Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Robert Reich: America’s billionaires are giving to charity – but much of it is self-serving rubbish
Well-publicized philanthropy shows how afraid the super-rich are of a larger social safety net – and higher taxes
As millions of jobless Americans line up for food or risk their lives delivering essential services, the nation’s billionaires are making conspicuous donations – $100m from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for food banks, billions from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for a coronavirus vaccine, thousands of ventilators and N95 masks from Elon Musk, $25m from the Walton family and its Walmart foundation. The list goes on.
On Wednesday, Forbes released its annual billionaires list, happily noting that “the planet’s wealthiest are helping the global effort to combat the Covid-19 outbreak”.
I don’t mean to be uncharitable, but much of this is self-serving rubbish.
First off, the amounts involved are tiny relative to the fortunes behind them. Bezos’s $100m, for example, amounts to about 11 days of his income.
Well-publicized philanthropy also conveniently distracts attention from how several of these billionaires are endangering their workers and, by extension, the public.
Ruth marcus: Will the Supreme Court let Texas’s latest assault on women’s rights proceed?
No constitutional right is absolute; the Constitution, we are told, is not a suicide pact. In a pandemic, otherwise sacrosanct rights must yield to the common good.
So, to prevent the spread of the virus, governors can order the cancellation of mass gatherings — even when those gatherings are religious services, so long as their edicts do not single out religion. Similarly, the Second Amendment right to bear arms would probably not prevent orders closing gun shops among other “non-essential” businesses during the pandemic, any more than the First Amendment would prohibit the shuttering of bookstores.
And in the archetypal case involving the power of public health authorities to prevent the spread of disease, the Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states can compel vaccination even over the objections of those who claim an unconstitutional “invasion” of their “individual liberty.”
But if pandemics can justify intrusions on constitutional rights, they cannot be employed as excuses for interfering with or eliminating them. And that, of course, is exactly what Texas is up to in its order prohibiting abortions during the pandemic.
Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s voters will never admit they were wrong — even in the face of national catastrophe
Trump’s fans will never admit they made a mistake — that’s the hill they’ll die on, and not just metaphorically
In the age of the coronavirus, with most of us locked away in our homes, we turn to numbers to get a sense of what the hell is happening in this country. Number of diagnosed cases of the novel coronavirus: 555,371, though experts believe the real number is far higher due to under-testing. Number of deaths: 22,056, though experts believe the real number is far higher because of people who die at home or have their deaths misclassified. Number of newly unemployed: 17 million, though experts believe it’s likely higher because so many laid-off workers were unable to file for unemployment. Unemployment rate: 13%, and there are concerns it could go as high or higher than the unemployment rate during the Great Depression.
There’s one number that’s holding steady, however, and it’s the number that may very well decide if we are looking at four more years of this hellscape or if we’ll get new leadership that actually takes competence in government seriously: Donald Trump’s approval rating. That hasn’t budged below its baseline of around 40 to 42%. The initial boost Trump got from the rally-round-the-flag effect during this crisis has pretty much evaporated. But so far, that baseline is as immovable as Trump is from a TV camera.
Charles M. Blow: The Brother Killer
Many factors make blacks, especially black men, particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus.
A few weeks ago, Hannah Sparks of The New York Post reported on “a morbid — and chillingly astute — new slang term for the coronavirus pandemic: boomer remover,” because the virus has proved particularly deadly for the elderly.
But, because it is also disproportionately deadly for men and for African-Americans, I worry about how it will affect black men in particular, and have come to use another chilling term to characterize it: a “brother killer.”
And I fear that the worst may be yet to come, at least until treatments are developed and a vaccine discovered. There are silent populations of black men, largely removed from public view and public consciousness, who will remain vulnerable long after we “open the country back up,” whatever that looks like, and return to some semblance of normalcy.
For these men, the devastating effects of this virus may be as much about pre-existing social conditions as pre-existing medical ones.
Jennifer Senior: The One Kind of Distancing We Can’t Afford
The only way to fight this pandemic is through identification with its victims, not deliberate estrangement from them.
Last week, within the space of just 24 hours, two friends of mine — one an I.C.U. nurse, the other an E.R. doctor — told me that they’d each watched a 50-year-old woman die of Covid-19.
I, too, am a 50-year-old woman. As I listened to their stories, I had to stifle the same unlovely impulse. “But did your patients have a pre-existing condition?” I wanted to ask. “Were they fighting cancer, were they smokers, were they already floridly unwell?”
Which is ridiculous, honestly. Even if their patients had a history of heart disease or were partial to Camels, they no more deserved to die a frightening and solitary death than anyone else.
But my reaction, I think, was fairly typical of this exceptional moment, when reminders of our own mortality are never more than a few paces from our conscious, clattering minds: We are silently building moats that separate ourselves from the dead.
It’s the other culturewide distancing campaign.
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