Both the number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation and the number of continued claims for unemployment compensation are once again on the rise, signaling a worsening of the Pandemic Depression.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 935 thousand American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. While initial unemployment claims remain well below the peak of about seven million in March, they are far higher than pre-pandemic levels of about 200 thousand claims a week.
The number of continued claims for unemployment compensation, while also below its peak, rose from the previous week and was more than 20.6 million American workers—a figure that includes workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.* This means that, since the end of April, the number of continued claims has fallen below 20 million only once (and that to 19 million, toward the end of November).
To put this number into further perspective, consider the fact that the highest number of continued claims for unemployment compensation during the Second Great Depression was 6.6 million (at the end of May 2009), and in the week before the Pandemic Depression began there were only 1.6 million continued claims by American workers.
In the meantime, at least 1,074 new coronavirus deaths and 40,607 new cases were reported in the United States yesterday. As of this morning, more than 6.1 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 185.6 thousand have died—more than any other country in the world, which has received barely a mention from anyone in the Trump administration.
According to Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, “We are not moving in the right direction. With the looming expiration of benefits, it’s even more worrisome.”
In the meantime, at least 3,611 new coronavirus deaths and 245,033 new cases were reported in the United States yesterday—two morbid new records. As of this morning, more than 17 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 307,642 have died. That’s more than any other country in the world, a crisis continues to receive barely a mention from anyone in the Trump administration.**
The result will be new waves of business slowdowns and closures, which in turn will mean millions more U.S. workers furloughed and laid off. Widespread inoculations of the U.S. and world populations are still many months off. Therefore, in the absence of a radical change in economic policies and institutions, Americans can expect to see steady streams of both initial unemployment claims and continued claims in the weeks and months ahead.
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*This is the special program for business owners, the self-employed, independent contractors, and gig workers not receiving other unemployment insurance.
**The last time I posted a chart of unemployment claims, in early September, some 6.1 million Americans had been infected with the coronavirus and 185.6 thousand had died.
U.S. billionaires have recouped all of their wealth—and more—during the Pandemic Depression. Meanwhile, since May, the number of poor Americans has grown by about 8 million. And the number of American workers applying for and receiving unemployment benefits continues at record levels.
Pandemic be damned: America’s 400 richest are worth a record $3.2 trillion, up $240 billion from a year ago, aided by a stock market that has defied the virus.
When the Covid-19 pandemic began to sweep the world earlier this year, the wealth of U.S. billionaires plummeted in lockstep with the stock market. Yet, just six months after the market bottomed out—with hundreds of thousands Americans dead and the coronavirus still to be contained—the wealthiest Americans are doing better than ever. In other words, the pain, at least for the ultra-rich, was remarkably short lived.
Meanwhile, more and more American workers, who have lost their jobs or been furloughed, are attempting to survive on meager unemployment benefits. And many of them and their families—especially Black people and children—are now falling below the poverty line.
Part of the reason for this obscene growth in poverty is the expiration of the CARES Act’s $600 per week unemployment supplement. The other reason is that the number of American workers who are applying for unemployment benefits continues at elevated levels.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 898 thousand American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. While initial unemployment claims remain well below the peak of about seven million in March, they are far higher than pre-pandemic levels of about 200 thousand claims a week.
The number of continued claims for unemployment compensation, while also below its peak, was still more than 25 million workers—a figure that includes workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.*
To put this number in perspective, consider the fact that the highest number of continued claims for unemployment compensation during the Second Great Depression was 6.6 million (at the end of May 2009), and in the week before the Pandemic Depression began there were only 1.6 million continued claims.
In the meantime, at least 1,011 new coronavirus deaths and 59,751 new cases were reported in the United States yesterday. As of this afternoon, more than 7.9 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 217.1 thousand have died—more than any other country in the world, grotesque outcomes that continue to receive barely a mention from Trump or anyone (aside from Dr. Anthony Fauci) in his administration.
Meanwhile, many colleges and universities that have attempted to reopen with students in residence are reporting hundreds of (and, in some cases, more than a thousand) novel coronavirus infections.
The result will be new waves of business slowdowns and closures, which in turn will mean millions more U.S. workers furloughed and laid off. Unless there is a radical change in economic policies and institutions, Americans can expect to see steady streams of new COVID-19 infections and deaths, initial and continued unemployment claims, and growing poverty in the weeks and months ahead.
As for those at the top: during the first six months of the pandemic, the United States added more than 29 more billionaires, increasing from 614 to 643. The Pandemic Depression has been a boon to their fortunes.
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*This is the special program for business owners, the self-employed, independent contractors, and gig workers not receiving other unemployment insurance.
Year 3 of the Trump presidency was absolutely terrific—indeed, record-breaking—for Americans.
At least that’s how things look in terms of the headline numbers from the Census Bureau: median household income was up (by 6.8 percent, a record) over 2018 and the official poverty rate decreased (by 1.3 percentage points, to 10.5 percent, the lowest rate observed since estimates were initially published for 1959).*
And then there’s Kevin Hassett, former chair of Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers (who returned to the White House to lead its pandemic-response team, downplaying the danger of coronavirus and pushing the administration to re-open the economy amid lockdowns and social distancing) who seized on the report to make another of his wild claims:
If you’re a social justice warrior and you’re looking at the data, you would have to say that the Trump years, through the beginning of the pandemic, were the sort-of best years for advances in social justice since World War II.
The problem is that other data in the same report show nothing of the sort.
The distribution of income in the United States was just as grotesquely unequal in 2019 as it was in 2018 (and in every year both before and now during the Trump presidency). The highest quintile of American households captured 51.9 percent of income in the United States (it was 52 percent in 2018), the fourth quintile 22.7 percent (compared to 22.6 percent the previous year), and so on down the line. The lowest quintile got 3.1 percent, exactly the same as in 2018.
So no, no “social justice warrior” would be able to say the Trump years were the “best years for advances in social justice since World War II.”
In fact, quite the opposite. The economic policies of the Trump administration are both the product of and serving to reinforce the fundamental inequalities that have characterized the United States for decades now.
They’re also the reason why the novel coronavirus pandemic has hit the United States so savagely and unevenly. As I argued back in May, and Nick Hanauer and David M. Rolf recently concurred in Time,
Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.
The basis of their claim about inequality in the United States is a new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards [ht: mfa] of the RAND Corporation, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.”
While their general claim is pretty familiar (the pattern of capitalist growth in the United States during the two or three decades after World War II lowered the degree of inequality but, beginning in the mid-1970s, the trend was reversed and inequality rose during every decade), their analysis of the new pattern of capitalist growth reveals just how obscene it has been.
Consider the following conclusions from their study:
On average, extreme inequality is costing the median income full-time worker about $42,000 a year. Half of all full-time workers now earn less than half what they would have had incomes across the distribution continued to keep pace with economic growth.
The median male worker needed 30 weeks of income in 1985 to pay for housing, healthcare, transportation, and education for his family. By 2018, that “Cost of Thriving Index” had increased to 53 weeks (more weeks than in an actual year).
Two-income families are now working twice the hours to maintain a shrinking share of the pie, while struggling to pay housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and transportation costs that have grown at two to three times the rate of inflation.
Basically, according to Price and Edwards’s calculations, the income growth for most groups of Americans—thus, the bottom 25 percent, the median, the bottom 90 percent, and so on—was less than the rate of growth of real per capita Gross Domestic Product. Only the incomes of those in the top 5 percent grew at a faster rate. Thus, for example, the aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile after 1975 would have been 67 percent higher in 2018 had income growth followed the pattern of the first two post-War decades.
The cumulative result over the past 45 years is that the members of the bottom 90 percent lost almost $50 trillion ($47 trillion or $48.6, depending on the price deflator used), which was seized by those at the top, especially the richest 1 percent of Americans.**
That pattern of unequal growth, which was inherited by the Trump administration, has simply not changed in the last three and a half years, no matter what Trump, Haslett, or the other “hacks and grifters” in the White House say.
Moreover, the monstrous inequalities that existed at the end of 2019 have shaped in profound ways both the effects of the spread of the coronavirus across the country and the early stages of the recovery from the Pandemic Depression. American economic economic and political elites have demanded and been able to implement policies that have only served to reinforce the unequalizing pattern of economic growth, which left most Americans vulnerable to the pandemic and to the resulting economic downturn.
The unequal pattern of capitalist growth in the United States documented in the new RAND report is exactly the opposite of what social justice warriors have been fighting for. Everyone, except the tiny group at the top, have been the ultimate losers.
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*But there is a caveat on the median household income figures: the bureau’s main household survey for the report on Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019 was conducted in March and April of this year, as the pandemic was surging. That lowered the response rate, especially among low-income Americans. Still, the bureau estimates that median income in 2019 was about 4.1 percent higher than in 2018.
**The missing piece in the story told by Price and Edwards has to do with the mechanism of the massive transfer from the bottom 90 percent to those at the top. I have tried to fill in that missing piece, most recently in 2019 (e.g., here and here).
The number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation in the United States fell below one million for only the second time since the beginning of the COVID crisis. But the number of continued claims for unemployment compensation is once again on the rise, signaling a continuation of the Pandemic Depression.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 881 thousand American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. While initial unemployment claims remain well below the recent peak of about seven million in March, they are far higher than pre-pandemic levels of about 200 thousand claims a week.
The number of continued claims for unemployment compensation, while below its peak, rose from the previous week and was more than 29 million American workers—a figure that includes workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.*
To put this number in perspective, consider the fact that the highest number of continued claims for unemployment compensation during the Second Great Depression was 6.6 million (at the end of May 2009), and in the week before the Pandemic Depression began there were only 1.6 million continued claims.
In the meantime, at least 1,074 new coronavirus deaths and 40,607 new cases were reported in the United States yesterday. As of this morning, more than 6.1 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 185.6 thousand have died—more than any other country in the world, which has received barely a mention from anyone in the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, many colleges and universities that have attempted to reopen with students in residence are reporting hundreds of (and, in some cases, more than a thousand) novel coronavirus infections.
The result will be new waves of business slowdowns and closures and schools returning to online teaching, which in turn will mean millions more U.S. workers furloughed and laid off. Unless there is a radical change in economic policies and institutions, Americans can expect to see steady streams of both initial unemployment claims and continued claims in the weeks and months ahead.
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*This is the special program for business owners, the self-employed, independent contractors, and gig workers not receiving other unemployment insurance.
The number of initial claims for unemployment compensation in the United States once again surpassed one million—for the 21st time in the past 22 weeks—signaling a continuation of the Pandemic Depression.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. While initial unemployment claims remain well below the recent peak of about seven million in March, they are far higher than pre-pandemic levels of about 200 thousand claims a week.
The number of continued claims for unemployment compensation has also fallen from its peak but the total from the previous week (the series of continued claims lags initial claims by one week) was still 27 million American workers—a figure that includes workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.*
To put this number in perspective, consider the fact that the highest number of continued claims for unemployment compensation during the Second Great Depression was 6.6 million (at the end of May 2009), and in the week before the Pandemic Depression began there were only 1.6 million continued claims.
In the meantime, at least 1,193 new coronavirus deaths and 44,934 new cases were reported in the United States yesterday. As of this morning, more than 5.9 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 179.9 thousand have died—more than any other country in the world, which has received barely a mention during the Republican national convention.
The result will be new waves of business slowdowns and closures, which in turn will mean millions more U.S. workers furloughed and laid off. Unless there is a radical change in economic policies and institutions, Americans can expect to see steady streams of both initial unemployment claims and continued claims in the weeks and months ahead.
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*This is the special program for business owners, the self-employed, independent contractors, and gig workers not receiving other unemployment insurance.
The number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation in the United States once again increased, to over one million. But the cumulative number of initial claims is still staggering, reaching 57.4 million workers by the end of last week.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.1 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. They’re the third group to file for unemployment claims during the pandemic who are not going to benefit from the additional $600 benefit that was authorized in the CARES Act but which has now expired. Moreover, funds from the Paycheck Protection Program, which gave grants and loans to companies to keep workers on payroll, have been running out for many recipients.
I can’t pay my rent, electric bill, food, or car payments. I’m able to get the bare minimum with my allotted food stamps
said Sabrina Wickward Arce, a cosmetologist who is struggling to find a new job in Miami, Florida.
Here is a breakdown of each of the past twenty-two weeks:
• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million
• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million
• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million
• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million
• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million
• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million
• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million
• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million
• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million
• week ending on 23 May—2.12 million
• week ending on 30 May—1.90 million
• week ending on 6 June—1.57 million
• week ending on 13 June—1.54 million
• week ending on 20 June—1.48 million
• week ending on 27 June—1.41 million
• week ending on 4 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 11 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 18 July—1.42 million
• week ending on 25 July—1.44 million
• week ending on 1 August—1.19 million
• week ending on 8 August—971 thousand
• week ending on 8 August—1.11 million
While the number of continued claims for unemployment compensation has continued to fall from its peak, the total from the previous week (the series of continued claims lags initial claims by one week) was still 14.8 million workers. And we need to add to that an additional 11.2 million workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.* Therefore, approximately 26 million workers are jobless and receiving some form of unemployment compensation.
To put this number in perspective, consider the fact that the highest number of continued claims for unemployment compensation during the Second Great Depression was 6.6 million (at the end of May 2009), and in the week before the COVID Crisis there were only 1.8 million continued claims.
In the meantime, at least 1,295 new coronavirus deaths and 43,006 new cases were reported in the United States yesterday. As of this morning, more than 5.5 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 173 thousand have died—with no end in sight.
The United States can therefore expect to experience new waves of business closures, which in turn will mean more American workers furloughed and laid off, and therefore steady streams of both initial unemployment claims and continued claims, in the weeks and months ahead.
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*This is the special program for business owners, the self-employed, independent contractors, and gig workers not receiving other unemployment insurance.
The number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation in the United States fell below one million for the first time since the beginning of the COVID crisis. But the cumulative number of initial claims is still staggering, reaching 56.3 million workers by the end of last week.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 963 thousand American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. They’re the second group to file for unemployment claims during the pandemic who are not going to rise the additional $600 benefit that was authorized in the CARES Act.
Here is a breakdown of each of the past twenty-one weeks:
• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million
• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million
• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million
• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million
• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million
• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million
• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million
• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million
• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million
• week ending on 23 May—2.12 million
• week ending on 30 May—1.90 million
• week ending on 6 June—1.57 million
• week ending on 13 June—1.54 million
• week ending on 20 June—1.48 million
• week ending on 27 June—1.41 million
• week ending on 4 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 11 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 18 July—1.42 million
• week ending on 25 July—1.44 million
• week ending on 1 August—1.19 million
• week ending on 8 August—0.96 million
While the number of continued claims for unemployment compensation has continued to fall from its peak, the total from the previous week (the series of continued claims lags initial claims by one week) was still 15.5 million workers. And we need to add to that an additional 10.7 million workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.* Therefore, as of 10 days ago, 26.2 million workers were receiving some form of unemployment compensation.
To understand the magnitude of this figure, we need to compare it to the number of continued claims in late May 2009 (6.6 million), the worst point of the so-called Great Recession. Right now, in the midst of the Pandemic Depression, the number of American workers receiving unemployment compensation is 4 times what it was at the nadir of the Second Great Depression.
In the meantime, at least 1,478 new coronavirus deaths and 54,187 new cases were reported in the United States on 12 August. As of this afternoon, more than 5,217,000 Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 166,100 have died. The three-day rolling average of new cases per million people in the country was 153.4 compared to 32.5 cases for the world as a whole.
We can therefore expect to see new waves of business closures, which in turn will mean more American workers furloughed and laid off, and therefore steady streams of both initial unemployment claims and continued claims, in the weeks and months ahead.
*This is the special program for business owners, the self-employed, independent contractors, or gig workers not receiving other unemployment insurance.
The American economy gained 1.8 million jobs last month, even as the coronavirus surged in many parts of the country and newly reintroduced restrictions caused some businesses to close for a second time.
And, it’s true, both the official (U-3) unemployment rate (the orange line in the chart) and the more inclusive (U-6) rate (the green line) have fallen since April. But, at 10.2 and 16.5 percent, respectively, they’re still at or just below what they were during the worst period of the Second Great Depression.
Moreover the percentage of American workers who have been unemployed for 15 weeks or more is on the rise—and can be expected to continue to grow in the months ahead.
The massive Reserve Army of unemployed, long-term unemployed, discouraged, and underemployed workers is serving to discipline and punish workers, both those who have managed to keep their jobs and those who have lost them.
We know this because workers’ pay is going down. At the same time, workers are forced to have the freedom to commute to and labor at their jobs under perilous pandemic conditions, they’re being paid less. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, both the average hourly and weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers fell between June and July of this year.*
Meanwhile, now that emergency federal benefits have expired, the unemployed—both continuing cases and newly laid-off workers—will not be receiving the $600-a-week supplement that helped them pay their bills through the spring and early summer.
Instead of raising workers’ wages, to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and to attract them back to work, employers and their political representatives prefer to slash unemployment benefits in order to compel workers to compete for the few jobs that are currently available.
Whichever way you look at it, American workers are the ones who are being forced to shoulder the lion’s share of the costs created by the COVID economic crisis.
*These numbers relate to production employees in mining and logging and manufacturing, construction employees, and nonsupervisory employees in the service-providing industries. These groups account for approximately four-fifths of the total employment on private nonfarm payrolls.
The total number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation in the United State continues to rise.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.19 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That means initial jobless claims exceeded one million for the twentieth week in a row.
Here is a breakdown of each week:
• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million
• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million
• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million
• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million
• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million
• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million
• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million
• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million
• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million
• week ending on 23 May—2.12 million
• week ending on 30 May—1.90 million
• week ending on 6 June—1.57 million
• week ending on 13 June—1.54 million
• week ending on 20 June—1.48 million
• week ending on 27 June—1.41 million
• week ending on 4 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 11 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 18 July—1.42 million
• week ending on 25 July—1.44 million
• week ending on 1 August—1.19 million
All told, 55.3 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past twenty weeks.
To put that into perspective, I produced the chart above comparing the cumulative totals of the initial unemployment claims for the current pandemic compared to two other relevant periods: the worst point of the Second Great Depression (from mid-January to late May 2009) and the weeks immediately preceding the current depression (from early November 2019 to late March 2020).
As readers can see, the differences are stunning: 12.6 million workers during the Second Great Depression, 4.4 million in the period just before the COVID crisis, and more than 55 million in the past twenty weeks.
And now that emergency federal benefits have expired, the unemployed—both continuing cases and newly laid-off workers—will not be receiving the $600-a-week supplement that helped them pay their bills through the spring and early summer.
In the meantime, at least 1,253 new coronavirus deaths and 53,726 new cases were reported in the United States. As of this morning, more than 4,832,400 Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 158,500 have died. The three-day rolling average of new cases per million people in the country was 157 compared to 31 cases for the world as a whole.
We can therefore expect to see new waves of business closures, which in turn will mean more American workers furloughed and laid off, and therefore a steady stream of initial unemployment claims, in the weeks and months ahead.
The incompetence of the Trump administration—mirroring the dangerous incompetence of Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Narendra Modi of India—coming on top of a destroyed public health system and a failed private sector testing establishment has condemned millions of people in the U.S. to catch the disease and pass it on. There is—thus far—no prospect of breaking the chain of infection in the United States.
Initial unemployment claims in the United State continue to rise.
This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.43 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. Last week, it was 1.42 million.
Here is a breakdown of each week:
• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million
• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million
• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million
• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million
• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million
• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million
• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million
• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million
• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million
• week ending on 23 May—2.12 million
• week ending on 30 May—1.90 million
• week ending on 6 June—1.57 million
• week ending on 13 June—1.54 million
• week ending on 20 June—1.48 million
• week ending on 27 June—1.41 million
• week ending on 4 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 11 July—1.31 million
• week ending on 18 July—1.42 million
• week ending on 25 July—1.43 million
All told, 54.1 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past nineteen weeks.
To put that into some kind of perspective, I produced the chart above comparing the cumulative totals of the initial unemployment claims for the current pandemic compared to two other relevant periods: the worst point of the Second Great Depression (from late January to late May 2009) and the weeks immediately preceding the current depression (from early November 2019 to late March 2020).
As readers can see in the chart above, the differences are stunning: 12 million workers during the Second Great Depression, 4.2 million in the period just before the COVID crisis, and more than 54 million in the past nineteen weeks.
The extraordinarily high numbers of initial claims should come as no surprise, given the decline in economic activity throughout the country. This morning, the Commerce Department reported that real Gross Domestic Product decreased at an annual rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 (corresponding to a drop of 9.5 percent from the first quarter). That is, by far, the most severe drop in the postwar period (the next most significant decline came in the first quarter of 1958, on the order of 10 percent on an annual basis).
In the meantime, many U.S. states continue to set daily records for new confirmed COVID-19 cases. Today, the three-day rolling average of new cases per million people in the country reached 194 compared to 32 cases for the world as a whole.
We can therefore expect to see new waves of business closures, which in turn will mean more American workers furloughed and laid off, and therefore a steady stream of initial unemployment claims, in the weeks and months ahead.
It is hard to imagine a worse combination to combat the fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic than Republican governors, the administration of Donald Trump, the GOP-controlled Senate, and the basic institutions of U.S. capitalism.
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