So much disinformation and the data is not pointing in a direction that would justify Trump attempt to “open the economy”. His posturing seems to continue as usual with the same incompetence and it is going to get worse before it gets better.
Despite Trump we have a moral interdependence. This article in Jacobin is worth your time, if only because this current pandemic crisis is no different than the climate crisis. One useful idea is that Trump’s ability to lawfare his way out of trouble is another aspect of the power to withdraw, which also explains Trump’s indifference to this crisis among others.
The scramble reveals a class system in which a mark of relative status is the power to withdraw. If you have wealth or a salary from an institution that values you, and enough space at home, you might be able to pull off the essentially absurd trick of isolating yourself for a few months by drawing down the global web of commodities on display at Costco and Trader Joe’s. But for the 50 percent of the country that has no savings and lives paycheck to paycheck, or in small apartments with little food storage, or has to hustle every day to find work, this is simply impossible. People will be out every day, on the subways, at the gas stations, choosing between epidemiological prudence and economic survival, because they have no choice but to make that choice.
And as long as this is true — as long as many of us are out there every day, mixing it up to get by — there is reason to think very few of us will be safe. Extrapolating from the little we know about the virus, the number of carriers will continue to grow. As long as our moral and political isolation drives us back into the marketplace, our material interdependence makes nearly everyone vulnerable.
[...]
Survivalism is so palpably desperate and elite-only that a pandemic also makes clear that we need the state if we are going to survive. Trump’s clumsy cycling through his repertoire — Everything’s fine! It’s foreign! We are taking strong action! — shows once again that he has no real idea of how to use the state, except as a showman’s platform and a bank account for grift. His class of late-capitalist oligarchs are too decadent, too thoroughly the products of their own stupid and selfish ethos, to have any instinct for what to do in a crisis like this one. But sharper minds will have plenty of ideas, many of them bad for many people.
[...]
The lesson of the climate crisis, that we can afford public abundance but the effort to have universal private abundance will kill us all, carries over to pandemic: we can afford truly public health, but if everyone is driven to try to stay healthy alone, it won’t work, and trying will kill a lot of us.
jacobinmag.com/...
At least there are a few looters who won’t get swag.
The vigorish