The The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Two guests on

today's program. The political scientist Thea Rio Franco's will discuss the

relevance of the Green New Deal in the present crisis.

spoiler, it's more urgent than ever.

And then the journalist Alexander Zeichik will talk about how the patent and profit-driven

drug industry is making a search for a vaccine far harder than it needs to be and how a public option for

farmer could change all that. Before that a few words in the news. In the eight

weeks between March 21st and May 9th over 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance, an average of

over 4 million a week. That's almost 20 times the weekly average before the crisis began.

And the number of drawing benefits in the week ending May 2nd, the most recent available,

was over 21 million, ten times the number before the crisis. Many states are having trouble

processing the cascade of applications, so both the initial and continuing claims numbers as they're known in the

jargon are behind reality. The so-called insured unemployment rate the share of the

labor force drawing benefits is close to 16 percent. That's usually considerably lower than the official unemployment rate,

so we're likely to see a number well north of 20% when the May employment report is released in early June.

These numbers are breathtaking. And the Federal Reserve is out with its annual survey of households material well-being.

Most of the work was done last October before the Corona crisis,

but they did a supplementary survey in early April to try to catch up with a new reality.

A few highlights.

39% of the people in a household with income below $40,000 who were working in February

reported a job loss in March, and another 6% had their hours reduced or got put on

unpaid leave. Overall 19% of adults had such an experience in March. No doubt

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