Health Care

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Bernie Sanders bowed out of the race for president on Wednesday, but he made it clear that he still leads a national movement. Sanders has a substantial delegate count, of 914 as I write. Although he has concluded that he won’t reach the 1,991 needed to win the nomination, his […]

Epidemics

Trump, Eyeing Reelection, Wants to Put us Back to Work too Soon: Our Health vs. Whose Economy?

John Buell

President Trump, who hoped to run for re-election on a booming economy, is being frustrated by a tiny virus. As usual he lashes out with mixed and confusing messages. He acknowledges the severity of the crisis but then he suggests that health restrictions will needlessly derail the economy. He complains the cure may be worse […]

African-Americans

African-Americans, Victimized by U.S. Racism and Classism, are now preyed on by Coronavirus

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The coronavirus appears to be striking African-Americans at far higher rates than white Americans, write Reis Thebault, Andrew Ba Tran and Vanessa Williams at WaPo. Given that African-Americans are on average younger than whites, they should have fewer cases. But other causes are overriding the youth advantage. The median age […]

Epidemics

Coronavirus and Medicare for All: Our Crisis comes from Gov’t Putting Profit over Public Health

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – Big business dominates our government and public health takes a back seat to the need for private profit. Many government leaders from both political parties share the same ‘profits over public health’ ideology, even though the Covid-19 pandemic clearly shows how our economic system has failed to serve […]

Authoritarianism

While Rome Burns: With 2020 Election in Doubt Trump Gets what he’s always Wanted

Karen J. Greenberg

(Tomdispatch.com) – Last month, Donald Trump retweeted a doctored photo of himself playing the fiddle that was labeled “My next piece is called: nothing can stop what’s coming.” It was clearly an homage to the Emperor Nero who so infamously made music while Rome burned. To it, the president added this comment: “Who knows what […]

Food Security

The US Public Now Wants Medicare for All and the Nordic Model– But a Social Movement is Needed

George Lakey

( Waging Nonviolence) – Surprisingly, for a mainstream daily newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer ended its March 22 editorial on the coronavirus by calling for system change, writing, “This crisis has laid bare some hard truths: that we’ve built a society that has removed protections for workers, supported the creation and growth of the gig economy, […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Crisis will also be Killing 250K / year Soon, and Needs same Planetary Swift Action as Covid-19

The Conversation

By Eric Galbraith and Ross Otto | – In the past few weeks, governments around the world have enacted dramatic measures to mitigate the threat of COVID-19. It’s too soon to know whether these measures will prove too little to limit mass mortality, or so extreme that they set off economic catastrophe. But what is […]

Donald Trump

Trump bashed Immigrants, but Nearly 1/3 of US Doctors are Foreign-Born, on Pandemic Front Lines

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It turns out we need those foreigners after all, despite what Trump thinks. On Sunday British investigative journalist Iain Overton tweeted, The names of the first three doctors to die fighting COVID-19 in the UK Amged el-HawraniAdel el-TayarHabib Zaidi — Iain Overton (@iainoverton) March 29, 2020 The significance is that […]

Donald Trump

Maybe that Imperial Presidency Idea wasn’t so Great: The Coronavirus Reveals that America Long Since Fell Apart

David Faris

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – If you were asked three months ago, when news of the novel Coronavirus we now call Covid-19 was just emerging from China, which rich country in the world was the most defenseless against a global viral pandemic, would you have said anything but the United States? The Coronavirus crisis […]