On Our Radar

One of the main coronavirus relief fund sources for suffering small businesses hit its $350 billion limit Thursday and is no longer accepting any more lenders or applications, the Small Business Administration announced.

The CARES act bails out homogeneous chains but ignores the local restaurants that have transformed every region of this country.

One thing we know for certain about the COVID-19 crisis is that the pain will not be shared equally. Wealth can determine everything from the quality of healthcare people can access to how well they can ride out a job loss. And inequality is baked into the system.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday he favors allowing states struggling with high public employee pension costs amid the burdens of the pandemic response to declare bankruptcy rather than giving them a federal bailout.

They say you cannot see hunger. But what do you see in thousands of cars outside a food bank in San Antonio? Or cars lined up for hours outside supermarkets in Puerto Rico when people heard about food and water deliveries after Hurricane Maria?

One day in the fall of 1969, Denis Hayes, a graduate student at Harvard, snagged a 10-minute meeting with Gaylord Nelson, a United States senator from Wisconsin who had been talking up his idea for a national teach-in about environmentalism.

The past few weeks have exposed just how much a person’s risk of infection hinges on class. Though people of all incomes are at risk of being laid off, those who can work from home are at least less likely to get sick.

One in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential, according to a New York Times analysis of census data crossed with the federal government’s essential worker guidelines. Nonwhite women are more likely to be doing essential jobs than anyone else.

The prospect of a pandemic has been a well known systemic risk for many years, but no one could have predicted the exact timing or nature of the current coronavirus crisis.

Presidents’ Council on Impact Investing asks regulators to “immediately suspend efforts that could severely undermine the CRA and rob communities of desperately needed support”

“The severity of this disease in the African American community is a crisis within a crisis,” Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said Friday.

We’re three months into 2020 — yet this is how long American women must work into the year to earn the same salary as men did in 2019.

Nationally, 71% of households with children rely on women’s income for their economic well-being. The wage gap puts them at an even greater disadvantage when financial crises hit, says Roy in this op/ed.

It’s not too late to start protecting employment or to make medical care for COVID-19 free.

Workers around the country are walking off the job to protest a lack of protective equipment, safety measures, even soap.