If Trump had to make a choice between reducing employment levels and restoring corporate profitability in the short term, that is, between now and November, I suspect he would chose the former over the latter. Why? Because lower unemployment rates, which was one of his claims to fame before the pandemic, are probably essential if he is going to win reelection in November, Even his billionaire backers, I suspect, would go along with this trade off, knowing that it is temporary and that nothing will be better for their bottom line than 4 more years of Donald in the White House.

Hunger is swelling across the country, reports the NYT. But the Republicans could care less. Let our children starve, they say. While Democrats want to expand the Food Stamp program for the duration of this awful pandemic and economic implosion, McConnell and gang resist.

If anybody is operating on the assumption to “never waste a crisis,” it is this gang. It is strikingly evident in the negotiations around stimulus packages addressing a cratering economy, massive unemployment, and human hardship on an unimaginable scale.

The planet needs stewards who understand we are an interwoven (and to a degree contingent) part of the web of life and then act accordingly. But the pandemic is a forewarning that ecological mutuality and dependence isn’t yet our lodestar. This cognitive deficit, if it continues, will make the present pandemic nothing but the first act of a real life drama in which nature will become the main protagonist and exact its revenge on humanity in ways that are unimaginably deadly and disruptive.