Inequality

( Otherwords.org) – The forces of greed shoved working families to the edge — all it took was a virus to push them over. By Jim Hightower | April 29, 2020 In this horrible time of economic collapse, it is truly touching to see so many corporate chieftains reaching out in solidarity with the hard-hit […]

Inequality

Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers

Inequality.org

By Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo and Sophia Paslaskiis | – Billionaire Wealth and the Pandemic ( Inequality.org) – In its 34th annual list of global billionaires, published on April 7, 2020, Forbes reports a modest decline in the total number of billionaires from 2,153 in 2019 to 2,095in 2020. “The world’s richest are not immune […]

Corruption

Trump, Inc.: How Jared Kushner is Tackling White House Coronavirus Response — Without Any Evident Experience

ProPublica

by Andrea Bernstein, WNYC | – This story was co-published with WNYC. (ProPublica) – On April 2, Jared Kushner uncharacteristically took to the podium to speak at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing. He’d been given the task, he said, of assisting Vice President Mike Pence’s Coronavirus Task Force with supply chain issues. “The president,” […]

Donald Trump

The Scum of all Fears: America declines the Trump Administration’s Invitation to Die

David Faris

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – President Trump, facing the prospect of possibly the worst electoral environment ever to face an incumbent president, is borrowing a page from the last Republican administration, the one that ended with a sitting president so universally reviled that he decided to skip his own party’s nominating convention. America’s 45th […]

Epidemics

Inequality and the Coronavirus: Or How to Destroy American Society From the Top Down

Tomdispatch

By Liz Theoharis | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – My mom contracted polio when she was 14. She survived and learned to walk again, but my life was deeply affected by that virus. Today, as our larger society attempts to self-distance and self-isolate, my family has texted about the polio quarantine my mom was put under: […]

Epidemics

Unprotected Nurses of the World, Unite; You have nothing to Lose but your Corporate Chains

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Many pundits have correctly recognized Covis19’s role in exposing extreme class, race, and gender inequalities in this society and the vulnerabilities they foster. This virus also exposes the grave injustices that characterize many American workplaces, where many Americans spend nearly a third of the prime years of […]

Democratic Socialism

The Rich wanted to Strangle a Tiny Gov’t in a Bathtub to avoid Taxes; Now it Turns out We need a Competent State

Jim Hightower

( Otherwords.org) – Amazingly, America has become a nation of socialists, asking in dismay: “Where’s the government?” These are not born-again Bernie Sanders activists, but people of all political stripes (including previously apolitical multitudes) who are now clamoring for big government intervention in their lives. Nothing like a spreading coronavirus pandemic to bring home the […]

Donald Trump

With Trump gross Incompetence, Bookstores moving Post-Apocalyptic Fiction into Current Events Section

John Feffer

(Tomdispatch.com) – In retrospect, it’s no surprise that, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, dystopian fiction enjoyed a spike in popularity. However, novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which soared on Amazon, would prove more horror stories than roadmaps. Like so many ominous sounds from a dark basement, […]

Epidemics

Exponential Growth: Bad in a Pandemic, Bad Economics if we Care about Climate and Mass Extinctions

contributors

By Chirag Dhara (The Hindu) – “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low,” said Mr. Donald Trump on Feb. 26, 2020. About 50 Americans had contracted the virus by then. Today, merely seven weeks later, cases in the US have neared 500,000 and left 18,000 dead. As the […]