The United States has entered the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This commentary describes the grassroots movements of the early years of the Great Depression in order to learn something about the dynamics of popular response to depression conditions. These early unemployed, self-help, labor, and other movements helped lay the groundwork for the New Deal and the massive labor struggles of the later 1930s.

Black people are two-and-a-half times as likely as White people to catch COVID-19 and substantially more likely to be unemployed as a result of the pandemic. George Floyd, in addition to being murdered by racist police, was infected by COVID-19 and lost his job when the restaurant he worked for closed because of the pandemic.

We are in the midst of the largest mass uprising in half a century. It is a response to the killing of an unarmed Black man named George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman. But it challenges a pattern of Black oppression that goes far beyond one cop killing one Black person, indeed, far beyond the issues of police abuse of the Black community.

On February 26, 2012, a neighborhood watch coordinator in Sanford, Florida, named George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed African American seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Two weeks later Zimmerman was charged with murder. Zimmerman claimed self-defense. A year and a half later he was acquitted.

Since the beginning of coronavirus lockdowns, the words “essential workers” are suddenly on everyone’s lips. Hospital orderlies, bathroom cleaners, bus drivers – until recently ignored, denigrated, and underpaid – are suddenly treated as heroes. Locked-down Americans stand in front of their houses at 7:00 pm to applaud them. Politicians give speeches celebrating them. These workers were always essential to the running of our society, but now they are being recognized as such. Recognized — but abused more than ever.

This is the fourth in a series of commentaries proposing an Emergency Green New Deal. Mass unemployment, misery, and impoverishment require emergency response not only to the medical pandemic but to the economic catastrophe that is accompanying it. “The Coronavirus Depression and the Emergency Green New Deal” explores a program tailored to the realities of the economic emergency.

When I look at the so-called “world order” of the human race, I lick my chops. In the good old days, my ancestors used to be able to conduct pandemics around the world without interference. And it looks like the good old days are coming back!

When young people around the world began their Climate Strikes, organized workers began joining in, contributing to the September 20, 2019 tally of more than seven million participants worldwide. Many unions were poised to help make the 2020 Earth Week climate strikes still bigger—when the coronavirus pandemic intervened. But trade unionists and other climate protectors are saving Earth Week by taking it on-line.

t was hardly surprising when a group of trade unions sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to provide ventilators and other personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers and all other workers put at risk by exposure to coronavirus.