California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Essential Economy Should Replace an Economy Based on Consumerism

by John Lawrence, July 7, 2020

The economy is never going back to what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. Brick and mortar stores were already failing. Now their fate is being sealed. J Crew, JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus, Chesapeake Oil, Gold's Gym, Hertz, Tuesday Morning, Diamond Offshore, Whiting Petroleum, Sur La Table, 24 Hour Fitness, GNC, Chuck E Cheese, Lucky Brand, Men's Wearhouse, Pier 1 - the list goes on and on. Many of these businesses were carrying huge amounts of debt even before the virus hit. This huge number of bankruptcies is going to slam the economy, and the economy will be restructured as a result. Brick and mortar stores will never be the same as more people are going online to order goods. More schools and businesses will also be going online and staying online. This is good as it will slow the greenhouse gas emissions from commuter vehicles.

The economy needs to be restructured even if we never had the pandemic. Maybe the pandemic is a blessing in disguise if it forces a restructuring which reduces the market for fossil fuels. There needs to be massive restructuring in this regard in the next 10 years if we are to have a prayer to escape runaway global warming. This restructuring will also allow the next President if it's Joe Biden to address economic inequality and uplift the lower half of family incomes. Joe Biden is calling for a $15.00 minimum wage with no exception for tipped workers. This is a step in the right direction. There needs to be massive hiring in fields which will rebuild American infrastructure in a way that uses renewable energy. Fossil fuel companies that are carrying huge amounts of debt should be left to go bankrupt instead of being propped up by interest free loans from the Federal Reserve.

Medicare for All needs to be implemented and updated to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Both Medicare and Obamacare are currently prohibited by law from negotiating with drug companies to get lower drug prices. Whether Biden calls it Medicare for All or enhanced Obamacare, the health care system needs to be radically overhauled and updated so that the poor and middle class get the same level of care as the rich. This is all predicated on both Houses of Congress being controlled by Democrats. Otherwise, nothing will get done, and the US will continue to go down the path of degeneration.

The current American economy is predicated on 70% consumption. It is predicated on private enterprise and very limited government. The result is immense economic inequality and lack of investment in public health, which the pandemic has made evident, and also lack of investment in infrastructure. Instead, the only government investment has been in a ginormous military establishment which has been used in disastrous wars, the only result of which has been to create millions of refugees. It has done nothing to help the 40% of the world's population that does not even have access to clean water or proper sanitation. This situation has only been made worse by the current President whose only goal has been to make the world safe for white people. He has used economic sanctions with the result that the world has turned away from using the US dollar and turned toward China as an ally. Case in point: China has been helping Iran economically as the US policy of trying to trash Iran's economy has left it no alternative.

Instead of making America Great Again, Trump has absolutely trashed the nation including his response to the pandemic. While other countries have mounted a credible response, Trump has only further trashed the American economy by insisting that opening the economy was the only thing that mattered. "So I said to my people, slow down the testing, please." Exactly the wrong response. Trump said to his people (the Supreme Court) "Slow down the legal process, please." He got his wish there. His tax returns will not become public until after the election if ever. The Supreme Court said it has to go back to a lower court. From there it will probably go to a court of appeals and from there back to the Supreme Court in a neverending circular process that only rich people can afford. Lawyers will make a fortune though. That's why rich people get justice. Poor people can't afford it.

The political system needs to be restructured so that the Senate can never again be captured  by one political party which then stymies any initiatives put forward by the other party. Democrats in the House can put forward progressive legislation, but, as long as Mitch McConnell is leader of the Senate, it will never see the light of day or be implemented. It becomes a joke. The result is that the political process is only spinning its wheels and has been for 40 years. Let's hope a Democratic President and a Congress in which both Houses are controlled by Democrats can implement, instead of just talking about, progressive policies starting in 2021.

Off the Top of My Head

Going Through Hell ... Twice

by John Lawrence, July 7, 2020

This is what happens when Governors, Mayors and Presidents don't follow the guidelines laid out for them by medical experts and scientific data. Governor Andrew Cuomo did the right thing, and his state is recovering nicely. Trump and his coterie of mainly southern macho men who think they know it all did not, and, as a result, they are ping ponging back and forth - open and shut, open and shut. These A-holes want the economy to sing nicely even if it means sacrificing a few senior citizens. Trouble is COBID has other plans for them. It is still out there, liable to spring up again unless people and political leaders do the right thing and model the right behavior.

Certain parts of the country will recover. New York state proved that. A Democratic governor did do the right thing while Trump and his henchmen were only posturing and talking tough. While they were doing that, Cuomo was demonstrating that New Yorkers were not only tough, but caring, intelligent and loving. That's how he ended his press conferences every day. Trump supporters can yell, "USA, USA" all they want. The fact is that Trump is not making this country great again: He's reducing it to a shit pile. The European Union will not even let Americans travel there. China, which has gotten the pandemic under control, is becoming he undisputed world's number one economy. China is being looked up to by many of our allies, whom Trump has gone out of his way to alienate, while the US is being looked down upon.

Trump can huff and puff all he wants about looters and anarchists and agitators. No one cares any more. Those terms ring hollow. People are waking up to the real American history as found in "A People's History of the United States," by Howard Zinn instead of the fairy tale history we all learned in school. The fact is that America was founded on slavery and theft of Native American lands. According to History.com:

In an era in which the international slave trade was starting to grow, Columbus and his men enslaved many native inhabitants of the West Indies and subjected them to extreme violence and brutality. On his famous first voyage in 1492, Columbus landed on an unknown Caribbean island after an arduous three-month journey.

On his first day in the New World, he ordered six of the natives to be seized, writing in his journal that he believed they would be good servants. Throughout his years in the New World, Columbus enacted policies of forced labor in which natives were put to work for the sake of profits. Later, Columbus sent thousands of peaceful Taino “Indians” from the island of Hispaniola to Spain to be sold. Many died en route.

No wonder his statues are being taken down. He is as much an affront to Native Americans as Jefferson Davis is to African Americans. The Spaniards were just after gold and other riches, and when they couldn't get any more work out of the Indians, they started importing African slaves. Some US states have replaced Columbus Day with Native American Day. At least thirteen states do not celebrate Columbus Day (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, DC; Wisconsin); South Dakota officially celebrates Native American Day instead.

The point is that all white people are immigrants. My family came here from Europe some 11 generations ago at about the same time the first slave ships arrived. America is a nation of immigrants and the first white settlers did not treat the so-called Indians (a name made up by Christopher Columbus) all that well. Let's acknowledge the real American history and not celebrate murderers and enslavers.

Off the Top of My Head

Culture Wars: Neither Here Nor There

by John Lawrence, July 4, 2020

So they change a name of  a military base: is one black family any better off? Conservatives love it when the debate is confined to cultural stuff. It doesn't threaten their bank accounts one tiny little bit. But when you get down to anything substantive, anything concrete, like defunding the military-industrial complex and using the money for free public education from pre-school to college, well, wait a minute that's socialism. They already consider public education K-8th socialism. Well what about health care? When you start talking about free health care, or even reasonably priced health care, well that's socialism. Hey let's confine the discussion to whether or not we should allow confederate statues to exist. Taking one down does not make one black family any better off and doesn't threaten the white elite one bit. It doesn't cost them one dollar and it doesn't add one dollar to any black family's income.

So let's talk about concrete issues, ones that could really benefit the hoi polloi and take a few dollars out of wealthy peoples' pockets:

    1. Medicare for All

    2. A Financial Transactions Tax

    3. Forgiveness of student loan debt

    4. A Green New Deal that would create good paying jobs for millions of black, Native American and     Latinx people

    5. Raising the minimum wage to a living wage

    6. A wealth tax

    7. Defunding the military which is the police force of the world and increasing the budget of the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization

Instead of debating these concrete issues conservatives want to argue over symbols. That's where their mentality is at. Don't trample on my flag. Don't trample on my history. Don't burn my flag. None of these symbolic and cultural issues improve the life of any American. They just preserve the status quo and the economic inequality that is only getting worse and which will get worse at a faster rate due to the pandemic. In short the ones mired in these issues know that nothing really will change as long as they can keep the discussion at this level. And those who could profit by changing the system are too often persuaded by those who wouldn't just to argue about symbols. Eliminating all the statues of slaveholders will not change American history one bit and will not make one black person better off.

As long as they don't eliminate the military bases and reduce the inflow of money to the military, the big wigs would be happy to entertain changing the name of Fort Bragg to Fort Rosecrans. General Rosecrans whipped Bragg's ass in Tennesee. As Commander of the Army of the Cumberland, he fought against Confederate General Braxton Bragg at Stones River, and later outmaneuvered him in the brilliant Tullahoma Campaign, driving the Confederates from Middle Tennessee. So it's a logical change of name. But it won't do anything to improve the lives of blacks, native Americans or Latinx. All the government help given to whites like the GI bill after WW II effectively excluded blacks as did all the land given to whites by the Homestead Act. First slavery, then Jim Crow laws served to keep black wealth at a minimum even negative in many cases. Instead of gaining wealth as whites did, they were targeted to be debtors and kept there by PayDay loan operators charging exorbitant rates of interest. Native Americans were gypped out of their lands by Americans not honoring treaties and by outright theft. They were also killed by a pandemic the white man brought with him from Europe. Thus Montezuma's revenge and now maybe COBID will do the same thing to Trump's non-mask wearing base.

So Trump is getting his base excited about cultural issues. It's a total sideshow designed to keep the status quo intact and to let the rich keep on getting richer. The poor, especially blacks, need to be kept in their place. All the progressive legislation designed by Cory Booker to reform the police nationwide will never see the light of day as long as the Senate is controlled by Republicans. He might as well not waste his breath. It's meaningless and never has a chance in hell of passing the Senate and being enacted into law. So why don't the Democrats do something more productive instead of spinning their wheels with great ideas that will never see the light of day.

Off the Top of My Head

We Spent a Trillion Dollars on the Military-Industrial Complex: It Didn't Save Us From the Biggest Killer.

by John Lawrence, July 3, 2020

Do we have our priorities misallocated? The biggest killer has been the pandemic. China has won by default because it has triumphed over - not us - but the COBID-19. That catapulted the world's second largest economy into first place. The US pathetic response misdirected by Trump has guaranteed that the US is not great again but a "pitiful helpless giant" as President Nixon said. How many lies are Trump's base going to believe before they realize that they've been scammed? The pandemic might not magically end some day, and then things might not go back to normal. There are other pandemics waiting in the wings. We need to defund the defense budget as it's now configured and start funding our real defense priorities.

In the book, Spillover, David Quammen writes that we dodged a bullet when the SARS virus hit the streets in 2003, but we weren't so lucky this time:

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent in the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, a person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever and the chils - maybe even the cough - precede the major discharge of virus towards other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this appears to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally were not emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or the subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - not just lucky but salvational. With influenza and many other diseases the order is reversed, high infectivity preceding symptoms by a matter of days. A perverse pattern: the danger, then the warning. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918-1919 influenza: high infectivity among cases before they experienced the most obvious and debilitating stages of illness. The bug traveled ahead of the sense of alarm. And that infamous global epidemic, remember, occurred in the era before globalization. Everything nowadays moves around the planet faster, including viruses. If SARS had conformed to the perverse pattern of presymptomatic infectivity, its 2003 emergence wouldn't be a case history in good luck and effective outbreak response. It would be a much darker story.

The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like the angel of death.

How prescient! COBID-19 is the Next Big One. The book quoted above was written before the current pandemic but was predictive of it, especially the part about the infections being spread by asymptomatic people. That order reversed is what saved the SARS epidemic from becoming a pandemic, but we weren't so lucky this time, and maybe we won't be next time. The COBID-19 virus has already mutated into a more highly infectious form. Trump's ineffectual and misguided response almost guarantees that this pandemic will destroy the US both medically and economically.

Off the Top of My Head

What the SARS Epidemic Can Teach Us

by John Lawrence, July 2, 2020

In 2003 SARS broke out in China. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is a coronavirus in the same family as COBID-19. Fortunately, it was confined to Singapore, where an authoritarian government locked it down and quenched it out and a few other mostly Asian countries. Cases were also found in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Toronto, Canada, but the US escaped the spread and the fire was put out quickly. About 8000 people contracted SARS and 774 died. Compared to the current COBID pandemic, the US and the world dodged a bullet. Currently, there are almost 11 million cases worldwide and 500,000 deaths. In the US alone there have been almost 130,000 deaths. However, research on SARS has helped to gain a better understanding of COBID especially on the role of PPE and the importance thereof since most of the cases of SARS were spread from an infected patient to medical personnel who weren't properly protected.

People in the south of China eat all kinds of exotic animals including civet cats which were indicted as the animal host from which SARS was transmitted to humans. The Chinese government went back and forth from killing all civet cats to only thinking that only farmed civet cats were the culprits and not wild ones. The current thinking is that civic cats were an amplifier host. An amplifier host is a larger animal than the reservoir host capable of generating larger amounts of virus before transmitting it to humans. The reservoir host is thought to be bats. So bats transmitted the virus to civet cats and then it was amplified and transmitted to humans.

It is important to note that even though the SARS epidemic was quenched, it is still present in its reservoir hosts as is other viruses including COBID-19. So other cases of SARS can still pop up and will always pop up as long as it is present in its reservoir host. That's the meaning of a reservoir host. Killing all the amplifier hosts does not wipe out the virus so it was a futile exercise just to kill all civet cats. There is no vaccine for SARS. There may never be a satisfactory vaccine for COBID-19. That's why the measures of mask wearing and social distancing are so important. Other coronavirus outbreaks may occur at any time in the future as the virus mutates or as other viruses transfer from animal hosts to humans. The wet markets in China, where all kinds of exotic animals are butchered for food, are thought to be the areas most likely in which SARS, COBID-19 and other viruses are transmitted from animals to humans.

Americans have been misled about the coronavirus first in terms that the economy could reopen and get back to normal in a couple of months or that "flattening the curve" is all that would be necessary or even that a safe and effective vaccine would be found by the end of the year or in fact ever. The only known way to reduce the impact of this pandemic or future pandemics is by means of testing in huge numbers with short turnaround times, contact tracing, mask wearing and social distancing. Americans want a magical solution, a pill or a shot, that can make them safe against the virus. It may or may not happen. It hasn't happened with a whole multitude of viruses including SARS, HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. Any of these maladies can break out at any time if there is a transmission from an animal reservoir or amplifier host to a human.

COBID-19 is not necessarily the end of pandemics. It is more realistic to think that there are even more future pandemics out there especially as humans encroach on animal habitats. Certainly, the Chinese appetite for exotic animals sold in so-called "wet markets" is a potential culprit. If there were a cooperative and productive relationship between the US and China, perhaps the world could come to an understanding about closing down or regulating these markets. The wet market in Wutan where COBID-19 presumably originated has been shut down. In the meantime perhaps the US defense budget should be rethunk. As of 2015 the number of Americans killed by terrorism in the previous decade: 24. Number of Americans killed by guns in the last decade: 280,024.

The number of Americans killed world wide by our "enemies" including ISIL, al-Qaeda and various other terrorists is insignificant compared to those killed by the COBID pandemic in a few short months yet we spend $1 trillion a year on so-called "defense" while almost nothing on pandemic preparedness and research. Trump has attempted to defund the CDC and WHO, the agencies that do research and preparedness, the agencies that study viruses and virus transmission. Instead of defunding the police we should defund the military and refund those agencies that defend us from future pandemics. Today the US set a record: 50,000 new cases of COBID in one day.

Off the Top of My Head

US Testing for Coronavirus is a Joke

by John Lawrence, June 27, 2020

Try to get a test without waiting on hold for an appointment. Try and get a test without waiting in line for hours. Try and get a test and get the results back in less than 10 days. This is the anecdotal experience of 2 adults I know in their seventies plus my Granddaughter. My Granddaughter spent several days in Arizona recently, had a cough when she got back and was told by her doctor that her symptoms were not serious enough to warrant a test. Testing should be ubiquitous, easy to get and results should be available in 24 hours or less. This is not the case in the US, and that's at least one reason why the US is experiencing the pandemic as a worse crisis than almost anywhere else in the developed world.

So who gets tested? Only those showing up at hospitals that obviously need to be hospitalized or those willing to wait for hours on hold and in line who really think they might have the virus. So Trump is right about one thing: the more tests there are, the more cases will be discovered and the infection rate is skewed because most of them either obviously are sick or have symptoms and have reason to believe that they will test positive. This raises the purported infection rate in the general population. But the testing regime is all wrong. To get an accurate idea of the infection rate, you would have to test the general population at random, not just those who are willing to stay on hold or in line for hours because they think they might test positive, and tests have to be available on a convenient basis. Those who are not being tested at the present time are the asymptomatic carriers who have no reason or incentive to be tested. This would also skew the infection rate higher and be a more accurate representation of the actual rate of infection, but the infection rate might be either more or less than what the present testing indicates

So how did China test almost 11 million people, the entire population of Wuhan, in only 10 days? They had a lot more testing centers per square mile than anywhere in the US, and they devoted a lot more personnel to the job including contact tracing. They did batch or pool testing which just now is being rolled out in the US. China has been able to manufacture enough test kits to test huge numbers of people and the results were available in 48 hours. The cost of testing is covered by the government. The US has been further hampered by a lack of reagents, the chemicals used in the test kits. Evidently, a lot of the critical components of test kits are not manufactured in the US and the stock of them is in short supply.

In South Korea you call the COVID-19 hotline to get information on local testing sites, walk to the nearest one, have a brief one-on-one visit with a doctor, and have your nasal or oral sample collected. The whole process takes less than 30 minutes. Later that evening, you get a text message letting you know whether you're COVID positive. All this for free or just under $20. So results in less than 24 hours? How come South Korea can do it, but the US can't?

Germany has been very successful in its response to the pandemic. Labmate reported:

The death rate is around 4%, significantly lower than neighbouring countries such as France which has confirmed around 130,000 cases and reported more than 24,500 deaths. Experts say the low death rates in Germany are a result of intense testing, with domestic laboratories conducting up to 160,000 tests per week. In comparisons, countries like Britain carry out just 10,000 tests per day. With access to more tests Germany can identify COVID-19 carriers and prevent them from spreading the disease. Intense testing also allows the German healthcare system to identify COVID-19 patients earlier and offer early treatment.

One of the key drivers behind Germany's low death rate is the proactive development of a test for the novel coronavirus. It was later adopted by the WHO and distributed around the world on a mass scale, but not before Germany had already accumulated a large stockpile of kits. Since February, up to 300 German laboratories have been commissioned to manufacture the tests, empowering Germany with the scope to carry out high-intensity testing.

The country built on its success with a contract with German-based engineering and technology company Bosch. In just six weeks, the company's medical engineers developed a rapid, fully automated molecular diagnostic test to detect COVID-19 in just 2.5 hours.

"The special feature of the Bosch test is that it offers differential diagnosis, which saves doctors the additional time needed for further tests," says president of Bosch Healthcare Solutions GmbH, Marc Meier. "It also provides them with a reliable diagnosis quickly so they can then begin suitable treatment faster."

So turnaround time in Germany is just 2.5 hours?! Superior testing technology? Leadership on a national basis? Things unheard of in the US where manufacturing technology has been outsourced, supplies have not been stockpiled. The US response to the coronavirus has been third rate, and that's why we're in the state we're in with cases skyrocketing around the country.

The most important point is that massive testing needs to take place ON A RANDOM BASIS in order to find the asymptotic carriers and compute an accurate infection rate. Until that happens, the US will struggle with the pandemic, opening and closing, indecisive as to what to do. A major cause of all this incompetence is lack of leadership at the national level.

Off the Top of My Head

A House Built Upon Sand: the US Economy

by John Lawrence, June 26, 2020

The wise man built his house on rock, and it withstood the rains and the floods and the wind. The foolish man built his house on sand and it collapsed. An apt metaphor for the US economy in the midst of a pandemic that is only getting worse. Before the pandemic hit, it was a full employment economy in which half the people couldn't survive a $400. emergency. It was an economy built on consumerism. Consumerism was 70% of GDP. About half the economy was small business, but these jobs and this economic activity was vulnerable. Much of it was non-essential. It was bars (by the way you can drink at home); it was restaurants (by the way you can eat at home). It was travel and hospitality (by the way you can sleep at home if you're willing to make your own bed).

The essential parts of the economy continued to operate even when the pandemic hit. It isn't fair that minimum wage workers were more exposed to the coronavirus, but, be that as it may, with some exceptions these workers did not get sick in higher ratios than anyone else. If more of the jobs were essential, productive and less frivolous, there would have been fewer jobs lost and much less unemployment. The economic house was built on sand and when the pandemic hit, it collapsed. At the same time the fault line of black racism and inequality was fully exposed. It's as if the hurricane of the pandemic cut away the underbrush and exposed this situation for what it is thanks to #BlackLivesMatter.

The Homestead Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln which gave free land to white people allowed whites to build equity and wealth while blacks who were promised 40 acres and a mule after slavery were denied even that. They ended up in many cases working the same land as sharecroppers and living in worse poverty than when they were slaves. After World War II the G.I. Bill aimed to help American veterans adjust to civilian life by providing them with benefits including low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans and financial support. African Americans did not benefit nearly as much as White Americans. Historian Ira Katznelson argues that "the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow". In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.

Additionally, banks and mortgage agencies refused loans to blacks, making the G.I. Bill even less effective for blacks. Once they returned from the war, blacks faced discrimination and poverty, which represented a barrier to harnessing the benefits of the G.I. Bill. So whites were able to build wealth through home ownership while blacks were denied that opportunity. Wealth from home ownership is the difference between the middle class and the poor. Home ownership became the means for the intergenerational transfer of wealth for white people. Each generation of black people started out from zero. There was an intergenerational transfer of poverty instead.

Blacks who were able to get manufacturing jobs after the Second World War did fairly well, but those jobs have by and large fled the country. In the financial crisis of 2008, the Great Recession, blacks were screwed as well. While the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks and mortgage companies hundred cents on the dollar, blacks who needed help paying their mortgages did not get it and were foreclosed on. The government could have bailed them out instead, but it didn't.

So now the country is faced with not only a public health crisis but also an economic, financial and racial crisis which would be much less severe if those manufacturing jobs still existed. The economy is not coming back as it was constructed pre-pandemic. There is no way that small business based on 100% occupancy is going to survive based on 50% occupancy. Many of the businesses like professional sports, cruises and even churches are predicated on high occupancy. People will not be comfortable with high occupancy unless a vaccine is found for COBID, but finding a vaccine is not a foregone conclusion. There are some viruses for which a vaccine has never been found including HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

It takes a lot of money to develop a vaccine, and that money has been lacking from US budgets. There are two obstacles to faster progress, said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic. “One is scientific, and one is embarrassing,” he said. The embarrassing part is the lack of investment. It takes 10 years and more than $1 billion to develop a vaccine — a small fortune for a medical advance but a pittance for a weapons system. While defense research is driven by one mega-customer, the Pentagon, vaccine researchers face a confusing hodgepodge of potential backers. In short the US has spent its money on weapons of war instead of protecting its people from pandemics which are far more deadly than terrorist attacks. 405,000 Americans died in WW II. Over half that amount have already died in this pandemic, and it's getting worse due to American foolishness at the top levels.

There is a chance now for America to start out on a new path, and that path would be more or less what Bernie Sanders and other progressives have identified as their agenda: a Green New Deal would create good jobs for millions of unemployed Americans and it could give priority to black people so that they could get started on wealth building. Low cost housing loans and subsidies could give black people the same advantages they didn't get with the Homestead Act and the G.I. bill. At the same time a Green New Deal would be converting the country to renewable energy and rebuilding infrastructure, both of which are necessary if earth is to remain habitable for the human race. Medicare for All would only bring the US up to the level of most other civilized countries.

We have to reset our priorities, reduce the military-industrial complex and make peace and have cooperation with our so-called enemies. We can quibble about Russia's and China's internal affairs or we can cooperate with them as peers to forestall global warming and create a planet worth inhabiting. We can spend our money on war or we can spend it forestalling future pandemics. The solution to many of our myriad problems is clear, and it doesn't require a revolution necessarily. Reform is all that's necessary to implement Medicare for All. Reform is all that's necessary to implement a Green New Deal. But countries that do not do what's necessary and obvious to meet the needs of the people create a situation in which violence may ensue. It's no longer a question of capitalism vs socialism. Most countries of the earth including Russia and China are a combination of both. I started with a Biblical reference so I will end with one: "Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!" God bless the USA.

Off the Top of My Head

Coronavirus Pandemic Spiking Because Some Americans Cannot Give Up Trivial Pleasures

by John Lawrence, June 22, 2020

Now we see the results of "opening up" during a pandemic. Americans had been led to believe that "flattening of the curve" was all that was necessary before we could resume business as usual. Such was not the case as we are seeing now. A state like New York State, which has had good leadership, is close to being able to resume a modicum of normalcy while still taking reasonable precautions while other states never took proper precautions in the first place. President Trump has downplayed the pandemic while over 120,000 Americans have died. Since he and others said we could open up in June, by George, we're going to open up in June, come Hell or high water.

The Washington Post reported:

Last week, Texas, Florida, Arizona and at least seven other states reported their highest weekly infection-rate averages. But there is little sign that states are reconsidering politically popular decisions to open the economy. In parts of California, where more than 5,000 have died of the virus, people will be allowed to see movies in theaters this weekend for the first time since the stay-at-home orders began in early March.

People are getting antsy, yes, but the fact of the matter is that there is more COBID-19 out there now than there was two months ago. And it is deadly not just for people over 65 with underlying conditions. It is a fact that you don't want to find out the hard way, but some people are hell bent on doing just that. Their "freedom" means so much to them that they are willing to take a chance. They are even willing to inflict their carelessness on unwilling participants which after all is the American way. It looks like the slogan "We're all in this together" is getting a little frayed around the edges.

Business Insider reported:

US stocks slid Monday as investors focused on spiking global coronavirus cases, which offset continued economic-reopening progress.

New cases of coronavirus continue to increase in the US as the country reopens from lockdowns that began in mid-March to contain the disease. The US reported more than 30,000 new COVID-19 cases on Friday (June 19) and Saturday (June 20), the highest levels since May 1, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Clearly, the environment out there is more dangerous now than it has been since the start of the pandemic.

Off the Top of My Head

Defund the Police ... Defund the Military

by John Lawrence, June 11, 2020

Police have been given jobs social workers should be doing. They've criminalized everything from homelessness to mental illness to drug addiction. That's what defunding the police is all about. They should hire more social workers and less police. The police are asked to do a lot more than what police work should be all about. So has the military. Every problem overseas, many of which could be solved by teachers, social workers and doctors has been looked at as a problem for the military to solve. Many of these problems derive from the fact that people are in dire poverty. They need help building schools, houses, sanitation systems. Instead we send the military in to bomb them just as we send the police in at home to take them to jail by any means necessary.

We glorify police work with all kinds of TV shows just as we glorify the military. No one ever glorifies the Peace Corps though, and, if they were sent in more often, there would be more positive results. Instead of helping people, the first thought of American leaders is to send in the police or the military. The Washington Post reported:

To fix policing, we must first recognize how much we have come to over-rely on law enforcement. We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue.

Police themselves often complain about having to “do too much,” including handling social problems for which they are ill-equipped. Some have been vocal about the need to decriminalize social problems and take police out of the equation. It is clear that we must reimagine the role they play in public safety.

Everything that could be said about the police could be said about the military. Instead of helping people overseas to escape from the poverty they experience, we police them instead. What a novel idea to spend less on the military and more on the Peace Corps. Let's reimagine the role they play in public safety. Policing has been the primary vehicle for using violence to perpetuate the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people that has been with us since slavery. The military has been the primary vehicle to perpetuate American control over black and brown bodies in other parts of the world.

The Peace Corps budget is $410.5 million. The military budget is $934 billion. The military budget covers the DoD, overseas contingency operations, the VA, Homeland Security, the State Department, and many others that involve national security. By contrast in 2003, the military budget was less than half that - $437.4 billion. The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. If the Soviet Union collapsed because of overspending on the Cold War, the US is in danger of collapse from overspending on its military when it is not even engaged in a major war. Overspending on the military is just a jobs program that Congress will not curtail. Trump for all his bluster about wanting our NATO allies to spend more on defense, nevertheless, authorized a $34 billion increase in military spending for 2020. Meanwhile, China, the world's second largest spender on its military is spending $178.2 billion in 2020 while Russia spends a mere $70 billion.

The U.S. spends some $100 billion annually on policing — most of it coming from local budgets — and an additional $80 billion on incarceration, according to a detailed 2017 report by the Center for Popular Democracy. In cities across the country, policing alone can take up anything between a third and 60 percent of the entire annual budget. Many major cities spend as much as 40 percent of their municipal budgets on policing, leaving a dwindling pool of resources for poverty prevention, infrastructure and everything else. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated this dynamic: Cities facing steep revenue declines are trying to decide which services to cut to remain solvent, and mayors are often hesitant to cut law and order spending. Welfare spending has been on a long, uneven decline, while law and order spending ballooned almost unabated until about 2010, when it amounted to nearly 2.5 percent of national income. Since then, law and order spending has fallen to a hair under 2 percent, while welfare spending stands at about 0.8 percent of national income less than half what we spend on police.

The US domestic Peace Corps called AmeriCorps has a budget of $560 million. So the US spends a paltry $1 billion on its foreign and domestic Peace Corps while spending $180 billion on police and almost a trillion on its military. Without this spending the economy would surely collapse. Military and police jobs are jobs of last resort for non college educated youth. However, this could be turned around. This money could be spent on other pursuits like housing the homeless (Habitat for Humanity), social workers, teachers, sanitation systems in foreign countries lacking them, building green infrastructure (Green New Deal), eradicating poverty, education (giving "The Talk" as part of public school curriculum), sustainable agriculture, clean water, cleaning the oceans, cleaning the rivers and more.

While the US spends a huge amount of its budgets on police and military work, China is spending its budget building infrastructure all over the world with its Belt and Road initiative (BRI). Whatever you want to say about it, it represents peaceful development of countries outside of China while the US does nothing of the sort, preferring instead to police the world with its 800 military bases in more than 70 countries. So while the US presence outside the US is mainly military in nature, China's presence outside China is basically peaceful development. This development will also lead to economic advantages for China through increased trade.

China’s overall ambition for the BRI is staggering. To date, more than sixty countries—accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population—have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so. Analysts estimate the largest so far to be the $68 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a collection of projects connecting China to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. In total, China has already spent an estimated $200 billion on such efforts. Morgan Stanley has predicted China’s overall expenses over the life of the BRI could reach $1.2–1.3 trillion by 2027, though estimates on total investments vary.

The US has sought to demonize China's BRI and to create a second Cold War to justify its military expenditures. Throw Russia into the mix as well. The US wants to line up its group of allies in a potential contest versus China and its allies. However, many US purported allies are jumping ship as they read the tea leaves and realize that the US sees its role in the world and at home as mainly police work. Poverty alleviation is something the US doesn't do. This needs to change if we are ever to combat our common enemy, the coronavirus and climate change, and forget about creating a Second Cold War which will only drain US resources while China goes ahead building infrastructure and increasing trade.

 

Dying to Work

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Most of Europe and all fifty states of the US are in various stages of “reopening.” But why, exactly?

The pandemic is still with us. After the first tentative steps to ease the lockdown in Germany – the most successful large European country to halt the spread of the virus thanks to massive testing – the disease has shown signs of spreading faster.

At least Germany is opening slowly and waiting until almost no new cases are occurring there, as is the rest of the EU.  

By contrast, the United States – with the highest death rate and most haphazard response to Covid-19 of any advanced nation – is opening chaotically, each state on its own. Some states are lifting restrictions overnight, although relatively few tests for the virus have been conducted. 

Researchers expect the reopenings to cause thousands of additional deaths.

Two weeks after Texas Governor Greg Abbott began reopening the state’s economy, Texas experienced the single-highest rise in casessince the beginning of the pandemic. Since Nebraska reopened May 4, Covid-19 cases in Colfax County alone have surged 1,390 percent

Experts warn that Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida’s Gold Coast, the entire state of Alabama and several other places in the South that have rapidly reopened their economies are in danger of a second wave of coronavirus infections over the next four weeks.

Last week, Ford Motor reopened its large North American assembly plants. The following day Ford closed and then reopened its Chicago Assembly plant twice in less than 24 hours after two workers tested positive for Covid-19. On Then Ford temporarily shut its Dearborn, Michigan Truck plant after an employee tested positive, then promptly resumed operations.

So why “reopen” so abruptly, when Covid-19 continues to claim lives?

The main reason given is to get the economy moving again. But this begs the question of why an economy exists in the first place, other than to promote the wellbeing of people within it.

Both Ford plants are vital to its profitability, and Ford’s profitability is important to jobs in the Midwest. But surely the wellbeing of Ford workers, their families, the people of Chicago and Dearborn and others in the Midwest are more important.  

A related argument is that workers are clamoring to return to their jobs. “People want to get back to work,” Trump has asserted repeatedly since March. Fox News host Sean Hannity claims people are “dying to get back to work,” seemingly unaware of the irony of his words.

Polls suggest otherwise. Americans whose jobs require them to leave home express trepidation about doing so; 60 percent fear exposing their families to COVID-19.

Many Americans must return to work because they need the money, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Rich economies can support their people for years if necessary. During World War II, America shut down most of its economy for nearly four years.

The obstacle right now is a lack of political will to provide such support, at least until enough testing and tracing provide reasonable evidence the pandemic is contained.

Although nearly half of all U.S. households report that they’ve lost employment income since mid-March, the extra jobless benefits enacted by Congress are only now starting to trickle out. Both Trump and Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refuse to extend them beyond July 31, when they’re scheduled to end.

Meanwhile, states are denying benefits to anyone whose company has called them back.

Finally, Trump and his enablers argue that reopening is a matter of “freedom.” He has called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public-health restrictions, and Fox News personalities have decried what they call denials of “basic freedoms.”

Armed protesters have stormed the Michigan state capitol demanding the “freedom” to work. At the Kentucky statehouse, protesters shouted “We want to work!” and “We’re free citizens!”

But the supposed “freedom” to work is a cruel joke when people are forced to choose between putting food on the table or risking their lives. It’s the same perverse ideology that put workers in harm’s way in the dawn of the industrial age, when robber barons demanded that workers be “free” to work in dangerous factories twelve hours a day.

In truth, there is no good reason to reopen when the pandemic is still raging – not getting the economy moving again, or workers clamoring to return to work, or the cost of extended income support, or because workers should be “free” to endanger themselves.

Let’s be clear. The pressure to reopen the economy is coming from businesses that want to return to profitability, and from Trump, who wants to run for reelection in an economy that appears to be recovering.

Neither is reason enough.  

When Profits and Politics Drive Science: The Hazards of Rushing a Vaccine at “Warp Speed”

by Ellen Brown, from Global Research, June 4, 2020

More than 100 companies are competing to be first in the race to get a COVID-19 vaccine to market. It’s a race against time, not because the death rate is climbing but because it is falling – to the point where there could soon be too few subjects to prove the effectiveness of the drug.

So says Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company that is a frontrunner in the race. Soriot said on May 24^th,

“The vaccine has to work and that’s one question, and the other question is, even if it works, we have to be able to demonstrate it. We have to run as fast as possible before the disease disappears so we can demonstrate that the vaccine is effective.”

If the disease is disappearing of its own accord, why throw billions of dollars at developing a vaccine? The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already agreed to provide up to $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca and another $483 million to US frontrunner Moderna to develop their experimental candidates. “As American taxpayers, we are justified in asking why,” writes William Haseltine in Forbes.

Both companies have attracted billions from private investors and don’t need taxpayer money, and the government’s speculative bets are being made on unproven technologies in the early stages of testing. The profits will go to the companies and their shareholders, while the liabilities will be borne by the public. Vaccine manufacturers are protected from liability for vaccine injuries by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the 2005 PREP Act, which impose damages instead on the US government and US taxpayers.

Long-term systemic effects including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune disease, and infertility can take decades to develop. But the stage is already being set for mandatory vaccinations that will be “deployed” by the US military as soon as the end of the year. The HHS in conjunction with the Department of Defense has awarded a $138 million contract for 600 million syringes prefilled with coronavirus vaccine, individually marked with trackable RFID chips. That’s enough for two doses for nearly the entire US population.

COVID-19, like other coronaviruses, is expected to mutate at least every season, raising serious questions about claims that any vaccine will work. A successful vaccine has never been developed for any of the many strains of coronaviruses despite 30 years of effort, due to the nature of the virus itself. In fact vaccinated people can have a higher chance of serious illness and death when later exposed to another strain of the virus, a phenomenon known as “virus interference.” An earlier SARS vaccine touted as effective because it produced antibodies to the virus never made it to market because the laboratory animals contracted more serious symptoms on re-infection, and most of them died. In reports from China and South Korea, even people who have previously recovered from COVID-19 have become re-infected with the virus. If antibodies created naturally in response to the wild virus don’t protect against future infections, the weaker vaccine-triggered antibodies won’t work either.

Researchers working with the AstraZeneca vaccine claimed success in preliminary studies because its lab monkeys all survived and formed antibodies to COVID-19, but data reported later showed that the animals all became infected when challenged, raising serious doubts about the vaccine’s effectiveness. But these concerns have not deterred the HHS, which is proceeding at “Warp Speed” to get the new technologies on the market.

Fast-tracking Moderna’s mRNA Vaccine

Biotech company Moderna, the US frontrunner, has been allowed to skip animal trials altogether before rushing to human trials. It has gotten fast-track approval from the FDA for its “messenger RNA” vaccine, an innovation that has never been approved for marketing or proven in a large-scale clinical trial. The major advantage of mRNA vaccines is the speed with which they can be deployed. Created in a lab rather than from a real virus, they can be mass-produced cost-effectively on a large scale and do not require uninterrupted cold storage. But this speed comes at the risk of major side effects.

In a 2017 TED talk called “Rewriting the Genetic Code,” Moderna’s current chief medical officer Dr. Tal Zaks said, “We’re actually hacking the software of life ….” As explained by a medical doctor writing in The UK Independent on May 20^th:

Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine … uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells’ protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus. …

In many ways, the vaccine almost behaves like an RNA virus itself except that it hijacks your cells to produce the parts of the virus, like the spike protein, rather than the whole virus. Some messenger RNA vaccines are even self-amplifying…. There are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including the possibility that they generate strong type I interferon responses that could lead to inflammation and autoimmune conditions.

As noted in Science Magazine, RNA that invades from outside the cell is the hallmark of a virus, and our immune systems have evolved ways to recognize and destroy it. To avoid that, Moderna’s mRNA vaccine sneaks into cells encapsulated in nanoparticles, which aren’t easily degraded and can cause toxic buildup in the liver. A lab-created self-amplifying virus that evades the cell’s defenses by stealth sounds inherently risky. In fact “stealth viruses” are classified as “bioweapons.”

While long-proven, cheap coronavirus treatments with decades of safety testing are being described as dangerous and unproven for treating COVID-19, no one seems to be looking at the risks of the novel vaccines being rushed to market as the only viable alternative for getting the economy back to work. 

Why the Need for Haste?

The argument originally advanced for fast-tracking a COVID-19 vaccine was that the magnitude of the pandemic required shutting down the whole economy until a vaccine was found. But earlier dire projections have now been heavily revised downward. The 3.4% coronavirus mortality rate put forward by the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the start of the pandemic was downgraded by the CDC in May to between 0.2% and 0.3%, less than one-tenth the original estimates. The computer-modeled projection of 2.2 million US deaths issued by Imperial College London in March, which triggered shutdowns across the United States, has also been found to be “wildly” overblown. In fact researchers writing in the UK Telegraph on May 16^th called it “the most devastating software mistake of all time.” They wrote that “we would fire anyone for developing code like this” and that the question was “why our Government did not get a second opinion before swallowing Imperial’s prescription.”

Here is a chart of the actual death rate from COVID-19 in Sweden, which did not lock down its economy, versus the rate projected by the Imperial College model without lockdown:

Sweden has actually fared better than many industrialized countries that did lock down their economies. As of June 5^th, Belgium, the UK, Spain and Italy, which all locked down, had more deaths per million than Sweden; while France, the Netherlands, Ireland, the US, Switzerland and Canada all had fewer. Sweden was in the median range. Other researchers have found no correlation between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths.

In other news from the CDC, on May 23^rd the agency reported that the antibody tests used to determine whether people have developed an immunity to the virus are too unreliable to be used.

But none of this seems to be dimming the hype and the deluge of investment money being thrown at the latest experimental vaccines. And perhaps that is the point of the exercise – to extract as much money as possible from gullible investors, including the US government, before the public discovers that the fundamentals of these stocks do not support the hype. If we need seven billion doses of the vaccine before life can return to normal, as Bill Gates contends, the profit bonanza is enormous; and there is no need for vaccine manufacturers to proceed with caution, since the government will pick up the tab for vaccine injuries.

Moderna: A Multibillion-Dollar “Unicorn” That Has Never Brought a Product to Market

Moderna in particular has been suspected of pumping its stock price with unreliable preliminary test data. On May 18^th its stock jumped by as much as 30%, after it issued a press release announcing positive results from a small preliminary trial of its coronavirus vaccine. After the market closed, the company announced a stock offering aimed at raising $1 billion; and on May 18^th and 19^th, Moderna executives dumped nearly $30 million worth of stock for a profit of $25 million.

On May 19^th, however, the stock rocketed back down, after STAT News questioned the company’s test results. An antibody response was reported for only eight of the 45 patients, not enough for statistical analysis. Was the response significant enough to create immunity? And what about the other 37 patients?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the results a “catastrophe” for the company. He wrote on May 20^th:

Three of the 15 human guinea pigs in the high dose cohort (250 mcg) suffered a “serious adverse event” within 43 days of receiving Moderna’s jab. Moderna … acknowledged that three volunteers developed Grade 3 systemic events, defined by the FDA as “Preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention.”

Moderna allowed only exceptionally healthy volunteers to participate in the study. A vaccine with those reaction rates could cause grave injuries in 1.5 billion humans if administered to “every person on earth”.

A volunteer named Ian Haydon buoyed the markets when he appeared on CNBC to say he felt fine after getting the vaccine. But he later revealed that after the second jab, he got chills and a fever of over 103°, lost consciousness, and “felt more sick than he ever has before.” And those were just the short-term adverse effects. The long-term degenerative effects won’t be known for years.

By May 22^nd, Moderna’s stock was down by 26% from its earlier high, making its 30% rise on a misleading press release look like a “pump and dump” scheme. On CNBC on May 19^th, Jacob Frankel, a former Securities Exchange Commission lawyer, said Moderna’s stock offering on the heels of hyped news was the type of action that would draw scrutiny by the SEC, and that it could have a criminal component.

Dual Use? Another Look at Moderna’s mRNA Vaccine

Moderna’s stock has more than tripled this year, taking it to a market cap of over $22 billion. STAT News called it “an astonishing feat for a company that currently sells zero products.” Many of the companies actively developing COVID-19 vaccines have longer and more impressive track records. Why the keen interest in this “unicorn” startup that went public only in 2018 and has no record of market success?

Moderna’s stock first shot up after the World Health Organization announced on February 24^th that the world needed to prepare for a global pandemic, collapsing stock markets everywhere. In a well-timed press release the next day, Moderna announced that testing of its vaccine on humans would begin in March, rocketing its stock price up by nearly 30%. Mega-investors made tens of millions of dollars in a single day, including BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which made $68 million just on February 25^th. BlackRock was called “the fourth branch of government” after it was tasked in March with dispensing up to $4.5 trillion in Federal Reserve credit through “special purpose vehicles” established by the Treasury and the Fed.

Moderna has other friends in high places, including the Pentagon. Several years ago, Moderna received millions of dollars from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Perhaps the fact that Moderna’s mRNA vaccine is a “stealth virus” riding in on nanoparticles to evade the cell’s defenses explains DARPA’s interest in the technology. DARPA was behind the creation of both DNA and RNA vaccines, funding their early research and development by Moderna and by Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc.

In a 2010 document titled “Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens,” the US Air Force acknowledged that it was studying “genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society,” including “binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases.” In December 2017, over 1,200 emails released under open records requests revealed that the US military is now the top funder behind the controversial “genetic extinction” technology known as “gene drives.” As investigative reporter Whitney Webb observed in a May 4^th article, “these genetic ‘kill switches’ could also be inserted into actual humans through artificial chromosomes, which – just as they have the potential to extend life – also have the potential to cut it short.”

Biowarfare is forbidden under international treaty, but the army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick says its investigations are to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” and to protect civilians from threats to public health. Even assuming that is true, are the army’s technicians proficient enough to tinker with the genetic code without hitting a kill switch or two by mistake?

The military is thinking about war, the pharmaceutical companies and investors are thinking about profits, the politicians are thinking about getting a vaccine to market so the country can return to work, and even the regulators are bypassing proper safety tests in the rush to get the entire global population vaccinated. That means it’s up to us, the recipients of these novel untested GMO vaccines, to demand some serious vetting before the military shows up at our doors with their prefilled RFID-chipped syringes some time later this year.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Off the Top of My Head

Racist Economics

by John Lawrence, June 8, 2020

Is it racism when the schools in predominantly black neighborhoods are worse than schools in predominantly white neighborhoods? Schools in many parts of the country are funded with local property taxes. It stands to reason that property values in poor neighborhoods are less than property values in rich neighborhoods, and, therefore, property tax revenues and hence school funding is less. So the worse schools are found in poor "predominantly black" neighborhoods. A word you hear often these days is "predominantly". Nothing is totally black and white, but, when black people are affected in a way that is greater than their percentage of the population, one could say it is a "predominantly black" situation. When police arrest black people at a greater rate than they do white people, we could say that the police are a racist institution.

It has been said that the only mistake that the looters at the current protests made was that they didn't form a hedge fund first before they started looting. Martin Luther King said, “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” Republicans have breathed a sigh of relief that so far the Black Lives Matter movement has had little to say about poverty, economic inequality, militarism and materialism. Some though are getting to the heart of the problems in our society that affect us all but affect black people "disproportionately."

Writing in the New Yorker Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor said:

The [1992] uprising in L.A. shared with the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties an igniting spark of police abuse, widespread violence, and the fury of the rebels. But, in the nineteen-sixties, the flush economy and the still-intact notion of the social contract meant that President Lyndon B. Johnson could attempt to drown the civil-rights movement and the Black Power radicalization with enormous social spending and government-program expansion, including the passage of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which produced the first government-backed, low-income homeownership opportunities directed at African-Americans.

By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, the economy was in recession and the social contract had been ripped to shreds. The rebellions of the nineteen-sixties and the enormous social spending intended to bring them under control were wielded by the right to generate a backlash against the expanded welfare state. Political conservatives argued that the market, not government intervention, could create efficiencies and innovation in the delivery of public services. This rhetoric was coupled with virulent racist characterizations of African-Americans, who relied disproportionately on welfare programs. Ronald Reagan mastered the art of color-blind racism in the post-civil-rights era with his invocations of “welfare queens.” Not only did these distortions pave the way for undermining the welfare state, they reinforced racist delusions about the state of black America that legitimized deprivation and marginalization.

The 1990s saw Democrats agreeing with Republicans that problems in the black community were largely caused by overly generous social programs. President Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it." Senator Joe Biden jumped right on board the push to reduce welfare programs by saying, "“the culture of welfare must be replaced with the culture of work. The culture of dependence must be replaced with the culture of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. And the culture of permanence must no longer be a way of life.” Biden championed the 1994 “crime bill” that pledged to put a hundred thousand more police on the street, called for mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes, increased funding for policing and prisons, and expanded the use of the death penalty. By the 1980s Ronald Reagan decried "welfare queens."

Taylor continues:

So, though Biden desperately wants us to believe that he is a harbinger of change, his long record of public service says otherwise. He has claimed that Barack Obama’s selection of him as his running mate was a kind of absolution for Biden’s dealings in the Democrats’ race-baiting politics of the nineteen-nineties. But, from the excesses of the criminal-justice system and the absence of a welfare state to the inequality rooted in an unbridled, rapacious market economy, Biden has shaped much of the world that this generation has inherited and is revolting against.

More important, the ideas honed in the nineteen-eighties and nineties continue to beat at the center of Biden’s political agenda. His campaign advisers include Larry Summers, who, as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, was an enthusiastic supporter of deregulation, and, as Obama’s chief economic adviser during the recession, endorsed the Wall Street bailout while allowing millions of Americans to default on their mortgages.

Biden was chiefly responsible for the 2005 bill that took away bankruptcy protection from student load debtors (presumably disproportionately black). Credit card companies, many of whom are headquartered in Biden's state of Delaware, have been major Biden campaign contributors. Biden was known as the Senator from MBNA. Biden should just turn over the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders who has been on the right side of issues which are now coming to the forefront in American life.

Taylor continues:

In 1968, King, in the weeks before he was assassinated, said, “In a sense, I guess you could say, we are engaged in the class struggle.” He was speaking to the costs of the programs that would be necessary to lift black people out of poverty and inequality, which were, in and of themselves, emblems of racist subjugation. Ending segregation in the South, then, was cheap compared with the huge costs necessary to end the kinds of discrimination that kept blacks locked out of the advantages of U.S. society, from well-paying jobs to well-resourced schools, good housing, and a comfortable retirement. The price of the ticket is quite steep, but, if we are to have a real conversation about how we change America, it must begin with an honest assessment of the scope of the deprivation involved. Racist and corrupt policing is the tip of the iceberg.

We have to make space for new politics, new ideas, new formations, and new people. The election of Biden may stop the misery of another Trump term, but it won’t stop the underlying issues that have brought about more than a hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths or continuous protests against police abuse and violence. Will the federal government intervene to stop the looming crisis of evictions that will disproportionately impact black women? Will it use its power and authority to punish police, and to empty prisons and jails, which not only bring about social death but are now also sites of rampant COVID-19 infection? Will it end the war on food stamps and allow African-Americans and other residents of this country to eat in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Will it finance the health-care needs of tens of millions of African-Americans who have become susceptible to the worst effects of the coronavirus, and are dying as a result? Will it provide the resources to depleted public schools, allowing black children the opportunity to learn in peace? Will it redistribute the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to rebuild devastated working-class communities? Will there be free day care and transportation?

In short we need good paying union jobs (Green New Deal) that will deal with the issue of climate change (Green New Deal), forgiveness of student loan debt (the least Biden can do since he was largely responsible for creating the situation), Medicare for All (since hospitals in black neighborhoods compare unfavorably with those in white neighborhoods), public housing (to end homelessness and guarantee everyone the right to have a roof over their head). If we want to solve the problem of institutional racism in this country, we need to address the fundamental problems of economic inequality. Where do we get the money? Not only by defunding the police which claim the lion's share of local budgets, but by demilitarizing the bloated military-industrial complex and taxing the rich at 1955 levels (91%). The Federal Reserve can always take a few more trillion on its balance sheet; it has taken trillions on its balance sheet already and given the money to the big banks. How about Quantitative Easing for the people? Economic inequality is a problem which affects black people disproportionately (there's that word again), but the solution of which will contribute to the benefit of white people as well.

Off the Top of My Head

The Fed Will Have Given About a Trillion Dollars a Year to Rich People Since 2008 by the End of 2020

by John Lawrence

The Federal Reserve prints money and gives it to rich people. According to CNBC, it will have printed about $10 trillion by the end of 2020. This policy is called quantitative easing. It represents a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for rich people, but so far, despite Andrew Yang's proposal and the Second Great Depression we find ourselves in due to the coronavirus, there is no UBI in the works for the rest of us. In addition the Fed has lowered interest rates to zero for rich people, but credit card rates for poor people still top 30%. So the rich can borrow unlimited amounts of money to buy up all the foreclosures and failing businesses caused by the Second Great Depression.

The economy is not going to bounce back to where it was which was an economy in which consumerism was 70% of GDP. There just is no way when large scale venues and bars operating at 25% capacity will be the norm for the foreseeable future. There is also the possibility of multiple waves or spikes in the number of cases as states and cities try to open too much too soon. Plus people are just not going to feel comfortable going on cruises and going to professional sports venues until there is a vaccine which is not a foregone conclusion that one can even be developed. The economy as it existed pre pandemic was one in which we were entertaining ourselvesr to death. It was an economy built on entertainment, an economy predicated on selling each other lattes. Even though we can still be entertained at home via TV and via the internet, there is still a substantial enough loss of revenues and jobs that the economy will stumble along at half or three quarters speed unless a fundamental change is made in how the economy functions.

Government investment in the economy similar to FDR's New Deal is not only necessary to get the economy working again, it is essential to change an economy of entertainment and titillation to an economy where real and essential work will once again be the norm. We have a multi trillion dollar deficit in infrastructure in the US. This can be addressed by forgetting the defunct economy consisting of selling each other lattes and putting people to work doing real and essential jobs. This will also contribute to a revitalization of the American spirit. America was built by people doing real work whether that was in agriculture or manufacturing and not by people entertaining us to death.

The book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by Neil Postman made the argument very cogently. According to Wikipedia,

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.

Postman was on to something. Entertainment and not religion is the opium of the masses. When people like the Kardashians can make their living by just advocating consumerism and indolence, America has lost its work ethic. A UBI which just allows the consumer economy to reinvent itself would to a certain extent be a missed opportunity for government to create meaningful jobs that the private sector can't create to build a better, more meaningful society, a society built on helping people here and around the world. FDR was on to something. His New Deal can be emulated in a Green New Deal which at one and the same time can address the global warming crisis, build  a stronger and more resilient infrastructure and create meaningful jobs for every American.

Dying to Work

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Most of Europe and all fifty states of the US are in various stages of “reopening.” But why, exactly?

The pandemic is still with us. After the first tentative steps to ease the lockdown in Germany – the most successful large European country to halt the spread of the virus thanks to massive testing – the disease has shown signs of spreading faster.

At least Germany is opening slowly and waiting until almost no new cases are occurring there, as is the rest of the EU.  

By contrast, the United States – with the highest death rate and most haphazard response to Covid-19 of any advanced nation – is opening chaotically, each state on its own. Some states are lifting restrictions overnight, although relatively few tests for the virus have been conducted. 

Researchers expect the reopenings to cause thousands of additional deaths.

Two weeks after Texas Governor Greg Abbott began reopening the state’s economy, Texas experienced the single-highest rise in casessince the beginning of the pandemic. Since Nebraska reopened May 4, Covid-19 cases in Colfax County alone have surged 1,390 percent

Experts warn that Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida’s Gold Coast, the entire state of Alabama and several other places in the South that have rapidly reopened their economies are in danger of a second wave of coronavirus infections over the next four weeks.

Last week, Ford Motor reopened its large North American assembly plants. The following day Ford closed and then reopened its Chicago Assembly plant twice in less than 24 hours after two workers tested positive for Covid-19. On Then Ford temporarily shut its Dearborn, Michigan Truck plant after an employee tested positive, then promptly resumed operations.

So why “reopen” so abruptly, when Covid-19 continues to claim lives?

The main reason given is to get the economy moving again. But this begs the question of why an economy exists in the first place, other than to promote the wellbeing of people within it.

Both Ford plants are vital to its profitability, and Ford’s profitability is important to jobs in the Midwest. But surely the wellbeing of Ford workers, their families, the people of Chicago and Dearborn and others in the Midwest are more important.  

A related argument is that workers are clamoring to return to their jobs. “People want to get back to work,” Trump has asserted repeatedly since March. Fox News host Sean Hannity claims people are “dying to get back to work,” seemingly unaware of the irony of his words.

Polls suggest otherwise. Americans whose jobs require them to leave home express trepidation about doing so; 60 percent fear exposing their families to COVID-19.

Many Americans must return to work because they need the money, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Rich economies can support their people for years if necessary. During World War II, America shut down most of its economy for nearly four years.

The obstacle right now is a lack of political will to provide such support, at least until enough testing and tracing provide reasonable evidence the pandemic is contained.

Although nearly half of all U.S. households report that they’ve lost employment income since mid-March, the extra jobless benefits enacted by Congress are only now starting to trickle out. Both Trump and Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refuse to extend them beyond July 31, when they’re scheduled to end.

Meanwhile, states are denying benefits to anyone whose company has called them back.

Finally, Trump and his enablers argue that reopening is a matter of “freedom.” He has called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public-health restrictions, and Fox News personalities have decried what they call denials of “basic freedoms.”

Armed protesters have stormed the Michigan state capitol demanding the “freedom” to work. At the Kentucky statehouse, protesters shouted “We want to work!” and “We’re free citizens!”

But the supposed “freedom” to work is a cruel joke when people are forced to choose between putting food on the table or risking their lives. It’s the same perverse ideology that put workers in harm’s way in the dawn of the industrial age, when robber barons demanded that workers be “free” to work in dangerous factories twelve hours a day.

In truth, there is no good reason to reopen when the pandemic is still raging – not getting the economy moving again, or workers clamoring to return to work, or the cost of extended income support, or because workers should be “free” to endanger themselves.

Let’s be clear. The pressure to reopen the economy is coming from businesses that want to return to profitability, and from Trump, who wants to run for reelection in an economy that appears to be recovering.

Neither is reason enough.  

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

From the Irish Times

April 25, 2020

By Fintan O’Toole

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestationof a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

Off the Top of My Head

Trump's Gotterdammerung?

by John Lawrence, May 29, 2020

Gotterdammerung is the name of Wagner's opera based on a Norse folk tale. It is about the whole world caving in around you, and this is exactly what happened to Hitler in 1945 as the Russians entered Berlin. Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer and an avowed antisemite as was Hitler. Hitler blamed the Jews for everything, and promoted conspiracy theories about them much as Donald Trump has made conspiracy theories part and parcel of his rise to the world's most powerful position including the one that Obama wasn't born in the US. Trump is pulling the world down around us by disavowing the fact that he has totally botched the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The result is that the world is coming down around the ears of US citizens in the same way that Hitler brought the world down around the ears of German citizens resulting in a complete shambles.

The Republican party now represents a cult devoted to Trump much as the Nazi party was a cult devoted to Hitler. The similarities are striking. A cult by definition is a group of people devoted to a leader and a leader's spoken word as truth regardless of the facts, regardless even if it is not even in their own personal welfare. Trump has said that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and his followers would still be behind him. It is probably true. Hitler's followers believed his every word and trusted him implicitly. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by then President Hindenburg so you could almost say he came to power by democratic means as did Trump although with a minority of the popular vote.

Hitler's conspiracy theories about the Jews included the one that the Jews were responsible for Germany losing the First World War. Other conspiracy theories were that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, that Jews were responsible for epidemics like the Black Death of the Middle Ages, that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood, that Jews poisoned Christians' wells and on and on. Trump has disseminated the disinformation that Democrats have used the pandemic as a way of defeating him politically, that mask wearing is not necessary, that China should be blamed for the pandemic, that drinking Chlorox might kill the virus.

The Irish writer, Fintan O'Toole wrote in the Irish Times:

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks.

People thought the German people would stop Hitler too. They didn't although some tried.

Even Twitter has gotten into the business of fact checking Trump. Twitter had added fact checks to two of Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots, inviting readers to “get the facts” and linking to a page calling the president’s claims “unsubstantiated.” Trump even tweeted about an unsubstantiated allegation that Joe Scarborough had been responsible for the death of one of his staffers. The claims have been undermined by the official autopsy, which found Klausutis had an undiagnosed heart condition. Klausutis's husband, Timothy Klausutis, reiterated that in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week, saying that Trump's claims denigrated the memory of his wife for perceived political gain.

Evidently , this was too much for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsi. So now he is flagging Trump's disinformational tweets to be fact checked. This outraged Trump who signed an ineffectual executive order to the effect that Twitter would lose its liability protection although he doesn't have the authority to do so, but Dorsi is not being intimidated by Trunmp's threats. He fact checked him again for violence in his tweeted response to the Minneapolis protests about George Floyd's death which was "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Hitler was unwilling to surrender to save German lives. Instead he pulled the world's wrath down around his head and also the German people's collective heads in a scene reminiscent of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. Trump is doing the same thing by tweeting disinformation and false allegations, stirring up his base with hateful jabs at anyone he disapproves of, firing every official and whistleblower who is not loyal to him, endangering the lives of the American people by not giving credence to facts and scientific data and generally acting like a dictator who is above the law.

The O'Toole article continued:

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

National Geographic had an article about the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. They interviewed some of the people who lived through it who are still alive. One of the ladies, Waltraud Pless, was a German child during the war. Her words are meaningful: "Look at the world now: People haven't learned. It's horrifying that neo-Nazis are back, and not just in Germany, in the US, in Scandinavia. People are still so easily manipulated." Just as Hitler made a cult of the German people, Donald Trump has his own cult following. Thank God that Jack Dorsi is challenging him right in the means he uses to egg on his followers: Twitter. In the final analysis, O'Toole said, "Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again"

Off the Top of My Head

Why the US Needs Allies and Enemies

by John Lawrence, May 28, 2020

The US needs allies because they need markets for Lockheed Martin's, Boeing's and Raytheon's military equipment. The US needs enemies because they constitute the rationale for selling US produced weapons to our allies. It's as simple as that.Lockheed Martin was in eastern Europe drumming up the market for its F-35 aircraft long before those countries became members of NATO. Then Lockheed Martin lobbyists lobbied Congress to accept these countries as NATO members so they could consummate those sales. Saudi Arabia is our designated ally in the middle east with enough money to buy US military equipment. Trump has bragged about selling it to them.

The Washington Post reported:

The Trump administration announced last week that it will declare an emergency to allow U.S. companies to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That emergency circumvents Congress and the usual bureaucratic process for approving U.S. arms sales. By selling about $8 billion worth of precision-guided munitions and combat aircraft, President Trump advances his view of Saudi Arabia as a “great ally” of the United States.

Trump wants a strong economy. Selling billions of dollars worth of weaponry to our "allies" increases GDP. Trump doesn't even try to hide the correlation between selling weapons of war which are meant to kill people and destroy property and the fact that this is "good for the economy." So is a bloated military-industrial complex good for the economy. Look at all the jobs it creates! Lockheed Marin employs 110,000. Boeing employs 161,000. Northrup Grumman employs 70,000. Raytheon employs 67,000. General Dynamics employs 102,900. And there are many more contractors and subcontractors. They have divisions and subcontractors in every Congressional district guaranteeing that, even if Congress voted on the sale of arms, they would vote for every weapons program being developed just to create jobs in their district.

Just as the US needs allies to buy its weapons and create jobs, it needs enemies to justify the sale of all these arms. For many years Russia fulfilled that role. Now they are rapidly trying to create another Cold War with China since all the futile and useless wars in the Middle East are petering out. But there is a problem with starting a Cold War with China. For one thing China manufactures most of the consumer products America buys. This is because American corporations can produce their products more cheaply with Chinese labor. So starting a war, hot or cold, with China is like cutting off your hand to spite your foot. The other thing is that China has an economy which is as strong or stronger than the US economy. While the US economy is fading, China's is getting stronger, and the coronavirus pandemic is only accelerating that trend as China has had an effective response to it while the US has not. The Soviet Union never had as strong an economy as the US, and in the end it couldn't keep up with the production of weaponry and also have a viable consumer economy. China's middle class is larger than the US middle class.

The US needs to cooperate with China to solve the global warming problem instead of alienating them and creating an adversarial relationship. The world can't afford any more Cold Wars. China has built infrastructure all over the world creating friends and allies while the US can't even build or repair infrastructure in its own country. The US has flaunted its capitalist enterprise culture but corporate America was completely at a loss for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Now is the time to rely less on free enterprise and more on a jobs program to rebuild America, and that can only be done by government, perhaps in cooperation with private enterprise, but government now has to take the leading role. We need a Green New Deal now more than ever.

Off the Top of My Head

Heroes Work Here ... At Minimum Wage

by John Lawrence, May 26, 2020

I've seen these signs all over nursing homes. Yes, heroes work there, but only Governor Cuomo is advocating for hazard pay for them and for all the heroes that went to work in full knowledge that their lives were at risk. Transit workers, nurses, police, fire, EMTs - they all put their lives at risk. Some of them died and Cuomo is going to give their families a death benefit which is only right. Do I hear Trump or anyone at the national level paying more than lip service to these heroes? No, they expect people to do their jobs as essential workers with no increase in pay or benefits while the more fortunate and better paid stay home.

The problem with the American economy and why it won't bounce back to full employment is that it is based 70% on consumption. GDP is made up of 4 components: Consumer spending (C), all investment (I), all government spending minus taxes (G), and the value of exports minus imports. In 2018, U.S. GDP was 69% personal consumption, 18% business investment, 17% government spending, and negative 5% net exports. Therein lies the problem. The American economy is too heavily dependent on consumer spending. And consumer spending is what the coronavirus pandemic has sent down the tubes. Especially leisure and hospitality spending. A large component of this is bars and restaurants, but also travel and tourism. These businesses, although some semblance of them will open, will not return to their former state for a long time. For those that were barely profitable to begin with, they can not make it at 25% or even 50% capacity.

The new normal will have to depend more on government spending just like it did during the Great Depression since consumer spending will necessarily decline. How much it declines and for how long will be determined by if and when an effective vaccine is found and the majority of the world's population is vaccinated. Even then it will be too late for many businesses especially brick and mortar businesses that were already on the ropes. Notably J C Penney and Hertz have already gone bankrupt.

This is the time to implement the Green New Deal, and this will be a realizable possibility after the November election when a Democrat is in the White House and Democrats control both Houses of Congress. There will be a lot of damage that needs to be repaired after 4 years of Trump and even more years of Mitch McConnell controlling the Senate. Unlike the Great Depression I don't think there will be a world war to bring us out of the depression that's on the horizon. What will bring us out of it is government spending which should increase to make up for the decrease in consumer spending.

Government spending to implement a Green New Deal will put a lot of people to work that formerly worked in leisure and entertainment industries. As Jay Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve has said, there is infinite money available. The Fed has already blackholed trillions of debt from the bailout of the big Wall Street banks. It can bail out the Main Street economy as well. No one is concerned at this point that the US runs a trillion dollar deficit every year. There is no way that the US is not going to run deficits far into the future. The Fed can just take US debts onto its balance sheet as it has been doing if investors don't want to buy them. So far other countries' central banks have bought US debt as the US dollar is the world's reserve currency. This may not continue but no matter. The Fed will just step in. The important thing is that the money should be used wisely, more wisely than it has been used so far in supporting a vast military-industrial complex. Doing more constructive things with government generated GDP and putting people to work outside the military building green infrastructure will get the US economy back to full employment.

'A Misbegotten, Warped Freedom Obsession Is Killing Us': Video of Trumpian Anti-Mask Jerks Goes Viral

Published on Friday, May 22, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Freedom is wasted on people who think coughing on people is freedom."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

93 Comments

A counter-protestor holds a sign during the Michigan Conservative Coalition-organized "Operation Haircut" outside the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan on May 20, 2020. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)

Author Anand Giridharadas on Friday shared on social media what he called an "end-of-empire" video featuring a compilation of Americans refusing to wear face masks in public places, purposefully coughing on others, and claiming their "freedom" is being trampled by public health guidance urging social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

"A misbegotten, warped freedom obsession is killing us," Giridharadas tweeted. 

A misbegotten, warped freedom obsession is killing us. pic.twitter.com/KbYaTVtR0O

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) May 22, 2020

In the video, one woman curses at and tries to hit a store employee after being refused entry for not wearing a face mask; another screams at workers and reaches over a plastic barricade to assault them; a man tells a Costco employee he doesn't have to wear a mask because he "woke up in a free country," and one woman tells a grocery store manager that she can't wear a mask due to a medical condition and that she can't use a delivery service because she wants to buy "private" items.

Several people also cough on and spit at essential employees. 

"Freedom is wasted on people who think coughing on people is freedom," Giridharadas said.

The video follows a number of small but well-publicized demonstrations by people calling on state officials to fully reopen the economy and end all guidance urging social distancing and mask-wearing to prevent the spread of Covid-19. 

Many of the anti-quarantine protests are organized and promoted by conservative groups with ties to Trump administration officials, including the Convention of States, whose past supporters include immigration official Ken Cuccinelli and HUD Secretary Ben Carson; and the Michigan Freedom Fund, which Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has donated to regularly. 

Contrary to the message pushed by the demonstrations and the people in the video, the vast majority of Americans support safety measures to stop the spread of Covid-19. 

A HuffPost/YouGov survey published this week showed 62% of respondents said wearing a face mask is a matter of public health, not personal preference. More than half of those surveyed said they are currently wearing a mask whenever they are in a public place where they might come into contact with others.

Large majorities of respondents from across the political spectrum reported that they view mask-wearing as "respectful," not a sign of "weakness" or unnecessary fear of the virus. 

If President Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians demanding an end to public safety measures have their way, Giridharadas tweeted, images of the vocal minority shown in the video will illustrate the downfall of U.S. society in its current state. 

Now I've delayed your snappy comeback by three hours. Go back to thinking!

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) May 22, 2020

"If we somehow save ourselves and come back, they will be forgotten eventually," he wrote. "But if we continue to decay and fall, these will be studied in history classes in some society saner than ours."

---

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Off the Top of My Head

Are We All In This Together or Do My First Amendment Rights Guarantee That I Don't Have to Be?

by John Lawrence, May24, 2020

Is freedom an absolute right? If it is, the government can't tell you to wear a mask or can it? Can the government create laws or rules or do my First Amendment rights take precedence? Some people say it is asking too much to ask that everyone act in the best interests of society. Are we about promoting the public good or only our own selfish good? John Stuart Mill said, "There is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard whatever to work ill if we suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with it..." It would be pretty hard to have any social cohesion if everyone felt they had a right to do their own thing whatever the circumstances. Some societies have struck a different balance between personal freedom and the individual's obligations to society.

The Chinese city of Wuhan ended its lock down April 7 almost a month ago after 76 days sealed off from the world. On January 23 11 million people were put under lock down to contain the quickly spreading coronavirus. On February 10, Trump said, "“Now, the virus that we're talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We're in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” So even after Wuhan was completely locked down, Trump was downplaying the coronavirus just as it was spreading in the US. Instead of it going away in April, it caused almost 100,000  deaths in April and May. He, like Nero, fiddled while the US burned.

On February 14 Trump reiterated that only 12 people in the US had been infected. Meanwhile, during the month of February Trump was doing multiple fundraising events and campaign rallies. February 26 was the first day regular briefings on the virus started. Trump used these opportunities mostly to congratulate himself on what a great job he was doing to contain the spread of the virus. Trump said, “But we have it so well under control. I mean, we really have done a very good job. When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue,” he said. “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens.” Spoken like a true idiot.

At the present time we have approximately 100,000 deaths in the US from COBID-19. China and South Korea both of which took very aggressive action early on have opened up although they continue to take precautions and contact trace aggressively should another case show up. The US with half its states still trending upwards on new cases is making an attempt to open up regardless of the consequences. Montgomery, Al has no ICU beds available in the midst of this reopening. It will probably end up being a mess. In any case the economy is not going to spike up to where it was before the coronavirus hit. Trump will probably go down as the most incompetent President in history more interested in praising himself than in doing what was necessary to protect the American people.

Furthermore, Trump has exacerbated the situation by encouraging his idiot supporters to flaunt their First Amendment rights. They want business as usual because it's their right. They want to be free to spread the virus because they could give a shit whether they transmit it to anyone else. Their freedom is more important than not infecting some other person. Other societies and cultures have more of a caring attitude towards their neighbors. Rights are balanced more reasonably with obligations. Those societies' economies will probably recover a lot more quickly. Those societies did the right thing in the first place.

Off the Top of My Head

There's Contact Tracing and Then There's Contact Tracing

by John Lawrence, May 21, 2020

I think Governor Cuomo is great, but what he described as contact tracing for New York State is so twentieth century compared to what China is doing. If someone tests positive, NY State will send a contact tracer to interview that person and ask that individual whom they have been in contact with recently. A noble effort, but not anywhere near the scope and power of the Chinese method which relies completely on the latest technology. Their method puts an app on every cell phone which automatically records in a data base the contact information for every individual this person has been near, say within 6 feet of. I don't know exactly how it works, but I also assume it would record in the data base how much time this person has been near each of the contacts. The contacts might be persons they knew or just persons they passed on the street. If one of the people in the data base tests positive, the person's cell phone color coded app changes from green to yellow, and that person is not allowed to be admitted to any public space until they are tested and/or quarantined.

It seems to me that this method is more thorough and can contact trace in a matter of microseconds compared to Governor Cuomo's NY State method which would take days, and in the meantime the contacts of the person who tested positive would be spreading the coronavirus to other people. That represents antiquated technology. Some people might say that the Chinese technology is too intrusive. Americans would be giving up their privacy rights. So who might not want the government to know with whom they were in contact? Mainly criminals. Law abiding citizens should have no problem with the government knowing with whom they were in contact. People up to no good, however, certainly would have a problem with the government knowing with whom they were in contact. Husbands cheating on their wives, wives cheating on their husbands, fugitives, tax cheats, escaped convicts, murderers, terrorists, white power hate groups, illegal telemarketers, scammers, identity thieves, people in trouble with the law - all these would not want the government knowing with whom they were in contact.

Google and Apple came up with a similar system to the Chinese, but it's totally voluntary or in other words completely useless. People have to voluntarily turn the app on on their cell phone. The government, any government whether it be Chinese or American, does not have any interest in wasting its resources on law abiding citizens. People in the act of committing crimes have been caught on security cameras and videos. Body cameras worn by police have tended to make an officer think twice before violating someone's rights. Does this seem too intrusive? Maybe rights need to be somewhat redefined. Perhaps there should be laws about what the government can and cannot do with data collected if it had a mandatory data collection program using a cell phone app. If the purpose is to trace contacts, then all other purposes, with the exception of detection of criminal activity, should be circumscribed by law. America has a hard time capturing criminals even when the data is staring law enforcement in the face. If a contact tracing app also results in criminals being caught, I say so much the better. In the meantime a superior system to eliminate COBID-19 would result in American society getting back to some semblance of normal sooner rather, than later.

So Long to American Exceptionalism

Published on Monday, May 18, 2020

by TomDispatch

Over there is now over here: America’s pandemic role reversal.

by Karen Greenberg

 

29 Comments

The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Remember the song “Over There”?

“Over there, over there
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere...”

Maybe not, since it was popular so long ago, but it was meant to inspire American troops saying goodbye to their country on their way to a Europe embroiled in World War I. Written by George M. Cohan, the song paid homage to an American wartime urge to do good in the world, to take what was precious about this country and spread it to less fortunate, endangered peoples elsewhere. As Jon Meacham and country music star Tim McGraw reminded us, that song’s message couldn’t have been simpler: The good guys are coming.

A century later, that sentiment in Cohan’s lyrics had merged with a related but ultimately contrary message: the supposed determination of America’s leaders to keep at bay and away the dangers rife in so much of the rest of the world. As President George W. Bush repeatedly assured Americans after the 9/11 attacks, this country would keep the threat of terrorism "over there"—and so away from our shores. “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America,” he typically told American legionnaires back in 2007.

More than a decade later, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham offered a reminder of the lingering persistence of such an “over there” mindset. Defending President Trump’s decision to keep American forces in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, he explained: “I want to fight the war in the enemy’s backyard, not ours.”

Trump’s version of keeping danger “over there” manifested itself most notably in his attempts to keep the immigrant version of the dangerous Other over there. Beginning with his “big, fat, beautiful wall” and his Muslim ban, such efforts, including most recently his April 22nd proclamation of a 60-day suspension on immigration by those seeking green cards, have never ended.

One “immigrant” he could not keep out, however, was the coronavirus, which—owing significantly to his acts (or lack of them) -- has played havoc with the over-there conceit. When it comes to Covid-19, undeterred by a military presence abroad or border walls, keeping the threat to this nation at bay is no longer a possibility. Instead, an array of dangers, deprivations, and fears that have long beset the rest of the world -- and from which the United States considered itself largely immune -- have now entered our supposedly separate, well-guarded, very exceptional American world. Like the giant “murder hornets” from Asia detected for the first time in the United States in April, perils once reserved for places abroad are now squarely in our own backyard.

Like it or not, Over There is now Right Here.

America as a War Zone

The stage for bringing “there” to the homeland was aptly set when President Trump declared the country at war with a disease. Suddenly, America’s forever wars of the twenty-first century were no longer distant affairs. "War" was here and now, and this time we weren’t the invaders, but the ones who had been invaded.

Appropriately enough, in these last months, New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic in this country, has been described by many in terms normally reserved for a war zone: the bodies of the dead laid out in rows as after battlefield encounters; tents like those seen at the outskirts of battle zones serving as makeshift hospitals in parks; sirens screaming day and night as emergency vehicles transport severely ill casualties of the virus to exhausted and overworked medical teams. And in the context of such a war at home, the military -- along with the various National Guard units -- has been on hand to help build temporary hospitals and distribute food and supplies.

Inside this new war zone, the basic circumstances of life have begun to resemble those long considered forever distant. For years now, we’ve been reading about casualty figures from places where Washington has pursued its “over there” war on terror. As Brown University’s Costs of War Project has reported, since 9/11 more than 800,000 people have been killed in U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani borderlands alone.

Now, by far the largest numbers of deaths are no longer over there but right here in the United States, thanks to the invisible virus among us. The world watches us as we lose Americans by the thousands on an almost daily basis. Health systems worldwide, and particularly in Africa, have long been a focus of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other medical groups. For decades, specialists have tried to ameliorate a lack of doctors, an absence of medical equipment, a need for more hospitals and greater access to healthcare on that continent. That was over there. No longer.

Life in the U.S. Becomes Precarious

Alongside images of war, the U.S. healthcare system is now experiencing the kind of shortages and incapacity that had previously been associated with those in impoverished countries. As a 2017 WHO report concluded, “Half the world lacks access to essential health services.”

This past month, as Covid-19 patients overwhelmed New York City hospitals, conditions there began to resemble those in such lands. The most basic things like access to emergency rooms or to urgent care for people with the virus (but also for those with other problems entirely) became less certain. As the numbers of Covid-19 patients soared, those experiencing other life-threatening symptoms began to be treated according to a new, far grimmer calculus. At the same time, individuals in need of emergency care for other reasons came to fear going to ERs and exposing themselves to the pandemic, sometimes dying at home instead.

In these months, for instance, the number of organ transplants fell precipitously. On March 31st, the Regional Emergency Medical Advisory Committee of New York City announced that adults in cardiac arrest were not to be transported to the hospital for additional attempts at revival if their hearts had not restarted after 20 minutes. Many cancer surgeries have been delayed until further notice.

And it’s not just emergency care that’s under siege. Doctors have become unavailable for non-urgent matters. Messages like this one from a medical group tell it all: “If you are young, healthy, and sick but otherwise stable at home, please limit your calls to your doctor’s office so we can manage the high volume of calls incoming from high-risk patients.” While tele-health appointments with your general practitioner have become a way of life, they are no substitute for a yearly physical, let alone in-person attention to medical disorders and diseases. Dentists are, of course, not performing regular services. How many of us will have to forego our yearly mammograms, our regular dental check-ups, our annual physicals during this pandemic?

If lack of access to adequate healthcare is a measure of a country under wartime-like stress, the United States is no longer an exception.

Off the Top of My Head

America's Ingenious Solution to the Creation of a Full Employment Economy

by John Lawrence, May 19, 2020

People have been decrying the loss of jobs to automation and offshoring of manufacturing jobs for years. This is behind a call for a Universal Basic Income (UBI). So why was America a full employment economy before the pandemic hit? The answer lies in the fact that, instead of manufacturing jobs, large numbers of people were employed in the leisure and hospitality industry as bartenders, servers, baronistas, tattoo artists, nail salon workers, barbers and beauticians, uber drivers etc. Ten million of them are now unemployed. These inessential jobs took the place of essential jobs that went offshore or were replaced by robots. Old fashioned union jobs were replaced with nonunion jobs. Nevertheless, they all comprised a full employment economy. In that sense Trump was right. It was a beautiful economy ... until you looked a bit deeper into the nature of the employment.

Most of the people employed in these inessential jobs were living paycheck to paycheck. They are the ones who had less than $400 in the bank to cover an emergency. They are burdened by a ton of student loan debt which they have no hope of paying off in a lifetime and, thanks to Joe Biden and like minded Congressmen, they can't discharge this debt in bankruptcy. But they take up the slack caused by the loss of good paying unionized manufacturing jobs, that's for sure. Some of those jobs will come back when the economy "opens up," but too many people have been deceived by the Gaussian curve, the one that they keep talking about "flattening" and "bending." The authorities were wrong to suggest that, when we were on the downhill side of the curve, it would be safe to open up. It's not. Flattening the curve was all about having enough ICU beds, ventilators and PPE. It was about having the hospitals not get overwhelmed. They shouldn't have implied that, once the curve was flattened, it would be safe to "open the economy."

One or two people entering the US in February or March caused 90,000 deaths in April and May. Now there is a 5% to 10% infection rate still in many parts of the country. That's a lot more than one or two people. The number of COBID cases could spike if people aren't careful opening up. On the other hand if people take reasonable precautions, the economy could partially open up under different conditions without spiking the number of new cases. That remains to be seen. July and August should tell the tale of whether Americans used proper and reasonable precautions or said 'to hell with it, we're going back to business as usual.' That's why I'm staying in for the next two months.

Getting back to all those inessential workers who have become unemployed. A better use of their talents might be found in a rearrangement of the economy which created more manufacturing jobs in a new green economy. There is much work that should be being done, that's not being done. Let's call it infrastructure in general. In particular green infrastructure. That would entail massive Federal programs and massive amounts of government provided money. The deficit for this year alone will be around $4 trillion. Where will all this money come from? It would come from a variety of places. Downsizing the military and military-industrial complex would be a good place to start. America's enemies are first the pandemic, second global warming. They are not the enemies created to satisfy the needs of the military-industrial complex for more money. Secondly, taxing the wealth and income of the super wealthy. Thirdly, the Federal Reserve can print an unlimited amount of money. The only consideration is inflation and a diminution in the value of the dollar. Those things are not imminent threats. Strengthening the US by reinventing a manufacturing economy, putting people to work at good paying jobs doing something constructive, rather than serving each other lattes, will tend to strengthen the overall economy in the long run and get America back on a solid footing where it can again be a moral world leader.

Alternatives to Killing People for the Economy

Published on Saturday, May 16, 2020

by Common Dreams

In order to pay for those programs and help the country get back on its feet, we need to tax the wealthy and invest in our common good.

by Cynthia Kaufman

 

8 Comments

A sign warns residents to take steps to contol the coronavirus outbreak at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn on March 19, 2020 in New York City. (Photo: Victor J. Blue/Getty Images)

As the U.S. begins to reopen after being shut down to protect us from spreading Covid-19, many people are beginning to talk about a choice between what is good for the economy and what will keep us healthy. Much pain and suffering has come as people have lost their livelihoods and their homes, and so we need to move quickly to put into place the things that will ensure that people have what they need to live. But rather than sacrificing people for the economy, we need to rethink what we mean by "the economy." No one needs to be killed for us to have a healthy economy. 

We live in a world where there is enough of everything we need for us all to live well, and to do so within the ecological limits of the planet. And yet, as the Covid-19 crisis has laid bare, the social systems we live in lead to grotesque wealth for some, extreme devastation for many, dangerous underinvestment in the public infrastructure we need to be safe, and political systems controlled by those who profit from destruction of our environment and shared social fabric.   

As we work to keep people safe from Covid-19, while protecting their livelihoods, we can shift our economies to build a world where we all have enough. If we keep ourselves focused on tackling our inequality crisis, even as we build toward environmental sustainability, we can develop an economic system that meets our human needs, without anyone needing to die for it. 

Economic policies to get people living well  

There are many things that governments can do to make sure that people have what they need. As I write this, there is a proposal in the California legislature to allow people ten years to pay the rent they cannot afford to pay now. Several European governments gave money to companies in the Covid-19 crisis on the condition that they use the money to keep people on payrolls. We can give everyone a universal basic income (UBI) and health care. There are many policies that can be enacted right now that will protect people's livelihoods in the short term and which will build a better future for us all. 

In order to pay for those programs and help the country get back on its feet, we need to tax the wealthy and invest in our common good. We need steep increases in wealth taxes, progressive property taxes, and progressive income taxes. We need to take the profit motive out of basic housing and healthcare. We need to invest in public education. We need to make sure that there are processes in place to ensure that everyone has access to the things they need to live a decent life. Some of these are things that the US did with great success at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

In Capitalism and Ideology, Thomas Piketty argues that after WWI and WWII, as people in the U.S. and Europe emerged from devastated economies, and where people had sacrificed a lot for the common good, there was a powerful public support for challenging the forms of  inequality that had existed in the prior period. In Britain, the levels of taxation imposed on the wealthy were so huge that they led to a virtual end to the aristocracy. In the same period, the US developed deeply progressive income, wealth, and inheritance taxes.  

After World War I, many industrial assets were taken over by the U.S. government and run for the public good. In America Beyond Capitalism Gar Alperovitz offers evidence to show that many of those nationalized industries have been more efficient, and effective at providing for social goods, than private businesses. Mike Davis has argued that we need to nationalize some of the basic industries and companies we depend on. He argues for a nationalization of Amazon and of wifi service. 

If those sounds like things we shouldn't do because they are "bad for the economy," it is important to note that, as Piketty documents, the years of decreasing inequality in many countries of the world, roughly 1950-1980, were years of increased economic growth in those same countries. Since that time, our economy in the U.S. has gone from one based on progressive taxation, to one where the wealthy actually pay less in taxes than the rest of us. In a New York Times op-ed David Leonhardt writes, "The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households [in 2018] was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980." Because of that lack of progressive taxation, Jeff Bezos is about to become the world's first trillionaire. Just getting back to where we were in terms of taxation in 1950 would generate much of the income needed to provide for everyone's needs to be met. Very few people know that history, or the success, of those early twentieth century approaches to taxation and nationalization. As long as we have systems of accountability in place, we can make our economies more democratic without that leading to tyranny, corruption, a lack of innovation, or inefficiency.

So why does that all seem so impossible right now? Much of it has to do with a deep shift in how we think about how wealth is generated and what is good for the economy. That shift in beliefs was the result of a few different forces. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the public faces of a concerted political and intellectual assault on the idea that taxes and investment in our shared social fabric were paths to prosperity for all. They helped propagate the belief that those things lead to tyranny. Their work has been followed by decades of deep pocket investment by the Koch brothers, and others, in the intellectual work of very effective right wing think tanks. 

Another factor are the very real failures in the experiments in nationalization led by the countries that ended up with authoritarian communism. We now know that it is not a good idea for governments to have too much power over our economic decisions when those governments are not accountable to their people. The failure of those experiments casts a long shadow over our imaginations, and there are many lessons we need to learn from those failures. And yet, our experience in the US in the mid twentieth century, and the experiences of many countries, has shown that nationalization under conditions of accountability, as well as deeply progressive taxes, actually make an economy work better. 

"The Economy"

The third reason these ideas of progressive taxation, nationalization, and investment in public goods, seem so hard to imagine right now, is related to how we understand what is good for an economy. As we hear horrific statements from people in power about how we need to allow some people to die in order to save "the economy," it is worth pausing and asking what that precious beast "the economy" is, which is more valuable than human lives. 

There is a view of what an economy is, and what is healthy for it, that is shared by the mainstream media, by liberal politicians, by right wing economists in Koch funded think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, as well as by mainstream economists. It is the view that is taught in almost every economics department in the country. That view defines the economy as the set of things bought and sold for money. It assumes that the more things we buy and sell the better off "the economy" is. It assumes that the more markets are allowed to make social decisions the better off we all are. It assumes that more growth, measured in GDP, is good for "the economy." And many people who accept these assumptions also argue that inequality doesn't really matter because doing things that lead to growth will increase the size of the pie, so we don't need to worry about how that pie is divided.

While supporters of mainstream economics often say they are in favor of "free markets" and against government intervention in the economy, the notion of "the economy" they propagate, requires governments to protect ownership of land, contracts, and intellectual property. Some of those same people advocate for subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and huge investments in the military. They tend to argue that the economy is hurt when governments do things to make it less monopolistic, or force it to serve more than a small number of people. They argue against rent control because it distorts markets, but they don't argue against bailouts for banks. Far from wanting markets to be free from government interference, proponents of mainstream approaches to economics generally argue for as much freedom for capital as possible. 

Increased freedom for capital means that capital is allowed to shop the globe to find places to hide from taxation. And freedom of capital has led to a huge expansion of the size and power of the finance sector. Only 15% of money invested by large banks today is invested in actual production. The changes that have come from allowing more freedom for capital have led to extreme increases in inequality all around the world, even as they have actually undermined economic growth. 

As people in the U.S. government talk about the need to sacrifice human lives for the economy, it is good to remember that "the economy" is not what we care about. We care about how we are all doing. What is good for a company's stockholders and owners is not always the same as what is good for employees. While it might be good for economic growth to have the Tesla factory in Fremont California open up without a safety plan, that would not be good for the workers. And there are other ways to make sure the workers in that factory have enough to pay their rent and buy food. We could tax Musk's wealth and provide a safety net for the workers. 

When he defied the shut down and opened the factory in defiance of the county health officials, Elon Musk claimed to want to be free from the tyranny of the government. And yet his businesses have received $5 billion in government subsidies. Wealth and productivity are the results of many complex social processes, including subsidies. The wealth generated by factories, such as Tesla, are not mostly, or even primarily, the results of the actions of the owners and stockholders. The success of businesses is always part of a complex social process. As Piketty writes, "all wealth creation depends on the social division of labor and on the intellectual capital accumulated over the entire course of human history, which no living person can be said to own or claim as his or her own personal accomplishment." To develop health and resilience in the material world we depend on, we need to use the resources that belong to society to do the things needed so that we can all live well within the ecological limits of the planet. 

Alternative economic approaches

There are many economic theorists, working outside the mainstream paradigm, who question its most fundamental assumptions. Some of the best of these are Ha-Joon Chang, Clair Brown, Kate Raworth, and Amartya Sen. In Latin America an alternative is developing based on the idea of buen vivir, living well in our relations with each other and with the rest of nature. We need to think of the economy as the material substrate of our common lives, rather than as a self-contained thing which has its own needs. From that perspective, the things we need to do to improve our economic well-being are vastly different ways from what mainstream economists are arguing we need to do as we come out of the shutdown. We don't need to open factories while they are unsafe. We don't need to bail out the cruise ship industry or the fossil fuel industry. Instead we need to make sure that there are systems in place to protect people's livelihoods. 

Those alternative economists argue that we shouldn't measure the success of an economy based on how much is bought and sold, but rather on how much it is meeting our needs The most commonly used measure of the health of an economy in the world right now is GDP, which, roughly, measures how much is bought and sold. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Human Development Index (HDI) do a much better job at measuring the ways an economy serves our human and ecological needs. And they argue that markets are not the best ways to decide where social resources should go. For example, the labor market does not need to be the main way we decide who has money and who doesn't. Giving everyone a universal basic income (UBI) increases well-being and stimulates economic activity without relying on a market in labor. 

Conclusion

Lurking behind the Covid-19 crisis, are the inequality and climate crises. Dealing with them was urgent before Covid-19 hit us, and the actions we take in the next 6 months will have huge implications for the world we create as we come out of it. There is plenty of money and wealth in our society to meet all of our needs while staying within the ecological limits of the planet. There is a fairly clear and well proven path to building that economy.  The hard part is developing the political will to get us there. Part of building that political will is shifting how we understand what is good for the economy. Rather than being driven to do what is good for capital, we need to focus on doing the things that will help us share our social wealth and use it to solve the crises we face and to build a resilient, just, sustainable common future. The economy exists to serve our needs, it isn't a god which requires sacrificial victims. 

Cynthia Kaufman is the author of Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World, Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change. She is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College. She blogs at cynthiakaufman.wordpress.com.

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Off the Top of My Head

10 Million Jobs Lost in Leisure and Hospitality Sector

by John Lawrence, May 17, 2020

It seems like there have been huge job losses in inessential industries like leisure and hospitality. These are jobs in which the lower half of America economically serves the upper half. They are bartenders, waiters, servers, baristas, casino workers. They are service workers for the upper middle class. They are the bottom half of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck and can't cover a $400 emergency. Nevertheless, they contributed to a full employment economy and added considerably to GDP. It seems that perhaps 25% of American workers prior to the pandemic worked in areas that weren't really essential. So what is essential and what is inessential? If you pay me $10 to tell you jokes for an hour, I'm an employed worker, and that $10. adds to GDP. However, it's not what I would call an essential job.

Wouldn't be better if all those bartenders, servers, baristas and casino workers were rebuilding  infrastructure or doing something more constructive? Aren't there essential jobs which aren't being done? Maybe necessary would be a better word for it. Necessary work is not being done because there is a market demand for inessential, unnecessary workers in a full employment society in which the top 50% have money to spend on bars and restaurants, cruises, concerts, spectator sports and casinos. Perhaps all the unemployed bartenders could be trained to do real jobs involving the rebuilding and expansion of much needed infrastructure. The problem is that these jobs would be public sector jobs. The private sector left to itself will provide unnecessary, in essential jobs catering to those who have money to spend in the private economy. They constitute the leisure class.

"The Theory of the Leisure Class" by Thorstein Veblen written in 1899, is a treatise on economics and a detailed, social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social class and of consumerism, derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor, which are social institutions of the feudal period  that have continued to the modern era. Today the neo-feudal working class services the needs for amusement and conspicuous consumption of the upper middle and upper classes.

Left to itself the private economy will just think of more and more ways for people to spend money amusing ourselves rather than doing necessary work which will replace bridges, roads, levees and dams that are falling apart. The public economy is that economy which is concerned with public health, public infrastructure, converting from a fossil fuel to a green economy fueled by renewable energy among other things.  Left to itself the private economy will continue on its merry way belching smoke and contributing to global warming. Left to itself the private economy will continue shipping jobs to wherever the workers are cheapest and reimporting cheap consumer goods into the US. That leaves jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector. You might also include tattoo parlors which provide employment for many people. It's a question of what types of jobs are available and how important is it that those jobs get done. Is it important that, when you drive over a bridge, you can know that it hasn't exceeded its "replace by" date?

The fact that the food supply chain had to convert from selling agricultural products to restaurants to selling them to grocery stores when the lockdown went into effect, and this is what caused the bottleneck at grocery stores because over half of food products were sold to restaurants before the pandemic hit tells you something. This in itself is somewhat amazing. When I was a kid, people rarely went out to eat. Most meals were consumed at home. Mother made them. Today mothers hold down full time jobs outside the home in order that the family can afford mortgage payments on a home and car payments for two cars. Not that long ago most families had only one car. Mother didn't need one because she stayed home and raised the kids, prepared the meals and did the housework. Perhaps she even tended a garden and canned or froze vegetables to save on the grocery bill.Today the kids have to be cared for by child care workers, a whole relatively new category of jobs that didn't used to be necessary.

Would America be better off if many of the inessential workers in the leisure and hospitality industry were employed instead in industries which actually made America a better place and in jobs which paid a decent wage? Today many local economies are hurting because tourism has gone down the tubes. An economy based on tourism is an economy based on inessential and unnecessary work to a large extent. There is much more important, essential and necessary work that should be getting done instead of basing an economy on amusement and stuff that in many cases does not contribute to the health and welfare of people or society. Voltaire said we'd all be better off if we tended our gardens. A full employment economy based on unnecessary work is not necessarily a healthy economy.

Off the Top of My Head

Is a Pandemic More of a Threat to National Security Than War

by John Lawrence, May 16, 2020

Bill Gates thinks so. He's been warning world leaders and everyone else since his now famous Ted talk in 2015. However, the US has been spending over a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war, and nothing on preparations for a pandemic until one was upon us. Now it is costing trillions of dollars dwarfing the defense budget. Not to be outdone, the military-industrial complex is turning its attention to preparations for war with China which happens to be the current bogieman. China sort of snuck up on us while Lockheed Martin and others were promoting east European countries for membership in NATO with the incentive that they would locate defense plants there contributing to their economic development. They had been successful in locating subcontractors in every Congressional district so that they would have plenty of support from Congress for their projects such as the F-22 and the F-35. Now they would have subcontractors in places like Romania and Poland so that enthusiastic leaders in those countries would be cheerleading NATO membership.

So as they turn their attention towards China, Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors will no doubt be promoting location of defense plants in southeast Asia and the Pacific region. It has to be this way because Big Pharma does not have any interest in making vaccines or preparing for a pandemic. There's no money in it. That's why it falls to the lot of the Gates foundation, which doesn't need to make a profit, to spend their endowment supporting vaccine development and public health. The military-industrial complex has found a sure thing in the promotion of preparedness for war even though today it's becoming increasingly evident that the billions spent on hardware for war is money wasted when the real threats come from pandemics, global warming and extreme poverty in the world. The problem is there is no profit in providing solutions to these problems. Only people like Bill Gates who as private citizens have large sums of money to spend are even interested in finding and implementing solutions.

In March 2015, Mr. Gates warned in a widely watched TED Talk that an infectious disease pandemic posed a greater threat to the world than a nuclear war because nations have built so few defenses. He called for an international warning-and-response system with mobile units of medical personnel, rapid diagnostics, drug stockpiles and technologies to produce vaccines in months. So what did the world do in response: NOTHING. What has the world done in response to the global warming crisis: NOTHING. What has the world done to mitigate extreme poverty: NOTHING. What has the world done to foment war and aggravate tensions among nations: EVERYTHING.

At least 70.8 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 25.9 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. There are also millions of stateless people, who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom of movement. What is the US doing to ameliorate the situations of these people: NOTHING. These children growing up in these harsh conditions are the future haters of the US. They are the future ISIS and al Qaeda fighters. The US is spending trillions on preparations for war in order to fight these children when they grow up in a few short years. Climate change is only going to aggravate the conditions of the poorest people in the world.

Governor Cuomo has said that his approach to solving the pandemic crisis is based on science and data driven. This in and of itself puts him at odds with President Trump and all his anti-intellectual and conspiracy theory driven followers. Trump and the neocon Republicans have been profiting from whipping up anti-intellectual hysteria for years. Their vendetta against Hillary Clinton was because she was too competent, she was too smart. They preferred a dumb ass like Trump. It's this mentality along with a military establishment and military mindset that glorifies war that will probably mean that an armageddon of one sort or other - whether it is ongoing pandemics, climate change or nuclear war - will determine the fate of the earth and humanity.

Bill Gates Has Regrets

by Betsy McKay from the Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2020

Years before the Covid-19 pandemic, the billionaire tried to warn global leaders of the threat from new infectious diseases. Few listened. ‘I feel terrible.’

Melinda Gates and Bill Gates during an April 18 video appearance.
PHOTO: GLOBAL CITIZEN/REUTERS

Five years ago, Bill Gates warned that the biggest potential killer the world faced wasn’t war, but a pandemic. The billionaire spent hundreds of millions of dollars to find faster ways to develop vaccines and create disease-tracking systems. He urged world leaders to build national defenses against new infectious diseases.

Looking back, Mr. Gates said, “I wish I had done more to call attention to the danger.” The Microsoft Corp. co-founder is now squaring off against the scenario he sought to forestall.

“I feel terrible,” he said in an interview. “The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage.”

In his second career as philanthropist and co-chair of one of the wealthiest foundations dedicated to global health and American education, Mr. Gates, 64 years old, has put himself at the center of the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed more than 283,000 people and crashed the world economy.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pays for researchers seeking treatments, and it is working with pharmaceutical executives and governments to produce billions of doses of promising vaccines while they are being tested so they can be dispensed as soon as regulators approve them. The foundation has helped reserve space in a manufacturing plant so production of the most effective new medicines can begin quickly.

Mr. Gates questions pharmaceutical company chief executives, digging into the details of vaccine production. “Every day, it’s, OK, are we going to run out of glass vials?” he said. “You may think that’s a simple part of it, but nobody’s ever made 7 billion vaccines.”

He discusses the evolving science of the pandemic with U.S. and world leaders. In TV interviews and his blog posts, he explains the logic behind lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus and the slow path to reopening commerce and schools. “Covid-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about,” Mr. Gates wrote in a February article for the New England Journal of Medicine.

His high profile during the pandemic has also made him a target of conspiracy theories and antivaccine groups.

Experts in public health and global development have criticized Mr. Gates and his foundation at times for his self-appointed role. With its rich coffers, the foundation is deciding in some cases which diseases take priority and how they are fought, they say.

“All we do is we spend our money, and we share our opinions,” Mr. Gates said. “We’re not making the decision at the end of the day.”

Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has if anything shown the limits of any one person—even the world’s second richest—to stop a pandemic. The virus, Mr. Gates said, is “the most dramatic thing ever in my lifetime by a lot.” It has disrupted foundation work to eradicate polio, vaccinate children in low-income countries and other longtime priorities, though funding for those programs continues.

So far, the Gates Foundation has committed $305 million in the search for Covid-19 vaccines and drug remedies, as well as aid to get medicines and supplies to lower-income countries. Before the pandemic is over, Mr. Gates said, “we will end up spending a lot more.”

Novel threat

Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda Gates, established their foundation in 2000 with an interest in finding biomedical innovations against infectious disease and ways to deliver them. In 2014, Ebola focused their attention with an epidemic that killed at least 11,300 people world-wide.

“The world as a whole doesn’t have the preparedness for epidemics,” Mr. Gates said in a November 2014 interview with The Wall Street Journal. He had just sat through a presentation about promising Ebola drug treatments and had met with a Nigerian physician who survived the infection.

“What’s to stop some form of SARS showing up?” he said, referring to the 2002-2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by another coronavirus. Next, he said, could be “SARS II.”

In March 2015, Mr. Gates warned in a widely watched TED Talk that an infectious disease pandemic posed a greater threat to the world than a nuclear war because nations have built so few defenses. He called for an international warning-and-response system with mobile units of medical personnel, rapid diagnostics, drug stockpiles and technologies to produce vaccines in months.

“An epidemic is one of the few catastrophes that could set the world back drastically in the next few decades,” he wrote that month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Mr. Gates joined other global-health experts calling for better public-health defenses. “In no way was I a lone voice,” he said. “The one thing that’s unique about my voice, though, is that I haven’t spent my life in infectious diseases.”

He explained the risks of a pandemic to 2016 U.S. presidential candidates and urged them to make preparedness a national priority. He also made the pitch to President-elect Trump at a Trump Tower meeting in December 2016. The White House declined to comment.

At the 2017 Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering on international security policy, Mr. Gates said that “getting ready for a global pandemic is every bit as important as nuclear deterrence and avoiding a climate catastrophe,” according to his prepared remarks.

In Munich, he talked about faster ways to make vaccines. One idea was to use ready-made components to build custom vaccines against new viruses, saving time.

The foundation around that time committed $100 million for a coalition of donors and governments to finance new vaccines for emerging infections. Such vaccines are expensive to develop and largely unprofitable because demand for them is sporadic. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is now funding development of vaccines, including for Covid-19.

Mr. Gates took advantage of his ability to reach leaders of government, which he said were the only entities with the means to build preparedness.

“I chose, when I met with people all the way up to the top, in Europe, in the U.S., around the world, to talk about this pandemic risk,” he said.

He views philanthropies as catalysts. “I’m putting hundreds of millions of the foundation’s money into this,” he said. “But it’s really a governmental thing, just like the defense budget is there to help with an outbreak of war.’”

Many world leaders agreed in principle with him. But the lack of an immediate threat made most countries reluctant to spend the large sums needed to defend against a galloping pandemic. “I wish the warnings that I and other people gave had led to more coordinated global action,” he said.

Frustrated at inaction abroad, Mr. Gates turned to a project close to home. He wanted to know how best to slow the transmission of respiratory viruses that can cause pandemics.

“Whenever I asked about respiratory viruses, like how important are schools and if you do shutdowns, how much can you drop the transmission, and even…do masks actually help or not?” he said, there weren’t clear answers.

The questions prompted him to invest more than $20 million of his own money for a study that got under way in 2018. It was designed to find better ways to test for flu, trace infections using genetics and stop its spread. Researchers began testing flu samples from people in the Seattle area.

In mid-January, as China imposed a lockdown on Wuhan, where the virus first spread, Mr. Gates began peppering his foundation’s scientists with questions: What drugs are most promising? How long until we have a vaccine? How could the foundation help accelerate trials?

The foundation began committing funds to kick-start development of treatments and vaccines for the new coronavirus.

Mr. Gates hosted a meeting of epidemiologists and global health experts in mid-February. The likelihood of Covid-19 being contained in China was probably less than 25%, he told his senior staff after hearing the experts, people close to him said.

When Mr. Gates saw the virus spreading to more countries, he questioned the foundation’s scientists as well as heads of pharmaceutical companies about testing capacity, plans for vaccines and ways the foundation could help.

Toward the end of February, researchers in the Seattle-area flu study, by then in its second year, discovered Covid-19 in a test sample from a teenager. Genetic analyses showed the sample might be tied to an earlier case in the area. That suggested “there was a fair amount of community spread,” said Trevor Bedford, a genomic epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who helped direct the flu study.

That same week, health officials discovered a Covid-19 outbreak at a Kirkland, Wash., nursing home, about 11 miles from Mr. Gates’s home.

After years of warning about a deadly pandemic, Mr. Gates faced one in his backyard.

Off the Top of My Head

Why is the US Accusing China of Hacking into Vaccine Research?

by John Lawrence, May 14, 2020

Shouldn't we be sharing progress on a vaccine for the coronavirus with the rest of the world including China? And the rest of the world should be sharing their progress with us. This is not the time for hoarding intellectual property. It's a global problem; there should be cooperation in coming up with a global solution. The Trump administration put out a memo: "These actors [China] have been observed attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property (IP) and public health data related to vaccines, treatments, and testing from networks and personnel affiliated with COVID-19-related research." Really? Unbelievable. Why should China have to hack when this research on a vaccine should be freely shared? What, is some pharmaceutical company hoping to make a killing off of selling the vaccine? It should be freely available to everyone in the whole world if and when they come up with one, whoever comes up with it.

The root of the problem the US has with China is that American businesses want to profit from exporting jobs there while reaping greater short term profits than they would have if they kept the jobs in the US. In "Has China Won" the author writes: "[American businesses] are only interested in the bottom line of their companies. All they want is easy access to the large Chinese market to increase their sales and profits." American businesses are only interested in short term profits. By contrast China is playing the long game. They are patient; US businesses are not. In addition to importing products from China manufactured with cheap Chinese labor. American corporations have sold large amounts of products into the Chinese market. By 1993, China bought one-sixth of the planes Boeing sold. By 2017 China provided 21% of Boeing's total revenue from commercial planes. Without the Chinese market Boeing would be out of business especially after the 737MAX debacle.

China accounted for 42% of GM's sales in 2017. GM and Ford have made more profits from their sales of cars in China than they have from sales in the US. China is now GM's largest market. Just a few years ago GM needed a Federal bailout or else it would have gone bankrupt. China has helped one of America's iconic companies to thrive. In light of the fact that China has virtually supported US companies, the Trump administration is picking a fight with China over its trade policies. Not only that but the Democratic party in the persons of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are supporting Trump! Senator Schumer said: "when it comes to being tough on China's trading practices, I'm closer to Trump then Obama or Bush."!

It's interesting that the Trump administration is going out of its way to provoke a fight with China when China not only provides a huge consumer market for American exports, but China is the US' largest creditor. China holds more US debt in the form of Treasury bonds than any other nation. Why have American businesses been so eager to trade with China if China has been engaging in unfair trading practices? Because American corporations are only interested in short term profits while China is in it for the long haul. Lenin once famously said that businessmen would happily sell for a profit the rope that would be later used to hang them. Former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said, "Some firms have accepted the Faustian bargain of maximizing today's earnings per share while operating under restrictions that jeopardize their future competitiveness." In short American corporations have accepted Chinese trading practices that some consider unfair in order to maximize short term profits which is all Wall Street and the stock market cares about. A Faustian bargain has reached its termination date!

In "Has China Won," we find the following analysis of Trump's chaotic and ineffectual verbal assaults on China:

While China projects an image of being a stable and predictable member of the global multilateral order, America, under Trump, is increasingly perceived as a chaotic and unpredictable actor. Donald Trump once famously said that "trade wars are good, and easy to win." Instead, Trump's track record in this area shows that trade wars are in fact difficult to win. In the magazine Foreign Affairs (November/December 2019), Weijian Shan observed: "The numbers suggest that Washington is not winning this trade war. Although China's economic growth has slowed, the tariffs have hit US consumers harder than their Chinese counterparts. With fears of a recession around the corner, Trump must reckon with the fact that his current approach is imperiling the US economy, posing a threat to the international trading system, and failing to reduce the trade deficit that he loathes."

Not only that but midwestern farmers who used to export soybeans and other products to China are now going broke. Also the above book was written before the coronavirus, before fears of a recession turned into an almost certainty of a depression. China has managed to slip under the radar as a "developing nation" for many years. Meanwhile, the US has been distracted by a futile and fruitless concentration on Russia as America's chief rival and bogieman. Now that it has turned its attention to China, it's too late. There are too many American businesses hooked on and profiting from cheap Chinese labor while for other businesses China is a greater percentage of their markets than the US is.

The lack of PPE and test kits can be attributed to the fact that they are mostly manufactured in China, and the US has had to get in line behind other countries bidding for Chinese output. Trump is hardly in a position to order and bully China around. Their middle class is now bigger than the American middle class. American businesses are salivating over exporting to that market, but Trump could ruin the whole situation just as he has ruined it for midwestern soybean farmers and American consumers. By the way the one American manufacturer of masks was not even contacted by the Trump administration. So much for making America great again.

Off the Top of My Head

The Matter of Where the Coronavirus Originated

by John Lawrence

I hate to bring up an issue that has been politicized, and one that seems to put me on the side of President Trump, whom, let me be clear, I think is the worst President in American history. Also it really doesn't matter that much whether the coronavirus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or at a "wet market" in Wuhan. However, a recent 60 Minutes broadcast about this was so unauthoritative and misleading as to be an insult to our intelligence. Here is the crux of the matter: two experts made it clear that the virus was not "engineered", and, therefore, according to them, it could not have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology where one of them had worked on a grant from a US institution. They maintained it had to have originated at the "wet market" because it came from a bat and not from a genetically modified virus. This is a false dichotomy.

Just because the coronavirus was not genetically engineered does not mean that it didn't come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Am I too presumptuous to assume that they also have bats there? It is totally possible that COBID-19 escaped from the Institute and came from an unengineered virus from a live or dead bat located there. A Washington Post article on April 2 cast doubt on the conventional theory that the virus originated in a wet market:

Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the seafood market.

Hmmm...no connection to the seafood market? Bats weren't even sold there? Why wasn't the Lancet piece noted in the 60 Minutes piece?

The article continued:

There’s a competing theory — of an accidental lab release of bat coronavirus — that scientists have been puzzling about for weeks. Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread?

So they did have samples of bat coronaviruses at either the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention or at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or both.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that “the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,” with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it “also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.” He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, “which provides only minimal protection,” compared with the top BSL-4.

And then there’s the Chinese study that was curiously withdrawn. In February, a site called ResearchGate published a brief article by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology. “In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories,” the article concluded. Botao Xiao told the Wall Street Journal in February that he had withdrawn the paper because it “was not supported by direct proofs.”

OK, so it's not an open and shut case that the virus originated at the "wet market" and not at a Chinese Laboratory. In the final analysis, safety standards in either case should be enhanced. It's not a question of blaming China no matter where the virus originated. However, in this situation Trump and Pompeo may well be right. The 60 Minutes piece was an insult to our intelligence with the insistence that it could not have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology because it was not an "engineered" virus.

One more consideration - why isn't there an American Institute of Virology? Why is all the cutting edge research being done in China and not in the US? Why do American scientists have to go to China to do cutting edge research? I suppose it's for the same reason that Trump wanted to shut the CDC down. It's all about "drowning government in a bathtub."

Trump’s 4-Step Plan for Reopening the Economy Will Be Lethal

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Donald Trump is getting nervous. Internal polls show him losing in November unless the economy comes roaring back.

But much of the American economy remains closed because of the pandemic. The number of infections and deaths continue to climb. Almost 3,000 Americans died last Friday alone, the deadliest day since the pandemic began.

So what is Trump’s reelection strategy? Reopen the economy anyway.

Step 1: Remove income support, so people have no choice but to return to work.    

Trump’s Labor Department has decided that furloughed employees “must accept” an employer’s offer to return to work and therefore forfeit unemployment benefits, regardless of Covid-19.

Trump’s ally, Iowa Republican governor Kim Reynolds, says employees cannot refuse to return to work for fear of contracting the disease. “That’s a voluntary quit,” making someone ineligible for benefits.  

GOP officials in Oklahoma are even threatening to withhold the $600 per week of extra unemployment benefits Congress has provided workers if an employer wants to hire them. Safety is irrelevant.

“If the employer will contact us … we will cut off their benefits,” says Teresa Thomas Keller of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission.

Forcing people to choose between getting Covid-19 or losing their livelihood is inhumane. It’s also nonsensical. Public health still depends on as many workers as possible staying home. That’s a big reason why Congress provided the extra benefits.

Step 2: Hide the facts.

No one knows how many Americans are infected because the Trump administration continues to drag its heels on testing. To date only 6.5 million tests have been completed in a population of over 200 million adults.

Florida, one of the first states to reopen, has stopped releasing medical examiners’ statistics on numbers of Covid-19 victims because the numbers are higher than the state’s official count.

But it’s impossible to fight the virus without adequate data. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s leading infectious degree expert, warns that reopening poses “a really significant risk” without more testing.

Not surprisingly, the White House has blocked Fauci from testifying before the House.

Step 3: Pretend it’s about “freedom.”

Weeks ago, Trump called on citizens to “LIBERATE” states like Michigan, whose Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed strict stay-at-home rules.

Michigan has the third-highest number of Covid-19 deaths in America, although tenth in population. When on Thursday Whitmer extended the rules to May 28, gun-toting protesters rushed the state house chanting “Lock her up!”

Rather than condemn their behavior, Trump suggested Whitmer “make a deal” with them.

“The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” he tweeted. “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely!”

Meanwhile, the Attorney General, William Barr, has directed the Justice Department to take legal action against any state or local authorities imposing lockdown measures that “could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens.”

Making this about “freedom” is absurd. Freedom is meaningless for people who have no choice but to accept a job that risks their health.

Step 4: Shield businesses against lawsuits for spreading the infection.

Trump is pushing to give businesses that reopen a “liability shield” against legal action by workers or customers who get infected by the virus.

Last week he announced he would use the Defense Production Act to force meat processing plants to remain open, despite high rates of Covid-19 infections and deaths among meatpackers.

“We’re going to sign an executive order today, I believe, and that’ll solve any liability problems,” Trump said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insists that proposed legislation giving state and local governments funding they desperately need must include legal immunity for corporations that cause workers or consumers to become infected.

“We have a red line on liability,” McConnell said. “It won’t pass the Senate without it.”

But how can the economy safely reopen if companies don’t have an incentive to keep people safe? Promises to provide protective gear and other safeguards are worthless absent the threat of damages if workers or customers become infected.  

The truth: The biggest obstacle to reopening the economy is the pandemic itself.

Any rush to reopen without adequate testing and tracing – far more than now underway – will cause even more deaths, and a longer economic crisis.

Maybe Trump is betting that the worst of the Covid destruction will occur after election, when the economy appears to be on the road to recovery.

The first responsibility of a president is to keep the public safe. But Donald Trump couldn’t care less. He was slow to respond to the threat, then he lied about it, then made it hard for states – especially those with Democratic governors – to get the equipment they need.

Now he’s trying to force the economy to reopen in order to boost his electoral chances this November, and he’s selling out Americans’ health to seal the deal. This is beyond contemptible.  

Return to 'Business as Usual' Means Climate Catastrophe: World's Mayors Demand Transformative Green Covid-19 Recovery

Published on Thursday, May 07, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Half-measures that maintain the status quo won't move the needle or protect us from the next crisis."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

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A climate placard during a protest carried out by the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion in front of the House of Representatives in The Hague, Netherlands on April 17th, 2020. (Photo: Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Nearly 40 mayors representing more than 700 million people in cities across the globe are calling for a transformative recovery from the Covid-19 crisis that fundamentally alters global economic and energy systems, warning that a mere return to "business as usual" means accepting a world barreling toward climate catastrophe.

The mayors on Thursday signed on to a statement of principles that aims to provide a framework for the "transition to a more sustainable, low-carbon, inclusive and healthier economy for people and the planet."

"Covid-19 has laid bare the systemic inequities too often found at the heart of our communities—and as we start to emerge from this crisis, we must rebuild an economy that truly works for everyone," said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, chair of C40 Cities, the coalition of mayors that crafted the 9-point statement.

Mxolisi Kaunda, mayor of Durban, South Africa, called on cities to "approach the future with a new vision, a vision of a prosperous and climate-just society for all."

"During this time we are forced to confront the fragility of the current economic system that has created a vastly unequal society and how that inequality makes it difficult for our social and health relief systems to respond effectively," said Kaunda. "Let us not lose the painful lessons that we have had to learn during this pandemic and use those rather to become cities that are more resilient to future disasters, including climate change."

The principles endorsed by 37 mayors are as follows:

• The recovery should not be a return to 'business as usual'—because that is a world on track for 3°C or more of over-heating;
• The recovery, above all, must be guided by an adherence to public health and scientific expertise, in order to assure the safety of those who live in our cities; 
• Excellent public services, public investment, and increased community resilience will form the most effective basis for the recovery; 
• The recovery must address issues of equity that have been laid bare by the impact of the crisis – for example, workers who are now recognized as essential should be celebrated and compensated accordingly and policies must support people living in informal settlements;
• The recovery must improve the resilience of our cities and communities. Therefore, investments should be made to protect against future threats—including the climate crisis—and to support those people impacted by climate and health risks;
• Climate action can help accelerate economic recovery and enhance social equity, through the use of new technologies and the creation of new industries and new jobs. These will drive wider benefits for our residents, workers, students, businesses and visitors; 
• We commit to doing everything in our power and the power of our city governments to ensure that the recovery from Covid-19 is healthy, equitable, and sustainable;
• We commit to using our collective voices and individual actions to ensure that national governments support both cities and the investments needed in cities, to deliver an economic recovery that is healthy, equitable, and sustainable;
• We commit to using our collective voices and individual actions to ensure that international and regional institutions invest directly in cities to support a healthy, equitable, and sustainable recovery.

"The only parallel to what we're facing right now is the Great Depression," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. "Against that kind of challenge, half-measures that maintain the status quo won't move the needle or protect us from the next crisis. We need a New Deal for these times—a massive transformation that rebuilds lives, promotes equality, and prevents the next economic, health, or climate crisis."

The mayors' statement came after new Oxford University research published this week found that "green stimulus" spending on sustainable energy projects would be more effective than conventional stimulus measures in repairing the widespread economic damage done by the coronavirus pandemic.

"The Oxford study compared green stimulus projects with traditional stimulus, such as measures taken after the 2008 global financial crisis, and found green projects create more jobs, deliver higher short-term returns... and lead to increased long-term cost savings," the Guardian reported.

Cameron Hepburn, lead author of the new study, told Reuters on Tuesday that his research shows "we can choose to build back better, keeping many of the recent improvements we've seen in cleaner air, returning nature and reduced greenhouse gas emissions."

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Off the Top of My Head

The Only Rational Actor: Governor Cuomo

by John Lawrence, May 7, 2020

Cuomo's daily briefings are data driven, informative and compassionate. I'm so proud of New York state. It almost makes me want to move back there. My Dad was born in Sugar Loaf, New York, and when we crossed the state line from New Jersey to New York, he always said the air smelled better. Meanwhile, Trump's the complete opposite of Cuomo: missing in action, idiotic and only concerned about his reelection prospects. Trump has screwed up at every turn from advocating hydroxychloroquine to telling people to drink chlorox to muzzling Dr. Fauci. How does it feel red state Americans to have voted for a complete idiot?

Cuomo has made it clear that when New York state opens up after the pandemic has been overcome, it won't be business as usual. He will be using this opportunity, if you can call it that, to bring New York state back to a new and better normal. Certain things will be done in a new and better way. He has formed a consortium with other states in the neighborhood to buy and stockpile all the equipment that was in short supply for this pandemic so that, when the next one hits, they will be prepared and not have to engage in a bidding war to get stuff from China. He has enlisted the help of Bill Gates and other experts to make major improvements to the educational system. He is open to creative ideas to make New York state a better state than it ever was in the past, and will be consulting with experts to make it so.

One of the problems that Governor Cuomo wants to solve, as do many other Governors and Mayors, is homelessness. The pandemic has made it clear that you can't have half a million people living on the streets in deplorable conditions without that situation being a threat to public health. I think this nation is swinging from a total reliance on the private sector, which was totally at a loss when the pandemic hit, to more of a reliance on public sector workers and government itself. The leaders in controlling and eliminating this epidemic are not the CEOs on Wall Street and in American board rooms. It has become evident that it was unprofitable for the private sector to manufacture the equipment needed for a public health crisis. If governors and mayors had not stepped in, there would have been no intelligent response to this crisis. Intelligence is not Trump's strong suit which he has amply demonstrated.

It has become apparent that the true heroes in our society are people who take care of other people, not people who make tons of money in nonessential activities. Maybe there will be a reconsideration and revision of our values. Is it so important to spend 1.5 trillion dollars on a military-industrial-intelligence complex. The last two major wars have been total and complete disasters. I'm talking about the Vietnam and Iraq wars about which our Presidents lied to us. There are 70 million refugees in the world many of them living in crowded camps where the lack of facilities and medical care provides a perfect breeding ground for disease. If homelessness is a threat to public health, how much more are the crowded refugee camps? Many of them are there due to American wars in the Middle East. We have a responsibility to help all these people in other parts of the world who are living in extreme poverty and with little hope for the future. It's also the perfect breeding ground for future Osama bin Ladens.

Many things were in need of change even before the pandemic hit. Now many things can be changed for the better after the pandemic is over. A redefinition of essential and nonessential workers. If a worker is essential, I think they should be paid more. It's nice to honk your horns and have a government provided flyover of the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds (which wastes millions of dollars by the way) to honor front line workers, but I think they would rather have a substantial raise in pay instead. At this point they, not the military, are the heroes. The military is for the most part useless when the world is facing a public health crisis which knows no national boundaries. We need to change our prerogatives, our values and our mentality becoming more like Governor Cuomo: New York tough, smart and loving. God bless you, Governor Cuomo.

Off the Top of My Head

A Limited First Step at Reopening

by John Lawrence, May 5, 2020

This reopening albeit limited is still an experiment to see whether or not the virus will spike even under these conditions. It will allow one on one contact less than 6 feet for barbers, hairdressers and other similar activities that require close contact between a practitioner and her client. This is a reasonable way to reopen slowly and moderately, and then you notice after a short period of time whether COVID cases increase or decrease. If they decrease, then you can reopen a little more. If cases increase, then you have to shut down the limited activity that you opened. There will be no total or complete Grand Reopening until at least January which is the first date when we could possibly have a vaccine. This is the only thing that could shut down the virus totally and completely. Till then every form of opening is an experiment.

So January is a target date and by then, hopefully, we'll have a new President and it will be either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. I'm still holding out some hope for Bernie. At that point with a new Democratic President, America should become a new and renewed place. We should not go back to business as usual pre-pandemic. We need to go full speed ahead with a Green New Deal. This will provide for a full employment economy almost immediately. We need to shut down the oil industry. It is already practically bankrupt. It should be taken to bankruptcy and operated as a national utility until the renewable energy industry can make up the difference. To do this rapidly we need huge numbers of workers to construct a new power grid consisting of renewable energy nodes.

Since massive randomized testing is not being done and will probably never be done, the only reliable metrics we have are the number of new cases. Randomized testing followed up with contact tracing for those that test positive would allow a statistical estimate of the number of positive cases out there and the probability of getting infected. It would need to be done every day to monitor the changes, hopefully a downward trend. Of course there is a linear progression of risky activities from least risky to most risky. The riskiest activities are mass events like at sports arenas and music festivals. Bars and restaurants can be limited in riskiness by keeping the density down to a smaller percentage of normal occupancy. Of course as occupancy rates go down so do profits. So bars and restaurants will have a tough time of going back to profitability even if they are open under limited conditions. The safest restaurant dining is al fresco since it's safer to be outside than inside.

Any hot spots like nursing homes and meat packing plants need to be first identified and then mitigated to the point that there are no new cases. Daily testing and contact testing is important for this. Other hot spots may become identified, and the same testing, contact tracing and mitigation of the environment needs to be implemented. New meat packing plants and nursing homes may need to be built or modified to provide the necessary amount of distancing. If people just start out going whole hog  without taking proper precautions, they are volunteering themselves to be infected with the virus. This would be analogous to having unprotected sex with someone that has a venereal disease. At any event the next two months should be interesting. If anyone has to die, may it be those who took unnecessary risks. I hope those front line workers doing their jobs to help the rest of us and taking necessary risks will stay safe, but I don't have a lot of respect for those that take unnecessary risks just to have a good time.

'Kind of Like Large Scale Negligent Homicide': As Trump Urges Reopenings, CDC Report Warns of Surge in Covid-19 Deaths

Published on Monday, May 04, 2020

by Common Dreams

Internal CDC document projects U.S. coronavirus deaths could reach 3,000 per day by June 1—nearly double the current daily death toll.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

15 Comments

A patient is transferred from Elmhurst Hospital in New York on April 25, 2020. (Photo: John Lamparski/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

As President Donald Trump publicly encourages states to reopen their economies against the advice of public health experts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is privately projecting that U.S. Covid-19 deaths could reach a staggering 3,000 per day by June 1—nearly double the current daily death toll of more than 1,700.

The New York Times on Monday obtained an internal CDC document (pdf) predicting around 200,000 new coronavirus cases each day by the end May, up from around 25,000 new cases per day at present.

"The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways with cases rising so rapidly that the health care system is overloaded," the Times reported.

Trump administration "is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times." https://t.co/nZZfZLKSla pic.twitter.com/OsaYXEDh3P

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) May 4, 2020

The CDC projection came to light just hours after Trump claimed during a Fox News town hall that the U.S. has been "successful" in limiting the death toll from the virus. More than 1.1 million people have contracted Covid-19 in the U.S. and nearly 68,000 have died. The virus has killed at least 1,000 people across the nation every day since April 2.

"The administration should be tried for crimes against humanity," Mairav Zonszein wrote in response to the CDC data.

Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman ripped Trump for publicly urging states to reopen their economies even as his administration predicts a massive surge in coronavirus deaths behind closed doors. Georgia, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and other states have begun to lifting social distancing restrictions in recent days despite their lack of adequate testing equipment.

"Keeping dire internal projections private while publicly pushing states to 'reopen' due to electoral considerations is kind of like large scale negligent homicide," Friedman tweeted.

While a number of states have initiated the reopening of their economies, a new analysis published Monday by the Center for American Progress found that none of the nation's fifty states has reached the crucial kind of thresholds public health experts say would be needed to safely do so.

"Based on evidence-based thresholds for incidence and testing, no state is ready to substantially relax its stay-at-home order," wrote Topher Spiro and Emily Gee, the authors of the analysis.

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Off the Top of My Head

Statistics of Coronavirus Testing Are Not Being Done Correctly

by John Lawrence, May 3, 2020

There will never be enough testing kits to determine someone's level of safety for going out in public. Right now testing is haphazard, and is only used for people who have a high likelihood of being exposed or having been exposed. What really needs to be done is to test a randomized sample of the population  in order to know with, say, a 95% level of certainty how many positive cases are out there. You don;t need to test the whole population to do that, only a randomized sample. Here's how it works. For example, let's say you'd feel safe if you knew with a high level of certainty that there were fewer than 10 active cases in your county of one million people.

There is a simple formula that would determine how many people you would need to test. Let's say you calculate that you would have to test 100,000 people or 1/10 of the population, and you found that there were 5 cases. Then  you could assume, even without using the formula, that there might be 50 active cases in the whole population of a million people or 10 times the number of positive cases you found in the sample because the total population is 10 times the sample size. Well how could you ever feel safe if you knew approximately how many positive cases were out there, and that number exceeded your safety level of 10 cases. You'd need to do this randomized sample every day or every week to get an accurate picture of active cases symptomatic or especially asymptomatic. Positive cases would be taken off the street and quarantined or hospitalized as the case might be. The next sample would not include them, only people that hadn't been tested or had tested negative. Just because a person tested negative for one randomized sample doesn't mean that they would test negative for forthcoming tests. Eventually by ruling out risky business openings and letting safe ones proceed while taking precautions like social distancing, the number of positive cases should come down to a safe level.

Nowhere in the US is random sampling being done because test kits are so few and too precious to be used in a scientific experiment. Maybe the authorities don't want you to know how many positive cases are out there with a high degree of certainty because, if you knew, you'd never go out in public until the number of active cases came down much further. That would delay the economy's reopening. So what they're actually doing is to reopen the economy cautiously now that they feel they have the hospital capacity to handle another spike in number of cases which will surely come. The precautions they are taking with businesses like restaurants and hair dressers will help some, but be advised you all are guinea pigs engaged in a life or death experiment. For older people it doesn't make much sense.

Governor Cuomo said today that the US has spent billions in China on the necessary materials to fight the coronavirus. Different jurisdictions have engaged in bidding wars to obtain the necessary PPE, ventilators, test kits, swabs and such. Imagine China is sitting there letting American jurisdictions bid up the prices of materials because they are manufactured in China where Trump's vaunted Defense Procurement Act is impotent. So Cuomo, in preparation for the next pandemic, is going to stockpile the medical necessities and make sure they're manufactured in his regional coalition. The state are having to go it alone since the Federal government is an ineffectual basket case especially under Trump. Remember all those neocons who wanted to drown government in a bathtub? Well, this is the result you get when you do that - a nation dependent on a purported "enemy" for necessary materials. Not that China should be our enemy. Trump seems to like to make them one, and they still come to our aid ... for a price. They're no dummies. They've learned their lessons about capitalism well.

Off the Top of My Head

Meat Plant Workers and CNAs Should Quit Their Jobs Unless They Get Hazard Pay

by John Lawrence, May 2, 2020

President Trump can order meat plants to stay open, but he can't order workers to work. That stopped after emancipation. Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) are the minimum wage workers who staff nursing homes as well as hospitals. These two classifications of workers are the lowest paid workers working the most hazardous jobs. The way capitalism works is, if you don't like your job, you have a right to quit. They should all quit, and then their employers will have to offer more money to get anyone to work those jobs. The reason they don't quit is that they need the money, as minimum wage as it is, and you don't get unemployment if you quit a job.

With white people protesting and demanding that the economy reopen, what they are implicitly demanding is that the lowest wage workers, who used to be called service workers, but now are called essential workers, keep doing their jobs because they know that black and brown people have been contracting the virus and dying disproportionately to their percentage of the population, but white people have been relatively unscathed.. If these white people want the economy reopened and are going to brandish their AK-47s to make their point, let them go to work in meat packing plants and let them go to work as CNAs. It doesn't take much training to be a CNA. Basically all you need to know is how to change a bed and empty bedpans.

And by the way do we really live in a democracy when one man, Mitch McConnell, can control any legislation that gets passed or one Senator can filibuster any legislation so that nothing except what those Senators want passed gets passed? No, it is an aristocracy except it's an elected aristocracy rather than a hereditary one. At least they had noblesse oblige. There is no noblesse oblige among this current bunch of kleptocrats.

So how do we get to the crossroad where the lowest paid workers, who are mostly black and brown, turn out to be the most essential workers? It took a pandemic to expose this fault line in a society which is fundamentally exploitative and growing more unequal by the day. Mere inequality was the situation before the pandemic occurred. Now the lowest workers on the totem pole are not only the most exploited financially but the most exploited in terms of getting sick and dying. How ironic that they are considered the most essential by those of us who are financially so well off that we can shelter in place without having to go to work. Then we turn around and complain that we won't be able to purchase a top sirloin.

Perhaps this is a lesson that we should eat less meat. Maybe this is what the coronavirus is teaching us. Industrialized agriculture, particularly the beef industry, contributes huge amounts of global warming while being harmful to ecology in many other ways. A plant based diet would not only be better for us in terms of our own personal health, but would be far better for the planet. Beyond Meat is a step in the right direction. As some of their spokespeople have pointed out, why not take plants and create a good tasting product instead of running the plants through a cow to get one. It is far healthier and far better for the planet.

To sum up why would anyone making minimum wage consent to work in a hazardous industry if they could quit their job and work somewhere else? Trump can order meat packing plants to stay open, but he cannot force workers to do those jobs. Capitalism requires incentives to get people to work, and the incentive would be much more pay than what they are now getting. Otherwise, they should just quit their jobs and get retrained as software engineers.

'Pathetic': Trump Says No to Additional Covid-19 Stimulus Checks, Backs Cutting Tax That Funds Social Security Instead

Published on

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

 by

Common Dreams

"Cutting payroll taxes does nothing to help seniors or the millions of people who just lost their jobs. It does, however, defund Social Security and Medicare—which is why Trump is obsessed with the idea."

 

 

by

 Jake Johnson, staff writer

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 84 Comments

President Donald Trump takes questions from reporters during an event in the East Room of the White House April 28, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday expressed opposition to providing additional direct relief payments on top of the $1,200 checks that are slowly trickling out to eligible U.S. households, saying he would instead prefer to slash the tax that funds Social Security and Medicare.

"Well, I like the idea of payroll tax cuts," Trump said at a press conference when asked about the idea of authorizing another round of direct payments in the next coronavirus stimulus package as mass layoffs continue.

"A payroll tax cut does nothing for the 26 million who lost their jobs."
—Sen. Bernie Sanders

"I've liked that from the beginning," the president said. "That was a thing that I really would love to see happen. A lot of economists would agree with me. A lot of people agree with me. And I think frankly it's simple, it's not the big distribution, and it would really be an incentive for people to come back to work and for employers to hire."

Watch:

As part of his case that he saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Trump is now citing made-up experts who he claims said that the coronavirus wouldn't impact the US (no experts thought this) pic.twitter.com/OJT6XTFNOn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 28, 2020

Trump has floated the idea of a payroll tax cut several times in recent weeks—suggesting at one point earlier this month that the cut should be permanent—even though the move would not provide any relief for the tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs since mid-March.

"Economists don't actually agree with him," said Justin Wolfers, economics professor at the University of Michigan. "Payroll tax cuts are too slow and poorly targeted."

But a payroll tax cut would advance a longstanding objective of the conservative movement by striking a blow to Social Security and Medicare funding, advocacy groups pointed out. The CARES Act, which Trump signed into law last month, contained a little-noticed provision allowing employers to delay payment of the payroll tax for at least the rest of 2020.

"Unlike additional stimulus checks, cutting payroll taxes does nothing to help seniors or the millions of people who just lost their jobs," tweeted Social Security Works. "It does, however, defund Social Security and Medicare—which is why Trump is obsessed with the idea."

The president's opposition to additional direct payments comes as progressive lawmakers and activists are pushing for $2,000 monthly payments to all U.S. households for the duration of the Covid-19 crisis because the initial $1,200—for those lucky enough to have received it—was far from sufficient to cover basic expenses.

"Pathetic," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in response to Trump's remarks. "A payroll tax cut does nothing for the 26 million who lost their jobs. With rent due on May 1, we need to provide $2,000 a month to everyone until this crisis is over. If we can bail out corporations, we can make sure everyone has enough to pay for basic necessities."

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Off the Top of My Head

Reopening for Seniors

by John Lawrence, May 1, 2020

Reopening the economy is bad news for seniors as this pandemic is far from over, and there are no viable containment procedures for COBID-19. So the number of people infected is going to increase. There are going to be spikes. However, seniors need not partake of risky situations. Let the young and those that think they are invulnerable do that. Personally, I will not feel completely safe until the number of new cases in my county is less than 10 a day for 2 weeks. Depending on the number of people in your county and the fact that your county is tracking new cases, it would seem reasonable. San Diego County has 3.3 million people. So less than 10 new cases a day for 2 weeks would be my signal that it is OK to be in close contact with other humans again. Until then I won't go to a barber. I'll do curbside pickup at restaurants, and I'll order most things from Amazon Prime. I do go to grocery stores once a week, but they monitor how many people are in the store at any one time so again no close contact.

A lot of my life remains the same as it was before COVID-19. I don't go on cruises. I don't go to conventions or sports arenas. I may go to the symphony occasionally or to a jazz concert, but I won't be doing that any time soon. I have plenty of music to listen to at home. I watch movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime. I won't be going to movie theaters until the infection rate is less than 10 a day for San Diego County. I miss going to the Y to swim and work out, but I've substituted walking for swimming and I do a few exercises at home. I walk for an hour or more most days without a mask. Rarely do I encounter other people, but if I do, I cross to the other side of the street or walk off the sidewalk on the side of the street. I never come closer than the recommended 12 feet from anyone. 

Curbside pickup and delivery services are OK for seniors. Barbers and beauty parlors are not. The US with some exceptions will never have adequate testing or contact tracing. That's something I think we just have to accept. There has been no adequate coordinated strategy so far, and I don't think there ever will be. When a vaccine is available that should bring the number of new cases down below the 10 a day point which is my criterion for getting a haircut again. Until then I'll cut my own hair. I do a lot of Facetime with my girlfriend and with family members. My girlfriend and I have virtual dates. She won't let anybody in her house including me, and she doesn't go out. I have some senior friends whom I grocery shop for since they have underlying conditions, and I don't.

It isn't smart what some states are doing by opening up. They are running an experiment basically to see how many additional people will be infected versus more economic activity. You and I don't have to be statistics though. We don't have to go to bars and restaurants. There is plenty of booze and food available at home. We get to adjust the level of risk that we personally are willing to bear by just being smart about what activities we decide to pursue. For me there won't be any prolonged time in more or less intimate contact with any other human being for now. For me it pretty much comes down to the barber.

From Ukraine to Coronavirus: Trump’s Abuse of Power Continues

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Donald Trump has spent a lifetime exploiting chaos for personal gain and blaming others for his losses. The pure madness in America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic – shortages of equipment to protect hospital workers, dwindling supplies of ventilators and critical medications, jaw-dropping confusion over how $2.2 trillion of aid in the recent coronavirus law will be distributed – has given him the perfect cover to hoard power and boost his chances of reelection.

As the death toll continues to climb and states are left scrambling for protective gear and crucial resources, Trump is focused on only one thing: himself. 

He’s told governors to find life-saving equipment on their own, claiming the federal government is “not a shipping clerk” and subsequently forcing states and cities into a ruthless bidding war.

Governors have been reduced to begging FEMA for supplies from the dwindling national stockpile, with vastly different results. While we haven’t seen what “formula” FEMA supposedly has for determining who gets what, reports suggest that Trump’s been promising things to governors who can get him on the phone. 

Our narcissist-in-chief has ordered FEMA to circumvent their own process and send supplies to states that are “appreciative”.

Michigan and Colorado have received fractions of what they need while Oklahoma and Kentucky have gotten more than what they asked for. Colorado and Massachusetts have confirmed shipments only to have them held back by FEMA. Ron DeSantis, the Trump-aligned governor of Florida, refused to order a shelter-in-place mandate for weeks, but then received 100% of requested supplies within 3 days. New Jersey waited for two weeks. New York now has more cases than any other single country, but Trump barely lifted a finger for his hometown because Governor Andrew Cuomo is “complaining” about the catastrophic lack of ventilators in the city.

A backchannel to the president is a shoe-in way to secure life-saving supplies. Personal flattery seems to be the most effective currency with Trump; the chain of command runs straight through his ego, and that’s what the response has been coordinated around.

He claims that as president he has “total authority” over when to lift quarantine and social distancing guidelines, and threatens to adjourn Congress himself so as to push through political appointees without Senate confirmation.

And throughout all of this, Trump has been determined to reject any attempt of independent oversight into his administration’s disastrous response.

When he signed the $2 trillion emergency relief package into law, he said he wouldn’t agree to provisions in the bill for congressional oversight – meaning the wheeling-and-dealing will be done in secret.

He has removed the inspector general leading the independent committee tasked with overseeing the implementation of the massive bill.

He appointed one of his own White House lawyers, who helped defend him in his impeachment trial, to oversee the distribution of the $500 billion slush fund for corporations. That same day, he fired Inspector General Michael Atkinson – the inspector general who handed the whistleblower complaint to Congress that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

There should never have been any doubt that Trump would try to use this crisis to improve his odds of re-election.

Stimulus checks going to the lowest-income earners were delayed because Trump demanded each one of them bear his name. As millions of the hardest-hit Americans scrambled to put food on the table and worried about the stack of bills piling up, Trump’s chief concern was himself.

It doesn’t matter that this is a global pandemic. Abusing his power for personal gain is Trump’s MO.

Just three and a half months ago, Trump was impeached on charges of abuse of power and obstructing investigations. Telling governors that they need to “be appreciative” in order to receive life-saving supplies for their constituents is the same kind of quid pro quo that Trump tried to extort from Ukraine, and his attempts to thwart independent oversight are the same as his obstruction of Congress.

Trump called his impeachment a “hoax”. He initially called the coronavirus a “hoax”. But the real hoax is his commitment to America. In reality he will do anything – anything – to hold on to power.

To Donald Trump, the coronavirus crisis is just another opportunity.

Off the Top of My Head

A Jobs Program for Inessential Workers
by John Lawrence, April 30, 2020

Turn inessential workers into essential workers by putting them to work building green infrastructure. This is essential work that is not getting done. Much of the previous inessential work they did is better left undone even in a recovery. It is still inessential. It'll always be inessential compared to what needs to be done in creating and building green infrastructure. Building out solar and wind renewable energy could employ thousands if not millions of people. Repairing roads, bridges, waterways, clean water systems, airports, railroads and all other infrastructure could employ millions. This is essential work that has remained undone despite the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the US a D rating for infrastructure. High speed rail needs to be built. The widespread adoption of electric cars has to be mandated, and construction of a national electric vehicle charging network to power them has to be built.

Unemployed people still need jobs. Mark Cuban said on CNN this morning that there should be a jobs program similar to that of the New Deal. He is exactly right although he didn't make the necessary connection about the essential work that's still being left undone and the inessential work that doesn't need to be done even in a recovery. Forget Cuban's sports and entertainment enterprises. I hate to tell you that they are basically inessential. What is essential is greatly expanding the public health undertakings of the Federal  government which has been totally behind the curve in this pandemic.

We must ask ourselves what is essential and not go back to a new normal in which all the inessential businesses of the past are brought back just in order to provide employment to the millions who have lost their jobs. The pre-pandemic economy was 70% consumerism. The economy post epidemic should be much less a consumerist economy and much more an investment economy. The four components of gross domestic product are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Of these government spending must be ramped up to provide the essential jobs in infrastructure building as well as in the areas that the pandemic has made clear are indeed essential: health care, education, transportation, agriculture.

Government spending must go up; personal consumption must go down. It's as simple as that. As for business investment, it's a lost cause as business will only do what's profitable for itself as has been made abundantly clear. Investment in fossil fuels and plastics which the big oil companies are making is only destructive to a green economy, not constructive. As far as exports are concerned, the dollar has already been weakened as much as it could possibly be by zero interest rates, so increased exports, although desirable, are not likely to happen any time soon.

Private enterprise knows only one thing in terms of the economy "reopening": get back to consumer spending. It ain't going to happen. People are still afraid of the virus. The pandemic is not over. They will use their money to pay off debts instead of going in debt to the hilt like they are used to. People will save their money instead of entertaining themselves to death. Why? Maybe they have learned their lesson that a high employment economy predicated on the fact that people will always have a job and always have a prepensity to consume is just a chimera. Rather than living paycheck to paycheck, I hope people will understand that there may come a rainy day, and they need to save for that. That lesson has really been brought home by the coronavirus pandemic.

The true heroes are essential workers not the military. The military itself was brought to its knees by COBID-19. There is a lesson there. It's more important to spend our collective money on preparing for the coming pandemic of global warming than on a bloated military. It is more important to house the homeless and guarantee the economic rights of shelter and health care to all Americans as in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is more important to help people all over the world escape from extreme poverty because poverty breeds health crises which then can spread all over the world. It's more important to make peace with our rivals rather than try to control them with military threats and sanctions.

May the next President (and I hope to heaven that it's not Donald Trump) see the light of a more rational, compassionate and humane world, one more concerned about the health and welfare of all the world's peoples. I hope Governor Cuomo's values of being tough, smart, disciplined and most importantly loving spread to every corner of US and world society, and we get on with essential business instead of the inessential business of amusing, entertaining and consuming ourselves to death.

Calling Economic Crisis 'Five-Alarm Fire' for Millions of Families, 600,000 Sign Petition Demanding Rent and Mortgage Cancellation

Published on Wednesday, April 29, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Congress needs to act at the scale of the crisis, and they should start by canceling rent, mortgage, and utility payments for the duration."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

11 Comments

Protesters supporting the rent freeze circle City Hall during the coronavirus pandemic on April 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images)

As families across the U.S. struggle to pay for necessities during the coronavirus pandemic and the corresponding economic shutdown, an intensifying call is being directed at Congress to cancel rent, mortgage, and utility payments—in tandem with a full moratorium on evictions and shutoffs—until the crisis is over.

As part of that movement, the parent-led group ParentsTogether Action presented 600,000 petition signatures it had gathered after conducting a survey of 1,200 families across the country about their financial wellbeing since the coronavirus began spreading across the U.S. over the last two months, forcing millions of businesses to close and lay off or furlough workers.

About half of the families surveyed said they won't be able to pay their rent, mortgage, or utility bills on May 1 without cutting back on other essentials such as groceries, while 43% percent of the respondents said they also expected to be unable to pay in June.

"This economic crisis is a five-alarm fire and our government is just letting it burn. Millions of families can't afford rent or other basic necessities," said Justin Ruben, co-director of ParentsTogether. "They are begging for relief that, for many, just isn't coming. Congress needs to act at the scale of the crisis, and they should start by canceling rent, mortgage, and utility payments for the duration."

Many households are still anxiously awaiting the arrival of unemployment benefits and the $1,200 one-time payment the federal government is sending to many Americans. But 60% of those surveyed said they had yet to receive either, and more than a quarter said they had already spent their stimulus check.

On social media, ParentsTogether posted a video showing several parents describing their struggles amid the public health and economic crisis.

No family should be worried about losing their home during a pandemic. Congress should #CancelRent! pic.twitter.com/V5RuBPEEHV

— ParentsTogether Action (@ptogetheraction) April 29, 2020

One woman at risk for severe illness or death if she contracts Covid-19 said her husband had to stop working at his essential job to avoid exposing her. 

"He's not working, therefore that means either no bills or no rent, no food, and no medication," she said.

"Right now I am unable to return to work because I have to take care of my daughter," another said. "We need the elected people out there to understand that this crisis is really taking a toll on our family."

Local officials across the country have urged for a rent cancellation, while at the federal level Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced legislation to cancel rent and mortgage payments during the crisis. The bill has been endorsed by several national economic justice groups and is co-sponsored by progressive lawmakers including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jesus "Chuy" Garcia (D-Ill.).

No family should be worried about losing their home during a pandemic. Congress should #CancelRent! pic.twitter.com/V5RuBPEEHV

— ParentsTogether Action (@ptogetheraction) April 29, 2020

In a video posted to social media, Ocasio-Cortez expanded on how rent and mortgage payments could be suspended temporarily during the crisis.

Rep. @AOC: "Here's the path to canceling rent -- we're going to lay it out right here.

WATCH: @RepAOC lays out a method by which rent and mortgages can be suspended to help both renters and mom and pop landlords. pic.twitter.com/2mzG593PmD

— The Hill (@thehill) April 28, 2020

"When you think about how this is structured, it's not hard," the congresswoman said. "Let's say we want to start with three months. Suspend mortgage payments for three months, tack that on to the end of the repayment period. So let's say you have a ten-year mortgage, just suspend it three months and make it a ten-year and three-month mortgage."

ParentsTogether said their polling shows that the coronavirus relief passed by Congress so far "isn't reaching the people who need it most."

"Representative Ilhan Omar has responded by introducing legislation that would cancel rents and home mortgage payments nationwide," Ruben said. "It's time other members of Congress join her in bringing tangible relief to the millions unable to pay their bills."

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The Covid-19 Class Divide

by Robert Reich

Monday, April 27, 2020

The pandemic is putting America’s deepening class divide into stark relief. Four classes are emerging.

The Remotes: These are professional, managerial, and technical workers – an estimated 35 percent of the workforce – who are putting in long hours at their laptops, Zooming into conferences, scanning electronic documents, and collecting about the same pay as before the crisis.

Many are bored or anxious, but they’re well off compared to the three other classes.

The Essentials. They’re about 30 percent of workers, including nurses, homecare and childcare workers, group home workers, farm workers, food processors, truck drivers, warehouse and transit workers, drug store employees, sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, and the military.

Too many essentials lack adequate protective gear, paid sick leave, health insurance, and childcare, which is especially important now that schools are shuttered. They also deserve hazard pay.

Their vulnerability is generating a wave of worker activism at businesses such as Instacart, Amazon, Walmart, and Whole Foods. Mass-transit workers are organizing work stoppages.

Trump’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has the legal authority to require private employers provide essential workers with protective gear. Don’t hold your breath.

The Unpaid. They’re an even larger group that the unemployed – whose ranks could soon reach 25 percent, the same as in the Great Depression. Some of the unpaid are furloughed or have used up their paid leave. So far in this crisis, 43 percent of adults report they or someone in their household has lost jobs or pay, according to the Pew Research Center.

An estimated 9.2 million have lost their employer-provided health insurance.

Many of these jobs had been in personal services that can’t be done remotely, such as retail, restaurant, and hospitality work. But as consumers rein in spending, layoffs are spreading to news organizations, tech companies, consumer-goods manufacturers.  

The unpaid most need cash to feed their families and pay the rent. Fewer than half say they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month Pew.

So far, government has failed them, too. Checks mailed out by the Treasury last week are a pittance. Extra benefits could help, but unemployment offices are so overwhelmed with claims that they can’t get money out the door. Loans to small businesses have gone largely to big, well-connected businesses, with banks collecting fat fees.

On Wednesday, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said he opposed to any further federal aid to state and local governments, suggesting states declare bankruptcy instead. Which means even less money for unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and everything else the unpaid need.

The resulting desperation is fueling demands to “reopen the economy” long before it’s safe. If it comes down to a choice between risking one’s health and putting food on the table, many will take latter.

The Forgotten. This group includes everyone for whom social distancing is nearly impossible because they’re packed tightly into places most Americans don’t see – prisons, jails for undocumented immigrants, group homes for the severely disabled, camps for migrant farmworkers, Native American reservations, homeless shelters, and nursing homes.

While much of New York City is sheltering at home, for example, more than 17,000 men and women, many already in poor health, are sleeping in roughly 100 shelters for single adults.

All such places are becoming hot spots for the virus. These people need safe spaces with proper medical care, adequate social distancing, testing for the virus and isolation of those who have contracted it. Few are getting any of this.

Not surprisingly, the Essentials, the Unpaid, and the Forgotten are disproportionately poor, black, and Latino. And they are disproportionately becoming infected.

An Associated Press breakdown of available state and local data showed close to 33 percent of coronavirus deaths so far are African-American, despite representing only 14 percent of the total population in areas surveyed. The Navajo Nation already has lost more to coronavirus than have 13 states. Four of the 10 largest-known sources of infection in the United States have been correctional facilities.

These three groups aren’t getting what they need to survive this crisis because they don’t have lobbyists and political action committees to do their bidding in Washington or state capitals.  

The Remotes among us should be concerned, and not just because of the unfairness of the Covid-19 class divide. If the Essentials aren’t sufficiently protected, the Unpaid are forced back to work earlier than is safe, and the Forgotten remain forgotten, no one can be secure. Covid-19 will continue to spread sickness and death for months, if not years to come.

Off the Top of My Head

Why is the Federal Reserve Bailing Out Corporations With No Strings Attached?

by John Lawrence

A recent Washington Post article made the statement, "The U.S. plans to lend $500 billion to large companies. It won’t require them to preserve jobs or limit executive pay." The writer seemed to think this wasn't right. The bottom line is that it's not the U.S. government lending the money; it's the Federal Reserve which is not accountable to the people of the United States. It is not under any obligation to be democratic. It is privately owned by the big Wall Street banks and its main purpose is to provide liquidity to them. That's pretty much it. It was set up in 1913 in order to prevent runs on banks during banking panics. Since banks operate in terms of fractional reserve banking, which means they are allowed to loan out more money than they have in deposits, if everybody tries to get their money out of the bank at the same time. the bank has a liquidity crisis. That's where the Federal Reserve steps in.

The Fed is in charge of monetary policy and Congress is in charge of fiscal policy. The Fed sets interest rates in order to keep the value of the dollar stable and to control inflation. Congress authorizes budget expenditures which the taxpayers of the US are theoretically responsible for. In the past, as inflation has increased, the Fed has raised interest rates in order to slow economic expansion. If the economy goes into or is headed towards recession the Fed will lower interest rates in order to encourage economic expansion. Lately there has been no inflation despite interest rates being at approximately zero. So they really can't be reduced any further in order to increase economic activity despite the coronavirus pandemic which is forcing the economy into recession.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, the Fed has assumed a different role. Instead of setting monetary policy just by adjusting interest rates, it has engaged in a policy known as quantitative easing. Basically, this means that the Fed has printed money and bought Treasury bonds and other securities from the Big Banks in order to provide them with liquidity. Since the U.S. government itself has been running massive deficits and issuing tons of Treasury bonds to cover its debts, the Fed has been taking up the slack not only for the Wall Street banks but for the US government itself with Wall Street acting as the middle man for buying Treasuries. As the Fed has taken on this expanded role, it has also started bailing out corporations as well. It's a bailout nation with the Congress authorizing bailouts on the fiscal side and the Fed doing bailouts on the monetary side. They are coordinating their policies more than they traditionally have in the past.

There has been much confusion mostly deliberately caused by public officials about the public role of Congress and the separate private role of the Federal Reserve. In the book "Secrets of the Temple, How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country," author William Greider states: "The combat [between Congress and the Fed] and instability would continue because its real source was the political contract struck between democracy and capital back in 1913, the implicit decision that democratic politics could not be trusted to act responsibly in the national interest. Therefore, the authority and responsibilities of elected politicians were permanently curtailed. Put another way, the elected government was allowed to be permanently irresponsible  - free to indulge its own follies [like running budget deficits] and protected from the accountability by the higher authority, the nonelected central bank. The creation of the Federal Reserve represented a great retreat from democratic possibilities. The maturing of self-government was forever stunted."

So while the Chairman of the Fed usually speaks in cryptic terms unintelligble to the average American, his or her purpose was not to elucidate but to obfuscate. The Fed's role has always been on the side of sound money which the bond market insists upon and not on the side of labor. If somebody has to suffer, that role is allocated to working Americans. This was the case during the Great Recession of 2008 when the Fed bailed out the big banks but mortgagees got screwed. This is nothing new. Throughout history indebted farmers were let to go bankrupt, and the banks got preferential treatment. The Fed has always been on the side of capital not on the side of labor.

So the writers of the Washington Post article can sniff that the Fed is not imposing restrictions on the capital it is loaning to corporations, the fact of the matter is that the Fed has always been on the side of capital, not on the side of average Americans, and there is no reason to expect anything else. Democrats in Congress can put restrictions on money given to corporations that they can't use it to enhance CEO salaries or buy back their own stock, but the Fed has no interest in doing anything other than to make sure that the monied interests prevail.

Off the Top of My Head

When The Pandemic Is Over, The World Must Come Together

by John Lawrence, April 28, 2020

These are the fateful words of Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Prize Laureate and the first and only President of the Soviet Union. Recently, he recalled how the threat of nuclear war was reduced by the treaties in the 1980s made possible by his friendly relationship with Ronald Reagan. Writing in Time magazine, he said, "The leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union declared that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought." Despite the fact that the Cold War was declared to be over, the neocons running foreign policy today have been doing their best to create another one. The pandemic has made it clear that there are more important challenges than U.S.-Russian rivalry, and that the world has more to gain by cooperating even with supposed enemies or rivals than it does by perpetuating idiotic animosities. We have common enemies that affect us all with the coronavirus pandemic being just one of them.

Gorbachev mentioned "poverty and inequality, the degradation of the environment, the depletion of the earth and the oceans." Global warming is an existential threat that must be addressed now or there won't be a habitable earth left to fight over. "We have so far failed to develop and implement strategies and goals common to all mankind." Not only that the U.S. under Trump has retreated from any kind of cooperation with the other nations of the earth even our supposed allies. Instead U.S. foreign policy has been based on ordering other nations around as if we were the supreme bully. Trump's latest blunder is to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of a pandemic.

"Progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the U.N. in 2000, has been extremely uneven." The U.S. under Trump does not really support the U.N. in any way because it wants to be the ruler of nations not part of an organization that attempts to have a forum for the cooperation of nations. The United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000 commits world leaders to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women. The Eight Millennium Development Goals are:

• to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
• to achieve universal primary education;
• to promote gender equality and empower women;
• to reduce child mortality;
• to improve maternal health;
• to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;
• to ensure environmental sustainability; and
• to develop a global partnership for development.

I had never even heard of the Eight Millennium Development Goals although I think I'm pretty well informed. All of the media time spent on Trump's self-serving bragging could have been better spent informing us about this WHO program. But instead the media spends its time either chastising Trump's stupidity or praising his glory depending on which channel you watch. He has changed from campaign rallies to hour long daily commercials for himself.

"What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security. Even after the end of the Cold War, it has been envisioned mostly in military terms." Yes, military hubris crowds out any prospect of peace let alone a prospect of eliminating extreme poverty. Bill Gates is singlehandedly doing his best to eliminate poverty and disease in the world. He basically is a one man United Nations surrogate. He presciently tried to warn us of the pandemic in a Ted talk. Now he is spending millions of his own money on developing a coronavirus vaccine. There are some good people in the world - even billionaires. That I am sure of. It's just that not a lot of them occupy positions of power in the U.S. government.

Gorbachev continued: "The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people's health. To achieve it, we have to develop strategies, make preparations, plan and create reserves. But all efforts will fail if nations continue to waste money by fueling the arms race. I'll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking."

Gorbachev is calling on national leaders to cut military budgets by 10% to 15%. It is not enough. The mindset, even among Democrats, is that we need a huge military to defend ourselves from perceived threats and perceived enemies. They don't have the mindset that they could make the world a better place by defusing tensions among nations that they perceive as threats. It might start by apologizing to Iran for overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossaddegh and installing the brutal Shah. That would go a long way to establishing a peaceful relationship with Iran. It could start there. Instead the U.S. only fuels tensions by applying sanctions and carrying on like the rest of the world should bow down to the almighty dollar.

Off the Top of My Head

Silver Lining of the COBID Pandemic: Cleaner Air and Less Global Warming

by John Lawrence, April 27, 2020

Because of less economic activity, the air is cleaner all around the world. Researchers  have seen a drop in air pollutants as a result of fewer cars on the road and less exhaust from factories due to the shelter-in-place orders issued by world governments. While we've heard a lot about the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, which is emitted into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, nitrogen pollution is a particularly potent greenhouse gas as it is over 300 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. NASA satellite data shows recent nitrogen dioxide levels are down about 30% over major metropolitan areas including Washington, DC, New York City, Philadelphia and Boston. Nitrogen dioxide is a major cause of air pollution which results in lung disease. People living in environments where there is much air pollution already have compromised pulmonary systems and are more vulnerable to lung disease and the coronavirus which attacks lungs. Breathing polluted air is an underlying condition.

Carbon dioxide emissions are also down. In China, carbon emissions were down an estimated 18 percent between early February and mid-March due to reductions in coal consumption and industrial output. This saved some 250 million metric tons of carbon pollution - more than half the annual carbon emissions of the United Kingdom. Los Angeles’s notorious smog has lifted, giving way to clear blue skies and, according to Environmental Protection Agency data for March, better air quality than the city has experienced in almost 40 years. Carbon monoxide emissions are down by 50% in New York. You can see the stars in Delhi, a city where people wore masks long before the coronavirus to protect themselves from thick car fumes and industrial exhaust.

So as economies around the world suffer, gasses which contribute to air pollution and global warming are down. While governments around the world lollygag with GHG reduction, it takes a pandemic to actually do something about it. Even though the pandemic may destroy economies, it might save the planet from an even more disastrous fate - global warming. However, once economies reopen, pollution and GHG emissions are very likely to increase back to their former levels or even higher. If only there were a way to keep global warming at the current level and even to reduce it further which must be done if planet earth is to escape the fate of runaway global warming, a fate much worse than the worst pandemic.

How ironic that the 50th anniversary of Earth Day saw improvements to the environment while lockdowns around the world prevented people from being out in the environment. There has been a glimpse into a cleaner world in which electric vehicles could keep the air as clear as it is now every day. Yet governments of the world tarry, hesitant to do anything to disrupt economic activity. Amid these small gains for air quality, President Trump has directed the EPA to rewrite the air quality regulations he says pose "unnecessary and outdated barriers to growth." This will undoubtedly hasten air quality destruction and GHG pollution especially as the nation reopens its economy. Trump's 2019 repeal of the Clean Power Plan implemented under former President Barack Obama  was replaced with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule in 2019. The Environmental Protection Network says that that replacement "will cause more people, especially in front-line communities, to have heart attacks; suffer from asthma, bronchitis, and other respiratory illnesses; visit a hospital; and miss days of work and school."

Trump wants to restart the economy at any price including sacrificing more people to COBID-19. Some will succumb to the virus. Others will develop lung cancer from the pollutants in the air. Still others will get various cancers from the lack of clean water being served up in several locations around the country, not just Flint, Michigan. Among his many environmental sins, Trump has also tried to force California to lower its tailpipe emission standards. Courts are in the process of dealing with that. Hopefully, more rational and compassionate heads will prevail when Trump is voted out of office, the US rejoins the Paris Accords and reenters the nuclear agreement with Iran. Tensions around the world need to be reduced so that nations can get on with the business of cooperating over current and future pandemics as well as the present and future danger of global warming. These issues are way more important than relying on the military to solve every threatening situation. The military is helpless to do anything about either a pandemic or global warming. In fact it is only making the real dangers to society and the human race worse and consuming trillions of dollars that could be put to better use elsewhere. We need to get our priorities straight.

Cuba to the Rescue, But Don’t Tell the American People

Published on Thursday, April 23, 2020

by Jacobin

As we move through this crisis, we see the tragedy of the rich superpower with its privatized, dysfunctional health care system failing its people, while its impoverished neighbor — under constant attack from the superpower — reaches out to help the world.

by Medea Benjamin

 

17 Comments

Doctors and nurses of Cuba's Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade pose with a portrait of Cuban late leader Fidel Castro as they are bid farewell before travelling to hard-hit Italy to help in the fight against the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, at the Central Unit of Medical Cooperation in Havana, on March 21, 2020. (Photo: Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images)

While Bernie Sanders paid a political price for uttering something positive about Cuba’s literacy program, the current pandemic has shown the whole world the heroic side of Cuba’s health care system.

I saw this heroism firsthand when I worked with Cuban doctors in poor, remote villages in Africa. It was the 1970s and I was a young woman employed as a nutritionist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. My colleagues were good people who were helping to feed hungry children. They also made hefty salaries and lived a wealthy lifestyle they could never afford back home. The Cubans were different. They lived simply, worked under the harshest conditions, and earned almost nothing for their services. Their motivation was purely to help people in need.

They called it internationalism and said it was their revolutionary duty to repay their debt to society. They quoted Che Guevara: “The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.”

I was inspired, and ended up moving to Cuba. Four years, a marriage, and a baby later, I was accused by the Cuban government of writing articles critical of the revolution and deported. Certainly, I saw and experienced aspects of the Cuban system I disliked, but I never lost my admiration for the country’s public health system and its commitment to international solidarity.

It is truly inspiring that this small, poor island has basic health indicators equal, or better, to those of the world’s richest countries. This is even more remarkable after it has faced a brutal US blockade and sanctions for sixty years. Cuba’s infant mortality rate of 4 per 1,000 live births is lower than in the United States — and that’s according to the CIA! There’s little food on the store shelves and shortages in the pharmacies, but, as Cubans say, “We live like poor people, but we die like rich people.” That’s because their life expectancy of seventy-nine years is the same as in the United States, despite the fact that Cuba spends less than about $800 per person per year on health care compared with $11,000 in the United States.

Like most of the world, Cuba is now grappling with coronavirus. As of April 20, there were 1,137 confirmed cases, with 38 deaths. But Cuba’s free and universal health care system, including a robust cadre of health professionals, puts the island in a better position to deal with this crisis than most countries. With its intense focus on training health professionals, Cuba has the highest density of physicians in the world. Its ratio of medical professionals to patients is roughly three times higher than in the United States.

Cuba not only trains its own doctors; it trains doctors from all over the world. The island of only 11 million people is home to the world’s largest international medical school, the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). Since its founding in 1999, the school has trained over 35,000 young people from 138 countries, including the United States. And here’s the kicker: it’s free.

Pastors for Peace, the group that selects US students coming from the “humblest and neediest” communities, says the scholarships include full tuition, dormitory housing, three meals per day, textbooks, school uniforms, and a small monthly stipend. While graduates from US medical schools leave saddled with six-figure debts, the only debt ELAM students have is a commitment to practice medicine in low-income and medically underserved communities. That’s why you’ll find ELAM graduates like Dr. Melissa Barbar on the front-lines in the Bronx fighting coronavirus today.

If that doesn’t make you teary-eyed, just look at the brigade of doctors taking off for international missions to the most COVID-19 affected area of Italy, Lombardy. “We are not superheroes,” intensive care specialist Leonardo Fernandez told Reuters as the first brigade left Havana. “We are revolutionary doctors.” As of April 1, Cuba had sent 800 medical personnel to fight COVID-19 in sixteen countries, from Angola to Andorra, and more are on their way.

For Cuba, medical assistance has been a hallmark of the revolution: helping Chilean earthquake victims in 1963; Nicaraguans and Hondurans devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998; Indonesia tsunami victims in 2004; Haitians after the disastrous 2010 earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak. Teams were also dispatched to Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to fight Ebola in 2014.

Gradually, this “army of white coats,” as Fidel Castro called them, not only responded to emergencies overseas but began serving as family doctors in poor communities around the world. Poorer countries pay only the medical teams’ expenses or seek international support to compensate Cuba; wealthier countries pay more.

But the Trump administration poses a significant challenge to Cuban social programs. When he came to power, his administration launched an all-out attack on the Cuban economy: placing new restrictions on US travel to the island, reducing the amount of remittances Cuban Americans could send back home, interfering with the transport of Venezuelan oil to the island, and trying to sabotage Cuba’s medical collaborations.

Anti-Cuba zealots in the Trump administration have been enticing Cuban doctors working overseas to defect, paying journalists to write negative stories, slapping sanctions on Cubans in charge of the program, and strong-arming countries to expel Cuban doctors.

The crux of the attack has been to paint the program as a form of modern slavery because the doctors only receive about a quarter of the money the countries pay for their services. But Cuban health professionals volunteer for these assignments — they want the experience, they earn much more than they would back home, and they know the rest of the money goes to support Cuba’s national health care system.

The Trump administration has been successful in convincing the right-wing governments that came to power in Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador since 2018 to send about 9,000 Cubans packing. In a tragic twist, these same countries are now overwhelmed with coronavirus and lamenting the loss of experienced professionals.

As we move through this crisis, we see the tragedy of the rich superpower with its privatized, dysfunctional health care system failing its people, while its impoverished neighbor — under constant attack from the superpower — reaches out to help the world. We see Trump desperate to deflect from his catastrophic bungling of this pandemic, including defunding the WHO in what a prestigious medical editor called “an appalling betrayal of global solidarity,” while Cuba’s army of white coats have become the embodiment of global solidarity.

But if you are an American with political ambitions, you might think twice before saying something good about Cuba’s health care system.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the new book, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her previous books include: Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection; Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control; Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, and (with Jodie Evans) Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide). Follow her on Twitter: @medeabenjamin

© 2019 Jacobin

Off the Top of My Head

The Solution for New York State's Budget Crisis: A Wealth Tax on Wall Street

John Lawrence

There's a storm a'brewing between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. New York is facing a $15 billion revenue shortfall due to the coronavirus. Cuomo wants the Federal government to fill the gap, but Mitch has said, "Let the states go bankrupt." McConnell has told the blue states,"Drop Dead." New York state is a democratic state which won't vote for Donald Trump so McConnell is now all concerned about the budget deficit. The solution lies in the fact that New York City, the richest city in the world is located in New York state. Wall Street, home of the biggest and richest banks in the world is located in New York City. JPMorgan Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon is a billionaire. Goldman Sachs' CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, is a billionaire. Wall Street banks have just been given $1.5 trillion by the Federal Reserve. Besides that between 2008 and 2015, the Federal Reserve contributed about $4.5 in quantitative easing (QE) to the big Wall Street banks.

In addition New York is the hedge fund capital of the universe. They are worth trillions of dollars. So a wealth tax on Wall Street billionaires, banks and hedge funds could easily fill New York State's budget gap. In addition to that consider Manhattan real estate. The median price of homes currently listed in Manhattan is $1,550,000. At $238 million, 220 Central Park South penthouse is the most expensive home sold in the U.S. Come on, Governor Cuomo. Just raise the property taxes on Manhattan real estate. Property tax is a wealth tax. A wealth tax on New York City assets could easily fill the budget gap. What are you waiting for? Democrats control the majority in both houses of the New York State legislature. No Mitch McConnell there. The state can just vote to raise taxes on billionaires, banks and hedge funds.

OK, here's the likely scenario. If Cuomo proposes a wealth tax on Wall Street banks, hedge funds and billionaires, all of which have received massive bailouts from the Federal Reserve, the affected parties will massively lobby New York state legislators and Republicans at the national level including Mitch McConnell. According to New York Public Radio in 2012:

Hedge funds, hedge fund executives, and their immediate family members gave $23.4 million dollars to state and local politicians from the start of 2005 through February of this year, according to a report released Wednesday by Common Cause New York, an advocacy group that campaigns for open government.

While this is the first time Common Cause has tracked these donations in New York, contributions from the hedge funds in federal campaigns leapt from only $2.4 million in 2000 to $19 million in 2008.

I'm sure the affected parties have contributed much more since 2012 and will ride McConnell's ass and ply him and other Republicans with money, and then Congressional Republicans will change their tune regarding bailing out New York state. The result will be that New York state will not have to tax Wall Street although 15 billion is just a small blip on one billionaires' balance sheet. Remember a billion is a thousand million. C'mon, Governor Cuomo, it's a no brainer.

Humanity Must 'Tackle Two Crises at Once,' Says Greta Thunberg of Climate and COVID-19 on 50th Earth Day

Published on Wednesday, April 22, 2020

by Common Dreams

U.N. Chief António Guterres declared the pandemic "an unprecedented wake-up call" and urged world leaders to pursue a "green recovery."

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

19 Comments

A resident wearing a face mask stands next to a mural featuring Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and her quote "You're never too young to save the world" on March 30, 2020 in the Trullo district of Rome during Italy's lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)

The 50th annual global Earth Day coming amid the coronavirus pandemic sparked fresh demands from Fridays for Future founder Greta Thunberg, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, and others for the international community to simultaneously tackle the COVID-19 and climate crises.

"Today is Earth Day and that reminds us that the climate and environmental emergency is still ongoing and we need to tackle both the corona pandemic, this crisis, at the same time as we tackle climate and environmental emergency, because we need to be able to tackle two crises at once," said 17-year-old Thunberg.

She emphasized that while it is always "important" and "essential" to be guided by science, "during crises like this it is even more important that we listen to scientists, science, and to the experts. That goes for all crises, whether it's the corona crisis or whether it's the climate crisis."

Thunberg's comments came in a livestreamed conversation with Johan Rockström, a Swedish professor who is joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, hosted by the Nobel Prize Museum. The teen activist, also a Swede, has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Price.

Thunberg's youth-led climate action movement Fridays for Future marked Earth Day by releasing a short video entitled "Our House Is On Fire," evoking a speech the activist delivered at the World Economic Forum's annual summit in Davos, Switzerland in January 2018.

"We believe it's time people realize that climate change isn't going to happen, but that it's already happening," Fridays for Future U.S. spokesperson Joe Hobbs said in a statement. "We hope that by watching this video people will realize they need to take action now, instead of putting it off until later."

During a video address Wednesday, Guterres said: "On this International Mother Earth Day, all eyes are on the COVID-19 pandemic—the biggest test the world has faced since the Second World War. We must work together to save lives, ease suffering, and lessen the shattering economic and social consequences.

"But there is another deep emergency—the planet's unfolding environmental crisis," he added. "Biodiversity is in steep decline. Climate disruption is approaching a point of no return. We must act decisively to protect our planet from both the coronavirus and the existential threat of climate disruption."

Guterres declared that "the current crisis is an unprecedented wake-up call" and outlined six "climate-related actions to shape the recovery and the work ahead," urging world leaders to pursue a green recovery from the pandemic that ensures "a healthy and resilient future for people and planet alike."

 

As the coronavirus has spread across the globe, killing nearly 180,000 people, infecting more than 2.59 million, and devastating the world's economy, climate and environmental activists have called for a global Green New Deal and just recovery that prioritizes a rapid transition to renewable energy and other efforts to reduce planet-heating emissions and pollution more broadly. Recent studies tying poor air quality to COVID-19 deaths have added weight to those demands.

The U.N. chief's comments Wednesday were welcome by 350.org, a global environmental advocacy group leading the calls for a just recovery from the public health crisis:

#EarthDay2020 BREAKING: Secretary General of @UN calls on governments to use their economic response to the Coronavirus pandemic to respond to the "even deeper emergency" of #ClimateCrisis with #JustRecovery for all (via @ReutersUK
) https://t.co/COCJ4AqycV #FightEveryCrisis

— 350 dot org (@350) April 22, 2020

Author and activist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, discussed Earth Day, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic on Democracy Now! Wednesday morning. McKibben's interview echoed his piece for The New Yorker last week entitled "How We Can Build a Hardier World After the Coronavirus."

Among the key messages that the coronavirus pandemic is sending the world, according to McKibben, is the importance of listening to science. As he put it during the show: "If they say stand six feet apart, we stand six feet apart. If they say it's time to stop burning coal and gas and oil, then that's what we need to do."

"Similarly, we're learning lessons about delay in timing here that are crucial," McKibben continued. "As you know, the countries that flattened the coronavirus curve early on are doing far better than those like ours, which delayed. That's a pretty perfect analog to the 30 years that we've wasted in the climate crisis."

"And I think third, maybe most powerfully," he added, "the lesson that we're learning is social solidarity is almost everything."

Addressing how the ongoing coronavirus-related lockdowns have caused a massive decline in emissions and pollution around the world, McKibben said that "there are people on Earth who are getting literally their first lungfuls of clean air this month in their lives... Even as we all live through the horror of this pandemic, there are people who are glimpsing the way that the world could be."

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Off the Top of My Head

In 1918 Pandemic, There Were 3 Spikes Over a 10 Month Period, Each More Deadly Than the Last

by John Lawrence

John M. Barry's book, “The Great Influenza,” was an exhaustive analysis of the Spanish flu which ravaged the US between 1918 and 1920. In 2005, the National Academies of Sciences named it the year’s outstanding book on science or medicine. There are lessons that can be drawn from this book that apply to the current pandemic. First no vaccine was available throughout the entire pandemic. One wouldn't become available until 1930. Just as today there were many snake oil salesmen offering one only to have it proven worthless. Doctors were not too concerned about the first wave of Spanish flu because it wasn't that deadly.

Then a more strident form of the virus revealed itself and it turned out to be much more deadly. Throughout fall 1918, this aggressive form of the virus swept through the U.S. and the world in a second wave, ultimately killing 0.65 percent of all Americans and double that percentage of young people. Italy lost 1 percent of its population to the virus, the worst death rate of any developed country. Troops returning to the United States from European countries brought back the newly aggressive virus. No one can predict whether COBID-19 will mutate into a more deadly form of the virus. At present it has not been studied enough. Those people who just want to wing it like President Trump or suggest bogus remedies are likely to have a deleterious effect on the process of getting rid of the virus and getting back to normal. Governor Cuomo said it, "This is no time to act stupid."

In the current pandemic, San Francisco's mayor was the first to order a citywide lockdown. It was the same in 1918 — and it helped the city avoid widespread deaths initially. San Francisco's public health director quarantined all naval installations, organized a citywide effort to prepare and urged people to wear masks. Despite those efforts, the city was still struck by the pandemic's third wave, in winter 1919. In the end San Francisco suffered the most deaths of any city on the West Coast.

Philadelphia was next. Wilmer Krusen, Philadelphia's public health director, only agreed to monitor the situation a full week after the virus first appeared in the city. Krusen insisted to reporters — who believed him — the influenza was only “old-fashioned influenza or grip.” He allowed a major parade to be held on Sept. 28, where several hundred thousand people were jammed along the route. Within 72 hours, every bed in the city's 31 hospitals was filled. People were trying to bribe nurses $100 to let them in. On the third day after the parade, 117 people died in a single day. Krusen didn't ban public meetings until Oct. 3. Is this a lesson for Georgia's governor who wants to reopen? Or a lesson for Trump who minimized the effects of the virus saying it would be gone by summer.

In some areas, including Phoenix, San Francisco and parts of Michigan and Georgia, the third wave killed more people than the second wave. Officials in Savannah, Ga., who had reopened public gathering places, re-closed them on Jan. 15 with even stricter rules than before. Is this a harbinger of Georgia's wanting to reopen prematurely like they did in 1919? They haven't learned their lesson, I guess. Maybe they should study their own history.

Anyway what you don't want to do is open, than close, then reopen, then close. That would be self defeating and only prolong the whole situation. There should be no more public gatherings until a vaccine is available and testing has show conclusively that the chances of getting the coronavirus are less than one in a thousand. The statisticians can figure out how many tests would be necessary to determine that.

Coronavirus and the Height of Corporate Welfare

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the global economy, here’s how massive corporations are shafting the rest of us in order to secure billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts.

The airline industry demanded a massive bailout of nearly $60 billion in taxpayer dollars, and ended up securing $50 billion – half in loans, half in direct grants that don’t need to be paid back. 

Airlines don’t deserve a cent. The five biggest U.S. airlines spent 96 percent of their free cash flow over the last decade buying back shares of their own stock to boost executive bonuses and please wealthy investors.

United was so determined to get its windfall of taxpayer money that it threatened to fire workers if it didn’t get its way. Before the Senate bill passed, CEO Oscar Munoz wrote that “if Congress doesn’t act on sufficient government support by the end of March, our company will begin to…reduce our payroll….”

Airlines could have renegotiated their debts with their lenders outside court, or file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They’ve reorganized under bankruptcy many times before. Either way, they’d keep flying.

The hotel industry says it needs $150 billion. The industry says as many as 4 million workers could lose their jobs in the coming weeks if they don’t receive a bailout. Everyone from general managers to housekeepers will be affected. But don’t worry – the layoffs won’t reach the corporate level.

Hotel chains don’t need a bailout. For years, they’ve been making record profits while underpaying their workers. Marriott, the largest hotel chain in the world, repurchased $2.3 billion of its own stock last year, while raking in nearly $4 billion in profits. 

Thankfully, Trump’s hotels and businesses, as well as any of his family members’ businesses, are barred from receiving anything from the $500 billion corporate bailout money. But the bill is full of loopholes that Trump can exploit to benefit himself and his hotels.

Cruise ships also want to be bailed out, and Trump called them a “prime candidate” to receive a government handout. But they don’t deserve it either. The three cruise ship corporations controlling 75 percent of the entire global market are incorporated outside of the United States to avoid paying taxes.

They’re floating tax shelters, paying an average U.S. tax rate of just 0.8 percent. Democrats secured key provisions stipulating that companies are only eligible for bailout money if they are incorporated in the United States and have a majority of U.S. employees, so the cruise ship industry likely won’t see a dime of relief funding. However, Trump has made it clear he still wants to help them.

The justification I’ve heard about why all these corporations need to be bailed out is they’ll keep workers on their payrolls. But why should we believe big corporations will protect their workers right now? 

The $500 billion slush fund included in the Senate’s emergency relief package doesn’t require corporations to keep paying their workers and has dismally weak restrictions on stock buybacks and executive pay. 

Even if the bill did provide worker protections, what’s going to happen to these corporations’ subcontractors and gig workers? What about worker benefits, pensions and health care? How much of this bailout is going to end up in the pockets of executives and big investors?

The record of Big Business isn’t comforting. Amazon, one of the richest corporations in the world, which paid almost no taxes last year, is only offering unpaid time off for workers who are sick and just two weeks paid leave for workers who test positive for the virus. Meanwhile, it demands its employees put in mandatory overtime.

Oh, and these corporations made sure they and other companies with more than 500 employees were exempt from the requirement in the first House coronavirus bill that employers provide paid sick leave.

And now, less than a month into statewide shelter-in-place orders and social distancing restrictions, Wall Streeters and corporate America’s chief executives are calling for supposedly “low-risk” groups to be sent back to work to restart the economy. 

They’re so concerned about protecting their bottom line that they’re willing to let people die to preserve their stock portfolios, all while they continue working from the safety and security of their own homes. It’s the most repugnant class warfare you can imagine.

Here’s the bottom line: no mega-corporation deserves a cent of bailout money. For decades these companies and their billionaire executives have been dodging taxes, getting tax cuts, shafting workers, and bending the rules to enrich themselves. There’s no reason to trust them to do the right thing with billions of dollars in taxpayer money. 

Every penny we have needs to go to average Americans who desperately need income support and health care, and to hospitals that need life-saving equipment. It’s outrageous that the Senate bill gave corporations nearly four times as much money as hospitals on the front lines. 

Corporate welfare is bad enough in normal times. Now, in a national emergency, it’s morally repugnant. We must stop bailing out corporations. It’s time we bail out people.