If we didn’t know it before — or had forgotten — the escalating pandemic and its widening economic ripple effects are hammering home the reality that our world is full of risk and uncertainty. Preparedness is paramount.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented public health crisis that has overwhelmed our already thinly stretched public health resources and forced Americans to make difficult economic choices. With millions of workers finding themselves unemployed or working through this pandemic there are big questions about how we can keep workers safe while still allowing everyone to make ends meet.
In the Lake Apopka region of Florida, a typical August day might yield a high temperature of 92 degrees F, a heat made all the worse by the stifling humidity. The weather is bad enough for office workers who spend most of the day next to an air conditioner. For farm workers, who spend their August picking blueberries outdoors, the heat can be oppressive, even fatal.
Charges and countercharges about unfair labor practices and misleading production numbers are swirling around this week. Is there any truth to any of them?
Clearly, the political focus of the year is a certain mind-boggling presidential candidate who hardly touches policy matters — and when he does, tends to push absurd ideas and proposals that would tank our economy, lead to world war, destroy our climate and environment, and piss off our allies. However, as I wrote the other day, Donald Trump’s success in politics wasn’t magic — far from it. Donald Trump’s success in politics was built on the back of decades worth of conspiracy theories and anti-science rhetoric and extremism from the Republican Party. (Come on, people, there’s a reason he won the GOP nomination.)
