Neoliberalism

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – Republican Presidents Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Donald Trump and the 2020 GOP all have promoted the myth about heroic job creators vs. despicable moochers. Their toxic and misleading ideology is based on discredited supply side, trickle-down, voodoo economics that have consistently failed […]

Donald Trump

The Ultimate Stress Test: America as revealed by the Coronavirus Pandemic

Rajan Menon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) virus, which causes Covid-19, seemed to emerge from deepest history, from the Black Death of the 14th century and the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. In just months, it has infected more than 1.5 million people and claimed more than 88,000 lives. The virus continues to […]

Donald Trump

How Trump is making the Coming Great Recession even more Massive

Reese Erlich

San Francisco (48hills.org) – The current recession was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. But after 11 years of economic boom, a capitalist bust was inevitable. And it’s being made worse by the Trump Administration’s blunders. Meanwhile socialist China, despite very real problems, is effectively combating the pandemic and starting an economic recovery. Here in the […]

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 […]

Employment

The Fundamentalist Religion of the Market and COVID-19

Richard Foltz

Discussions on the role of religion in the contemporary world generally fail to take into consideration an argument advanced by David Loy more than twenty years ago: namely, that the dominant faith system practiced across the globe today is in fact that of so-called “free-market” capitalism, a self-serving ideology forcibly imposed by a worldwide plutocracy […]

Donald Trump

How did we Become so Backward? S. Korea had US Equivalent of 1,311 Coronavirus Deaths as we hit 16,000

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The US is heading for having the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world next week. Admittedly the US is a big country and it still won’t have the highest number of cases per capita. But it won’t even be in the running for the country with the fewest […]

Banking

When Renters and Homeowners and Small Businesses need a Bailout, the Fed gives it to Big Corporations

Tomdispatch

By Nomi Prins | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – To say that these are unprecedented times would be the understatement of the century. Even as the United States became the latest target of Hurricane COVID-19, in “hot spots” around the globe a continuing frenzy of health concerns represented yet another drop down the economic rabbit […]

Banking

The US Tax System is a vast Ponzi Scheme that only Benefits the Wealthy

F. Douglas Stephenson

( Gainesville Sun ) – There are no easy answers to financing U.S. health insurance, mental health care, social services, public health and other services for nearly 330 million individuals. The USA is a very large country and financing services must be tailored to this reality. Accordingly, funding government programs requires us to muster the […]

Donald Trump

How we gave up our Health, Environment and Diplomacy for Wars, Walls and Plutocracy

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, MA (Special to Informed Comment) -Budgets are moral documents (or immoral, depending on priorities). So also is tax policy. Consider Trump’s proposed $1.3 trillion discretionary budget for 2021. In snapshot, the Pentagon gets 55% and every other need of 331 million people–from health, education, agriculture, transportation, environmental protection to housing–is left with 45%. As […]