Opinion

This is the age of the septuagenarian in US politics. The president is 73. His likely opponent in November’s election is 77. Even if Joe Biden is not the Democratic nominee, the other option is 78-year-old Bernie Sanders.

The U.S. government now owes over US$23.5 trillion in debt, or about $71,000 for every man, women and child living within its borders. It has risen $3 trillion since President Trump took office in 2017 and is almost double what it was just 10 years ago.

Much of the U.S. economy has effectively shut down as America increasingly takes the coronavirus pandemic seriously. Retail stores and restaurants across the country are vacant. The entertainment and hospitality industries are on hiatus.

Singapore’s response to the coronavirus has been held up by many around the world as a model. As of this week, the country has had 266 total cases (with zero deaths), and its infection rate is much slower than the rest of the world.

The richest 1 percent Americans own 40 percent of the wealth. That same 1 percent also owns more than half the value in mutual funds and stocks, while the top 5 percent of Americans own two-thirds of the nation's wealth. The top 0.01 percent of Americans — the 16,000 or so richest families — saw their income increase at rates far higher than the much-discussed 1 percent.

The medical evidence is clear: The coronavirus global health threat is not an elaborate hoax. Bill Gates did not create the coronavirus to sell more vaccines. Essential oils are not effective at protecting you from coronavirus.

As conservative media figures and Republicans pivot from their failed strategy of downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, they're adopting a deeply cynical new ploy to help manage perceptions of the growing outbreak.

Tuesday night was another round of major losses in the Democratic presidential primary for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Ohio may have delayed its primary, but in the states that still had voting — Florida, Illinois and Arizona — Sanders fell 8-12 percentage points below what he got in the 2016 primary race, despite having four years steadily building his national presence. Former Vice President Joe Biden is now so far ahead in the delegate count so far that for all intents and purposes, it's impossible for Sanders to catch up.

If there’s one thing that irks me to no end about the atheist community, it’s the overrepresentation of vocal jerks—and let’s be frank, they’re usually white men—who exhibit smug superiority and a sort of fundamentalist and arguably (post-)Protestant ethos, in nearly all their interactions. While some of these “stable geniuses” style themselves progressives, others identify as libertarians or “classical liberals,” and at least the latter are more honest about what ultimately amounts to their alt-right adjacent, or even fully alt-right, views on matters of race, gender, and “identity politics.”

The Connecticut Labor Department saw unemployment benefit claims jump 100 percent over four days, from a norm of 3,000 or so filings in a typical week ending Friday to nearly 30,000 on Tuesday. I asked yesterday what the economic indicators were to justify the president’s $1 trillion stimulus package. Well, there they are.

Matt Colvin got thoroughly roasted on the internet this past weekend. Twitter was strewn with quote-tweets denouncing the high immorality of a man stockpiling 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer, intending to sell it at a big markup on ebay and Amazon.

Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein worries that the Coronavirus pandemic will provide another opportunity for neoliberal elites to impose more of their right wing agenda on a citizenry scared and confused by this mysterious and dangerous disease. Klein of course is expanding on her award winning Shock Doctrine Naomi The Shock Doctrine. Klein showed how corporate elites worldwide have repeatedly and brutally used “the public’s disorientation following a collective shock — wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters — to push through radical pro-corporate measures.”

The public health and economic crises we’re experiencing are closely related. They reveal in stark terms the dangerous mythology of trickle-down self-sufficiency and the need for policies that respond to the real needs of people who are or will soon be affected.