Pietersblog

The American Economy Is About to Die From Coronavirus — Because Nobody Saved It

Door umair haqueeand.co9 min

You are watching an economy begin to die. That, my friends, is what economic devastation looks like. It says that unemployment claims skyrocketed to 7 million last week. That’s a number so high, so fast, that there’s no parallel in all of recorded history — even remotely.

The American economy is undergoing the largest shock in history. It’s a shock faster, bigger, and more devastating than any war, which is one of many reasons the war metaphor is inadequate. We have literally never experienced such a thing before.

Why is the American being left to die? Because not nearly enough is being done about. This shock is unprecedented in history — and the response needed to be, too. Instead, Congress and the Prez passed a stimulus bill that’s far, far short of the mark. How much so? In what precise ways?

Let’s think about it together.

The first reason the economy is dying is that the stimulus is inadequate because it’s simply far too little. We’re going to do a little math together — don’t get scared, it’s math any grade schooler can handle. How large is the US economy? It’s $20 trillion per year. Of that, about 99% of the number of firms are small businesses. How large is the portion of the stimulus outlined to support businesses, especially small ones? $500 billion. Are you seeing a problem here yet? You should. That’s about just 2.5% of the economy over a year, which means this.

The portion of the stimulus meant to support business is enough to keep the economy going for…just one week. (Sure, we can adjust those numbers up and down. If I assume the 80% of the economy is business, not 100%, the stimulus is enough to keep the economy going for…two weeks. You see the problem, perhaps.) Think about that for a second. Just one week of support, amidst the greatest crisis since the last World War. What the?

This shock is historic precisely because it’s going to cause the economy to shut down — as in waves of businesses to literally shutter its doors as people stay at home — for far, far longer than a week. It’s already been a week. It’s going to be months until any semblance of normality is resumed. But by then, it will be too late: because this stimulus only supports the economy for a week, most of it will be…dead.

Yes, really. That brings me to the second reason the stimulus is short of the mark. This stimulus isn’t quick, large, or simple enough to buoy confidence — and so people are beginning tp panic. Even if I want to get what little support is being offered — say as a small business owner — how do I begin? Where do I turn? Even I myself can scarcely figure out the answer, and I’ve pored over the various documents. It’s a tangle of red tape, a bureaucratic mess. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Why?

Keynes pointed out about a century ago that the key to staving off depressions is confidence. If I believe that things will be OK, and you do too, then maybe we won’t hoard our money and lay off our employees and so forth — and the vicious spiral of depression won’t result. But If I can’t figure out how to access even what little support there is…then I will lose confidence, fast. The vicious cycle will set in all the sooner.

That is precisely what we see happening. Why have ten million people filed for unemployment in just two weeks? Because there’s not enough support to keep the economy going, and because what little there is isn’t producing a feeling of confidence. Instead, because it’s a maze and a mess, people are fast losing confidence in institutions and systems. Employers are laying people off — even if they don’t have to, because they can’t figure out how not to have to.

Meanwhile, the media is touting a $1200 check to every American. The truth is very different. That $1200 has all kinds of tests attached to it. If you make this much as a single person, that much as a married couple, and so on. It’s true that 90% of people will see something — but most people won’t see nearly enough.

Let’s do the same calculation we did for businesses for people. The economy is $20 trillion. The US has 127 million households, give or take. Divided equally, that produces income per household of about $150k. But of course, Americans aren’t nearly that rich. Median income is only about $60K — because the rich skim a full half the economy right off the top. 60K is about $1100 a week. That means the much vaunted stimulus check equals about just a week’s worth of the average person’s income.

Do you see the weird parallel here? The stimulus is so small it supports businesses for just one week. And exactly the same is true for people — it supports the average person for just one week, too.

Just one week. It’s already been more than a week.

That brings me to the third reason this stimulus is inadequate: what good is it supporting people and businesses for just one week…with all kinds of strings attached…when the crisis will last months? That money won’t be paid out for several more weeks, perhaps months in many cases. And the conditions attached to it make it a sum that’s almost meaningless for many people. Are you seeing the problem again? Timing and conditionality: what absurdly little support there is will arrive far, far too late. Too late for what? Not just too late to pay the bills. We can all see that coming. Too late to prevent panic, which is the key to averting any depression.

And who knows how to get it all? How much you will get? Whether or not you’ll need to hire a lawyer to see any funds at all? Who to even apply to? because the design of this stimulus is so obscure, keeping everyone in the dark, there’s no real feeling of reassurance or confidence gently lifting up the economy. Hence, people are beginning to panic. That is why ten million have filed for unemployment in the last two weeks alone.

Now let’s think of unbelievably destructive that really is. How much is “ten million people”, anyways? The US labour force is about 164 million people. Ten million is already six percent of it. That might not sound like a lot, but it is: it’s about 3 percent a week. If that trend continues, it’ll be twelve percent in a month. 24 percent in two months. That’s a quarter of the economy, filing for unemployment…in a matter of weeks. That’s fifty percent in four months. How long do you think Coronavirus will last? Two months? Three? Four? Bang!

Coronavirus is an extinction level event for modern economies. That is why all this, my friends, is an event the likes of which the modern world has never really seen before. Not even in war, natural calamity, or financial crisis. Because when a society reaches even about 25% or so of sudden, irreversible, long-term, hardcore unemployment, the economy is more or less finished. It cannot recover for generations. That number means that huge numbers of businesses are shuttered, jobs are destroyed never to come back, incomes vanished, savings gone, homes foreclosed on. It is the end of families, relationships, stability, hope. It is usually the end of democracy, too, as people turn to a strongman in their rage and discontent and despair. Economic ruin is the end of a gentle, modern, wise culture, society, and politics in this way — the root of all ruin.

All that collapse is now very much in America’s near future — not next year, but this summer. Because the response to Coronavirus has been profoundly inadequate. You can see it in everyday life — doctors fashioning masks from pizza boxes, the dying sharing ventilators. All this reflects the simple fact: the American government didn’t do nearly enough about the greatest economic shock in modern history. It barely did anything at all.

In the end, when they write the books, I’m confident they’ll say this. The American government supported people and business for one week. Just one week. Amidst an epic, historic crisis which was to last months. As a result, the economy seized up and died, like a Coronavirus patient who couldn’t breathe anymore, but didn’t have a ventilator, either.

But that was needless. Because money at this scale is just a social fiction. The government can and should support the economy for as long as it takes, guaranteeing both business and personal incomes, as well as writing checks every single month. That doesn’t plunge a society into “debt.” It’s not money we are “borrowing” from anyone else, like say China. We are just lending it to ourselves, which means that we can cancel the debt afterwards with no ill consequences, either. The central bank can literally write off whatever debt is accrued the day after the crisis subsides. And if you doubt that, go ahead and think about who it’s owed to. The government owes money to whom, exactly? The answer is: nobody. It has only borrowed from itself, and therefore it can cancel the debt, too.

No, there won’t be “inflation.” What there will be is massive deflation if none of the above happens. All those millions filing for unemployment? That means wages fall massively, and prices follow, too.

Think of it like filling a hole. Coronavirus has shredded a massive, gaping hole in the heart of the economy. Either the government fills it, borrowing thread, buying needles, and employing people to stitch and sew — or like any hole in a fabric, it grows, one thread fraying at a time, leading to the next. The government filling the hole is not bad economics, or irresponsible — it is the only sensible thing to do. When the fabric of the economy is whole again, then the “debt” of buying all that new thread is immediately revealed to be imaginary. If we hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t have had an economy at all. The resources we “borrowed”…from ourselves tomorrow…for use today were therefore necessary, life-saving, critical…investments. Without them, we wouldn’t have had a tomorrow at all.

Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately.Americans don’t quite understand that. Capitalism has convinced them that “debt” is as real as the violence of a gun. But it isn’t. “Debt”, “credit”, “money”, and “finance” — these are all just social constructions. There are times when societies need to go into massive “debt”, which really means invest massively, so that everyone and everything, including life as they know it, can survive. That simply means they need to allow their mechanism of collective action, the government, to “borrow” artificially limited resources from itself, tomorrow for everyone, today — or else we don’t have much of a tomorrow. This is one of those moments. Or else. Life as we know it implodes.

Will Americans get that, though? Before it’s too late?

I’ll see you on the breadlines, brother.

Umair Haque
April 2020

Bron: Eudaimonia & Co en Medium Daily Digest

Eudaimonia and Co

geplaatst op: Facebook 09-04-2020

Aljazeera, maart 2020

As the number of infections and deaths from COVID-19 multiply by the day, there have been increasing calls across the world for people to show solidarity and care for each other. Yet for the Israeli government, there is no such thing as solidarity.

As soon as the first coronavirus infections were detected, the Israeli authorities demonstrated that they have no intention of easing apartheid to make sure Palestinians are able to face the epidemic under more humane conditions.

Repression has continued, with the Israeli occupation forces using the excuse of increased police presence to continue raids on some communities, such as the Issawiya neighborhood in East Jerusalem, home demolitions in places like Kafr Qasim village and the destruction of crops in Bedouin communities in the Naqab desert.

Despite four Palestinian prisoners testing positive for COVID-19, the Israeli government has so far refused to heed calls to release the 5,000 Palestinians (including 180 children) that it currently holds in its jails. And there has been no sign that the debilitating siege on the Gaza Strip, which has decimated its public services, would be lifted any time soon.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also trying to exclude the mostly Palestinian Joint List from the formation of an emergency unity government to tackle the outbreak, calling its members “terror supporters“.

At the same time, the Israeli authorities have been quick to depict Palestinians as carriers of the virus and a threat to public health.

In early March, when the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced it had confirmed the first seven cases of the coronavirus (which causes COVID-19 disease) in the occupied Palestinian territory, Israeli Defense minister Naftali Bennett was quick to shut down the city of Bethlehem, where all the cases were located.

Of course, the concern there was not the health and safety of Palestinians in the city, but rather the threat of them infecting Israelis. The nearby settlement of Efrat – which also had confirmed infections, of course – was not put on lockdown at that time.

Shortly after, the health ministry issued a statement advising Israelis not to enter the occupied Palestinian territories. 

Then last week, Netanyahu asked the “Arab-speaking public” to follow the instruction of the ministry of health saying that there is a compliance problem among the Palestinians. No such concerns were expressed about of some members of the Jewish population of Israel, who outright refused to shut down religious schools and businesses.

This attitude towards Palestinians is of course not new. The writings of early European Zionist settlers are full of racist assumptions about Arab hygiene and living conditions, and the threat of the disease coming from the Palestinian population was an early justification for apartheid.

Apart from the decades-old repression and discrimination, during the COVID-19 epidemic, Palestinians will be facing another consequence of occupation and apartheid – a broken healthcare system.

The roots of its dysfunction go back to the mandate era, when the British discouraged the formation of a Palestinian-run healthcare sector. The Palestinian population (mostly the urban parts of it) was serviced by a number of hospitals that the British colonialists set up, as well as health facilities established by various Western missionaries. Meanwhile, the Jewish settlers were allowed to set up their own healthcare system, funded generously from abroad and run independently of the mandate.

During World War II, some missionaries left and closed down their clinics, and after 1948, the British withdrew, leaving behind an ill-performing healthcare infrastructure. In 1949, Egypt annexed Gaza. The following year, Jordan did the same with the West Bank. Over the next 17 years, Cairo and Amman provided for the Palestinian population living under their rule, but they did not really establish a well-functioning healthcare system.

UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – had to step up its services, providing primary healthcare, while the Palestinians started building a network of charitable healthcare facilities.

After the war of 1967 and the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Israel as an occupying power was legally responsible for healthcare of the Palestinians, but unsurprisingly, it did nothing to encourage the development of a robust healthcare sector. To illustrate the point: in 1975, the budget allocated for healthcare in the West Bank was smaller than that of one Israeli hospital for the whole year.

In 1994, the Palestinian Authority was created and took over service provision. Needless to say, the continuing occupation and the fact that the Authority’s budget was dependent on foreign donors and the whims of the Israeli government, as well as the corruption of PA officials, did not allow the Palestinian health sector to improve. 

As a result, if you were to enter a Palestinian hospital in the West Bank today, you would be struck by the overcrowding of patients, the shortages of supplies, the inadequate equipment and the substandard infrastructure and sanitation. Medical professionals have repeatedly protested the poor working conditions in their hospitals, most recently in February this year, but to no avail.

With just 1.23 beds per 1,000 people, 2,550 working doctors, less than 20 intensive care specialists and less than 120 ventilators in all public hospitals, the occupied West Bank is facing a public health disaster if the authorities do not contain the spread of COVID-19.

The situation in the West Bank may seem bleak, but the one in the Gaza Strip is simply catastrophic. The United Nations announced that the strip will be unlivable by 2020. It is now 2020 and the residents of the Gaza Strip – apart from inhuman living conditions – are now also facing a COVID-19 outbreak, as the first cases were confirmed on March 21. 

The Israeli, Egyptian and PA-imposed blockade of Gaza has brought its healthcare system to the brink of collapse. This has been compounded by cycles of destruction of health facilities and a slow rebuilding efforts following repeated large-scale military offensives by the Israeli military. 

The people of Gaza already face dire conditions: unemployment is at 44 percent (61 percent for the youth); 80 percent of the population is dependent on some form of foreign assistance; 97 percent of water is undrinkable; and 10 percent of children have stunted growth due to malnutrition. 

Healthcare provision is on a constant decline. According to the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, since the year 2000 “there has been a drop in the number of hospital beds (1.8 to 1.58), doctors (1.68 to 1.42) and nurses (2.09 to 1.98) per 1,000 people, leading to overcrowding and reduced quality of services”. Israel’s ban on the import of technology with possible “dual use” has restricted the purchasing of equipment, such as X-ray scanners and medical radioscopes.

Regular power cuts threaten the lives of thousands of patients relying on medical apparatuses, including babies in incubators. Hospitals lack about 40 percent of essential medicines, and there are inadequate amounts of basic medical supplies, such as syringes and gauze. The 2018 decision of the Trump administration to stop US funding for UNRWA also affected the agency’s ability to provide healthcare and bring doctors to perform complex surgeries in Gaza.

The limits of the Gaza healthcare system were tested in 2018 during the March of the Great Return, when Israeli soldiers opened mass fire on unarmed Palestinians protesting near the fence separating the strip from Israeli territory. In those days, hospitals were overwhelmed with wounded and dead, and for months they were struggling to provide proper care for the thousands injured by live ammunition, many of whom were permanently disabled.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, which also experiences severe problems with water and sanitation infrastructure. It is clear that stopping COVID-19 from spreading will be next to impossible. It is also clear that the population, which is already worn down by malnutrition, a higher rate of disability (due to all the Israeli assaults), and psychological distress due to war and hardship will be that much more vulnerable to the virus. Many will die and the healthcare system will likely collapse.

So as the West Bank and Gaza face potential health catastrophes amid an impeding COVID-19 epidemic, the question is, what will Israel do? Will it give access to its healthcare system to Palestinians? Will it at least stop blocking foreign medical aid?

A recent video that went viral on Palestinian social media can give us the answer. In it, a Palestinian labourer is seen struggling to breathe by the side of a road at an Israel checkpoint near Beit Sira village. His Israeli employer had called the Israeli police on him after seeing him severely sick and suspecting that he had the virus. He had been picked up and dumped at the checkpoint.

Decades of settler colonial rule, military occupation, and repeated deadly assaults have taught Palestinians not to expect any “solidarity” from the Israeli apartheid government. In this, like in previous crises, they will pull through with their proverbial sumud (perseverance).

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect A

Daily Koss, 26 maart 2020.

Peter,

Amazon is endangering its workers during the coronavirus outbreak! Workers in at least nine warehouses have already tested positive.
Amazon must be responsible and provide all of its workers fully paid leave now. Amazon is one of the largest and wealthiest companies in the world. Throughout the coronavirus crisis, Amazon has positioned itself as a new essential service for the technological era. But the services it offers wouldn’t exist without the thousands of workers that provide them directly. What’s truly essential in this global pandemic is allowing people to protect the health and wellbeing of themselves and their families. As schools shut down, hospitals fill, and states adopt protective measures, workers must be able to take care of their loved ones and avoid spreading this virus.

COVID-19 has disrupted society on a level our country has never faced. It’s made one truth abundantly clear: paid leave should be a right, not a privilege.
The health of our nation lies in people being able to stay home AND still care for their families. Amazon workers, including grocery workers at subsidiaries like Whole Foods, should be no exception.
Amazon’s warehouse workers, delivery workers, and workers at its subsidiaries, are being forced to work on the frontlines of this crisis. They deserve paid leave now.

Bezigheden binnenshuis.

Het is zover. Nog net geen Lock Down, maar het zit er aan te komen. We hebben ons opgesloten in huis en laten de boodschappen bezorgen. We houden contact met deze en gene. De auto is uitbesteed voor het geval we iets gedaan willen hebben of nodig hebben wat we van hieruit niet zelf kunnen regelen. En we hebben een tuin. Vandaag was het super mooi weer en daar hebben we dan optimaal van geprofiteerd : een binnentuin! Alles begint in bloei te raken en aangezien we uit de nog koude wind zitten, voelt het zonnetje warm aan.

Elke dag voeren we gezondheidsinformatie in op een app aan de artsen die beoordelen of er wel/niet sprake is van een slechte ontwikkeling. Tot nu toe geen zorgelijke resultaten.

Verder volgen we de ontwikkelingen op de voet: nationaal en internationaal en dan zie je het virus zich geleidelijk over de wereld verspreiden met de bijbehorende uitroepen van ontkenning, klein maken tot en met de klap van de echte crisis en onvoldoende beademingsapparaten om de toestroom van patienten op te vangen en te helpen.

Politici en Ondernemers die al sinds 1973 het neoliberalisme hebben geïntroduceerd , hebben het totale netwerk van zorg,onderwijs, levensvatbaar inkomen en huisvesting voor veel mensen onderuit gehaald. Door de crisis is het runnen van een land als onderneming uitgelopen op een fiasco. Nu wreekt zich ook de uitholling van de internationale instituties zoals de VN, de WHO, het Europese Parlement, en het terugtrekken uit de oude wereldorde door de VS en ontbreekt zo de mogelijkheid om deze crisis mondiaal te sturen. Dat kan leiden tot vergaand nationalisme en oorlog.

Nu zitten we nog in de tuin, genieten van de zon, lezen mooie boeken en beschouwen de ontwikkelingen. Naar buiten gaan we niet.