Commentary & Opinion

There is an emerging consensus that life after the COVID-19 pandemic – if there ever will be such a thing – will not look exactly like life before the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor should it. And I’m not only referring to changes that will be made in direct response to the spreading of disease, or an enhanced awareness of viral and bacterial transmission and efforts that can, and will, be taken to minimize the spread of disease.

The Trump Administration and some of the companies that run large meat-packing plants are behaving reprehensibly towards their workers. When hot spot outbreaks of COVID-19 began to occur at many meat-packing plants, some of them closed down temporarily. As more and more workers got sick, some started to stay home out of fear for their own health. The result was a decline in production. It got so bad, that farmers – particularly those that raised pigs for slaughter – found no place to sell their maturing products.

Will the coronavirus pandemic take the American election system’s integrity as another casualty?

As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. The fact that Trump has handled the virus badly, stupidly, doesn’t mean that everything out of his mouth is wrong even if he says it for all the wrong reasons and without any understanding of the impact.

The words "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" have long been associated with U.S. Postal Service’s workers.  The Postal Service has its historical roots in the 1775 Second Continental Congress and its first postmaster general was Benjamin Franklin.  It is one of the few government agencies explicitly referred to in the U.S. Constitution.

The reopening of America is a complex calculation, comprised of the need for a recovering economy and a significant health risk.  There has been little clear information about a number of factors that are troubling to me and I hope they may be of at least concern to you.  With 30 million plus people out of work as the enhanced unemployment expires, what will the citizens be able to pay for, obviously, it will be significantly diminished as compared to their recent consumer history.  Will businesses that open have enough customers to survive, or will these business owners deplete their last remaining resources to open and then find that they are in a worse economic position a few weeks into this process?  Given the fact that no state has met the criteria for testing, we will only know the results- more, less cases or the same.  The latter would be an interesting result.  Will the public simply stay away in large numbers, will there be a mix of all of these things occurring simultaneously throughout the country with different outcomes in regions, counties, cities, etc.? 

There are two kinds of people during a pandemic: Those who take the opportunity to read “The Plague” by Albert Camus, and those who don’t. I, like thousands if not millions of others, am in the first category. I’ve always been a fan of Camus, but I had never read “The Plague,” which, for those who don’t know, is a novel about how a handful of residents in the French Algerian city of Oran respond to the bubonic plague. Published in 1947, and wholly a work of imagination – there was neither a plague in Oran in the 20th century nor did Camus ever live through a plague or pandemic -- it garnered Camus the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later.

When the clock struck eight on the night of Sunday, March 22, our economy was put on “pause.”  In order to try to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus Governor Andrew Cuomo had no choice but to issue an executive order putting most of the state on lockdown.

On the one hand - skyrocketing unemployment and surging demand for emergency food assistance from Food Banks, pantries and soup kitchens. On the other hand - farms dumping milk, smashing eggs, plowing vegetables into the ground and farms closing. How can this be?

Americans like to say we’re no. 1, we’re the greatest, the world’s only superpower. So this is for the America greatsters. Not if we rest on our laurels, we’re not. Our genes came from all over the world. The science that’s been our glory, had many stages of development off our shores. The world doesn’t sit still waiting for the U.S. to create the next big thing. Several Asian countries have nuclear weapons. Several are challenging our digital developments, invading our privacy and platforms in ways that threaten the utility of what gets designed here.

The Mohawk people, one of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, lived in northern New York near where I live, and many still do. Their leaders had a rule that every decision must be made considering its effects seven generations in the future.

In March, the Legislature granted Governor Cuomo unprecedented power to make laws.  No New York Legislature had ever granted its executive the power to change and make new laws without legislative consent. 

POTUS and the head of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Powell, are now proposing negative interest rates which means, in effect, Banks would be paying customers to borrow.  It also means that if you have a positive checking or savings balance you may be being charged that negative interest rate as well to maintain your money in the Bank.  This  nuance of negative interest rates  is unlikely to be disclosed by the Trump administration as POTUS tries to pass off the blame for the result on the Banks.  This is clearly complex economic theory, but this theory does have claws that might scratch you.

At a press conference this past weekend, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot issued a stern warning to those gathering for social events in the city: “"We will take you to jail, period."

This virus has been bringing out how much we depend on each other, rich and poor, black and white, men and women, immigrant and native. We used to talk about brotherhood and I’ve never found a good substitute for the vision of mutual concern and respect that people in my generation meant by brotherhood. Now two people who shouldn’t be named claim that Blue states don’t deserve help though we do a lot for the rest of the country, through our taxes, the business we generate and by repeatedly jumping to the aid of people all over this country when they suffer from natural disasters. What they’re really saying is that they feel no responsibility for those among us who need help, especially if they don’t have the skin color and ancestry that they honor.

New York State has flattened the curve of new coronavirus infections. Entering the final week of April, the daily totals of new hospitalizations and deaths have significantly declined.  Shutdowns of “non-essential” economic activity and social distancing are having the desired effect by reducing the spread of the virus, though those same shutdowns are wreaking havoc on both private and public sector finances. 

As the nation struggles to deal with the COVID pandemic, it's clear that "essential workers" are carrying the load on behalf of the rest of us.  Our health care workers and first responders often have to deal with incredibly sick and contagious people; others considered "essential" have to continue to go to work to keep our transit systems running, lights on and grocery store shelves stocked, even if it means potential life-threatening exposure.  Many of us continue to work, but from the relative safety of our residences.

Commentator Bill Owens shares his thoughts on the headlines of the past week. 

During this COVID-19 era there’s time, for some, to catch up on books. One of the unread books [ref.1] I took from my shelf recently is about the present Dalai Lama – which takes us to Tibet.

In a recent Commentary, I argued that the Democrats in Congress needed to stand strong against Republican efforts, led by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, to push through bills that bailed out the giant corporations leaving ordinary people to fend for themselves.   To a certain extent, they were able (by standing strong in the Senate) to force compromises on the last two bills passed. 

I’ve always believed in the wisdom and power of positive pessimism. Over the years, I have adopted it as something of a creed, a belief system, a world view, and a healthy approach to life. Plan for the worst and you will never be disappointed. If all hell breaks loose, you have the satisfaction of having been proven right, of having had the foresight and wisdom to correctly predict the outcome. If things go better than you expect, you will be relieved at the very least, or even possibly made happy that the disaster for which you had planned was averted.

Last Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.  For five decades, the world has marked Earth Day as a time to reflect on the state of the environment and to debate how best to improve the only habitat we have.

There’s no good time to be stingy about public health. It costs more, and it kills our own.

Oil prices plummeted on Monday to zero and below. The industry was in free-fall and panic. Amongst the causes of this, was the drop in gas usage and pushed further down by the flooding of the market with Saudi Arabian and Russian oil production, the level of supply is so high that there is essentially no future’s market for oil. That stabilized somewhat as the week wore on. What is really interesting is the two countries involved, Saudi Arabia and Russia are purportedly friends of Mr. Trump. Looks to me like their friends who want to destabilize our economy and potentially the world economy for who knows what nefarious reason.