As usual, feel free to use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Okay, let’s lay it on the line.
Donald Trump is a blithering idiot, and he’s incompetent at the actual mechanics of running a government. This isn’t to deny his other competencies in bullying and running a campaign, but he’s obviously mentally deficient.
He is bungling the Coronavirus response. That’s going to lead to a lot of dead people, including a lot of old people who, forgive me, voted for him.
Meanwhile, there is a Democratic primary going on in which the candidate who is obviously suffering from dementia and doesn’t want universal health care is winning.
So apparently, Democrats also want to be governed by an incompetent, they just weren’t offered one before.
If you elect incompetents, they will do incompetent things–like bungle epidemic responses.
Then we have Britain, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson is bungling the response, including, hilariously, not shutting down Parliament. Apparently, British elites are now so inbred and incompetent that they can no longer even manage the basics, like, “killing the commoners while staying alive ourselves.”
Britain has possibly the lowest number of beds per capita in Europe. When it gets hit hard, people are going to die in droves. Likely millions.
Brits had two chances to vote for Corbyn. If they’d elected him in 2017, he’d have re-staffed the NHS and opened many more beds. Nor is it possible to imagine that he would have bungled the response to the epidemic in this manner.
The British media, according to an academic study, lied about Corbyn over 75 percent of the time. They suggested Labour was anti-semitic, when the evidence showed to be trivial amounts, no greater than under Blair. They actively campaigned against him.
Every “journalist” and producer who did so has blood on their hands, and it’s going to be a lot of blood.
But voters have responsibilities, too. I have sympathy for those who are going to suffer and die, and I’m in the moderate risk group (over 50, bad lungs). But we have been voting for incompetents who have gutted any collective action ability for decades.
I live in Ontario, ruled by Doug Ford. Dougie is arguably more incompetent and slightly more evil than Trump. He is bungling the response. Trudeau, our Prime Minister, who is very pretty and has nice abs, is bungling the response. There were competent alternatives to these people, but those competent alternatives were left-wing (NDP) and wanted to help the poors, and the electorate didn’t want that. (“Oh no! A poor might be helped!”)
Well, now the poors weren’t helped and the old people who voted to not help the poors (because, yes, that’s how these elections all went) are going to die.
I do have sympathy, because I don’t like people suffering, but when people deliberately take action to ensure other people don’t get help, when they deliberately elect incompetents (even ones who are obviously suffering from mental problems like Trump, Bush, and Biden), and then find out that they too will suffer? Well, one’s sympathy has to be somewhat leavened.
Oh, and it’s still a, umm, thing of terrible beauty to see that Britain’s leadership class has so degraded that they are keeping Parliament open so that they can die along with their subjects. Not because they’re noble, but because they are stupid.
You couldn’t make this stuff up. No one would believe this in fiction; that people could be so stupid, short-sighted, mean, and venal–especially against their own self interests.
But here we are.
Meanwhile, I like my readers, so kindly take care of yourself. If you’re in a place early on the curve, and especially if old, take the precautions. Remember, systems will be overwhelmed in many places, and there will not be enough beds or ventilators. This is not a drill. Do what you can to save your life.
Edit: And…the panic buying has hit Toronto, where I live. Went to the local supermarket, and locusts had descended.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Covid Fatality from Bloomberg
Three weeks ago, Italy had almost no cases of Coronavirus. Today the country is on lockdown. There are so many cases that doctors cannot put ventilators in everyone who needs them, and are having to choose who gets them, leaving many to die who might otherwise live.
Covid-19 has an exponential spread if it is not handled correctly. Donald Trump and the US have chosen to not manage it properly. In fact, in most cases the US has chosen to not even test. We do not know how widespread the Coronavirus is.
Trump is acting like the average American CEO, he is managing the numbers, not the underlying reality.
That may get you killed. Maybe you’re young and healthy, then it may kill your parents, grandparents, or other older people you care about.
You should assume, at this point, that there will be an epidemic in the United States and you should prepare for one. Buy the necessary supplies for staying in place for at least two weeks if you have not already. Include any medications if you can. Get some non-prescription anti-virals if you can (raw garlic and bee propolis are decent), because while conventional medicine is superior, you must assume that there will not be enough ventilators, for example, to go around. Heck, there may not even be even be enough beds.
Hospital beds per 1,000 people (OECD):
🇯🇵 Japan 13
🇰🇷 South Korea 12
🇷🇺 Russia 8
🇩🇪 Germany 8
🇨🇵 France 6
🇨🇭 Switzerland 4.5
🇨🇳 China 4.3
🏴 Scotland 4.2
🇦🇺 Australia 3.8
🇮🇹 Italy 3.6
🇪🇸 Spain 2.97
🇮🇪 Ireland 2.96
🇺🇸 USA 2.77
🏴 England 2.3Spot the problem.#coronavirus
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) March 2, 2020
British readers should take note as well.
A lot of organizations are cancelling meetings, there are planes flying entirely empty, school is being cancelled, and so on. All of these things are good.
Note that the fatality rate soars if the spread of the disease is not slowed, because if there are too many cases all at once, and hospitals are overwhelmed. The chart going around to illustrate this follows.
The US isn’t going to have a better curve. So assume that you aren’t going to get good hospital care, and that you might not get hospital care at all.
All of this is, of course, a bad case scenario. But that scenario is happening, right now, in Italy. If you make preparations and you don’t need them, that’s not a problem. If you do need them, you’ll be glad you did.
This virus specializes in older, unhealthy people. But young people are carriers, even if they don’t die. So if you don’t have to, you should probably be avoiding older people for the duration.
Social distancing is not a bad idea. If you can work for home, you probably should. Employers which can have their workers work from home should do that now. Schools should be sending students home, conventions should be cancelled, etc.
In Italy, the government has cancelled mortgage payments. I would suggest that other governments consider the same and do something similar for renters, while also cancelling utility payments, with the government directly compensating utilities. Other similar measures can be imagined.
The American government’s inclination will be to give money to rich people through the Federal Reserve, but it is poor people who need to be convinced they can afford to stay home, and not go to work and keep spreading the disease.
Remember that the virus has a five day average incubation period. You could have it now and feel fine. Further you can have the virus and never get symptoms, but spread it. This is especially likely if you are young and healthy.
So, take this all seriously. It might save your life, or it might save the life of someone you care about.
As for the politics, it all depends. If it’s not too bad, Trump can keep the lid on it. People will die, the media doesn’t really report it, he survives. If it truly breaks out, and people are sharing videos of their grandmothers dying without health care because hospitals are overwhelemed, he’s going to get the blame–quite deservedly so. Of course, most politicians, including Trump, Biden, and Sanders, are old, and are at high risk to get the disease and die. Trump, in particular, is obviously not healthy.
The Coronavirus is not a hoax, it is deadlier than the flu, and the response has been bungled.
Edit: One of the symptoms is coughing blood. An herbalist I respect has suggested Dragon’s Blood (Sangre De Grado) might help with that. I pass this on very tentatively, I’m not a doctor and don’t play one, but I have ordered some for myself. It’s not expensive. None of this is a substitute for hospital care, of course, but hospitals may be overwhelmed.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
We have Idaho primaries (25 delegates), Michigan primaries (147 delegates), Mississippi primaries (41 delegates), Missouri primaries (68), North Dakota caucuses (18 delegates), and Washington primaries (107 delegates).
The polling on this is terrible, it went very south Sunday. Expect bad news tonight.
Fortunately, this is not a big mess of primaries, and there will be a chance to turn it around later, but some luck is going to be required. Perhaps Sanders can take Biden down clearly in the next debate (or, more likely, Biden’s senility will take him down). Perhaps a Biden senile-moment blows up past the media’s ability to filter it. Perhaps something else; obviously no one wants the Coronavirus to decide the primaries or elections, but Trump, Biden, and Sanders are all in the very vulnerable class, and politicians are still exposing themselves to people.
If you’re working to get Bernie elected, I’d suggest you keep working. It’s impossible to know what will happen, but also be prepared for the bad news which is most likely coming.
(Aside: To me it looks like Warren’s repeated attacks on Sanders had the effect of estranging various of her followers from Sanders. She’s not stupid enough not know what she’s doing. So be it.)
Feel free to use the comments to discuss the results as they come in, and so on.
Edit: Corrected the number of delegates Missouri offers.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Warren Elizabeth
There is another set of primaries tomorrow. Bernie and Biden are neck-and-neck in current total delegates, with Biden taking the lead in polling for tomorrow.
Warren has spent a week not doing anything but complaining about Bernie and going on a comedy show.
Today is the last moment Warren can endorse either Bernie or Biden and look like she means it. If she endorses today she can claim it was for impact on the next set of primaries.
If she doesn’t do it today, she clearly dithered.
The case for her endorsing Sanders is simple. His policies and politics are far closer to hers. So much closer that there is no comparison between Sanders and Biden in this regard.
But more than that, and perhaps worse, is that the bankruptcy bill Biden championed and helped force through is why Warren claims she went into politics. It is her political raison d’etre. It is her origin story as a politician.
If she doesn’t endorse Sanders, not only is she not supporting the politician who wants to do most of what she wants to do, she is failing to oppose the politician who she claims has been her nemesis.
On top of that, she will be forfeiting a leadership position in the left-wing progressive movement, a movement large and powerful enough to challenge the Democratic political machine.
In 2016, she slid on not endorsing anyone, but this time tens of millions of passionate Sanders supporters, many of whom feel they need universal health care to survive, student debt relief not to be poor, and a vigorous climate change plan to have a future, aren’t going to forgive sitting on the sides.
If she sits this one out, then she’s just a Senator again. Plus, she’ll probably be primaried.
I also keep seeing arguments that Warren owes no one anything, and I find that strange. She’s a sitting Senator whom millions of people supported in the primaries. It seems to me, at least, that she owes those people something; that if she believed in her policy platform, if she believed those policies were good for the country, that she owes her supporters an attempt to get something similiar through with Bernie, because Biden isn’t going to do it. Heck, he’s floated Jamie Dimon and Bloomberg’s names as potential cabinet members.
Meanwhile, we’re coming up on another finanical crisis, thanks to the Coronavirus and Russia deciding to crash oil prices at the same time as demand is already slumping. The big banks are going to need another huge bailout–again, Warren’s reason for being in politics.
She won’t fight to have Sanders in charge, so that Wall Street isn’t bailed out while ordinary people aren’t?
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that if Warren doesn’t endorse Bernie, it looks like she has no principles and doesn’t care about her followers. (No, don’t use electability. Sanders polls better against Trump and doesn’t have dementia.)
It makes it appear that she’s primarily concerned with only one person: Elizabeth Warren.
I hope that isn’t the case, but she’s running out of time to prove it isn’t. In fact, if you read this post by email tonight and she hasn’t endorsed him by then, she’s probably too late.
I confess to some anger over this, but I also feel sadness. When a politician who had a chance at greatness proves that they are primarily moved by self-interest, not by the principles they espoused, it is a cause for sorrow. We sneer at politicians precisely because so many of them seem to have no real beliefs, but it is ennobling when we find one of the few who aren’t like that.
I had hoped Warren was among their number, and my anger is genuinely partly moved by sorrow. As I said repeatedly throughout the primary, though I preferred Sanders I would have endorsed Warren if she were the nominee.
And everyone knows that if Sanders and Warren’s positions were reversed, he would have already endorsed.
May Warren prove her that followers were right to trust her, that her origin story was real, and that she stands behind her plans.
(If anyone else is getting bored of “all primary all the time,” yeah, posts on other subjects soonish.)
Edit: I changed the wording from “neck-and-neck” in first paragraph after commenters pointed out I obviously hadn’t read the polling from today and yesterday. Yup, Biden’s pulling ahead substantially, my bad, I had only looked at current delegate totals. Guess Americans really do hate the ideas of universal health care, their children not being debt slaves, and not dying like flies to climate change.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
Strategic Political Economy
Lessons for the Green New Deal from the Economic Mobilization for World War Two (PDF deck) [Josh Mason, via Naked Capitalism 3-2-20]
(Based on forthcoming Roosevelt Institute paper coauthored with Andrew Bossie)
Why so much direct public investment?
- Private sector unwilling/unable to bear risk, especially in newer industries
Lessons for Green New Deal
- Decarbonization may call for large direct investment by public sector as opposed to shifting private investment via prices/subsidies
- Public role largest in new industries/technologies
- Public role not just to provide resources, but to solve coordination problems and to bear risk
Third lesson: Full employment is powerful force for redistribution
- 1940s saw the largest compression of incomes in US history as in most advanced countries
- Lowest paid groups (African Americans, agricultural workers) gained most
- Very little direct redistribution – all about labor market
Summary – Three lessons from wartime mobilization:
- Rapid economic transitions require larger role for direct public investment
- Output, employment are more elastic than conventional estimates of potential assume
- Full employment is powerful force for income compression, even without explicit redistribution
Predatory Finance
Alexander Hamilton’s Creations Are in Uncharted Territory: The slide below 1% suggests the Fed has lost control and has troubling implications for the long-term economic outlook.
John Authers, March 4, 2020 [Bloomburg, via The Big Picture 3-5-20]
…what happened on Super Tuesday in the bond market was truly historic. The G-7’s finance ministers and central bankers talked in the morning, produced a statement that the market found disappointing, and then the Federal Reserve announced an emergency interest rate cut…. An emergency cut is intended to deal with extreme financial conditions….
The long-term outlook is now of drawn-out deflationary stagnation. We can see this from another amazing development — the drop in the 30-year yield to a negative level in real terms. In other words, its yield is less than the average inflation rate that can be derived from the inflation-linked bond market. Nothing like this has ever happened before:
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, March 5, 2020 [Wall Street On Parade]
For discussion on topics unrelated to recent posts (i.e., pretty much anything NOT related to the US primaries and election).
So, identity is and always has been one of the most important forces in politics, the rise and fall of empires, etc. This was true long before “identity politics” or intersectionality and it will be true long after they are forgotten.
Identity is who you feel with. Who you bleed with. If people like you are hurt, you hurt. You can see this in degrees in terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes. If it’s the Brits being hit, Americans care. French? Somewhat less. Baghdad market bombing? Don’t give a shit. (Yes, you are special flower and do actually care, which may well be true, as you are one of my readers and self-selecting for caring more about people not like you, but most people don’t. I wish they did, but they don’t.)
This is also true for good things; they matter more if they happen to people I identify with.
My primary political identification is with the precariat: The working class who aren’t even stable working class. They can lose their jobs at any time, they live in bad housing, they are one bad bounce away from the street. In the US, they can’t afford healthcare even if they have insurance, in most countries they can’t afford dental care and you can see it as they get older in their yellow teeth.
These are the people who are always scared, who will work until they die or physically just can’t, and who will push far past what “can’t” would be for most other people. They work through pain and illness because, even in most countries with sick days, a week isn’t enough if you’re precariat: When you eat badly, and you work hard, your health breaks at some point.
I’ve been precariat a lot during my life. I’m precariat now. I’ve belonged to other classes, I’ve even been well off, upper middle class. I’ve hobnobbed and lived with the upper classes plenty, I grew up with them in boarding school. I can fit in with most classes, as long as I have the wardrobe, though as I get older and look older it becomes a bit harder: I don’t have the shiny well-cared for, calibrated, drugged look the upper classes have at my age.
Some of my identification with the precariat is simply that I often am one. But I could choose to identify with other classes or groups, I’ve been among many of them at some time. People can be stubborn about identifying with a class they no longer have the material circumstances for–they can hold on to that until they die, acting as if they still belong and often getting away with it. It’s worth doing, because lower class people are treated worse.
Period. They are treated worse, always. I put on a suit and clean up and I see the change. I change my manners and act middle class, and how I am treated changes, always for the better.
Lower class people have manners and attitudes which are recognizable, and higher orders, even the people only a little higher, shit on them the moment they recognize those manners. Exceptions exist, and I’ve gone out of my way when my circumstances are good to be an exception (which is why service staff anywhere I go regularly always like me), but they are exceptions.
But while some of my identification is simply positional, a lot of my political identification stems from the fact that the precariat, more than anyone except those who have fallen out of the system completely, are the ones who need the help. They tend to work very hard and get very little for it. I’ve done office work, construction work, retail and food prep, among many, many jobs, and the psychological stress of office work can be real, but it’s not the same as a hard physical job, where in any case the bosses are often still assholes. (This is especially true in retail in my experience. Never did manufacturing.) Office workers also tend to have a bit of protection from the most abusive behaviour, because of a certain shield of civility which does not apply to those at the bottom.
So, I am for Bernie, and I was for Corbyn, because they will do the most for those who need the most help. I can argue that most of what they want to do will also be excellent for everyone but the very rich, even if many of those people don’t recognize it, and it’s true, but I don’t care very much. The self-identifying middle class, the upper class, and the rich (three separate classes) are mostly either actively scum, or passively scum. The “middle class” has thrown everyone, including their own weaker members, under the bus in a pathetic attempt to keep their perceived status. The upper class are the rich’s close retainers, executing their policies and about one member of the rich out of a hundred who has power is doing more good than evil.
Identification is a matter of feel. When the precariat are hurt, I hurt. I feel their pain. This isn’t theoretical, you can see it on brain scans. When something good happens for them, I am happy. This is true even if it has no effect on me; I’m Canadian, and have universal health care–yet I have spent much of my career advocating for the US to adopt universal care.
One reason that Warren never had a hard core of supporters the way Sanders does is simple: She doesn’t identify as lower or working class or precariat. She doesn’t feel like one of the body. She doesn’t actually seem to feel the pain. Bernie, despite having been in Congress for ages, has a lot of Jewish working class feel. The anger that turns off the technocrats as inappropriate for the office is real to working class types. If there’s reason to be angry, be angry. And Bernie is angry because their bosses are treating them like shit.
Warren wants to be the good boss; the good intellectual. The savior.
Bernie feels like one of us and he’s angry with us.
He may or may not win the nomination (though I think he can win the election.)
But it’s why there’s a core of people who trust him through thick and thin.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.