Mamma Mia! Rudy Giuliani Threw a Potential Superspreader Event for Trump on Columbus Day
It was Columbus Day in Pennsylvania, and in 2020 that could only mean one thing: Rudy Giuliani was in Philadelphia sounding like Livia Soprano.
As Donald Trump traveled to Florida for his first MAGA rally since his hospitalization for COVID-19, his campaign called in the most famous Italian American Trump supporter who hasn’t yet been fired or indicted (it’s been a rough four years for my people) for what they billed as the launch of “Italian Americans for Trump.” With Trump down in the polls 22 days from Election Day, the evening started with an actual Hail Mary inside a cramped Trump campaign office in Northeast Philly.
Holy Mary
Mother of God
Pray for us sinners now
And at the hour of our death
“RUDY!” a man yelled. “Next mayor of Philadelphia: Rudy!”
But for everybody’s sake, I hope it worked more like a prayer to Saint Raphael, the patron saint of healing.
While outside it rained and temperatures fell to 56 degrees, inside the cramped office space, the air was warm and humid, like hot breath. Giuliani, who is 76 years old, spoke at close range to about 75 supporters for over 30 minutes. Although he claims to have tested negative, he was present at debate-prep sessions two weeks ago with the president and others — Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway, and Bill Stepien — all of whom have since tested positive. At the Philly event on Monday night, he did not wear a face covering, and while many others in attendance did, they often wore them improperly, the masks hanging below their noses, rendering them ineffective.
Giuliani mentioned hydroxychloroquine, the drug promoted by Trump throughout the pandemic as a way to prevent coronavirus infection that was discredited even before Trump contracted the virus. “I took one this morning,” Giuliani said. “I was exposed four days ago. Four negatives. My doctor makes me take hydroxychloroquine because he believes it’s a prophylactic. Not only that — my doctor has treated 2,000 patients. Two people died. One was 87. The other was 79. Both of them had very serious diabetes.”
He called the drug “a great pill if you take it at the early stages.” And he credited Trump with the experimental medication doctors used to treat the president for the virus. “Now we have at least five therapeutics,” he said, adding falsely that “people don’t die of the disease anymore. Young people don’t die at all. Middle-aged people die very little. And even elderly people have only a one percent chance of dying. When I had prostate cancer, I had a 10 percent chance of dying. It’s no longer what it was back in March.”
In the last few weeks before Election Day, the Trump campaign is hosting events throughout the state, mostly in areas they’re likely to win. But the Italian American community is strong in Philadelphia, and so the mayor from a Garden State away delivered remarks designed to use racism and conspiracy theories to scare white voters into action.
Support in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the urban islands of Pennsylvania’s rural and suburban sea, had historically been enough to hand Democrats victory here. That changed in the last election, when Trump increased turnout enough to beat Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes statewide, or about one percentage point. But if 2020’s polls are to be believed, that outcome was a fluke. Trump has only led Biden in one out of 55 state polls conducted over the past 19 months and tied with him just twice. More often, Biden has beat Trump by double digits, and currently leads him by an average of seven points.
“Hillary was more frightening than Joe. Joe’s a big crook, don’t get me wrong. He’s a slimy crooked politician. But he comes across like a nice old man,” Giuliani said before transitioning into a singsong voice: “He’s a Catholic” — a “fake Catholic” someone in the crowd interrupted — “killing babies about two days before they’re born. He’s okay with that.”
Giuliani also took a shot at Biden’s son: “There are pictures of Hunter all over the world smoking crack.”
The event had been scheduled to take place in South Philly, home to the city’s Italian Market. But the owners of 2300 Arena, a 15,000-square-foot venue best known for hosting pro-wrestling matches (and, relevant to our purposes here, once called the Asylum Arena) canceled after learning that the “private fundraiser for a local politician” they’d agreed to was actually a MAGA rally, according to the Inquirer. The Trump campaign failed to note the change of address in invitations to supporters, as well as the 4:30 start time. A man driving a car with Trump flags waving from the roof drove up to the 2300 Arena and shouted across the street, asking if the event had been canceled. The sign on the doors read “THERE IS NO POLITICAL RALLY OR FUNDRAISING EVENT TONIGHT AT THE 2300.” The man raised his fist in the air as he drove off.
The Trump campaign blamed Mayor Jim Kenney for the inconvenience, but a spokesperson for the mayor’s office said it was the pandemic, not politics, that had intervened. As in many cities across the country trying to stop the spread of the virus, Philadelphia’s health department guidelines ban indoor gatherings larger than 25 people. Relative to the rest of the country, rates of coronavirus in Pennsylvania have been low, but they are rising. Over the last week, the state has averaged more than 1,000 new infections per day with 18 deaths reported on Monday alone. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Philadelphia alone has recorded 1,855 deaths.
A half-hour away from the 2300 Arena, amid construction warehouses in Northeast Philly, a police officer told reporters outside the Trump campaign office that the Italian Americans for Trump event was in obvious violation of the city mandate. “I stay away from crowds,” the officer said, as he opted to stay outside and keep his mask on.
Meanwhile, inside, Giuliani claimed to be defending his honor. “They have 10,000 people march, spitting in each other’s face,” he said. Assuming the character of a left-wing protester, he shouted, “‘Kill police! Kill police! Pigs in a blanket! Fry ’em like bacon!’” As he remarked that “‘Black Lives Matter’ equals ‘kill cops,’” a man in the room yelled, “Build the wall!”
Giuliani continued, “… and it’s founded by people who killed cops.” He offered the example of Susan Rosenberg — a onetime fugitive and member of the Weather Underground who served 16 years in jail after being caught with weapons and explosives — who became, on the inside, an influential activist, writer, and poet. Giuliani has been using her case to whip up fear since 2001, when her prison sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton. “He let her out in 16 years so she could train Black Lives Matter in how to kill cops,” he said on Monday, “which is what she did when she was young.” (That’s another right-wing conspiracy theory; Rosenberg does sit on the board of a group that raises money for the cause, but that’s it.) He added, “Another guy, the financier for the Black Revolutionary Army. He also killed cops. It’s a horrible situation.”
After claiming that Democrats used the pandemic to take away gun rights, which did not happen, he mentioned the McCloskeys, the couple who wielded guns on the porch of their St. Louis mansion in front of Black Lives Matter demonstrators who were passing by. Giuliani claimed, falsely, that the protesters had yelled, “’We want to rape your wife! We want to rape your wife! We want this for reparations! This is number one for reparations! Biggest house here! Reparations!’” He added, “Nobody knows this, but at the time, their daughter was upstairs under the bed because she was afraid they’re going to come in and they’re talking about rape and they’re going to rape the wife and they’re going to find the daughter.”
Moving on to the Q&A portion of the evening, a woman kicked things off by asking about QAnon. “I don’t trust QAnon,” Giuliani said. She responded, “I’m sorry, I forgive you.” Giuliani added, “If you want to know, do I think there’s a deep state? One hundred percent.”
If there is a deep-state plot to prevent Donald Trump from being reelected, they couldn’t do a better job than the Trump campaign, which seems intent on hosting superspreader events. And in the name of Italian Americans! Madonna Mia.
In 2018, taking note of the devastating toll the recession had taken on a whole generation of young workers, the Wall Street Journal noted that Millennials were at risk of becoming “America’s Lost Generation.” Similar warnings have already begun to circulate in regard to the emerging generation, known as Gen Z.
Merkel Warns on Pandemic: ‘Difficult Months Are Ahead of Us’
BERLIN (AP) — Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans to come together like they did in the spring to slow the spread of the coronavirus as the country posted another daily record of new cases Saturday.
“Difficult months are ahead of us,” she said in her weekly video podcast. “How winter will be, how our Christmas will be, that will all be decided in these coming days and weeks, and it will be decided by our behaviour.”
Meanwhile, new restrictions went into effect in several other European nations in an effort to staunch the resurgence of the pandemic.
In Paris and eight other French cities, restaurants, bars, movie theatres and other establishments were being forced to close no later than 9 p.m. to try to reduce contact among people. The country was deploying 12,000 extra police officers to enforce the new rules.
In Britain, a three-tier regional approach to battle the pandemic introduced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week went into effect, with each level bringing in progressively tighter restrictions.
On Saturday, tier-2 cities like London and York were subject to a ban on socializing with people from other households indoors, while the county of Lancashire joined Liverpool in tier 3 with the tightest restrictions.
Lockdown! London Goes into ‘High Alert’, Banning Households From Mixing Indoors https://t.co/SmfBkQIIOc
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 15, 2020
Among other things, that means pubs have been forced to close and socialization with others is banned even in many outdoor settings.
In Northern Ireland a “circuit breaker” lockdown lasting four weeks came into force Friday in an attempt to quickly tamp down the spread of the virus. All pubs and restaurants must close except for takeaway services, and schools will close for two weeks for an extended half-term holiday.
Data from Friday showed that a further 136 people died in the U.K. within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus, bringing the total official toll to 43,429.
On Friday, the World Health Organization warned that intensive care units in a number of European cities could reach maximum capacity in the coming weeks if the number of infections is not slowed.
Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg joined the list of top politicians who have tested positive for the virus, and was quarantined though he showed no symptoms, his office told Austria’s APA news agency. He called off trips next week to Britain, Denmark, Greece and Cyprus.
The Vatican, meantime, said someone who lives in the same Vatican hotel as Pope Francis tested positive for coronavirus, adding to the 11 cases of COVID-19 among the Swiss Guards who protect him.
In Germany, which was widely lauded for being able to rapidly slow the spread of the pandemic when it first broke out, the numbers have been climbing rapidly recently.
On Saturday, the country’s disease control centre, the Robert Koch Institute, reported 7,830 cases overnight, a new record.
Like most countries, Germany has been grappling with how to keep schools and businesses open, while trying to prevent people from coming into close contact with one another.
Germany has registered a total of 356,387 coronavirus cases, though a relatively low 9,767 deaths.
With the numbers again rising, however, Merkel urged Germans to avoid unnecessary travel, cancel parties and remain at home whenever it is possible.
“What brought us so well through the first half-year of the pandemic?” she asked. “It was that we stood together and obeyed the rules out of consideration and common sense. This is the most effective remedy we currently have against the pandemic and it is more necessary now than ever.”
In the neighbouring Czech Republic, the number of new infections surpassed 10,000 for the first time, surging to 11,105 on Friday, the Health Ministry said.
That was almost 1,400 more than the previous record set a day earlier and the country has now registered a total of 160,112 cases, including 1,283 deaths.
After a series of new restrictive measures adopted by the government to slow down the surge, Health Minister Roman Prymula said he still expects a rise of those testing positive for about two weeks.
Italy´s northern Lombardy region, where the European coronavirus outbreak began in late February, has taken new measures to contain rebounding infections, limiting bar service and alcohol sales, banning contact sports, and closing bingo parlours.
The regional government late Friday also called for high schools to adopt hybrid schedules, with students alternating in-person with online learning.
The measures were taken after Lombardy, Italy´s most populous region, once again become the most affected in the COVID-19 resurgence, adding more than 2,000 infections a day. Hospitals are coming under strain and intensive care units are filling up.
The new measures allow only table service for bars from 6 p.m., ban takeout alcohol sales from that time and prohibit all consumption of booze in public spaces, an effort to eliminate crowds from forming in piazzas with takeout drinks.
Italy´s other hardest-hit region, southern Campania, has taken similarly strict measures, including a shutdown of schools for two weeks. After parents protested, the regional governor backed off Friday and allowed daycare centres to remain open.
In the capital, Rome, residents grumbled as numbers climbed, fearing a return to the strict country-wide restrictions that were imposed when the virus was spreading out of control.
“The situation is critical thanks to the morons, because I call them morons, who have not respected the rules,” said resident Mario Massenzi. “And if we fall back into the same situation as in March, we are finished.”
Coronavirus: Italian Region Limits Alcohol Sales, Bans Contact Sports, Shuts Bingo Halls https://t.co/SI9afavY1U
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 17, 2020
Thomas Adamson in Paris, Sylvia Hui in London, Nicole Winfield in Rome, Colleen Barry in Milan and Karel Janicek in Prague contributed to this report.
The Third Wave of the Pandemic Is Here
When the country passed 100,000 deaths, a spectacularly bleak edition of the New York Times marked the occasion with a six-column headline for a flood of obituaries that ran the full length of the front page (and onto several additional pages). When the toll passed 200,000, it did not even mark the tragic landmark on A1. They are running out of hospital beds in Wisconsin — which used to qualify as a battleground state, incidentally — and in North Dakota, which hasn’t imposed a mask mandate, they are down to 39 open ICU spots. But while the pandemic does indeed appear to be getting worse almost everywhere in the country, it also seems unlikely to return to the center stage of America’s attention until after Election Day — at which point perhaps 25,000 more Americans might have died.
But things won’t really change immediately after November 3, either. The apparent collapse of last-minute stimulus negotiations means that our sclerotic Congress won’t likely extrude any meaningful pandemic relief until January 20. There also won’t be a national testing program erected, or a federal contact-tracing system belatedly instituted, or, probably, a vaccine or novel therapeutics in wide distribution before the next presidential inauguration, either. At which point there might be 100,000 more American deaths than there are today, each a tragedy unfolding amid a considerably uglier humanitarian catastrophe — poverty and hunger, evictions and loss of health insurance, mass joblessness without commensurate federal support — than the pandemic has produced to this point. In other words, the third wave will likely be worse, nationally, than the first; much less buffered by political action and support, at least on the federal level; and, as long as the election eclipses the full attention of the news media, many times less salient. We’ve already tuned it out, and nothing is likely to help anytime soon.
Not very long ago, the pandemic response in Europe appeared to shame the United States. “Cafe society returns to Paris,” the Guardian declared as America’s Sun Belt second wave drove a summer spike from 20,000 new daily cases to 60,000. The day that article was published, the seven-day rolling average of U.S. deaths was 731; in France it was 32. Two months later, in mid-August, America’s seven-day average was at a then-distressing 1,008 cases, while the French figure had fallen to an enviably low 12. France is, yes, a much smaller country. Adjusted for population, the American outbreak, right then, was more than 50 times worse.
But as fortunes turned here — by mid-September, new American cases were down almost half from their peak — they shifted in the other direction over there. In France, where the seven-day rolling average of new cases had been as low as 530 in mid-July, it has grown to 12,000. In Spain, the average went from 250 to 11,000 new cases. In the U.K., where the average grew from 575 to 11,000 new cases, the growth overwhelmed the country’s rickety database, housed on an Excel spreadsheet that literally ran out of rows. And now, with America’s daily caseloads spiking, Europe’s recent experience looks not like an alternate path or even a cautionary tale but a grim forecast for what could transpire here. Already, according to Covid Exit Strategy, 26 American states are currently experiencing “uncontrolled spread.” Another 17 are “trending poorly.” That’s 43 of 50 states. Five of the remaining seven qualify as “caution warranted,” and only two states — Maine and Vermont — qualify as “trending better.” Two states out of 50. However you look at it, a third wave of the pandemic is here.
But “wave” isn’t really the most precise term, and not just because the disease proceeds erratically across the country, with some communities in the West and Mountain West in the grip of a terrifying first encounter with COVID-19 while others are breathing easier and feeling as though they are many months past a peak. It’s because neither of the first two waves ever really crashed, only crested. This makes the third phase even more concerning — recent growth in caseloads, and deaths, comes on top of a distressingly high baseline of spreading sickness — roughly 40,000 new cases and 800 new deaths per day. Three weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci told James Hamblin of The Atlantic that “we must, over the next few weeks, get that baseline of infections down to 10,000 per day, or even much less if we want to maintain control of this outbreak.” Three weeks later, it reached 50,000 — five times the upper end of Fauci’s “safe” range. Lamenting, this week, the maddening lack of a national testing strategy nine months after the coronavirus first arrived in America, immunologist Rick Bright of the NIH wrote, “the country is flying blind into what could be the darkest winter in modern history.”
When the coronavirus first arrived, in the spring, there was much hand-wringing and anxiety about a second wave to come in the fall or winter, as had happened with the 1918 flu — which killed five times more Americans in the winter than it had in the summer. And while experts warned in the spring not to count on a seasonal suppression of the disease in the summertime, their own data often suggested that the disease was in fact probably suppressed somewhat in those months, thanks in part to temperature and humidity effects that are now running in the opposite direction. That many of them are now warning we are underestimating coronavirus seasonality is not among the most conspicuous public-health reversals of the pandemic — reversals on mask wearing, asymptomatic spread, fomite and aerosol transmission, and the safety of the outdoors were all probably more consequential. But having it both ways on seasonality — emphasizing its trivial impact during the summer and its significant impact in the fall and winter in order to produce heightened vigilance in both instances — may well have muddied the public’s understanding of the disease. And possibly, in so doing, made the winter pandemic potentially worse.
“Absolutely, we did hear that a lot,” said Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, when I asked him about the summertime admonition to not count on a seasonal decline. “I think that people have become very confused about it all.”
Mina is an assistant professor at Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics and has made a significant name for himself during the pandemic as one of the most clear-sighted advocates of true mass testing, arguing back in the early spring that by far the easiest way to get disease spread under control was to test many millions of Americans very regularly. The fall and winter, he said, may already have gotten away from us. “We still have about 40,000 or 50,000 cases a day right now, and we haven’t really gone too far below that this summer,” he said. “But the fact that transmission can continue and persisted during the summer should not be misconstrued to mean that this is not a seasonal virus. It just means that maybe pretty soon we’re going to have 150,000 cases a day.” In this, Mina is echoing the warnings of other experts. The University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm told Meet the Press, “There’s a really hard road ahead of us,” and told STAT News, “I think November, December, January, February are going to be tough months in this country without a vaccine.” Harvard’s Caroline Buckee has compared the approach of winter to dark clouds on the horizon.
“A lot of that comes from just looking at how seasonal viruses like coronavirus generally transmit,” Mina said. “And frankly, they usually go to near zero during the summer months. And I would say that the fact that transmission has continued during those months, despite the fact that this is a seasonal virus; and the fact that normally, you’d expect the virus would go to near zero in the summer to really large numbers, even exponential growth in November, December — that doesn’t bode very well for us.”
By the time the virus was really circulating throughout the country, he said, we had already left the winter for the spring and summer, which means very few places, if any, experienced the pandemic at anything like its natural seasonal peak. In parts of the country where the virus has receded, he said, we’ve had a tendency to attribute that to our behavior — mask-wearing, social distancing, testing — “but I’m not convinced that it really is only from our behaviors. I think that we have probably benefited a tremendous amount just from the natural course of this virus.”
So what’s possible going forward? Mina said it was “very likely” we will exceed the spring peak, when, at one point, 2,500 people were dying from COVID-19 each day. But he also acknowledged there wasn’t yet clear evidence for that outcome and added that in a few places — the Northeast in particular — there remains a concerted focus on mask-wearing and social distancing that could mitigate such a surge, along with some amount of limited herd immunity or community protection from earlier exposure. “But I think many of the parts of the country that aren’t necessarily taking it quite so seriously run a real risk, a very high likelihood, of having substantially more cases.” How substantial? I asked. “Maybe ten times more than they’ve seen so far,” he said. “We’re not sure how bad it’s going to get this winter, but I think there’s a very good likelihood that it will be much worse.”
Warnings like these are, of course, speculative, given that the coronavirus is such a young disease it hasn’t even lived through a single fall yet — which means we can’t really know how it interacts with that weather when it does. (And given that the data on temperature effects of the disease gathered from around the world this year are somewhat muddied, with some studies showing little effect and others showing much more significant ones.) When I recently asked Micaela Martinez, an infectious-disease ecologist among the world’s leading experts on seasonality, whether we were seeing the beginning of such an effect, she cautioned that seasonality may only be playing a small role in the recent bad-news turn. True recurrent seasonality, which returns year after year, only comes when the disease is endemic, she said — that is, not in its initial spread through the population but in subsequent years or eras, once it has fully penetrated a population and can only infect new susceptibles (young kids, new arrivals, those whose immunity has waned). In the meantime, she explained, while there may well be some effect of seasonality on transmission and possibly disease severity, that effect would likely be dwarfed by others: how many susceptible people remained in a given community and our current interventions (masking, social distancing, and closures).
The matter of the remaining number of susceptibles is a tricky one. Early in the pandemic, the conventional rule of thumb was that at least 60 percent of a community would have to be exposed to the disease, and possibly 80 percent, before the community as a whole acquired a kind of collective immune protection against the disease — a phenomenon sometimes called “herd immunity” and sometimes “community protection.” But in the summer, as transmission rates seemed to decline in many places almost independent of policy interventions, a growing number of scientists and modelers began to wonder whether those thresholds were high or perhaps way too high. Many conjectured that caseloads and deaths were improving in part because of better testing and in part because of social behaviors like mask-wearing and social distancing, but also because enough people had gotten the disease, in certain places at least, that the virus was having a harder time finding susceptible victims, naturally slowing its spread. Stronger versions of this argument, often less credited by epidemiologists and virologists, suggested that the pandemic was entirely over in many of these places.
The herd-immunity argument has been renewed, in recent weeks, by the Great Barrington Declaration — a petition of epidemiologists and public-health officials, led by Harvard’s Martin Kuldoroff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, expressing their concern that pandemic shutdowns were unwise and their belief that a less restrictive, more focused approach to managing the disease spread might be preferable. (A similar critique was made in August in The Wall Street Journal by Greg Ip, and even Brown’s Ashish Jha, among the more responsible guardians of coronavirus conventional wisdom, has lately worried that shutdowns were problematic.)
Unfortunately, as the summer has turned to fall, the herd-immunity hypothesis has gotten much less persuasive because in many of those places the disease trajectory has gotten much worse. That is true at the country level, though countries are a crude measure. Many of the European nations hit hardest in the spring have seen dramatic growth in cases in the late summer and fall. One pre-publication paper posted last month, surveying a number of non-European countries whose disease trajectories suggested they had reached herd immunity, calculated likely exposure rates in each ranging from 67 percent in Ethiopia to 80 percent in Madagascar. If the threshold of herd immunity was much lower than those crude 60-to-80 percent estimates offered at the outset of the pandemic, the disease wouldn’t have been able to spread that much before disappearing.
Particular cities offer better case studies, since they are more genuinely single communities, and there, too, the data is discouraging. In Spain, for instance, the places that had been hit hardest in the spring had relatively worse experiences with a second wave than those that had been spared. At the even more local level, some especially hard-hit parts of New York City are among the most concerning of the new fall clusters. And while there are still some signs of enduring community protection — Sweden, long vilified for an implicit herd-immunity approach, is now among the safest places in Europe, with total per capita deaths lower than the U.S. — a bet on community protection now looks much less safe than it might have a few months ago. Through the spring and summer, Belgium was, in terms of per capita deaths, the worst-hit country in Europe; it just registered about 8,000 new cases, the equivalent of 260,000 in the U.S.
Those looking for good news at the outset of the third wave do have something to point to: the lethality of the disease. Thanks to some combination of the age distribution of cases, improved treatments and better understanding of the disease, more vigilance in protecting the country’s most vulnerable, and more widespread mask-wearing, which can reduce the viral load of any exposure and thereby perhaps the risk of infection, the COVID-19 fatality rate appears much lower than it was in the spring. While the real fatality rate is a matter of some dispute and contestation, in August, Youyang Gu, then the pandemic’s most accurate modeler, calculated that it had fallen to 30 percent of its first-wave peak.
When I spoke to Gu in September, shortly before he discontinued his forecast, citing exhaustion and the improved quality of other projections, he was relatively downbeat looking forward into the fall. While the disease’s estimated infection fatality rate remains dramatically lower than it was in the spring, he said he believed that was largely due to the age distribution of cases and, less significantly, breakthroughs in treatment. It was likely just a matter of time, he said, before the rate creeps back up again.
Harvard’s Mina agrees, calling the possibility that the fall and winter could make the coronavirus not just more infectious but more lethal “likely” and citing a variety of possible explanations: that our epithelium is dryer in the winter; that we produce less mucus; that the air both indoors and outdoors is dryer, then, too; and that there may be a seasonal effect on the viral load as well, meaning the body would produce more virus in the winter than in the summer, making it both more easily transmitted and more dangerous. The science of these dynamics in other diseases is not all that well established, he cautioned, but he suggested that it may very well be the case that many diseases we think of as “seasonal” are in fact year-round diseases that only get severe enough that we notice them in wintertime.
For his part, Gu doesn’t believe the American fatality rate will return to its spring peak, when treatment was confused and the disease much less well understood. But he thinks it’s quite likely that, due to seasonal effects, the rate will grow higher this winter than it was this past summer. And it wouldn’t have to get much higher at all to be catastrophically destructive, given the volume of cases we have today (probably about 4 million, nationally and growing). While Gu describes a recent estimate from the University of Washington’s IHME, which used a large seasonal effect to project 400,000 deaths in the U.S. by the end of this year, as “just not possible,” he believes total Americans deaths could reach 300,000 by January, with a few additional months of winter still yet to come.
Along with NYU economist Paul Romer, with whom he has collaborated, Mina is perhaps the most prominent advocate of mass testing as a path to disease suppression. But, given where we are on testing and what the country cases are in the fall, even he is losing faith. “I wish I could say I felt like we were at a point with rapid testing that it would have much of an effect at all,” he said. “But I don’t think it will, unfortunately. I started talking about this back in June, and we haven’t really seen much movement.”
Even the seemingly good recent news about the FDA authorizing the use of rapid testing, he says, has limited significance. “I would like to see the government not just wait for [diagnostics companies like] Abbott or Roche or whoever to come out with a new rapid test but for the government actually to put $50 billion — which is frankly a drop in the bucket when it comes to the economic losses that we’ve seen — into the development and deployment of massive numbers of these rapid tests. But we’ve seen this government largely just stand and sit idly by and wait until a company like Abbott says, ‘Okay, we have, we can make 30 million a month per year.’” He laughed. “That’s 1 million a day for a country of 330 million. That’s not a lot. But the average person doesn’t get that.” Early in the summer, Romer argued that the country needed to be testing 30 million people a day to allow life to return to normal; even more conservative mass-testing estimates put the figure at 30 million a week — four times as many as Abbott can today produce.
“When the president gets up in front of his microphone and says, ‘We’re going to get you 150 million tests,’ most people think, ‘Oh, he’s really doing something,’” Mina said. “But that’s not tomorrow. That’s not every day. That’s 150 million tests between now and probably January or February. When they say things like, ‘This is going to help us open up the schools, and every teacher is going to get a test’ — it can’t just be one test. That’s not the plan. The plan has to be for every teacher to get a test twice a week. One test once does nothing,” he said.
“I just keep thinking about this epidemic — on our soil, in our country. And, like, what would the government do if we had 200,000 people die from bombs being dropped on us? You know, we would not be sitting idly by saying, ‘Oh, I wonder when Lockheed Martin is going to come out with a new bomb, and we’ll buy it whenever they come out with it, it might be next year.’ No, they would be doing everything in their power to push forth new technology to actually build it themselves.”
“We’re seven months into this,” Mina continued, “Why do we still not have a game plan? I mean, it’s just astounding. It’s just remarkable. We are barely in a better position from a testing perspective than we were in May. And we have no surveillance set up for most of the country. What are we doing?”
When I mentioned that I’d written a column in early April called “There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis” and another, a month later, called “There Is Still No Plan,” Mina responded, “You should just keep writing that. Just take your exact article from April and literally just publish it tomorrow, with the same headline, and not change any words.” He paused. “I just can’t understand what the hell we’re doing.”
One answer: We’re simply waiting until January, and for tens of thousands more Americans to die, before even beginning the project of national pandemic response we should have launched fully a year before.
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Joe Biden Promises to Let Mayors Import Foreign Workers
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/09/10/joe-biden-promises-to-let-mayors-import-foreign-workers/
If Joe Biden is elected president, mayors and county executives will get a pipeline of foreign workers for local CEOs who say they cannot recruit Americans for the jobs, says Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign platform.
“It is the Democratic version of [President] George W. Bush’s [2004] ‘Willing worker, willing employer’ proposal,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. The Bush proposal, he said, would have allowed:
Any employer to import any number of workers from anywhere in the world to do any job at any wage above minimum wage. What Biden wants to do … is to give city and county governments the ability to import people and then give them to the employers.
In exchange, Krikorian said, “the [employers] would express their gratitude with donations and consulting contracts for the [politicians’] cocaine-addicted sons.”
Biden’s local migration plan is described in his immigration platform titled, “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants”:
As president, Biden will support a program to allow any county or municipal executive of a large or midsize county or city to petition for additional immigrant visas to support the region’s economic development strategy, provided employers in those regions certify there are available jobs, and that there are no workers to fill them. Holders of these visas would be required to work and reside in the city or county that petitioned for them.
The imported workers would not be legal immigrants, according to the plan. They would be visa workers who likely could eventually apply for green cards, presumably if they have earned the approval or CEOs or mayors.
Even without approval from Congress, the plan is doable because it builds on the existing pipelines of foreign workers.
For example, both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama cited section 1324a of the 1965 immigration law to create and expand the Practical Training pipeline, which provided work permits to roughly 500,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges in 2019. In contrast, President Donald Trump has trimmed the program.
Obama used the same 1324a claim to bypass Congress, as he provided work permits to at least 800,000 younger illegal immigrants under the so-called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
For more than a decade, lower courts have ping-ponged two lawsuits by the Immigration Reform Law Institute challenging the 1324a claim. The Supreme Court declined to address the legality of the 1324a claim when it rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to cancel the program.
Also, Congress has declined to block the work permit programs, and in 2019, apparently affirmed a “Parole in Place” presidential authority that could be cited in presidential amnesties.
Moreover, there is no annual limit on the number of foreign temporary workers who can be nominated for green cards. This means that Fortune 500 CEOs can import short-term workers and then extend their stay by nominating them for green cards. Many CEOs prefer indentured workers because they are unable to leave their employers until they get their green cards, perhaps after a decade of compliant work.
The Biden program is pitched as a stimulus for interior states who have been left behind as Congress’s immigration programs deliver millions of new workers and trillions of dollars in new wealth to coastal investors, states, regions, and counties.
Biden’s plan says the new pipeline would:
…allow cities and counties to petition for higher levels of immigrants to support their growth. The disparity in economic growth between U.S. cities, and between rural communities and urban areas, is one of the great imbalances of today’s economy. Some cities and many rural communities struggle with shrinking populations, an erosion of economic opportunity, and local businesses that face unique challenges. Others simply struggle to attract a productive workforce and innovative entrepreneurs.
The language in Biden’s plan echoes the pitch by the investor-created Economic Innovation Group, which is lobbying legislators to back a new immigration program dubbed the “Heartland Visa.” The group’s pitch says that “A place-based visa program would allow mutually-advantageous matches to be made between skilled immigrants and places wishing to attract more human capital.”
The group sold its idea to the New York Times, Pete Buttigieg, and others. Buttigieg’s 2020 vision, titled, “Investing in an American asset: Unleashing the Potential of Rural America,” said:
Pete will create a new, place-based Community Renewal visa to provide opportunities for people who want to move to America and help build our economy where they are needed most and where they will do well. These visas will be targeted toward counties that have lost prime-working-age population over the last 10 years, and smaller cities that are struggling to keep pace economically with larger cities.
The EIG is run by wealthy investors who would gain from any increased inflow of cheap workers, consumers, renters, and home-buyers — especially if the immigrants needed federal aid. The group is particularly interested in raising real estate prices, saying, “The relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand.”
The EIG group did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.
Immigration shifts wealth from wages to stocks, from young to old, from central states to the coasts, from the many to the few.
Yes, migrants get huge relative gains in pay & civic life by moving into US.
But investors skim the $$ from the diversity#H1Bhttps://t.co/PVA75K3v9T
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 21, 2020
The EIG plan would flood local labor markets and make it difficult for American workers — especially marginalized workers — to argue for good jobs and decent wages.
Biden’s plan is a “terrible idea for a whole bunch of reasons,” said Krikorian.
The program would create a local laborforce of indentured migrant workers, who would be stuck in the district until they eventually get green cards, said Krikorian. “The indentured side of it is appalling … Are they going to send ‘immigrant chasers’ after them as they move to the next town?”
The plan would encourage corrupt deals with employers, he said. “When politicians have authority over importing visas, businesses have a real interest in currying favor with those guys — the certainty of corruption will be the subject of news stories as long as this kind of thing lasts,” he said.
The plan is bad for local government because the easy alternative of cheap foreign workers will make it difficult for local officials, citizens, and executives to make difficult resource decisions about education and infrastructure spending, said Krikorian:
Businesses and local governments would no longer have an incentive to make the hard choices about investing in community college, training programs … they won’t have to. They’ll just call up their Congressman, and order up a bunch of foreign workers.
EIG’s “place-based visa plan” won’t help the places that hope for foreign redemption, said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigraiton Reform Law Institute. “It will never work — people will just move to where they want to go,” which is usually close to similar people, usually in coastal states, he said. But that movement would be no problem for the EIG investors who have ties to many companies around the nation, he said.
By allowing politicians to deliver short-term workers to cooperative CEOs, the Biden plan would dramatically increase government power over the CEOs, Krikorian said. But that is not a problem for business advocates of immigration, he said:
Their goal is maximizing immigration regardless of how it happens. Yes, they would prefer it happened in a libertarian-ish fashion the way George W Bush offered, where the government was not involved, but they’ll settle for Biden’s version. It increases the number of people moving here because that is the goal.
The better alternative to more visa-worker migration would be to reduce the distorting impact of the federal government’s cheap-labor immigration policy, say reformers.
For example, CEOs will move their coastal jobs to cheaper U.S. locations if they have to pay fair-market pay rates, Miano said. “If you cut off H-1B visas, there will be a rush of coastal jobs to Kansas, Montana, and those kinds of places,” he said.
Trump’s 2020 platform promises to end cheap labor replacement of American employees.
“The solution has always been to tighten up the labor market,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “We’ve seen it in the [Trump-enforced] exit of J-1s [visa workers] — when all of a sudden, job opportunities are created for college students.”
“It is a virtuous circle when you tighten the labor market,” he said.
The inflow of immigrants and visa workers has changed the nation’s workplaces, economy, and labor force.
For example, the H-1B visa pipeline delivers roughly 100,000 foreign graduates to CEOs each year. Most of those H-1B workers are hoping to get green cards from their CEOs, so they are willing to work long hours, without complaint, for lower salaries, for many years, in the so-called Green Card Economy.
The H-1B program is just one of several programs that provide CEOs with a workforce of at least 1 million indentured foreign graduates who have few legal rights to demand higher wages, to complain to a federal agency, or to testify in court.
This huge population of foreign graduates reduces nationwide pressure for pay raises, reduces gateway jobs for young American graduates, reduce the workplace status of American professionals, reduces turnover and innovation in the tech sector, and reduces the creation of new companies that threaten the tech CEOs’ control over their technology.
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Donald Trump's labor & immigration promises for a 2nd term are vague but useful.
They are also better for ordinary Americans than Joe Biden's business-backed, open-ended inflow of wage-cutting & rent-raising blue-collar workers & college-graduates. https://t.co/OmE4tRPf4T
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 26, 2020
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Desperation swells among millions of unemployed in the US as layoffs mount and aid dries up
Over six months after pandemic-induced lockdowns went into effect in the US—before being quickly abandoned by Democratic and Republican governors at the insistence of President Donald Trump and the financial oligarchy—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression shows no signs of abating.
While the March-April crescendo of job losses of over 11 million has not been repeated, talk of a “V-shaped” recovery in the jobs market has been put to rest as ongoing layoffs in transportation, entertainment and hospitality sectors are adding tens of thousands more to the unemployment rolls every day. The Department of Labor (DOL) reports that 28.4 million workers are currently receiving unemployment benefits or are waiting for approval.
At the same time, small business owners who took advantage of loans offered through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, are teetering on the brink of collapse as Small Business Administration data revealed this week that less than one percent of the over 5.2 million loans granted through the program have been turned into grants. Since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed, with many still on the hook for outstanding PPP loans.
The combined economic squeeze on workers and small businesses has led to growing food insecurity and a rise in evictions. Despite the growing indicators of widespread social displacement, hunger, and mental anguish, including 40 states reporting an increase in opioid-related mortality, the US Congress, overwhelmingly comprised of millionaires, many of whom withheld information on the danger of the pandemic to increase their stock portfolios, continues to feign interest in a fifth coronavirus relief bill while accomplishing nothing.
The latest DOL report states that the US unemployment rate stands at 8.4 percent. However, economists estimate the number to be above 11 percent due to the fact that millions of workers have given up on securing employment as demand for work outstrips available jobs, with 2.5 workers per every one job, according to the DOL, for July, the last month data is available.
Despite the coordinated abandonment of any health and safety guidelines as part of the ruling class’s homicidal “back to school” and “back to work” campaign, which has led to a resurgence of the coronavirus cases across the country, millions of people continue to stay at home and spend what little money they have on essentials.
The reduction of travel, and with it, consumer spending, like all aspects of the pandemic, will be another burden the working class will be forced to shoulder. On Thursday, domestic airline carriers American, United and Delta are set to lay off up to 40,000 workers unless more government bailout funds are secured. As part of the CARES Act, the major airlines received $25 billion in government funding on the condition that they would not lay off workers prior to October 1.
The reduction in travel is hitting entertainment sectors particularly hard. The unemployment rate in central Florida, already 15 percent in Osceola County and nearly 12 percent in Orange County, is expected to balloon once the data is released for the month of September following multiple large-scale layoff announcements from several major resorts.
On Tuesday, Disneyworld and Disneyland resorts announced 28,000 layoffs, affecting workers at the California, Florida, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong locations. Disney Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro said in a statement that the “difficult decision” to eliminate thousands of jobs “will enable us to emerge a more effective and efficient operation when we return to normal.” D’Amaro estimated that “67 percent” of those laid off are part-time, meaning they will not be eligible for full unemployment benefits, which in Florida is capped at an insulting $275 a week for 12 weeks.
The Swan and Dolphin hotels, which are located at Disney World in Orlando, but not owned by the company, also announced 1,100 layoffs at the beginning of September. Shortly thereafter, SeaWorld confirmed that it would be terminating 1,900 workers at its Orlando location, while Universal Orlando Resort also announced in September that it was extending furloughs for nearly 5,400 workers through “at least” the end of the year.
Audits conducted within the last month in California, Wisconsin, Florida and Nevada reveal dysfunctional call centers in which millions of calls from claimants went unanswered, with backlogs growing day after day. Laid-off workers report calling unemployment offices hundreds of times a day for weeks on end, only to be hung up on or, if they do get through, their issue is not resolved.
In Florida, where last month Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump acolyte, admitted that the unemployment system was designed to pay out the “least number of claims ,” claimants still report not receiving funds even after sending in the requisite documentation.
As of September 18, more than 152,000 Floridians were waiting to be paid, according to the state’s own dashboard, while an estimated two thirds of the state’s unemployment funds have already been depleted, leaving many new applicants without access to funds without new legislation or until next year. DOL data for Florida shows that for the month of April only 36.44 percent of approved first unemployment payments were made within 14 to 21 days after the claim was approved. In May this decreased to 31.7 percent.
For those workers who have managed to get through annoying phone trees and have had their claims successfully processed, the expiration of state unemployment benefits, which is capped at 26 weeks a year in many states, combined with the ending of the Lost Wages Assistance Program (LWA), administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, portends more hardship.
While nearly every single US state and territory was approved for the $300 weekly payment meant to last six weeks, at least 15 states will end the program this week, or have already ended it, including: Arizona, California, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
Conversely, states such as Michigan that were approved weeks ago to begin distributing funds have yet to send funds to most of those who are eligible, while in Nevada, where the unemployment rate in Las Vegas is above 16 percent, Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) Administrator Elisa Cafferata still does not expect LWA payments to begin depositing into workers accounts for at least “another four to five weeks.”
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of increasing income inequality
A new study from the RAND Corporation, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards, provides new documentation of the profound restructuring of class relations in America over the last 40 years.
The study, which looks at changes in pre-tax family income from 1947 to 2018, divided into quintiles of the American population, concludes that the bottom 90 percent of the population would, on average, make 67 percent more in income—every year (!)—had shifts in income inequality not occurred the last four decades.
In other words, any family that made less than $184,292 (the 90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would be, on average, making 67 percent more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5 trillion of collective lost income for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.
Furthermore, the study concludes, that had more equitable growth continued after 1975 (a date they use as a shifting point), the bottom 90 percent of American households would have earned a total of $47 trillion more in income.
Given that there were about 115 million households in the bottom 90 percent of the US in 2018 population (out of a total of 127.59 million in 2018), that would mean that each of these households would, on average, be $408,696 richer today with this lost income.
To reach these conclusions, the authors break down historical real, pre-tax, income into different quintiles of the population (bottom fifth, second fifth, third fifth, fourth fifth, highest fifth). Looking at the period between 1947 and 2018, they divide the years based on business cycles (booms and busts of the economy).
Their data quantitatively expresses the restructuring of class relations that began at the end of the post-WWII boom. Facing intensified economic crisis, automation, and global competition, the US ruling class undertook an aggressive campaign of deindustrialization, slashing wages and clawing back benefits won in the previous period by explosive struggles of the working class, while simultaneously funneling money to financial markets, expanding the wealth and income of both the upper and upper-middle class.
As the data shows, while the bottom 40 percent of American households made significant percentile increases to their income, relative to the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947 and 1968, in the 40 years from 1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In 1980-2000, the bottom 40 percent of the population experienced a net income gain significantly below that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because these are percentile increases, the absolute differences between the gains of the rich versus the poor is far larger.
Furthermore, not included in this data is wealth. In the last 40 years, and especially the last 10 to 20 years, the stock market has become the principal means through which the top 10 percent of the population has piled up historic levels of wealth.
Significantly, the data from 2001 to 2018 shows a sharp slowdown in income gains for all sections of American society as per capita GDP growth slowed and US capitalism experienced a historic decline. However, while the income of the top 5 percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent between 2008 and 2018, the wealth of the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008, just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the beginning of 2018.
By using the data, the authors come up with a set of counterfactual incomes based on what would be the different income brackets in 2018 without a shift in income distribution. The top 1 percent, instead of making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The 25th percentile, instead of making $33,000 would make $61,000.
The authors of the study also make several other important observations by breaking down their data on the basis of location, education, and race.
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several other proposals to expand the inflow fo workers and consumers into the United States.
He promises to let companies import more visa workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
Unemployment skyrockets
among youth
More than 7.7 million workers younger than 30 are now unemployed in the US. Over 3 million dropped out of the labor force over the course of a single month, from mid-April to mid-May. The number of young people now unemployed amounts to nearly one in three young workers, the highest rate since the country started tracking unemployment by age in 1948.
These figures are paralleled in countries hit by the coronavirus pandemic all around the world. In Australia, the youth unemployment rate has jumped to 13.8 percent. Youth unemployment rates in Australia were already more than double the overall unemployment rate of the country and were almost three times higher than for those 25 and older.
A report from the Resolution Foundation think tank recently found that youth unemployment in the UK could rise by 640,000 this year, bringing the total above 1 million. In Spain, half of all those who have lost jobs since the start of the outbreak have been adults under the age of 35. In Canada, the youth unemployment rate jumped to 27.2 percent in April, from 16.8 percent in March. Student unemployment was even higher.
Young workers are vastly over-represented in the sectors hardest hit by the lockdown and social distancing measures. These sectors include hospitality, food services, retail, arts and recreation. Nearly 40 percent of the young workers who are unemployed in the US worked in the devastated retail and food service sectors alone. The Millennial generation, those aged between 26 and 40, make up a majority of bartenders and half of restaurant workers.
According to a new report by Data for Progress, over half of people under the age of 45 say that the $1,200 cash payment from the US federal government covered just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults.
The US Labor Department continues to report that the majority of laid-off workers expect their joblessness to be temporary. However, there is growing concern among economists that many jobs will never come back.
Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, recently told the New York Times that the path to recovery “is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought.” Bloom is the co-author of an analysis of the pandemic’s effects on the labor market titled “COVID-19 Is Also a Reallocation Shock.” In it, he and his co-thinkers estimate that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.
A large body of research, along with the fresh experience of the 2008 recession, shows that young people, especially those without a college degree, are particularly vulnerable during economic downturns and recessions.
An analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that up to 57 million US jobs are now vulnerable, including a growing number of white-collar positions. Furthermore, the report finds that 86 percent of jobs made vulnerable by the pandemic pay less than $40,000 a year. In other words, those workers who were already in precarious situations are not only getting hit the hardest, many will be forced out of their industry altogether.
For those workers in the Millennial generation (now aged 26 to 40) and older, this is the second major economic catastrophe in barely a decade. The researchers note in their report that “the generation that first entered the job market in the aftermath of the Great Recession is now going through its second ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ downturn.”
If the 2008 financial crash is any indication, we can expect that the current economic downturn will exact a devastating toll on all workers, the youth in particular.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, youth unemployment soared to more than 60 percent in some European regions. In many countries, the youth unemployment rate never fully recovered to pre-recession levels. In the US, half of recent graduates were unable to find work during the recession years. Millennials’ official unemployment rate ranged as high as 20 or 30 percent.
The recession was used as an opportunity to make more fundamental changes to the economy that would leave young workers hounded by high rates of underemployment, low wages and stagnant earnings trajectories for the following decade.
Full-time salaried positions were slashed with the introduction of “gig” economy work. Nearly 95 percent of the jobs created during the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2017, were part-time, contract, on-call or temporary. This piecemeal work, cynically sold to the younger generation as “flexible” work, often excludes health care, retirement benefits, sick days and other benefits, and is highly unreliable.
It has already become commonplace for workers to hold down two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet and provide for their families.
To get a sense of the scale of the economic crisis pre-pandemic, one should consider that in 2019 some 61 percent of US workers were reporting that they did not have enough savings to cover a $1,000 emergency room visit or car repair. One in five Millennials reported not being able to afford routine health care expenses, and nearly half had nothing saved. This situation is being dramatically worsened by the impact of the pandemic.
In 2018, taking note of the devastating toll the recession had taken on a whole generation of young workers, the Wall Street Journal noted that Millennials were at risk of becoming “America’s Lost Generation.” Similar warnings have already begun to circulate in regard to the emerging generation, known as Gen Z.
However, as the Journal itself nervously pointed out at the time, the Millennial generation in the US was also the first generation to favor socialism over capitalism. The dire conditions facing young people, which are more and more understood to be the consequence of decaying social order, have created the objective basis for a vast radicalization of young people and workers across the globe. The two years prior to the onset of the pandemic were marked by the reemergence of the class struggle internationally, in which young workers played leading roles.
Generation Z is now coming of age under conditions that far outstrip those which the Millennials confronted in the aftermath of 2008. The events of the day will not pass by this new generation, or the older generations, for that matter, without leaving a profound and revolutionary political impact.
The younger generation is coming of age in a world of immense contradictions, with enormous developments in technology and science occurring simultaneously with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of workers internationally as a result of the criminal response of the ruling class to the pandemic. Trillions of dollars are being poured into the coffers of the global corporate elites while young people’s schools are defunded and their jobs destroyed.
Instability and uncertainty are among the defining features of everyday life. Under such conditions, there is no doubt that the popularity of socialism among young people will continue to grow at a rapid pace. Far from becoming the “Lost Generation” as predicted by the Wall Street Journal, the emerging generation of young workers carries within it an enormous revolutionary force.
