#^d 2020-03-29 #^h Weekend Roundup
News this week is pretty much all coronavirus. Most striking number below is Anthony Fauci's projection that coronavirus will kill more than 100,000 Americans, and that millions will be infected. The US now has more confirmed cases than any other nation -- even China, despite a head start and nearly four times as many people (see How the US stacks up to other countries in confirmed coronavirus cases; note the graphs, which plot spread over time; also note how little testing has actually been carried out in the US).
Or, if you're more concerned about money than people, the number of new unemployment filings last week broke the previous record, by a factor of five. We're now seeing projections that unemployment will shoot to 20%, and that this quarter's GDP will drop by more than 10%. For comparison, the total drop in the 2008 "Great Recession" over two quarters was 4.3%. Congress passed a $2 trillion "stimulus" bill late last week. I'd call it more of a stopgap. I'm especially struck by how eager Republicans are to break the bank when one of their own is president, compared to how chintzy and vindictive they are when a Democrat is in the White House. Much like Republicans managed to undermine Obama's $700 billion stimulus bill in 2009, Democrats worked hard to make this bill more fair to workers and the newly unemployed than Trump initially wanted.
Ran through this rather quickly, without many comments. You can look up the technical stuff yourself (here's the Vox index; American Prospect has a relatively good political-oriented series, including David Dayen's "COVID-19 Daily" briefs). Occasionally I note speculation on what happens "after" -- still, I find this impossible given that I don't have any real idea how far this falls apart, or when (if ever) a "new normal" stabilizes. I've seen pieces comparing coronavirus to global warming, but don't find them to be very credible (yet). Also, not much below on politics. Nothing in the last week (or month) has convinced me that Biden is the right person to take on Trump, yet it feels unseemly to try to convince his Democratic supporters of that at this particular moment. It seems significant that this poll shows only 24% of Biden supporters to be very enthusiastic, vs. 53% of Trump supporters. (His 24% not only compares poorly to Trump, but to Hillary Clinton's lame 32% four years ago.)
Some scattered links this week:
Davey Alba/Sheera Frenkel: Medical expert who corrects Trump is now a target of the far right: "Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration's most outspoken advocate of emergency virus measures, faces a torrent of false claims that he is mobilizing to undermine the president."
Zeeshan Aleem:
The EPA appears to be using coronavirus to make huge concessions to polluters.
Civil rights icon Rev. Joseph Lowery has died: He was involved in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and remained an activist to his death, at 98.
Jillian Ambrose: Oil price may fall to $10 a barrel as world runs out of storage space.
Andrew J Bacevich: Judgment Day for the national security state: The coronavirus and the real threats to American safety and freedom.
Ross Barkan: If sanitation workers don't work, nothing works.
David Blanchflower: Pandemic economics: 'much worse, very quickly'.
Katelyn Burns: Republicans are using the pandemic to push anti-abortion and anti-trans agendas. Needless to say, I agree with this New York Times editorial: Make abortion more available during the pandemic -- not less.
Bob Cesca: GOP Groundhog Day: Why do we keep electing Republicans? They're no good at this.
Marjorie Cohn: Team Trump tried to bully the ICC into dropping war crimes probe but failed.
David Dayen: The man who knew: "An interview with Barry Lynn, whose prediction about the dangers of centralizing our manufacturing has sadly come true amid the coronavirus outbreak."
Jesse Drucker: Bonanza for rich real estate investors, tucked into stimulus package.
Lee Fang:
Robert Fisk: What Trump is doing in the Middle East while you are distracted by COVID-19.
Peter Kafka: The pandemic is driving media consumption way up. But ad sales are falling apart.
Roge Karma: Coronavirus, anxiety, and the profound failure of rugged individualism: Interview with Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope, where he: "advances an argument that is both radical and obvious: Depression and anxiety are more than just chemical imbalances in the brain; they are also products of our distinct social environments -- social environments that have left our core psychological needs unmet."
Stephanie Kelton: As Congress pushes a $2 trillion stimulus package, the "how will you pay for it?" question is tossed in the trash. Probably where it belongs, but one can't help but note the partisan asymmetry: when a Republican is in the White House, Republicans in Congress are more than willing to spend whatever it takes, but elect a Democrat and they're always whining about deficits and insisting on austerity -- not least to make an Obama look bad. How they escape blame for their machinations is hard to fathom, but controlling their own propaganda networks helps. Also the fact that Democrats see their base broadly as including not just the vanishing middle class but also business and the poor (who are always hardest hit in a crisis) makes them willing to help Republicans, where the opposite is rarely true.
Ezra Klein:
What both the left and right get wrong about the coronavirus economic crisis: Interview with Adam Tooze. Nothing very profound on left or right, leaving room for what Tooze gets wrong: as a historian of economic crashes, he sees much that is familiar from past crashes but has little to offer on what's different, which I'd say has less to do with money and more with psychology.
The debate over ending social distancing to save the economy, explained.
Peter Kornbluh: Secret US intelligence files provide history's verdict on Argentina's Dirty War: "Recently declassified documents constitute a gruesome and sadistic catalog of state terrorism."
Robert Kuttner:
Coronavirus: The Jonathan Swift solution. Related:
Chauncey DeVega: Trump's death cult finally says it: Time to kill the "useless eaters" for capitalism.
Nick Martin: Give me capitalism or give me death.
The end of American exceptionalism: "The word means different things to different people -- but it's gone."
Jill Lepore:
The National Emergency Library is a gift to readers everywhere.
What our contagion fables are really about: "In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn't the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human."
Andrew Levine: Neither Biden nor Trump: Imagine Cuomo: Figured this would be a pan of the mini-boomlet touting NY Governor Andrew Cuomo as a possible relief pitcher for a flagging Biden, but I found Levine plying the "parallels between [Cuomo] and FDR":
Two governors of New York state, both from established political families -- the one patrician, the other old-school "ethnic" and therefore, by sympathy and conviction, working class -- both non-ideological but, by nature, experimental and open to measures that right wingers would, at best, be wary of or would, more likely, categorically oppose.
FDR was hardly a "socialist" in the usual sense of the term. He had no quarrel with private ownership of means of production. Quite to the contrary, his aim not at all to move beyond capitalism, but only to save it from the capitalists.
To that end, he was amenable to the kinds of social democratic measures that Sanders and, in her own way, Warren favor. The New Deal was many things, but at least sometimes and in some respects, it had a counter-systemic thrust that linked it to the socialist tradition, in much the way that Sanders' "democratic socialism" does.
Cuomo seems cut from a similar cloth.
That's true enough for FDR, but I have my doubts about Cuomo, who's been tightly aligned with business interests (above all the huge finance sector) all along, during a period of history when political support has been unprecedentedly transactional. As I've noted before, FDR wasn't predisposed to look left, but while he tried a broad mix of left/right proposals, he found that the most successful came from the left. Cuomo might find the same, but I wouldn't rate him as more likely to do so than Biden, who at least seems to have some empathy for working people, something Cuomo has never been noted for. Indeed, the other big difference between FDR and Cuomo was the former's polio, which gave him a sense of how the high and mighty could be humbled. Also on Cuomo:
Akash Mehta: Even in a pandemic, Andrew Cuomo is not your friend.
Alex Shephard: How Andrew Cuomo became a media darling.
Michael Luo: The fate of the news in the age of the coronavirus.
Farhad Manjoo: How the world's richest country ran out of a 75-cent face mask.
Sara Morrison: Tom Coburn, the Senate's "Dr. No," has died at 72.
Nicole Narea: Trump's reckless promotion of hydroxychloroquine to fight coronavirus, explained.
John Nichols: This is what an opposition party it supposed to sound like: "Bernie Sanders's moral outrage and devastating sarcasm struck back against a GOP assault on poor and low-income workers."
Anna North: A sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden has ignited a firestorm of controversy.
Lois Parshley: The coronavirus may hit rural America later -- and harder: "Rural communities 'tend to be older, with more chronic illness,' making people more at risk of severe Covid-19."
Heather Digby Parton:
Cameron Peters: Bernie Sanders wins the Democrats Abroad primary. This doesn't mean much, but it's the only primary this week.
Paul R Pillar: The nationalist response to the coronavirus.
Nick Pinto: America's Crisis Daddy Andrew Cuomo exploits coronavirus panic to push bail reform rollback in New York.
Anna Sauerbrey: Germany has relatively few deaths from coronavirus. Why? Not mentioned here, but the one thing I know about German health care is that they keep patients in hospital much longer than elsewhere -- especially compared to the US, where prices are astronomical and stays patients are often rushed out with excessive haste. What that suggests to me is that Germany has more beds and nurses per capita than elsewhere, which is exactly what you'd want in face of a pandemic.
Dylan Scott: How do 3 million newly unemployed people get health care?
Tierney Sneed:
Rebecca Solnit: Who will win the fight for a post-coronavirus America?
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Confronting the long history of massive inequality: Interview with Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century and now Capital and Ideology.
Matt Taibbi: After Richard Burr's coronavirus scandal, will the government finally crack down on congressional insider trading?
Anya van Wagtendonk: Trump says he won't comply with key transparency measures in the coronavirus stimulus bill: "The administration says it won't provide documentation for audits into $500 billion in corporate bailout funds."
Emily Todd VanDerWerff: The coronavirus has given Trump something he's always wanted: A chance to totally take over TV.
Tim Wu: Bigger brother: Review of Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
Matthew Yglesias:
Top economists warn ending social distancing too soon would only hurt the economy.
Fauci predicts over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States: "We're going to have millions of cases."
Joe Biden's message on coronavirus: It's time to tell the unvarnished truth.
Biden calls for widespread application of Defense Production Act.
State data indicates we're headed for another record unemployment week.
/Christina Animashaun: New unemployment claims soar to 3.3 million, shattering previous records.
Cable news should cancel the Trump Show: "Airing Trump's daily 'briefings' live misinforms people and undermines public health officials."
The coming unemployment catastrophe, in one chart. Based on Goldman Sachs 3/19 projection of 2,250,000 new claims. The actual number this week was 3.3 million, chart amended in link above.
Li Zhou/Ella Nilsen: