Chris Hedges's Blog, page 6

Ruthless Senate GOP Blocks Emergency Paid Sick Leave Bill

Critics lambasted Senate Republicans on Wednesday after Sen. Lamar Alexander blocked a vote on an emergency paid sick leave bill hours after the World Health Organization officially declared the global coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) moved to speed the proposal through the legislative process so senators could quickly vote to guarantee all American workers 14 days of paid sick leave in the event of a public health emergency.

“For many of our workers―restaurant workers, truck drivers, service industry workers―they may not have an option to take a day off without losing their pay or losing their job,” Murray said. “That’s not a choice we should be asking anyone to make in the United States in the 21st century.”

Claiming the bill would be an “expensive” and burdensome mandate for employers, Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, blocked the Senate from voting on the bill, saying it must be voted on first by the GOP-controlled Health Committee.

“This is unconscionable. Every last one of them should lose their jobs,” said Alex Wall of CAP Action, of the Republican senators.

Murray, who sponsored the Senate bill, had argued that “may not have an option to take a day off without losing their pay or losing their job” if they become ill or if their children’s schools close as a precautionary measure.

“That’s not a choice we should be asking anyone to make in the United States in the 21st century,” she said.

As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, public health experts are urging workplaces to adopt flexible sick leave policies in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 1,100 people in the U.S. so far. Allowing sick people to stay quarantined for at least 14 days could keep the American health system from becoming overloaded, they say.

The Democrats’ plan fell far short of sick leave policies in many other industrialized nations. In the U.S., more than a quarter of workers aren’t granted any paid sick leave from their employers.

Journalist David Dayen echoed Wall’s sentiment that Senate Republicans must face consequences for blocking the bill.

“This is really bad, but also the ads write themselves, so perhaps not the end of the story,” he tweeted.

Jacobin columnist Abi Wilkinson wrote on social media that senators, many of whom are old enough to be vulnerable to the coronavirus, are accustomed to being “cushioned from the impact of their decisions” and have likely not considered that they may interact with service industry workers who will be forced to work even when sick.

“A bunch of septuagenarians with Cadillac health care plans just told the working class to keep toiling through a pandemic even if it kills them,” writer Brian Merchant added.

WHO Declares That Virus Crisis Is Now a Pandemic

GENEVA — Expressing alarm both about mounting infections and inadequate government responses, the World Health Organization declared Wednesday that the global coronavirus crisis is now a pandemic but added that it’s not too late for countries to act.

By reversing course and using the charged word “pandemic” that it had previously shied away from, the U.N. health agency sought to shock lethargic countries into pulling out all the stops.

“We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO chief.

“All countries can still change the course of this pandemic. If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilize their people in the response,” he said. “We are deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction.”

The WHO said Iran and Italy are the new front lines of the battle against the virus that started in China.

“They’re suffering but I guarantee you other countries will be in that situation soon,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief.

He added that the agency thought long and hard about labeling the crisis a pandemic — meaning a new virus causing sustained outbreaks in multiple regions of the world.

The risk of employing the term, Ryan said, is “if people use it as an excuse to give up.”

But the likely benefits are “potentially of galvanizing the world to fight.”

Underscoring the mounting challenge: Italy’s cases soared again, to 12,462 infections and 827 deaths — both numbers second only to China.

Italy weighed imposing even tighter restrictions on daily life and announced billions in financial relief Wednesday to cushion economic shocks from the coronavirus, its latest efforts to adjust to the fast-evolving crisis that silenced the usually bustling heart of the Catholic faith, St. Peter’s Square.

In Iran, by far the hardest-hit country in the Middle East, the senior vice president and two other Cabinet ministers were reported to have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. Iran reported another jump in deaths, by 62 to 354 — behind only China and Italy.

In Italy, Premier Giuseppe Conte said he would consider requests from Lombardy, Italy’s hardest-hit region, to toughen the already extraordinary anti-virus lockdown that was extended nationwide Tuesday. Lombardy wants to shut down nonessential businesses and reduce public transportation.

These measures would be on top of travel and social restrictions that imposed an eerie hush on cities and towns across the country. Police enforced rules that customers stay 1 meter (3 feet) apart and ensured that businesses closed by 6 p.m.

Milan shopkeeper Claudia Sabbatini said she favored the stricter measures. Rather than risk customers possibly infecting each other in her children’s clothing store, she closed it.

“I cannot have people standing at a distance. Children must try on the clothes. We have to know if they will fit,’’ she said.

But Conte said fighting the outbreak must not come at the expense of civil liberties. His caution suggested that Italy is unlikely to adopt the draconian quarantine measures that helped China push down new infections from thousands per day to a trickle now and allowed its manufacturers to restart production lines.

China’s new worry is that the coronavirus could re-enter from abroad. Beijing’s city government announced that all overseas visitors will be quarantined for 14 days. Of 24 new cases that China reported Wednesday, five arrived from Italy and one from the United States. China has had over 81,000 virus infections and over 3,000 deaths.

For most, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for a few, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illnesses, including pneumonia. More than 121,000 people have been infected worldwide and over 4,300 have died.

But the vast majority of people recover. According to the WHO, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

In the Mideast, the vast majority of the nearly 10,000 cases are in Iran or involve people who traveled there. Iran announced another increase in cases Wednesday to 9,000. Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency said they include Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri. Fars said Iran’s ministers for cultural heritage, handcrafts and tourism, and for industry, mines and business were also infected.

Cases in Qatar jumped from 24 to 262. Kuwait announced a two-week shutdown of the country.

For the global economy, virus repercussions were profound, with increasing concerns of wealth- and job-wrecking recessions. U.S. stocks in afternoon trading wiped more than all the gains from a huge rally a day earlier as Wall Street continues to reel from worries about the coronavirus.

Wall Street’s plunge followed a steep decline by markets across Asia, where governments there and elsewhere have announced billions of dollars in stimulus funds, including packages revealed in Japan on Tuesday and Australia on Wednesday.

Italy’s government announced Wednesday it was dedicating 25 billion euros (nearly $28 billion) to boost anti-virus efforts and soften economic blows, including delaying tax and mortgage payments by families and businesses.

Britain’s government announced a 30 billion-pound ($39 billion) economic stimulus package and the Bank of England slashed its key interest rate by half a percentage point to 0.25%.

Normal life was increasingly upended.

With police barring access to St. Peter’s Square, emptying it of tens of thousands of people who usually come on Wednesdays for the weekly papal address, Pope Francis live-streamed prayers from the privacy of his Vatican library.

In France, the government’s weekly Cabinet meeting was moved to a bigger room so President Emmanuel Macron and his ministers could sit at least 1 meter (more than 3 feet) apart.

Athletes who usually thrive on crowds grew increasingly wary of them. Spanish soccer club Getafe said it wouldn’t travel to Italy to play Inter Milan, preferring to forfeit their Europa League match rather than risk infections.

Olympic champion skier Mikaela Shiffrin said she would be limiting contact with fans and fellow competitors, tweeting that “this means no selfies, autographs, hugs, high fives, handshakes or kiss greetings.”

In the U.S., the caseload passed 1,000, and outbreaks on both sides of the country stirred alarm.

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are vying to take on President Donald Trump in the presidential election, abruptly canceled rallies Tuesday and left open the possibility that future campaign events could be impacted. Trump’s campaign insisted it would proceed as normal, although Vice President Mike Pence conceded future rallies would be evaluated “on a day to day basis.”

In Europe, Spain’s number of cases surged Wednesday past the 2,000 mark and Belgium, Bulgaria, Sweden, Albania and Ireland all announced their first virus-related deaths.

“If you want to be blunt, Europe is the new China,” said Robert Redfield, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Also sounding the alarm at a Congressional hearing in Washington was Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Bottom line, it’s going to get worse,” he said.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that if the virus is not halted by vaccines and cures, up to 70% of the country’s 83 million people could ultimately become infected, citing estimates that epidemiologists have been putting forward for several weeks.

Germany has some 1,300 confirmed infections and Merkel’s comments fit a pattern of government officials using sobering warnings to convince people to protect themselves, most notably by washing their hands and not gathering in large numbers.

“It’s terrifying,” said Silvana Gomez, a student at Harvard University, where undergraduates were told to leave campus by Sunday. “I’m definitely very scared right now about what the next couple days, the next couple weeks look like.”

___

Leicester reported from Paris, Cheng reported from London. Also contributing were Colleen Barry in Soave, Italy; Nicole Winfield in Rome; Sylvie Corbet in Paris; Geir Moulson in Berlin; Pan Pylas in London; LLazar Semini in Tirana, Albania; Matt Sedensky in Bangkok; Joe McDonald and Ken Moritsugu in Beijing; Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo; Tales Azzoni in Madrid and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea.

Biden Wins Key State of Michigan, 3 More in Serious Blow to Sanders

WASHINGTON — Joe Biden decisively won Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary, seizing a key battleground state that helped propel Bernie Sanders’ insurgent candidacy four years ago. The former vice president’s victory there, as well as in Missouri, Mississippi and Idaho, dealt a serious blow to Sanders and substantially widened Biden’s path to the nomination.

Biden again showed strength Tuesday with working-class voters and African Americans, who are vital to winning the Democratic nomination.

Sanders won North Dakota and awaited results from Washington state. Washington’s primary was too early to call, and because all votes there are cast by mail or by dropping them off in a ballot box, many ballots were marked for candidates who have since dropped out of the race.

The six-state contest Tuesday marked the first time voters weighed in on the primary since it effectively narrowed to a two-person race between Sanders and Biden. And the first four states on Tuesday went to Biden, a dramatic reversal for a campaign that appeared on the brink of collapse just two weeks ago. Now it is Sanders, whose candidacy was ascendant so recently, who must contemplate a path forward.

Addressing supporters in Philadelphia, Biden noted that many had “declared that this candidacy was dead” only days ago, but “now we’re very much alive.” He also asked Sanders supporters to back him going forward.

“We need you, we want you, and there’s a place in our campaign for each of you. I want to thank Bernie Sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy and their passion,” Biden said. “We share a common goal, and together we’ll beat Donald Trump.”

It marked a high point for the former vice president’s staff. They sipped beer and broke into an impromptu dance party after his speech, which was held close to his Philadelphia headquarters.

Even as the contours of the race came into shape, however, new uncertainty was sparked by fears of the spreading coronavirus. Both candidates abruptly canceled rallies in Ohio that were scheduled for Tuesday night. That set the stage for Biden’s remarks in Philadelphia, while Sanders flew home to Vermont and didn’t plan to address the public.

Sanders’ campaign also said all future events would be decided on a case-by-case basis given public health concerns, while Biden called off a scheduled upcoming Florida stop. Still, the former vice president said Tuesday night that he’d be announcing plans to combat the coronavirus later this week.

The Democratic National Committee also said that Sunday’s debate between Sanders and Biden would be conducted without an audience.

Among former White House hopefuls and leaders of powerful liberal groups, however, Biden’s momentum is now undeniable.

Bradley Beychok, president and co-founder of American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal super PAC, said his group “will be ALL IN to elect @JoeBiden as our next president.” The organization is spending millions of dollars trying to win over people who backed President Donald Trump in key states in 2016.

Guy Cecil, chairman of the flagship Democratic outside political organization Priorities USA, tweeted: “The math is now clear. Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee for President and @prioritiesUSA is going to do everything we can to help him defeat Donald Trump in November.”

There were other major warning signs for Sanders on Tuesday. He again struggled to win support from black voters. About 70% of Mississippi’s Democratic primary voters were African American, and 86% of them supported Biden, according to an AP VoteCast survey of the electorate.

After Sanders upset Hillary Clinton in Michigan four years ago, his loss there Tuesday was particularly sobering. It undermined his argument that he could appeal to working-class voters and that he could expand the electorate with new young voters.

One of the few bright notes for Sanders was his strength among young voters, but even that has a downside because they didn’t turn out enough to keep him competitive. Sanders won 72% of those under 30 in Missouri and 65% in Michigan, according to AP VoteCast. The senator was also about even with Biden among voters ages 30 to 44.

“There’s no sugarcoating it. Tonight’s a tough night,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of Sanders’ highest-profile supporters, said on Instagram. “Tonight’s a tough night for the movement overall. Tonight’s a tough night electorally.”

Another top Sanders backer, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, tweeted: “Yes we are a family, united in restoring our democracy and committed to defeating Trump, but that doesn’t mean we should stop fighting for the candidate that best represents our policy priorities in this Primary.”

According to an Associated Press analysis, Biden picked up at least 177 new delegates in Tuesday’s voting while Sanders got 111.

Although six states voted, Michigan, with its 125 delegates, got most of the attention. Trump won the state by only 10,704 votes during the general election, his closest margin of victory among Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those states gave Trump the narrow edge in the 2016 Electoral College after Clinton won the popular vote.

Sanders has vowed not to drop out regardless of Tuesday’s results and frequently railed against the “Democratic establishment” that he says has aligned against him.

In addition to the powerful groups now siding with Biden, the former vice president has picked up the endorsements of many of his former presidential rivals, including Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker and, as of Tuesday, entrepreneur Andrew Yang. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, sometimes mentioned as a possible vice presidential choice, also endorsed Biden and campaigned with him ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

Biden also gave a nod to all his former competitors, saying, “We’re bringing this party together.”

“That’s what we have to do,” he said.

Not every Democrat was lining up behind Biden, though. Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, who represents a sprawling district from the college town of Ann Arbor to the Detroit suburbs, said Tuesday that she’s staying neutral.

“I remember what it was like four years ago and the vitriol and the anger, the people mad at each other the whole election cycle. We can’t afford that,” Dingell said. “It’s about getting out and voting in November.”

Like Sanders, Biden has no public events scheduled for Wednesday. And though he’s celebrating a growing delegate lead, he’s still confronting voters who question his positions, which include a gun control plan that reinstates an assault weapons ban and includes a voluntary buyback program for assault weapons.

That issue was at the center of a testy exchange with a worker while Biden was rallying earlier Tuesday in Detroit. The man accused him of “actively trying to end our Second Amendment right.” Biden shot back, “You’re full of shit,” but went on to say that while he supports the Second Amendment, “Do you need 100 rounds?”

___

Associated Press writers Mike Householder in Detroit and Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.

 

Weinstein Sentenced to 23 Years for Sexual Assaults

NEW YORK — Harvey Weinstein was sentenced Wednesday to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault, a sight the disgraced Hollywood mogul’s multitude of accusers thought they would never see.

Weinstein, who has been accused of violating scores of women, was convicted last month of raping a once-aspiring actress in a New York City hotel room in 2013 and forcibly performing oral sex on former TV and film production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in 2006. He faced a maximum of 29 years in prison.

Both women confronting Weinstein again in court Wednesday after their testimony helped seal his conviction at the landmark #MeToo trial.

“It takes a very special kind of evil to exploit connections to leverage rape,” said the 2013 rape accuser.

“Rape is not just one moment of penetration. It is forever,” added the woman, who recalled a moment during the trial when she left the witness stand in tears and then could be heard screaming from an adjacent room.

“The day my screams were heard from the witness room was the day my voice came back to its full power,” she said.

Asked later about her reaction after the sentence, she wiped her eyes, raised her arm and nodded her head.

The Associated Press has a policy of not naming people who have been sexually assaulted without their consent. It is withholding the rape accuser’s name because it is not clear whether she wishes to be identified.

Weinstein, who has maintained that any sexual activity was consensual, showed no visible reaction to the sentence. Beforehand, he broke his courtroom silence with a rambling plea for mercy in which he said his “empathy has grown” since his downfall.

He told the court he felt “remorse for this situation” but said he was perplexed by the case and the #MeToo climate in which it unfolded. “Thousands of men are losing due process. I’m worried about this country,” he said, arguing that men are being accused of “things that none of us understood.”

“I’m totally confused. I think men are confused about these issues,” he said in a calm but creaking voice, adding that he had fond memories of his accusers.

Looking back during the trial at emails they exchanged, he said, he thought they had a good friendship: “I had wonderful times with these people.”

The executive behind such Oscar-winning films as “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction” became Exhibit A for the #MeToo movement after years of whispers about his alleged behavior burst into public view in The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2017.

More than 90 women, including actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and Uma Thurman, eventually came forward to accuse Weinstein of sexual assault and sexual harassment. The takedown energized the #MeToo campaign of speaking up about sexual assault and holding perpetrators accountable.

One of Weinstein’s lawyers, Donna Rotunno, told the court he faced an uphill fight from the start of the trial, with media coverage of his allegations and the #MeToo movement making it impossible for him to get a truly fair shake.

“How can we deny the fact that what happened before we walked in here had an impact?” Rotunno asked.

Weinstein’s lawyers pleaded for leniency because of his age and frail health, and prosecutors, who said the man once celebrated as a titan of Hollywood deserved a harsh sentence that would account for allegations of wrongdoing dating back decades.

Weinstein was sentenced a week shy of his 68th birthday, and his lawyers argued that a lengthy prison term would, in effect, be a life sentence. They had sought a five-year sentence.

Weinstein used a walker throughout the trial and arrived at the courthouse Wednesday in wheelchair because of back problems from a car crash last summer. He has a condition that requires shots in his eyes and last week had a stent placed to unblock an artery.

The agency that runs New York’s state prisons said every inmate is evaluated to determine which facility meets his or her security, medical, mental health and other needs.

The New York case was the first criminal matter to arise from accusations of more than 90 women, including actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and Uma Thurman.

The Associated Press has a policy of not naming people who have been sexually assaulted without their consent. It is withholding the rape accuser’s name because it is not clear whether she wishes to be identified.

Weinstein was convicted on two counts: criminal sex act for the 2006 assault on the production assistant and rape in the third degree for a 2013 attack on another woman.

He was acquitted of the more serious charges against him of first-degree rape and two counts of predatory sexual assault.

Now that Weinstein has been sentenced, his lawyers can move forward with a promised appeal.

His legal team was upset with Burke’s handling of the case, from his inclusion of a juror who’d written a novel involving predatory older men to his rulings on evidence, witnesses and objections.

Just as jury selection was about to get under way in January, Weinstein was charged in California with raping a woman at a Los Angeles hotel on Feb. 18, 2013, after pushing his way inside her room, and sexually assaulting a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel suite the next night.

Weinstein could get up to 28 years in prison on charges of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force and sexual battery in the California case. Authorities have not said when he would go there to face those charges.

Three more sexual assault cases under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department and Beverly Hills’ police could mean that he’ll face additional charges. No details have been provided on these cases.

Trump’s 2020 Budget Reveals His Real Priorities

The 2020 presidential campaign is well underway, and it’s noisy. Candidates make promises, break promises, offer assurances, and spin the news constantly.

What’s one way to get a clear look at their priorities? In the case of a sitting president, by looking at their budget proposals. And when President Trump announced his $4.8 trillion budget recently, he made clear his top priority was continuing to plow more money into war, walls, and Wall Street — and less into everything else.

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“We’re going to have a very good budget with a very powerful military budget,” he said, “because we have no choice.”

This is simply false. Budgets are all about choices, and President Trump’s budget speaks volumes about the priorities and people he has chosen.

The Pentagon already has a higher budget than it did at the peak of the Vietnam War. Yet while tens of thousands of troops qualify for food stamps, half of every dollar the Pentagon receives goes to corporate contractors that siphon off more than $350 billion each year. That’s roughly twice the entire budget for taking care of our veterans.

Who else wins with this budget? Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose notorious treatment of immigrants and their children shocked the conscience of Americans. Under Trump’s plan, ICE’s budget would double by 2024.

Finally, Trump also chose to extend tax cuts that favor the wealthy at a further cost of $1.4 trillion over 10 years.

Who didn’t the president choose?

With his cuts to food stamps, housing, and afterschool programs, he didn’t choose the youth in Pacoima, California, where 1 out of 5 public school students are homeless, or the 39 million children who are poor or low-income across the nation.

With his cuts to student loan assistance, he didn’t choose the homeless students in Santa Cruz, California, who need to decide between doing research or finding a place to live, or the 45 million families who are saddled with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt.

With his cuts to health care and Medicaid, he didn’t choose Venus Greer from Selma, Alabama, who didn’t have access to Medicaid and died from preventable cancer complications, or the other 87 million Americans who are uninsured or underinsured.

WIth his cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, he didn’t choose the Apache Nation in Oak Flats, Arizona, who are fighting against Resolution Copper to prevent the desecration of their sacred lands. He didn’t choose the Applachians, Lousianans, or Ohio Valley residents who suffer sky-high cancer rates from industrial contamination, or the 9 million people who die premature deaths worldwide from pollution.

Because of his warmongering and militarism, he didn’t even choose the 20 veterans who commit suicide every day, or the thousands of young people who will enlist in the military this year because they have no other economic opportunity.

The choice that Trump has made for this country is not just for war, walls, and Wall Street. It is also a choice for massive poverty, systemic racism, the devastation of our planet, and an endless war on the poor at home and abroad.

Budgets are moral documents. They reflect our priorities, who we believe is deserving of our nation’s abundant resources, and what we choose to invest in for future generations.

The Poor People’s Campaign Moral Budget, by contrast, shows how we can invest instead in education, good jobs, social welfare, housing, health care, water, democracy, and peace — and in the process grow our economy, stave off the climate crisis, and make our society safer and more equitable.

Trump has made his choice. What will ours be?

The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia

Now that the Michigan Democratic primary is over and Joe Biden has been declared the winner, it’s time to read the handwriting on the political wall: Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president, and Bernie Sanders will be the runner-up once again come the party’s convention in July. Sanders might influence the party’s platform, but platforms are never binding for the nominee. Sanders has lost, and so have his many progressive supporters, myself included.

I am nothing if not a realist. The idea that Sanders might have become the Democratic candidate was always a fantasy, not unlike my youthful dreams of one day becoming an NFL quarterback. Even after Sanders’ triumph in the Nevada caucuses, I never thought the party establishment would ever allow a socialist — even a mild social democratic one, such as Sanders — to head its ticket.

Funded by wealthy donors, run by Beltway insiders and aided and abetted by a corporate media dedicated to promoting the notion that Sanders was “unelectable,” the Democratic Party never welcomed Sanders as a legitimate contender. Not in 2016 and not in 2020. In several instances, it even resorted to some good old-fashioned red-baiting to frighten voters; the party is, after all, a capitalist institution. Working and middle-class families support the Democrats largely because they have no other place to go on Election Day besides the completely corrupt and craven GOP.

Now we are left with Donald Trump and Biden to duke it out in the fall. Yes, it has come to that.

In terms of campaign rhetoric and party policies, the general election campaign will be a battle for America’s past far more than it will be a contest for its future. The battle will be fueled on both sides by narratives and visions that are illusory, regressive and, in important respects, downright dangerous.

Of the two campaigns, Trump’s will be decidedly more toxic. The “Make America Great Again” slogan that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 and the “Keep America Great” slogan he will try to sell this time around are neo-fascist in nature, designed to invoke an imaginary and false state of mythical past national glory that ignores our deeply entrenched history of patriarchal white supremacy and brutal class domination.

The fascist designation is not a label I apply to Trump cavalierly. I use it, as I have before in this column, because Trump meets many of the standard and widely respected definitions of the term.

As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, fascism “is a historic phase of capitalism … the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism.”  Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht’s theory.

Trumpism similarly meets the definition of fascism offered by Robert Paxton in his classic 2004 study, “The Anatomy of Fascism”:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:

A cult of traditionalism.
The rejection of modernism.
A cult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
The view that disagreement or opposition is treasonous.
A fear of difference. Fascism is racist by definition.
An appeal to a frustrated middle class that is suffering from an economic crisis of humiliation and fear of the pressure exerted by lower social groups.
An obsession with the plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.
A requirement that the movement’s enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
A rejection of pacifism.
Contempt for weakness.
A cult of heroism.
Hypermasculinity and homophobia.
A selective populism, relying on chauvinist definitions of “the people” that the movement claims to represent.
Heavy usage of “newspeak” and an impoverished discourse of elementary syntax and resistance to complex and critical reasoning.

Joe Biden is not a fascist. He is, instead, a standard-bearer of neoliberalism. As with fascism, there are different definitions of neoliberalism, prompting some exceptionally smug mainstream commentators like New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait to claim that the concept is little more than a left-wing insult. In truth, however, the concept describes an all-too-real set of governing principles.

To grasp what neoliberalism means, it’s necessary to understand that it does not refer to a revival of the liberalism of the New Deal and New Society programs of the 1930s and 1960s. That brand of liberalism advocated the active intervention of the federal government in the economy to mitigate the harshest effects of private enterprise through such programs as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That brand of liberalism imposed high taxes on the wealthy and significantly mitigated income inequality in America.

Neoliberalism, by contrast, deemphasizes federal economic intervention in favor of initiatives calling for deregulation, corporate tax cuts, private-public partnerships, and international trade agreements that augment the free flow of capital while undermining the power and influence of trade unions.

Until the arrival of Trump and his brand of neo-fascism, both major parties since Reagan had embraced this ideology. And while neoliberals remain more benign on issues of race and gender than Trump and Trumpism ever will be, neoliberalism offers little to challenge hierarchies based on social class. Indeed, income inequality accelerated during the Obama years and today rivals that of the Gilded Age.

As transformational a politician as Barack Obama was in terms of race, he too pursued a predominantly neoliberal agenda. The Affordable Care Act, Obama’s singular domestic legislative achievement, is a perfect example of neoliberal private-public collaboration that left intact a health industry dominated by for-profit drug manufacturers and rapacious insurance companies, rather than setting the stage for Medicare for All, as championed by Sanders.

Biden never tires of reminding any audience willing to put up with his gaffes, verbal ticks and miscues that he served as Obama’s vice president. Those ties are likely to remain the centerpiece of his campaign, as he promises a return to the civility of the Obama era and a restoration of America’s standing in the world.

History, however, only moves forward. As charming and comforting as Biden’s imagery of the past may be, it is, like Trump’s darker outlook, a mirage. If Trump has taught us anything worthwhile, it is that the past cannot be replicated, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.

After Big Wins for Biden, Sanders Supporters Hold Out Hope

Despite suffering another round of defeats in multiple primary voting states on Tuesday to former Vice President Joe Biden, supporters of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run are not about to give up the fight just yet and political observers are noting that even if the delegate lead Biden has amassed ultimately proves insurmountable the Democratic Party will have to win over voters inspired by Sanders if President Donald Trump is to be vanquished in the general election.

“This is a very dangerous moment for the Democratic Party,” said CNN contributor Van Jones as the results from contests in six states — Mississippi, North Dakota, Missouri, Michigan, Idaho, and Washington — were reported. With Sanders’ especially high hopes for Michigan dashed by a substantial margin of victory by Biden, Jones said, “You have an insurgency about to be defeated. What do you do with the people that you defeat?”

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Progressives Warn Biden Is Anything but a Safe Choice



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The fact that “a lot of young people” believed “they had a champion” in Sanders, argued Jones, is not something that Democrats should ignore. “Young people who are graduating with a quarter million dollars in debt, young people with a lot of pain, and they had a champion,” he said. “And they thought they were going to be able to surround the divided establishment with their movement, crush that divided establishment, and move forward. Instead, the establishment united and stopped them. Now what do you do?”

When Sanders was defeated in the 2016 primary, Jones continued, “there was an assumption that all his people were going to fall in line and vote against Trump and there was not enough care for the concern and the pain of his base. Tonight, there’s going to be a lot of crowing, a lot of relief on the part of the establishment, but keep it temperate and turn—turn to those [Sanders supporters] and say we want to be your champion. If you don’t do that, you’re going to have a pyrrhic victory.”

This is a very dangerous moment for the Democratic party. You have an insurgency about to be defeated. What do you do with the people you defeat? A lot of young people are going to be crushed. We need to turn to them and say, “We want to be your champion.” #CNN #SuperTuesday2 pic.twitter.com/Hg4dJBPOaA

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) March 11, 2020

It was a similar sentiment shared by filmmaker Michael Moore, who appeared on MSNBC and said Democrats and the corporate establishment will be in big trouble if they don’t account for the hopes and aspirations of those Americans at the heart of the Sanders movement:

Michael Moore with some of the deepest things said on MSNBC in years. pic.twitter.com/dCnr8dcuSV

— Andrew Jerell Jones (@sluggahjells) March 11, 2020

“The game isn’t over,” Moore said. “All the other states who haven’t had chance to have their say, should have their say. Bernie, when he says “Not me, us,” — if you met him, that’s really where his head’s at. His idea was not just himself going into the Oval Office, but bringing millions with him. I think that his policies and the things that he stands for, we would hope to see happen if we do get rid of Trump — and none of us are giving up on that.”

Watch:

Especially concerning when it comes to Biden’s general election prospects remains his continued poor performance with young voters — among the reasons that progressives continue to warn that the Democrats may be setting themselves up for another loss to Trump in a general election if they fail to energize key portions of their base:

This is scary. Young people are the base of the Dem Party. Obama won 66% of the youth vote in 2008 & 60% in 2012. Hillary (who got crushed by Bernie among 18-29 yr olds) only got 55% against Trump. And Biden is on track to do even worse. pic.twitter.com/mCjI0L2L99

— 29 U.S.C. § 157 (@OrganizingPower) March 11, 2020

Not bowing to the idea that Sanders’ primary prospects are over, his supporters and campaign staff dismissed those treating his disappointing night — losing in Mississippi, Missouri, Michigan and Idaho — as the end of the line. For people like Nina Turner, national co-chair of the Sanders campaign, the Democratic primary season still has a long way to go:

Not over indeed @shaunking ! https://t.co/f4bdk9iZA8

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) March 11, 2020

As “Organizing for Bernie” tweeted:

We aren’t even half way there yet! #SuperTuesday2

1,991 needed to win nomination

Joe Biden 749

Bernie Sanders 607

— Organizers for Bernie 2020 (@OFB2020) March 11, 2020

“Fewer than half the states will have voted after tonight is all said and done,” said progressive writer and activist Ben Spielberg. “I understand why you’re disappointed — I am, too — but this primary is not even close to over. Do not despair. Do think hard about what next steps we need to take.”

Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders’ national press secretary, made it clear she is gearing up for Sunday’s one-on-one debate between the two candidates:

I, for one, am extremely excited about this debate all the moderates are panicking about.

The delegate count difference is only about 150 points out of 4051 total.

America finally gets to see Biden defend his ideas, or lack there of, on Sunday. #NotMeUs #Bernie2020 https://t.co/g4CYsQIfs6

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) March 11, 2020

While both Biden and Sanders were asked to cancel large rallies they had scheduled for Tuesday night in Ohio due to the coronavirus crisis gripping the nation, Biden made comments from Philadelphia, where he made overtures to Sanders and his supporters.

“I want to thank Bernie Sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy and their passion,” Biden said to a small room filled only with staff and some reporters at the National Constitution Center. “We share a common goal, and together, we’ll defeat Donald Trump.”

Sanders, meanwhile, returned to his home in Vermont Tuesday evening and did not deliver any public remarks.

Congress Wary of Trump’s Tax Break Plan to Address Virus Upheaval

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s proposed payroll tax break met with bipartisan resistance Tuesday on Capitol Hill as pressure mounts on the administration and Congress to work more vigorously to contain the coronavirus outbreak and respond to the financial fallout.

Flanked by his economic team, Trump pitched his economic stimulus ideas privately to wary Senate Republicans on another grueling day in the struggle against expanding infections. Fluctuating stock markets rebounded but communities discovered new cases and the two top Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, canceled Tuesday primary night rallies in Ohio.

The president’s GOP allies have been cool to additional spending at this stage, especially for cutting taxes that would have to be reimposed later — presumably after the November election. Democrats prefer their own package of low- or no-cost virus testing, unemployment insurance and sick pay for workers struggling to keep paychecks coming as the outbreak disrupts workplaces.

“We’re taking this unbelievably seriously,” Trump said after his meeting at the Capitol. “It will go away, just stay calm.”

Asked why he has not yet been tested for the virus, after having been in close contact with several advisers and members of Congress who are now self-quarantined after exposure, Trump said: “I don’t think it’s a big deal” and “I feel very good.”

White House officials have been blindsided by the president’s sudden moves. As Trump headed to Capitol Hill, two administration officials said the proposals he was putting in play had not been completed. They were unauthorized to discuss the planning and requested anonymity.

Trump’s team offered few specifics at the closed door GOP lunch on the size of the payroll tax break or its duration, senators said. Trump has long promised to bring about an election year “tax cuts 2.0,” and seemed to be seizing on the virus fears as a way to bring about a victory on that front before November. Behind closed doors he discussed the coming elections in swing states like Arizona and Montana where GOP senators face tough races.

In addition to payroll tax relief, Trump has said he wants help for hourly-wage workers to ensure they’re “not going to miss a paycheck” and “don’t get penalized for something that’s not their fault.” He’s also mentioned small-business loans. But details are slight.

So far, the president’s approach, based on tax breaks, is receiving a cool response. Some Republicans endorsed Trump’s suggestion that help be provided to the beleaguered cruise-ship and airline industries, while others spoke up for other industries, including energy and gas. Some pushed for broader economic stimulus from a bipartisan highway bill they said was shovel-ready and popular. The payroll tax plan remains a work in progress.

“They didn’t get into specifics,” said the No. 2 Republican, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota.

Increasingly, it appears a solution will originate in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi told House Democrats they would keep working this week despite concerns about the risk of infection at the Capitol.

“We are the captains of the ship,” Pelosi said during a closed-door meeting, according to a person in the room unauthorized to discuss the private caucus and granted anonymity. “We are the last to leave.” But time is short as Congress heads toward its scheduled break next week.

Trump tapped Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to meet with Pelosi, whose support will be needed for any deal in the divided Congress, where Republicans hold the Senate majority but Democrats hold the House.

Munchin declared the meeting with Pelosi “productive” and said they’d “work together on a bipartisan basis to figure out how we can get things done quickly.”

Pelosi insisted the “threshold” for any proposal must be its ability to respond to the virus. Her team was preparing to come out with a package in the next day or so.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was noncommittal after the meeting with Trump, emphasizing the path forward rests in the talks between Mnuchin and Pelosi. “We’re hoping that he and the speaker can pull this together,” he said.

That reflected divisions even within the administration on the best approach. The payroll-tax plan found support from Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner and trade adviser Peter Navarro, among others. Other aides, including Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow advocated more modest measures. Trump prefers the payroll tax holiday “last through the end of the year,” Kudlow said.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

The nation’s capital saw mixed signals about the public mood. Tourists still arrived for visits while marquee events, including this weekend’s Gridiron Club dinner, an annual mingling of political Washington, was postponed.

At the U.S. Capitol, some senators said they resisted shaking Trump’s hand when he arrived for lunch. Lawmakers were given new instructions on how to protect themselves, with the House’s attending physician asking them to stop shaking hands or touching people during greetings. He recommended the split-fingers Star Trek greeting instead.

Crowds are the norm in the Capitol and handshakes are coin of the realm there, even between political foes. But about a half dozen lawmakers — including Trump confidantes — have placed themselves in quarantine after being exposed to someone who had the virus, and the norm has been upended.

One, GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, who self-quarantined after having traveled with the president from Florida on Air Force One on Monday, said he had tested negative for the disease. He said he would remain quarantined as a precaution. Another, Trump’s incoming chief of staff. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C, remains on quarantine.

During House Democrats’ closed session, one lawmaker, California Rep. Raul Ruiz, who is a doctor, raised concerns about the situation, noting that the average age in Congress is 57. Some lawmakers have underlying health conditions and their work requires them to fly back and forth between home and the capital.

Still, Pelosi implored lawmakers to keep working to strengthen the country’s defenses.

But House and Senate leaders have made it clear there will be no voting by proxy. Quarantined lawmakers will be missing votes. Lawmakers were told up to 10,000 staff members could telework, if need be.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which monitors financial markets, encouraged employees at its Washington headquarters to work from home after an employee there had respiratory symptoms and was referred for coronavirus testing.

And Defense Secretary Mark Esper postponed a trip to India, Pakistan and Uzbekistan that was to begin Monday, citing the coronavirus crisis, Pentagon press secretary Alyssa Farah said Tuesday. She said he would remain in the U.S to help manage the Pentagon response.

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Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard, Andrew Taylor, Kevin Freking, Jill Colvin, Bob Burns, and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

There Is Hard Data That Shows ‘Bernie Bros’ Are a Myth

This piece originally appeared on Salon.

Mainstream pundits and politicians continue to obsess over the stereotype of the “Bernie Bro,” a perfervid horde of Bernie Sanders supporters who supposedly stop at nothing to harass his opponents online. Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens have all helped perpetuate the idea that Sanders’ supporters are somehow uniquely cruel, despite Sanders’ platform and policy proposal being the most humane of all the candidates.

The only problem? The evidence that Sanders supporters are uniquely cruel online, compared to any other candidates’ supporters, is scant; much of the discourse around Bernie Bros seems to rely on skewed anecdotes that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Many Sanders supporters suspect that the stereotype is perpetuated in bad faith to help torpedo his candidacy.

A few weeks ago I penned a story for Salon attempting to qualitatively disprove the Bernie Bro myth by pulling from psychological theory and the nature of online behavior. To summarize my conclusions: First, there is a general tendency for online behavior to be negative, known as the online disinhibition effect — but it affects all people equally, not merely Sanders’ supporters. Second, pundits systematically ignore when other candidates’ supporters are mean online, perhaps because of the aforementioned established stereotype; in this sense, the Bernie Bro is not dissimilar from other political canards like the “welfare queen.” Third, Twitter is not a representative sample size of the population, and is so prone to harboring propaganda outfits and bots such that it is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion.

Now, to add to this qualitative assessment, there is quantitative evidence, too — reaped from studying hundreds of thousands of interactions online — that reveals the Bernie Bro myth as, well, a myth. Jeff Winchell, a computational social scientist and graduate student at Harvard University, crunched the numbers on tweet data and found that Sanders’ supporters online behave the same as everyone else. Winchell used what is called a sentiment analysis, a technique used both in the digital humanities and in e-commerce, to gauge emotional intent from social media data.

“Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower,” Winchell says of his results. “There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don’t seem to be aware of…. Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat’s campaigns,” he added, noting that this may be partly what helps perpetuate the myth.

I interviewed him about his work and his results over email; as usual, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

First, for those who haven’t heard of this technique, what is a sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis summarizes human expression into various scores. Most commonly the score is how negative or positive it is. But it can also be used to evaluate subjectivity (for instance, is a politician’s statement factual or mostly opinionated?). Even taking the simpler text analysis, there are multiple challenges due to sarcasm, negations (e.g “I don’t like their service”, “After what he did, this will be his last project”), ambiguity (words that are negative or positive depending on their context), and [the fact that] texts can contain both positive and negative parts.

How are sentiment analyses used? What are other examples of this technique being used? 

The overwhelming application of sentiment analysis is in e-commerce (for instance, scoring how positive/negative customer feedback is). Customer service surveys are often analyzed this way. Marketing uses sentiment analysis to test product acceptance.

Other commercial applications are in recommendations. While a system may have the user given an overall rating, analyzing the comments they provide can identify the sentiment on subtopics within.

So tell me about the sentiment analysis script that you wrote to study online behavior among different politicians’ followers. How did this work? 

I downloaded all the followers of the Twitter accounts of the nine most popular Democratic presidential candidates and the president ([around] 100 million Twitter accounts). I then randomly chose followers from them and downloaded all their tweets from 2015 to the present.

I have run two different sentiment analysis algorithms on these tweets. So far, nearly 6.8 million tweets from 280,000 Twitter accounts have been analyzed out of the 100 million-plus tweets I currently have downloaded (I continue downloading more).

One sentiment analysis algorithm uses a well-regarded example of grammar/word dictionary sentiment rules that were popular 5 to 10 years ago before deep learning became popular. This one is identified by the Python libary’s name, Textblob.

The other algorithm is Microsoft’s supervised deep learning-based algorithm with default parameters. To those unfamiliar with deep learning, the number of parameters in this model is in the millions, and no human can be expected to understand them. The deep learning model learns/generalizes from examples of text given sentiment ratings by humans through millions of trials, each time evaluating how well it predicts the results and passing that model and accuracy to the next iteration.

Candidate’s Twitter followers don’t differ much in the chance someone’s tweets are negative.

New Update: Adds Microsoft’s Deep Learning-based sentiment analysis algorithm. It predicts the chance of positive text. Textblob’s algorithm rates tweets from -1 (neg) to 1 (pos). pic.twitter.com/1tIyoRI5g2

— Jeff Winchell (@CompSocialSci) March 7, 2020

The categories of negative and very negative are based on ranges of values in the two algorithm’s outputs. Textblob generates a number from most negative (-1) to most positive (+1). I classified scores of [below]  -0.75 as very negative and -.75 to -.5 as negative. Microsoft’s algorithm predicts the chance that some text is classified as positive. Based on the frequencies of a specific chance, I separated the lowest 1.5 percent of tweet ratings as very negative and the lowest 1.5 percent to 5 percent of all tweet ratings as negative.

What did your results find? 

The chance that some tweet is negative when it comes from a follower of candidate X is pretty much the same as if it came from a follower of candidate Y.

This uses two different algorithms, once very sophisticated (Microsoft’s supervised Deep Learning-based model), the other a good algorithm based on the algorithm standards of 5 to 10 years ago (Textblob’s grammar/dictionary-based rules). Microsoft’s algorithm calculates the chance a tweet is positive. Textblob’s rates the tweet from most negative (-1) to most positive (+1). But the variation of these measures changes little among tweets from followers from different candidates.

I deliberately round my numbers to 1 digit for smaller samples (negative or very negative percentage) or 2 digits if it’s about an average over all the tweets. I don’t like false accuracy and it is rampant in the political media. Any NLP [Natural Language Processing] expert will tell you that reducing a tweet to a single number denoting its negativity/positivity is not an exact science. So the rounding reflects that uncertainty.

Given this data, what do you think of the “Bernie Bro” narrative about his online supporters? 

Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower. There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don’t seem to be aware of. Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat’s campaigns.

People responding to hundreds of millions of people online tend to dehumanize others. They remember that someone is female/male or follows some candidate or is of some race, but they frequently don’t pay attention to differentiate actions of one member of that group versus another. So rather than consider how frequently an individual of some group acts, they think of how frequently the group acts as a whole. If they interact with many more members of one group than another, that perception of the group is magnified by the number of members they see.

Interesting. Did your opinion change after doing this little analysis?

Yes. I believed that Bernie’s followers are more likely to like him because they are more likely to experience the very negative life circumstances that Bernie Sanders wants to fix. People in a negative situation are more likely to interact negatively with people, particularly those anonymous online people that they have no in-person relationship with. So I had anticipated that Bernie’s followers on average would have a much higher chance to be negative. This does not appear to be the case or at least not as much as the claims I read on Twitter, political media reports or on TV.

Is there actually any difference between different candidates’ supporters online behavior, based on this? 

As a data scientist, I am usually skeptical of any result. So I’ll say maybe not or at least much less than claimed.

I still would like to dig deeper into this. This analysis looks at all tweets. I would like to look just at twitter interactions between candidate’s supporters, look at tweets responding or mentioning media professionals. I want to use some algorithms in the research that evaluate hate speech, racism, sexism. I’d like to look at specific topics of discussion, and possibly evaluate the influence of negative tweets (eg. retweets and number of followers who could see a tweet/retweet).

What is your academic background? 

I have a bachelor’s degree in math from Northwestern. I then worked in healthcare analytics with very large databases, branched into other applications of large scale data analysis before recently returning to grad school at Harvard to study data science. While there my interest in psychology and sociology has led me to pursue applications of data science in the social sciences to help people.

This story was updated on March 10 with additional interview questions to add context. 

Cash-Strapped Hospitals Can’t Handle the Coronavirus

Opponents of nationalized health care argue that a government-run health system would lead to health care rationing, forcing patients to go without critical care because the government can’t afford it. Rationing, however, is exactly what American hospitals in our private health care system are now facing with the advent of the new coronavirus.

The Seattle Times reported on Saturday that “health care providers say medical supplies are growing scarce, threatening to further stress a system already scrambling to control the coronavirus outbreak.” In some areas of Washington state, particularly hard hit by the coronavirus outbreak “health authorities are hunting for medical supplies and have called on employees to ration.”

One hospital in the Seattle area is monitoring certain patients remotely. Others, Politico reports Tuesday, “are conserving respirators, by scaling back on drills in which health care workers practice wearing them.”

The situation is not limited to Washington. As Politico explains, hospitals around the country have for years been encouraged to “cut costs and reduce in-patient treatments,” in the name of reducing America’s health care spending.

The federal government over the last decade “has rewarded hospitals that reduced the number of patients who walked through the doors.” These incentives haven’t necessarily lowered overall health care costs in the United States, but they certainly have reduced hospital resources.

Per Politico:

In 2015, scientists from [the Health and Human Services Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration] warned that resources would be squeezed during a large-scale public health emergency.

Since then the number of staffed beds in the United States has declined, dozens of hospitals in rural communities across the country have closed and President [Donald] Trump, in his most recent budget, called for an $18 million cut to the hospital preparedness program.

Now that the coronavirus has arrived and is quickly spreading, hospitals and local public health officers are scrambling to keep up — and worried about a prolonged outbreak.

Even hospitals with contingency plans will have to make difficult decisions. “Given that we’ve had a month or more of prep time, we have created contingency plans and will have additional beds available … but the actual ICU beds and ventilators are somewhat fixed and those numbers are what they are,” Mark Mulligan, director of NYU Langone Health’s division of infectious diseases and immunology, told Politico.

In addition to a lack of equipment and other resources, some health care providers are worried about the spread of infections throughout hospitals, and the impact on hospital staff. “Health care workers are my top worry,” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told ProPublica in March.

Approximately 15% of hospital workers in China have become severely ill from the coronavirus, he explained, adding, “If this takes place in the U.S., and we see those numbers of workers sent home or in the ICU, being taken care of by their colleagues, things will start to unravel. This is the soft underbelly of our preparedness system right now.”

Read the full Politico story here.