RSN: Norman Solomon | Power in a Time of Coronavirus

23 March 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

DON’T WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MOMENT TO DONATE - We tend to do better towards the end of the fundraising drives than we do at the beginning. It’s a bad approach. It ensures that the fundraising drives will be longer and the stress for everyone will be greater. It never used to be this way and it doesn’t need to be this way now. This is all about “reasonable donations.” #FundingMatters - Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

RSN: Norman Solomon | Power in a Time of Coronavirus

Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "Every day now, we're waking up into an extreme real-life nightmare, while responses are still routinely lagging far behind what's at stake."

   Urgency is reality. The horrific momentum of the coronavirus is personal, social, and political. In those realms, a baseline formula is “passivity = death.” The imperative is to do vastly better.

Consistent individual actions — such as “social distancing” and extensive handwashing — are absolutely necessary. People should stay home if at all possible. Other steps include disinfecting potentially contaminated surfaces and following the admonition to not touch your face.

Meanwhile, a huge social burden has fallen onto charities and other nonprofit organizations with resources that are tiny in relation to the scale of this catastrophe. Even in normal times they can’t do much more than slightly ameliorate the shredding of government social safety nets, the shrinking of the public sector, and the profit-obsessed cruelties of corporate capitalism.

Under the weight of the coronavirus emergency, the crucial political challenges involve fighting the bastions of dominant political malfeasance, lies, and plunder at the top of the U.S. government.

“In order to save lives, protect working families, and boost our economy in sustainable and healthy ways,” Oxfam concludes, “we need to take actions that are swift, bold, and well beyond what Congress has thus far been willing to approve.” After partnering with Data for Progress to do national polling, Oxfam released a report that shows public opinion favors much more drastic legislation in response to the coronavirus rampage.

“Registered voters in the U.S. strongly support immediate, aggressive action in response to both the public-health and economic crises,” the March 20 report says. “Among the measures they endorse: paid sick leave for all workers, emergency funding for food supplies for those affected by the crisis, free testing for the virus, and moratoriums on evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs.”

An immediate necessity is to galvanize political power from the grassroots to step up the pressure for an all-out government mobilization against this pandemic. That means continually pushing to generate maximum resources toward people who need them most — now and for a long time to come.

Rather than being a respite from political power struggles, the coronavirus emergency is greatly intensifying them. More aid for those immersed in greed will mean less for those in desperate need. The quest by corporate profiteers to mercilessly exploit dire situations has never flagged.

Showing the vital importance of his national voice as a presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders has outlined some of the gluttonous corporate maneuvers now underway.

“Just in the last few days,” he pointed out on Sunday, “we’ve seen numerous examples of lobbyists and their agents fighting for special favors: the airline industry is asking for $50 billion, the private space industry is asking for $5 billion, the hotel industry wants $150 billion, the National Association of Manufacturers wants $1.4 trillion, the International Council of Shopping Centers wants a guarantee of up to $1 trillion, Adidas wants to sneak in a long-sought provision allowing people to use pre-tax money to pay for gym memberships and fitness equipment — even when many gyms and retail stores are closed nationwide — and corporate pork producers are using the coronavirus to push Congress to expedite guest worker visas, even at a time when international travel and immigration is largely shut down.”

In this time of “unprecedented crisis,” Sanders said, “we need an unprecedented legislative response that focuses on the emergency health care needs of the American people and that puts working families and the poor ahead of CEOs and huge corporations.”

With this pandemic, fueled by the intentional neglect and greedy stupidity of Trump and Company, we have profuse reasons to heed words from legendary labor organizer Mary Harris, “Mother” Jones: “Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

To fight like hell for the living — to protect people from the ravages of the coronavirus and a harsh economic system — will require unrelenting work from progressive movements willing and able to organize effectively in every political arena.

---

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN 

Update My Monthly Donation

View article on FAIR's website Presenting Trump and Science as Equals Isn’t Balanced, It’s Dangerous Neil deMause With more than 32,000 COVID-19 infections and 400 deaths in the US to date, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams predicting that “this week, it’s going to get bad,” as hospitals prepare for the eventuality of rationing treatment for patients least likely to survive, the president of the United States hit his caps lock key and typed out a tweet: WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2020 The next day’s news coverage (Bloomberg News, 3/23/20; New York Times, 3/23/20) confirmed what the tweet implied: At the end of March, the White House will consider lifting recommendations that US residents stay at home and engage in “social distancing,” in order to get the economy rolling again. This would, public health experts agree, be a disaster, both in terms of death toll and as far as having any chance of eventually bringing the pandemic under control. The Imperial College London’s projections (3/16/20) of the consequences of an unmitigated epidemic are 2.2 million dead in the US alone, and likely a lot more after taking into account the impact of overwhelmed hospitals making it impossible to get care for other health needs. Meanwhile, public health experts say it’s now too late for short-term measures to work (New Yorker, 3/20/20), with at minimum eight weeks of social distancing and other closures needed to bring infection rates down to less immediately dangerous levels, with repeat shutdowns likely necessary in the summer and fall until a vaccine can be tested and made available (New York Times, 3/17/20); Hong Kong has already had to restore more stringent measures just two weeks after it first lifted restrictions (CNN, 3/23/20). Unfortunately, thanks to some of the same journalistic pitfalls that have undermined news coverage of early phases of the crisis (FAIR.org, 3/19/20), reporting on Trump’s statements ended up soft-pedaling the dangers of the economy-first approach, and denying readers important information on what will likely happen if the White House tries to lift restrictions too soon. The ratio of politicians to coronavirus experts quoted in this New York Times piece (3/23/20) was 5 to 1. As is common in breaking news coverage, most reports took a just-the-facts approach to the matter, pairing Trump’s statements with disease experts’ warnings, and leaving it to readers to decide whom to believe. The New York Times (3/23/20), for example, led by reprinting Trump’s tweet, then countering it with the opinion of infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, who serves on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that “it would take several more weeks until people can start going about their lives in a more normal fashion.” That kind of journalistic balance is problematic enough when it presents elected officials’ opinions as equally important as those of public health experts, in the middle of a public health crisis. But as the Times article (by Maggie Haberman and David Sanger) continued, it tilted even further toward the words of politicians, not scientists: Those quoted included former Trump homeland security advisor Thomas Bossert (who called social distancing “imperative”), Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin (who described talk of a “complete shutdown of the economy” as “fake news”), Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham (who said the US shouldn’t “back off aggressive containment policies”), and anti-tax advocate and Reagan White House advisor David McIntosh (who said the government must “put an end to the social distancing some time in the near future to restore economic activity”). No actual scientists other than Fauci were cited. Even on the numbers themselves, the Times skewed its coverage toward fears of an economic downturn: Its article twice cited the millions of job losses that would result from a long shutdown, but never mentioned the millions of deaths likely if the US chooses to lift restrictions too soon. CNN's claim (3/23/20) that there are "potentially hundreds of thousands of lives at stake" is a gross understatement. CNN (3/23/20), meanwhile, presented some coronavirus projection figures, though they were almost certainly too low, and framed as a question of exactly what monetary value to place on human lives: The dynamic has led to a robust internal debate over how best to balance the actual health of the country—with potentially hundreds of thousands of lives at stake—with its economic health. CNN likewise didn’t cite any public health experts, though it did quote Graham as a critic of Trump’s position, and Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Steve Hilton, plus unnamed Twitter users, as supporters. Other coverage took a similar he-said-she-said tone: The Hill (3/23/20) noted that Trump’s tweet came “as the number of coronavirus cases in the United States grows and grows,” but as social distancing policies “are also having devastating effects, with some projections of 20% or 30% unemployment in the second quarter.” Bloomberg News (3/23/20) likewise balanced Trump’s position against that of “the government’s top health authorities” (and the ubiquitous Graham)—though it at least cited one scientist, Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who said calling for abandoning social distancing to save jobs was dangerous “zero-sum” thinking: Epidemiologists are aware of the tradeoffs because they are thinking about them in their own lives. But to do a knee-jerk response by removing these measures is short-sighted, short-term thinking that’s going to get us into deeper trouble. Economic downturns can be devastating, no doubt—especially if the consequences fall the hardest on those with the least resources, as is already being predicted in this case (Atlantic, 3/20/20). That’s one reason that experts in poverty and employment—another group oddly missing from news coverage of Trump’s missives—have called for immediate government aid to provide housing, healthcare and cash to low-income Americans (US News, 3/19/20). In fact, there’s excellent evidence that concerted government action following an economic crash can prevent a human toll on the scale that would result from an unchecked pandemic: Death rates during the Great Depression did not measurably rise (Smithsonian, 3/28/11), despite widespread unemployment. At the Columbia Journalism Review (3/23/20), Jon Allsop has suggested that the problem is that pandemic reporting is forcing news outlets to seek a balance between two contrasting journalistic roles: Increasingly, journalists interacting with public officials must strike a difficult balancing act—between aggressive scrutiny of missteps and misstatements, which is always our job, and the effective communication and amplification of government public-health guidelines, which has rarely, if ever, felt so urgent. Yet those two tasks—reporting on public-health warnings, and factchecking elected officials—aren’t really at odds: They’re both part of the same core journalistic responsibility of informing readers on what’s true and what’s not. (And, when the exact truth can’t be determined, at least making clear which sources are more qualified to know better.) But in the middle of a public health crisis, the beliefs of elected officials and those of disease experts shouldn’t be presented as if they carry equal weight. Stopping the coronavirus pandemic from taking millions of lives may require news organizations to take sides—but if it’s on the side of science, that’s the kind of bias that journalism needs. © 2020 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Our mailing address is: FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING 124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201 New York, NY 10001 FAIR's Website FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today.

POLITICO NIGHTLY: 'Let's go to work'

By Renuka Rayasam and Joanne Kenen

Presented by

WE'RE HALFWAY THROUGH THE 15 DAYS — President Donald Trump says he wants to end America's social-distancing experiment soon to save the economy. But public health experts say it's too early to say we've slowed down the pandemic enough to spring back into normal life. At today's coronavirus task force briefing, Deborah Birx, the White House task force response coordinator, described a series of epidemics that are rippling across the country. Seattle started a few weeks ago. New York City has begun what's likely to be a brutal wave now. Birx said about one in 1,000 people in the NYC metropolitan area is probably infected already — an extraordinary rate. Trump's goal would be to keep some areas hunkered down, but let others loosen up, not next week but "very very soon." But that would require something we don't yet have: ongoing, widespread real time testing and monitoring to pinpoint hot spots before they become burning fires. The government would need to be able to obtain, analyze, and act on data, to know which neighborhoods should be quarantined, which individuals should be isolated, and which could go about their business. There would be all sorts of other complexities — travel, for one. These charts: Compiled by the Financial Times, they illustrate the U.S. trajectory compared to many other nations, developed and less developed. We're skyrocketing on confirmed infections, faster than any other country on the chart (and yes, we know that some countries aren't being transparent). The curve on deaths in the U.S. isn't much better — and the deaths lag a few weeks behind infections. Mortality rate: Trump talked a lot about how the mortality rate from Covid-19 is lower than feared earlier in the epidemic. But if thousands of New Yorkers get seriously ill very soon, a lot of people are going to die. One thing we do know: If we end up with more critically ill patients than ventilators, we'll know we failed. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition , a nightly intelligence brief from our global newsroom on the impact of the coronavirus on politics and policy, the economy and global health. You can catch me and Health Editor Adriel Bettelheim on Tuesday on POLITICO Live talking about the U.S. response to the coronavirus. Register here. Reach out: rrayasam@politico.com and @renurayasam.

A message from PhRMA: In these unprecedented times, America's biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: the eradication of COVID-19. We are rapidly screening our vast global libraries to identify potential treatments and have numerous clinical trials underway. Explore our efforts.

TOO SOON — Hopes that the economy will make a swift recovery after the worst of the crisis passes are quickly fading. On Thursday, economists are expecting the largest U.S. jobless claim number ever reported, smashing previous unemployment records. The word "depression" has been seeping into more long-term forecasts as fears grow that the virus could continue its spread — and that's even factoring in the multi-trillion dollar response from Congress and the Fed. That's rattling Trump — The clash between economists and public health officials is creating some strange alliances and disagreement among the president's closest advisers. Even if the president does lift lockdown orders, governors and local leaders may not follow suit blunting any potential economic uplift. Stay tuned: Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force will participate in a Fox New Virtual Town Hall on Tuesday from 12-2 p.m.

Grand Central Terminal stands mostly empty as much of the city is void of cars and pedestrians over fears of spreading the coronavirus. | Getty Images

Nightly Number

$419 billion: The decline in market value of Apple from its peak this year on Feb. 12 to today's close.

Turning to Congress

DOWN TO THE WIRE — Partisan rancor scuttled a vote to move forward on a nearly $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package for the second time in two days, but the high stakes mean that a deal is still likely as early as Tuesday, POLITICO's Congressional Editor Ben Weyl tells us. The rising death toll and economic fallout has lawmakers on Capitol Hill spooked both for the country as well as their own health. "This is big and scary," said Ben. "It feels bigger even than the 2008 financial crisis, because there's this virus that's mysterious and deadly and shutting our country down. The potential devastation, in human and financial terms, is hard to wrap your head around." At the moment, Democrats are worried about a provision sending $500 billion to distressed industries, which they say could turn into a slush fund with little oversight. And they want to see more help for the unemployed and hospitals. Lawmakers are anxious to get a deal done especially as an increasing number of their own ranks test positive for the virus or are quarantined. While Congress will likely take a breather after they pass this rescue package — no one wants to be in Washington right now — it's likely they'll eventually have to come back to deliver even more relief, Ben said. Over the long haul, the pandemic could also usher in changes to how Congress operates, including to allow lawmakers to vote remotely in times of crisis. "At the moment, leadership is reluctant to make that change. But momentum is growing, and I could see it happening one day," Ben said.

THE FDA & AGENCY IQ: The ground below our feet is shifting by the second. And the FDA is at the epicenter of the federal government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. POLITICO's newest division, AgencyIQ, is providing around-the-clock coverage of the developing public health crisis for regulatory professionals in the biopharmaceutical and in vitro diagnostic (IVD) communities. AgencyIQ's full suite of research and analysis is available in the COVID-19 Resource Center , which addresses important topics ranging from development pathways available to companies bringing new medical products to the public to the impact of FDA's efforts to accelerate the introduction of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. If you are monitoring this situation at a micro level, check it out here.

Talking to the Experts

How has Covid-19 transformed the job market? "Under the latest numbers, EPI expects a loss of around 14 millions jobs by the summer even with a congressional relief package factored in. The economist part of me is totally freaked out about what this means for working people. In the coming weeks, millions are going to be laid off and [unemployment insurance] systems are just crashing. It absolutely will be possible for some [to be retrained in in-demand fields.] Some people will luck out and get those jobs, but there will still be millions lost." — Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute as told to POLITICO's employment and immigration reporter Rebecca Rainey. "It's no exaggeration to call this the most severe challenge in modern history for dine-in restaurants. The concern right now is that some of these restaurants may not survive. Reopening can be expensive; one mid-sized operator estimated in a letter to Congress he would need two weeks of revenue to restart the company. The servers that I've spoken with aren't interested in leaving the industry. Right now, most are optimistic that this is a short-term crisis rather than a long-term one, and they're looking for gigs they're eligible for based on existing skill sets. One server out West told me she's considering Amazon's recent offer of part-time employment for those laid off at other jobs. It would be a pay cut relative to her usual tip income, but the pay is better than unemployment benefits." — Michael Saltsman of the conservative Employment Policies Institute This week, unemployment claims soared as state and federal officials restricted public gatherings and shuttered stores to prevent the spread of the Covid-19. Using wage data from the U.S. Department of Labor and working conditions surveys from O*NET, we analyzed those who are most vulnerable.

Beatrice Jin and Andrew McGill/POLITICO

2020 Watch

CONVENTION IN QUESTION — If you ask the DNC, their July convention in Milwaukee is going to happen the same as it always was. If you ask many skeptical Democrats, they have major doubts. The DNC's steady-as-she-goes posture stands in contrast to some of its own state parties. Democrats could pursue a range of options if a traditional convention is not possible, including postponing the gathering or changing the rules to allow delegates to vote remotely. "Given what the experts are saying, delegates may end up on a phone call" selecting their nominee, Bob Mulholland, a DNC member from California, said in a text message. "It is full speed ahead until a staffer yells 'Iceberg.'" Around the Nation OUT IN FRONT — Governors from both red and blue states are taking increasingly aggressive action to limit movement in an attempt to slow the spread of Covid-19. More than a dozen governors have now announced mandatory orders shutting down schools and forcing people to stay home as the number of new confirmed cases skyrockets around the country and the death toll rises about 100. How will their plans be scrambled after Trump's remarks tonight? — Massachusetts has been at the forefront of testing and New York's health department has the green light to begin testing a drug to treat Covid-19. The Global Fight DUTCH COURAGE — Shell, the Dutch oil company, is donating 2.5 million liters of isopropyl alcohol to the Dutch hospital system. That's a six-month supply of the key ingredient, a byproduct of oil and gas refining, for making sanitizer gel. The donation comes as the Netherlands struggles with 5,000 known infections among a population smaller than Florida's, with consequences ranging from closed borders to the Dutch health minister collapsing in Parliament. Protecting hospital workers is critical to battling the virus, and the heroic efforts of small distilleries to convert production to sanitizers is not enough on its own to meet urgent needs. Alongside Shell, there's another dozen major suppliers globally, including Dow, DuPont and ExxonMobil in the United States. Good news from Italy: Two weeks after the country's lockdown commenced, Italy's daily death toll fell for the second day in a row, hitting 601, after 651 Sunday and 792 Saturday. The timing of that progress is in line with what health experts predicted in recommending the lockdown.   TUNE IN TO POLITICO DISPATCH: Our POLITICO Dispatch podcast takes you behind the scenes at POLITICO, where journalists break news, work sources and pull back the curtain on politics and policy. Fast. Short. Daily. Subscribe and start listening today.     Parting Words ANIMAL HOUSE — With people around the globe on coronavirus lockdown, pets are suddenly having to get used to having their human companions around 24 hours a day. And while many jurisdictions have made exceptions for allowing pets to have fresh air, some people have taken advantage of the opportunity to leave the house. Luciano Barone, mayor of the Italian town of Mamoiada, was forced to clarify that one could only walk real dogs, after a local resident was caught taking a stroll with a toy pooch in tow.   A message from PhRMA: In these unprecedented times, America's biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: the eradication of COVID-19. The investments we've made have prepared us to act swiftly: · Rapidly screening our vast global libraries to identify potential treatments and have numerous clinical trials underway · Dedicating our top scientists and using our investments in new technologies to speed the development of safe and effective vaccines · Sharing learnings from clinical trials in real time with governments and other companies to advance the development of additional therapies · Expanding our unique manufacturing capabilities and sharing available capacity to ramp up production once a successful medicine or vaccine is developed Explore our efforts.   Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   Follow us POLITICO, LLC 1000 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA, 22209, USA