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“fetish: (n.) anything, such as the stock market, falsely believed by primitive peoples to possess divine, magical or supernatural qualities.”

-- Sol Luckman

News and Opinion

Why the Stock Market Is Healthy as Americans Die

This past week the S&P 500 went up 301 points, or 12 percent, its best performance in 46 years. During the same week, the reported number of Americans killed by Covid-19 went up 11,499, or 161 percent, the coronavirus’s best performance ever. So this seems like a good time to reevaluate our treasured belief that a rising stock market reflects general human flourishing.

This week, in only 4 days, we had the biggest Stock Market increase since 1974. We have a great chance for the really big bounce when the Invisible Enemy is gone!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2020

Meanwhile, the Covid-19 death toll that day topped 2,000 for the first time. ... Also last week, over 6 million Americans filed for unemployment. The chief economist at RSM, one of the largest accounting firms in the U.S., said this demonstrated that “the carnage in the American labor market continued unabated.” The recent cumulative total of newly-unemployed is 16.8 million people, or about one in ten workers. ...

What would truly make the stock market skyrocket, you might think by now, would be nuclear war followed immediately by a gigantic asteroid striking Manhattan. A hideously-mutated Jim Cramer, the last man on earth, would shriek “Dow 10,000,000!” just before expiring. This is not the case, however. Rather, the stock market is simply agnostic about human happiness. It’s just a best-guess measure of future post-tax corporate profitability. If future post-tax corporate profitability is compatible with people being alive and having enough to eat, that’s okay. If not, that’s likewise totally fine. We’re just not part of the equation.

As Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., puts it: “We should take the recent jump to mean that investors are betting that Congress and Trump just gave them lots of money.” That’s the true meaning of this week’s odd combination of events. Your grandmother can die of Covid-19 minutes after being discharged from the hospital. Nurses can be forced to protest their employers failing to provide them with basic personal protective equipment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could fail completely at developing a test for the virus. All of that is irrelevant.

What matters is that the Trump administration will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship to keep big corporations alive and profitable. That is, from the GOP’s perspective, the sole legitimate function of the U.S. government.

Trump advisers doubt swift reopening as WHO official says virus will 'stalk human race'

Senior US public health officials have pushed back on Donald Trump’s eagerness to reopen the country quickly, as a senior World Health Organization (WHO) figure warned that Covid-19 “is going to be a virus that stalks the human race for quite a long time to come”. ...

On Saturday night, Trump said a decision to open up the economy was one he alone would make, and would be “the biggest” of his presidency. He has targeted 1 May as the date when the country may begin a return to normalcy, and in a tweet on Sunday morning cited a drop in hospitalisations as “a very good sign”.

But Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert, stressed any such move should come only when it was safe and as a gradual process. He also warned of the danger of a resurgence of Covid-19 cases later in the year if things reopened too soon.

“If you just say, ‘OK, it’s whatever, 1 May, click, turn the switch on,’ obviously, if you do it in an all-or-none way, there’s an extraordinary risk of there being a rebound,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “That could be a real problem. And everybody knows that. “When one starts to relax some of those restrictions, we know that there will be people who will be getting infected. That is just reality. The critical issue is to be able to, in real time, identify, isolate and contact trace.

WHO special envoy Dr David Nabarro made a grim prediction.

“We think it is going to be a virus that stalks the human race for quite a long time to come until we can all have a vaccine that will protect us and that there will be small outbreaks that will emerge sporadically and they will break through our defences,” he said, also on NBC.

What Trump Knew & When He Knew It: NYT on How Trump Ignored COVID-19 Warnings Until It Was Too Late

They Are Rolling Out The Architecture Of Oppression Now Because They Fear The People

“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a recent interview. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.”

“Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19,” reads a new report from Bloomberg. “People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”

“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine. However, civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of power once the immediate threat has passed,” reads a recent VentureBeat article titled “After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal“.

“White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions,” reads a recent article by Politico, adding, “But the prospect of compiling a national database of potentially sensitive health information has prompted concerns about its impact on civil liberties well after the coronavirus threat recedes, with some critics comparing it to the Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks.”

“Mass surveillance methods could save lives around the world, permitting authorities to track and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus with speed and accuracy not possible during prior pandemics,” The Intercept‘s Sam Biddle wrote last week, adding, “There’s a glaring problem: We’ve heard all this before. After the September 11 attacks, Americans were told that greater monitoring and data sharing would allow the state to stop terrorism before it started, leading Congress to grant unprecedented surveillance powers that often failed to preempt much of anything. The persistence and expansion of this spying in the nearly two decades since, and the abuses exposed by Snowden and others, remind us that emergency powers can outlive their emergencies.”

As we discussed recently, it’s an established fact that power structures will seize upon opportunities to roll out oppressive authoritarian agendas under the pretense of protecting ordinary people, when in reality they’d been working on advancing those agendas since long before the crisis being offered as the reason for them. It happened with 9/11, and we may be certain that it is happening now.

The reason for this is simple: the powerful are afraid of the public. They always have been. For as long as there has been government power, there has been the fear that the people will realize the power of their numbers and overthrow the government that is in power. And understandably so; it has happened many times throughout history.

This is more the case now than ever. The oppressive, exploitative nature of neoliberalism has created a dissatisfaction that’s converged with humanity’s historically unprecedented ability to network and share information, which has seen anti-government protests and movements arising all around the world. Despite the longstanding media blackout on the Yellow Vests protests in France, you may be absolutely certain that eyes widened and leaders snapped to attention all around the planet when the words “We’ve chopped off heads for less than this” were scrawled in graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe during the early days of the demonstrations.

Leaders are made vastly more fearful and skittish by the fact that this dissatisfaction with the current world order just happens to be occurring at a time when that world order is already at its most tenuous point in decades, with a surging China poised to surpass the US as a superpower on the world stage and collaborating with Russia and other unabsorbed nations to create a truly multipolar world. It becomes much more difficult to control dominant narratives in a way that can effectively manufacture consent for the aggression that will be necessary to freeze and reverse this shift away from unipolar domination when the denizens of that unipolar empire are out in the streets demanding its downfall.

And so of course internet censorship is being ramped up as well, with the mass media demanding that plutocrat-owned tech companies do more to combat coronavirus “disinformation” and these government-allied tech giants all too happy to oblige. In a recent escalation in this ongoing trend, Youtube changed its rules and began deleting videos accordingly after David Icke said there is a connection between coronavirus and 5G in a controversial video on that platform. Youtube is owned by Google, which has been a military-intelligence contractor with ties to the CIA and NSA since its very inception; you don’t have to like Icke or his views to be repulsed by the idea of this institution manipulating human communication with an increasingly iron fist.

The escalations in internet censorship and the escalations in surveillance are both directed at a last-ditch effort to control the masses before control is lost forever, and neither are intended to be rolled back when the threat of the virus is over. People are now off the streets, with their communications being restricted and the devices they carry in their pockets being monitored with more and more intrusiveness. There are of course some good faith actors who legitimately want to protect people from the virus, just as there were some good faith actors who wanted to protect people from terrorism after 9/11, but where there is power and fear of the public there will be an agenda to reel in the freedom of the masses.

Journalist Jonathan Cook said it best when he wrote, “Our leaders are terrified. Not of the virus – of us.”

Assange Partner Speaks Out After Threat from Judge

Julian Assange Secretly Fathered 2 Kids While Hiding Out in the Ecuadorian Embassy

During the seven years Julian Assange spent living in an Ecuadorian embassy, the WikiLeaks founder had a secret pastime: fathering two kids. Stella Morris, a lawyer who’s helped Assange with his case, revealed this weekend that she is not only engaged to the controversial whistleblower, but has had two sons with him. And she’s now come forward in an effort to convince authorities to release Assange from the notorious Belmarsh prison in London — or else she fears he may get coronavirus.

“Now I have to speak out because I can see that his life is on the brink,” Morris told the Daily Mail in an interview. She has also detailed her history with Assange in court documents. “Julian's poor physical health puts him at serious risk, like many other vulnerable people, and I don't believe he will survive infection with coronavirus.” ...

“Mentally, I do not think he will survive further enforced isolation either,” said Morris, adding that Assange is now “effectively in solitary confinement” and spends almost every hour of the day in a cell.

Morris, 37, first met the 48-year-old Assange in 2011, when she was a legal researcher, the Guardian reported. The pair started a relationship in 2015 and got engaged in 2017, according to Morris.

Bolsonaro dragging Brazil towards coronavirus calamity, experts fear

Medical experts have said they fear that Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, could be hastening the country’s march towards a devastating public health crisis like those to have hit northern Italy and New York by undermining social distancing measures. ...

Over Easter, Brazil’s far-right leader repeatedly sniffed at his own health ministry’s distancing recommendations by going out for doughnuts, glad-handing fans and proclaiming: “No one will hinder my right to come and go.” During one outing, Bolsonaro was filmed wiping his nose with his wrist before shaking an elderly lady’s hand.

Specialists in public health and infectious diseases believe such behaviour is eroding the only measures standing between Brazil – which has suffered more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths – and a healthcare calamity. ...

Marcos Lago, an infectious diseases specialist at Rio de Janeiro’s Pedro Ernesto University Hospital, said Bolsonaro’s reckless conduct was confusing people over the need to stay at home. “He’s making a very dangerous bet … that Brazil won’t behave like the US, like England, like Italy. I think that’s an irresponsible bet because there’s a very big chance a catastrophe will happen and the chance of one not happening is very small.” ...

Since mid-March, the governors of nearly all of Brazil’s 27 states have been trying to slow transmission by ordering citizens indoors. But there are signs that such efforts are fraying, with a growing number of people stepping out on to the streets of cities such as Rio and São Paulo.

The experts point to several possible explanations for falling adherence to social distancing in Brazil. One was the failure of state governments to sufficiently support poor favela residents who had no option but to work. Another was the difficulty in persuading exuberant, family-focused Brazilians to shun relatives. “Brazilians are having a really hard time with social distancing. We aren’t used to this. We’re used to living together, to hugging and kissing each other,” said Tania Vergara, president of Rio’s Society of Infectious Diseases.

Like a frightened child shouting at ghosts in the dark:

Hit by virus, Pentagon warns enemies: don't test us

With an aircraft carrier forced into port and staff at bases handling nuclear missiles hit by COVID-19, the US military wants rivals to understand: don't test us, we have not been weakened. Statement after statement from the Pentagon has sought to deliver that message amid questions this week over whether the US fighting force can maintain full readiness, with cases among service members now at 2,031.

"We're still capable and we're still ready no matter what the threat," Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley said Thursday.

"I wouldn't want any mixed messages going out there to any adversaries that they can take advantage of an opportunity, if you will, at a time of crisis," he added.

"That would be a terrible and tragic mistake if they thought that."

GOP Senator Proposes "Denmark Style" Relief & Out Lefts Dems!

Trump Labor Secretary Condemned for 'Despicable' Efforts to Roll Back Unemployment Benefits, Paid Leave in Coronavirus Stimulus

From his guidance rolling back paid leave benefits to his attempt to limit who qualifies for beefed up unemployment insurance, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia's implementation of the multi-trillion-dollar coronavirus stimulus package is coming under fire from Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups who say the former corporate lawyer's handling of the new law favors businesses over people in desperate need of assistance.

Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, "has used his department's authority over new laws enacted by Congress to limit who qualifies for joblessness assistance and to make it easier for small businesses not to pay family leave benefits," the Washington Post reported Friday.

In a tweet late Friday, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) pointed to the unprecedented surge in jobless claims over the past month and ripped Scalia's "despicable" management of the CARES Act, which temporarily expands relief for the unemployed.

"Because of COVID-19, more than 16 million Americans have submitted unemployment claims in the past three weeks, but Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia is using his authority to limit who qualifies for assistance," Cohen wrote. "This is despicable. We are in the midst of a pandemic!"

While criticizing the stimulus package—which President Donald Trump signed into law late last month—as far too business-friendly overall, progressives have cautiously applauded the law's across-the-board expansion of unemployment benefits by $600 for a period of four months.

But lawmakers have voiced alarm at the Labor Department's lack of urgency in rolling out the benefits and, as the Post reported, Scalia issued guidance earlier this week that aims to "make it more difficult for gig workers such as Uber and Lyft drivers to get benefits." ...

Earlier this month, as Common Dreams reported, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) slammed Scalia for quietly scaling back the already inadequate paid leave provisions in the CARES Act and creating "gratuitous loopholes" for companies to deny benefits to their employees.

"The Trump administration is twisting the law to allow employers to shirk their responsibility and is significantly narrowing which workers are eligible for paid leave," Murray said in a statement. "This simply can't stand. This guidance needs to be rewritten so workers get the leave they are guaranteed under the law."

The Post reported that under the Labor Department's newly issued rules, "businesses that deny workers paid leave don't have to send the government any paperwork justifying why. The Labor Department's guidance asks companies to 'retain such records for its own files,' a contrast with the heavy documentation required from gig workers who must prove they were affected by the coronavirus outbreak to get aid."

Coronavirus Is Crashing America's Joke of an Unemployment System

In the last week of March, Floridians trying to file unemployment claims made over 864,000 calls to the state’s unemployment call center, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Just one percent of those calls were answered.

That rock-bottom number is one reason the state recently signed $96 million in contracts with two companies that will provide up to 1,250 call center workers to help field the astronomical volume of calls, according to the Times. Florida also launched a new “mobile friendly” unemployment website this week, after widespread issues with both the website and phone lines led residents to show up at local unemployment offices in person.

Part of the issue is that America’s unemployment systems are severely outdated. New Jersey, Connecticut, and Kansas, for instance, are all using systems that run on the until-recently obsolete COBOL programming language, and so they’re looking for older programmers who know the language to come out of retirement. ...

Although the federal government’s coronavirus relief packages have allocated money to help states handle the unemployment claims, including $1 billion in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act signed into law March 18, less than half of the money allotted in the $2.2 trillion stimulus to help states with administrative costs has been distributed, DOL officials told Politico yesterday. ...

As for Floridians, it appears a lot of them will have to wait. At the beginning of this week, state Department of Economic Opportunity head Ken Lawson said there were more than 560,000 outstanding unemployment applications, the Tampa Bay Times reported. The state’s goal for the week? To process 80,000 of them.

Will The Economy Ever Be Normal Again? w/Mark Blyth

"They're Crooks": Coal Industry Aims to Exploit Coronavirus Crisis to Cut Payments to Miners With Black Lung

Some of the largest coal companies in the United States are using the coronavirus crisis to pressure Congress to slash the tax that finances the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, a lifeline for more than 20,000 miners whose lung disease makes them more vulnerable to COVID-19.

The Washington Post reported this week that the National Mining Association (NMA), a trade group that represents the biggest U.S. coal operators still standing, "asked Congress last month for a 55 percent cut in the excise tax for the trust fund, and a suspension of another fee that pays to clean up abandoned mines. Altogether the operators say they could save about $220 million."

"While the level of taxation to back the fund has fluctuated sharply over the past two years," the Post noted, "it currently stands at $1.10 for every ton of coal mined underground and 55 cents for surface coal."

Harold Sturgill, a 60-year-old retired miner who was diagnosed with black lung in 1998, said in an interview with the Post that coal companies are "going to try to use this virus thing to stop paying benefits."

"They're crooks," Sturgill said.

“The burden should be on the coal operators,” Bounds said. “They come in our state, they mine our coal, they fill their pockets up, they declare bankruptcy. They leave with all the cash, and there’s no money to pay the miners.” https://t.co/ln2AWeQDkH #blacklungkills #covid19

— Sierra Club (@SierraClub) April 9, 2020

The NMA explicitly pointed to the coronavirus crisis in its tax cut request to Congress (pdf)—which was not included in the stimulus package that Congress passed last month—and labeled the coal industry "essential" to energy production in the United States. A group of Republican senators is currently pressuring the Federal Reserve to allow coal companies to benefit from the multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act.

"As the country faces this unique and mounting challenge around the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. coal miners continue to work to provide the resources necessary to power America while bracing for the severe financial distress facing all sectors across the nation," NMA wrote to congressional leaders. "To minimize the impact of this crisis on the coal industry, Congress should ensure all businesses have the financial resources necessary to ride out the pandemic."

The group, according to the Post, intends to keep pushing for the tax cut in future stimulus legislation. ...

Miners and advocates have long warned about the financial health of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, which is deeply in debt, and repeatedly asked lawmakers to act to ensure that the program is sustainable over the long term. Last July, as Common Dreams reported, a group of around 120 retired miners traveled to Washington, D.C. to demand congressional action to secure the fund's finances, only to be brushed aside by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.

With Postal Service on 'Verge of Collapse' and 630,000 Jobs at Risk, Trump Slammed for Refusing to Act

The U.S. Postal Service warned Congress this week that it will completely "run out of cash" in the next several months without immediate action from the White House and Congress, but—with as many as 630,000 jobs at risk—President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers have refused to commit to rescuing the prized government institution as it falters amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Postmaster General Megan Brennan told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in a briefing on Thursday that the USPS will need access to a total of $75 billion in cash, grants, and loans in order to avert financial ruin by the fall.

"We are at a critical juncture in the life of the Postal Service. At a time when America needs the Postal Service more than ever, the reason we are so needed is having a devastating effect on our business," said Brennan, referring to the coronavirus outbreak, which has led to a sharp decline in mail volume.

As Government Executive reported, "House Democrats pushed for a $25 billion cash infusion for the Postal Service as part of the last stimulus package, but Senate negotiators ultimately opted to include only a $10 billion line of credit. Postal management has said that amount would be insufficient for preventing fiscal calamity this year."

President Donald Trump has thus far rejected the Postal Service's requests. During a press briefing earlier this week, Trump urged USPS to simply "raise the prices by, actually a lot."

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), one of the most vocal critics of the Trump administration's refusal to assist USPS, said in a statement Thursday that "we cannot allow the Postal Service to collapse." ...

In a tweet Thursday, Connolly accused Trump of personally intervening to block the approval of any emergency funding for the Postal Service.

According to new reporting from the Washington Post on Saturday, Connolly's accusation was correct. "Trump threatened to veto the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act if the legislation contained any money directed to bail out the postal agency, according to a senior Trump administration official and congressional official," the Post reported.

The New York Times reported Thursday that a bailout for the Postal Service "has already emerged as a political sticking point" in talks over another large coronavirus stimulus package, "with Democrats pressing to deliver one and President Trump, a persistent critic of the agency, opposed."

"Some lawmakers, postal union representatives, and others who rely on the service now fear that the Trump administration is trying to use the current crisis to achieve conservatives' longstanding goal of nudging the mail service toward privatization," the Times noted, "either by setting highly prescriptive loan terms or by essentially forcing it into bankruptcy. That would aid commercial competitors like FedEx and UPS."

Homeless Families Are Taking Over Vacant Homes to Protect Themselves From Coronavirus

Trump Blacklisted This Chinese Company. Now It’s Making Coronavirus Masks for U.S. Hospitals.

With nurses and doctors desperate for respirator masks during the coronavirus outbreak, the Food and Drug Administration rolled out an emergency approval process for China-based suppliers last week, aiming to let quality products in while keeping out fraudulent ones.

But the first company the FDA approved has been prohibited by law from bidding for some federal contracts in the United States. Although the company, BYD, is a major global player in the electric vehicle and lithium battery markets, it also has glaring red flags on its record, experts warn, including a history of supplying allegedly faulty products to the U.S., ties to the Chinese military and Communist Party, and possible links to forced labor.

BYD also has no history of making personal protective equipment, and yet days after the FDA approval, it secured a $1 billion deal to supply masks to California. ...

Until two months ago, a BYD subsidiary, BYD Precision Manufacture Company Ltd., specialized in making electronic components, including hardware for Apple’s iPhones. Responding to a global shortage of personal protective equipment, BYD — an acronym for Build Your Dreams — repurposed its facility in Shenzhen into the world’s largest mask manufacturing plant last month.

“Irresponsible and Dangerous”: U.S. Deports Haitians Despite Coronavirus Risks

The United States, the new epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic, deported 61 Haitians on April 7 despite warnings that such deportations could contribute to the spread of the virus in Haiti. Public health experts fear that an outbreak could have particularly deadly consequences for the impoverished island nation, where many people lack access to basic necessities like health care and food.

Haiti lacks the resources to cope with a major outbreak of Covid-19, warned Cate Oswald, chief policy and partnership officer for Partners in Health, a Boston-based global health nonprofit whose Haitian sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, is coordinating with Haiti’s government to respond to the virus. For its population of 11 million people, Haiti has just 124 ICU beds and the ability to ventilate less than 70 patients, according to a 2019 study by the Research and Education Consortium for Acute Care in Haiti. “I’m nervous to see how this new disease has overwhelmed even the better-resourced health care systems,” Oswald told The Intercept.

To prevent the virus’s spread, the Haitian government has closed schools and most factories and is encouraging people to adopt social distancing measures. However, the majority of Haitians live on less than $2 a day and many work in the informal sector. The significant depreciation of the value of local currency and skyrocketing inflation have driven up prices of basic necessities like food. For people already struggling to feed their families, staying home is a luxury few can afford. And in the markets and public transit systems that informal sector workers depend on, it is often all but impossible to adhere to the social distancing guidelines recommended by public health authorities. ...

In this context, Oswald said, U.S. deportations to Haiti are “irresponsible and dangerous from a public health standpoint.” Because none of the 61 migrants the U.S. deported had been tested for the coronavirus, the Haitian government was forced to divert its scarce resources into quarantine measures. “It is certainly adding a strain to the already overburdened system that has been set up,” she said.

Bernie Drops Out Real-Time Reaction, Plus Matt Stoller On Covid-19 Bailout | Useful Idiots

Obama Rips Hillary & Teaches Bernie How To Win!

Krystal Ball: NYT CAUGHT covering up Joe Biden #MeToo allegation

Krystal and Saagar: Joy Reid, media MELTDOWN, Sanders former press sec goes scorched earth on Biden

Wash Your Hands? Despite Pandemic, Thousands Still Have No Water in Detroit, a Coronavirus Hot Spot

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels could fall by 2.5bn tonnes in 2020

Global carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry could fall by a record 2.5bn tonnes this year, a reduction of 5%, as the coronavirus pandemic triggers the biggest drop in demand for fossil fuels on record. The unprecedented restrictions on travel, work and industry due to the coronavirus is expected to cut billions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic metres of gas and millions of tonnes of coal from the global energy system in 2020 alone, according to data commissioned by the Guardian.

This would lead to the fossil fuel industry’s biggest drop in CO₂ emissions on record, in a single year eclipsing the carbon slumps triggered by the largest recessions of the last 50 years combined.

Climate experts expected global carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production to rise in 2020, from an estimated 36.8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide last year. Instead, emissions may fall by about 5%, or 2.5bn tonnes of CO₂, to its lowest levels in about a decade. ...

Erik Holm Reiso, a senior partner at Rystad, said: “The coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented event for energy markets, which will have a substantial impact on the world’s total carbon emissions. “The last time demand for oil contracted, during the financial crisis in 2008 to 2009, demand fell by 1.3m barrels of oil a day. But Covid-19 could cause oil demand to fall by more than five times as much.” ...

Resio said: “The real question is over the long-term impact of the virus. If we learn that remote working can work people may begin to question whether we need to take long haul flights to meet people in person. This could alter whether demand for oil ever recovers to the levels we have seen in previous years.”

Baltimore, Rhode Island Argue They’re Suing Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Deception

At a time when fossil fuel companies are using a public health crisis to demand financial and regulatory support, the governments of Baltimore and Rhode Island are calling out a “decades-long campaign of deception” by these companies in urging courts to advance lawsuits trying to hold polluters responsible for climate damages. Over a dozen of these climate liability lawsuits are currently pending, brought by cities, counties, one state, and one trade association seeking payments to help cover climate change-related costs. The lawsuits target major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP, alleging they deliberately deceived the public and policymakers on the dangers of fossil fuels.

And while the companies have fought hard to have these suits handled in federal court, where they likely have an easier path to dismissal, several of the cases are now proceeding in state courts. ...

Fossil fuel companies have tried to characterize these cases as trying to achieve complex policy decisions in the courts, but Baltimore and other plaintiffs have pushed back against what they say is a misrepresentation of their legal claims. They argue that these lawsuits are not about “solving climate change” (as some fossil fuel allies have claimed). The suits also do not challenge fossil fuel production as illegal. Rather, they allege that the companies’ actions to undermine climate science and to knowingly sell and promote a harmful product render them liable for climate impacts that they foresaw. The briefs from Baltimore and Rhode Island mention that as early as 1968, a report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute warned oil and gas companies that potential damage from burning fossil fuels “could be severe,” with impacts like rising sea levels and warming oceans. ...

While the Baltimore and Rhode Island cases proceed in state courts, the fossil fuel companies continue to pursue federal court jurisdiction. In Rhode Island’s case, the First Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to rule on this matter. In Baltimore’s case, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recently decided in the city’s favor that the case belongs in state court. The companies are petitioning the Supreme Court to overrule that decision.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

US's global reputation hits rock-bottom over Trump's coronavirus response

COVID-19: Coronavirus and Civilization

After lawsuit, Whitmer clarifies protesting allowed under stay-home order

“Burials Are Cheaper Than Deportations”: Virus Unleashes Terror in a Troubled ICE Detention Center

Bolsonaro Is Far From Alone in Putting Profits Over Lives—but He Is a Useful Scapegoat

As Nicaragua confronts Covid, its US-backed opposition exploits the pandemic as a weapon

Office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Attempted to Squash Newspaper's Lawsuit Seeking Coronavirus Records

Former OSHA Officials Voice Alarm as Trump Tells Corporations They Don't Have to Record Coronavirus Cases Among Their Workers

The Fed Is Killing the Two Main Functions of Wall Street: Price Discovery and Prudent Capital Allocation

Labour antisemitism investigation will not be sent to equality commission

Bernie Sanders’ political outsider savviness was his strength – and weakness

Krystal and Saagar: New poll shows Trump beating Biden, losing to Sanders

Saagar Enjeti: Biden, Media's PATHETIC Hillary Defense Against Devastating Trump Ad

Zaid Jilani: Urban vs rural covid-19 divide, how Trump is outmaneuvering Joe Biden's crisis response

Krystal and Saagar: Student groups, DSA won't back Biden, Hillary campaign manager FREAKS out

Krystal and Saagar: AOC stunning admission about Joe Biden

Rising: Joe Rogan tells brutal truth about Joe Biden

A Little Night Music

Lloyd Price - Wont’cha Come Home

Lloyd Price - Just Because

Lloyd Price - Lawdy Miss Clawdy

Lloyd Price - Question

Lloyd Price - Where Were You (On Our Wedding Day)?

Lloyd Price - So Long

Lloyd Price - Just For Baby

Lloyd Price - Lonely Chair

Lloyd Price - Stagger Lee

Lloyd Price - Counterfeit Friends