COVID-19 Social and Political Analyses

New Politics lists on this page a number of what we consider to be important social and political analyses as well as political statements concerning COVID-19, the coronavirus pandemic. Those who seek guidance for dealing with the health issues should see the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website and get in contact with their local government’s public health department or office of emergency management.

We update this list on a regular basis, but all articles are posted in chronological order. If you re looking for articles on a particular issue we recommend that you search our list by word, such as “agriculture,” “worker,” “women,” “Brazil,” and so on.

Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman, “U.S. Bets On Small, Untested Company to Deliver COVID Vaccine,” Frontline, July 10, 2020. “As part of its strategy to administer the [COVID-19] vaccine as quickly as possible, the Trump administration has agreed to invest more than half a billion in tax dollars in ApiJect Systems America, a young company whose injector is not approved by federal health authorities and that hasn’t yet set up a factory to manufacture the devices.”
Amy Goodman interviews Brazilian epidemiologist Cesar Victora, who coordinates the International Center for Equity in Health at the Federal University of Pelotas. “Brazilian Epidemiologist Slams Bolsonaro’s COVID Response as Far-Right President Tests Positive,” Democracy Now, July 10, 2020. “Bad political leadership is a major risk factor for the spread of the pandemic, not only in Brazil, but also in your own country.”
Julie Hollar, “Corporate Media Team With Trump to Disparage Public Health Experts,” FAIR, July 10, 2020. “Public health experts, unaccustomed to the spotlight, have really taken a beating lately. As they tirelessly work to unravel the mysteries of the Covid pandemic (and are increasingly burning out), the president of our country has constantly attacked and undermined them—and, lately, so have corporate media.”
Alexis Goldstein, “Coronavirus Relief Funds Are About to Run Out for the Child Care Industry,” Truthout, July 9, 2020. “So far, despite how essential child care is to restarting the economy, Congress has been unwilling to meet the crisis with the resources required to stave off a crisis.”
Andrea Germanos, “‘The Last Straw’: As Pandemic Rages, Oxfam Warns 12,000 Could Die Per Day From Hunger,” Common Dreams, July 9, 2020. “Meanwhile, those at the top are continuing to make a profit.”
Rhea Boyd, “What It Means When You Wear a Mask—and When You Refuse To,” The Nation, July 9, 2020. “In the United States, wearing a mask is not just politicized. It is racialized.”
Gregg Gonsalves, “Protest and Survive!” The Nation, July 9, 2020. “We can’t wait until January 2021 to shift course. Our lives depend on disruption now.”
Alejandra Rosa and Frances Robles, “Pandemic Plunges Puerto Rico Into Yet Another Dire Emergency,” New York Times, Published July 8, 2020, Updated July 9, 2020. “The island has had to weather a hurricane, a political crisis and earthquakes, but those crises did not lead to the widespread unemployment caused by the response to the coronavirus pandemic.”
Rachel Shabi, “The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response,” New York Review Daily, July 8, 2020. Britain’s public health sector, a cash-strapped, eroded, but functioning network comprising the National Health Service (NHS), general-practice clinics, and local authority health officials, has been repeatedly sidelined in favor of outsourced alternatives. As Allyson Pollock, a professor of public health at Newcastle University, put it to The New York Times recently: “They’re basically trying to build a centralized, parallel, privatized system.”
Amy Goodman interviews Dr. Sheri Fink, “The New NYC? Houston Hospitals Struggle with ‘Astonishing’ Rise in Coronavirus Cases,” Democracy Now, July 8, 2020. Discusses the similarities and differences between the earlier NYC pandemic hospital crisis the situation in Houston today.
Kevin Liptak and Nick Valencia, “Trump now in open dispute with health officials as virus rages,” CNN, July 8, 2020. “Five months into a still-raging pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 Americans, the long-simmering tensions between President Donald Trump and the health experts who staff his government have escalated from private griping to shrugging disagreement to now open dispute.”
Mike Davis, “Anthony Fauci: The Last American Hero?” The Nation, July 7, 2020.“Handed a golden opportunity to speak truth to power, the good doctor remains a team player in an administration bent on disaster.”
Michelle Chen, “Disaster Looms as the Coronavirus Disrupts the Garment Supply,” The Nation, July 7, 2020. “Fashion brands are sticking suppliers and workers with unpaid bills.”
Will Peischel, “Inside the Facebook Group Where Doctors Process Their Immense Coronavirus Grief,” Mother Jones, July 7, 2020. “The premise was simple: Create a community of mourning by running a record of announcements about the deaths of US physicians from the coronavirus. A digital graveyard, group-sourced by members of the medical community and close readers of the obituary section.”
Chris Walker, “Jared Kushner, Trump’s Golf Buddy and McConnell’s In-Laws Cashed In on PPP Loans,” Truthout, July 7, 2020. “The White House released figures this week detailing which businesses received funds from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), revealing a number of controversial payments made to lobbyists, political organizations, and Trump-linked businesses.”
David Bacon, “Will the New NAFTA Make the Pandemic Worse for Mexicans?” Foreign Policy in Focus, July 6, 2020. “For Mexican workers, farmers, and the poor, the pandemic and the new treaty replacing NAFTA are a devastating one-two punch.”
Jake Johnson, ‘The Swamp Is Alive and Well’: Trump-Connected Lobbyists Have Raked in $10 Billion in Covid-19 Aid for Corporate Clients,” Common Dreams, July 6, 2020. “The crisis offered an especially lucrative opportunity for those lobbyists who enjoy close ties to President Donald Trump and his administration—and they seized it.”
Sarah Mervosh and Manny Fernandez, “Months Into Virus Crisis, U.S. Cities Still Lack Testing Capacity,” New York Times, July 6, 2020, updated July 8, 2020. “With cases surging, some cities are seeing long testing lines and slow results.”
Chris Walker, “As COVID Ravages the US, Trump’s Campaign Insists It’s ‘Totally Harmless’,” Truthout, July 6, 2020. Trump’s “plan going forward appears to be, whether true or not, telling voters they can safely live with the disease running rampant in the months ahead.”
Nina Martin, “Agonizing Lag in Coronavirus Research Puts Pregnant Women and Babies at Risk,” ProPublica, July 6, 2020. “After months of asserting pregnant women were not at high risk for the coronavirus, the CDC recently released a study with sobering findings for expectant mothers. Experts say the data gaps are almost as worrisome as the results.”
John Kroger, “The Coming Fall Crisis: A Tragedy” Insider Higher Ed, July 5, 2020. H”ere’s the reality — most college and university presidents are declaring that their institutions will be open for on-campus education this fall because they face financial disaster if they do not.”
Tracey Tully, “How You Get Your Berries: Migrant Workers Who Fear Virus, but Toil On,” New York Times, July 5, 2020. “Many laborers in New Jersey follow the ripening of crops up the East Coast. Each influx of new workers brings the risk of a fresh outbreak.”
Motoko Rich, “Tokyo’s First Female Governor Sails to Re-Election Even as Virus Cases Rise,” New York Times, July 5, 2020. “Yuriko Koike has received high marks for her visible presence during the pandemic, but the coronavirus’s resurgence has raised anxiety in the Japanese capital.”
Jordan Muller, “Florida reports record number of coronavirus cases amid nationwide surge,” Politico, July 4, 2020. “Health experts fear coronavirus cases will continue to climb after the July 4 weekend.”
Kate Bennett, “White House hosts a party in the midst of a pandemic,” CNN, July 4, 2020. “Passing out masks and enforcing personal space feels incongruous at the home of a President who, while publicly saying he is “fine” with the idea of face masks, has shunned wearing one of his own in front of press. In fact, Trump’s anti-mask status has helped turn the decision to wear a mask or not into a political issue”.
Sonam Sheth, “Dr. Fauci: It’s ‘pretty obvious’ the US is not ‘going in the right direction’ to control the spread of coronavirus,” Business Insider, July 4, 2020. The nation’s top infectious disease expert said Thursday that the US is not headed in a positive direction when it comes to controlling the novel coronavirus pandemic.”
Myriam Rana, “After the epidemic in China: crises and changes?” International Viewpoint, July 3, 2020. “Millions witnessed the catastrophic management of the health crisis by the authorities: an unbearable reality despite the cosmetic efforts of state propaganda. The anger triggered by the death of Doctor Li Wenliang, who had raised the alarm about a probable epidemic and the high popularity of the daily blog of the journalist Fang Fang, who criticized the health situation in Wuhan, are significant. Beijing is, however, carrying out a vast campaign on its “impeccable” management of the health crisis.”
Michelle Graff and Trevor Memmott, “Coronavirus is creating a crisis of energy insecurity,” Environmental Health News, July 1, 2020. “Fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has led to unpaid bills and energy shutoffs in many vulnerable US households. Indiana University researchers warn we need to act now to avoid yet another health emergency.”
Christina Maxouris, “Hospitals face ‘an explosion of Covid’ and signs of another surge as coronavirus case numbers climb,” CNN, July 2, 2020. Hospitals and health workers are overwhelmed in Texas and Florida.
Neil DeMause, “What Media Aren’t Telling You About Reopening Risks,” FAIR, July 2, 2020. Argues that science should determine the type of reopening and that we should learn from best practices, but argues the media has not made that clear.
Anneken Tappe, “Unemployment rate won’t recover for the next decade, CBO projects,” CNN, July 2, 2020. “America’s recovery from the pandemic recession could last through the better part of the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office‘s 10-year forecast published Thursday.”
Chris Walker, “New Study Suggests Thousands of Deaths Are Missing From Coronavirus Toll,” Truthout, July 2, 2020. Yale School of Public Health study suggests higher death count from pandemic.
Susan Ram, “Garment workers in South India rise up against Covid-linked retrenchment,” Counterfire, July 2, 2020. “Hundreds of unionised women workers are combating efforts by the fashion industry to pass the costs of Covid-19 onto the world’s most vulnerable.”
Joe Buckley, “The role of labour activism in Vietnam’s coronavirus success,” Equal Times, July 2, 2020. In February, garment workers at Praegear Vietnam launched a strike to demand the factory implement measures to protect workers against the coronavirus. In response, local union officials organised training and talks by medical experts, and the company introduced such things as free masks, temperature checks, and spraying disinfectant. Other factories in the same region followed suit.”
“How the American Worker Got Fleeced,” Bloomberg Businessweek, July 2, 2020.“Over the years, bosses have held down wages, cut benefits, and stomped on employees’ rights. Covid-19 may change that.”
Alex Lawson, “Blood on His Hands: The Nursing Home Covid-19 Crisis is Donald Trump’s Fault,” Common Dreams, July 1, 2020. “The president is desperate to deflect from the truth: Over 54,000 nursing home residents and workers are dead. Those deaths were preventable. Their deaths are his fault.”
Jake Johnson, “‘Deplorable Act in Face of Global Crisis’: Trump Condemned as US Buys Up Nearly Entire Supply of Covid-19 Drug,” Common Dreams, July 1, 2020. “It’s a very concerning precedent because if we see the vaccine coming from a U.S. company, we’re likely to see the same type of behavior and hoarding by the U.S. and other developed countries.”
C.J. Polychroniou, “Chomsky: We Must Not Let Masters of Capital Define the Post-COVID World,” Truthout, July 1, 2020. Interview with Noam Chomsky that criticizes President Donald Trump’s politics.
Tommy Beer, “Research Determines Protests Did Not Cause Spike In Coronavirus Cases,” Forbes, July 1, 2020. Protests against racism did not cause a significant increase in coronavirus infections, according to a team of economists who have published a 60-page paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Sasha Abramsky, “As Infection Rates Soar, Trump Says Virus Could Just ‘Disappear’ The president’s delusions put the entire country in danger,” The Nation, July 1, 2020. “The Signal this week: America has jumped the shark when it comes to the pandemic. After politicizing both mask-wearing and the reopening of state economies, Trump is now presiding over an out-of-control spread of the novel coronavirus, from sea to shining sea.”
David Agren, “Mexican bishops call for more robust response to COVID-19 crisis,” Catholic News Services, July 1, 2020. “Mexico’s bishops have expressed alarm over the scope of the COVID-19 crisis, which they say is continuing to expand across the country even as health authorities allow the gradual resumption of economic activity.”
No author, “U.S. Sets New Single-Day Case Record,” New York Times, July 1, 2020. “The United States set a single-day case record for the fifth time in eight days on Wednesday. More than 48,400 new coronavirus cases were announced by Wednesday evening, even before several states had reported final data. North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas also hit daily records, with Texas reaching more than 8,000 new infections.” Some states reverse reopening.

JUNE 2020

Editors, “Coronavirus Crisis: Political Economic Responses,” Journal of Australian Political Economy, Winter 2020. Circulated June 31, 2020. The entire issues, several articles, dedicated to the issues of the coronavirus and its impact on various aspects of society.
Berkeley Lovelace, Jr., “Dr. Anthony Fauci says new virus in China has traits of 2009 swine flu and 1918 pandemic flu,” CNBC, June 30, 2020. “The virus, which scientists are calling “G4 EA H1N1,” has not yet been shown to infect humans but it is exhibiting “reassortment capabilities,” Fauci told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during a hearing Tuesday.”
Noah Smith, “Coronavirus Brings American Decline Out in the Open,” Bloomberg, June 29, 2020. “Without fixes for infrastructure, education, health care and government, the U.S. will resemble a developing nation in a few decades.”
Jaisal Noor, “Coronavirus Cases Surge As Nurses Demand States Close Until They Can Reopen Safely,” The Real News, June 29, 2020. “The US experiences record-high coronavirus cases after ignoring the warnings of public health experts and medical professionals.” Jaisal Noor speaks with National Nurses United President Zenei Cortez.
Mandy Smithberger, “Covid-19 Means Good Times for the Pentagon
Or How to Vaccinate the Military-Industrial Complex,” Tom Dispatch, June 28, 2020. “Washington’s reflexive prioritizing of the interests of defense contractors has meant paying remarkably little attention to, and significantly underfunding, public health. Now, Americans are paying the price.”
Guardian Staff, “Video appears to show Trump campaign removing social-distancing stickers in Tulsa,” Guardian, June 27, 2020. “Washington Post shares clip of volunteers apparently pulling stickers saying ‘do not sit here’ from seats in BOK Center.”
Marie McCullough, “COVID-19 has not surged in cities with big protests, but it has in states that reopened early,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 2020. Argues that protests produced no spike in cases but that reopening did.
Sharon Lerner, “Scientists Pin Blame for Some Coronavirus Deaths on Air Pollution, PFAS, and Other Chemicals,” Intercept, June 26, 2020. “It’s already clear that environmental pollution is responsible for some portion of the hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths around the world. Now scientists are trying to pinpoint how exactly industrial chemicals make people more susceptible.”
Ron Knox and Shaoul Sussman, “How Amazon Used the Pandemic to Amass More Monopoly Power,” The Nation, June 26, 2020. “When Congress finally forces Jeff Bezos to testify, they should ask him why Amazon put market dominance ahead of customer satisfaction.”
Scott McLemee, “Publishing Season, Flu Season,” Inside Higher Ed, June 26, 2020. This article discusses books pertinent to COVID-19 that are forthcoming this fall.
Jessica Corbett, “Expert Warns US Cities Could Face ‘Apocalyptic’ Future as Country Sets Record for New Covid-19 Cases in One Day,” Common Dreams, June 26, 2020. “The number of infections could be 10 times the 2.4 million confirmed cases, says the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Jake Johnson, “‘Free Handout to Insurance Industry’: Trump Administration Tells Insurers They Don’t Have to Cover Covid-19 Tests for Workers,” Common Dreams, June 25, 2020. “According to the Trump administration, insurance company profits are more important than the lives of nursing home residents and workers.”
Derek Watkins et al, “How the Virus Won,” New York Times, June 25, 2020. “Invisible outbreaks sprang up everywhere. The United States ignored the warning signs. We analyzed travel patterns, hidden infections and genetic data to show how the epidemic spun out of control.”
Kia Lilly Caldwell and Edna Maria de Araújo, “In Brazil, Structural Racism Has Made COVID-19 Far Deadlier for Black People,” Foreign Policy in Focus, June 24, 2020. “Brazil has joined the U.S. atop the list of worst-impacted countries. Both have far-right leaders — and a legacy of institutional racism.”
Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh,“How U.S. and Brazil Leadership That “Neglects Science” Led to Hemisphere’s Worst Coronavirus Crises,” Democracy Now, June 24, 2020. Interview Marcia Castro, professor of demography, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-chair of Harvard’s Brazil Studies Program.
Ari Berman, “Thought COVID Wreaked Havoc on the Primaries? Just Wait Until November,” Mother Jones, June 24, 2020. “The primary debacles show just how much could go wrong in the presidential election.”
Thomas Sablowski, “The Coronavirus and the Class Character of German Politics,” The Bullet, June 24, 2020. An examination of the class character of German politics in the pandemic and economic crisis.
Beth Gardiner, “In Pandemic Recovery Efforts, Polluting Industries Are Winning Big,” Yale Environment 360, June 23, 2020. “Oil and gas giants, mining interests, and coal-fired power plants have all received financial and regulatory relief as governments around the world enact pandemic recovery plans. These moves threaten to create a dirty, high-carbon legacy that long outlasts the current crisis.”
Chris Brooks, “Fact Check: Have there been 500 wildcat strikes in June?” Organizing Work, June 23, 2020. “If you read the headlines on Payday Report, you might think so. But the evidence offered does not support this claim.”
Mike Ludwig, “Trump Responds to COVID-19 Spike by Cracking Down on Immigration,” Truthout, June 23, 2020. “The number of new COVID-19 cases are spiking in several states, but President Trump did not announce new public health responses on Monday. Instead, he issued an executive order extending and expanding suspensions of immigration and guest worker programs until the end of the year. “
Roar Collective, “ROAR Roundtable: COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis,” ROAR, June 23, 2020. “The path the world takes out of lockdown will shape the climate struggle for decades to come. What can we do to seize the moment?”
Celine McNicholas and Margaret Poydock “Workers are striking during the coronavirus,” June 22, 2020. “Labor law must be reformed to strengthen this fundamental right.”
No author, “Covid-19 has led to a pandemic of plastic pollution,” The Economist, June 22, 2020. “As the world produces more protective equipment—and gorges on takeaways—pity the oceans.”
Inae OH, “Half of the Country Is Seeing New Coronavirus Spikes. So Naturally, Trump Is Returning to Denialism,” Mother Jones, June 22, 2020. “The rejection of reality comes as the virus has claimed 120,000 lives.”
Julie Hollar, “Covering a Pandemic, Election-Style,” FAIR, June 22, 2020. A discussion of Trump’s remarks about testing.
Julia Conley, “New Research Suggests Racial Justice Protests Have Not Led to Covid-19 Transmission Spike,” Common Dreams, June 22, 2020. “A new study offers evidence that widespread wearing of masks at outdoor demonstrations may be limiting Covid-19 transmission, while indoor gatherings are linked to spreading the disease.”
Eric Strikwerda and Ingo Schmidt, “COVID-19: A View from the Great Depression of the 1930s,” The Bullet, June 21, 2020. A comparison of today’s health and economic crises with the social and political responses of the Great Depression.
Michelle Fawcett and Arun Gupta, “Undocumented Farmworkers Are Refusing Covid Tests for Fear of Losing Their Jobs,” In These Times, June 19, 2020. A general discussion of the COVID pandemic and agricultural workers, particularly in California.
Josh Manson, “Prisons Are Responding to COVID by Putting More People in Solitary Confinement,” Truthout, June 19, 2020. “Corrections officials are confining people to their cells in prisons, jails, and detention centers at alarming rates in response to COVID-19, but advocates say the practice risks wider transmission of the disease, and are calling instead for large-scale decarceration.”
Julia Conley, “‘Heartbreaking,’ Say Global Experts, Alarmed at Signs US Has ‘Given Up’ Fight to Stop Covid-19,” Common Dreams, June 19, 2020. “I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it”s unsafe,” said one expert in New Zealand. “It’s hard to see how this ends.”
Mauricio Savarese, “Brazil tops 1 million cases as coronavirus spreads inland,” AP News, June 19, 2020. “Brazil’s government confirmed on Friday that the country has risen above 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases, second only to the United States.”
Yves Smith, “How America’s Covid-19 Rescues Look Set to Increase Inequality,” Naked Capitalism, June 19, 2020. A discussion of the government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis and it relation to the longstanding issue of inequality.
Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “Trump Rally in Tulsa Inflames Racism Amidst Coronavirus Surge,” Democracy Now, June 18, 2020. Criticism of President Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally for its implications for both racism and the pandemic.
Heidi Shierholtz, “A quarter of a year in, job losses remain at historic levels,” Economic Policy Institute, June 18, 2020. “More than one in five workers are either on unemployment benefits or are waiting to get on.”
Ady Barkan and Zain Rizvi, “The Covid-19 Vaccine Should Belong to the People,” The Nation, June 18, 2020. “The US government has the authority under existing law to break patent monopolies.”
Chris Walker, “Trump Claimed Coronavirus Will “Fade Away” on a Day That Saw 26,000 New Cases,” Truthout, June 18, 2020. A discussion of another one of Presient Donald Trump’s false and dangerous remarks about the pandemic.
Jessica Corbett, “‘Unimaginable Double Emergency’: Record High of Nearly 80 Million People Forcibly Displaced Worldwide Amid Pandemic,” Common Dreams, June 18, 2020. “These numbers should serve as a wake-up call to the international community on the human cost of war, and the social and economic implications exacerbated by Covid-19.”
Jeet Heer, “The First Wave of Covid-19 Isn’t Over Yet,” The Nation, June 17, 2020. “Even with a competent president, we’d still be in deep trouble.”
Jessica Corbett, “Top Global Experts Say Humanity Must ‘Heal Our Broken Relationship With Nature’ to Prevent Future Pandemics,” Common Dreams, June 17, 2020. “We must curb the high risk trade and consumption of wildlife, halt deforestation and land conversion, as well as manage food production sustainably.”
Peter Dorman and Lawrence Mishel, “A majority of workers are fearful of coronavirus infections at work, especially Black, Hispanic, and low- and middle-income workers,” Economic Policy Institute, June 16, 2020. “Those facing risks are not proportionately receiving extra compensation.”
Jessica Corbett, “‘This Is Mass Murder’: Covid-19 Deaths in US Prisons Have Risen by 73% the Past Month,” Common Dreams, June 16, 2020. “The number of known cases in the facilities has doubled since mid-May to over 68,000.”
Juan Cole, “The Ostrich Policy: Trump ready to Kill Hundreds of Thousands to avoid bad Coronavirus Optics for Election,” Informed Comment, June 16, 2020. Discusses how President Donald Trump’s planned rallies will contribute to further disease and death.
Maeve O’Neill, “A Healthy World Beyond COVID-19,” Rebel, June 16, 2020. “The current pandemic has thrown a long overdue spotlight on our health system, and how we care for people more generally. Physiotherapist Maeve O’Neill looks at the changes needed for a more healthy – and humane – society.”
A.K. Thompson and Clare O’Connor, “The Politics of the Mask,” Boston Review, June 16, 2020. “Today we face the paradox of states simultaneously criminalizing masks—because of protests—and mandating them because of COVID-19. In this interview, social theorist A.K. Thompson explores the history of masks in protests and why rioting is politically effective.”
Salimah Valiani, “COVID-19 and Patriarchy in the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife,” The Bullet, June 16, 2020. “In an effort to shed light on the vital but undervalued labour of predominantly female health professionals, the World Health Organization named 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. It is an irony and a sickening reality that 2020 turned out to be the year when nurses and other health workers would be pushed to utter vulnerability in the effort to manage COVID-19.”
Janine Jackson, “‘Immunity Shouldn’t Be Part of the Conversation’: CounterSpin interview with Remington Gregg on corporate immunity,” FAIR, June 16, 2020. “[T]here’s a push, led in Congress by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to grant corporations legal immunity from liability for any harms workers may suffer from being forced back into workplaces that are unsafe.”
Martin Smith and Marcela Gaviria, “The Virus: What Went Wrong?” Frontline PBS, June 16, 2020. “From award-winning journalists, this new, 90-minute documentary special traces the coronavirus’s path.”
Madeline Holcombe, Holly Yan and Theresa Waldrop, “Some states see Covid-19 cases surging as restrictions are relaxed,” CNN, June 16, 2020. As states move forward with relaxing virus-compelled restrictions — and as people grow weary of complying with them — some areas are reporting a record number of new daily cases.
Kaela Sanborn-Hum, “Striking McDonald’s Workers Block Entrance, Shut Store,” Labor Notes, June 15, 2020. “A strike by 33 workers at a McDonald’s in North Oakland has shut down the store since May 26. Twelve workers there have tested positive for COVID-19, and so have eight of their family members, including a 10-month-old baby. This is one of the longest recorded strikes ever by McDonald’s workers.”
Dayton Martindale, “9 Statistics That Show What a Miserable Failure the CARES Act Is,” In These Times, June 15, 2020. “Major bailouts went to big corporations, giving them lasting security, while the rest of us got a temporary Band-Aid.”
Jonathan Bernstein, “Don’t Blame the Public for Coronavirus Confusion,” Bloomberg, June 15, 2020. “With mixed messages and no leadership from the top, it’s little wonder Americans don’t quite know what to do.”
Hannah Levintova, “The Administration Vowed Transparency on COVID Relief Spending—Until It Didn’t,” Mother Jones, June 15, 2020. “Now officials say they have no plans to release the names of companies getting funds.”
Holly Yan, “Why a 2nd shutdown over coronavirus might be worse than the 1st — and how to prevent it,” CNN, June 15, 2020. “Weeks after lifting stay-at-home orders, some states are seeing record numbers of hospitalizations from Covid-19 as thousands more Americans get infected every day.”
Raju Das, “The Pandemic and the Need for a New Society,” The Bullet, June 14, 2020. “The pandemic is, in fact, forcing us to think about what kind of society we wish to live in, what kind of society is worth fighting for. This article discusses the conception of a new society in relation to production, work and needs, ecology and spatial development, and the political in the public sphere.”
Brendan Montague, “Capitalism is the virus,” The Ecologist, June 13, 2020. “Capitalism, colonialism, and ecological devastation are all cause and effect of each other, and they coevolved together.”
Adrienne Gladden-Young, “Give Black Scientists a Place in This Fight,” The Atlantic, June 13, 2020. “During the pandemic, African Americans need the health establishment to engage us not as victims, but as leaders and problem-solvers.”
Bryant Furlow, “A Hospital’s Secret Coronavirus Policy Separated Native American Mothers From Their Newborns” ProPublica, June 13, 2020. “Pregnant Native American women were singled out for COVID-19 testing based on their race and ZIP code, clinicians say. While awaiting results, some mothers were separated from their newborns, depriving them of the immediate contact doctors recommend.”
Claudia Wallis, “Why Racism, Not Race, Is a Risk Factor for Dying of COVID-19,” Scientific American, June 12, 2020. “Public health specialist and physician Camara Phyllis Jones talks about ways that jobs, communities and health care leave Black Americans more exposed and less protected.”
Julia Conley, “Erasing 30 Years of Progress, Covid-19 Pandemic Could Lead to More Than One Billion People Living in Poverty: Study,” Common Dreams, June 12, 2020. “These findings expose the extent of precarity in developing countries, but also the fragility of poverty reductions to any economic shock.”
Steve Lopez, “Why are so many people not wearing masks? Here’s how they explain it,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2020. Personal opinion piece based on impressionistice interviews. “We implemented safety precautions too late in the U.S., costing lives, and we’ve given up on them too soon, which will cost more.”
No author, “Covid-19 challenges New York’s future,” The Economist, June 11, 2020. Discusses how the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown have affected New York City and raise questions about its future.
Harry Glasbeek, “‘Open the Economy’? The Pandemic, Costs, Benefits, Capitalism,” The Bullet, June 11, 2020. Discusses the cost-benefit analyses used in the capitalist society’s reckoning of the costs of reopening.
Derrick Z. Jackson, “A Second Wave of COVID-19 Looms Large—and It’s Not Because of Protests,” The Union of Concerned Scientists, June 11, 2020. Some scientists estimate that “the protests could ultimately lead to between 15,000 and 50,000 overall coronavirus infections and between 50 to 500 deaths….But [that[ barely compares to the rioting of the virus and the looting of lives incited by the incompetence of the Trump administration and state decisions to prioritize reopening for business over public health. Those policies have seriously worsened a pandemic that has already caused 113,000 deaths in the United States…”
Oliver Milman, “‘An American fiasco’: US hits grim milestone of 2m Covid-19 cases,” The Guardian, June 10, 2020. “Pandemic has devastated US, but experts warn lack of testing and early reopening mean ‘we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
Vanessa Barbara, “Brazilians Die, Bolsonaro Shrugs,” NYR Daily, June 10, 2020. Discusses President Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disastrous results.
Jake Johnson, “‘Lethal Inequality’: New Study Shows Millions at High Risk of Covid-19 in US Lack Adequate Health Insurance,” Common Dreams, June 10, 2020. “It’s not just Covid care that’s unaffordable. Patients with heart disease, asthma, and diabetes need protection too. Medicare for All is the long-term answer.”
Imani countess and William Minter, “Racism and COVID-19: The World’s Twin Pandemics,” Foreign Policy in Focus, June 10, 2020. “The U.S. may be at the center of both pandemics, but — as worldwide demonstrations show — each is global.”
Evan A. Eskew and Colin J. Carlson, “Overselling Wildlife Trade Bans Will Not Bolster Conservation or Pandemic Preparedness,” Climate & Capitalism, June 10, 2020. “Indeed, expansive wildlife trade regulations driven by the threat of COVID-19 might seem to conservationists a double victory for human and wildlife health. But these calls to action, and their disproportionate focus on Africa and Asia, often ring hollow given that many high-income countries routinely outsource their biodiversity threats to other nations.”
Peter Daszak, “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab,” The Guardian, June 9, 2020. “Instead of following false claims, we should focus our efforts on the regions where the next pandemic is likely to emerge.”
Vinod Mubayi, “Criminalizing dissent and Covid-19 in India,” No Borders, June 9, 2020. “How Modi’s market-driven, scapegoating regime will weather the crisis will depend in part on whether or not India’s left, trade unions, and social movements can find ways to mobilize.”
Allan Sloan, “The CARES Act Sent You a $1,200 Check but Gave Millionaires and Billionaires Far More,” ProPublica, June 8, 2020. “The stimulus checks were meant to get average Americans through the lockdown, but those $1,200 payouts were small change compared with the billions in tax breaks the CARES Act handed out to the country’s wealthiest.”
Eleanor J. Bader, “Students and Staff Oppose COVID-Inspired Disaster Capitalism on US Campuses,” Truthout, June 8, 2020. “The current economic crisis is raising important questions about government responsibility and whether or not state and federal lawmakers will use COVID-19 to gut public programs, including access to a high-quality public education, as they push more wealth to the top.”
Christine Douglass, Molly Fyfe, and Amali U. Lokugamage, “Structural racism in society and the covid-19 ;stress test’,” BMJ, June 8, 2020. “Racism has and continues to drive health and social inequality in the UK and is, we believe, a likely co-factor contributing to deaths in ethnic minority communities in this crisis.”
Faculty Members at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “Why Is the University of California Punishing Students During a Pandemic?” Truthout, June 7, 2020. Though we have the COVID-19 crisis, “The chancellor and executive vice chancellor confirmed that UC Santa Cruz would continue punitive measures against students due to their peaceful involvement in the wildcat strike this past winter.”
David Goodman, “How racism kills,” VTDigger, June 7, 2020. This is apparent when police kill unarmed people of color such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But the lethality of systemic racism is also evident in the Covid-19 pandemic, which is killing African Americans at a staggering three times the rate of white people.”
Clarence Gravlee, “Racism, Not Genetics, Explains Why Black Americans Are Dying of COVID-19,” Scientific American, June 7, 2020. “Some scientists and politicians have invoked baseless ideas about unknown genes, ignoring systemic inequality and oppression.”
Christopher Blackwell, “Companies Are Using Pandemic to Squeeze Money From Incarcerated People Like Me,” Truthout, June 6, 2020. A personal account of the difficulties of prison life in the times of the coronavirus.
Alan MacLeod, “Media Downplay Global South Leadership on Covid-19,”FAIR, June 6, 2020. “Only Westerners, it seems, are deserving of praise.”
Michael Roberts, “Returning to Normal?” Michael Roberts Blog, June 6, 2020. “Financial markets may be expecting a quick return (and investors riding this forecast are making huge profits right now). But the reality is that the financial market boom is floating on an ocean of free credit provided by the state and central bank monetary financing.”
Susan Smith Richardson, “George Floyd, Coronavirus and the Inequality Stealing Black Lives,” Public Integrity, June 5, 2020. Agues that the killing of George Floyd and the coronavirus are two sides of the same coin.
Touré, “On Protesting During a Pandemic,” The Nation, June 5, 2020. “I’ve been afraid of Covid-19 for three months, but I’ve been afraid of getting killed by police for four decades.”
Emily Lemmerman and Colette Perold, “With a Little Help from My Friends: How Taco Bell Workers and Many More Are Self-Organizing in the Pandemic,” Labor Notes, June 5, 2020. How the DSA-UE collaboration, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), is helping workers organize t Taco Bell and elsewhere.
Keri Blakinger and Abbie VanSickle, “We Were Gassed, Arrested, and Maybe Exposed to COVID-19,” The Marshall Project, June 4, 2020. “The things that make mass arrests especially awful are now health risks.”
Lisa Song, “Tear Gas Is Way More Dangerous Than Police Let On — Especially During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” ProPublica, June 4, 2020. “In the middle of a respiratory pandemic, law enforcement agencies have used tear gas in especially dangerous ways. The chemical agent also seeps into homes, contaminates food, furniture, skin and surfaces, and can cause long-term lung damage.”
Ari Shapiro interviews Valerie Wilson, “How Social And Economic Disparities Have Worsened Pandemic’s Effects On Black Workers,” NPR, June 4, 2020. “NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks to Valerie Wilson from the Economic Policy Institute about why the pandemic has disproportionately affected African-American workers and families.”
Liz Theoharis, “Organizing the Rich or the Poor? Which America Will Be Ours After the Pandemic?” TomDispatch.com, June 4, 2020. Compares the coronavirus economic impact with other moments of economic crisis in the past.
Chuck Collins, “Billionaire Pandemic Wealth Gains Surge Past Half-Trillion as 42.6 million File for Unemployment,” Institute for Policy Studies, June 4, 2020. “U.S. Billionaire Wealth Up $565 billion since March 18, a gain of over 19 percent.”
Sophie Lewis, “Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It,” The Nation, June 3, 2020. “The care and love we extend to one another can no longer be confined to house-sized pockets.” A critical discussion of the unfairness of our living arrangements.
Julie Hollar, “Proposals to Ease Covid’s Blow on the Hardest Hit All but Ignored by Corporate Media,” FAIR, June 3, 2020. “The poor and people of color are the hardest hit, not just by the novel coronavirus but also by the economic fallout.”
Shannon Palus, “Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue,” June 2, 2020. “Facing a slew of media requests asking about how protests might be a risk for COVID-19 transmission, a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, with input from other colleagues, drafted a collective response. In an open letter published Sunday, they write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”
Chris Walker, “Black Workers Hit Harder and Earlier by COVID Unemployment, New Report Shows,” Truthout, June 2, 2020. “A new report details how racial inequities in American society contributed to higher rates of unemployment within Black communities as compared to rates among whites during the economic downturn brought on by coronavirus.”
Dean E. Robinson, “Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Point to Need for Medicare for All,” Labor Notes, June 1, 2020. “Medicare for All would go a long way to beginning to address racial disparities in health care in general and for COVID-19 in particular.”
John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises,” Monthly Review, June 1, 2020. “COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism. As the world enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are seeing the emergence of catastrophe capitalism as the structural crisis of the system takes on planetary dimensions.”
Elise Gould and Valerie Wilson, “Black workers face two of the most lethal preexisting conditions for coronavirus—racism and economic inequality,” Economic Policy Institute, June 1, 2020. “Evidence to date suggests that black and Hispanic workers face much more economic and health insecurity from COVID-19 than white workers.”
Dan La Botz, “The American Working Class on Unfamiliar and Dangerous Terrain: A Fightback Begins,” New Politics, June 1, 2020. The working class faces three challenges: coronavirus, the economic depression, and Trump’s authoritarian government.

MAY 2020

Derek Hawkins, “All coronavirus testing centers shuttered in Los Angeles over ‘safety worries’ during protests,” Washington Post, May 31, 2020. “Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the city’s coronavirus testing centers were closed Saturday because of “safety worries across the city” as protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody raged for a third day. The closures, which Garcetti said were necessary to clean up damage and restore order, underscored the potential for the demonstrations around the country to disrupt the coronavirus response in hard-hit metropolitan areas.”
No author, “Bolsonaro Let Coronavirus Ravage Brazil. A Favela Is Taking Matters Into Its Own Hands,” Video without text. The Intercept, May 30, 2020. Brazil’s authorities deny the truth of the spread of the coronavirus and don’t take measures to stop it. Poor residents act on their own.
Katey Zeh, “The ‘Pro-Life’ Movement’s Response to COVID-19 Reveals Its Hypocrisy,” Truthout, May 30, 2020. “As communities reel from the devastating impacts of COVID-19, conservative politicians and lawmakers in an alarming number of states have capitalized on the fear and scarcity surrounding the pandemic. They are using legitimate health concerns as a smokescreen to enact anti-choice abortion bans.”
Isabella Weber, Ho Qi, Zhongjin Li, “China Is Not the Enemy — Neoliberalism Is,” Jacobin, May 30, 2020. “China’s united response to COVID-19 is often painted as a reflection of authoritarian ‘Asian values.’ But the collective mobilization relied on real public support — a temporary social truce that today threatens to fracture.”
Basav Sen, “Coronavirus Denial and Climate Denial Have One Thing in Common: Greed,” Newsweek, May 29, 2020. “The Trump administration is waging an Inquisition-like “war on science” across the federal government, affecting the EPA, the Interior Department, and many other agencies. Official coronavirus minimization is completely consistent with the pattern of official climate change denial and dismissal of science.
Saurav Sarkar, “Twin Cities Labor Mobilizes Against George Floyd Murder,” Labor Notes, May 29, 2020. “The organized labor movement has begun swinging into action to support protests against the racist police murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd.”
Communications Workers of America, “Statement from the CWA Executive Board on the Need to Dismantle the Racism that Plagues Our Communities,” CWA Press, Releases, May 29, 2020. “The CWA Executive Board is committed to moving beyond an endless string of reaction statements and demonstrating our continued commitment to justice for Black people through our organizing, representation, political, and movement building work.”
Manuel Perez-Rocha, “Corporate Lawsuits Could Devastate Poor Countries Grappling with COVID-19,” Inequality, May 28, 2020. “Wealthy corporations may use trade courts to keep public health measures from cutting into their profits.”
Jeremy Mohler, “A Philly suburb wants to sell its water, offering a glimpse of post-COVID America,” In The Public Interest, May 28, 2020. A Philadelphia suburb is trying to sell its drinking water system. “The city’s fiscal issues have been greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis,” said Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland.
Dan Froomkin, “Trump’s coronavirus failure is an ongoing tragedy, not a thing of the past,” Press Watch, May 28, 2020. Argues that the press is not paying enough attention to the continuing coronavirus crisis.
Many signers, “Jair Bolsonaro is a threat to Brazil and global health,” an open letter, No Borders, May 29, 2020. “The open letter below was initiated by elected officials from the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) and is part of the Fora Bolsonaro (Bolsonaro Out) campaign, including filing a formal impeachment petition in the national congress. “
Yadul Krishna, “India’s Kerala Is Combating COVID-19 Through Participatory Governance,” The Bullet, May 28, 2020. A discussion of the role of the Kerala government’s citizen participation in health programs and the positive impact of that approach.
Nomi Prins, “The Great Depression, Coronavirus Style Crashes, Then and Now,” TomDispatch, May 28, 2020. “Nomi Prins considers what the two haunting bookends of ‘the American century,’ the Great Depression and the Coronavirus Crash, have in common and what the earlier one has to tell us about the otherwise unknown world of catastrophe we’ve now entered. In the process, she imagines what it might truly mean to “reopen” such a ghostly world.”
Ai-jen Poo, “Who Cares? Now, All of Us Must,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2020. The former director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) discusses the conditions of the countries 2.2 million domestic workers.
Mike Ludwig, “Trump and GOP Want COVID-19 Protections for Bosses — But Not Workers,” Truthout, May 27, 2020. The GOP has consistently sided with employers over issues of workplace safety as pro-business forces push to reopen the country and jump-start the economy, which Trump sees as crucial to his reelection.
Juan Grigera, “Salt in the Wound: The Crises of Covid-19,” Spectre, May 27, 2020. “The crisis that triggered the global pandemic is a radical crisis for global neoliberalism. Unlike the climate crisis, which has begun to unfold slowly, the ongoing viral crisis emerged suddenly and without warning. In both cases, we can observe an unexpected relationship between humans and nature, as well as a contradiction between use value and value—theoretical concepts we will elaborate in what follows.
John Queally, “As US Death Toll Hits 100,000 People, Here’s a Simple Guide to 12 Things Trump Did To Make Covid-19 Much Worse,” Common Dreams, May 27, 2020. “The president’s ‘chaotic and incompetent response has fueled the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. and beyond, causing tens of thousands of preventable deaths.’”
Holly Corbett, “What The Pandemic Means For The Wealth Gap,” Forbes, May 26, 2020. “Income inequality is not new, but the current pandemic and recession are amplifying the wealth gap.”
Colin Wilson, “The pandemic lays bare a government out of its depth,” RS21, May 26, 2020. “As Boris Johnson desperately clings on to Dominic Cummings, Colin Wilson argues that the Tory government is woefully unprepared to resolve a crisis of such historic proportions as the current pandemic.”
Danny Katch, “The Day My Coworkers and I Chose Our Survival Over Our Supervisor,” Jacobin, May 26, 2020. “Like many during this pandemic, my coworkers and I were told on September 11, 2001, to possibly risk our lives by staying on the job. Instead, we walked out.”
Sharon Lerner, “Despite the Hype, Gilead’s Remdesivir Will Do Noting to End the Coronavirus Pandemic,” The Intercept, May 26, 2020. Remdesivir has been heralded as our best hope in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, the antiviral drug doesn’t seem of much help to patients with Covid-19….[while] a combination of generic drugs that appears to be more effective in fighting the coronavirus has flown under the radar.”
Lisa Adkins and Marijn Konings, “COVID Life and the Asset Economy,” The Bullet, May 27, 2020. The authors of a forthcoming book titled The Asset Economy argue that the understanding of an economy dominated by the logic of assets and especially by the logics of asset appreciation and depreciation is essential to analyzing the current pandemic and its political and social implications.
Shasta Darlington et al, “Latin America is now the ‘epicenter of the outbreak,’ says health official,” CNN, May 26, 2020. “Latin America has surpassed Europe and the United States in the daily number of reported Covid-19 infections, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said Tuesday, putting the region at the center of the global outbreak.”
Ian MacDougall, “Bill Barr Promised to Release Prisoners Threatened by Coronavirus — Even as the Feds Secretly Made It Harder for Them to Get Out,” ProPublica, May 26, 2020. “Celebrity prisoners like former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort have been granted home detention, but a secret Bureau of Prisons policy has kept all but 1.8% of federal inmates behind bars, where the virus rages.”
Jessica Corbett, “Survey Shows 1 in 5 Teachers—Citing Covid-19 Concerns—Likely Won’t Return to US Schools This Fall,” Common Dreams, May 26, 2020. “Polling also showed that nearly six in 10 parents may refuse to send their children back to classrooms next semester.”
Tussanee Reedbook, “Educators Must Use the Pandemic to Revolutionize Education for All Students,” Truthout, May 26, 2020. A personal discussion of education, curriculum, and testing with a focus on students of color.
Lisa Song, “The Financial Catastrophe That Coronavirus Brought to Small Towns,” ProPublica, May 26, 2020. “The federal government has abandoned America’s small towns as the coronavirus depletes their budgets. It’s flood season and local leaders have no idea how to help residents through natural disasters. “We do not see how we will survive,” one told us.”
Various organization, “Over 40 million Health Professionals Urge G20 Leaders to Put Public Health at the Core of Covid-19 Recovery,” International Council of Nurses, May 26, 2020. “This letter is supported by the Global Climate and Health Alliance, Every Breath Matters, and the World Health Organization. Over 40 million nurses, doctors and other health professionals from 90 countries, including many working on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic, sent a letter today to G20 leaders urging them to put public health at the centre of their economic recovery packages, to help avoid future crises and make the world more resilient to them.”
Sebastião Salgado, “Brazil’s Reckless COVID Response Threatens Indigenous Survival,” Democracy Now, May 26, 2020. Interview by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Video and transcript. “As Brazil sees more than 800 deaths in 24 hours and nearly 400,000 confirmed cases, we look at COVID-19’s devastating impact on Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, who are dying at double the rate of the rest of the country. We speak with world-renowned Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who wrote an open letter to right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who called the virus a ‘little flu,’ to warn him the pandemic is ‘an extreme threat to their very survival.’”
Marie-Hélène Duverger, “France opens schools, Covid-19 stalks the halls,” No Borders, May 26, 2020. Duveger discusses this: “As of May 26, France is reporting 145,279 confirmed coronavirus infections and 28,457 Covid-19 deaths, a per capita rate 30 percent higher than the United States. Despite the pandemic, French President Emmanuel Macron has ordered 40,000 primary schools to reopen. Two things stand out about this decision.“
Colin Wilson, “The pandemic lays bare a government out of its depth,” RS21, May 26, 2020. “As Boris Johnson desperately clings on to Dominic Cummings, Colin Wilson argues that the Tory government is woefully unprepared to resolve a crisis of such historic proportions as the current pandemic.”
Roger Sollenberger, “Dubious state testing numbers may be screwing up national CDC reports,” Salon, May 25, 2020. “Some states have been combining viral and antibody testing data, leading to messy or useless national statistics.”
Jesse Drucker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Sarah Kliff, “Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Bailout for Struggling Health Providers,” The New York Times, May 25, 2020.“Twenty large chains received more than $5 billion in federal grants even while sitting on more than $100 billion in cash.”
Michael Roberts, “Coronavirus, the economic crisis and Indian capitalism,” Michael Roberts Blog, May 25, 2020. The transcript of the presentation by Roberts on 30 April to the Indian Students Forum (TISS) in Mumbai.
Anne, Kim, “Trump Sabotaged America’s Recovery Even Before COVID-19 Began,” Washington Monthly, May 25, 2020. “The president’s pre-pandemic fiscal recklessness will slow the nation’s rebound.”
James Plested, “Elon Musk is a shithead,” Red Flag, May 25, 2020. Musk like Trump “in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, [has] been firmly in the capitalist death-cult camp, downplaying the threat early, and now pushing for a rapid reopening of the US economy despite warnings from scientists that doing so risks hundreds of thousands more lives.”
John Cassidy, “The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2020. The corporate debt problem is serious and could get worse.
Dan La Botz, “Trump Forever? He May Try,” New Politics, May 24, 2020. Trump may use the coronavirus crisis and the economic depression to thwart the November election and keep himself in office illegally.
Kevin Drum, “Imperial College Says the Most Dangerous States Are the Ones That Are Reopening,” Mother Jones, May 23, 2020. “Our pals at Imperial College have released a state-level model showing which states have reduced their R₀ below one.” Table and Map.
Lewis M. Steele, “Racism Has Undermined the U.S. Safety Net, Making the Crisis More Painful and Reconstruction More Challenging,” Inequaity, May 22, 2020. “New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter’s new book, ‘American Poison,’ is a scathing analysis of misguided white antagonism toward social welfare programs.”
Mike Davis, “Workers Face “Sophie’s Choice” Between Income & Health as 50 States Reopen Amid Pandemic,” Democracy Now, May 22. Interview. “Part 1: Mike Davis: Workers Face ‘Sophie’s Choice’ Between Income & Health as 50 States Reopen Amid Pandemic; Part 2: Mike Davis: As Workers Face Dangerous Conditions Amid Reopening, We Need Unions & Medicare for All.”
Norman Solomon, “This pandemic isn’t just about Trump’s incompetence — it’s about class war, waged from the top,” Salon, May 22, 2020. “Class war — waged methodically from the top down — is so constant and pervasive that it might seem unremarkable. The 24/7 siege to make large companies more profitable and the wealthy more wealthy is going on all around us. In the process, it normalizes avoidable death as a cost of doing business.”
Kim Pollock, “Don’t Blame the Virus for Capitalism’s Latest Crisis!” The Bullet, May 22, 2020. “I will demonstrate how it was, in fact, already in crisis well before the virus, Wuhan alarms or pandemic. Let’s consider some key economic indicators based on Statistics Canada data. They support the view that the economy was in recession by last fall.”
Julie Hollar, “In Pandemic, Sunday Shows Centered Official Voices, Sidelined Independent Health Experts,” FAIR, May 22, 2020. “On the networks’ Sunday morning political talkshows, which play an important role in setting agendas for national political debate, the voices asked to participate were overwhelmingly the usual narrow cast of Beltway actors, with independent public health experts playing a marginal role, and public interest voices almost entirely sidelined.”
Amber Colón Núñez, “Covid-19 Profiteers Are Making a Killing,” In These Times, May 21, 2020. “Here are some of the most outrageous capitalist responses to the pandemic.”
Bob Dreyfuss, “Trump’s ‘Blame China’ Strategy Echoes Bush’s Targeting of Iraq,” Truthout, May 21, 2020. The Trump administration’s blaming of China for the coronavirus will make it more difficult to cooperate on future viruses and has other dangerous implications.
MatthewRozsa, “60 million people will be driven into extreme poverty due the pandemic,” Salon, May 21, 2020. “The World Bank predicts that the pandemic will cause the first global increase in poverty since 1998.”
Chris Brooks, “Follow the Money: Employers Are Behind the Rush to Reopen,” Labor Notes, May 21, 2020. “True to form, the rich are doing everything they can to benefit financially from the crisis—and their work is paying off.”
Valerio Arcary, “Brazil’s most dangerous moment nears,” New Boders, May 20, 2020. Brazil’s rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro is mobilizing his base but the left is demanding his impeachment and removal from office.
Stephanie Mencimer, “Jared Kushner Had One Job: Solve America’s Supply Crisis. He Helped Private Companies Instead,” Mother Jones, May 20, 2020. “The short-lived Project Airbridge is an example of how the Trump administration has taken advantage of the pandemic to boost some of the country’s biggest companies while doing little more than offer hard-hit states photo ops and the chance to compete against each other to pay exorbitant prices for PPE.”
Jonathan Alan King, “Protecting Public Health Requires COVID-19 Treatments to Be Patent-Free,” Truthout, May 19, 2020. Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are racing to get patents and monopolies on vaccines, which poses a problem for public health.
Franco Turigliatto, “32,000 dead, time for Italy to open for business?” No Borders, May 19, 2020. “Veteran Italian socialist Franco Turigliatto explains the capitalist forces behind the push to reopen and how the left, trade unions, and social movements can resist.”
Amy Goodman interviews Dr. Ashish Jha, “Harvard Doctor: As States Rush to Reopen, Lack of COVID-19 Testing Is ‘Achilles Heel’ for U.S.” Democracy Now, May 19, “Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of Harvard University’s Global Health Institute, who says that testing needs to vastly improve in order for widespread reopenings. He calls the lack of accurate tests in the U.S. the nation’s ‘Achilles heel.’”
Hamilton Nolan, “A Quiet Frenzy of Union Organizing Has Gripped the Nonprofit World,” In These Times, May 19, 2020. “Over the past two years, there has been a legitimate boom in nonprofit union campaigns. All of those that have gone public have been successful. Alongside the recent rise in unionization at media outlets, museums and cultural institutions, nonprofit workers are part of an unprecedented uprising of labor organizing in white collar professions.”
Jeremy Brecher, “Unions Fight to Protect All Essential Workers,” Labor Network for Sustainability, No date, but May 2020. “Workers who are allowed or required to go on working through the pandemic are being exposed to the coronavirus – and to its economic consequences – with inadequate support from either their employers or their government. In response, workers and their unions have been taking action themselves to provide – and demand – protection.”
Daniella Burgi-Palomino, “US Deportations Are Exporting COVID-19 to Latin America and the Caribbean,” Truthout, May 18, 2020. “Travel is restricted around the world — but the United States has been flying migrants on hundreds of deportation flights to at least 11 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean since the pandemic began in the United States. There have been over 100 cases of migrants deported from the United States testing positive for COVID-19 upon being returned to Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico and Colombia.”
Negin Owliaei, “Reopening the Economy is a Death Sentence for Workers,” Inequality.org, May 18, 2020. “The wealthy may be fine with sacrificing the vulnerable, but workers are fighting for the sanctity of life.”
Mike Davis, “How a Pandemic Happens: We Knew This Was Coming,” Literary Hub, May 18, 2020. A discussion of many issues, scientific, social, and political and the coronavirus pandemic.
Dan La Botz, Class Struggle and Social Protest in the Coronavirus Pandemic, New Politics, May 18, 2020. “The fight for safe workplaces will become the driving force of activism in the coming weeks.”
Michael Roberts, “Profitability, investment and the pandemic,” Michael Roberts Blog, May 17, 2020. A discussion of the current capitalist crisis and the difficulties of recovery looking at various models and at empirical data.
Sarah Abramsky, “Exploiting Pandemic, Trump Admin Weighs Banning Immigration Indefinitely,” Truthout, May 16, 2020. “Earlier this week, the Trump administration started hinting that the president’s ‘temporary’ ban on immigration, rushed into effect in late April as a part of the pandemic response, was about to be extended indefinitely.”
Joe Penny, “Racism, Rather than Facts, Drove the U.S. Travel Bans,” The Intercept, May 16, 2020. “Experts say that ingrained racism informed policymakers’ and the media’s favorable views toward European countries, and that even when presented with direct evidence to the contrary, those biases impeded important public health measures that would have kept people safe.”
Thomas Sablowski, “The Deadly Consequences of Neoliberalism: The Covid-19 Pandemic in Germany,” The Bullet, May 16, 2020. “Unlike the endless praises in the liberal and social democratic press in North America, the Covid-19 pandemic is relentlessly uncovering the weaknesses of the German healthcare system – the deadly consequence of two decades of neoliberal policies.”
André Freire, “25,000 dead in Brazil, no end in sight,” No Borders, May 16, 2020. “In this article, André Freire explains how the Brazilian government is systematically undercounting Covid-19 deaths as part of deliberate policy to downplay the pandemic’s toll in order to push for an end to social distancing and the reopening of the economy.”
Lynn Casteel Harper, “America’s deadly ageism: How COVID-19 exposes prejudice against the elderly and dementia patients,” Salon, May 15, 2020. “The alarming death rate of U.S. nursing home residents due to the novel coronavirus is not a sad inevitability.”
Anders Melin, “CEOs cut millions of jobs amid coronavirus yet keep their lofty bonuses,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2020. So far, top executives of many major U.S. corporations — including some at the very epicenter of the crisis — have mostly held on to their outsize pay packages after giving up some of their salaries. And even as rank-and-file jobs vanish, some still have a distant shot at collecting bonuses for 2020, albeit smaller than last year’s.”
Mike Ludwig, “Essential Sanitary Workers Strike for Hazard Pay and PPE in New Orleans,” Truthout, Mary 15, 2020. “The severe outbreak of COVID-19 in southern Louisiana was the last straw for a group of sanitation workers who pick up trash in eastern New Orleans. Last week, they walked off the job and went on strike, demanding hazard pay and a $15 living wage.”
Helena Sheehan, “Science in a time of pandemic,” Culture Matters, May 15, 2020. “This pandemic highlights the need for a global, public and open framework for science, focused on the urgency of finding preventative, diagnostic and therapeutic responses to this virus, particularly a vaccine. It should transcend all considerations of prizes, patents and profits.”
Jeffery R. Webber, “Choosing between life or Capital in Latin America,”: Interview. Marxist Left Review, Summer 2020, available online since May 15. A discussion of the spread of the coronavirus in Latin America and the reaction of governments in the region.
Jullian Borger et al, “World looks on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way, “The Guardian, May 15, 2020. “The president’s outlandish behavior as Americans suffer has inspired horror and confusion while alienating allies.”
Alejandro Reuss, “Not Simply a ‘Natural Disaster’,” Labor Notes, May 14, 2020. “Part 1 of a joint series in Labor Notes and Dollars & Sense on the economics of the coronavirus crisis. Part 2, “How the Coronavirus Crisis Became an Economic Crisis.”
David Bacon,” COVID-Related Strikes Hit Washington’s Apple Sheds,” Capital and Main, May 14, 2020. “Demands for safer working conditions and extra hourly hazard pay during the pandemic are powering a strike wave in the Yakima Valley.”
Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh interview Dévora Kerstel and Andrew Soloman, “Coronavirus Pandemic Prompts Global Mental Health Crisis as Millions Feel Alone, Anxious & Depressed,” Democracy Now, May 14, 2020. Video and transcript. “Is the coronavirus pandemic generating a mental illness crisis? Millions face isolation, poverty and anxiety. We speak with psychology professor and author Andrew Solomon, as the United Nations calls on governments to put mental health “front and center” in their response to the crisis.”
Gregg Gonsalves, “Reopening: A Chronicle of Needless Deaths Foretold,” The Nation, May 14, 2020. “Brace yourselves for a long, slow burn. We will not get our epidemic under control in the US.”
Alberto Toscano, “Beyond the Plague State,” The Bullet, May 14, 2020. “In view of this long and deeply entrenched history of the plague state, of plague power, is it possible to imagine forms of public health that wouldn’t simply be synonymous with the health of the state, responses to pandemics that wouldn’t further entrench our desire for and collusion with sovereign monopolies of power?”
Prabir Purkayastha, “Why Capitalism Can’t Cure Global Pandemics,” The Bullet, May 14, 2020. “Public health was important as long as infectious diseases were perceived to be threats. As they became “forgotten,” so did public health in rich countries.”
Eli Zaretsky, “Culling the Herd: A Modest Proposal,” London Review of Books, May 14, 2020. Suggests that American society had prepared black people to be the victims of the Covid-19 slaughter. “When the coronavirus presented them with a choice between letting people die and closing down ‘the economy’, there was no question which the masters would choose. “
Laura Spinney, “The coronavirus slayer! How Kerala’s rock star health minister helped save it from Covid-19,” The Guardian, May 14, 2020. Discusses and talks with Kerala, India’s state health minister, KK Shailaja.
Beth English and Kelly Pike, “Will the Pandemic Set Women Back?” Project Syndicate, May 14, 2020. “By sapping demand for garments and other goods produced in export-oriented developing and emerging economies, the COVID-19 pandemic poses an acute threat to women workers and progress toward greater gender equality. In addressing the economic fallout of the public-health crisis, policymakers must tailor their response accordingly.”
Sarah Lazare, “Trump’s “Reopening” Is a Red Herring,” In These Times, May 14, 2020. “We should not concede the language of ‘reopening”’to right-wing liars who are sending poor people to their death.”
Bill Resnick interview Al Bradbury, “From Invisible to Essential: Worker Struggle in the COVID Pandemic,” Solidarity, May 13, 2020. A discussion of worker responses to the coronavirus.
Conn Hallinan, “In a Pandemic, Military Spending is an Extravagant Waste,” Foreign Policy in Focus, May 13, 2020. “In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or vaccines.”
Philip Ball “Anti-vaccine movement could undermine efforts to end coronavirus pandemic, researchers warn,” Nature, May13, 2020. “Studies of social networks show that opposition to vaccines is small but far-reaching — and growing.”
Gus Fisher, “Deforestation and Monoculture Farming Spread COVID-19 and Other Diseases,” Truthout, May 12, 2020. Just what the title says, a popular discusson of the science.
Cristina Flesher Fominaya, “How do you protest when you can’t take to the streets?” Open Democracy, May 12, 2020. “Cyberspace has become the main arena for social movements, as digital tools are used to help activists and citizens communicate, organize, and mobilize.”
Jake Johnson, ‘No Excuse for This’: House Dems Unveil 1,815-Page Bill That Would Bail Out Corporate Lobbyists But Omits Key People-First Priorities,” Common Dreams, May 12, 2020. “Democratic leadership has had plenty of input from progressive thinkers over the past couple of months. They just care more about the input from corporate lobbyists.”
David Bush, “Imperialism and COVID-19,” Spring, May 12, 2020. “The obvious solution to a global pandemic is global solidarity, to open borders to people and to share resources. But this goes against the global system of imperialism. “
Mike Elk, “American workers are being hung out to dry during the pandemic,” Business Insider, May 12, 2020. Argues that OSHA is failing to protect workers health.
Loong-Yu, “When Bootlicking Overrides Fighting Epidemic.” International Viewoint, May 12, 2020. “The Chinese case still displays features that are quite different from the West if we look more carefully at how the events unfolded in the crucial weeks between December 2019 and January 2020.”
Zeynep Tufecki, “How Hong Kong Did It,” The Atlantic, May 12, 2020. “With the government flailing, the city’s citizens decided to organize their own coronavirus response.”
Salimah Valiani, “Covid-19 Unmasks Dangers of Commodified Healthcare,” The Bullet, May 12, 2020. “Covid-19 has been linked to a number of truth claims long made by activists in South Africa and around the world. Perhaps most glaring is the need for universal healthcare and fortified public healthcare.”
Michael Felsen and Jessica Martinez, “The Fight for Workplace Safety,” The Progressive, May 12, 2020. “When the Department of Labor failed to regulate employers, essential workers made workplace safety a priority.”
Aaron Jaffe, “Social Reproduction Theory in and beyond the Pandemic,” Pluto Press, no date. The author discusses his book “Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon.”
Hamilton Nolan, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” In These Times, May 11, 2020. “Our government has pursued a plan that has been extremely competent and generous when it comes to propping up financial institutions and the value of financial assets, but extremely parsimonious and incompetent when it comes to providing an adequate financial safety net to human beings and small businesses.”
Mara Hvistendahl, “As Trump and Biden Trade Anti-China Ads, Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans Spike,” the Intercept, May 11, 2020. “As coronavirus deaths mount, President Donald Trump’s China-bashing has evolved from a short-term political tactic into a full-fledged election strategy…. Instead of taking the high road, the Biden campaign has offered its own version of xenophobic hype.”
No author “Health workers become unexpected targets during covid-19,” The Economist, May 11, 2020. Discusses violent attacks on nurses in various nations.
Juan Cole, “If only we Had that $6.4 Trillion we wasted on Iraq and Afghanistan to Lift the Economy and Fight Coronavirus,” Informed Comment, May 11, 2020. “So not only did we waste $6.4 trillion, we continue to waste trillions more on war industries that don’t actually do us any good or make us perceptibly safer.”
Justin Mayhugh, “When Auto Plants Reopen, Some of Us Will Die for Corporate Profit,” Labor Notes, May 11, 2020. Despite all the evidence that we are nowhere near out of the woods with the coronavirus pandemic, the Detroit automakers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) have agreed to restart production at most facilities on May 18. Various part supplier facilities will restart even sooner….these decisions were made entirely by the Detroit Three executives and the top brass of the UAW, who rarely—if ever—visit these worksites.
National Nurses United, “Nation’s Largest Nurses Union Hosts National Vigil for COVID-19 Nurse Deaths,” National Nurses United, May 11, 2020. “On Tuesday, May 12th at 9:30 PM ET / 6:30 PM PT, nurses from National Nurses United (NNU) will host a streamed, Facebook Live candlelight vigil to honor the more than 100 nurses who have lost their lives to COVID-19 while fighting for the safe care of their patients – a fatality number that has more than doubled in just the past two weeks.”
Faroque Chowdhury interviews Fred Magdoff, “COVID-19 Pandemic: This is the time for bold programs from the left to help the people,” CounterCurrents.org, May 11, 2020. “Discusses the coronavirus pandemic in light of capitalism and agriculture.”
Amy Goodman interviews Norman Siegel, “‘Weaponized and Racialized’: Police Departments Use COVID-19 to Target Black & Brown Communities,” Democracy Now, May 11, 2020. “We continue our look at how Black and Brown communities are being disproportionately targeted and policed in New York City’s enforcement measures during the pandemic.”
Mark Bergfeld and Sarah Harris, “The COVID-19 Crisis and the End of the ‘Low-skilled’ Worker,” Spectre, May 10, 2020. “In a pandemic, essential laborers are working, but the labor market isn’t.”
Jesse Eisinger, “The Bailout Is Working — for the Rich,” ProPublica, May 10, 2020. “The economy is in free fall but Wall Street is thriving, and stocks of big private equity firms are soaring dramatically higher. That tells you who investors think is the real beneficiary of the federal government’s massive rescue efforts.”
Sasha Abramsky, “In the Absence of Federal Action, US States Scramble to Address Hunger Crisis,” Truthout, May 10, 2020. “As the COVID-19 crisis intensifies, a Depression-era double-whammy food crisis has emerged.”
Tim Dickinson, “The Four Men Responsible For America’s COVID-19 Test Disaster,” Rollingstone, June 2020 issue, posted May 10, 2020. “The White House’s inability to track the disease as it spread across the nation crippled the government’s response and led to the worst disaster this country has faced in nearly a century.”
Dan La Botz, “Trump Will Sacrifice Tens of Thousands to Reopen Economy and Win Reelection,” New Politics, May 10. “With Trump’s plan for reopening next month’s death toll will continue to rise and the economy could virtually collapse.”
No Author, “Palestine and the COVID Crisis,” Socialist Project, May 10, 2020. “We call on governments to stop colluding with Israel in their silence, military contracts, and investments, and stress the need to deepen the campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). It is this political system, not merely an act of nature, against which we must mobilize an international response of immediate medical relief and of struggle and solidarity.”
André Singer, “Covid-19 and Bolsonaro’s “permanent radicalization,” Open Borders, May 10, 2020. “Outlines some of the key dynamics underpinning the current situation in Brazil.”
Joshua Kaplan and Benjamin Hardy, “Early Data Shows Black People Are Being Disproportionally Arrested for Social Distancing Violations,” ProPublica, May 8, 2020. “Crowds of mostly white protesters have defied Ohio’s stay-at-home order without arrest, while in several of the state’s biggest jurisdictions, police departments have primarily arrested black people for violating the order.”
Adam Serwer, “The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying,” The Atlantic, May 8, 2020. “The pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others.”
Naomi Klein, “Screen New Deal,” The Intercept, May 8, 2020. “Under cover of mass death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High Teach Dystopia.”
Bryce Covert, “Hit Hard by Covid, Nursing Home Workers Threatened to Strike—and Won,” The Nation, May 8, 2020. “Underpaid and overworked long before the pandemic, workers demanded more personal protective equipment, more stringent safety protocols, and hazard pay.”
Nancy Kasten, “Gun Violence Increases in the US Amid COVID-19 Shutdown,” Truthout, May 8, 2020. “Since shelter-in-place orders went into effect in March, the overall crime rate and the rate of injury from automobile and pedestrian accidents have both decreased in cities throughout the U.S. But death and injury resulting from violence and accidents involving firearms has actually increased.”
Corey Robin, “The Pandemic Is the Time to Resurrect the Public University,” The New Yorker, May 7, 2020. A discussion of the City University of New York and public universities in general in light of the issues posed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Adam Hayden, “The COVID-19 Pandemic Illustrates the Ableism That Pervades Our Society,” TruthOut, May 7, 2020. Based on personal experience, discusses the way that responses the pandemic have failed to recognize the disabled and advocates a different approach.
Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh interview Tedros Adhanom Ghegreyesus and Achal Prabhala, “Profiting from the Pandemic: Will Pharmaceutical Giants Use Patents to Limit Access to COVID Drugs?,” Democracy Now, May 7, 2020. Video and transcript. “As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide approaches 4 million and the pandemic could be with us for months or years, we look at who can access drugs like remdesivir, being developed by pharmaceutical giant Gilead, which has the patent for the drug and is poised to make massive profits. We look at how much drugs like remdesivir will cost, and who can access them.”
Ann Jones, “Testing Times, “A Journal of the Onset of the Plague Year,” TomDispatch, May 7, 2020. Compares the differences of the lockdown in Norway with lock down in Massachusetts, U.S.A based on personal experience.
John Clark, “Struggles in the Shadow of the Pandemic,” The Bullet, May 7, 2020. “As the lockdown causes so much hardship for so many, immediate struggles for survival that are shaped by clear anti-capitalist politics would be very much in line with the traditions and lessons of May Day. How can this be taken forward and what are the possible key sites of struggle?”
Miles Kampf-Lassin, “The U.S. Response to Covid-19 Has Lavished Wealth on the Rich,” In These Times, May 6, 2020. While the pandemic ravages American workers, the federal government has orchestrated a monumental transfer of wealth from the bottom of the economic ladder to the top.
Ashley Smith interview Gilbert Achcar, “Pandemic and Oil Crisis Could Make Second Arab Spring Return With a Vengeance,” Truthout, May 6, 2020. “As the world confronts a global economic crisis exacerbated by the current pandemic, what lessons can the U.S. left learn from those outside our borders?”
Steven Greenhouse, “‘Stop throwing us bare bones’: US union activism surges amid coronavirus,” The Guardian, May 6, 2020. “Activism spikes amid the pandemic nationwide as workers protest what they consider inadequate safety protections.”
Kevin Rudd, “The Coming Post-COVID Anarchy: The Pandemic Bodes Ill for Both American and Chinese Power—and for the Global Order,” Foreign Affairs, May 06, 2020. The coronavirus has led to new tensions between the United States and China and threatens to disrupt existing international relations.
Joan Benach, “The Pandemic Kills the Poor: Inequality Will Kill Them Even More,” The Bullet, May 6, 2020. “The coronavirus pandemic is killing the poorest due to inequality. In turn, the poverty and inequality created by the economic crisis will kill even more. The coronavirus forces us to create radical social change.”
Sam Gindin, “Conversion as Strategy: From GM to Workplace Plans,” The Bullet, Mary 5, 2020. “What is now on the agenda is the potential for a much more comprehensive approach to industrial conversion in face of the environmental crisis. The threat to life of climate change, which has for the time being been pushed into the background by Covid-19, won’t be allayed by social distancing or fixed by a vaccine. Ecological strategies focusing on conversion will be particularly promising in terms of their potential to actively engage working people by offering them a response to economic restructuring that emphasizes retaining our productive capacity.”
No Author, “How covid-19 gave peace a chance, and nobody took it,” The Economist, May 5, 2020. “Ceasefires are breaking down as America and China bicker at the UN.”
Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interview Dr. Michelle Tom and Dr. Sriram Shamsunder, “Navajo Nation Suffers Third-Highest COVID-19 Infection Rate in U.S. with Limited Healthcare & Water,” May 5, 2020. Video and transcript. A Discussion of health conditions in the Navajo Nation.
Dennis Kosuth, “Countering the Calls to Reopen,” Rampant, May 5, 2020. “A Chicago nurse who took part in a counter-protest of a “Re-open Illinois” rally reports on the scene.”
Minday Isser, “Striking Bus Drivers Steer the Way to a Better World,” In These Times, May 5, 2020. Bus drivers in the Amalgamated Transit Union have organized job actions to insure safety for themselves and their passengers.
Ashley Smith, “Interview: Vermont State College Workers and Students Rebuff Shock Doctrine,” Labor Notes, May 4, 2020. Faculty and staff in Vermont organized to stop the closing of colleges and now fight for funding.
Roger Bybee, “Return of ‘The Jungle’: Risking Death to Maximize Profits,” The Progressive, May 4, 2020. “America’s food processing and meatpacking workers are in extreme danger of contracting Covid-19.”
Zoe Carpenter, “What We Know About the Covid-19 Race Gap,” The Nation, May 4, 2020. “The CDC is finally releasing more data that show just how unequal the toll of the pandemic is. But we can’t stop there.”
Eoin Higgins, “As World Joins Forces to Raise $8 Billion for Global Covid-19 Fund, US Contributes This Much: $0,” Common Dreams, May 4, 2020. “President Donald Trump’s brand of “America First” isolationism was on full display Monday as the U.S. declined to participate in a international pledge drive which raised more than $8 billion during its kick-event to create a global fund to develop and deploy diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines to fight the coronavirus pandemic.”
David Bacon, “Following Mexico’s Worker Strikes, the US Steps in to Keep Border Factories Open,” May 4, 2020. The U.S. government has pressured the Mexican government to keep U.S. owned factories working despite health dangers from Covid-19.
Mike Downham, “Older people will not be abandoned,” RS21, May 4, 2020. “Many older people feel abandoned by the UK Government’s scandalous response to Covid-19. The ridiculous confusion caused by the Health Secretary directly contradicting his own government’s advice and the ‘airbrushing’ of older people from government statistics on the virus are symptomatic.”
David, Quammen, “Why Weren’t We Ready for the Coronavirus?” The New Yorker, May 4, 2020. “The U.S. has fared worse than other countries not because it lacked information or funding but because it failed to learn the lessons of the last outbreaks.”
David McNally, “Coronavirus, Crisis and Class Struggle: 1,” New Politics, May 4, 2020. Argues that the coronavirus and the economic crisis are both disastrous, but also an confirmation of socialist politics.
Amy Davidson Sorkin, “The Rush to Reopen,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2020.“Statewide stay-at-home orders around the country are expiring, and the new measures are a hodgepodge, when what’s required is vigilance and cautious, calibrated plans.”
Mandy Smithberger, “Beware the Pentagon’s Pandemic Profiteers,” Tom Dispatch, May 3, 2020. “Hasn’t the Military-Industrial Complex Taken Enough of Our Money?”
Revolutionary Workers Party of Mexico (PRT), “Our lives are worth more than your profits,” No Borders, May 3, 2020. The PRT “issued this statement on May Day, explaining the public health, economic, and political landscape.”
Marjorie Cohn, “Israel’s New Government Is Exploiting Pandemic to Annex 30 Percent of West Bank,” Truthout, May 2, 2020. Agues that President Trump will likely support Israel’s annexation of territory of the West Bank.
Mike Gonzalez, “Coronavirus in Latin America,” RS21, May 2, 2020. “The conflict between those who wish to protect capital and those who wish to protect lives is unfolding across the world. Latin America is no exception.”
Samantha Agarwal, “This State in India Shows Us Why Fighting Covid-19 Requires Working-Class Power,” Truthout, May 2, 2020. Looks at Kerala, historically ruled by a Communist-led leftwing coalition and the participation of grassroots people in addressing the Covid-19 crisis.
Chris Brooks, “The Hammer and the Dance: Why Reopening Now Will Kill,” Labor Notes, May 1, 2020. Explain why it is a mistake to rush to reopening the economy and how it will endanger workers.
Shirin Ghaffary, “The May Day strike from Amazon, Instacart, and Target workers didn’t stop business. It was still a success,” Vox, May 1, 2020. “In the time of coronavirus, essential workers can hold effective protests even without huge attendance.”
Ashley Smith interviews Mark Meinster, “‘It’s Time to Engage in as Much Class Struggle as We Can’,” Jacobin, May 1, 2020. “The United Electrical workers’ union and the Democratic Socialists of America are teaming up to help nonunion workers organize during the coronavirus crisis. The goal: find workers who are already spoiling for a fight and help them win it.”

APRIL 2020

*Elie Mystal, “The Men Pushing to Open the Economy Clearly Don’t Need Child Care,” The Nation, April 30, 2020. “There’s no way to send people back to work without providing safe, affordable child care, but the men in charge don’t seem to care.”
*Dayna Long interviews Dr. Greg Gelembiuk, “Reopening Requires Science,” Red Madison, April 30, 2020. “Dr. Gelembiuk is a scientist in Madison and a member of the Community Response Team, which seeks to reduce police use of force and to establish more oversight and accountability over police. He was appointed to the Police Department Policy & Procedure Review Ad Hoc Committee in 2019.”
Zita Holbourne, “Coronavirus and its impact on Black communities,” RS21, April 30, 2020. “In the rising coronavirus death toll, black and brown people in the UK are represented in disproportionate numbers, due to not only discrimination and poverty, but because they make up a sizeable amount of the frontline workforce working without adequate PPE.”
Jaisal Noor: interviews Ryan Grim of the Intercept, “Dems’ Coronavirus Response Repeats Past Blunders,” The Real News, April 30, 2020. “Sanders is out of the race, but the fight over the future of the Democratic part continues, says Ryan Grim, author of We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.”
Robin Andersen, “A Pandemic Is Not a War,” FAIR, April 30, 2020. “The war metaphor positions the virus within an underlying set of cultural assumptions that are widely understood: War as a media frame is easily deployed because it’s so familiar. But the application of war metaphors only serves to mask what’s truly at stake.”
Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “The Fury of the Virus, the Folly of War,” April 30, 2020. Expresses support for United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ call for a global cease fire during the pandemic.
Franck Gaudichaud and Alex G, “Between the October revolt and Covid-19 in Chile,” No Borders, April 30, 2020. A discussion of what happened to social movements in Chile and France with the coming of the pandemic.
Red Madison, April 30, 2020. “Dr. Gelembiuk is a scientist in Madison. He is also a member of the Community Response Team, which seeks to reduce police use of force and to establish more oversight and accountability over police. He was appointed to the Police Department Policy & Procedure Review Ad Hoc Committee in 2019.”
Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Edward Wong and Adam Goldman, “Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs,” The New York Times, April 30, 2020. “Some analysts are worried that the pressure from senior officials could distort assessments about the coronavirus and be used as a weapon in an escalating battle with China.”
*Eric Gunn, “Covid-19 outbreaks highlight meatpacking plant conditions,” April 30, 2020. “Advocates decry Trump order to keep industry going, downplaying safety concerns.”
Harold Meyerson, Ruth Milkman, Nelson Lichtenstein, Mike Elk, David Weil, Lande Windham, Stephen Lerner, and Steven Greenhouse, “The Future of Labor in Post-Pandemic America: An American Prospect symposium,” American Prospect, April 29, 2020. “The Prospect asked seven labor historians, journalists, and strategists to give us their thoughts on how workers and their movements will fare in the months and years ahead, and their proposals for what workers’ movements should be doing—not just for their current members but, primarily, for the millions more non-members who’ve won the nation’s admiration and sympathy but still lack the power to significantly improve their lot.”
Mike Downham, “Act now or this will happen again,” RS21, April 29, 2020. “The avoidable devastation caused by Covid-19 is teaching us crucial lessons about the struggle for climate justice, argues Mike Downham. Action now can save lives and prevent even worse catastrophes in the future.”
Dave Gibson, Laura Thompson, Clara Jeffery, James Wes, “Trump’s 100 Days of Deadly Coronavirus Denial,” Mother Jones, “April 29, 2020. What the next few months will bring is unclear, but a look back at the first 100 days of America’s coronavirus crisis clearly shows the consequences of the president’s lack of preparation, seriousness, and empathy.
Dayton Martindale, “A Federal Jobs Program for Contact Tracing,” In These Times, April 29, 2020. “To safely reopen the economy, we need a public health corps. Here’s how to build it.”
C.J. Polychroniou interviews Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky: COVID-19 Has Exposed the US Under Trump as a ‘Failed State’,” Truthout, April 29, 2020. “The label “failed state” has started to fit the U.S. like a glove as the COVID-19 national health crisis continues to reveal the structural flaws and weaknesses of the United States, argues world–renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky.”
Ed Wong, “Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing, The Atlantic, April 29, 2020. “A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.”
Ashley Smith interviews Eli Friedman, “Socialists Should Side With Workers — Not the Chinese or American Ruling Class,” Jacobin, April 29, 2020. Argues that in the coronavirus pandemic we should not be moved by either U.S. or Chinese propaganda but should support workers.
Dorothee Benz, “As Covid-19 Forces Emission Reductions, Media Offer Oil Industry Elegies,” FAIR, April 29, 2020. “If you’re looking for corporate media to celebrate the good news of the drop in demand for oil, you will be disappointed.”
*Nouriel Roubini, “The Coming Greater Depression of the 2020s,” Project Syndicate, April 28, 2020. “While there is never a good time for a pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis has arrived at a particularly bad moment for the global economy. The world has long been drifting into a perfect storm of financial, political, socioeconomic, and environmental risks, all of which are now growing even more acute.”
Sean Petty, “Organizing COVID-19 Action Teams in New York Hospitals,” Labor Notes, April 28, 2020. Explains how some NYSNA nurses “formed Contract Action Teams that recruited member-leaders in every hospital unit to distribute information, organize discussions, and mobilize for actions.”
Mike Elk, “Defying Trump’s Order , Nebraska Meatpackers Strike – PA National Guard Replaces Striking Nurses – Richmond Threatens to Fire Striking Bus Drivers,” Payday Report, April 28, 2020. An account of various strikes and threatened strikes.
*Tiffany Cabán, “This Crisis Demands an End to Mass Incarceration,” The Nation, April 28, 2020. “Prosecutors are in a unique position to flatten the curve.”
Justin Akers Chacón, “Beyond the Migra-State, Beyond Bordred Capitalism,” Spectre, April 28, 2020. “The Only Way Out of the Crisis Is to Fight for Open Borders.”
John Kirk, “Cuba’s Unique Model of Medical Internationalism,” The Bullet, April 28, 2020. Discusses the role of Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade in the coronavirus crisis and argues that Cuban doctors’ have economic motives as well as solidarity motives.
Michael Klare, “The Beginning of the End for Oil? Energy in a Post-Pandemic World,” Tom Dispatch, April 28, 2020.” So take a breath and, amid all the bad news pouring in about a deadly global pandemic, consider this: when it comes to energy, what was expected to take at least two decades in the IEA’s most optimistic scenario may now occur in just a few years.”
Maeve Higgins, “The Essential Workers America Treats as Disposable,” NYR Daily, April 27, 2020. Discusses the discrimination against undocumented immigrants in the pandemic and the difficulties they face.
Forrest Hylton, “Brazil’s Gravedigger-in-Chief,” London Review of Books, April 27, 2020. An indictment of Jair Bolsonaro for his mishandling of the coronavirus crisis in Brazil.
No author, ‘How Historical Trauma And Structural Inequality Help Spread COVID-19,” The Real News, April 27, 2020.. Video, no transcript. “Historical and generational trauma affect Black and other marginalized communities, and ongoing inequality is making the coronavirus pandemic worse among those groups.”
William Rivers Pitt, “Covid Deaths in US Will Soon Surpass Number of Americans Killed in Vietnam War,” Truthout, April 27, 2020. “It took five presidents — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford — and more than 20 years to amass that body count [58,000] overseas. Donald Trump needed just four months to knock on the door of that grim milestone right here at home…”
Jim Tankersley, “Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality,” The New York Times, April 27, 2020. “The coronavirus recession has exacerbated the racial and income divides in America. Lifting restrictions too soon will make them worse and leave workers with a bleak choice.”
Dan La Botz, “An Evil King Rules an Afflicted Land: Coronavirus and the Depression in America,” New Politics, April 26, 2020. The sense of governmental and business failure, still spreading with the virus across the country, must be having a significant impact on the American people’s consciousness, though it is still too early to know what this means for the future.”
Ella Koeze, Jugal K. Patel and Anjali Singhvi, “Where Americans Live Far From the Emergency Room,” The New York Times, April 26, 2020. “As the coronavirus outbreak spreads into rural parts of the United States, more people who live far from a hospital are increasingly likely to need one….even a relatively small outbreak there could overwhelm medical resources, with potentially grim consequences for public health.”
Dilip Hiro, “The World Leadership Trophy: The Winner’s Prize in the Virus-Killer Race,” Tom Dispatch, April 26, 2020. “Dilip Hiro is back with a pandemic chronology, as he says, “from hell,” one that is also distinctly a chronology of American decline. When this decline is over, who knows what kind of planet we’ll find ourselves on?”
Mike Ludwig, “Despite Covid-19, Trump Keeps on Gutting Protections for Workers,” Truthout, April 25, 2020. Documents the Trump administrations weakening of many workers protections.
Nina Eichacker, “Economic Reporting on Hardships of Pandemic Should Explore Market Failures,” FAIR, April 25, 2020. “While we may allow for some progress in overall reporting on the social and economic needs in responding to an unprecedented medical, social and economic challenge, editorial boards and journalists for these and other publications should frame economic and public health problems in more structural and systemic terms going forward as they consider the scope of the pandemic.”
Morris Pearl, “Democrats Are Insulting American People by Repeatedly Saying ‘Next Time’ on Real Covid-19 Relief,” Common Dreams, April 24, 2020. “The challenges that millions of Americans are facing right now are real, life-threatening, and demand immediate, far-reaching action by our elected officials. It shouldn’t be too much to ask that they act like it.”
David Harvey, “We Need a Collective Response to the Collective Dilemma of Coronavirus,” Jacobin, April 24, 2020. “The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for us to think again about Marx’s idea of human freedom. As David Harvey writes in Jacobin, emergency steps to get through the crisis also show us how we could build a different society that’s not beholden to capital.”
Bill Resnick interviews Michael Friedman, “Covid-19 and Capitalism: the science and the social/economic context,” Solidarity, April 24, 2020. Discusses the climatic and environmental origins of the coronavirus and its development as well as the health issues and responses.
Jesse Drucker, “The Tax-Break Bonanza Inside the Economic Rescue Package,” The New York Times, April 24, 2020. “As small businesses and individuals struggle to obtain federal aid, the wealthiest are poised to reap tens of billions of dollars in tax savings.”
Dudley Paul, “Teachers’ Unions and Covid-19: Time to Step Up,” The Bullet, April 24, 2020. A discussion of the role that some U.S. and Canadian unions are laying in responding to the coronavirus crisis.
Khaled Abdul Rahman, “The political instrumentalization of the Covid-19 crisis in Egypt,” Open Borders, April 24, 2020. “As of April 24, Egypt is reporting 3,659 coronavirus infections and 276 Covid-19 deaths. However, as this article shows, the government’s use of the crisis for its own political purposes casts doubt on the veracity of these figures.”
Elizabeth May, “Hospital Workers Like Me Are Waging a War Against Coronavirus. Where Is Our GI Bill?” The Intercept, April 23, 2020. Suggests that hospital workers, veterans of the war on Covid-19, should receiving something like a GI Bill to help with education and housing.
Amy Krosch, “The Pandemic Could Lead to More Discrimination against Black People,” Scientific American, April 23, 2020. “African-Americans are already afflicted disproportionately by COVID-19, but economic collapse could make things even worse for them.”
Vladimir Safatle, “Get ready for war in Brazil,” No Borders, April 23, 2020. “As of April 23, Brazil is reporting 46,182 confirmed coronavirus cases and 2,924 Covid-19 deaths. No believes the numbers because there is little testing and sources estimate the real toll is at least twice as high and growing fast.”
No author, “Global unions call for recognition of COVID-19 as an occupational disease,” IndustriALL, April 23, 2020. “On the occasion of International Workers Memorial Day 2020, the global trade union movement is calling upon governments and occupational health and safety bodies around the world to recognise SARS-CoV-2 as an occupational hazard, and COVID-19 as an occupational disease.”
No Author, “Tunisian unions sign agreement over salaries in time of pandemic,” IndustriALL, April 23, 2020. “In a bid to support workers amid the Coronavirus pandemic, the Tunisian General Labour Union, UGTT, which shares affiliates with IndustriALL Global Union, signed an important agreement on 14 April with the employers’ organization UTICA and the ministry of social affairs to ensure that private sector workers get their full salaries for April.”
Sophie Pinkham, “The Challenge of Treating 2 Epidemics at Once,” The Nation, April 23, 2020. “As overdose deaths climb, advocates and activists fear the opioid crisis will run headlong into the Covid-19 crisis.”
Various activists, “Black Lives Matter and COVID-19: An Activist Roundtabl e,” Rampant, April 23, 2020. “Antiracist activists and organizers from around the country describe what Black Lives Matter means in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Danny Katch, “Their Money or Your Life,” Haymarket Books, April 23, 2020. A general discussion of the current situation concluding that we need a revolution.
Udi Ofer and Lucia Tian, “New Model Shows Reducing Jail Population will Lower COVID-19 Death Toll for All of Us,” ACLU News and Commentary, April 22, 2020.T”he ACLU partnered with epidemiologists, mathematicians and statisticians to create a first-of-its-kind epidemiological model that shows that as many as 200,000 people could die from COVID-19 — double the government estimate — if we continue to ignore incarcerated people in our public health response.”
Abdi Latif Dahir, “‘Instead of Coronavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us.’ A Global Food Crisis Looms,” The New York Times, April 22, 2020. “The world has never faced a hunger emergency like this, experts say. It could double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million by the end of this year.”
Igor Derysh, “Banks face lawsuits after publicly traded corporations get $300M in coronavirus small business aid,” Salon, April 22, 2020. “Multiple class-action lawsuits allege big banks “prioritized corporate greed” by putting big firms first in line.”
Mike Davis, “Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell,” Labor Notes, April 22, 2020. “…the threat ahead is mass immiseration and hunger on a scale unseen since 1933.”
Marc Steiner interviews Professor Bill Black, “The Second COVID-19 Bailout Still Won’t Be Enough,” The Real News, April 22 2020. “Trump demands that states take the lead on COVID-19 response but won’t give federal support for local governments or workers, and is still fighting oversight for the trillions already spent on stimulus.”
Yves Smith, “The Coronavirus New Normal Has Only Started To Arrive,” Naked Capitalism, April 22, 2020. A discussion of various health and economic aspects of the current crisis.
Steve Downs, “Viewpoint: How to Save Transit Workers’ Lives,” Labor Notes, April 21, 2020. Criticizes past and current policies and makes recommendations.
Jin Wu, Allison McCann, Josh Katz and Elian Peltier, “28,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis,” The New York Times, April 22, 2020. “…the total death numbers offer a more complete portrait of the pandemic, experts say, especially because most countries report only those Covid-19 deaths that occur in hospitals.?
David Miranda, Fernanda Melchionna, and Sâmia Bomfim, “Brazil fights multiple pandemics,” No Borders, April 21, 2020. “The most recent and dramatic one is that of COVID-19. But the impact of the virus is exacerbated by epidemics of political authoritarianism, social inequality and violence, including gender violence, that punish the country, as an example of what occurs around the world.”
Elie Mystal, “These People Aren’t Freedom Fighters—They’re Virus-Spreading Sociopaths,” The Nation, April 21, 2020. The “liberate America” protesters claim they just want to make their own choices about their health and safety, but they really want to force others to risk their lives.
Jennifer Kahn, “How Scientists Could Stop the Next Pandemic Before It Starts,” The New York Times, April 21, 2020. “Researchers believe they could pre-emptively create vaccines and drugs to fight a wide range of viral threats — if they can get sufficient funding.”
Jaisal Noor, “Tea Party 2.0? Reopen Government Protests Linked To Right-Wing Donors,” The Real News, April 21, 2020. Video and text. “The ongoing protests endanger public health, but are supported by Trump and may be funded by right-wing donors.”
Liz Theoharis, “Inequality and the Coronavirus: Or How to Destroy American Society From the Top Down,” Tom Dispatch, April 21, 2020. “In order to respond to such a crisis and the growing needs of millions, it’s important to first acknowledge the deeper history of injustice and pain that brought us all here.”
Alessandra Mezzadri, “A crisis like no other: social reproduction and the regeneration of capitalist life during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Developing Economics, April 20, 2020. “As the COVID-19 health crisis deepens, it looks increasingly clear that the short-term collapse in global output is likely to exceed that of any recession in the last 150 years – that is, in the entire history of capitalism….We may still be mourning our dead, but time seems to have come to discuss how we guarantee economic survival that, under capitalism, is based on production and work”.
Pierre Tristam, “American Carnage: How Donald Trump Is Killing Us,” FlaglerLive, Apri 20, 2020. “ We are moving from a natural disaster to a man-made one, from statistically unavoidable deaths to deaths willed by indifference, ignorance, selfishness, and the political calculations of a single man.”
Vanessa A. Bee, “Would We Have Already Had a COVID-19 Vaccine Under Socialism?” In These Times, April 20, 2020. “Debunking the myth that capitalism drives innovation…. While capitalists insist innovation can only be driven by a profit motive, the advances made through public research tell a different story.
Jessy Ní Cheallaigh, “Ireland flattens the curve, but socialist policies needed,” No Borders, April 20, 2020. “Although the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar has received the lion’s share of international praise, health care workers, trade unions, social movements, and the socialist left have had to push every step of the way. “
Ken Barrios, “Empty the Prisons,” Rampant, April 20, 2020. “The pandemic has exposed the depth of racism embedded in US society. The Left should center the struggle against mass incarceration and #FreeThemAll as a strategic priority.”
Wardah Khalid, “Corporate News Coverage of the Pandemic Is Rife With Islamophobia,” Truthout, April 19, 2020. “Mainstream media outlets need to be held accountable for perpetuating Islamophobia amid a pandemic.”
Woo Seoc-Gyun, “How South Korea flattened the curve, and who pays the bill,” No Borders, April 19, 2020. Woo Seoc-Gyun M.D., MPH, a physician specializing in public health and economics and a researcher at the Center for Health and Social Change (CHSC), discusses the situation in South Korea.
David Wallace-Wells, “The White House Has Erected a Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE,” Intelligencer, April 19, 2020. “In a time of pandemic, having evacuated federal responsibility, the White House is functionally waging a war against state leadership and the initiative of local hospitals to secure what they need to provide sufficient treatment.”
G.N. Nithya, “Between the rock of the occupation, and the hammer of coronavirus,” The Bullet, April 19, 2020. “The Coronavirus and the Conditions of Palestinian Workers.”
Joe Evica, “Organizing for Real Safety and Security during ‘Safer at Home’,” Red Madison, April 19, 2020. “Besides practicing social distancing measures and adequate access to PPE, we must be collectively advocating for paid sick leave in the event anyone is our family gets sick, hazard pay for employees working with direct contact to the public, and additional flexibility and time off for families with children who are required to stay home as a result of the closure of schools and daycares.”
Jordan Humphreys, “‘Conventional capitalism is dying’: COVID-19, recession and the return of the state,” Marxist Left Review, Summer 2020 [became available mid-April, 2020. “The state isn’t going to retreat back into its corner once the initial shock has stabilised. As the economic historian Adam Tooze has put it, ‘the normal economy is never coming back.’.”
Shashikant Tripathi, “Capital’s dilemma: the conundrum of neoliberalism and Covid-19,” Counterfire, April 18, 2020. “Despite all the claims made by neoliberals, inequality, poverty, ecological and health crisis are the main concerns of the society even today. Most of it is a byproduct of cut throat competition, uncontrolled anthropocene activities and the animal spirit of capitalism.”
Victoria Law, “As Coronavirus Spreads Through Prisons, States Are Failing Incarcerated People,” Truthout, April 18, 2020. “As the numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases climb inside the nation’s jails and prisons, incarcerated people and their family members fear for their lives. “
Ari Paul, “Covid-19 Speculation Goes From Margin to Center,” FAIR, April 17, 2000. “The fact that President Donald Trump attacked the official US state broadcasting outlet, Voice of America, as an organ of Chinese government propaganda (NPR, 4/10/20) is a testament to just how important anti-China rhetoric is to his political strategy in regards to the Covid-19 pandemic.”
*Karen Spring and Judy Ancel, “Corona Capitalism in Honduras,” Labor Notes, April 17, 2020. In Honduras companies such as Hanes, Gildan, and Fruit of the Loom and auto parts maker Empire Electronics have announced a two to four month shutdown and the government is failing to help workers.
Andrew Tillett-Saks, “‘All Union Members Are Hereby Fired’,” Labor Notes, April 17, 2020. Citing a decrease in orders because of Covid-19, Myan Mode garment factory in Yangon, Myanmar fired union workers but kept non-union workers and continued to run the plant.
John Feffer, “We’ve Reached Peak Trumpian Dystopia,” The Nation, April 17, 2020. “Can America survive Trump and the coronavirus?”
Editorial, “Bolsonaro fires Health Minister, genocidal plan targets Afro-Brazilians,” Esquerda Online, April 17, 2020. “Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s dismissal of Minister of Health Luiz Mandetta represents a hardening of the government’s deadly policy.”
Hannah Gais, “Hate Groups and Racist Pundits Spew Covid-19 Misinformation on social Media Despire Companies’ Pledges to Combat It,” Southern Poverty Law Center, April 17, 2020. “Hate groups and racist pundits have pushed misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube throughout the crisis, despite companies pledging to fight fake news about the virus.”
Alfredo Saad-Filho, “Coronavirus, Crisis, and the End of Neoliberalism,” The Bullet, April 17, 2020. “Neoliberal capitalism has been exposed for its inhumanity and criminality, and COVID-19 has shown that there can be no health policy without solidarity, industrial policy and state capacity.”
Michael Grabell, Bernice Yeung and Maryam Jameel, “Millions of Essential Workers Are Being Left Out of COVID-19 Workplace Safety Protections, Thanks to OSHA,” ProPublica, April 16, 2020. “Even as the federal worker-safety agency has been inundated with complaints, it has rolled back safety standards and virtually eliminated non-health care workplaces from government protection.”
Patricia Cohen, “Straggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis,” The New York Times, April 16, 2020. “The coronavirus pandemic has shown how close to the edge many Americans were living, with pay and benefits eroding even as corporate profits surged.”
Tamara Pearson, “The Self-Centered Rich Country Response to Pandemics and Crises Is Wrecking Poor Countries,” Common Dreams, April 16, 2020. “Along with measures like rent freezes and guaranteeing workers’ rights, really addressing a global pandemic involves public health planning that cross borders and confronting global inequality and the climate crisis.”
Labor Notes Staff, “Nurses Across the U.S. Protest Dangerous Conditions and For-Profit Health Care,” Labor Notes, April 16, 2020. “Nurse union activists organized actions at hospitals across the country yesterday, a national day of action to draw attention to how the U.S.’s profit-driven health care system is failing workers and patients alike.”
Janine Jackson interviews Mike Elk, “‘This Many Strikes Says That Something Fundamentally Is Changing in the Country’” FAIR, April 16, 2020. “Janine Jackson interviewed Payday Report’s Mike Elk about frontline labor action for the April 10, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.”
Hina Tai, “A Covid-19 Vaccine Will Not Be Enough — We Need a Plan to Distribute It,” Truthout, April 16, 2020. “…historically, the greatest challenge is what comes after we have a vaccine — navigating a broad spectrum of sociopolitical and economic barriers to immunization that often result in unequal vaccine access and global health disparities.”
Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh interview Arundhati Roy, “Pandemic Is a Portal: Arundhati Roy on COVID-19 in India, Imagining Another World & Fighting for It,” Democracy Now, April 16, 2020. Text and video. “Officials in India say six major cities are coronavirus hot spots, including the capital city, New Delhi. We go there to speak with writer and activist Arundhati Roy, who has a new essay on how “The Pandemic Is a Portal.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The Black Plague,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2020. “Public officials lament the way that the coronavirus is engulfing black communities. The question is, what are they prepared to do about it?”
Eric Toussaint, “Suspend public debt payments to fight Covid-19,” No Borders, April 16, 2020. “Significant amounts of financial resources must be made available urgently, incurring new debts as little as possible.”
Zach Montague, “Coronavirus Cases at D.C. Whole Foods Highlight Risks Facing Grocery Workers,” New York Times, April 15, 2020. “A cluster of infections at the store in the heart of trendy downtown Washington is not an isolated episode, as the nation’s grocery workers increasingly fall ill.”
Tre Kwon, “Only the Rank and File Can Save Us Now,” Spectre, April 15, 2020. I’m a nurse working in the ICU at one of the largest, highest-grossing healthcare systems in New York City. There, I’m a shop steward and member of the New York State Nurses’ Association (NYSNA). I’m also a revolutionary socialist and part of the Left Voice editorial board.
Sasha Abramsky, “Trump’s Defunding of the WHO Threatens to Make the Pandemic Worse,” Truthout, April 15, 2020. “Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will withhold all its contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO) is an unforgivable abnegation of U.S. responsibility at the very moment when a coordinated international public health response is most needed.”
Alice Speri, “As Coronavirus Ravages New York, the NYPD Is Detaining Kids,” The Intercept, April 15, 2020. “Many have questioned the logic and safety of police continuing to execute low-level arrests and physically escalating intervention” during the pandemic.
Liliana Segura, “As Virus Spreads in Federal Prisons, People Inside Describe Chaos, While Families are Left in the Dark,” The Intercept, April 15, 2020. “As the coronavirus outbreak has spread inside the nation’s prisons and jails, people inside and outside BOP facilities describe a system mired in chaos. Families are scared and mostly in the dark.”
Joshua Cho, “Pandemic Doesn’t Stop Corporate Media From Crusading Against Universal Healthcare,” FAIR, April 15, 2020. Discusses the prejudice against universal healthcare in the corporate media.
Jeremy Mohler, “Corporations Are Not Letting This Crisis Go to Waste,” In These Times, April 15, 2020. “As the pandemic wreaks chaos, corporations and the GOP are following the shock doctrine playbook.”
Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa (GRILA), “Africa Amid the Pandemic,” John Riddell blog, April 15, 2020. Authors urge Pan-Africanists to embark on required initiatives beyond solely meeting medical objectives and into systemic change for broader public health and wellbeing of African populations.”
Jessica Corbett, “‘Biggest Coronavirus Stimulus of All’: Richest Man in the World Jeff Bezos Now $24 Billion Richer Amid Pandemic,” Common Dreams, April 15, 2020. “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world’s richest man—has added nearly $24 billion to his already massive fortune in 2020 as virus-related lockdowns across the globe have forced people to stay inside and fueled increased e-commerce demand.”
Diane Archer, “Why Can’t Everyone Get Free COVID-19 Treatment?” The Bullet, April 15, 2020. ”Tens of millions of other Americans continue to face powerful financial barriers to care. Our corporate healthcare system is not designed to ensure everyone gets needed care, much less to protect the public health.”
Steve LeVine, “America Is About to Witness the Biggest Labor Movement It’s Seen in Decades,” Medium, April 15, 2020. “It took 40 years and a pandemic to stir up a worker revolution that’s about to hit corporate America.
Bilal Hussain, “Fighting Covid-19 — And Repression — in Kashmir,” Foreign Policy in Focus, April 14, 2020. “The Indian government’s repression of doctors and restrictions on the Internet could make the pandemic far deadlier in the formerly autonomous region.”
Mobashra Tazamal and Kristin Garrity, “Islamophobia Has No Place in the Fight Against Covid-19,” Truthout, April 14, 2020. “We must reject both overt and subtle messaging linking COVID-19 to Islam.”
Eddie Conway interviews Priscilla Wald, “Mainstream Media Blind Spots In The Coronavirus Crisis,” The Real News, April 14, 2020. “The mainstream media let Trump’s blunders dominate the COVID-19 narrative, neglecting their chance for a nuanced look at public health, incarceration, farmers, and homelessness.”
Jake Johnson, “‘A Complete Abomination’: Mega-Rich Hedge Funds Swoop Down to Grab Covid-19 Small Business Relief Funds,” Common Dreams, April 14, 2020. Some hedge funds “insist they are small businesses—just like hair salons, restaurants, and dry cleaners—that could use a helping hand,” Bloomberg reported.
The Editors of Strike Wave, “The Covid-19 pandemic shows that capitalism fails workers,” Strike Wave, April 14, 2020. Criticizes labor leaders for their praise of “ethical capitalism” over “vulture capitalism.” Argues capitalism is not good for workers.
Ibram .X. Kendi, “Stop Blaming Black People for Dying of the Coronavirus,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2020. “New data from 29 states confirm the extent of the racial disparities.”
Vale Disamistade, “No, Italy Is Not the Case Against Medicare for All,” The Nation, April 14, 2020. “The Americanization of Italian health care plays a part in the country’s disastrous coronavirus outbreak.”
William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalist Crisis: Deadlier than Coronavirus” (Part I), Arena, April 14, 2020. “If there’s one thing the coronavirus has made clear it is that, if we are to have any hope of resolving the dire problems that plague humanity, from ecological collapse, to war, poverty, inequality and disease, we have to collectively confront across borders the powers that be in the world capitalist system and their control over the means of our existence.”
Natalie Gallón, “Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega hasn’t been seen in a month,” CNN, April 14, 2020. President Ortega hasn’t been seen in a month and the country has not followed international health guidance for the coronavirus.
Amanda Taub, “A New Covid-19 Crisis: Domestic Abuse Rises Worldwide,” The New York Times, April 14, 2020. “Movement restrictions aimed to stop the spread of the coronavirus may be making violence in homes more frequent, more severe and more dangerous.”
Morris Pearl and William Lazonick, “With working Americans’ survival at stake, the US is bailing out the richest,” the Guardian, April 14, 2020. “Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives who, while enriching themselves, spent the past decade pushing business corporations to the edge of insolvency.”
Action Program for Nigeria, “How will the poor survive Covid-19?” No Borders, April 14, 2020. “The response from the corrupt elite is for a lockdown until the virus goes away, but it could be 12-18 months before a vaccine is developed and distributed. Who can survive at home for that long?”
Laura Spinney, “We Need to Rethink Our Food System to Prevent the Next Pandemic,” Time, April 13. Argues necessity of changing agriculture prevent generation of new pandemics.
Amba Guerguerian and Carrie Klein, “Finding Creative Ways to Protest During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” The Indypendent, April 13, 2020. “Even amid the coronavirus pandemic, people around the world are finding ways to keep fighting for the causes that matter to them.”
Khury Petersen-Smith, “How Wars, Sanctions, and Militarism Made the Coronavirus Crisis Worse,” Common Dreams, April 13, 2020. “As we take steps to control the virus, these devastating U.S. foreign policies need to be immediately reversed.”
Sharon Zhang, “Trump’s EPA Is Unleashing the Pollution That Makes Us Vulnerable to Covid-19,” Truthout, April 13, 2020. “Exposure to air pollution increases the risk that an individual will suffer critical illness after contracting Covid-19, according to a report released on April 8 by researchers at Harvard….Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to indefinitely suspend environmental rule enforcement is tantamount to gross negligence.”
Corey Robin, “What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy,” The New York Review Daily, April 13, 2020. “…if we cannot gather to assemble or vote, much less deliberate, in what sense can we have a democracy? How do we do politics in a pandemic, self-governance under quarantine? Is it possible to supervise the supervisors if we’re too sequestered—or sick—to vote?”
Reihana Mohideen, “Socialism v. corona-capitalism in the Philippines,” No Borders, April 13, 2020. “Reihana Mohideen, international spokesperson for the Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM) in the Philippines explains that “Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, a right-wing populist in the mold of Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, was initially slow to respond to the health crisis. As the threat grew, Duterte intensified draconian military and police measures to enforce a lockdown that relies more on martial law than public health.”
Julie Hollar, “There’s No Reason to Turn Airtime Over to Trump’s Deceptive Coronavirus Campaign Rallies,” FAIR, April 13, 2020. “Despite weeks of open discussion about Donald Trump’s daily briefings serving as little more than campaign rallies full of harmful misinformation,, television networks continue to broadcast them live (now with some cut-aways and fact checking), and some reporters continue to cover the tension as just another partisan battle with no clear right or wrong.”
Michael Roberts, “The post-pandemic slump,” Michael Roberts Blog, April 13, 2020.“The coronavirus pandemic marks the end of longest US economic expansion on record, and it will feature sharpest economic contraction since WWII.”
Chris Brooks interviews Noam Chomasky, “Interview: Noam Chomsky on How Bosses Are Making Coronavirus ‘Worse, for Their Benefit’,” Labor Notes, April 13, 2020. Chomsky talks about the crisis and how to get out of it.
Dimitris Fasfalis, “Marx in the Era of Pandemic Capitalism,” The Bullet, April 13, 2020. “How could Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) help us interpret the current crisis? His theory of history offers critical resources to interpret the unprecedented crisis which is shaking the world today, while indicating at the same time that ‘the world after’ so much mentioned could only be anti-capitalist.”
Richard Marcantonio, “Two Ways Out of the Pandemic,” The Call, April 12, 2020. A discussion of the pandemic, the economic crisis, politics, and the role of labor, arguing that the active sectors of the working class could put the capitalist class on the defensive.
Jasmine Heiss and Jack Norton, “Prioritizing Jails Over Hospitals Has Made Rural US More Vulnerable to Covid-19,” Truthout, April 12, 2020. “Rather than hospitals or health clinics, much of the rural U.S. is dotted with jails and prisons; places where vulnerable people live in inescapably close proximity, and the novel coronavirus can be a death sentence.”
Charles Bethea, “The Federalist as ‘Medical Journal’ in the Time of the Coronavirus,” The New Yorker, April 12, 2020. “Lately, the Federalist, a conservative online magazine not known for its medical coverage, has been publishing pseudoscientific coronavirus takes by writers not known for their epidemiological expertise.”
Jason DeParle, “The Coronavirus Class Divide: Space and Privacy,” The New York Times, April 12, 2020. “‘Shelter in place’ is a dictate that assumes the existence of shelter — the safe, stable, controlled environment that poor people often lack.”
Dan La Botz, “In the Tempest of Coronavirus: Racism and Class Struggle,” April 12, 2020. The state of the coronavirus crisis in the United States as of April 12.
Brian Mier, “Bolsonaro Is Far From Alone in Putting Profits Over Lives—but He Is a Useful Scapegoat,” FAIR, April 12, 2020. “While it is true that [Jair Bolsonaro] is a controversial and widely disliked leader, who well deserves to be called out for all kinds of terrible things he has said and done does his initial reaction to and handling of the coronavirus crisis really differ in any significant measure from what US and UK leaders, and their media sycophants, have been saying and doing?”
Rajan Menon, “The Ultimate Stress Test: The American World That Covid-19 Reveals,” Tom Dispatch, April 12, 2020. “Now, like several other countries, notably Italy and Spain, the United States faces a different, far tougher stress test imposed by Covid-19. The early results are alarming.”
Jack Healey, “It’s ‘People, People, People’ as Lines Stretch Across America,” New York Times, April 12, 2020. Lines for groceries, food aid, and unemployment assistance stretch for blocks as the coronavirus crisis forces Americans into quarantine queues.”
Andrés Lund, “Capitalism stripped naked, Covid-19 in Mexico and beyond,” No Borders,April 11, 2020. “Left-of-center populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was slow to react to the pandemic and his government’s economic response is far short of what is needed to protect millions of Mexican workers now losing their jobs.”
Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes, “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus,” The New York Times, April 11, 2020.
AFP, “Africans in Guangzhou lose homes in virus crackdown,” Rthk.rk, April 11, 2020. “Africans in Guangzhou say they have become targets of suspicion and subjected to forced evictions, arbitrary quarantines and mass coronavirus testing as the country steps up its fight against imported infections.”
Jim Naureckas, “The Most Important Thing Media Can Tell Us Is How We’re Getting Infected,” FAIR, April 11, “The main way to save lives, and the best hope for stopping the outbreak, is for individuals to change their behavior so we stop spreading the virus.”
*Danny Katch, “New York Officials Caused More Deaths to Maintain the ‘Illusion of Education’,” Truthout, April 10, 2020. Argues that the Department of Education’s decision to keep schools open contributed to the spread of coronavirus.
C.J. Polychroniou interviews Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, “To Heal From COVID-19, We Must Imagine a Different World,” Truthout, April 10, 2020. “Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin tackle the questions of what lessons we can learn from this pandemic and how society may organize moving forward.”Sam Gindin, “The Coronavirus and the Crisis This Time,” The Bullet, April 10, 2020. All this opens up the prospect – but only the prospect – of a reorientation in social outlooks as the crisis, and the state responses to it, unfold.
Nancy Lessin, “Saving Workers’ Health and Lives in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Tools for the Fight,” Labor Notes, April 10, 2020. “We lay out some of your legal rights—so you can make sure your employer knows that you know. We lay out the most effective ways of protecting workers—and it’s way beyond facemasks. Finally, we give some tips on how to organize.”
Julia Malaoui interviews Olivier Besancenot, “France after the pandemic, the iron fist or reinvent society?” No Borders, April 10, 2020. Besancenot of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) argues for a “shock of solidarity.
Andrew Liu, “Blaming China for coronavirus isn’t just dangerous. It misses the point,” The Guardian, April 10, 2020. “This pandemic is a creature of capitalist globalisation, not any single country. ‘Chinese culture’ is a convenient scapegoat.”
Ed Pilkington and Ankita Rao, “A tale of two New Yorks: pandemic lays bare a city’s shocking inequities,” The Guardian, April 10, 2020. New York is two cities, one that can stay home in safety, the other that must go to work in essential jobs here it is exposed to illness and death.
Carl Rosen, Andrew Dinkelaker, Gene Elk, “We Need the Labor Movement To Organize Worker Fightback in the Face of the Covid-19 Crisis,” In These Times, April 10, 2020. “Unions have a choice right now: Hunker down and try to ride out the Covid-19 storm or put our shoulders to the task of assisting workers in their fight to either improve conditions on the job or shut their workplaces down.”
Peter S. Goodman, Katie Thomas, Sui-Lee Wee and Jeffrey Gettleman, “A New Front for Nationalism: The Global Battle Against a Virus,” New York Times, April 10, 2020. “Every country needs the same lifesaving tools. But a zero-sum mind-set among world leaders is jeopardizing access for all.”
Bernd Bonfert, “Organizing under lockdown: online activism, local solidarity,” April 9, 2020. “As the pandemic forces us into lockdown, activists across Europe demonstrate that there are still ways to organize and practice solidarity at a safe social distance.”
Chris Brooks, “Please Join: National Health Care Day of Action,” Labor Notes April 09. Labor Notes has called upon its readers and supporters to join unions in a National Health Care Day of Action on April 15.
Alejandra Borunda, “Farmworkers risk coronavirus infection to keep the U.S. fed,” National Geographic, April 10, 2020. “Farmworkers have been labeled essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, critical to keeping the U.S.’s food supplies flowing. But they are worried. Their communities are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of the disease, and for many of them, information and protection from the disease has not been forthcoming.”
James Bandler, “Inside the Union Where Coronavirus Put 98% of Members Out of Work,” ProPublica, April 9, 2020. “Unite Here was a rare union success story. But then the coronavirus decimated the restaurant, food service and hotel industries, where most of its 307,000 members work.”
Jane Bradley, “In Scramble for Coronavirus Supplies, Rich Countries Push Poor Aside,” The New York Times, April 9, 2020.“Developing nations in Latin America and Africa cannot find enough materials and equipment to test for coronavirus, partly because the United States and Europe are outspending them.”
Kim Moody, “How Just-in-Time Capitalism Spread Covid-19,” Spectre, April 8, 2020. “…this virus has moved through the circuits of capital and the humans that labor in them, and not solely by random “community” transmission.”
*David Bacon, “Iraq’s Coronavirus Crisis Was Made Possible by Decades of War and Occupation,” The Nation, April 8, 2020. “To fight the pandemic, Iraqi workers are demanding political change.”
Charles M. Blow, “Focus the Covid-19 Fight in Black Cities,” New York Times, April 8, 2020. “Let’s concentrate on where the need has been shown to be greatest.”
Gregory Shupak, “As US Consigns Iranians to Death, Corporate Media Look the Other Way,” FAIR, April 8, 2020. “Covid-19 has hammered few countries as hard as it has hit Iran, which reports (as of April 8) 64,586 cases and 3,993 deaths. US sanctions are a major reason that Iranians are getting infected with and dying from the coronavirus in such large numbers: The US’s economic warfare softened Iran up for the pandemic well before its outbreak.”
Aaron Lakoff, “Dispatches From Palestine on COVID-19,” The Bullet, April 8, 2020. “We don’t have the capacity or equipment to keep us safe from this virus. It will spread very easily, and we will start to see the numbers here that we’ve been seeing in Italy and Spain.”
Tim Stickings and Allisha Rouse, “Wonders Down Under: New Zealand Prime Minister declares the country is beating coronavirus and prepares to relax strict lockdown in a week as Australian measures squash curve as well,” Daily Mail, April 8, 2020. “Ardern said NZ is ‘turning a corner’ just six weeks into epidemic with only 992 confirmed cases and one death. Australia and New Zealand have both carried out much more widespread testing than Britain or the U.S.”
Henry A. Giroux, “The Covid-19 Pandemic Is Exposing the Plague of Neoliberalism,” Truthout, April 7, 2020, “The current coronavirus pandemic is more than a medical crisis, it is also a political and ideological crisis. It is a crisis deeply rooted in years of neglect by neoliberal governments that denied the importance of public health and the public good while defunding the institutions that made them possible.”
Karen J. Greenberg, “While Rome Burns Trump Gets What He’s Always Wanted,”
Tom Dispatch, April 7, 2020. “Here are six examples of how the coronavirus, like a malign magic wand, has helped cast a disempowering spell over that opposition and so furthered Trump’s long-term goals.”
Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, “What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms,” The Bullet, April 7, 2020. “Care of the sick is not the mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits for the private equity firms and its investors.”
Matt Loffman, “Asian Americans describe ‘gut punch’ of racist attacks during coronavirus pandemic,” PBS, April 7, 2020. The novel coronavirus pandemic has Americans across the country fearful for their personal health and well-being, but for Asian Americans, the virus has stirred up another threat: a wave of verbal and physical attacks.
John Eligon, Audra D. S. Burch, Dionne Searcey and Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times, “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States,” April 7, 2020. “Data on race and the coronavirus is too limited to draw sweeping conclusions, experts say, but disparate rates of sickness — and death — have emerged in some places.”
No author, “The world’s refugee camps are a coronavirus disaster in waiting,” The Economist, April 6, 2020. “Most are still free of the virus, but desperately ill-equipped to withstand it.”
Hamilton Nolan, “The Plan Is to Save Capital and Let the People Die,” In These Times, April 6, 2020. “Whether Americans know it or not, their government is not working for them. Their government is working on behalf of capital. Humans are now a mere second-order, instrumental factor to be considered based on how it affects capital.”
Hsiao-Hung Pai, “Covid-19: The ‘China’ narratives and Chinese workers.” RS21, April 6, 2020. The workers who built China’s emergency hospitals are missing from the dominant narratives about China and the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Ibram X. Kendi, “What the Racial Data Show” The Atlantic, April 6, 2020. “The pandemic seems to be hitting people of color the hardest.”
Michael Roberts, Lives or livelihoods? Michael Roberts Blog, April 6, 2020. An examination of the coronavirus response and its impact on the economy at present and possibilities for recovery.
Abha Bhattarai, “Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus” Washington Post, April 6, 2020. “At least four people – who had worked at Walmart, Trader Joe’s and Giant – have died from Covid-19 in recent days.”
Jake, Johnson, “‘We Are Undervalued’: Target Delivery Workers to Walk Off Job in Demand for Better Treatment Amid Outbreak,” Common Dreams, April 6, 2020.”We are exposing ourselves to great risk so others don’t have to. During these uncertain times, Shipt must not put profits before people.”
No author, “Covid-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map,” Payday Report, early April, updated regularly. “An interactive strike tracking map so that workers can follow the wave of strikes hitting the country. Each point contains a link to more information on the strikes occurring.”
Suze Wilson, “Three reasons why Jacinda Ardern’s coronavirus response has been a masterclass in crisis leadership,” The Conversation, April 5, 2020. A discussion of the leadership skills and style of New Zealand’s president who has led one of the most successful government responses to coronavirus.
Charles M. Blow, “Social Distancing is a Privilege,” New York Times, April 5, 2020. “The idea that this virus is an equal-opportunity killer must itself be killed.”
Nomi Prins, “Wall Street Wins – Again Bailouts in the Time of Coronavirus,” Tom Dipatch, April 5, 2020. “As in 2008, the most beneficial policies and funding will be heading for Wall Street banks and behemoth corporations.“
Rebecca L. Spang, “The Revolution Is Under Way Already,” April 5, 2020. “Far from making Americans crave stability, the pandemic underscores how everything is up for grabs.”
Eren Duzgun, “Capitalism, Coronavirus and the Road to Extinction,” The Bullet, April 5, 2020. “The Godzilla-like image of the virus Covid-19 has been haunting the world. Not only has the virus unraveled nightmarish possibilities leading to the extinction of millions of people, but it has also served as a quintessential case revealing the structural contradictions of and existential threats posed by capitalism on a global scale.”
Sarah Kliff and Julie Bosman, “Official Counts Understate the Coronavirus U.S. Death Toll,” The New York Times, April 5, 2020. “Inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision making has led to an underecouncting of people with the coronavirus who have died, health experts say.”
Feminist Alliance for Rights (FAR) and others, “Statement of Feminists and Women’s Rights Organizations from the Global South and marginalized communities in the Global North,” No Borders, April 5, 2020. The following statement has been endorsed by more than 1,200 individuals and women’s networks and organizations globally, from more than 100 countries, to demand States to adopt a feminist policy to address the extraordinary challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in a manner that is consistent with human rights standards and principles.”
Charles Beathea, “What the Coronavirus Is Doing to Rural Georgia,” The New Yorker, April 4, 2020. “The pandemic hits a region that was already struggling to address its medical needs.”
Marea Socialista, “Trump threatens Venezuela under cover of coronavirus,” No Borders, April 4, 2020. “Marea Socialista’s statement denouncing Trump’s latest threats and calling for international solidarity.”
Paul Mason, “Will coronavirus signal the end of capitalism?” Aljazeera, April 3, 2020.“The peasants’ revolt after the 14th-century plague saw off feudalism. After COVID-19, will it be the turn of capitalism?” Text and video.
Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020. “The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years….And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India…”
*Cooperation Jackson, “Towards a General Strike to end the Covid-19 Crisis and Create a New World: A Call to Action,” Spectre, April 3, 2020. “We must send a clear message that things cannot and will not go back to “normal.” In order to do this, we need to call for collective work and shopping stoppages, leading to a general strike that is centered around clear, comprehensive demands.”
Wilfred, Chan, The WHO Ignores Taiwan. The World Pays the Price, The Nation, April 3, 2020 “Taiwan was more prepared for the coronavirus than any other country, but the WHO puts politics first.”
Jeet Heer, “Trump Helps Big Business Profiteer Off Our Misery,” The Nation, April 3, 2020. “The White House’s Darwinian federalism gives corporate greed a pass while scapegoating political opponents.”
Sushant Singh and Utpal Pandey, “Lockdown crisis in India: a people’s perspective of Covid-19,” Counterfire, April 3, 2020. “With no access to state support, healthcare or testing, India’s working and poor people have been completely abandoned by the government during the lockdown.”
Jill Lepore, “America’s Century of Delayed Health-Care Reform,” The New Yorker, November 30, 2009, republished April 3, 2019. “The more time passes, the more it looks as if having no real health-care plan were the American way.”
No author, “Capitalism after Coronavirus: more like Humpty Dumpty than Sleeping Beauty?” The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher, April 3, 2020. “Capitalism is in an induced coma. When the crisis is over will a simple kiss awake it like Sleeping Beauty? Or will ‘all the king’s men’ be puzzling over ‘how to put Humpty together again’?”
Jane Slaughter, “How Auto Parts Workers Shut Their Plant,” Labor Notes, April 3, 2020. “Union members at a Detroit-area auto parts plant refused to work March 19 and 20 after learning that a management employee had tested positive for the coronavirus. Angry first-shift workers gathered outside the plant and refused to enter.”
Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, “Cities That Went All In on Social Distancing in 1918 Emerged Stronger for It,” New Yok Times, April 3, 2020. “They had lower mortality rates from the influenza pandemic. But their economies also appeared to fare better.”
Bernie Sanders, “Priorities for the Next Coronavirus Relief Package,” Sanders Campaign, April 3, 2020. “In this unprecedented moment in modern American history, it is imperative that we respond in an unprecedented way. That means that Congress must pass, in the very near future, the boldest piece of legislation ever written in modern history.”
Omar Shaban, “Gaza’s New Conflict: Covid-19,” Counterpunch, April 3, 2020. The current healthcare and sanitary system in the Gaza strip are extremely exhausted, lack basic resources, equipment and material that would be necessary not only to fight a major pandemic, but to simply treat normal day-to-day patients. A major outbreak of COVID-19 in the Gaza strip would lead to… a death toll higher than all previous military conflicts combined.”
Max Elbaum, “The People’s Bailout: New Center of Gravity for the Resistance,” Organizing Upgrade, April 3, 2020. Summary of a program of the Working Families Party that included the President of National Nurses United and organizers from Mijente, It Takes Roots, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and several other groups.
Thomas J. Adams and Cedric Johnson, “Austerity Is Fueling the COVID-19 Pandemic in New Orleans, Not Mardi Gras Culture,” Jacobin, April 2, 2020. “Mainstream outlets are claiming the mounting coronavirus crisis in New Orleans is the result of cultural practices like Mardi Gras. That’s nonsense — it’s a consequence of deep class divides and decimated public health infrastructure.”
Nicole Aschoff, “Pandemic Bonds Are a Scam Holding the Global South Hostage,” Jacobin, April 2, 2020.” The World Bank’s ‘pandemic bonds’ demonstrate how global capital has an uncanny ability to profit from social ills. So far, investors have earned about $96 million in interest on the pandemic bonds, but developing countries have yet to receive desperately needed money.”
Meagan Day, “Decades of Hospital Closures Led to This Disaster,” Jacobin, April 2, 2020. “The United States has been closing vitally needed hospitals for decades. Now, with a pandemic afoot and triage tents popping up in Central Park, we need to stop holding our hospital system hostage to the whims of the market.”
Elie Mystal, “Republicans Are Using the Covid-19 Crisis to Kill Abortion Rights,” The Nation, April 2, 2020. GOP governors have begun banning abortion during the Covid-19 crisis, creating a precedent that might be too cruel for conservative judges to pass up.”
Michael T. Klare, “Avenger Planet: Is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature’s Response to Human Transgression?” Tomgram, April 2, 2020. “The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up. The only way to avert such a catastrophe and assure ourselves that Earth will not become an avenger planet is to heed Mother Nature’s warning and cease the further desecration of essential ecosystems.”
Marc Kagan, “‘Essential’ Workers Are Dying,” Jurisprudence, April 2, 2020. “America’s underclass is becoming more visible in the coronavirus crisis.” Discusses death of eight New York City transit workers.
Vishwas Satgar, “Covid-19, the Climate Crisis and Lockdown,” The Bullet, April 2, 2020. “Complex and holistic systems thinking, grounded in an ethics of care rather than war has to prevail….if Covid-19 helps jettison the Thatcherite neoliberal subject – competitive, greedy and possessive individual – for a more humane state of being and solidarity-based society, it would have produced our strongest defense against a crisis-ridden world. It would have also affirmed an ethics of care for our natural relations that nurture us, feed us and enable us to have life.”
Frida Ghitis, “The New Divide in a Polarized Latin America: How to Respond to Covid-19,” World Politics Review, April 2, 2020. “In Latin America, the responses from national leaders have ranged from buffoonish irresponsibility to stern action. The region is a good place to try to identify what it is about a government that makes it act so recklessly in the face of a looming public health crisis.”
Candice Bernd, “Amid Pandemic, Workers Walk Out, Building Momentum Toward General Strike,” Truthout, April 2, 2020. Reviews recent worker protests and strikes and claims, “Calls for a new massive general strike are again surfacing as workers recognize the need to force corporations and state and federal governments to implement sweeping changes, including wealth redistribution and a guaranteed right to health care, housing and jobs.”
Sarah Jones, “The Coronavirus Is Radicalizing Workers,” New York, April 1, 2020. “Protests at Amazon, Instacart, and Whole Foods — where low-paid workers have found themselves on the frontlines of a global disaster — have created a public relations nightmare for the companies, who say they’re providing essential services to Americans stuck at home.”
“Ireland Vows To Treat All Covid-19 Patients For Free,” The Real News, April 1, 2020 “The Irish government nationalized its hospitals, imposed a rent freeze, and authorized state-funded childcare, promising free treatment for patients with Covid-19.” Kim Brown interviews Jack Hogan, reporter for the Irish Times.
Labor Notes staff, “Shut It All Down Now!” Labor Notes, April 01, 2020. “More unions are demanding that all non-essential workplaces be shut down, to slow the spread of the coronavirus.’
Farooque Chowdhury interviews John Bellamy Foster, “Catastrophe capitalism: climate change, Covid-19, and economic crisis,” MRonline, April 1,, 2020. Foster “discusses the pandemic in relation to the present condition of capitalism and economic crisis.”
Melissa Rakestraw, “Postal Workers and Covid-19: A Dispatch from the Front Lines,” Rampant, April 1, 2020. “A Chicago-area letter carrier discusses the situation on the ground in the midst of the pandemic. In spite of widespread failures on the part of management, postal workers are organizing to win safer conditions for themselves and the public they serve.”
Alexandra Berzon, Jacob Bunge, Alejandro Lazo, “U.S. Plant Workplaces Emerge as Coronavirus Battlegrounds,” Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2020. “Tensions are breaking out between employers and workers across the U.S. as some companies push to keep producing during the coronavirus pandemic and some employees push back over health concerns and other issues.”
Blake Farmer interviews James Hildreth, “The Coronavirus Doesn’t Discriminate. U.S. Health Care May Be A Different Story,” NPR, April 1, 2020. A 3-minute audio with text, including archived interview with Georges Benjamin, of CDC and then head of APHA, about importance of getting data on who is being affected by the disease.
Pat Armstrong, “Viruses and Care,” The Bullet, April 1, 2020. Looks at long-term care and labor issues in the context of neoliberalism and the privatization of health care that has taken place.
Valerio Arcary, “A revolutionary strategy to beat Bolsonaro,” No Borders, April 1, 2020. “Valerio Arcary argues for a revolutionary strategy that will not only push Bolsonaro out of power, but will also strengthen the left and the working class in the process.”
C.J. Polychroniou interviews Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky: Ventilator Shortage Exposes the Cruelty of Neoliberal Capitalism,” Truthout, April 1, 2020. In the interview Chomsky “discusses how neoliberal capitalism itself is behind the U.S.’s failed response to the pandemic.”
*Labor Notes staff, “A Worker Agenda Against Coronavirus,” Labor Notes, April 1, 2020. “This week and last, Labor Notes invited labor leaders and organizers to talk via Zoom about what we can do to organize during this pandemic. These are the beginning steps we came up with.”
Katie Ferrari, “Organizing without a Union During the Coronavirus / Organizándose sin sindicato durante el coronavirus,” Labor Notes, April 01, 2020. “Almost 200 people joined last night’s video call to hear from nonunion workers in agriculture, grocery, transit, and hair styling.” This article gives the summary of the conversation.

March 2020

Sonia Shah, “The microbes, the animals and us,” Le Monde diplomatique, March 2020. “The novel coronavirus came out of a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan. We don’t know its animal origin, but we do know that if we protect wildlife habitats, animal microbes are less likely to cross over into humans.
John Smith, “Why coronavirus could spark a capitalist supernova,” Open Democracy, March 31, 2020. “There is no magic money tree – the ‘rescue packages’ aim to rescue a rotten system, and won’t work.”
Adam Hanieh, “This is a Global Pandemic – Let’s Treat it as Such,” The Bullet, March 31, 2020. “One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public health systems across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19…”
Sasha Abramsky, “As the Covid-19 Crisis Deepens, Grassroots Organizers Take Action,” The Nation, March 31, 2020. “Progressive ideas on housing, health care access, wage subsidies, and more are entering the mainstream at a startling pace.”
Margaret Flowers, “The US’s Wave of Hospital Closures Left Us Ill-Equipped for Covid-19,” Truthout, March 31, 2020. Discusses the impact of putting profits before patients on health care and hospitals, asking where did all the hospitals go?
Todd Chretien, “‘What if?’ – Trump, Capitalism & Covid-19,” The Rebel, March 31, 2020. “In the first part of a two part series, Todd Chretien talks Trump, capitalism and Covid-19.”
Eamonn McCann, “The Connivance of Capitalists,” The Rebel, March 31, 2020. “Socialist ideas have been jeered and sneered at by the same establishment now faced with the consequences of their profit driven contempt. We should be done with those bellowing cheerleaders of capitalism, argues Eamonn McCann.”
Rebecca Gordon, “The Future May Be FemaleBut the Pandemic Is Patriarchal,” Tomgram, March 31, 2020. Looks back at earlier plans for May Day without women, turns to impact of corona virus on women suggesting they face many risks, and asks what will come after.
Sonia Shah, “How Trump Is Going to Get Away With a Pandemic,” The Nation, March 31, 2020. “There are lots of ways for the Trump administration to cook the data to hide the extent of the coronavirus outbreak—in fact, it already is doing so.”
Dan La Botz, “The Coronavirus Strikes and their Significance, So Far,” New Politics, March 31, 2020. “If wildcat strikes continue and grow they could propel new rank-and-file movements that rise to seize the leadership of the union and to turn them into fighting organizations of the working class.”
Peter C. Baker, “‘We can’t go back to normal’: how will coronavirus change the world?” The Guardian, March 31, 2020. “Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse.” A useful review of recent discussions.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2020. “The argument for resuming a viable social-welfare state is about not only attending to the immediate needs of tens of millions of people but also reëstablishing social connectivity, collective responsibility, and a sense of common purpose, if not common wealth.”
Ross Barken, “Cuomo Helped Get New York Into This Mess,” The Nation, March 30, 2020. “The governor’s position on health care spending looked starkly different a couple of months ago.”
Brazilian left parties, “Bolsonaro’s coronavirus denialism will cost lives” (text and video), No Borders, March 30, 2020. The left parties criticize the Brazilian president and threaten legal action.
Judith Butler, “Capitalism Has its Limits,” Verso, March 30 2020. Judith Butler discusses the COVID-19 pandemic, and its escalating political and social effects in America.
Kenya Evelyn, “Amazon workers walk out over lack of protective gear amid coronavirus,” The Guardian, March 30, 2020. Amazon workers walked out of a New York City facility on Monday, going on strike and demanding increased protective gear and hazard pay as they work through the coronavirus pandemic.
Isaac Chotiner interviews Richard A. Epstein, “The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2020. Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, wrote a paper titled ‘Coronavirus Perspective’ that down played the extent of the spread and the threat and influenced conservatives and President Trump.
Democratic Socialists of America, New York Chapter, “The People’s Bailout for New York: A Socialist Response to the COVID-19 Crisis,” NYC DSA website, no date but late March. Proposes urgent steps and long-term measures.
Vijay Prashad, Paola Estrada, Ana Maldonado and Zoe PC, “IMF Refuses Aid to Venezuela in the Midst of the Coronavirus Crisis,,” The Bullet, March 30, 2020. The IMF “policy to provide special assistance to countries should have been sufficient for the IMF to provide the assistance that the Venezuelan government had requested. But, very quickly, the Fund declined the request from Venezuela.”
Edgar Franks, “Fighting for justice while feeding the nation during a pandemic,” No Borders, March 29, 2020. “Puntorojo interviews Edgar Franks, Political Director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia…in Washington State. The majority of the members are Mixteco and Triqui people from Guerrero and Oaxaca, Mexico.”
Partido Revolucionario de los Trabjadores, “Declaración del PRT frente a la emergencia que representa la pandemia de Covid-19,” PRT website, March 28, 2020. Political statement that describes the coronavirus crisis, criticizes the Mexican government an its president, argues that workers and women should receive pay and support, and calls or a struggle against capitalism.
Laura Spinney, “Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus?” The Guardian, March 28, 2020. “Scientists are tracing the path of Sars-CoV-2 from a wild animal host – but we need to look at the part played in the outbreak by industrial food production.”
Robert Galbraith, “Cuomo Puts Private Equity Vulture in Charge of Coronavirus Economic Recovery, “Truthout, March 28, 2020. Cuomo’s former aides and appointees have deep ties to Wall Street: William Mulrow is a senior advisory director at the private equity giant Blackstone Group and Steven M. Cohen is chief administrative officer of MacAndrews & Forbes, the conglomerate owned by billionaire Cuomo donor Ronald Perelman.
Joan Benach, “The Official Story of the Coronavirus Hides a Systemic Crisis,” The Bullet, March 28, 2020. “…Covid-19 is not only a global health problem, but is also a problem with interconnected facets of an economic, ecological and social nature, making it a systemic and political problem on which it is necessary to reflect.”
Katie Halper, “Media Silent as Poll Workers Contract Covid-19 at Primaries That DNC, Biden Campaign Claimed Were Safe,” FAIR, March 28, 2020. “…one of our most urgent tasks is accurately informing the public about Covid-19 to counter his lies. Instead, the chair of the DNC and the Biden campaign decided to amplify Trump’s message that Covid-19 was no real impediment to public gatherings, and endangered millions of their own voters. And instead of reporting on this urgent story, the media have enabled this dangerous behavior.”
Michael D. Shear, Abby Goodnough, Sheila Kaplan, Sheri Fink, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland, “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19,” NYT, March 28, 2020. “Aggressive screening might have helped contain the coronavirus in the United States. But technical flaws, regulatory hurdles and lapses in leadership let it spread undetected for weeks.”
William Rivers Pitt, “Trump and His Allies Have Decided to Preserve Capitalism at Any Cost,” Truthout, March 28, 2020. Makes the case that conservative leaders and politicians put business before health.
Gregg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, “Claims that the cure is worse than the disease rely on a false tradeoff between human needs and the economy,” Boston Review, March 27, 2020. “Claims that the cure is worse than the disease rely on a false tradeoff between human needs and the economy.”
Mike Elk, “Memphis Teamsters Wildcat Strike at Kroger’s Crucial Southern Warehouse,” Payday Report, March 27, 2020. “Today, a group of mostly African-American workers, members of Teamsters Local 667, went on a wildcat strike at a warehouse in Memphis, after a co-worker tested positive for Covid-19.”
James Traub and Paul von Chamier, “Today’s Coronavirus Anger Can Revive Tomorrow’s Welfare State,” FP, March 27, 2020. “Under the right conditions, social frustration can herald the dawn of new political solidarity.”
Marc Steiner interviews, Dr. Sonia Shah, “Covid-19, Ebola, And SARS Outbreaks Were All Unleashed By Humans,” The Real News,” March 27, 2020. “Some of the most devastating outbreaks of the modern era can be traced to rapacious development and habitat destruction that brings wild creatures into our domestic spaces.”
No author, Health care workers across Mexico protest shortages of supplies,” Mexico News Daily, March 27, 2020. “Staff from Mexico City to Yucatán, doctors and nurses are demanding face masks, gowns and gloves.
Eamonn McCann, “Ireland nationalizes hospitals–‘It Can be Done’,” No Borders, March 27, 2020. “Written just before this announcement, here Eamonn McCann looks at how production can be reorganized to solve the coronavirus crisis and more.”
Rachel M. Cohen, “To Develop a Covid-19 vaccine, pharma and the Federal Government Will Have to Break Old Patterns,” The Intercept, March 27, 2020. Asks, if and when a vaccine for Covid-19 is approved, then what? “Will distributing a vaccine resemble the embarrassing efforts to distribute coronavirus tests? Does the government even have the capacity to manufacture a vaccine as quickly and widely as needed?”
Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace, “ Covid-19 and Circuits of Capital, Monthly Review, March 27, 2020. A discussion of various aspects of the disease and its relationship to the “circuits of capital.”
Muzaffar Chishti and Sarah Pierce, “Crisis within a Crisis: Immigration in the United States in a Time of Covid-19,” Migration Policy Institute, March 26, 2020. A comprehensive overview: “An unprecedented global pandemic that knows no borders has brought into sharp focus the intersection of U.S. immigration and public health policy, and the unique challenges that immigrants face in the United States today.”
Justin Akers Chacón, “Bailouts are class warfare” Puntorojo, March 26,2020. A new phase in the crisis of neoliberalism is now unfolding in the form of a battle between capital labor and labor.
Ontario Health Coalition, “Austerity and the Crisis in Healthcare,” The Bullet, March 26, 2020. Calls for increased funding and shifts in funding to deal with all health care issues as well as coronavirus.
Kathleen McLaughlin, “When Butte wouldn’t shut down: The devastation of the 1918 flu and our collective trauma,” Mountain Time, March 26, 2020. “So many people buried in these grounds died 102 years ago in a flu pandemic, in part because powerful people in the city refused to shut everything down to stop the spread of the virus.”
Several authors and articles, “Out of Control: Crisis, Covid-19 and Capitalism in Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, March 26, 2020. “Activists and researchers from across Africa speak about the impact of Covid-19 on their countries.”
Sarah Jaffe, “Horror Story After Horror Story’: A Frontline Nurse Discusses the Crisis,” The Nation, March 26, 2020. “Zenei Cortez, a nurse and union leader, says not giving medical workers protective gear is like giving a firefighter a squirt gun.”
South African Federation of Trade Unions, “The state isn’t pulling its weight!” March 26, 2020. The federation argues that the anti-viral lockdown is a social-distancing start – but fiscal stinginess and tight monetary policy risk a rebellion born of extreme desperation.
Roberto Luzzi, “Facing the coronavirus-capitalist epidemic in Italy,” No Borders, March 26, 2020. Union leader Roberto Luzzi “explains how the compulsion for profit has transformed Italy into the most intense Covid-19 killing zone in the world.”
Dan DiMaggio and Saurav Sarkar, “Walkouts Spread as Workers Seek Coronavirus Protections,” Labor Notes, March 26, 2010. Overview of worker and union actions in response to coronavirus and the health issues raised.
Martin Thomas, “Lessons from past pandemics,” Solidarity, March 25 2020. Earlier experiences in “…1891-2 and 1918 suggest that if socialists organise well in the crisis, then after it our message of democratic social solidarity can gain ground to change things for good.”
Daniel Boguslaw, “Dock Workers Threaten to Shut Down Ports After Risking Coronavirus Exposure,” Vice, March 25, 2020. “Members of a historically-militant union are demanding sanitary conditions while working ports that serve as major shipping arteries.”
Mike Davis, “Lessons from Wuhan,” The Nation, March 25, 2020. Discusses the question of why China was successful in containing the virus.
Science for the People, Statement on the COVID-19 Pandemic, March 25,2020. Makes demands on government and private institutions. This is a short version of the statement with link to complete statement.
Amy Goodman interview Sean Petty, “Frontline NY Nurses Lack Protective Masks & Ventilators, Say Worst Yet to Come as Covid-19 Spreads,” Democracy Now, March 25, 2020.
Joey S. Kim, “Orientalism in the Age of COVID-19,” L.A. Review of Books, March 25, 2020. Author looks at racist attitudes toward China because of COVID-19 in light of long history of “yellow peril” Orientalism.
Javier Pineda, “Popular revolt, feminist mass strikes, and Covid-19 in Chile,” No Borders, March 25, 2020. Provides an account of the growth of the pandemic in Chile, the government response, the reaction of the left, social movements, and the trade unions.
Michael Roberts, “Lockdown!” Michael Roberts Blog, March 24, 2020. An examination of the relationship between the coronavirus pandemic and the capitalist economic crisis with many tables and graphs.
Christine Berry, “The Covid-19 pandemic will change everything – for better or worse,” Verso, March 24, 2020. Author “…argues, crises aren’t only opportunities for the left, and the conditions that are emerging could well play into the hands of a renewed far-right.”
Dr. Prabir Kumar Chatterjee, “India’s People’s Health Movement prepares for Covid-19,” Video and text. No Borders, March 24, 2020. Discusses the threat to the Indian health system and the country’s economy of the coronavirus pandemic.
Tyler Zimmer, “Capitalism Has Failed—We Need a Planned Economy,” Rampant, March 24, 2020. March 24, 2020. The “free market” offers no solutions to the problems we face. “To overcome the present crisis, we have to take the reins into our own hands and democratically plan a future for all.”
Alan MacLeod, “In Pursuit of Chinese Scapegoats, Media Reject Life-Saving Lessons,” FAIR, March 24, 2020. “For weeks, conservative media echoed the explicit Trump line that the reaction to COVID-19 was a liberal “hoax” weaponized against the White House.” Also discusses Trump’s racism and the question of China.
Jamelle Bouie, “Trump Thinks He Knows Better Than the Doctors About Coronavirus,” New York Times, March 24, 2020. Discusses Trumps refusal to follow scientific advice and refers to Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase “socialism or barbarism.”
International Crisis Group, COVID-19 and Conflict: Seven Trends to Watch, Crisis Group, March 24, 2020. ‘The COVID-19 pandemic unquestionably presents an era-defining challenge to public health and the global economy. Its political consequences, both short- and long-term, are less well understood.”
[No author], “Ecosocialism or barbarism: an interview with Ian Angus,” Review of African Political Economy, March 24, 2020. Discusses Marxism, climate change, health issues, and criticizes Green New Deal.
Ashley Smith interviews Michael Roberts, “The Virus, Capitalism, and the Long Depression,” Spectre Journal, March 24, 2020. Marxist economist Roberts discusses the health and economic crisis looking at the causes and possible state policy responses.
Ingar Solty, “The Bio-Economic Pandemic and the Western Working Classes,” The Bullet, March 24, 2020. Examines the economic crisis, the neoliberal impact on health care, the impact on the working class and the working class response.
Atul Gowande, “Why Americans are Dying from Despair,” The New Yorker, March 23, 2020. “The unfairness of our economy, two economists argue, can be measured not only in dollars but in deaths.”
William I. Robinson, “Beyond the Economic Chaos of Coronavirus Is a Global War Economy,” Truthout, March 23, 2020. Argues that the crisis is pushing us toward a veritable global police state.
Jeet Heer, “Trump Toys With a Let-Them-Die Response to the Pandemic,” The Nation, March 23, 2020. Explains that goaded by the right-wing media, the president is arguing for a dangerous nihilistic strategy of letting the virus run wild in order to save the economy.
Emma David, “The cradle will rock,” RS-21, March 23, 2020. The social crisis produced by the coronavirus has had a major impact on children and their care. A nursery worker reflects on a fortnight of uncertainty and change.
William Rivers Pitt, “The Virus of Capitalism Has Infected the COVID-19 Fight,” Truthout, March 23, 2020. Discusses the struggle between private business interests, the government, and the public over coronavirus policies.
Donatella Della Porta, “Social movements in times of pandemic: another world is needed,” Open Democracy, March 23, 2020. Reflections on how to organize in the era of covid-19 and social distancing.
Walden Bello, “Coronavirus and the Death of ‘Connectivity’,” Foreign Policy in Focus, March 22, 2020. Bello argues that China rescued globalization after the financial crash in 2008, but the coronavirus crisis has put deglobalization back on the agenda. Whether this will move in reactionary or progressive direction remains to be seen.
Silvia Ferraro and Waldo Mermelstein, “Brazil’s workers strike for the right to quarantine,” No Borders, March 23, 2020. Interview with Silvia Ferrero and Waldo Mermelstein of Brazil’s Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) discuss government policy, health care, politics, labor and social movements.
Dan La Botz, “America Faces the Deluge“, New Politics, March 23, 2020. A snapshot of the coronavirus at the time of publication.
Doug Henwood, “Now Is the Time to Fundamentally Transform America,” Jacobin, March 21, 2020. State that with this crisis, “The market will never do it on its own. It may not be socialism, but if we do it well, it will legitimate a public sector badly in need of legitimation.” And proposes a social democratic program.
Orion, Rummler, “America’s hospitals, doctors and nurses urge Trump to ramp up medical supplies,” Axios, March 21, 2020. Gives the demands of the American Hospital Association, American Medical Association and American Nurses Association.
Adam Gaffney, “America’s extreme neoliberal healthcare system is putting the country at risk,” The Guardian, March 21, 2020. Argues for single-payer health care.
Andrew Chirwa, “South African union demands action on Covid-19,” No Borders, March 21, 2020. NUMSA calls on South African government to nationalize hospitals and abolish private health care and makes other demands.
Hunter Walker and Jana Winter, “Feds: White supremacists’ planned to weaponize virus,” Yahoo News, March, 21, 2020.
Mike Davis, “The Coronavirus Crisis Is a Monster Fueled by Capitalism,” In These Times, March 20, 2020. Puts epidemic in cultural context, compares to so-called “Spanish flu,” argues that neoliberal, austerity, anti-union policies weakened U.S. health care, and criticizes the new U.S. left for being too nationalist.
Leopoldo Tartaglia, “Dispatch from Italy: Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus,” Labor Notes, March 20, 2020. Discusses a wave of strikes in Italy over government handling of health care and the coronavirus.
Daniel Denvir interviews Mike Davis on Coronavirus Politics, The Dig, (Audio), March 20, 2020. Davis discusses coronavirus in terms of history, politics, and the left.
“Chinese Virus,” World Market,” N+1, March 20, 2020. Despite the title, argues that “Chinese virus” is a racist and xenophobic term, discusses Chinese origins, the role of the market in spreading the disease, and the search for a vaccine.
Amy Goodman Interviews Mariame Kaba, “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid & How to Organize in the Age of Coronavirus,” Democracy Now, March 20,2020. “We look at the incredible community networks across the country that are coming together to protect their neighbors during the coronavirus pandemic — and how you can get involved.”
Sandra Bloodworth, “Class war in the Spanish Flu pandemic,” Red Flag, March 20, 2020. Discusses how the so-called “Spanish Flue” led to class struggle.
Laia Facet, “1000 Covid-19 deaths in the Spanish State, no end in sight,” No Borders, March 20,2020. Interview with Laia Facet of the Spanish organization Anticapitalistas about the state of the pandemic in Spain and the political response, accompanied by a short video.
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Social Insurance in a Time of Pandemic: A Proposal for the Government to Act as Buyer of Last Resort,” Dollars and Sense, March/April 2020. Argues that “a buyer-of-last-resort program would alleviate the hardship of workers and businesses and maintain the cash flow for families and businesses, so that the coronavirus shock has no secondary impacts on demand—such as laid-off workers cutting down on consumption—and a quick rebound can take place once demand comes back.”
Ellen Engelstad, “Norway’s Workers Insisted They Shouldn’t Pay for Coronavirus — And They Won,” Jacobin, March 19, 2020. Explains that a split in the government allowed the trade unions to to pressure the government “to pass a new and much more social set of measures” giving workers full pay for 20 days and then 80 percent of pay and 62 percent of all else.
Alessandro Delfanti, Beatrice Busi, and Erika Biddle, “Workers and the Virus: Radical Lessons from Italy in the Age of COVID-19,” Socialist Project, March 19, 2020. What can we learn from the Italian experience about the conflict between needing work and maintaining one’s health, childcare issues, and the problems facing clearing workers among others.
Valerio Arcary, “Nothing will be the same. Notes on the Covid-19 emergency in Brazil,” No Borders, March 19, 2020. Arcary writes, “We cannot predict to what extent today’s determining political factors will remain in place. Nothing will be the same.”
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), “We demand a COVID-19 response that puts people over profit,” (petition), undated but from March 2020. A petition making demands on the U.S. government.
Huron Valley Labor, “Community Response to COVID-19,” undated but March 2020. We post this as an example of many local initiatives being taken.
Signers, “Open Letter to ICE From Medical Professionals Urging the Release of Individuals in Immigration Detention Given the Risk of COVID-19,” Undated, but March, 2020.
Alexander Main, “U.S. Sanctions and Covid-19,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 19, 2020. Argues that U.S. economic sanctions on other nations do not advance U.S. foreign policy goals and do great harm to those countries’ people.
David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,” March 19, 2020. A discussion of the current health and economic crisis in terms of Harvey’s theories and models of capitalism.
Solidarity National Committee, “A Medical, Economic and Social Crisis,” March 18, 2020. An analysis of the coronavirus and the economic crisis looking at many of its facets.
Miriam Jordan, “‘We’re Petrified’: Immigrants Afraid to Seek Medical Care for Coronavirus,” New York Times, March 18, 2020. Explains why immigrants are afraid to seek medical care.
Charles Davis, “Sanders proposes $2,000 monthly cash payments until the end of the coronavirus crisis,” Business Insider, March 18, 2020. Sanders calls on the U.S. government to give each household $2,000 per month until the crisis ends.
Chris Brooks, “Auto Companies Announce Closure Following Outbreak of Wildcat Strikes,” Labor Notes, March 18, 2020.
Danny Katch, “NYC Public Hospital Worker Warns ‘We Should Expect the Worst’ From Coronavirus,” Indypendent, March 18, 2020. An interview with Sean Petty, a pediatric emergency room nurse, who argues that, because of government policies, the hospital are ill prepared for pandemic.
Chris Brooks, “Auto Companies Announce Closure Following Outbreak of Wildcat Strikes,” Labor Notes, March 18, 2020. Explains how rank-and-file workers’ wildcat strikes preceded and pressured the auto companies to shut down.
Dan La Botz, “The American Working Class, Coronavirus, and the Recession,” New Politics, March 18, 2020. An overview of the impact of the coronavirus and the recession on U.S. workers looking at at the government, employers, the unions, and the election in process.
Fourth International Bureau, “Covid-19 pandemic: let’s protect our lives not their profits!” March 18, 2020. Describes the current situation as a crisis of the capitalist system and puts the emphasis on self-organization.
John Vidal, “‘Tip of the iceberg’: is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?” The Guardian, March 18, 2020. Discusses how diseases such as Ebola, Sars, bird flu and now Covid-19 arise because of changes in environment and calls for better planning and development.
Editors of Nature, “Coronavirus: three things all governments and their science advisers must do now,” Nature, March 17, 2020. Argues that the British and U.S. governments should stop developing plans in secret and support open research and discussion of alternatives as suggested by the World Health Organization.
Puerto Rican Educators, “Fighting for health and safety in the face of Covid-19, No Borders, March 17, 2020. Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico and the National Union of Educators and Education Workers make demands on the government.
Sheri Fin, “White House Takes New Line After Dire Report on Death Toll,” New York Times, March 16/17, 2020. Explains how a British model of the disease led Trump administration to take more drastic action. (See article below.)
Dr Sabine L. van Elsland and Ryan O’Hare COVID-19, “Imperial researchers model likely impact of public health measures,” March 17, 2020. British scientists argue that various mitigation methods could reduce deaths by half.
Fiona Ferguson, “Coronavirus & Capitalism,” Rebel News, March 17, 2020. A critique by a Northern Irish author of the policies of Boris Johnson and the British government, making specific demands.
Chris Brooks, “As Rank-and-File Auto Workers Demand National Shutdown, Union Officials Partner with Companies to Keep Plants Open,” Labor Notes, March 17, 2020. Looks at labor unions’ and rank-and-file workers’ responses to the coronavirus issue in North American auto industry.
Rampant editorial collective, “A Light at the End of the World,” Rampant, March 17, 2020. States that COVID-19 inaugurates a new era and that the future will be shuttered by repression or it will be built upon solidarity.
John Westmoreland, “Lessons from the Spanish flu of 1919: internationalism and people before profit,” Counterfire, March 17, 2020. Looks at the origins and impact of the 1919 flu and argues it had no particular national origin but was cause by capitalism and war.
Jane Slaughter, “Solidarity Is Our Only Chance,” Labor Notes, March 16, 2020. Proposes a program of demands for the labor movement to deal with coronavirus and longer term needs.
Chris Brooks, “Organizing around the World for PTO: Pandemic Time Off,” Labor Notes, March 16, 2020. An overview of labor responses to COVID-19 around the globe.
National Nurses United, “Nurses: Time to sharply ramp up health care capacity for COVID-19,” March 16, 2020. Argues that there is inadequate equipment for nurses and criticizes the CDC and the American Hospital Association; makes demands for personal protective equipment for nurses.
Virgínia Fontes, “Active Social Solidarity and the Coronavirus in Brazil,” No Borders, March 16, 2020. Criticizes policies of the Brazilian government and makes demands on the state.
Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Capitalism and How to Beat It,” The Intercept, March 16, 2020. A video and short text claims that the coronavirus provides opportunities both to capital and to people; agues for a green future.
Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN): “We call for not a loss of human contact but only a temporary change in its forms,” March 16, 2020. Call for closing off the Zapatista communities, for extraordinary hygiene measures, and for continuing with other struggles.
The Red Nation, “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Capitalism in Crisis,” March 16, 2020. Criticizes U.S. domestic and foreign policy and proposes a program to respond to the crisis.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “When Every Community is Ground Zero: Pulling Each Other Through a Pandemic,” March 16, 2020. Calls for community mobilization and lays out a set of demands on the government and private sector.
Patrick Silberstein, “France: Covid-19: A Very Political Virus,” New Politics, March 16, 2020. (dated March 11) Discusses the coronavirus in the context of French politics and society calling for greater workers power and democracy.
Working Class Studies, “Class and the Challenge of COVID-19,” March 16, 2020. Notes that workers will be most impacted, that class will affect the response, calls for solidarity and internationalism.
Daniel Tanuro, “Eight Theses,” International Viewpoint, March 15, 2020. Calls upon the left to analyze the dynamic interaction of capitalism, the environment, and health to understand the crisis.
Max Fisher and Emma Bubola, “As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality, Inequality Worsens Its Spread,” New York Times, March 15, 2020. Explains that the coronavirus affects poor people more, and that the crisis leads to more poor people.
Michael Roberts, “It was the virus that did it,” March 15, 2020. The effect of the pandemic on an already fragile world economy.
Ryan Grim, “Dispatch from a Nurse on the Frontlines of the effort to Contain Coronavirus,” The Intercept, March 14, 2020. A nurse from a rural state in the United States states that there has been inadequate preparation, leadership, and resources.
Anticapitalistas, “A social and political emergency plan to fight Covid-19,” No Borders, March 14, 2020 (Originally published March 10). The political organization Anticapitalistas makes political, social, and health demands on the Spanish state.
Statement of the Alliance of MENA Socialists, “Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes Inhumanity of Capitalism: What Can Socialists Do,” March 14, 2020. Posted on New Politics. An analysis of the nature of the coronavirus and its social, economic, and political impact and makes suggestions about actions that socialists can take from the workplace to the society at large.
New York Times editorial board, “There’s a Giant Hole in Pelosi’s Coronavirus Bill,” New York Times, March 14, 2020. Critique of bill passed by the House of Representatives.
Eric Schewe, “With the Coronavirus, Science Confronts Geopolitics,” Daily Jstor, March 13, 2020. Argues that the coronavirus scare proves that scientific research has a political component.
Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves, “Alone Against the Virus,” Boston Review, March 13, 2020. Looks at the ways that neoliberalism made the United States ill prepared for coronavirus and argues for the need for a New Deal for health care.
Stephanie Bastek, “How Global Agriculture Grew a Pandemic,” American Scholar, March 13, 2020. An audio interview with Rob Wallace on the subject the title suggests with some links to other resources.
DiEM25 Coordinating Collective, “The fight against pandemics can only be won with free, universal, public health care,” DiEM25, March 13, 2020. The pan-European Democracy in Europe 2025 organization calls for free public health care for all, accompanied by two videos of talks by Yanis Varoufakis.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), “Coronavirus: Four Demands for Teamsters,” March 13, 2020. Gives four demands for teamsters dealing with hygiene, freedom from harassment by management, paid sick leave, and absenteeism, and mentions the UPS workers petition.
Sarah Lazare, “Coronavirus Shows Capitalism Is a Razor’s Edge,” In These Times, March 12, 2020. The impact of coronavirus on precarious and low-wage workers.
Democratic Socialists of America, “Now is the Time for Solidarity: DSA National Statement on COVID-2019,” March 12, 2020. A political statement from the Democratic Socialists of America.
Sam Gindin, “Inoculating Against Globalization: Coronavirus and the Search for Alternatives,” Socialist Project, March 12, 2020. How globalization brought us the coronavirus crisis.
Mike Davis, “COVID-19: The monster is finally at the door,” Links, March 12, 2020. On the roots of the pandemic and why we need peoples’ movements to break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare.
Interview with Rob Wallace, “Coronavirus: ‘Agribusiness Would Risk Millions of Deaths,’” March 11, 2020. Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, discusses coronavirus with an emphasis on its origins in industrial agriculture.
Tomas, Pueyo, “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now” Politicians, Community Leaders and Business Leaders: What Should You Do and When?” Medium, March 10, 2020. A broad overview of many aspects of the coronavirus with many charts and graphs. Discusses various scientific and practical aspects of the pandemic.
Michael Meeropol , “Government Austerity Is Costing Lives in the Fight to Contain Covid-19,” URPE, March 9, 2020. Argues that the U.S. government’s austerity programs weakened the health care system and led to the poor response that will cost lives.
Kelly Hayes, “Demands from Grassroots Organizers Concerning COVID-19,” New Politics, March 8, 2020.
Chris Hill, ‘”The Cripples Will Save You’: A Critical Coronavirus Message from a Disability Activist,” March 6, 2020. Makes the case for the inclusion and importance of the disabled and argues that their perspective can contribute to dealing with coronavirus.
Eric Toussaint, “No, the coronavirus is not responsible for the fall of stock prices,” Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, March 5, 2020. Argues that coronavirus only detonated an economic crisis that was to be expected.
Mark Bergfeld, “The Insanity of Making Sick People Work,” Jacobin, March 5, 2020. Discusses the health issues facing industrial and service workers, but especially cleaning workers because of change brought about by coronavirus.
New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of France, “Coronavirus: les capitalistes ne peuvent pas être la solution alors qu’ils sont à l’origine du problem,” undated, but in March 2020. Political statement of the New Anti-Capitalist Party of France.
[No author], “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China,” February 26, 2020.
Jim Robbins, “The Ecology of Disease,” New York Times, July 14, 2012. Scientists attempt to understand the ecology of disease looking at various countries’ farming practices and the interaction between wild and farm animals.