#^d 2020-04-05 #^h Weekend Roundup
I wanted to write an intro this week objecting to people who are still ragging on "Sanders-ites," as in:
one of the most discouraging things about the Sanders-ites who continue to rail against Biden is their appalling lack of understanding of how government works. Their schematic recitations of corporate behemoths who apparently control the every move of Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi reflect a profound lack of any grasp of the realities of American political life, which is that action and reaction occur in a lot of different and even hidden places.
I don't have any problems with arguing that it's more realistic to aim for incremental reforms than for ideal solutions, but this isn't about tactics or goals. The point here is to disparage people for wanting something more than the centrists/moderates are willing to argue for. I can't help but take these attacks personally. Even if there are people on the left too pig-headed to compromise their principles, I don't see any value in attacking them personally, let along generalizing and slandering them as a group. But every day I see attacks on "Sanders-ites" like this, and I'm getting sick and tired of them, and their high-handed authors.
Should write more, but will leave it with I'm more sad than angry or anything else that Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. I'm not especially bothered by his positions or his record -- needless to say, not for lack of points I'd argue with -- but I do worry that he'll prove an inarticulate and hapless campaigner (as we already have much evidence of). Still, the sad part has little to do with Biden personally. It shows that most Democrats are reacting to fear -- not just of Trump and the Republicans, but of their expected reaction to the changes Sanders is campaigning for. That may go hand in hand with being uninformed and/or unimaginative, but I can't fault anyone for excessive caution -- especially in the middle of a crisis so unprecedented no one can honestly see their way beyond.
Some scattered links this week:
Yasmeen Abutaleb/Josh Dawsey/Ellen Nakashima/Greg Miller: The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged.
Michael Ames: Why an Idaho ski destination has one of the highest Covid-19 infection rates in the nation: This first came to my attention when a generally right-wing relative in Twin Falls complained on Facebook about all the Blaine County license plates at Costco. Even in Idaho, denialism fades fast as the virus nears. Interesting side-point here is the perception that it's the globe-trotting elites who are propagating the spread of Covid-19, thereby endangering everyone else.
Kate Aronoff: Darling, let's do coronavirus in the Hamptons this year: "The rich continue their tradition of escapist virtue signaling."
Dean Baker: Every post in his Beat the Press blog is worthwhile, especially: Getting to Medicare for All, eventually.
Peter C Baker: 'We can't go back to normal': how will coronavirus change the world?
Josh Barro: Oil prices are cratering. That's not a good thing.: "A barrel now sells for around $20 -- the lowest in two decades." Whether it's a good thing is arguable. Sure, it's bad for the economy, or at least for oil producers, but they're some of the most reprehensible oligarchs around: if anyone has to go broke, let it be them. You might think that cheaper gas will encourage people to buy and burn more, but it's only cheap for the moment because demand has fallen way below supply: use more and you'll pay more. Personally, I think this would be the perfect time to raise the gas tax. Related:
Rosemary Batt/Eileen Appelbaum: Hospital bailouts begin -- for those owned by private equity firms.
Zach Beauchamp: Trump is mishandling coronavirus the way Reagan botched the AIDS epidemic: Interview with Gregg Gonsalves.
Max Boot: Who could have predicted Trump would be such a bad crisis manager? Everyone, actually. No, I haven't started caring what Max Boot thinks, but once in a while he hits on a title which crystalizes a key insight. In that regard, this one is much better than The worst president. Ever. Boot has Trump displacing John Buchanan, who used to be widely regarded as the worst president ever. I've never been clear why history judges Buchanan so harshly. I mean, what the fuck could he have done differently? He didn't have the moral standing or the political base to confront the slave states, and he didn't have the leadership skills to defend the Union. On the other hand, nothing he could have done to satisfy the anxieties of the slaveholders would have been accepted by the "free" states, with their increasing command of the economy, supported by a majority of the population. Sure, he dithered, postponing an increasingly inevitable war, which broke out in the lame duck months of his term.
Katelyn Burns: Sen. Kelly Loeffler sold at least $18 million more in stocks before the coronavirus crash than previously reported.
John Cassidy: The coronavirus is transforming politics and economics.
Steve Coll: The meaning of Donald Trump's coronavirus quackery.
Ryan Costello: COVID-19 outbreak in Iran exposes twisted aims of Iran hawks. Related:
Esfandyar Batmanghelidj: Will the Trump administration block Iran's request for an emergency loan to combat COVID-19? Yep. [According to a Trita Parsi tweet.]
Daniel Brumberg: COVID-19 and Iranian relations.
Meagan Day: Joe Biden is wrong about single-payer and coronavirus.
Jason Ditz: Trump orders anti-drug Navy ships to Venezuelan coast: The return of "gunboat diplomacy," following indictment of Venezuelan president Maduro for something involving narcotics:
This will be one of the biggest US military operations of the sort since 1989, when the US invaded Panama and ousted Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug charges. Attorney General William Barr wrote the legal justification for Noriega invasion, and also wrote the recent justification for a bounty against Maduro.
Abdul El-Sayed: In the middle of a pandemic, our for-profit healthcare system is failing us.
David Enrich/Ben Protess/Eric Lipton: Trump's company seeks to ease financial crunch as coronavirus takes toll.
Michelle Goldberg: Jared Kushner is going to get us all killed.
John Harris: [Boris] Johnson seems unable to unify us. Who will speak for the country? But he does quote Johnson as saying, "One thing I think [the] coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society." That is directly opposite of Conservative icon Margaret Thatcher's famous maxim, "there is no such thing as society."
John F Harris: Trump is an authoritarian weakman. I could cite dozens of alarmist pieces against which this is arguing (e.g., Lucian K Truscott IV: Trump is preparing the ground for a totalitarian dictatorship). Trump certainly has the desires of a dictator, and he plays the demagogue to the hilt, but he's something he lacks -- heart? stomach? brains? maybe he's just too lazy? -- keeps him from seizing power (although his underlings are eager to do so, even their reach seems to have self-imposed limits).
Doug Henwood: This downturn could be worse than the early 1930s "We could experience in months what took three or four years to unfold after the 1929 stock market crash. Things are going to be very bad unless we see some serious structural reforms."
David Ignatius: Inside the ouster of Capt. Brett Crozier: the Navy aircraft carrier captain who "pleaded for help against the coronavirus pandemic sweeping his crew" and was fired for his trouble.
Fred Kaplan:
Elizabeth Kolbert: Pandemics and the shape of human history.
Paul Krugman:
The Covid-19 slump has arrived: "But we're already botching the response."
Notes on the coronacoma (wonkish): I think this is basically right:
What we're experiencing is not a conventional recession brought on by a slump in aggregate demand. Instead, we're going into the economic equivalent of a medically induced coma, in which some brain functions are deliberately shut down to give the patient time to heal.
To simplify things, think of the economy as consisting of two sectors, nonessential services (N) that we can shut down to limit human interactions and hence the spread of the disease, and essential services (E) that we can't (or perhaps don't need to, because they don't involve personal interaction.) We can and should close down the N sector until some combination of growing immunity, widespread testing to quickly find and isolate cases, and, if we're very lucky, a vaccine let us return to normal life.
For those (like me) still receiving their regular paychecks, this period of shutdown -- call it the coronacoma -- will be annoying but not serious. I miss coffee shops and concerts, but can live without them for however long it takes.
Things will, however, be very different and dire for those who are deprived of their regular income while the coronacoma lasts. This group includes many workers and small businesses; it also includes state and local governments, which are required to balance their budgets but are seeing revenues collapse and expenses soar.
How big is the N sector? Miguel Faria-e-Castro of the St. Louis Fed summarizes estimates that are as good as any: 27 to 67 million people, which he averages to 47 million. That's a lot; we could be looking at a temporary decline in real GDP of 30 percent or more. But that GDP decline isn't the problem, since it's a necessary counterpart of the social distancing we need to be doing.
The problem instead is how to limit the hardships facing those whose normal income has been cut off.
Rob Larson: Bill Gates's philanthropic giving is a racket.
Jill Lepore: The history of loneliness.
Sharon Lerner: EPA is jamming through rollbacks that could increase coronavirus deaths.
Eric Levitz: Trump condemns New York for planning ahead on coronavirus.
Anatol Lieven: The pandemic and international competition: How the US can save itself with a 'Green New Deal'.
Simon Mair: What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures. The two axis/four square grid reminds me of Peter Frase's Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, where "barbarism" here becomes "exterminism." [PS: Frase summarized his thesis in 2011, here: Four Futures.]
Dylan Matthews: Coronavirus could lead to the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression.
Harold Meyerson: Medicare for All's teachable moment.
The linkage of health insurance to employment -- an accident of American economic history -- never made much sense, and when unemployment is pervasive and a pandemic has been loosed on the land, it makes no sense at all.
This is the teachable moment for universal health coverage not linked to employment status. Democrats should seize this moment and teach. For those who have to be dragged screaming to this, they can advocate it as a temporary measure, during which time its popular support would likely only increase.
Ian Millhiser: Texas's election law could disenfranchise millions during a pandemic.
Jim Naureckas: Can you hide a pandemic? There's no need to believe Beijing on China's coronavirus success. Note: "Neither the Chinese government nor U.S. intelligence agencies are particularly trustworthy services." On the other hand:
If any of the thousands of researchers who have been scouring Chinese coronavirus statistics in search of patterns that could help defeat the pandemic elsewhere have detected signs of "fake" numbers, Bloomberg doesn't seem to know about it.
The reality is that it's very hard to hide an epidemic. Stopping a virus requires identifying and isolating cases of infection, and if you pretend to have done so when you really haven't, the uncaught cases will grow exponentially. Maintaining a hidden set of real statistics and another set for show would require the secret collusion of China's 2 million doctors and 3 million nurses -- the kind of improbable cooperation that gives conspiracy theories a bad name.
China is slowly and carefully returning to a semblance of normalcy (Science, 3/29/20). If China is merely pretending to have the coronavirus under control, the pathogen will rapidly surge as people resume interacting with their communities. Once international travel is restored, it will be quite obvious which countries do and don't have effective management of Covid-19.
Terry Nguyen: How the Trump administration has stood in the way of PPE distribution.
Ella Nilsen: New York is in dire need of ventilators. China just donated 1,000. Isn't one measure of world power the ability to offer aid to other nations in time of crisis? This dramatically shows that China can do things the US cannot. Indeed, the not-so-United States have been left on their own to beg foreign nations for supplies, while at the same time locking down exports and imposing sanctions on others (like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela). You might argue that this is less a question of "greatness" than of cultural norms: after all, the US is built on rugged competition, which often means screwing your neighbors. Countries like China and Cuba (see Cuban docs fighting coronavirus around the world, defying US), with their Communist backgrounds, are used to the idea of sacrificing oneself for the common good, which gives them a temporary edge when most people are in dire need. On the other hand, when/if this blows over, people around the world are likely to look back and remember who helped and who didn't. The US benefited from a reservoir of good will built up in the 1940s, maintained long after the US stopped doing anything to deserve it. Also note: Patriots plane arrives in Boston carrying critical N95 masks for medical workers: the masks were imported from China. Also: Lara Seligman: Russia sends plane with medical supplies to U.S. for coronavirus response.
Anna North:
JC Pan: The pandemic's shameless profiteers. Related:
Andrew Marantz: Alex Jones's bogus coronavirus cures.
Amanda Marcotte: Behind the right's obsession with a miracle cure for coronavirus: It's not just about Trump.
Alex Pareene: Joe Biden is wasting a crisis.
Paul R Pillar: The war metaphor and the coronavirus.
Nomi Prins: Wall Street wins -- again: "Bailouts in the time of coronavirus":
As I wrote in It Takes a Pillage: An Epic Tale of Power, Deceit, and Untold Trillions, instead of the Fed buying those trillions of dollars of toxic assets from banks that could no longer sell them anywhere else, it would have been cheaper to directly cover subprime mortgage payments for a set period of time. In that way, people might have kept their homes and the economic fallout would have been largely contained. Thanks to Washington's predisposition to offer corporate welfare, that didn't happen -- and it's not happening now either.
David Roberts: Gutting fuel economy standards during a pandemic is peak Trump.
Nathan J Robinson:
Everything has changed overnight: "The Democratic primary is no longer over. This is a historic crisis requiring nothing less than FDR-style ambition and leadership. We've got just the guy."
Where is Joe? "Biden has failed completely to show leadership during a crisis. There is no excuse for it."
Philip Rocco: Wisconsin's pandemic primary will put voters' lives in danger. I keep seeing efforts from all over the political spectrum (well, in the Democratic Party, anyhow) to shame Wisconsin into postponing its primary election. I, for one, would like to see the election proceed, if only because the gravity of the crisis makes it even clearer that political choices have real consequences. Biden has cruised to victory everywhere since the sudden convergence on Super Tuesday, but has shown virtually no leadership skills during the crisis, while the importance of Sanders' program has become even more striking. Wisconsin should be a good state for Sanders (as it was in 2016), so this could be a pivot point in the election. Unfortunately, the campaigns have degraded to such an extent that we'll never know what free debate and unencumbered participation (real democracy) might reveal. (In fact, 538's polling averages for Wisconsin show Biden with a solid lead, 51.6% to 36.0%, and increasing leads in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Georgia.) One point I do agree with is that we need to figure out how to universally vote safely by November. Few things are more essential in times like these than democracy.
David Runciman: Too early or too late?: "On political timing and the pandemic."
Aaron Rupar: Trump says 200,000 Americans could die from coronavirus, because he's done "a very good job."
David K Shipler: Welcome to the Fourth World: "How Trump has initiated America's undoing -- and how coronavirus is helping him speed it up."
Richard Silverstein: Israeli election: There was a moment of hope, now it's gone.
Cady Stanton: Coronavirus shows the need for DC and Puerto Rico statehood.
Paul Starr: How the right went far-right: "The media once quarantined neofascists. Not anymore." Review of Andrew Marantz: Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
Jeff Stein: Americans hit by economic shocks as confusion, stumbles undermine Trump's stimulus effort.
Matt Stieb: Trump is fighting a war against governors, not the coronavirus.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg/Nicholas Fandos: From afar, Congress moves to oversee Trump coronavirus response: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would move to form a special committee to scrutinize the Trump administration's response, including how more than $2 trillion in federal relief money is being spent."
Matt Taibbi: Bailing out the bailout: "It will take years to sort through the details, but Trump's $2 trillion COVID-19 response looks like a double-down on the last disaster."
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders.
When Bernie Sanders's critics mocked his platform as just a bunch of "free stuff," they were drawing on the past forty years of bipartisan consensus about social-welfare benefits and entitlements. They have argued, instead, that competition organized through the market insures more choices and better quality. In fact, the surreality of market logic was on clear display when, on March 13th, Donald Trump held a press conference to discuss the COVID-19 crisis with executives from Walgreens, Target, Walmart, and CVS, and a host of laboratory, research, and medical-device corporations. There were no social-service providers or educators there to discuss the immediate, overwhelming needs of the public.
The crisis is laying bare the brutality of an economy organized around production for the sake of profit and not human need. The logic that the free market knows best can be seen in the prioritization of affordability in health care as millions careen toward economic ruin. It is seen in the ways that states have been thrown into frantic competition with one another for personal protective equipment and ventilators -- the equipment goes to whichever state can pay the most. It can be seen in the still criminally slow and inefficient and inconsistent testing for the virus. It is found in the multi-billion-dollar bailout of the airline industry, alongside nickel-and-dime means tests to determine which people might be eligible to receive ridiculously inadequate public assistance.
Anya van Wagtendonk:
Peter Wade: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson hospitalized for coronavirus.
David Wallis: Uncle Sam needs to start giving us all free hand sanitizer. Businesses seem to be able to find supplies, but as far as I can tell it's impossible for the rest of us to track down sellers -- especially given that shopping around is being discouraged. Same for face masks, which now have become obligatory outer wear, but all the focus so far has been on getting them to hospitals (which, sure, need them even more than we do).
Richard Wolffe: As the numbers of dead and unemployed grow, Trump looks and sounds smaller.
Matthew Yglesias:
America has no federal response to this crisis.
But while Donald Trump enjoys playing president on TV, he's always been lazy about doing the actual job. So while he's taking advantage of the crisis to stage daily extra-long episodes of the Trump Show with guest appearances from Mike Pence and public health officials, the executive branch of the federal government is mostly missing in action.
/Christina Animashaun: New unemployment claims surge to record-high 6.6 million. That's double last week's 3.307 million, which was about 5 times the highest previous week ever. We're in totally uncharted territory.
Biden can unite progressives and swing voters with a focus on climate.
We can do it: A wartime-style mobilization to bear coronavirus and mass unemployment.
Joshua Zeitz: Why the Trump administration won't be able to make the stimulus work: "As the New Deal shows us, it takes expertise, professionalism and skill to execute massive government programs -- qualities the White House lacks."
Li Zhou/Ella Nilsen: "This one is scarier": Obama-era officials say current economic crisis is fundamentally different from 2008.