The Most Important Thing Media Can Tell Us Is How We’re Getting Infected

https://fair.org/home/the-most-important-thing-media-can-tell-us-is-how-were-getting-infected/






JIM NAURECKAS





There are countless healthcare heroes putting their own lives on the line to save sick people’s lives, but the real front line of this pandemic is regular people trying to keep from getting sick in the first place.

Barring the discovery of a miracle treatment, medical intervention can only do so much. The main way to save lives, and the best hope for stopping the outbreak, is for individuals to change their behavior so we stop spreading the virus. (Individuals, of course, do not always choose their circumstances; society needs to support individuals so that they don’t need to choose between the health of the community and daily survival.)


Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s refusal to take decisive action (CNN, 3/17/20) is a big part of the reason New York State has the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the nation.

And drastic changes in behavior have caused dramatic reductions in the spread of coronavirus. Take New York State, which has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, and probably the world: On March 17, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared his opposition to a shelter-in-place policy (CNN, 3/17/20), there were 1,706 recognized cases of Covid-19 in the state. When Cuomo bowed to reality on March 20, telling workers at all non-essential businesses to stay home (CNBC, 3/20/20), that number had risen to 8,310—a growth rate of 48% a day, which doubles the number of cases faster than every two days.

With New Yorkers largely heeding the call to mostly shut down our lives, that growth rate has declined sharply. In the week after Cuomo’s order, known cases grew 27% per day; the week after that, it was 13%; the following week, which brings us to yesterday, cases grew 8% per day. (These numbers from this highly useful site.)

This is good; if we had kept going at the rate we were at on March 20, infections would be in the millions in the state right now, and the virus would be starting to run out of fresh victims to infect. It’s hard to say what the death toll would have been, especially with a healthcare system that would be almost useless in the face of such numbers, but hundreds of thousands does not seem like an unlikely death toll. So—good job, people!

But the fact remains that each day for the past 11 days, New York State has added at least 8,000 to the total of identified cases—when the total that was alarming enough to shut down most of the economic life of the state was 8,130. So far in New York, the proportion of identified cases that are officially registered as fatal—bearing in mind that both of these numbers are severely undercounted—is 4.8%. If that number stays steady, the new cases will add something like 375–525 additional deaths to the eventual tally every day—in a state where in normal times there are approximately 425 deaths from all causes each day.


The question is: Will human brains continue to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic? (XKCD, 3/30/20)

And it is not clear that the growth rate in new cases will continue to decline; we may have reached a plateau. Cases grew by 8% on April 5 and April 8; by 7% on April 6, 9 and 10; and by 6% on April 7: There is no clear downward trend. And maintaining a 7% growth rate means doubling the number of cases every 10 days; that is obviously not sustainable, especially when you already have 180,000 cases.

This story could be repeated for pretty much every state and territory in the union. There’s no place where the outbreak is clearly dying out on its own, nowhere that the number of cases looks to be dropping anytime soon below the numbers that forced the dramatic clampdown on economic life.

What this means is: We need to do better. As much as we have changed our lives to stop spreading the virus, we need to change more. That’s the only feasible path back to a semblance of normal life.

And that’s where the media can be most helpful: by investigating and reporting how the virus is continuing to spread. Are new infections happening among people who have disregarded instructions about isolation and social distance? Among essential workers who lack adequate safety gear? Among those who are doing their best to heed warnings, but are finding themselves exposed in the course of obtaining basic necessities? Do masks help? Is exercising outdoors safe?

Finding out what the weak spots are in our defense against the coronavirus is the most vital task journalists can perform right now. It’s news we could use—desperately.

Thank you, Bernie. Screw You, New York Times.

LAURA FLANDERS







https://fair.org/home/thank-you-bernie-screw-you-new-york-times/








It is the essence of American liberalism to trash radical dreams and then dance on them. And that’s just what the New York Times did the day after Bernie Sanders bowed out of the Democratic race for the nomination. On that day, in a special editorial (4/9/20), the editors of the very same paper that disparaged his every move opined that America is divided and our democracy corrupt, and launched a series promising to report on just the sort of transformative policies Sanders advocated.


The New York Times (4/9/20) found it safe to acknowledge that “those with wealth increasingly shape the course of policymaking” the day after the last candidate who spoke out against the power of the wealthy dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“A great divide separates affluent Americans, who fully enjoy the benefits of life in the wealthiest nation on earth, from the growing portion of the population whose lives lack stability or any real prospect of betterment,” they wrote.

In the Times‘ world, it’s apparently OK to bemoan a society and an economy that privileges the rich over the poor, but it’s unacceptable to run for the presidency on a promise to reverse those priorities.

“The United States has a chance to emerge from this latest crisis as a stronger nation, more just, more free and more resilient. We must seize the opportunity,” wrote the editors.

The words look pretty on the page, snug in among the Tiffany ads. But when a campaign seeks to seize not just opportunity, but power—and spread it around—the same paper’s reporters and headline writers called that campaign and the candidate leading it “threatening,” “menacing” and “unelectable.”

“The wealthy are particularly successful in blocking changes they don’t like,” the Times writes now, as if their own paper has played no role in that. On the eve of the decisive March 10 Midwest primaries, the week before which Sanders was leading in the polls, columnist Thomas Friedman (3/10/20) redbaited Bernie for the umpteenth time, deliberately distorting democratic socialism as Stalinism, and accusing Sanders of “demonizing the engines of capitalism and job creation.”

The truth is, the New York Times, the paper of record of US liberalism, likes the progressive pose. With gravitas, they write that out of the coronavirus crisis, “there’s a chance to build a better America.”

But it didn’t take a pandemic to wake 13 million Americans to that chance and to vote for it in 2016, or 2.1 million of them to contribute to that effort in this race. Those millions didn’t need all this new, unnecessary death to hear the death knell sounding for status quo America. What they needed was a fairer chance against the establishment media.

Reality of American capitalism exposed: Millions line up for food aid as pandemic spreads

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/13/pers-a13.html






13 April 2020

“… in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, April 1939

***

The rapid spread of the coronavirus in the United States is revealing the consequences of decades of ruling-class policy, which have left the center of world capitalism completely unprepared for a significant health care emergency. At the same time, the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic is exposing the reality of widespread poverty and insecurity.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, breadlines became a symbol of social distress. Such scenes are reemerging in the form of massive line-ups for emergency food assistance in every state and community.

On Thursday, 6,000 cars lined up for five miles at a food bank drive-through in San Antonio, Texas. Some families arrived 12 hours early to ensure they received some aid. In Inglewood, California, south of Los Angeles, 5,000 cars lined up to receive food on Friday. Food bank usage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has increased by 543 percent in recent days.

Boxes of food are distributed by the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, at a drive thru distribution in downtown Pittsburgh, 10 April, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar]

Those who are lining up are not just the poorest workers, who typically rely on food banks in hard times, but also broader sections of the working class and middle class families who have never had to rely on such aid in their lives.

“I’ve never had to go to a food pantry in my life,” Shanell Gray, a recently laid off hotel worker, told the Columbus Dispatch at a food distribution in Ohio’s capital city this weekend. “This just went really fast. I was able to pay my rent for this month. May is the struggle.”

Nearly 17 million workers have filed for unemployment in the last three weeks, the highest number ever recorded. Even this figure, however, underestimates the scale of layoffs. Millions more are either ineligible for benefits or have been unable to apply due to overloaded websites and call centers.

The vast majority of the population has yet to receive any financial assistance. Just 10,000 people had received a direct deposit to their bank account as of Friday, and most states still have not established a means of sending out the $600 weekly increase in unemployment for four months.

While trillions have been handed over to the banks and gigantic corporations—with no requirement that they wait in lines—every obstacle is being put in place to prevent workers from getting anything and to cut off aid as soon as possible.

Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late arch-reactionary Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has done everything in his power to limit payments, including by excluding gig workers who use phone apps to find work and making it easier for companies to avoid paying sick and family leave.

“We want workers to have work, not to become dependent on the unemployment system,” Scalia declared in an article posted last week on Fox Business News. The comments mirrored Trump’s outraged response to the fact that “we’re paying people not to go to work.”

The consequences will be catastrophic. According to one survey, nearly three-quarters of all workers live paycheck to paycheck. Almost three in 10 American adults have no savings. With so many hanging on by their fingernails before the pandemic, the often-individual experience that one missed paycheck spells personal disaster has become a mass phenomenon.

Already, one-third of Americans missed paying rent in the first week of April, a figure that is sure to be higher in May as millions deplete their savings accounts to get by without a paycheck. If they are not immediately being evicted, due to a patchwork of local and state level moratoriums, then millions will eventually be thrown into the streets because they cannot afford to pay back the rent they will owe when workplaces reopen.

If the promised stimulus money does arrive from the federal government, it will count for little. The one-time $1,200 payment will not cover the cost of rent in most cases, let alone food and other essentials. The stopgap measures included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Republicans and Democrats last month are woefully inadequate to meet social need.

While so many are hungry for food, the anarchy of the capitalist market has been exposed by the fact that farmers are destroying crops of staple foods as orders and prices fall. No measures have been taken to redistribute and process food for consumption even as stores struggle to keep up with demand for basic food items such as milk and eggs.

Instead eggs are smashed by the tens of thousands, countless tons of green beans mulched and plowed into fields, onions buried by the tens of thousands of pounds in trenches to rot. Five percent of the country’s milk supply has been dumped, and it could rise to ten percent with the continued closure of schools, restaurants and hotels.

The massive economic devastation that is unfolding will be exploited by the Trump administration to agitate for a return to work, creating conditions in which those who are unable to find work or refuse to endanger their lives are cut off from unemployment and other aid.

The working class, however, will have its say. Over the past several days, worried comments have begun to appear on the likelihood of mass social unrest.

Bloomberg editorial board member Andreas Kluth warned Saturday that the pandemic will lead to “social revolutions,” which the ruling elites must be prepared to confront.

Kluth explains that countless Americans simply do not have the option to stay home to avoid the coronavirus, putting them at risk of getting sick or infecting their families. He notes that the situation is even worse for the millions who live in slums in countries like South Africa and India, where social distancing is not an option, handwashing is impossible without running water and there are no emergency supplies of face masks.

“In this context, it would be naïve to think that, once this medical emergency is over, either individual countries or the world can carry on as before. Anger and bitterness will find new outlets… In time, these passions could become new populist or radical movements, intent on sweeping aside whatever ancien régime they define as the enemy.”

Capitalism is being exposed to a degree without precedent in modern history. Workers must draw the lessons. A system that funnels trillions to a handful of financial parasites while condemning millions to poverty and death must be swept aside.

Niles Niemuth

John Prine | House Of Strombo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5Rkm_dqm7A

John Prine Greatest Hits Playlist - Top 10 Country Songs Of John Prine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zGQJhZGFTY

John Prine Live On Soundstage 1980

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HSm3a6YnO4

John Prine's 16 Funniest, Quirkiest, Prine-iest Songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk4nXqf82kM