When a brutal act outrages everyone

 
When a brutal act outrages everyone (WITH A UN SEAT)
By Nils Castro: On June 8, the National Bureau of Economic Research - the highest academic authority in the study of the cycles of the United States economy - ruled that this country entered a recession in February 2020, for the first time Since 2009. But the news was spread with a cat locked: The New York Times, the AP agency and other media added that this occurred due to the closure of the US economy due to the covid-19 pandemic, which is a lie. This falsity insinuates that the problem does not lie in a structural exhaustion of the North American economy, but in this fortuitous biological plague.

However, analysts often consider recession to the effect of two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, which places the origins of the economic crisis in the last period of 2019, before that virus entered the scene. However, by then reports of the impending recession in the United States - and in Europe - were already frequent in the international press. And for Latin Americans the issue was even more obvious, because our economies had already been going from bad to worse long before.

There is little innocence in that mistake. The first covid-19 patient in the United States was announced on January 21, 2020, and was a traveler who had recently returned from Wuhan to Washington state. But it was not until January 30 and February 26 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first and second cases of patients without exposure to the virus from travel or contact with an infected person. Until that date, the other known cases corresponded to individuals who had just visited China. It was not until the end of February, the 29th, when the first death by covid-19 in the United States occurred in Washington state. [1]

Statistically, the curve for cases of illness and death of pandemic victims in that country remained low until mid-March, when it skyrocketed, becoming very high in April. Therefore, a recession that started in February cannot be attributed to covid-19. Because that economic contraction arose before and due to endogenous causes. This is not a casual observation: it points out that when the pandemic has ended, the original causes of the economic crisis will still be active, since they have another origin. By the time this happens it will not be easy to define whether this will correspond to the old or to a new “normality”.

This obviously does not imply that this pandemic is alien to the current phenomenon. On the contrary, as it expanded, it quickly accelerated the recession, impressed it with unusual complexity and worsened its repercussions. The sum of the recession plus the pandemic - with both the halting of activities and the high risk of its reopening - soon meant that the US economy would retreat further, anticipating a further drop in GDP. The unemployment rate rose from 3.5% in January to 14.7% in March, the highest recorded since the Gan Depression.

The World Bank says this will be the worst recession since World War II, as this year the US economy will contract 6.1% and the Eurozone economy 9.1%, while China's economic growth will be 1% slower. Although the Bank expects that in 2021 the global economy may rebound by 4.2%, the pandemic will still be a threat to the financial market and world trade. In turn, the OECD foresees an unprecedented global crisis, with two options: with or without flare-ups upon restarting activities. Meanwhile, she will remain on the tightrope of uncertainty until there is a vaccine available to everyone. But he predicts that world GDP will contract 7.5%, even if there are no re-shoots.

Anthony Fauci, the main scientific responsible for the fight against covid-19 in the United States, warned that that country "is still at the beginning" of the pandemic. Although this continues to wreak havoc, the states of the Union still do not have a unified criterion, not even to increase the tests, essential to combat the disease. It is a new virus, easily transmitted, which in addition to affecting the airways can also cause other damage to the sick, and Fauci admits he is surprised by "how quickly it spread throughout the planet." Experts reiterate that the lack of a national strategy - which President Trump is far from contributing - leaves Americans to chance.

But not everyone has a bad time. According to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans fo Tax Fairness, between mid-March and mid-May - during the partial quarantine - the wealthiest Americans increased their fortunes by $ 434 billion. Although some say that the virus does not discriminate between classes and borders, at the same time 38.6 million workers lost their jobs in the United States, and the level of food insufficiency grew.

As academic analyst and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has written, “We are all facing the same storm, but we are not all in the same boat. Economic inequality in the United States has produced two very different pandemics: in one, billionaires are isolating themselves on their yachts in the Caribbean, and wealthy families can be quarantined in multi-million dollar mansions. In the other boat are the people who risk their lives for their jobs and the people without income who are starving. ”

More laconic but no less eloquent was Senator Bernie Sanders, who commented that "a nation is not sustainable when so few have so much while so many have so little."

In such circumstances how can it be surprising that the brutal murder of Geroge Floyd, as a drop that spills the cup, after insulting the entire society, mobilizes millions of white, Latino, indigenous, mestizo, middle-class women and men, workers, precarious employees and intellectuals of all colors, along with blacks, equally fed up with such a regime of extreme inequality and multiple discriminations, which insists on returning to its “normality”, to which - crisis after crisis - it wants again and again.

Panamanian intellectual.