I've barely ventured out of the house in three weeks. Not because I'm a shut-in. Covid-19, a deadly flu-like virus transmitted to humans via bats, has swept out of China and into Europe and the U.S. We've been ordered to stay at home, except for essential workers. Many people have already commented on this, but many of the workers who have newly been deemed essential--grocery store cashiers, street cleaners, bus drivers--were thought of as low skill, easily replaced workers who didn't deserve to make much above minimum wage, let alone a middle-class living.
Anyway, leafing through the newspaper, virtually every article is about Covid-19 (perhaps rightfully so), and I don't have much to add, besides pointing to this piece that highlights the danger of authoritarians using the crisis to swipe more power.
The Department of Defense has awarded contracts to companies to meet emergency measures in New York. An Evangelical NGO, Samaritan's Purse, has set up a field hospital in a patch of central park. A for-profit company, Parsons Corporation, has been awarded a contract to do the same in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. What I'm about to line out has already been reported out in local outlets, so I'm treating this as a reporting exercise that readers can follow along with.
The company given the contract for the field hospital in Van Cortlandt Park is the colorless sounding Parsons Corporation. A search of Open Corporates shows that they are located in northern Virginia and that their CEO is Charles Harrington, and their treasurer is Shelly Green.
The contract, for $40 million, is for six months. It started on April 3 and ends on October 3, according to USspending.gov.
Parson's was incorporated in 1978 in... Delaware. They chose that state for its lax regulations, Delaware's laws are why many rich people and corporations don't have to hold their money off-shore. According to Wikipedia, the company was first established in the 1940s. The corporation is owned by an agent called, "The corporation trust company," located in 1209 Orange Street, Wilmington, Delaware. This information is all from Open Corporates and, no doubts, all sounds very boring. But it's the first step in peeling back the lid to see how things really go down in this country.
Oh, and they landed in some trouble with the Inspector General's office for some work they did (or didn't do) in Iraq after the American invasion. What they do in the Bronx with their $40 million could be an interesting story to return to in a few months.