I, too, am a New Yorker, and run a mutual aid fund with (and for) others in my large nonprofit. We’ve given a little extra cash to people whose hours have been cut during the pandemic, or whose households have lost a second income (we haven’t had to cut many workers, as our organization runs essential services).
As you said, this “screamer headline” doesn’t tell the whole story. Our residential neighborhoods are calm and local groceries, delis, and other small businesses are open and running. And people are helping each other in so many ways: I had COVID in mid-March, and local neighbors - not people I’d ever met, just people in the neighborhood, shopped for groceries for me, ran errands, and checked in on me.
Yes, it will be hard coming back from this. But I don’t know a single person who has permanently moved out of the city, and the blocks here are not war-torn and ravaged. Rather, they’re mostly quiet and empty (for NYC), since we’re missing tourists and most commuters. We’re surviving just like everyone else: one strange day at a time.
The economy is tanking because everything was closed to flatten the curve.
Cases are growing because people are now more scared of abject poverty than of corona so they are finding ways to work and live again. This was inevitable and I see no way of stopping them.
As is often the case, NYC is partly crippled by strange rules that require it to ask the state government for permission to do things related to taxes, education, transit, and so on that other municipalities can just go ahead and do, and since the rural parts of the state have more voice in Albany, they’re often denied even for reasonable policies. Transit is even worse, since major decisions can involve multiple state governments and multiple agencies with effective veto power at every stage. It’s truly Byzantine compared to everywhere this Long Islander has lived.
@mariaonthemove Thanks, that’s good to know. My sister is in Manhattan and said about the same.
If only there were some way, some entity or mechanism, to ensure that people didn’t fall into abject poverty in the midst of a major economic downturn that didn’t rely only on the “invisible hand of the market”.
If more Americans acknowledged that there was and that it is a good thing instead of (gasp) “soshalism”, perhaps they’d agree with most reputable economists and public health experts that the supposed binary choice between combatting the pandemic and saving the economy is a false dichotomy. Perhaps then they wouldn’t discover the hard reality that choosing the economy and letting the pandemic surge only will mean that the economy will suffer even more in the longer term (AKA pay now or pay a lot more later).
I’m not making a political statement, just a pragmatic one. People around here are getting rather desperate and many are starting to resent the politics.
As noted, it’s not really a pragmatic issue because the dichotomy – at least in the reality-based community – is a false one.
In the meantime, I certainly can’t blame anyone for resenting the GOP’s stubborn resistance to give desperate citizens (including their own suckers) relief funds like other OECD countries are doing.
I have no use for fatalism or exceptionalism of any flag. I and my family are out of options and need a solution so we are risking covid and working anywhere and any way we can. I don’t think too much about the rest of the world right now.
You are the one that made the assertion that shutting down was somehow worse than the virus. The problem with that is that the US DID NOT SHUT DOWN HARD ENOUGH OR LONG ENOUGH. The rest of the world largely did and they are able to move on. It sucks HERE because WE failed. Period. Don’t blame people who tried to do the right thing. They warned you.
Probably for the best. It would only be more upsetting for you to see how competent governments that actually care about getting their citizens through this and that aren’t locked into “free”-market fundamentalism are acting.
I asserted that It that the people who previously followed lockdown orders are now more afraid of starving in the street than of the virus, not quite the same but I can certainly see how you could be confused. I was talking about reality, not blame:
Observation of a problem and whinging about it only gets ones so far. If one wants to find a solution one has to look to root causes. One way to examine that is to look at the differences between the U.S. and other wealthy and advanced nation-states.
On a country-by-country basis, the U.S. is in an embarrassingly terrible condition both in terms of the pandemic and its impact on the real economy (i.e. main street, not Wall Street). It’s no mystery why: GOP politics, neoliberal fundamentalist ideology, and a right-wing science-denying demogogue are clearly responsible for both situations.
Without those factors, as @G_r_ld_z_n_r notes, the U.S. would likely have shut down the economy early enough and for long enough – like other OECD countries – that they’d have gotten through the first wave and had a real respite and time to prepare before the second wave arrived.
That’s not what’s happening. The countries that locked down properly during the first wave now have options that the U.S. doesn’t.
If you want financial help, demand that Senate Republicans stop blocking it. When they don’t listen, do your best to get them voted out.
While you’re at it, try voting for a president with the competence to handle a public health emergency instead of one who suggests that ingesting bleach might be a solution. This matters, because a vaccine isn’t expected until next spring or summer.
If New York city’s tax base was enough to pay for the maintenance of it’s own infrastructure, then it could act as it pleases. If Daddy is paying, Daddy gets a say.
This is why we (meaning humans) build large scale institutions, to serve us, especially in times of crisis. But too many of us have bought into the fiction that the “government” is something outside of us, and that we’re entirely subject to the whims of the market, which are natural forces that we can’t change or shape. Bullshit. It’s time we stop believing in bullshit and push for change that benefits all of us rather than some rich wall street asshole who would sooner turn a profit than pay his fair share of taxes.
False. The city needed a bailout in the '70s , in the aforementioned Drop Dead era, and the deal here involved giving up a ton of local control going forward, even decades later.
You think effin’ Elmira contributes more than takes from NY state coffers or something, as compared with NYC?
