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Coronavirus Hits Black & Hispanic Children
By Shlomo Maital
“It is what it is”. That statement by President Trump, about America’s massive death toll from COVID-19, [160,000 persons so far and rising by 1,000 or more a day, every day since April 1] raised the blood pressure of a lot of people. So did his blatantly false statement that children are “totally immune”, modified to “virtually immune”.
But what was truly upsetting was not Trump’s lies, but medical facts, reported in the journal Pediatrics, and described in a CNN report. Black children, Hispanic children, poor children – all suffer far far more from the virus than others. The virus has swept over society like a tsunami, but it has hit hardest the racial and income groups who always get hit hardest by everything. It is unfair, immoral, unacceptable. Black lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. Children’s lives matter. ALL lives matter. And no, it is NOT what it is. What it is, is – White House officials and the President are tested daily, and get the results within hours. For the rest of America – the wait can be many days. The inequality starts right at the very top. So does the moral rot.
Here is a summary of the report in Pediatrics:
* Coronavirus infection rates in the United States are significantly higher among children of minority race and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, according to a new study
* The study examined 1,000 child patients tested between March 21 and April 28 in Washington DC. Only 7.3% of White children tested positive for coronavirus, in contrast to 30% of Black children and 46.4% of Hispanic children, the study found.
* Three times as many Black children reported known exposure to the virus as White children, the researchers reported.
* The test site collected basic demographic information for all patients; the research team then used survey data to estimate family income based on home addresses.
Of the 1,000 people tested, 207 were positive for coronavirus. About 9.7% of those in the highest income quartile were infected, while 37.7% in the lowest quartile tested positive, the team found.
* Of the patients tested, about one third were Black and about a quarter were Hispanic. The team found that the inequities existed even after they adjusted for age, sex and median family income.
The data speak for themselves. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, lower-income groups, all suffer disproportionately. Why? They have to go to jobs with little social distancing, just to survive, and they have far poorer medical care and far less access to quality care.
I hope we will NOT go back to the good old days. They weren’t so good. A great many things need fixing, and the virus has swept away the topsoil and revealed all the rot beneath. Any society that accepts “it is what it is”, among children of color, is unworthy. And its leaders are criminals.
Why Money Should Be Like Manure – But It Isn’t!
By Shlomo Maital
Money, it is said, is like manure. To do any good, it has to be spread around widely.
But in today’s screwed-up post-global-crisis world, it isn’t. Money is increasingly concentrated in a very few hands. And as a result it just sits there. This is the nub of the problem.
Consider these two pieces of data.
* A new study by Oxfam, the British philanthropic NGO, claims that 85 super-super-rich individuals in the world hold wealth worth $1.65 trillion! This amount of wealth, held by fewer than 100 individuals, is equal to the value of all the wealth held by the poorest half of the whole world – 3.5 billion people. The average wealth of the super-super-rich 85 is $19 b. per person.
Try this imaginary exercise. Suppose, tomorrow, these 85 super-super-rich followed Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and gave away their wealth (gradually selling assets, in order not to depress the prices of stocks, bonds and real estate) and handed the proceeds to the world’s 3.5 billion poor people. Each poor person would get $471. This is a paltry sum. But it would change the lives of the poor. They could start businesses, buy small pieces of land, buy a home. And this spending would generate income for other poor people, who in turn would spend it…and end the global economic stagnation.
Imagine, as John Lennon says.. Imagine. But it’s just a pipe-dream. The wealth of the super-super-rich is the opposite of manure. It sits in their safes and living rooms, instead of spreading around the world.
* According to the Financial Times, Jan. 22, “the pile of unspent corporate cash that has built up since the start of the financial crisis is being held by an increasingly concentrated pool of companies that will be crucial to hopes of a pick-up in business investment to stimulate the world economy.” A study by the consulting firm Deloitte shows that globally, “about a third of the world’s biggest non-financial companies are sitting on most of a $2.8tn gross cash pile of unspent corporate cash (retained earnings) ! And of that sum, fully 5 per cent is accounted for by Apple alone, with $150 b. in unspent cash! ” “Looking ahead, the wave of cash [spending] that many are expecting will depend on the decisions of a few, rather than the many,” a Deloitte expert said.
Why aren’t corporations spreading around their cash, like manure? In a risk-averse world, with sluggish economies, there is no need to invest in more productive capacity. Better to hold on to the money and play with it than invest it in real industry, in real job-creation, in real innovation. This is what the handful of rich corporations believes.
Why not impose a tax on unspent retained earnings, to create an incentive to invest it? Why reward Apple for holding its cash abroad, instead of investing it in America?
So there you have it. Billionaires and rich corporations. Both sit on huge piles of money. And the money just sits there. Until it starts to move, we won’t see true global economic recovery or more new jobs for those who really need them.
TIMnovate 