1. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the astonishing failure of the United States to contain the pandemic. But something important gets lost in the details.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html

2. It does a good job emphasizing the key vulnerabilities, particularly high social inequality and lack of universal medical care. And it correctly blames the political decisions of Trump and the rest of the Republican Party as the most significant proximate cause of disaster.

3. But it leaves the impression that the Republicans simply made a mistake in reopening too soon. Not at all. The reason other rich countries took a different path was that they were willing to use state intervention in the economy so everyone could survive lockdown.

4. The difference in the US is not so much refusing to listen to experts, as it is the decrepit state of the safety net and the refusal to support everyone during the lockdown. That massively ratcheted up popular and elite pressure to reopen too soon.

5. What is behind the refusal to support those who can’t work, both before and during the pandemic? Very simple: corporate power and free market ideology. Those are what’s now spreading mass death across the country.

6. This needs to be repeated over and over again. Of course the politicians are to blame, but they themselves are a product of uncontrolled corporate power and free market ideology. We have to break their hold on the US if we want to survive.

7. Here, the human consequences of free market ideology and corporate power:
“Fewer than 300 Australians have died of complications from Covid-19… If the United States had the same per capita death rate, about 3,300 Americans would have died, rather than 158,000.”