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brokered a deal to move the Port of Los Angeles toward 24/7 operations, joining Long Beach, which is already operating around the clock, and that they are encouraging states to accelerate the licensing of more truck drivers.

On Wednesday, the White House will host leaders from the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to discuss the difficulties at ports, as well as hold a round table with executives from Walmart, UPS and Home Depot.

Imports for the fourth quarter are on pace to be 4.7 percent higher than in the same period last year, which was also a record-breaking holiday season,

Companies are exacerbating the situation by rushing to obtain products and bidding up their own prices.

Administration officials acknowledged on Tuesday in a call with reporters that the $1.9 trillion economic aid package Mr. Biden signed into law in March had contributed to supply chain issues by boosting demand for goods, but said the law was the reason the U.S. recovery has outpaced those of other nations this year.

Consumer demand for exercise bikes, laptops, toys, patio furniture and other goods is booming, fueled by big savings amassed over the course of the pandemic.

The blockages stretch up and down supply chains, from foreign harbors to American rail yards and warehouses.

Home Depot, Costco and Walmart have taken to chartering their own ships to move products across the Pacific Ocean.

the average anchorage time had stretched to more than 11 days.

Companies that had been trying to avoid passing on higher costs to customers may find that they need to as higher costs become longer lived.

worsening supplier delivery times and conditions at ports suggested that product shortages would persist into mid- to late next year.

governments around the world could help to smooth some shortages and dampen some price increases, for example by encouraging workers to move into industries with labor shortages, like trucking

“But to some extent, they need to let markets do their work,” she said.

a Transportation Department official gathering information on what the administration could do to address the supply chain shortages had contacted his company. Flexport offered the administration suggestions on changing certain regulations and procedures to ease the blockages, but warned that the problem was a series of choke points “stacked one on top of the other.”

from the whole big picture, the supply capacity is really hard to change in a noteworthy way.”

The shortages have come as a shock for many American shoppers, who are used to buying a wide range of global goods with a single click, and seeing that same product on their doorstep within hours or days.

The political risk for the administration is that shortfalls, mostly a nuisance so far, turn into something more existential. Diapers are already in short supply. As aluminum shortages develop, packaging pharmaceuticals could become a problem,

slow deliveries could make for slim pickings this Christmas and Hanukkah.

Consumer price inflation probably climbed by 5.3 percent in the year through September, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected to show on Wednesday.

They often point out that much of the surge has been spurred by a jump in car prices, caused by a lack of computer chips that delayed vehicle production.

the pandemic has shut down factories and slowed production around the world. Port closures, shortages of shipping containers and truck drivers, and pileups in rail and ship yards have led to long transit times and unpredictable deliveries for a wide range of products

Tesla, for instance, had been hoping to reduce the cost of its electric vehicles and has struggled to do that amid the bottlenecks.

If demand slumps as households spend away government stimulus checks and other savings they stockpiled during the pandemic downturn, that could leave purveyors of couches and lawn furniture with fewer production backlogs and less pricing power down the road.

If buying stays strong, and shipping remains problematic, inflation could become more entrenched.

To get their own orders fulfilled, companies have placed bigger orders and offered to pay higher prices.

“While it is possible, and hopeful, that all of these events will have peaceful resolutions, we should prepare for the potential negative outcomes.”

Last April, as the world emerged from the pandemic, he saw a chance for an economic “Goldilocks moment”—fast, sustained growth alongside inflation and interest rates that drift slowly upward. Instead, growth was accompanied by inflation that well outpaced expectations.

“In hindsight, the medicine…was probably too much and lasted too long,” Mr. Dimon wrote in Monday’s letter, referring to pandemic-era stimulus measures that kept consumers afloat and borrowing costs low. 

Russia’s war against Ukraine and Western sanctions meant to stop it will “at a minimum” slow the global economy, Mr. Dimon said. Oil, commodity and agriculture markets are already reeling, he said. The prospect of additional sanctions, which he supports, could “dramatically, and unpredictably, increase their effect.”

“Along with the unpredictability of war itself and the uncertainty surrounding global commodity supply chains, this makes for a potentially explosive situation,”

Energy investments, he said, are especially needed to wean the world off Russian oil and gas. He specifically called for the U.S. to issue permits for oil and gas projects and increased shipping of liquefied natural gas to Europe.

ensuring current energy needs are met doesn’t have to come at the expense of investments in green energy and broader efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

“We need to secure proper energy supplies immediately for the next few years, which can be done while reducing CO2 emissions,” Mr. Dimon wrote.

Fear of coronavirus infection is the economy’s biggest hurdle, he said, and the recovery will be held back until Americans believe it’s safe to resume commercial activities involving person-to-person contact.

“The No. 1 thing, of course, is people believing that it’s safe to go back to work so they can go out,” said Mr. Powell. “That’s what it will take for people to regain confidence.”

“If consumers are afraid to eat out, shop or travel, a relaxation in laws requiring business closures may do little to bring back customers and thus jobs,”

Mr. Powell and other senior central bank officials have indicated they don’t think a V-shaped recovery is likely. This has fueled their concern that the government’s initial relief measures may prove insufficient to nurse the economy through a shock with no modern parallel and with interest rates already near zero.

Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren said he expected the unemployment rate to peak near 20% this year and to stay above 10% through the end of the year. “This outlook is both sobering and a call to action,” he said. “Now is the time for both monetary and fiscal policy to act boldly to minimize the economic pain from the pandemic.”

For the third time in a week, Mr. Powell suggested additional spending by Washington could be needed to prevent long-term damage from high unemployment and waves of bankruptcies. “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent and are significantly worse than any recession since World War II,”

Mr. Rosengren warned that simply allowing businesses to reopen without slowing the spread of the virus risked making the economy worse.

It is vital that the design and timing of reductions in business restrictions not result in worse outcomes and higher unemployment over a longer period of time.”

Congress has appropriated nearly $2.9 trillion so far to support households, businesses, health-care providers and state and local governments, or around 14% of national economic output.

“I do think we need to take a step back and ask over time is it enough, and we need to be prepared to act further,” Mr. Powell said Tuesday.

Animating the administration’s approach is the expectation of a V-shaped recovery, he indicated. “We believe it’s the best bet,” Mr. Kudlow said.

“They’re all assuming after Labor Day everything is fine. Hope is not a strategy,” said Stephen Myrow, a former Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration

The issue has taken on urgency because of uncertainty over how long consumers will shun commercial activities that require human contact and because of partisan differences that could hold up further federal spending.

Since we’re nowhere close to that point — in particular, testing is still far behind what’s needed — we’re months away from a safe end of the lockdown. This is causing severe hardship for workers, businesses, hospitals and — last but not least — state and local governments, which unlike the federal government must balance their budgets.

Yet at the moment further relief legislation is stalled. And let’s be clear: Republicans are responsible for the impasse.

But the special loan program for small businesses has already been exhausted. State and city governments are reporting drastic losses in revenue and soaring expenses. And the Postal Service is on the edge of bankruptcy.

So we need another large relief package, targeted at these gaps. Where would the money come from? Just borrow it. Right now, the economy is awash in excess savings with nowhere to go. The interest rate on inflation-protected federal bonds is minus 0.56 percent; in effect, investors are willing to pay our government to make use of their money

What policy can and should do is mitigate that hardship. And the last relief package did, in fact, do a lot of the right things. But it didn’t do enough of them.

It’s true that Senate Republicans are trying to push through an extra $250 billion in small-business lending — and Democrats are willing to go along. But the Democrats also insist that the package include substantial aid for hospitals and for state and local governments. And Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is refusing to include this aid.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows what is really happening: McConnell is trying to get more money for businesses while continuing to shortchange state and local governments. After all, “starve the beast” — forcing governments to cut services by depriving them of resources — has been Republican strategy for decades

At a basic level, then, anti-government ideologues are preventing us from responding adequately to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.

Their obstructionism will cause vast suffering, as crucial public services are curtailed. It will also compound the economic damage.

In the near future, we’ll see millions of unnecessary job losses as impoverished families cut back spending, as local governments lay off teachers and firefighters, as the post office, if it survives at all, becomes a shadow of its former self.

And many of these job losses will probably persist even after the pandemic subsides.

If there’s a silver lining to all this, it is that the people sabotaging our response to Covid-19 economics may also be sabotaging their own political future. Trump is, after all, counting on rapid economic recovery to erase public memories of his disastrous handling of the pandemic itself. Yet he and his allies in the Senate are making such a recovery much less likely.

Early successes are crucial for presidents, since they must harness their power when it is at its apex early in their terms. Political muscle is built for later legislative fights by enacting priorities and uniting party factions behind a common cause. Presidents who struggle to get early priorities passed are not necessarily doomed. But they risk creating an impression of disarray that can hurt them in their first midterm elections, as was the case with President Bill Clinton's collapsed effort to overhaul American health care.

And progressives who were dismayed by the removal of a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour elected to bank their gains, staying behind the effort and vowing to fight another day.

The President judged the $600 billion cost of an alternative package offered by 10 GOP senators as insufficient for the scale of the crisis. In votes so far in the House and the Senate, the bill has not attracted a single Republican supporter as Biden's opponents stake out early positions for the midterm elections on the basis of a pro-Trump base of activists who are keen to deny the new President an early victory.

Various polls show that more than 60% of the public supports it, which means some Republican and independent voters are on board.

Some economists, meanwhile, fear that it could trigger an inflationary spike in an economy that already appears to be in recovery and could overheat if there is a swift exit from the pandemic.

"It's a real tragedy when you look at that package. We know that the result of that package is going to be middle-class tax increases," the Wyoming Republican said.

The bill is sure to be a fulcrum of the Democratic midterm election campaign next year.

But if the current pace of vaccinations is maintained and the end game of the pandemic is not derailed by a wave of sickness and death caused by Covid-19 variants, Biden can expect a much faster and more robust economic rebound.

The bill is almost the inverse of Trump's sole major legislative triumph outside of a conservative refashioning of the judiciary: a massive tax cut that cost $1.5 trillion and was targeted mostly at corporations and more well-off Americans.

His initial $1.9 trillion request, not far off half the entire US annual federal budget, is playing into Republican claims that his administration will be rooted in out-of-control socialism.

The partisan nature of the votes on Biden's recovery package also has some Democrats pondering whether to seek to abolish filibuster rules that mean most major legislation needs a 60-vote majority to pass. The $1.9 trillion behemoth was advanced using a process known as reconciliation, which applies only to budget issues and can be used only sparingly.

But it seems equally certain that Democratic priorities like voting rights will die in a 50-50 Senate.

But if those systemic problems made Trump president, the more visceral shock of the pandemic and the visceral incompetence (and worse) of his administration have created a space where a meaningful majority of Americans may be satisfied with recovery, normalcy, a phase of decadence that feels depressing but not dire.

Mr. Trump devoted Saturday to four rallies across the state, and he and Mr. Biden planned campaign events for the final 48 hours of the race as well, with a wave of prominent Democrats and celebrities slated to arrive

In Pennsylvania in particular, the possibility of extended court battles and confusion hangs over the race, with the state Republican Party hoping the Supreme Court will reconsider its decision last week to allow the state to continue receiving absentee ballots for three days after Election Day.

The Texas Supreme Court denied an effort by Republicans to throw out more than 120,000 votes that had been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, an increasingly Democratic area anchored in Houston.

in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday, Mr. Trump claimed, inaccurately, that the result of the election was always determined on Election Day. “We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3,” he said. “The evening of Nov. 3. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it should be. What’s going on in this country?”

Mr. Trump entered the final hours of the race in a worse position here than he was four years ago, when Pennsylvania was seen as Hillary Clinton’s firewall. This time, Mr. Biden has a lead of six points, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday, and is working to create multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes.

Mr. Trump’s lagging position in the race was evident in his grueling travel schedule that had him shoring up votes in five states he won four years ago — Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.His final rally of the day was scheduled for 11 p.m., and risked violating a midnight curfew in Miami-Dade County.Mr. Biden, by contrast, set his sights squarely on Pennsylvania on Sunday, an approach he will repeat again Monday, along with a foray into Ohio, a state Mr. Trump won handily in 2016 but that polls show could be more competitive now.

Mr. Biden countered with his own warning later Sunday, saying, “The president is not going to steal this election.”

Mr. Biden’s Philadelphia events kicked off a last push through the state over the final two days. On Monday, Mr. Biden, Senator Kamala Harris and their spouses are expected to campaign in five media markets, hoping to cement support across a sprawling coalition and to keep Mr. Trump’s margins down in parts of western Pennsylvania that propelled him to victory in 2016.“My message is simple,” Mr. Biden said Sunday. “Pennsylvania is critical in this election.”

Democrats are well aware of how devoted Mr. Trump’s core base remains. In Macomb County in Michigan, where the president held his first rally Sunday, Irwin Patterson was selling Trump merchandise at a makeshift roadside store.

He also embraced the actions of some of his supporters in Texas who had surrounded a Biden campaign bus with their vehicles on Saturday, in an apparent attempt to slow it down and run it off the road. Mr. Trump claimed the vehicles were “protecting his bus, yesterday, because they are nice.”

Compared with other swing states, such as Florida, far fewer early ballots have already been cast in Pennsylvania and, according to the U.S. Elections Project, as of Sunday there were more than 350,000 absentee ballots that had been requested by Democratic voters that had yet to be returned.

That lead, however, isn’t enough to make Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans feel fully confident about the state of the race in Pennsylvania.

The Trump campaign ads running in Pennsylvania have been overwhelmingly centered on economic messages, mainly jobs and taxes.

Pennsylvania saw its unemployment rate fall to 8.1 percent in September, according to the Labor Department, nearly identical to the national rate of 7.9 percent.

“That blue wall has to be re-established,” Mr. Biden said in another recent Pennsylvania campaign appearance. He said that winning the state meant a “great deal to me, personally as well as politically.”

Pennsylvania has long loomed large in the psyche of the Biden campaign. Mr. Biden, a Scranton native, gave his first speech of his presidential campaign in Pittsburgh, and he chose Philadelphia for his campaign headquarters, before the pandemic hit.

Pennsylvania’s economy is emerging from the pandemic recession but still has a long road ahead to its pre-crisis state. Like the nation, it has seen a two-track recovery that has left small businesses and low-earning workers behind.

PHILADELPHIA — As the national early vote climbs past a staggering 93 million and challenges to the electoral process intensify across states, President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. are barreling into Pennsylvania and turning it into the top battleground in Tuesday’s election, with Democrats flooding in with door-knockers and Republicans trying to parlay Mr. Trump’s rallies into big turnout once again.

Pennsylvania has more Electoral College votes, 20, than any other traditional battleground except Florida, and Mr. Trump won the state by less than one percentage point in 2016.

Mr. Biden is ahead with a modest margin in recent polls, and is trying to cut into the president’s turnout in rural counties. But Mr. Trump’s rallies have energized many Republican voters, and his team is already preparing legal challenges over the vote if it ends up being close.

“Every day is a new reminder of how high the stakes are, how far the other side will go to try to suppress the turnout,” Mr. Biden said as he campaigned here Sunday. “Especially here in Philadelphia. President Trump is terrified of what will happen in Pennsylvania.”

Some Trump supporters also turned disruptive on Sunday: Vehicles bearing Trump flags halted traffic on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey; local officials said the motorcade backed up traffic for several miles. In Georgia, a rally for Democrats that had been scheduled was canceled, with organizers citing worries over what they feared was a “large militia presence” drawn by Mr. Trump’s own event nearby.

Mr. Biden, by contrast, set his sights squarely on Pennsylvania on Sunday, an approach he will repeat again Monday, along with a foray into Ohio, a state Mr. Trump won handily in 2016 but that polls show could be more competitive now.

Throughout his final sprint of rallies, Mr. Trump has moved to baselessly sow doubt about the integrity of the electoral process.

Democrats are well aware of how devoted Mr. Trump’s core base remains. In Macomb County in Michigan, where the president held his first rally Sunday, Irwin Patterson was selling Trump merchandise at a makeshift roadside store.

Later, he tweeted in response to the news that the F.B.I. was investigating the incident that “in my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” adding that federal authorities should be scrutinizing antifa instead.

Of the three big Northern swing states Mr. Trump won by a hair four years ago, the once reliably blue state of Pennsylvania is the one his advisers believe is most likely within his reach. That’s in large part because of the support of rural voters and Mr. Biden’s call for eventually phasing out fossil fuels, an unpopular stance for many voters in a state with a large natural gas industry.

The Trump campaign ads running in Pennsylvania have been overwhelmingly centered on economic messages, mainly jobs and taxes. The campaign’s most aired ad in Pennsylvania over the past week has been a negative ad claiming Mr. Biden will raise taxes (he has said he will raise taxes for those making over $400,000).

But the Biden campaign has not ceded the subject to the president, with 14 different ads on air that touch on jobs and the economy. Its most aired ad in Pennsylvania over the past week featured a Biden speech outlining his plans for pandemic recovery, including jobs. Another ad directly rebuts the Trump campaign’s attacks on his tax plan.

Pennsylvania saw its unemployment rate fall to 8.1 percent in September, according to the Labor Department, nearly identical to the national rate of 7.9 percent. That is a significant improvement from the 16.1 percent unemployment it posted in April. But the state still had 380,000 fewer jobs in September than it did in September of 2019, and there are 18 percent fewer small businesses open here compared to a year ago, according to data compiled by the economists at Opportunity Insights.

Americans have since ramped up spending on everything from home improvements to bicycles with the help of stimulus checks sent to millions, though overall expenditures remain below pre-pandemic levels.

A nationwide decline in combined state revenue has happened after only two events in 90 years: following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The U.S. economy has steadily recovered since the spring, and more than 11 million jobs of the 22 million lost earlier in the year have come back. Still, the unemployment rate recently hovered at 7.9%, and there has been an uptick in permanent layoffs.

Economists warn a two-track recovery is emerging, with well-educated and well-off people and some businesses prospering, at the same time lower-wage workers with fewer credentials, old-line businesses and regions tied to tourism are mired in a deep decline.

After 2008, some states implemented or added to rainy day funds—cash reserves that can be used to fill revenue gaps caused by a potential shock

School systems also usually receive local funds through property taxes.

Schools received federal aid from the pandemic-stimulus packages passed by Congress earlier this year.

The money was quickly spent

The Ohio Education Association, a teachers union, said the state’s school districts could face budget shortfalls for the 2022 and 2023 budget years of between 20% and 25%.

Many states are pleading for more aid from Congress, which has so far sent money in its coronavirus relief packages to deal with the health crisis but not to offset revenue losses.

Congress has doled out about $150 billion in Covid-19 response dollars to state and local governments, plus some additional money to cover elevated Medicaid costs.

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said they don’t want Covid-19 aid used to address longstanding financial problems.

Community Health Resources, which offers mental-health and addiction services to 27,000 children and adults, is concerned it won’t receive its expected more than $40 million in state funding—62% of the organization’s annual budget—in the next fiscal year, which begins in July.

Dr. Conley said Monday it was possible the president would no longer be contagious before the 10-day period ends.

The president has repeatedly played down the threat of the virus, which medical experts say is very real, especially for older people and people with pre-existing health problems. After returning to the White House on Monday from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump stood on a White House balcony, removed his mask and flashed two thumbs up.

Biden said that he was glad Mr. Trump “seems to be coming along pretty well” but that he hoped the president would “communicate the right lesson to the American people: Masks matter.”

including Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s experimental antibody drug cocktail

Mr. Trump’s physicians declined to answer several questions about the president’s case

“That’s crucial information,” he said. Without it, he said, it isn’t clear how badly the illness has affected him, particularly whether he contracted pneumonia. Mr. Trump’s early treatment with dexamethasone, which is typically given to people with more-severe breathing problems who are further along in the illness, raised questions, Dr. Chin-Hong said.

But tracking back to the fundamentally fraught nature of this exercise, the risk of flogging the “comeback” too hard is people think the pandemic is over, and a sanctioned complacency creeps in.

If you are Morrison and Frydenberg, you want to build confidence but not complacency, and that can be a fine distinction to hit. If you sound too positive, you invite the nation to conclude the crisis has passed when it hasn’t, and that increases the risk of outbreaks, and so it goes.

One of the stranger dynamics during this deeply strange year has been various players in the federal government castigating various premiers for internal border closures, when the big daddy of border closures was actually the decision of the Morrison government to close the international border – a decision with huge economic ramifications.

Part of the answer, to be fair, is luck. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a major energy shock in Europe, which had come to rely on imports of Russian natural gas. America, which exports gas, was much less affected.

What about inflation? When you use comparable measures, America also has the lowest inflation rate among major economies.

It’s true that one recent poll found that a majority of Americans and 60 percent of Republicans say that unemployment is near a 50-year high. But it’s actually near its lowest level since the 1960s.

A second, probably more important factor was that the United States pursued aggressively expansionary fiscal policy

Many economists were extremely critical, warning that this spending would fuel inflation, which it probably did for a while. But inflation has subsided, while “Big Fiscal” helped the economy get to full employment — arguably the first time we’ve had truly full employment in decades.

A strong job market may in turn have had major long-term benefits, by drawing previously marginalized Americans into the work force.

the percentage of U.S. adults in their prime working years participating in the labor force is now at its highest level in 20 years. One number I find especially striking is labor force participation by Americans with a disability, which has soared.

One last thing: When Covid struck, all advanced countries took strong measures to limit economic hardship, but they took different approaches. European governments generally paid employers to keep workers on their payrolls, even if they were temporarily idle. America, for the most part, let layoffs happen but protected workers with expanded unemployment benefits.

There was a case for each approach. Europe’s approach helped keep workers connected to their old jobs; the U.S. approach created more flexibility, making it easier for workers to move to different jobs if the post-Covid economy turned out to look quite different from the economy before the pandemic.

is clear: We have been remarkably successful, even if nobody will believe it.

In looking at the political implications of this horror show, one need only recall the 2008 Great Recession. The causes of that financial collapse — e.g., unregulated financial instruments, negligence from ratings companies, lender deception, the Federal Reserve’s failure to act — were complicated.

the politicians who resisted warnings (from then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, among other people) and favored a Wild West deregulated financial industry have unique culpability. And the party in charge at the time — the Republicans — bore the brunt of the voters wrath at the polls. Do we imagine this domestic debacle will play out differently?

Trump and his Republicans are vulnerable on three counts: failure to act to head off the pandemic, failure to respond adequately to the crisis and corruption in the response

Perhaps most important, Pelosi will set up a House select committee to oversee the entire coronavirus effort, much like then-Sen. Harry Truman did for World War II funding, to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.

Trump will faces three major challenges: Did he do everything to head off a deep recession? Did he do enough to help those hurt? Did he prevent profiteering and corruption that diverted and from the needy? Unless the answer to all three is “yes,” Trump will have a hard time persuading Americans to leave him in charge of mitigation and recovery.

3.5%, a 50-year-low, the black unemployment rate was 5.8%. The white unemployment rate was 3.1%.

“Whatever is being projected for the national unemployment rate, in most instances, we expect to see something close to twice that for black Americans.”

For Yolanda Murray of Detroit, Michigan, not having savings meant weeks of panic trying to figure out how she was going to pay the bills that came on 1 April after she was furloughed from her job at a hotel.

last hired, first fired” phenomenon dramatically affects black Americans more than any other group in the US due to the country’s history of racism and segregation of black Americans in the work sector.

Working in these fields leads to lower wages – black Americans have the lowest median wage of any racial group in the US – and the jobs are often seen as the most expendable during an economic downturn.

Even with a low unemployment rate, wage growth for low-wage workers, especially for black workers, has been slow. Black Americans have seen the slowest wage growth compared with other groups of Americans, reaching a growth rate that was four times slower at certain wage distribution levels, according to a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report.

The reason why African Americans bear the brunt of downturns more is that when firing decisions start to occur the least educated and those with the least experience tend to be let go first. There is also continued discrimination in the workplace,” Rodgers said.

t’s like how am I going to maintain all of this?” Murray said. Weeks after she filed her application for unemployment insurance, payments started coming in and Murray was able to pay her bills again.

Murray and her unionized co-workers spent 28 days striking for higher wages and better healthcare. At the time, workers at the hotel had not had wage rises since before the last recession, and healthcare costs were so expensive that Murray could only afford to cover herself, leaving her two children out of her plan.

Trump’s repeated claims that he has been the best president for African Americans was repeatedly pegged to falling unemployment numbers. But those numbers only tell a partial story, as work by Rodgers and others has shown. Black families are especially vulnerable to economic downturns because they lack the savings that can act as a buffer against unexpected layoffs or lost wages. And during the last recovery they lost ground against their white peers.

compared with 9%, respectively. And the black homeownership rate is the lowest of any racial group in the US and has consistently been about 30% lower than the white homeownership rate over the years, even as the economy was getting stronger.

“Wealth allows you to respond to that unexpected health emergency, that broken hole in the tire you have to replace. It also allows you to buy a home, put your kids through school,” said Danyelle Solomon, vice-president of the race and ethnicity program at the Center for American Progress.

Experts agree that being poor has costly effects on a person’s health: for adults living in extreme poverty, being poor can cost up to 15 years of life expectancy.

ave seen higher death rates due to Covid-19 compared with any other group in the US. Black Americans made up 25% of deaths from Covid-19 in the US though they make up a little under 13% of the US population.

“National emergencies, pandemics, epidemics, what they do is they spotlight inequality,” Solomon said. “What we see in Covid-19 is no different. It’s highlighting racial disparities at every single level that have been with our society for a very long time.”

Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France.

Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

he administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified i

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders

The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party

His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests

If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long

An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers

An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.

It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation.

putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

About 150 public companies managed to bag more than $600m in forgivable loans before the funds ran out. Among them was Shake Shack, a company with 6,000 employees valued at $2bn. It has since given the cash back but others have not.

Fisher Island, a members-only location off the coast of Miami where the average income of residents is $2.2m and the beaches are made from imported Bahamian sand, has received $2m in aid.

The banks that were the largest recipients of bailout cash in the last recession have also done well, raking in $10bn in fees from the government loans, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

By 2016 – seven years after the end of the last recession – the bottom 90% of households in the US had still not recovered from the last downturn while the top 10% had more wealth than they had in 2007.

For black and Latinx Americans, the situation is worse. The black-white wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979.

Meanwhile, billionaires have been unable to put a well-heeled foot wrong. Billionaire wealth soared 1,130% in 2020 dollars between 1990 and 2020, according to the Institute for Policy Studies

That increase is more than 200 times greater than the 5.37% growth of median wealth in the US over this same period

the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased 79% between 1980 and 2018.

North America’s oilfield services sector, which producers rely on to drill new wells, has been decimated, he said.“They’re decapitated from being able to grow,” Tahmazian said. “The supply side is broken.”

The pace of output recovery in the United States, the world’s No. 1 oil producer, is forecast to be slow and will not top its 2019 record of 12.25 million barrels per day (bpd) until 2023.

Many municipal and state health officials and lawmakers blame Bolsonaro's government for undermining their efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And the country's National Council of Health Secretaries (CONASS) has asked the federal government to adopt stricter measures to support hospitals and enforce social distancing.

"The health system in Brazil is on the verge of collapse," Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria told CNN's Becky Anderson during a recent interview. "There is no national coordination to combat the pandemic in Brazil. It would be important for the President and the governors to send the same message to the population, but this unfortunately, doesn't happen in Brazil.

He has made disobeying health guidance a point of pride, congratulating agricultural workers at an event last week for not staying home "like cowards."

"The emergence of new variants, which combine both the potential to be more transmissible and the absence of broad and articulated mitigation and suppression measures, are highly worrisome," the study's authors wrote, urging Brazil to encourage behaviors that limit the viral spread.

"The data showing the prevalence of this variant in several states and its ample spread throughout the country, as well as the challenges presented due to its high level of transmission, reinforce the immediate need to adopt non-pharmaceutical measures in order to reduce the speed or its spread and the increases in cases."

"This is what viruses do: They evolve, they get stronger. The only way to stop it is to contain its spread, which is why we need restrictive measures -- there is no other solution. Even if the Government decrees a national lockdown, we need the population to adhere. The action of each one of us will impact everyone as a whole," Naveca said.

Hope could be on its way, in the form of vaccines. But Brazil's vaccination rollout was slow in comparison to other countries, including others in the region, like Chile and Mexico.

Since then, roughly 4% of Brazil's 211 million citizens have received at least one vaccine dose, according to data from the Brazilian Health Ministry, and 2.3 million have had two doses.

"Pfizer says this very clearly on the contract, 'we are not responsible for any collateral side effects' - if you turn into an alligator it's your problem," Bolsonaro said in December. "If you become Superman, or grow a beard as a woman, or a man's voice becomes high pitched, they say they have nothing to do with that."

"I thank you for this meeting and we recognize Pfizer as a great world company," Bolsonaro said, during an excerpt of the meeting posted to his official Twitter account. "We would like to close these deals with you, even more given the aggressiveness of this virus in Brazil."

"The story in Brazil can be and will be repeated elsewhere if we stop implementing the measures as we need to implement them," he said. "Countries are going to lurch back into third and fourth surges if we're not careful."

"Unfortunately, I don't think we've learned our lesson," Molina said. "We [health workers] are tired, exhausted and are getting sick. We feel powerless. We need a more coordinated action if we're going to keep this from happening again.

"I haven't had a chance yet to go over the details of the counteroffer made by Capito. We're going to meet sometime next week, and we'll see if we can move that, and I'll have more to say about that at the time," Biden told reporters on the tarmac before departing for Cleveland.

The GOP's counteroffer is a sign that bipartisan talks will continue, but Republicans and the White House are still far apart on new spending for infrastructure and how to pay for it all. It's unclear how much closer the two sides can get in order to reach a deal ahead of Congress' return on June 7.

Biden traveled to Cleveland on Thursday to pitch his economic proposals at a critical moment in the bipartisan negotiations over a potential infrastructure deal.

"We've turned the tide on a once-in-a-century pandemic. We turned the tide on a once-in-a-generation economic crisis, and families are beginning to be able to breathe just a little bit easier. We still have work to do, but our future today is as bright and as wide open as it ever has been," Biden said, speaking from Cuyahoga Community College. He continued: "And now we're faced with the question: What kind of economy are we going to build for tomorrow?"

In addition to the national vaccination program, Biden touted the sweeping $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief law that delivered economic relief directly to Americans and businesses.

Biden pressed for large-scale infrastructure investments, including in research and development, arguing: "We must be number one in the world to lead the world in the 21st century. ... And the starting gun has already gone off -- we can't afford to fall any further behind."

"The bottom line is this: The Biden economic plan is working. We've had record job creation. We're seeing record economic growth. We're creating a new paradigm, one that rewards the working people of this nation, not just those at the top," Biden said. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that the White House was "grateful" to Capito for the proposal, which she said "substantially increased the funding level."

"At first review, we note several constructive additions to the group's previous proposals, including on roads, bridges and rail," Psaki wrote.

Biden, whose most recent proposal was $1.7 trillion, has indicated he'd be open to discussing a $1 trillion plan, senators have told CNN. But the disputes up to this point go far beyond the overall cost, with sharply different views over the scale of any potential compromise proposal and how it would be paid for continuing to serve as major roadblocks.

In their offer Thursday, Republicans doubled down that they want to pay for this plan using unspent Covid relief funding, user fees from electric cars and the existing gas tax. But, the White House views unspent Covid relief funds as a nonstarter because they argue much of that money has already been spent. Republicans, meanwhile, still are not budging on making any changes to their 2017 tax bill.

"The American Rescue Plan is working exactly as intended -- delivering relief to families, businesses, and communities to bridge our economy to the end of the pandemic and into a strong recovery," she said in a statement, adding, "major provisions of the law for state and local governments, K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and child care providers have been almost entirely allocated. Local governments, schools, and other entities are already budgeting for this year and beyond with these funds."

"The American people -- across the political spectrum -- are sending a clear message, the question now is whether Congressional Republicans will listen," Donilon writes.

Restoring the public’s trust in the C.D.C. is crucial. Hospitals and health care providers are beyond tired, beyond stretched.

We also face the need for the largest public health operation in a century, vaccinating the population — twice — to protect ourselves and each other from a surging pandemic. Because the impact of Covid-19 does not fall equally on everyone, we must redouble our efforts to reach every corner of the U.S. population.

Our successful recovery from this virus requires us to make sure that those who have suffered disproportionately are no longer left behind. As the C.D.C. director, I will work to address inequities that have left African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans hospitalized and dying at disproportionately higher rates from Covid-19, by focusing on the health conditions that are prevalent in communities of color.

I promise to work with my colleagues at the C.D.C. to harness the power of American science and confront these challenges.

And while the astounding crimes at the US Capitol last week rightly captured headlines, the day was also rife with violence and threatened violence at other state capitol buildings as well.

If this comes as news, it could be because there are fewer reporters than ever covering statehouses. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center study, the number of newspaper newsroom employees nationwide fell by 51% between 2008 and 2019. A 2014 Pew study found that the number of statehouse reporters dwindled by 35% between 2003 and 2014 alone.

Armed extremists have been allowed to menace lawmakers in buildings that belong to the people and must remain transparent and accessible to the people. And Republican state legislators have stoked the fires by doubling down on conspiracy theories and lies in their words and actions.

The US Capitol, with a more than 2,300 member police force and a $460 million annual budget, should have had the resources to secure itself. Indeed, the law enforcement response to the attack was wholly inadequate, and it stands in stark contrast to the police treatment of Black people protesting for civil rights.

We ignore what happens in our state capitols at our peril. The conditions that have led to this violence will not disappear overnight when Biden assumes office. State lawmakers will continue to bear a tremendous responsibility in pandemic response and recovery, including vaccine distribution, to the continued ire of violent mobs.

Our state capitols stand as the symbols and workplaces of our democracy at home. As lawmakers begin to return for winter sessions, they are tasked with making difficult decisions in the face of pandemic-slashed budgets and a continued public health crisis.