. He joined The Times in 2014 and was previously a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the Providence Journal. @mcorkery5
In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.
After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.
The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.
The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.
Many farmers say they have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, which have been overwhelmed with demand. But there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb.
And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half of their paying customers disappear. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, who has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.
Millions of pounds of beans and cabbage have been destroyed at R.C. Hatton farms in South Florida and Georgia.Credit… Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton.
The widespread destruction of fresh food — at a time when many Americans are hurting financially and millions are suddenly out of work — is an especially dystopian turn of events, even by the standards of a global pandemic. It reflects the profound economic uncertainty wrought by the virus and how difficult it has been for huge sectors of the economy, like agriculture, to adjust to such a sudden change in how they must operate.
Even as Mr. Allen and other farmers have been plowing fresh vegetables into the soil, they have had to plant the same crop again, hoping the economy will have restarted by the time the next batch of vegetables is ready to harvest. But if the food service industry remains closed, then those crops, too, may have to be destroyed.
Farmers are also learning in real time about the nation’s consumption habits.
The quarantines have shown just how many more vegetables Americans eat when meals are prepared for them in restaurants than when they have to cook for themselves.
“People don’t make onion rings at home,” said Shay Myers, a third-generation onion farmer whose fields straddle the border of Oregon and Idaho.
Mr. Myers said there were no good solutions to the fresh food glut. After his largest customer — the restaurant industry — shut down in California and New York, his farm started redistributing onions from 50-pound sacks into smaller bags that could be sold in grocery stores. He also started freezing some onions, but he has limited cold-storage capacity.
Recently mulched green beans.Credit…
With few other options, Mr. Myers has begun burying tens of thousands of pounds of onions and leaving them to decompose in trenches.
“There is no way to redistribute the quantities that we are talking about,” he said.
Over the decades, the nation’s food banks have tried to shift from offering mostly processed meals to serving fresh produce, as well. But the pandemic has caused a shortage of volunteers, making it more difficult to serve fruits and vegetables, which are time-consuming and expensive to transport.
“To purchase from a whole new set of farmers and suppliers — it takes time, it takes knowledge, you have to find the people, develop the contracts,” said Janet Poppendieck, an expert on poverty and food assistance.
Shay Myers, a third-generation onion farmer whose fields straddle the border of Oregon and Idaho.
The waste has become especially severe in the dairy industry, where cows need to be milked multiple times a day, regardless of whether there are buyers.
Major consumers of dairy, like public schools and coffee shops, have all but vanished, leaving milk processing plants with fewer customers at a time of year when cows produce milk at their fastest rate. About 5 percent of the country’s milk supply is currently being dumped and that amount is expected to double if the closings are extended over the next few months, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.
Before the pandemic, the Dairymens processing plant in Cleveland would produce three loads of milk, or around 13,500 gallons, for Starbucks every day. Now the Starbucks order is down to one load every three days.
For a while after the pandemic took hold, the plant collected twice as much milk from farmers as it could process, keeping the excess supply in refrigerated trailers, said Brian Funk, who works for Dairymens as a liaison to farmers.
But eventually the plant ran out of storage. One night last week, Mr. Funk worked until 11 p.m., fighting back tears as he called farmers who supply the plant to explain the predicament.
A field of onions in Idaho waiting to be buried. Americans eat many more vegetables when meals are prepared for them in restaurants than when they cook for themselves.
“We’re not going to pick your milk up tomorrow,” he told them. “We don’t have any place to put it.”
One of the farms that got the call was the Hartschuh Dairy Farm, which has nearly 200 cows on a plot of land in northern Ohio.
A week ago, Rose Hartschuh, who runs the farm with her family, watched her father-in-law flush 31,000 pounds of milk into a lagoon. It took more than an hour for the milk to flow out of its refrigerated tank and down the drain pipe.
For years, dairy farmers have struggled with low prices and bankruptcies. “This is one more blow below the belt,” Ms. Hartschuh said.
To prevent further dumping, farming groups are trying everything to find places to send the excess milk — even lobbying pizza chains to increase the amount of cheese on every slice.
But there are logistical obstacles that prevent dairy products from being shifted neatly from food service customers to retailers.
At many dairy processors, for example, the machinery is designed to package shredded cheese in large bags for restaurants or place milk in small cartons for schools, rather than arrange the products in retail-friendly containers.
A pit dug to dispose of unused onions. The onions will be left to rot into the soil.Credit…
To repurpose those plants to put cheese in the 8 oz. bags that sell in grocery stores or bottle milk in gallon jugs would require millions of dollars in investment. For now, some processors have concluded that spending the money isn’t worth it.
“It isn’t like restaurant demand has disappeared forever,” said Matt Gould, a dairy industry analyst. “Even if it were possible to re-format to make it an 8-ounce package rather than a 20-pound bag, the dollars and cents may not pan out.”
Those same logistical challenges are bedeviling poultry plants that were set up to distribute chicken to restaurants rather than stores. Each week, the chicken processor Sanderson Farms destroys 750,000 unhatched eggs, or 5.5 percent of its total production, sending them to a rendering plant to be turned into pet food.
Last week, the chief executive of Sanderson Farms, Joe Sanderson, told analysts that company officials had even considered euthanizing chickens to avoid selling them at unprofitable rates, though the company ultimately did not take that step.
Mr. Myers said there were no good solutions to the fresh food glut. “There is no way to redistribute the quantities that we are talking about,” he said.Credit…
In recent days, Sanderson Farms has donated some of its chicken to food banks and organizations that cook meals for emergency medical workers. But hatching hundreds of thousands of eggs for the purpose of charity is not a viable option, said Mike Cockrell, the company’s chief financial officer.
“We’re set up to sell that chicken,” Mr. Cockrell said. “That would be an expensive proposition.”
by Pepe ESCOBAR (4-9-20)
Pepe Escobar looks at a frightening future that might follow the already terrifying Covid-19 global outbreak.You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism – in deep crisis since at least 2008 – is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded.
But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst: global mass unemployment.
Henry Kissinger, anointed oracle/gatekeeper of the ruling class, is predictably scared. He claims that, “sustaining the public trust is crucial to social solidarity.” He’s convinced the Hegemon should “safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” Otherwise, “failure could set the world on fire.”
That’s so quaint. Public trust is dead across the spectrum. The liberal world “order” is now social Darwinist chaos. Just wait for the fire to rage.
The numbers are staggering. The Japan-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), in its annual economic report, may not have been exactly original. But it did note that the impact of the “worst pandemic in a century” will be as high as $4.1 trillion, or 4.8 percent of global GDP.
This an underestimation, as “supply disruptions, interrupted remittances, possible social and financial crises, and long-term effects on health care and education are excluded from the analysis.”
We cannot even start to imagine the cataclysmic social consequences of the crash. Entire sub-sectors of the global economy may not be recomposed at all.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) forecasts global unemployment at a conservative, additonal 24.7 million people – especially in aviation, tourism and hospitality.
The global aviation industry is a humongous $2.7 trillion business. That’s 3.6 percent of global GDP. It employs 2.7 million people. When you add air transport and tourism —everything from hotels and restaurants to theme parks and museums — it accounts for a minimum of 65.5 million jobs around the world.
According to the ILO, income losses for workers may range from $860 billion to an astonishing $3.4 trillion. “Working poverty” will be the new normal – especially across the Global South.
“Working poor,” in ILO terminology, means employed people living in households with a per capita income below the poverty line of $2 a day. As many as an additional 35 million people worldwide will become working poor in 2020.
Switching to feasible perspectives for global trade, it’s enlightening to examine that this report about how the economy may rebound is centered on the notorious hyperactive merchants and traders of Yiwu in eastern China – the world’s busiest small-commodity, business hub.
Their experience spells out a long and difficult recovery. As the rest of the world is in a coma, Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong stresses that China faces a 30 percent decline in external demand at least until next Fall.
Neoliberalism in Reverse?
In the next stage, the strategic competition between the U.S. and China will be no-holds-barred, as emerging narratives of China’s new, multifaceted global role – on trade, technology, cyberspace, climate change – will set in, even more far-reaching than the New Silk Roads. That will also be the case in global public health policies. Get ready for an accelerated Hybrid War between the “Chinese virus” narrative and the Health Silk Road.
The latest report by the China Institute of International Studies would be quite helpful for the West — hubris permitting — to understand how Beijing adopted key measures putting the health and safety of the general population first.
Now, as the Chinese economy slowly picks up, hordes of fund managers from across Asia are tracking everything from trips on the metro to noodle consumption to preview what kind of economy may emerge post-lockdown.
In contrast, across the West, the prevailing doom and gloom elicited a priceless editorial from TheFinancial Times. Like James Brown in the 1980s Blues Brothers pop epic, the City of London seems to have seen the light, or at least giving the impression it really means it. Neoliberalism in reverse. New social contract. “Secure” labor markets. Redistribution.
Cynics won’t be fooled. The cryogenic state of the global economy spells out a vicious Great Depression 2.0 and an unemployment tsunami. The plebs eventually reaching for the pitchforks and the AR-15s en masse is now a distinct possibility. Might as well start throwing a few breadcrumbs to the beggars’ banquet.
That may apply to European latitudes. But the American story is in a class by itself.
Members of the West Virginia National Guard’s Task Force Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Response Enterprise (CRE) (TF-CRE) assist staff, medical personnel, and first responders of an Eastbrook Center nursing home with COVID-19 testing April 6, 2020, in Charleston, West Virginia, after a resident tested positive for the pandemic virus. Members donned proper personal protective equipment (PPE) to complete testing on more than 120 residents and 25 staff as part of ongoing operations across West Virginia in support of a whole of government response effort. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Edwin L. Wriston)
The game ahead for the elites, taking advantage of the crisis, might well contain these four elements: a social credit system, mandatory vaccination, a digital currency and a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This is what used to be called, according to the decades-old, time-tested CIA playbook, a “conspiracy theory.” Well, it might actually happen.
A social credit system is something that China set up already in 2014. Before the end of 2020, every Chinese citizen will be assigned his/her own credit score – a de facto “dynamic profile”, elaborated with extensive use of AI and the internet of things (IoT), including ubiquitous facial recognition technology. This implies, of course, 24/7 surveillance, complete with Blade Runner-style roving robotic birds.
The U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Russia and India may not be far behind. Germany, for instance, is tweaking its universal credit rating system, SCHUFA. France has an ID app very similar to the Chinese model, verified by facial recognition.
Mandatory vaccination is Bill Gates’s dream, working in conjunction with the WHO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Big Pharma. He wants “billions of doses” to be enforced over the Global South. And it could be a cover to everyone getting a digital implant.
Here it is, in his own words. At 34:15: “Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.”
Then comes the last sentence which was erased from the official TED video. This was noted by Rosemary Frei, who has a master on molecular biology and is an independent investigative journalist in Canada. Gates says: “So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”
This “digital immunity proof” is crucial to keep in mind, something that could be misused by the state for nefarious purposes.
The three top candidates to produce a coronavirus vaccine are American biotech firm Moderna, as well as Germans CureVac and BioNTech.
Digital cash might then become an offspring of blockchain. Not only the U.S., but China and Russia are also interested in a national crypto-currency. A global currency – of course controlled by central bankers – may soon be adopted in the form of a basket of currencies, and would circulate virtually. Endless permutations of the toxic cocktail of IoT, blockchain technology and the social credit system could loom ahead.
Already Spain has announced that it is introducing UBI, and wants it to be permanent. It’s a form of insurance for the elite against social uprisings, especially if millions of jobs never come back.
So the key working hypothesis is that Covid-19 could be used as cover for the usual suspects to bring in a new digital financial system and a mandatory vaccine with a “digital identity” nano-chip with dissent not tolerated: what Slavoj Zizek calls the “erotic dream” of every totalitarian government.
Yet underneath it all, amid so much anxiety, a pent-up rage seems to be gathering strength, to eventually explode in unforeseeable ways. As much as the system may be changing at breakneck speed, there’s no guarantee even the 0.1 percent will be safe.
April 10, 2020
According to a new study from the National Multifamily Housing Council, it was found about a third of renters in the United States did not make their monthly payment by April 5, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While 82% of tenants paid rent in April 2019, the study found only 69% paid in April 2020.
This follows reports that nearly 10 million Americans applied for unemployment in March after the pandemic caused massive layoffs across the country.
About 35% of renters lost income in march and 45% do not have enough money saved to cover rent payments, according to a survey cited by Yahoo! Finance.
The NMHC data only includes 13.4 million of the 44 million renting households in the U.S., so the full impact of the pandemic on renters could be unknown until May, according to CNN.
“People were working in March. April rent may have come from their savings,” Enterprise Community Partners CEO Priscilla Almodovar told CNN. “The rent check is probably the first thing they pay. Now they may be unemployed, and we don’t know what resources will get to them in time for May.”
by Susan Rosenthal
https://susanrosenthal.com/strategies/covid-19-a-question-of-power/Globally, many people are afraid, angry, uncertain, and without confidence in their national leadership. – The Lancet
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people all over the world in an immediate and deeply personal manner. Close to one-third of humanity is under some form of lock-down. Within one month of quarantine, 60 percent of American workers will be unable to pay rent or buy groceries. Society is thrown into chaos, and the established order is failing to meet people’s needs.
What needs to change? What kind of society do we want, and how can we achieve it? Before we can answer such questions, we need to clarify what went wrong and who is responsible.
What went wrong
To maximize profit, the global capitalist economy is based on just-in-time production and minimal inventory, with no built-in reserve for the unexpected. When crises occur, supply chains break down, profits plummet, people are thrown out of work, and basic essentials become difficult to obtain.
Austerity policies were imposed on the faulty premise that smaller government is better because, it was argued, the private sector can deliver services more efficiently. When challenged by this virus, stripped-down governments and business leaders floundered, while nations with robust public health programs proved better able to contain the epidemic, preserve jobs, and save lives.
Who is responsible?
The capitalist class claim the exclusive right to rule, yet they failed to prepare for COVID-19; they failed to cooperate; they mounted a disorganized response; and they refuse to accept responsibility for the disastrous outcome.
According to The Atlantic, “America’s coronavirus response failed because we didn’t understand the complexity of the problem.” The New York Times stated, “the fundamental force damaging the economy is…an out-of-control virus.”
Lack of understanding did not cause this problem; it was predicted years ago. Nor did a virus cause this crisis. Human actions determine how infections spread and how much harm they cause.
The world spends more than $1 trillion a year on war, yet the World Health Organization reports that only half the world’s countries have a national program to prevent and control infection, including clean water, sanitation, and hygiene standards in all medical facilities.
Eight countries, containing 25 percent of the world’s population, have inadequate medical systems because of punitive economic sanctions. Venezuela is one of them. When Venezuela appealed to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan to manage the pandemic, their request was rejected.
The capitalist class are 100 percent responsible for this global crisis and for every death they could have prevented.
Their reckless exploitation of the non-human world releases dangerous new pathogens. Their drive to accumulate capital creates mass deprivation and encourages the spread of disease. Their competition for profit prevents cooperation within and among nations. When challenged by COVID-19, their house of cards collapsed.
Hell to pay
On March 26, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported,
Millions of deaths and collapsed health care systems will decimate us financially and as a society… The impact effect of business closures could result in reductions of 15% or more in the level of output throughout the advanced economies and major emerging-market economies. In the median economy, output would decline by 25%.
If this projection is correct, then the global economy will slump more deeply and for longer than during the 1930s Great Depression.
In The Shock Doctrine (2007), Naomi Klein describes how capitalists treat crises as an opportunity to increase their wealth and power. This crisis is no exception.
Even as the pandemic rages, capitalists are pushing to restart the economy at the cost of more deaths; cut access to medical care when the opposite is needed; and fund oil extraction instead of public health.
The Environmental Protection Agency gave polluting industries a long-desired gift by suspending enforcement of environmental standards “during the coronavirus outbreak,” with no specified end date. Pennsylvania declared construction on a natural gas pipeline to be an essential service.
The US National Labor Relations Board suspended all union elections and made it more difficult for workers to organize new unions and maintain existing ones.
Washington moved to seal the border with Mexico, turning back asylum seekers and deporting ‘illegals’ to their countries of origin. The excuse of protecting Americans is bogus, because the number of confirmed cases in the US is greater than all the cases in Latin America and the Caribbean combined.
Authorities are stepping up surveillance and tracking of the population, targeting specific groups, suspending civil liberties, banning public meetings, prohibiting protest rallies, and increasing the role of the military in civil society. The New York Times warned,
leaders across the globe are invoking executive powers and seizing virtually dictatorial authority.
Restoring profitability after this pandemic will require, “a grinding and deep destruction of all that capitalism had accumulated in previous decades.” Smaller businesses and poorer nations will be driven to bankruptcy, enabling bigger corporations and wealthier nations to absorb them and grow even bigger. Inequality will skyrocket, as billions of people scramble desperately to survive. Brute force will be necessary to suppress dissent.
The working class can go along with this capitalist agenda – profits for the few and misery for the many – or they can choose a different road, one that meets their needs.
Ideas
Naomi Klein tells us that when crises occur, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
The idea that the working class could end capitalist rule and manage society directly is not ‘lying around.’ The capitalists have shoved it deeply down the memory hole, and for good reason. Workers have the power to stop the flow of profit, democratize society, and redirect production to meet human needs.
In response to the crisis of WWI, the working class took power in Russia, inspiring a global wave of revolt. The capitalists barely defeated it with a combination of brute force and major concessions.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, American workers mounted a serious challenge to the capitalist system. In order to save it, the Roosevelt administration was forced to concede the New Deal.
Today, the working class are larger and more powerful than ever, forming more than half of humanity and connected through global systems of production and communication.
The concept of workers revolution is far too dangerous to be left ‘lying around.’ It must be dug out from under a shitload of capitalist lies and resurrected in its original form.
‘Shoulds’
Ideas that are permitted to ‘lie around’ are ones that can be ignored or incorporated (even if temporarily) into the existing system. I call these ideas ‘shoulds,’ for example, “They should do x instead of y.”
‘Shoulds’ dominate the liberal left in the form of proposals, plans, and policies that the ruling class should adopt in response to this crisis. These include: protecting jobs and wages; protecting essential workers; expanding public health systems and social programs; a universal basic income; nationalizing industries instead of bailing them out; suspending or forgiving consumer debt, rent, and home mortgage payments; prohibiting evictions, foreclosures, and utility shut-offs; releasing imprisoned refugees and immigrants; ending mass incarceration; ending punitive economic sanctions; forgiving foreign debt; and defunding the military.
Such demands should be implemented. However, the ruling class are deaf to any idea that is not profitable or that might undermine their control. They would rather cull a generation of older, frailer people, than suffer a loss of profit. They only do the right thing under threat of mass revolt, and only until they can regain control.
Despite this reality, the intelligentsia persist in the delusion that capitalist priorities are negotiable, because they see no alternative. Positioned as society’s ‘experts,’ they perceive their role as advisors to the ruling class, not as facilitators of working-class revolution. This is revealed in their persistent use of the term ‘we,’ as in, “We are all in this together” and “We should….”
There can be no ‘we’ in a society that is divided into an exploiting class and an exploited class. We (the majority) must choose sides.
Until workers press their demands as a class, the middle class will bang their heads against the capitalist wall, seeking solutions from rulers whose overriding concern is, always has been, and always will be to amass more capital than their competitors, regardless of the cost in human suffering.
The working class
A great many people have ‘discovered’ the importance of the working class, the folks who feed us, transport us, deliver our mail, remove our trash, tend to our sick, and perform the every-day essential tasks that are normally taken for granted. No longer.
Homemade signs and giant ‘Thank you!’ notes chalked on city walls, roads, and sidewalks display a new awareness of who we actually depend on for survival. While capitalists and politicians dither over the cost of care, essential workers are putting their lives on the line to provide what people need.
Appreciating the vital role of workers is not the same as seeing them as a revolutionary class.
Most left reformers believe that workers should be free from abuse, honored for their contribution, and well compensated. However, they do not see the working class as the solution to society’s problems, but as victims in need of rescue. In reality, workers are society’s rescuers.
Workers all over the world are fighting to protect public health against the fierce resistance of employers who are pushing to cut costs and stay in business, prolonging the pandemic and raising the death rate.
Amazon profits are soaring due to the surge in online shopping. Yet the world’s biggest corporation, run by the world’s richest man, refused to implement measures to protect workers and customers. To compel Amazon’s compliance, workers at Whole Foods organized a mass ‘sick-out.’
General Electric workers facing job loss are pushing a reluctant company to convert its closed or underused factories to produce more ventilators.
Transit workers are vital to get essential workers to their jobs. Yet many cities did not provide transit workers with personal protective equipment, sanitize their vehicles, or implement physical distancing, threatening drivers and passengers alike.
Detroit bus drivers refused to work under such conditions. Within 24 hours, they won all their demands, including blocking off the first row of seats, having passengers enter and exit though the back doors, and no collection of fares. As union president Glenn Tolbert remarked, “It caught the ridership off guard, but the strike was for them.”
In every nation and at every level of society, workers are demonstrating that what benefits them promotes public health, and capitalists are proving that what benefits them endangers public health.
State control?
Profit-seeking entities cannot solve social problems or cushion society from disaster. Is the solution to nationalize the production of essential goods and the delivery of basic services? Nationalizing something, or putting it ‘under public control,’ means putting it in the hands of the State.
Essential services should be nationalized, because State-managed industries are generally more responsive to human needs than profit-driven ones. However, this benefit has proved to be temporary. Austerity policies imposed in Spain, Portugal, Canada, and the UK cut billions of dollars from national medical systems, to the point that they could neither prepare for the pandemic nor respond to it effectively.
The State is not a class-neutral body that serves the greater good. The capitalist class constructed the State as a weapon to secure their rule over society.
A State that invests billions of dollars on war and billions more on fossil fuel extraction, refuses to provide the basic necessities of life, suppresses protest by force, and incarcerates the oppressed, is a tool of the ruling class. And the master’s tools can never be used to dismantle the master’s house.
Public control requires workers control
The only one way to ensure that an industry, institution, or service will function solely in the public interest is to put it under workers control.
All over the world, medical workers have given their lives to manage a disaster created by capitalist incompetence and negligence. Had workers been in charge of the medical system, they would have prepared for this pandemic and moved quickly to contain it. They would have cooperated to provide the public with timely, accurate information and mobilized them to meet the challenge. Afterwards, they would identify any mistakes and implement corrective measures.
The capitalist class cannot tolerate such projects. Any display of workers power would spread faster than the corona virus.
The only way for workers to manage any section of society is to remove the capitalists from power and take control of society as a whole.
A question of power
Capitalists insist that social change happens slowly, if at all. Yet, seemingly overnight, social relations have changed dramatically, and in unforeseen ways. The world is being reshaped. The question is which class will shape it in their interests.
There will be no ‘return to normal.’ The capitalist system is in a downward dive. Efforts to flatten the pandemic curve will also prolong and deepen the economic recession.
The solution to this crisis is not to demand a progressive capitalism or a smaller, kinder capitalism.
The solution is not to counter international competition with national self-sufficiency, because epidemics that arise anywhere can spread everywhere.
The solution is not to tax Amazon or even to nationalize it. The solution is for Amazon workers to remove Jeff Bezos from power and design a health-promoting environment for themselves, their suppliers, and their customers.
As I explain in Rebel Minds, the working class produce all social wealth, form the majority of humanity, and include the majority of people in every oppressed group. A united working class could end capitalist rule, abolish all oppression, and construct a truly democratic, global society.
We must not allow the capitalist class to keep making decisions that threaten our survival. We must put ‘removing the capitalist class from power’ on the agenda. We cannot ‘wait until people are ready.’ We need to get ready now.
BY DAVID RASBACHAPRIL 09, 2020 08:39 AM
A delivery of test kit materials that would have allowed Bellingham’s St. Joseph hospital and other PeaceHealth medical facilities in the Northwest to run COVID-19 tests quicker were seized and diverted by the federal government to the East Coast, PeaceHealth reports.
A response statement from the Federal Emergency Response Management Agency emailed to The Bellingham Herald said, “Reports of FEMA commandeering or re-routing such supplies are false.”
The Los Angeles Times first reported about the federal government quietly seizing orders for medical supplies made by hospitals in a story Tuesday, April 7. Those seizures came despite President Trump directing states and hospitals to secure what supplies they could to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
The Times reported that PeaceHealth, which has 10 hospitals in Washington, Oregon and Alaska including St. Joseph hospital in Bellingham, was among those impacted.
““It’s incredibly frustrating,” PeaceHealth Chief Operating Officer Richard DeCarlo told the Times. “We had put wheels in motion with testing and protective equipment to allow us to secure and protect our staff and our patients.”
The materials seized from PeaceHealth include vital test kit materials that are needed to run in-house analyzer machines, PeaceHealth Manager of Public Affairs Jeremy Rush told The Bellingham Herald in an email.
Those machines were purchased specifically for COVID-19 testing in PeaceHealth hospitals, Rush reported.
“Our analyzers remain idle, while we continue to send specimens to outside laboratory testing sites, prioritizing labs based on the shortest turnaround times,” Rush wrote.
In Northwest Washington, including St. Joseph hospital, that’s Northwest Labs in Bellingham, Rush reported.
If PeaceHealth hospitals had received the test kit materials and been able to do in-house testing, Rush wrote, and then it more quickly could rule out patients that tested negative for COVID-19. That, in turn, would have allowed the hospital to conserve personal protective equipment at a greater rate.
That being said, Rush stressed that “because of our ongoing planning and preparedness efforts, we continue to be stocked with PPE to meet current demand.”
When the test kit materials were redirected, PeaceHealth simply received information from its supplier that the items were not going to be delivered and told “they had been diverted to the East Coast based on direction from the federal government,” Rush reported.
According to the Los Angeles Times story, hospital and clinic officials in seven states described similar seizures in the past week, though the Federal Emergency Management Agency has not publicly announced the seizures.
FEMA and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection are working to prevent domestic brokers, distributors and others from sending critical medical resources overseas, according to the FEMA statement.
“PPE being distributed internally within the United States is not being seized or re-routed by FEMA,” the statement read.
If a hospital suspects that has happened to an order, the FEMA statement suggested it be reported to their state’s governor. Governors who believe it has happened should report it to the FEMA Region.
“If a company decides to cancel on a state contract in favor of federal one, FEMA will work with the company and the state to resolve the matter in a way that best serves their people,” the statement read.
FEMA also suggests anyone who learns of hoarding or price gouging of PPE to report it to the National Center for Disaster Fraud by calling 866-720-5721 or emailing disaster@leo.gov.
