Liberty and Capitalism

#Pliefemi O. Taiuro, "Liberty for Whom," The Nation, 5. 17 - 24.2021. - "The freedom that [Patrick] Henry, a plantation and slave owner, and his fellow founders took to be worth defending, was also linked to the racial domination that organized life and labor in the American colonies." "For centuries, he, [Stovall], argues, writers, intellectuals, and politicians have tried various strategies to reconcile the United States' and France's brutal histories of racial domination, settler conquest, and slavery with their stated commitment to freedom." " 'Much as the United Sates and France sought to suppress the pirates, [Tyler] Stovall, author of 'White Freedom: the Racial History of an Idea' (Princeton University), contends, they sought to dominate and control the children in their own countries, and they did so in the name of a new form of freedom: one defined not by bucking formal power structures (as the pirates did), but by respecting them."

"In 1776, Jefferson famously wrote the Declaration of Independence, which held that 'all men are created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to liberty,' even though he owned more than 60 human beings -- surely some sort of conflict, should we take his words literally." "Nevertheless, the conclusion of World War I marked a return to a politics that saw freedom as an ideal for some but not all." 

"The summer after the War's conclusion was known in the United States as the Red Summer for its massive wave of violence nationwide, as white mobs looked to restore the racial orders." "His [Stovall's] history of American and French racial politics outside of their domestic sphere is commendable, making these empires accountable for their total domains of control and influence , including their oft-ignored colonial endeavors and effects on global politics."

#Alyssa Battistonic, "Diminishing Returns," The Nation, 5. 17 - 24.2021. - "Yet it has forced many liberals to fiercely reckon with the features of capitalism that leftists have long lamented: the production of vast poverty amid obscene wealth, the consequence of economic powers, and the proliferation of crisis that disrupt the system's promised stability, and undermines human health and happiness." "For Milanonic [Branko, author of 'The Future of the System That Rules the World' (Harvard University)], the study of contemporary capitalism means recognizing internal differences within a unitary system. He identifies two main types: The meritocratic 'liberal capitalism of the West,' and the state-led 'political capitalism of China' and a number of other countries, in which a small elite has managed to entrench its position, even though equality of opportunity is ostensibly the norm." 

"Individual people who adopt lives of greater leisure will find themselves falling behind their hard-working peers, while nations that attempt to set shorter work weeks will find themselves overtaken economically, to the point that the citizens of richer nations will buy the very land out from under them. Yet it completely misunderstands the ecological problem we face today: not that we will run out of raw materials, but rather, that we will destroy the ecological functions that keep the planet habitable." "It is folly to think that one can reform capitalism without considering the changes reshaping the earth itself." 

#Esther Honig, "A Life," The Nation, 5. 17 - 24.2021. - "From November until late April, between 8,000 and 10,000 people, according to one estimate, cross the border daily, spending seven hours or more traveling from their homes in Mexico to work in Yuma's fields." "These commuters make up around a quarter of the estimated 38,000 farmworkers who shoulder Yuma County's $3 billion agricultural industry." 

"A study last year by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that farmworkers in the Salinas Valley, one of the nation's leading agricultural regions, had more than twice the infection [rate for the coronavirus], compared with the state population." "Last year, there were more than 213,000 H-2A workers, mostly from Mexico. Around 6,500 were sent to Yuma County... That's still a sliver of the estimated full-time farmworkers in the Valley, but in the past 14years, the number of jobs filled by H-2A visa holders has increased fivefold." 

ADDENDUMS:

*Talia Lavin, "Crowdfunding Hate in the Name  of Christ," The Nation, 4. 19 - 26.2021. - "The inclusion of some of the infamous figures on the alt-right creates a striking juxtaposition: evangelical Christians, who number in the millions in the United States, alongside fringe extremists -- white nationalist ideologies of the type that President Biden called 'demented' during a CNN townhall in February."

*Jeet Heer, The Nation, 4. 19 - 26.2021. - "The Republican fearmongering that Dr. Seuss being canceled is deeply cynical and dishonest. It also prevents the mature conversation that we need to have about racism in classic children's literature. "I think it's important to have a historical record of how commonplace and accepted racism was -- and the ways racialized groups responded to being stereotyped."

*Racism in medicine," TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "It is past time for the world's leading medical journals to name racism, publish evidence on how racism harms health, and articulatee how dismantling racism can prevent health inequities." 

*"Fight cancer with data," TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "For too long, electronic health records have been health system centric, making it difficult for patients, doctors, and researchers to track an individual patients' data over time, and across systems." "Better data sharing, and use of real-world evidence can lay the foundation for similar progress on other diseases, especially complex chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes." 

*Alexandra Schwartz, "In Good Faith," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "The term 'Ultra-Orthodox,' which many of the people whom it describes find to be pejorative, emerged some hundred years ago to distinguish between Jews who held to traditional customs, and those of a new sect, the Modern Orthodox, who strove to reconcile the demands of religion with the mores of secular life." 

The Age of Consent; Karl Marx's Focus; GOP Weaponizing Misinformation; and Some More

 #Jill Lepore, "The Age of Consent," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "The Dutch, the Portuguese, and the English offset the cost of arms and men by buying and selling and exploiting the labor of -- stealing the lives of -- African men, women, and children. [Linda] Colley, a historian at Princeton, points out that nine of the first ten Federalist Papers concern the dangers of war and two more concern insurrection. Thirty of the fifty-five delegates had fought in the war for independence." "Wars make states make constitutions; states print constitutions; constitutions guarantee freedom of the press.  In the nearly six hundred constitutions written between 1776 and about 1850, the right most frequently asserted -- more often than freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly -- was freedom of the press." 

"Before constitutions were written, women had informal rights in all sorts of places; constitutions explicitly excluded them, not least because a constitution, in Colley's formulation, is a bargain struck between a state and its men, who made sacrifices to the state as taxpayers and soldiers, which were different from the sacrifices women made in wartime." "The problem, in the United States, is that it is extremely difficult to amend the Constitution." "The system of government put in place by the Constitution is broken in all sorts of ways, subject to forms of corruption, political decay, and anti-democracy measures that include gerrymandering, the filibuster, campaign spending, and the cap on the size of the House of Representatives." Historically, American state constitutions have been amended over 7,500 times, amounting to an average of 150 amendments per state." 

#Buce Dobbens, "Degrees of Emancipation," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "In his [Avineri's view, [Karl] Marx was inspired by the desperation of the 19th century working class, which cried out for immediate revolutionary change,   more then by the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and justice, whose realization might be seen as following a less pressured timetable." "For Shlomo Avineri, author of 'Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution,' "the jarring experience inspired both Marx's commitment to an egalitarian universalism, and his skepticism as to whether liberalism could deliver on that commitment." 

#David Treuer, "How to Kill a Hydra," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "But there are more than 20 petroleum pipelines projects (and some 22 national gas pipelines) currently under construction in the United States, crisscrossing the country, threatening land and water." "The forgoing crisis was largely the fault of the US government's gutting of the Glass-Steagall Act, and its unwillingness to regulate a predatory market full of bundled subprime mortgages, among other toxic assets."

"The struggle -- than as now -- is an older and bigger struggle between the common good and corporate profit, between the harms the US government has so long inflicted, and the values it professes." "The embrace of conspiratorial narratives has been particularly pronounced in GOP organizations." Treuer calls on all "American news organizations -- including TV, radio, and Social Media outlets -- to investigate, acknowledge, apologize, and make amends for their role in disseminating racist ideas and profiting from racist violence."  

#Zoe Carpenter, "Going Viral," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "The GOP remains eager    to weaponize misinformation, not only to win elections but also to advance its policy agenda." "One  outcome of unplugging Trump and other right-wing influences has been a surge of interest in those   alternative social media platforms, where more dangerous echo chambers can form and, in encrypted spaces. become more difficult to monitor." 

"For now, the reforms at Facebook and other companies remain largely superficial. The platforms are still based on algorithms that reward outrageous content and are still financed via the collection and sale of user data." "According to Media Matters, Fox News pushed the idea of a stolen election nearly 800 times in the two weeks after declaring Biden the winner." "The far-right media ecosystem has become so powerful in part because there's no downside to lying."

#Alisa Solomon, "Theater Under Covid," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "A Brookings Institution analysis published over the summer estimated that the performing and fine arts industry had by that point --four months into the pandemic -- lost 1.4 million jobs and $42.5 billion in sales. And as a February, 'accountability report' states, more than 100 institutions have been taking steps toward 'naming and addressing the ten of white supremacy ingrained in our culture.' "

"According to the most recent surveys, more than 70 percent of writers whose work is produced on US stages are white men; 23 percent of acting contracts go to performers of color; 85 percent of directors at  New York theater nonprofits are white -- and on Broadway, 94 percent."

Police Crime Immunity, and Climate Change Horrors

#Janell Ross, "A cry from the heart," TIME, May10/May 17, 2021. - "They had for the first time in Minneapolis history, convicted a white police officer of murdering a Black man while on duty." "To Black people inside and outside the Minneapolis balloon, a conviction in the death of one Black man is unlikely to tip the scales, to make anyone feel that police accountability and equal justice can now be counted upon." (Police use of force, someone of Chauvin's expert witnesses tried to tell jurors they were not seeing in the video is, one 2019 study found, the sixth most common cause of death for young Black men.)"

#Josiah Bates, "Beyond the verdict," TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "From 2013 to 2020, according to the Mapping Police Violence project, fewer than 20% of police killings resulted in criminal charges  against the officer involved; convictions were even more unusual." "As Joseph Margulies, a criminal-justice professor at Cornell University, points out: 'The beginning of the real reforms is to shrink the blue footprint so that the police respond only to those cases that unambiguously demand an armed, uniformed officer.' " " 'What we've consistently asked for and demanded was divestment... from policing, and investment in our communities,' Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an activist with the Movement for Black Lives, says.' " 

#Aryn Baker/Kampi Yo Smaki, "Deep Waters," TIME, April 26/May3, 2021. - "Over the past decade, an unprecedented increase in annual rainfall -- widely attributed to climate change -- has raised the lake [Lake Baringo] by 40 feet (12 m), inundating nearly 22,000 acres and destroying homes." "Some 24 million people -- more than three times the number fleeing armed conflict -- are displaced each year by ecological disasters, such as floods, drought, hurricanes, heat waves, and rising sea levels. according to an October analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a global think thank headquartered in Sydney." 

"There comes a point where no amount of infrastructure can hold back the sea, bring back the seasonal rains or cool the global climate." "A 2018 study published in the University of Chicago's 'Journal of the Association of Environmental  and Resource Economists', predict that climate change will push 1 in 12 Southern and Midwestern residents of the U.S. to move to less affected areas in the Northeast and Northwest over the next 45 years." 

"The Green Climate Fund, as it is known, is the world's largest fund dedicated to addressing climate change, but so far, only 20% of global conditions have gone toward adaptation, with the rest going to greenhouse-gas-reduction projects -- despite a stated goal of 50-50 allocation." "Sub-Saharan Africa is already one of  the fastest urbanizing regions, with around 450 million city dwellers." 

#Justin Worland, "Climate's home front," TIME, April 26/May 3, 2021. - "Annual flood days in the city [suburban Charleston, S.C.] increased 750% from 1980 to 2020, according to data from the National Weather Service, and there are telltale signs all over. In wealthier neighborhoods, historic houses are discretely being elevated at costs that can run to several hundred thousand dollars." "Estimates are that flooding alone already results in $20 billion in property losses annually, and that this figure will grow to more than $30 billion in 30 years. A report from reinsurer Suise Re found that last year, extreme weather caused a total of $105 billion insured losses in North America." 'Last year, a report from Freddie Mac has found that homes in flood-affected parts of Houston sold for 3.1% less than those in other parts of the area, post-Harvey." 

#Aneal Ahmed, "Robert Bullard Isn't Done Yet," The Nation, 5 - 17 - 24.2021. - "In 1992, then Senator Al Gore and Representative John  Lewis introduced the Environmental Justice Act, which would have mandated that the EPA track environmental justice communities --those that have experienced a disproportionate pollution burden -- and maintain a list of the 100 areas most affected by pollution, while making the process of approving such sites in those communities more transparent." 

"There's also the issue of 'legacy pollution,' says Paul Mohai, a professor  at the University of Michigan, who has long worked with Bullard on environmental justice. Areas that have a toxic facility tend to attract more industrialization, concentrating the hazard in the same communities for decades on end." "To this day, low-income communities of color are significantly more likely to live near hazardous waste and air pollution. According to the most recent EPA data, Houston ranks in the 84th percentile when it comes to people of color living in proximity to hazardous waste nationwide. (A higher ranking indicates a higher exposure.)"  

Wealth Tax; Trans Youth; Pre-Kindergarten; and Epilepsy Funding

 #Daniel Markovits, "We need to tax wealth," TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "The  rich have too much money. We simply can't spend our way back to equality. Curing economic inequality requires redistribution and redistribution means taxes." 

"In one study, the least economically privileged fifth of contries experienced COVID-19 death rates of 67% higher than the most privileged fifth." "Meanwhile,  yearlong bull market -- triggered by the series of government rescues -- has added roughly $4.8 trillion of wealth to the richest 1% of American households."

"A onetime tax starting at 50% on the richest 5% of households, that is, on wealth in excess of $2.5 million." "The richest 5 % of American households own two-thirds of the country's total wealth, much of it in forms (publicly traded securities, real estate property) for which data on valuations already exists." "Extreme wealth inequality confronts the U.S. with a [severe] threat. Wealth taxes answer the threat."

#Rovse Bruner, "A wave of new bills threatens trans youth," TIME, April 26/May 3, 2021. - "HB 1570,which passed in Arkansas on April 6 after the lawmakers overrode a gubernatorial veto, is the first bill in the U.S. that effectively bars trans youth from transitioning." "Over 100 anti-trans bills in 33 states are bring considered in legislative sessions, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the highest number in any year on record."

"The CDC's latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released in 2019, estimated that about 20% of U.S. high schoolers identify as trans -- or roughly 300,000 trans across the country." "But at the national level, the Equality Act, which would amend the 1964's Civil Rights Act to include federal protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, still faces stiff opposition from Republicans in the U.S. Senate."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Childish Things," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Biden's proposals include one that would make pre-kindergarten programs for three- and four-year olds universally available." "One in every six children lives below the federal poverty level, which is an income of $27,501 for a family of four. For Black children, the rate is thirty per cent; for Latinx, twenty-four per cent, according to the Children's Defense Fund."

"Last month, the Court made it easier to sentence children to life without parole, meaning that they could die in prison." "That it is hard for Republicans to protest that, while they would like to do something for children, that something isn't in their plan. So they are left with indigenous attacks and warnings about socialism." 

"The challenge for the Biden Administration will be keeping the true reality of children's lives at the center of the fight. Superheroes aren't everywhere in Washington."

#Christine Kenneally, "Mind Machines," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "Today, at least two hundred thousand people worldwide, suffering from a wide range of conditions, live with a neural implant of some kind." "Although epilepsy affects more than fifty million of whom do not respond to medication, epilepsy research struggles to obtain funding. In the United States, multiple sclerosis, which affects an eighth of the number of people that epilepsy does, nonetheless attracts roughly five times more research money patient from the N.I.H."

"The suicide rate for people with epilepsy is between two and three times higher than it is in the rest of the population." "For the great majority of patients, deep brain stimulation is life-changing, but there were occasional reports of strange behavioral reactions." 

India's Medical Woes; the Wellness Industry; and the British N.H.S.

 #TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "On six of seven days beginning April 21, India set new global records for daily COVID-19 infections, repeatedly surpassing the 300,000 tally previously set by the U.S. It's total confirmed cases -- more than 18 million -- is second only to that of the U.S."

"India's health system is on the brink of collapse." "India's health care spending is a mere 3.5% of GDP, far lower than in countries ranging from the world's wealthiest like France (11.3%),and the U.K. (10%), to other emerging economies like Brazil (9.5%), and South Africa (8.3%)." "Only 9% of Indians have at least one vaccine dose..."

#Rani Ayyab, "Narendra Modi has left Indians...," TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "In rural India, where more than 66% of Indians live, many are skeptical of the vaccine, with misinformation circulating on social media and messaging services."

#Rachel Syme, "Feeling Better Now?" The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "One report estimated that the entire wellness industry is worth $4.5 trillion, with a growth rate of 6.4% year-over-year." "The desire for alternative forms of healing is nothing new. Given the bureaucracy of modern medicine, and many of the wellness trends that dominated the pastel, high-gloss Instragram  campaigns of the past decade -- turmeric lathes, sage burning -- were shaped directly from practices that indigenous, and non-Western cultures, have passed down for centuries."

"What distinguishes modern wellness, aside from its expansiveness, is its relentless focus on the self as the fount of all improvement." "Now the project is individual enhancement: poreless skin, pliant limbs, a micro-floral garden blooming inside your wild and precious gut." 

#Hannah Fry, "What Really Counts," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "The N.H.S. is a much loved, much mocked, and much neglected British institution, with all kinds of quirks and inefficiencies. At the same time it was notoriously difficult to get a doctor's appointment within a reasonable period; ailing people were often told they'd have to wait weeks for the next available opening."

"We might be interested in whether our children are getting a good education, but it's very hard to pin down exactly what we mean by 'good.' Instead, we tend to ask a related and easier question: How well do students perform when examined on some corpus of fact? And so we get the much lamented 'teach to the test' syndrome." "Even the tiniest fluctuations, invisible to science, can magnify overtime to yield a world of difference. Nature is built on unavoidable randomness, limiting what a data-driven view of reality can offer." "Even the best-performing algorithm over all could predict only twenty-three per cent of the variance in the children's grade-point average." "If complex models offer only incremental improvement to simple ones, we're back to the familiar question of what to count, and how to count it."

ADDENDUMS:

*Vera Bergegruen, "American Quandary," TIME, April 26/May 3, 2021. "At least two dozen Republican candidates who embrace the conspiracy ran for  congressional seats in 2020. "Over the course of the pandemic, the President retweeted QAnon-linked accounts more than 200 times, according to a tally kept by Media Matters for America, a liberal nonprofit group."

*Alex Ross, "New Stages," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Working musicians are reeling. Most American orchestral players have had to accept considerable pay cuts, and freelancers are in a desperate state, some of them being forced to give up on music entirely."

*Evan Osnos, "Unpacking the Court," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "After decades of careful centrism, Biden has proved to be more radical on policy than many Americans predicted. Yet, when it comes to the institutions of American democracy, his instinct is for restoration, not revolution."

Bird Navigation; Migrant Children; Reconciliation Truths; and More

#Kathryn Schultz, "Where the Wild Things Go," The NR, April 5, 2021. - "Salmon that leave their natal stream just months after hatching can return after years in the ocean, sometimes traveling nine hundred miles and gaining seven thousand feet in elevation to do so. Homing pigeons can return to their lofts from more than a thousand miles away, a navigational prowess that has been admired for ages." "To have a sense of direction , a given species might also need to have, among other faculties, something like a compass, a decent memory, the ability to keep track of time, and an information-rich awareness of it's environment." "True migration is the ability to reach a distant destination, without the aid of landmarks."  

"Some animals plainly do have such a map, or, as scientists call it, a map sense -- an awareness mysterious in origin, of where they are, compared with where they're going." "Subsequent experiments found that mature birds can be taken at least six thousand miles from their normal trajectory and still accurately reorient to their destination." 

"Ninety-nine per cent of Americans live someplace where light pollution has reduced, sometimes to just a handful, the number of visible stars in the night sky" "In the past fifty years, two-thirds of those wetlands have vanished, lost to reclamation" -- a word that suggests, Scott Weidensaul, author of 'A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds', bitterly but accurately, "humanity taking back something that had been stolen when in fact the opposite is true." "Species that rely on these wetlands are dwindling at rates of up to twenty-five per cent per year." 

"But the chief insight to be gained from how other animals make their way around the world is not their behavior but our own: the key finding we must learn to do now is not geographic but moral." 

#Jonthan Blitzer, "At the Border," The NR, April 5, 2021. - "There are currently some eighteen thousand unaccompanied migrant children in U.S. custody, including more than a thousand who remain in holding cells, as the government scrambles to find space to house them." "For much of March, about five hundred and fifty children have been arriving at the border every day." 

"Om average, it takes almost two and a half years to resolve an asylum claim, and there's now a backlog of 1.3 million pending cases, up from half a million under Obama. Trump sought to hide the asylum issue south of the border. Biden is paying a price for bringing it back into view. The question is whether he can withstand the political onslaught long enough to began to set things right."

#Peter Keating and Shawn Assael, "The Truth About Reconciliation," Mother Jones, May + June 2021. - "The Greenboro Commission ran into the problem that bedevils any reconciliation effort, and would surely hover over any national project today: Who gets to decide who apologizes, and for what?" "Critically, even as TRCs became standard international practice, there were hardly any ways to measure their effect on the places where they were supposed to bring about change. Even today, the transitional justice establishment is fuzzy about this." 

"A report issued by the organization [International Center for Transitional Justice] in January states that, while the transitional justice groups have developed some metrics to evaluate their work, 'information about the actual implementation of these measures is often incomplete or unreliable.' " "Many commissions appear to have had little, if any, impact on societal transportation" [James Gibson, a Washington University political scientist] has written. " 'It would not be terribly surprising to find that truth commissions more often fail than succeed.' "

#Mandy Oaklander, "PTSD. Addiction. Depression. Hope?" TIME, April 12/April 19, 2021. "Once dismissed as a fringe, counter-culture vice, psychedelics are rapidly approaching acceptance in mainstream medicine." "More Americans died from drug overdoses last year than ever before, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Weekly counts of drug overdoses were up to 45% higher in 2020 then in the same periods in 2019. according to research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in February." 

In a survey, about 80% said ibogaine eliminated or drastically reduced their withdrawal symptoms; half said their opiod cravings diminished; and 30% said that after ibogaine, they never used opiods again.

#Lisa Abend, "T.G.I.... Thursday?" TIME, April 12/April 19, 2021. - "Already, dozens of companies around the word -- as well as at least one municipal government --have trimmed a day from their weekly schedules. But Spain's pilot is on track to be the first national test." 

"In a study published in January in the 'Cambridge Journal of Economics', Louis Cardenas and Paloma Villanuva found that a five-hour reduction in work hours across Spain in 2017 would have created 560,000 jobs, raised salaries by 3.7%, and increased the GDP by 1.4%." "According to one European study, women spent an average of 62 hours a week caring for children, and 23 hours doing housework, while men devoted 36 and 15, respectively."

ADDENDUM:

*Camille Walsh, "Taxpayer Dollars." Mother Jones, May + June 2021. - "The taxpayer myth has deep roots, throughout history it has been intertwined  with the idea that all forms of resources from the government belong to white people, to do with as they please." "Black families were actually taxed disproportionately for a segregated school system, thanks to all-white school boards." 

Anti-Union Activities; Pandemic Economic Effects; and Public Transit Effects

 I. Anti-Union Activities by the Numbers

41.5% - Union election campaigns in which US employers were charged with violating federal law. 

29.3% - Union  election campaigns in which employers were charged with illegally disciplining workers for supporting a union.

$340m - Amount spent by US employers each year on anti-union consultants.

$8b - Amount lost to wage theft each year by 2.4 million US workers.

4x - How much more likely a noncitizen Latina if to experience minimum wage violations than a white male citizen.

13.2% - How much more a unionized worker earns, on average, than a non-unionized peer.

II. Some Pandemic Facts

$30m - In the first three months of 2020, the combined wealth of North Americans worth dipped 29% -- and then bounced back by August.

$1.3t - The amount by which in the pandemic's first year, the net worth of the 660 richest Americans increased by 44%.

82m - During the first year of the pandemic, the number of people who filed for unemployment benefits, and more than 100k businesses shut down permanently. 

1 in 5 - In February 2021, the ratio of renters who were behind on rent, and in 2020, 45m Americans experienced food insecurity -- 10 million more than in 2019.

28% - The percentage by which in 2020, the unemployment rate for people making less than $27,000 tumbled. For those making more than $60,000, it dropped less than 2%.

7.9m - The number of workers earning less than $14 per hour lost their jobs, even though average wages grew by nearly 7% last year.

76% - The percentage of lower-income workers say their work can't be done from home. Only 44% of upper-income workers say the same.

18m - The number of people lifted out of poverty by the CARES Act in April 2020, but  14 million fell back in after its unemployment benefits dried up.

10% - The percentage by which Americans' personal income jumped in January -- almost entirely due to the second round of stimulus. 

The Falling Minimum Wage - The real minimum wage was $10 in 1980. It fell to $7.25 in 2020. If it had increased by the same real value as it did for the top 1% of incomes, it would have been about $28 in 2020.

A Tale of Two Tax Cuts - Trump's 2017 tax bill gave the top-earning 0.1% of families a $193,000 tax cut. The March relief bill signed by President Biden gives families with kids making $25,000 or less an average cut of almost $7,700. (Source: Mother Jones, May + June 2021.)

III. Asset Bubble

Share of National Income - Although the share were less than 5% apart in 1980, the bottom 50% share dropped to 10% in 2020, while the top 1% share increased to 20% in 2020.

Share of Household Wealth - The share of the top 1% increased from $5m in 1980 to $20m in 2020. The top 10% went from near zero to about $4m in 2020. The percentage for all increased very slightly from zero in the 40 years. (Source: Mother Jones, May + June 2020.)

IV. Global Problem

Estimated falls in demand for cities' public transit systems in March 2021, compared with prepandemic levels. Stockholm -31%; Toronto -62%; Barcelona -24%; Milan -52%; Hong Kong -9%; Paris -51%; Chicago -49%; San Francisco -67%; Miami -1%. Singapore actually increased by 13%. (Source: TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021.)