Dr. Galbraith emailed me permission (2020 May 13) to repost his article in full. Originally posted on Defend Democracy Press, May 12, 2020. – Tony Wikrent
We need a radically different model to tackle the COVID-19 crisis
by James K. Galbraith
The Current Situation in the United States: May 2020
by James K. Galbraith
Two weeks ago, the US death toll from Covid-19 exceeded that of US soldiers in Vietnam, 1955-1974. On May 1, the one-day toll reached a new high, greater than that in New York City on September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, economic output has collapsed and over thirty million Americans had filed unemployment claims as of April 30, 2020. On the public health front, testing remains inadequate, contact tracing non-existent, treatment options appear stalled, and millions remain uninsured. The federal bailouts have worked well in one way only: To spur a modest revival of stocks and to forestall massive defaults on bonds.
The failures of the public health system border on sabotage. Test kits were available from the WHO in January; the US elected not to use them. The first production of tests from the CDC was botched. Testing was deliberately limited as community transmission grew, so that the virus escaped from the early containment that might have been possible. Lockdowns and quarantines came late, were poorly organized and weakly enforced. Supplies of PPE were not allocated to hospitals and health care providers according to need; the Defense Production Act was not deployed in a timely and effective manner to ramp up home production; no effective federal system to manage international medical supply chains exists to this day. While some firms have no doubt done their best, reports of profiteering and scams are rampant.
The push to reopen the economy is a further mark of failure. As food supply workers were not properly protected, unacceptable levels of sickness and workplace contamination have occurred, notably in the meat industry. Food banks are in crisis, while milk, eggs, and other perishables are wasted. State governments facing fiscal catastrophe press businesses to reopen on terms that cannot be profitable, because capacity is constrained for health reasons. The openings are calculated to force workers off of unemployment insurance, which can be revoked if they decline to return to risky jobs. Many smaller businesses are deciding not to reopen; they will face bankruptcy instead and disappear. Although evictions and foreclosures are technically deferred, many landlords have ignored this, and, in any event rent, mortgages, utility bills, and other debts continue to accrue.
Models of the pandemic now openly predict infections rising further as lockdowns are relaxed, to the point of testing the capacity of health care systems even in parts of the country not yet severely affected. Whether this will happen or not is not yet clear; the public may continue, as a general rule, to practice safe contact behavior, and if the transmission rates hold below one, as they presently are estimated to be in almost all of the American states, the pandemic may continue to decline. But if the models are borne out, death rates will rise by many multiples of their current values. These events are projected to lead to further lock-downs on a rolling basis, until such time as a vaccine or therapy is available. There is no guarantee of either.
Even if the pandemic is now contained the economy will not revert to “normal.” The United States is a premier producer of energy, aerospace, advanced information technologies, and financial services. It assembles many million automobiles, appliances, and other consumer durable goods every year. The oil sector has suffered a price collapse and borders now on mass bankruptcy; when fracking wells are capped they will sand up and become very costly to reopen, so the US energy-based economic expansion is over. Airplanes are lined up in parking spaces; no new civilian passenger airliners will be needed indefinitely. Households who are either unemployed or working from home (and therefore not commuting) or that face deferred rent and mortgages will not soon be in the market for new cars; in any event the old ones will last longer as they are being driven much less. As office buildings remain empty, new ones will not be built. Similarly for retail stores, already driven to the wall by on-line ordering and deliveries. The banking sector is on the hook for energy loans gone bad, and for household debts, and for corporate loans that will be at risk once the bailout money runs low. The debts built up during the pandemic will be defaulted in many cases, ruining credit for the households affected. All of which foretells a long depression even under the best foreseeable public health conditions. A cycle of infections and lock-downs will make all of this that much worse.
There is an illusion about, that the recent prosperity can be revived by “reopening.” But many industries – aircraft, airlines, hotels, automobiles, appliances, commercial construction, energy – will definitely shrink, whatever happens now and no matter how much money they receive. The bailouts were a measure predicated on the idea that these industries were facing just a temporary interruption. But it is difficult to see how bankruptcies and liquidations can be avoided if there is no revival in the demand for product. And large-scale production relies on interlinked supply-chains, so that if a single major producer (for example one of the majors in the automotive sector) fails, there is a risk of cascading liquidations (for example in auto parts), making operations difficult – perhaps impossible – for the survivors. In these industries the supply chains and subcontractors are much larger in the aggregate than the assembly operations of the final production firm.
Higher education, a large sector in America, faces a crisis of high costs, collapsing enrollments, and the actual alternative of cheap on-line instruction in many fields. This was already in the works for demographic reasons, and is now being accelerated by the loss of household wealth. Health care, ten times larger, also faces financial difficulties as millions are losing their insurance and – for the moment anyway – as accidents, other infectious diseases, and such are down, depriving doctors and hospitals of reimbursements. Service industries from restaurants to retailers cannot function profitably at one-quarter of capacity; bars, nightclubs, and most sporting venues cannot reopen at all.
Federal decision-making has failed at every level. In the executive branch, it has been at best a complex of incompetence, denial, and political motivation. At worst, decisions were taken and are still being taken in full knowledge of the projected death rates and potential for private profiteering, both in the medical sector and in the larger financial economy. It is known that some private speculators made over three hundred billion dollars shorting the stock market before the February collapse, and that some Members of Congress sold their holdings based on information provided in intelligence briefings. Congressional action has been slow, marred by politics, lobbies, regional rivalries, poor judgment and a misdiagnosis of the economic issues, as Congress reached for legislative models used in past business downturns, especially the crisis of 2007-2009, which had no quarantine or other public health component.
The specific policies implemented were plagued by problems. To calculate payments under the first CARES Act, the IRS had to use filings from tax year 2018, and also ran into printing bottlenecks for paper checks that had to be mailed to those without direct deposit. Unemployment insurance benefits were made relatively generous, and the state unemployment insurance web sites could not handle the crush, so they crashed, leaving many without the ability to access the program. Instead of simple wage replacement (which would have protected health insurance and union membership) the Small Business Administration issued rules that appeared unusable for many firms, banks gave preference to favored clients, and in the first round also the money soon ran out. In short, the effort to save the economy by pouring money into it through conventional channels was inadequate, ill-considered, inefficient, and in some respects corrupt. The best that may be said is that it was much better than doing nothing at all.
As events progress, the usual pattern of property sales and purchases cannot proceed. So property values will collapse, leaving millions of homeowners without equity; as this happens, mass foreclosures and property seizures are inevitable under the present legal rules. Predatory private investors will buy distressed assets at firesale prices and the American population will revert, largely to renter status. For those with means, private tutors and doctors will remain available; the others will manage as they can. Needless to say, depression, despair, drug abuse, and suicide will prevail.
Or maybe they won’t. In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, it was possible – barely possible, but possible – to shift the blame from the bankers to the victims, from those who built a massively fraudulent financial system to those who took out the loans that they could not repay. But there was no viral element, no public health trigger, to that crisis. This one is different. Every development described above is a consequence, direct or indirect, of the coronavirus. Those who were laid off, and who went home, and who broke the transmission of the disease, did their part, just as health-care professionals and grocery clerks did theirs. Their legal case for relief remains weak. But the moral case is strong and the economic case is beyond dispute. Even the incumbent Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, a foreclosure-predator of the first water after 2008, has stated that the economic crisis “is no fault of American business, it is no fault of American workers, it is the fault of a virus.” This is true but it does not mean that things will return to the past if the virus can be made to go away.
To move forward, first of all, debts incurred before and during the pandemic will have to be written down. The energy sector and transport sectors will have to be rebuilt, based far more on renewables and sources other than oil. A large share of basic industries – especially in the health sector – will have to be repatriated so that basic sufficiency exists in this country. Millions of people will be needed to monitor and support public health; jobs for them must be organized and funded by the government. State and local governments will have to be federally-funded, in substantial part, to provide basic public services. New and sustainable housing must be built, in new community structures. High-speed broadband must be provided to all. A new financing model – cooperative, with public support – will be required to re-establish small businesses. Local, decentralized cultural and sporting venues will have to replace mass-based experiences; these too will require cooperative structures and public support. In short, the only way out, remotely acceptable to the population at large, will require a comprehensive restructuring of the economy on a cooperative foundation, with the government stepping up to guaranteed funding, employment, and public investments.
Disaster capitalism is being tried, and the worst case is now the likely case. But there is a scale beyond which disaster capitalism cannot go. At a certain point, the carnage becomes too great to neglect, impossible to avoid, and lethal to overlook. At a certain point, ordinary people will stand up and refuse to be bullied any more. That point has not quite arrived; we are still in the mind-set of “getting back to normal,” even as the pandemic continues. The contradiction between normality and public health is on people’s minds; the impossibility of returning to the previous abnormal-normal has not yet settled in. It will, in due course. At that point, the question of alternatives will have to be faced.
Dr. Galbraith emailed me permission (2020 May 13) to repost his article in full. Originally posted on Defend Democracy Press, May 12, 2020. – Tony Wikrent
Z
I agree. You can’t march a hundred million people through the chutes of financial destruction and not expect some to fight back, which will eventually spark a larger movement.
If it goes too long, the pivot point will be people defending themselves with weapons from evictions and foreclosures. Look at the choices for some of them: turning their entire family out in the streets to beg because they can’t find a job or fighting for their pride if nothing else and knowing damn well they’re in the right because Wall Street got bailed out … again … and the U.S. worker, and themselves, got f*ed again.
Some won’t beg. Being pushed out onto the streets is a sentence that they won’t accept. It’s a horrible sentence that this abusive economic system uses as one of its primary enforcement mechanisms. That and hunger.
Are the police going to enforce evictions and foreclosures with swat teams? I’d imagine they’ll lose their appetite for that in no time. As f*cked as some of them are, they still got a lot tighter ties to the community than the scumbag kleptocrats that rule us with their paper money machine.
Z
Agusto
I\’m not very optimistic for the capacity of Americans to effect change. The people of the United States have shown us time and again that they\’re doddering masochists. They\’ve long ago relinquished all agency to a system that works them over like grain in a mill.
Even now that this system and its response to Covid 19 is resulting in death and economic misery that outshines the glares of their big screen tvs; they\’ll cling to their delusions and wallow in their contradictions, there is nothing they can do because the gristmill is working as designed.
Sure, some may vote for the \”blue\” senile rapist, as opposed to the \”red\” senile rapist, and the most indignant may even go to a march or a protest. Unfortunately they lack an understanding of power, how to acquire it and apply it. They are the United States of American\’t.
Fortunately, the rest of the world sees through the charade, the military, economic and cultural collars of imperial power will begin to loosen. That radically different model humanity needs will not come out of the United States, a country where the response to this pandemic has been to let people die because the disease is a hoax, while at the same time claiming that China is lying and under counting their casualties.
Ché Pasa
Just to echo here. The scale of the pandemic-catastrophe is global and almost immediate. Our rulers have little or no interest in the well-being of the rabble. Their main interest at this point is to stave off revolt as long as they can, and when revolt comes, as it must, they will seek to crush it thoroughly and absolutely. The problem is they’re counting on the camo-cosplayers to be their shock troops, and to that I think we can say, “Yeah, nope.”
Galbraith’s analysis of what’s happened is spot on, as he usually is, but like nearly everyone, his vision of what to do about it is cloudy. The Dems, as they are wont to do, are seeking to stave off the end point and follow up by recreating the status quo ante, and it’s not going to work. The Rs for their part seek to protect and defend wealth and power no matter the cost, and liquidate everything else. That’s not going to work, either.
Meeting in the middle won’t work. Power is stuck spinning its broken wheels. We’re not going to get out of this with more and cheaper broadband. The fact is, how to deal with it was/is well understood, the protocols have been laid out clearly for decades, and our rulers mostly chose to ignore them — and reinvent the wheel, over and over again. They think they’ve done a fabulous job, and they have if their intent is to cull and keep on culling the herd. But they won’t be done until there is a significant population decline, and not just in the “developed” world.
We’re not going to change the basic dynamics by replacing one political team with the other.
It will take more than a movement.
And the upshot won’t be pretty.
GlassHammer
We are so far down the road of sub-optimal outcomes that all I can think of when reading this is “what a cute set of suggestions.”
I mean you can’t get a good outcome with literally none of the vast array of things required for it being both present and at your disposal.
You can get somewhere between a “very bad outcome” and “abandon all hope ye who enter here” with what we are working with.
Welcome to America, we do things badly well.
Z
I don’t believe a political movement will get it done. No way, not in this hopelessly corrupt political and financial (see: Federal Reserve) system that does not function for the benefit of the nation as a whole, just for the country club of the .01%.
The impetus will be armed resistance, but not a militia type of movement. Just people individually putting up a fight of some sort, essentially armed martyrs, and them being celebrated as heroes on the internet and that growing into mass civil disobedience as our rulers try to tighten their noose on us more and more to choke the growing resistance.
By the way, the snapping turtle from Kentucky is asking to have access to all U.S.ers web browsing records, etc. You think that lowlife scumbag hasn’t gotten death threats? And of course his dancing partners in the democratic party are going to let him do it through another renewal of the patriot act.
Z
Some Guy
This is the best summary of the state of play I’ve seen, especially with respect to the inevitability of ongoing economic weakness, so thanks for re-posting it.
Having said that, anyone, who ever used to read Dave Cohen’s wonderfully dyspeptic blog ‘Decline of the Empire’ will recognize the classic pattern of an article clearly laying out exactly why and how we are screwed and then putting in the ideologically obligatory little bit of implausible optimism at the end.
“At a certain point, ordinary people will stand up and refuse to be bullied any more.”
I’ll believe it when I see it. For now, I’m just idly wondering what form ‘Tea Party 2’ will take to encourage the 99% to blame all their problems on each other.
But if I play along with the notion that there is a possible outcome other than the U.S. turning into a typical Latin American style kleptocracy, what kind of push-back from ordinary people could plausibly make a difference?
I could be wrong, but armed resistance seems implausible given the surveillance state, and Americans authoritarian love of their Army and how easily they can be directed to fight each other rather than anyone with any power.
Democratically, there are three plausible approaches I can think of:
1) Takeover of existing party structures by radicals. This is sort of what Trump has done and Sanders attempted, and it may still be the most fruitful path forward, but to date Sanders has failed even against feeble opponents, and while Trump won the nomination, he has governed pretty much in standard Republican fashion. But who knows what another recession/depression (and the ongoing die-off of the older generation, being replaced by a more radical younger one with little to lose) might breed
2) Creation of a new party. When Canada was presented with a choice of neocon Harper vs. neolib Ignatieff, the NDP suddenly surged in popularity (especially in Quebec) and was a threat to takeover the Federal government. They never did, but the Liberal party was forced to tack back towards the center with Trudeau to head them off. The U.S. is so locked into Blue vs Red that this is harder for them, and a new party would likely need a platform that appeals to both Blue and Red supporters to succeed. You would think this would be plausible approach since it is what has happened historically in similar circumstances, even in the U.S., but I don’t see anything on the horizon that looks viable. Identity / culture-war politics is a very effective wedge that is used to keep people at each other’s throats about issues the folks in charge couldn’t care less about.
3) Breakup of the country into manageable pieces or at least heavily decentralize to the States or regions in a Canada style model. The Washington swamp is bleeding the country dry and is the epicenter of all the corruption and deep state folks. A region that managed to stop Washington (and New York and Silicon Valley ideally) from sucking them dry would probably prosper and might be small enough to be manageable with lower levels of corruption and incompetence. Again, I don’t see anything plausible on the horizon.
Coming back to reality, if anything the risks are on the downside. Governance will get worse, not better, not only will solutions not be implemented, anti-solutions (more subsidies for fracking, capital gains cuts) will be, people will stand up and demand to be bullied more, and so on.
nihil obstet
I haven’t yet seen work that needs to be done to visualize a humane, coherent future. This envisions a return to capitalist life and production with more accountable organizations (government and co-ops) running the economy. We need to see something different.
As productivity exploded in the early twentieth century, the ruling class came up with two remedies that I’m aware of. In the early part of the century, they engaged mass propaganda to create desire, more and more desire, so that the products could be sold. After World War II, they instituted a permanent war economy, draining production into massive military outlays. This was put in the service of an ideology of constant growth. And it maintained a requirement that people spend their lives “earning” money. Sale of time is the only means of distribution of resources to the populace.
The pandemic has resulted in a crash in production and employment. Why should we gin it up again, even on a more cooperative basis? Let’s keep the cooperative basis, but include a radical reduction of the creation of desire. There are ways to reduce the reach of advertising and public relations that we should adopt and ways of encouraging less resource-demanding ways of spending our lives that don’t translate into a return to hunter-gathering.
Meanwhile, we don’t need, nor should we want, large numbers of people in “bullshit jobs” just so they can get money for time in wage slavery and they can be controlled by the upper class. I’m a UBI advocate, but along with that we’d need to de-commodify essential goods. Meanwhile, how about significantly shorter workdays and weeks, more annual leave, sabbaticals for all, and earlier retirement? This will move us towards a society where work is for the common good and life is decent for all.
krake
“We’re not going to change the basic dynamics by replacing one political team with the other.
It will take more than a movement.
And the upshot won’t be pretty.”
With labor broken and captive to corrupt contracts and corporate control, after 50 years of media anathemizing any actual left revs, and a well-funded carceral-surveillance state, this means fascism, no?
bruce wilder
Rebellion from below? I am expecting more violence, but mostly petty unorganized poorly aimed despair.
If I were hopeful (I am not), I would hope to see a significant fraction of the 20% wake up and smell the coffee. Leadership for the masses; a lesser evil that believes in a lot lesser.
Galbraith is so good, so clear and so grounded in reality in this essay! But, precisely because he is (mostly) reality-based, he will not find much engagement from the academic or political or media establishment. He is asking for smart. Actually smart, not the “smart” Lambert Strether’s irony meter detects in so much smug librul discourse.
We do not do reality anymore in the U.S. And, now reality is slapping us up hard.
Hugh
You can’t beat something with nothing. People want vision, hope, something to believe in. If they aren’t offered anything good, many will accept something pretty awful, Trump for example. I agree that we can’t go back. A return to the status quo ante is magical thinking. The economy wasn’t working for most Americans before the pandemic hit. Even for our over classes, it was running on fumes. The pandemic took a sledgehammer to what was left.
As nihil obstet says, we should be coming up with a vision for an economy that works for us. The old one is gone. Good riddance. Why is it that 50-60 years ago, even a lower middle class family could live on a single income, own a home, have something for vacations, and send the kids to college –without incurring huge debts? Maybe we should start with the ante status quo ante. That’s not socialism. That’s your parents and grandparents.
I think we should also begin looking at where we are going to be in the Fall. The callous, mindless “re-opening” we are witnessing could cause deaths in the hundreds of thousands and totally disrupt both our economy and our political system. We need to start thinking about that now, not as a maybe but as a when.
Mandos
Anything is possible but I wouldn’t bet *too* hard against some form of the “status quo ante”. The world is littered with predictions from political minorities that *this* will be The One, After Which They MUST Listen.
Z
No matter how beaten down we are, the physics of friction still hold: you can’t push a hundred million people into destitution and homelessness and not expect them to stir and get angry, and eventually desperate enough that they’ll fight back in some way, individually or collectively. There’s capacity limits on the wood chipper.
It’s not courage that will fuel the resistance, it’s individual desperation, and that’s what this system and this government is pushing the working class towards. The system will hit hard physical resistance if they start enforcing their property laws and tossing families out in the streets and whatnot. They’re going to run into some problems with that. Lots. And who are they going to sell them to?
If our rulers gave a f*ck about the country, they’d halt all rent and mortgage payments, put the uninsured on medicare, give us all UBI until the end of the year and start federally funding a rebuild of our infrastructure and manufacturing base, but of course the free trade boys on Wall Street who run the joint aren’t going to allow that to happen. What these corrupt pieces of garbage will do instead is try to placate the working class by playing money games and push hard on this new social security idea they got to let people take some benefit money now and then retire later in life. This will keep the wood chipper from clogging and will allow them to later claim that social security got decimated by the virus and blame it on the nasty virus … who would have thought it would have done such great damage to the strongest economy in human history, that damn virus … as a reason for them to reduce benefits overall for everybody down the road.
When they cut SS benefits later on, which the ghouls have been salivating for for decades now, it will also help prop up the dollar as a fiscally responsible store of value and maintain its legitimacy as the king fiat currency and the most valuable poker chip in the international markets.
The Fed not only dishes out free poker chips to its pals though, it cuts the deck and deals the cards as well. For our corrupt rulers and their paper boys at the Federal Reserve, it’s all about money games and schemes. They have the push button money making machine and we don’t. They 3-D the markets with their printing press which keeps their wealth and power protected in a whole separate economy from ours.
Z
DanK
I disagree.
Disaster capitalism will continue to work.
The people will continue to take it up the yazoo and ask for more.
(And Canada probably will be dragged down with whatever shit happens in the US.)
Mel
Fictional example of playing out the next stage might be Ralph Ellison’s _The Invisible Man_.
Eric Anderson
Hugh says:
“I think we should also begin looking at where we are going to be in the Fall.”
Indeed.
My wife and I were discussing where this is all headed a couple of days ago. Basically we were discussing basics like, “What if our daycare opens back up? Are we willing to risk the safety of our only child?”
We both work “fulltime+” jobs, and are doing the 2hrs on 2hrs off routine to take care of our child. I said that, as hard as it is, we just keep going like we are until the election to see if more competent heads prevail that allow this country to, at minimum, form a coherent response to the virus.
But don’t get me wrong, I don’t anticipate a normal election. It’s going to be ugly AF no matter how you cut it. If Trump wins, people will lose their minds. If Biden wins, people will lose their minds. We’re so far into uncharted waters the word “map” no longer even applies. I, like Hugh anticipate we’ll chug along on the momentum I described in my last post. But the outlines of the rocks that will determine the fate of our ship won’t begin to become clear until post-election.
November will portend our fates.
Will
Eric: “But the outlines of the rocks that will determine the fate of our ship won’t begin to become clear until post-election….”
Do you think that this calamity might follow the others this system has produced? The S&L disaster, the housing bust, and so on? In those cases we saw a slice of what might have been called the middle class sliced off and placed in another, lesser, category. A lot of people get hurt badly, the divide grows, we proceed toward (eventually) being ungovernable. At least this is what I expect.
Hugh: “The economy wasn’t working for most Americans before the pandemic hit….”
I agree but with the quibble that I think I am the last generation (X) that actually saw a well functioning job market in a normal economy. We bring replacements in, we send manufacture out, and what remains is not really a market at all. I am the last of the breed. Someone who believes with all his heart that until this is addressed the rest cannot be fixed. Running a huge trade deficit via the reserve currency is a monkey trap. I have to wonder how much pain we will accept before letting go of the banana.
Will
metamars
I think we need a radically different approach to activism. One which will foster essentially a parallel set of legislation, transparently arrived at by transpartisan experts, to the real, official legislation. The cost/benefits would be clearly laid out, and it would then be up to activists in particular, and motivated citizens, in general, to exert their will, electorally, and ruthlessly force out of office legislators who won’t obey the publicly supported mandates.
There is (or was) at least one country in Europe that has an effective, citizen directed ability to establish at least legislative priorities. I can’t remember details, but we should be examining democratic systems all over the world for best practices in governance.
This virus mess represents an opportunity for epidemiological experts, doctors not beholden to Big Pharma or Big Insurance, and yes, economists (say like Galbraith) to “Act As Though” they were legislators, and craft model legislation (with FULL ACCOUNTABILITY in the form of cost/benefit ratios calculated) which could then be sold to the wider public. I think these groups should be smallish (say 10 to 20 experts), but there should be parallel groups working on identical issues. That’s to help counteract the hidden agenda/corruption aspects that would inevitably seek to infect these policy groups, if they ever got traction. Also, some groups will simply not be able to form a majoritarian consensus. At a certain deadline date, representatives from each competing group (or, more realistically, the top few groups) could publicly debate their relative plans. (This whole process would most likely be done remotely, via video conferencing). In particular, we would demand that competing groups critique the cost/benefit analyses of their competitors. These top groups would be determined by citizen vote. (see below)
The parallel legislation groups could be augmented by volunteer (everybody is a volunteer, in my scheme) citizens with legislative staff experience who could properly write up the legislation. Plus, other supporting task forces, as needed, say to research some set of details, or another.
The public has to credibly buy in to a winning plan, which will be forced down the throat of the legislators, one way or another. (I.e., either they adopt the plan, or get voted out of office.) How to count their votes, using the internet? I think the only way to credibly do it is to do so with full public transparency, where some sort of proof of citizenship has to be uploaded (e.g., Uber makes me upload a picture of my driver’s license; this sort of thing) AND people have to pay $1, via credit or debit card, so we have some additional assurance that the person uploading citizenship credentials does, in fact, have the right to those credentials (i.e., we are relying on the credit card companies’ ability to detect fraudulent transactions); also, the tiny fee will help pay for maintaining the system, including disqualifying voters who attempt to cast multiple votes.
The loss of privacy is lamentable, but I don’t see a way around it. At least we will be voting for policies, instead of polarizing personalities, so hopefully antifa or KKK thugs won’t show up on our doorstep with clubs at the ready.
The citizens have to cultivate candidates who will adopt their legislation, to use as a bludgeoning tool against recalcitrant Democratic and Republican deadwood officeholders. It should be understood that both parties have to be taken over, from below, one way, or another. The D’s and R’s aren’t going to do what we tell them to do, just because we nicely we ask. They have to be forced.
Given the current virus mess, with attendant fallout, I see an immediate need for 4 types of model legislative groups:
1) getting affordable, optimal treatment and isolation/quarantining capability to all covid-19 sufferers (more generally, any infectious disease that might be confused with it, at least until the tests are ubiquitous and cheap). This should consider mandates to overrule institutional corruption at NIH, NIAID, FDA, etc. At least some of the groups would, I hope, adopt a fine-grained “protect the vulnerable” strategy as outlined by Dr. David L. Katz.
2) proper and adequate small business bailouts
3) proper protection of people from rent, mortgage, tax and utility payments and evictions for X months.
4) targeted, covid related aid to state governments to make up for loss of general revenues (not pay for their pension plans, e.g., which they have underfunded for the last 20 years)
Plus, 2 more high-priority model legislative group types should be formed, ASAP, to work on
5) securing of food supply chains
6) securing of medicine supply chains
Eric Anderson
Will:
Yes. Actually, while writing the comment I was thinking about how a Biden administration will approach it, but didn’t go there because it seemed like a rabbit hole that could stretch for many paragraphs.
Nutshell: I anticipate a doubling down on the Clinton/Obama neoliberalism in the form of a return to China mollification, which the corporate class will amply reward Biden. Witness Pelosi’s HEROES act. They always chase the policies that ensure the greatest return to their campaign war chests. Watch the majority of the corporate donors (and the deep state that serve as the corporate classes attack dogs) pivot to Biden support prior to the election. Watch negative interest (Powell will go there) rates become the norm.
They don’t let go of the banana because they no doing so spells the implosion of the fake economy, and hence, the implosion of the party. Damn the consequences to the average voter, they don’t care. As Ian has said, it’s all about the Iron Law of Institiutions.
S Brennan
Useless agitprop.
Summery; Trump Awful, ponies for everyone!
Based on the Obama experience in 2009-2016, I see ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE to support the preposition that any DNCer approved, [Biden replacement] candidate would be superior…Bernie fans sit down, Sanders made a fool out his fan club TWICE, he’s a con man with a pretty good shtick, own it.
Mark Pontin
To step away from the politics for a moment —
After looking at various papers and noting two serious concerns about COVID19 not being addressed in the discussions I saw, I ran my questions by a top virologist who spent more than twenty years at USAMRIID, Lawrence Livermore, and NIAD. My concerns —
[1] No human population has ever developed herd immunity to a coronavirus to date, and to some extent such viruses’ very nature mitigates against ii.
[2] More interestingly, there’s some evidence that COVID19 — again like other coronaviruses, most notably SARS — exploits antibody-derived enhancement. See forex —
‘Impact of immune enhancement on Covid-19 polyclonal hyperimmune globulin therapy and vaccine development’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7161485/
‘Is COVID-19 receiving ADE from other coronaviruses?’
His answer –
The key to understanding ADE is that it is not universally observed, even in cases in Dengue. It can happen but not always. DEN vaccines are looking promising but have taken 40 years. When we think about vaccine safety this is a key consideration and an easy to measure aspect of the immune response.
Different vaccines will elicit different immune responses so it is really a matter of trying different antigens and methods to deliver in phase 1.
It is possible that we see ADE from the other corona viruses. SARS1 and 2 are about 70% similar. So it is a reasonable hypothesis. If we do have a significant problem with ADE then it will be possible to prescreen people for the antibodies that are causing the ADE and exclude them from trials or treatment. Not great but herd immunity is much more powerful then we give credit to.
Me: So while we haven’t seen human herd immunity emerge with any previous coronavirus, this virologist thinks I’d be wrong to assume that it cannot eventually with COVID19.
He also believes, however, that the virus’s R0 might actually be as high 9.2 and in the end the human global population will show a fatality rate of about 1 percent from the virus.
Z
One entire legislative branch of the U.S. government essentially consists of an 80 year old hopped up on amphetamines who constantly uses her chair as a pedestal to play vanity games that a 15 year old would feel ashamed of the next morning.
And not one House democrat dare challenges this f*ing immature idiot in any meaningful way!
It’s pathetic and thus far AOC and The Squad have also only been engaging in performance art politics during the COVID economic and health crisis. If they’re consumed about not getting re-elected, then why the f*ck did they even get involved in the government if they are willing to compromise with the party over this unless they at their core have also become only about themselves as well? Because of all the wonderful things that they tell themselves they’ll do sometime in the undefinable future? When and what, and what will be left?
Z
Seattle Resident
Z
Pramila Jayapal did speak out against and vowed not to support Pelosi’s 3 trillion dollar relief package in its current form on the grounds that it did not go far enough – no payroll guarantee program and no extension of health coverage for the unemployed.
Unfortunately, as long as the Senate and the White House are held by republicans, it won’t matter all that much what progressives push hard for, as well as what conservative dems push for.
Mandos
Argh! If there’s one thing I’ve tried to get across after many years of hanging around Ian’s sites, it’s that you can’t exert power inside the American system without engaging in many years of performance art politics! One of the things that has weakened the American left from within is the huge impatience at the necessity of supporting a political career in a very hierarchical electoral system. You have to “performance art” your way to the top and then keep performance arting yourself until you actually have power to exert.
Z
Seattle Resident,
Thanks for the info.
I was aware of that and now I’m waiting to see whether they’ll actually oppose Pelosi’s vanity games in a meaningful way. They have spoken out before, but then folded when it mattered.
I’d walk out on her on Friday. Don’t even bother voting on her bs bill.
If they do something like that, I’ll gain more respect for them than just vocalizing resistance and then, like AOC, throw demonstrative hissy fits on the floor about the nasty republicans when they damn well know they got that piece of trash Pelosi running interference for the republicans in their own branch.
Z
Z
Seattle Resident,
I also understand they can’t get anything passed all by themselves, but my point is why even give their corrupt speaker any respect at all? Why play along? She doesn’t deserve it. The way she is using her power is undemocratic and they shouldn’t lend it any legitimacy.
Z
anon y\'moyse
To garble Churchill: \”Americans can be counted on to do the wrong thing over and over, until they quite literally have no other choice.\”
We definitely haven\’t run out of choices yet.
krake
“Argh! If there’s one thing I’ve tried to get across after many years of hanging around Ian’s sites, it’s that you can’t exert power inside the American system without engaging in many years of performance art politics! One of the things that has weakened the American left from within is the huge impatience at the necessity of supporting a political career in a very hierarchical electoral system. You have to “performance art” your way to the top and then keep performance arting yourself until you actually have power to exert.”
If people aren’t willing to be terrifying, they must be willing to be entertaining.
Mandos
“If people aren’t willing to be terrifying, they must be willing to be entertaining.”
Yes, and then after that you can be *both*. That to me is one of the major lessons of Trump — the American right-wing understands performance art politics and how and when to escalate it, because they are not trapped under misconceptions about political sincerity. There used to be a left that understood that too, got buried under a mythology and…personality disposition of earnestness.
krake
“Yes, and then after that you can be *both*. That to me is one of the major lessons of Trump — the American right-wing understands performance art politics and how and when to escalate it, because they are not trapped under misconceptions about political sincerity. There used to be a left that understood that too, got buried under a mythology and…personality disposition of earnestness.”
QFP.
—
Say what you will about the awfulness of the battle flag, the iron, celtic and southern crosses, the reappropration of the sonnenrad and the valknut, the alarming and still somehow goofy-stoopid embrace of the hakenkreuz, the kolovat and the suspenders-wearing beardo battle drag of the right wing – (and they are just the worst; enemies, all) – but these feckos understand messaging; they *get* the uselessness of the crippling self-feckery of earnestness. Gods damn the pollyannas and righteous crunchies.
Mandos
off topic: Oh no! My ears have been contaminated! I think I just heard the voice that Roe Jogan guy. Unhear! Maintain purity!