Everyone’s a Socialist in a Pandemic

Medicare for All, but Just for This One Disease

All it took was a global epidemic of potentially unprecedented scale and severity and suddenly it’s like we’re turning into Denmark over here.

In the last few days, a parade of American companies that had long resisted providing humane and necessary benefits to their workers abruptly changed their minds, announcing plans to pay and protect even their lowest-rung employees harmed by the ravages of the coronavirus. (...)

It wasn’t just sick leave. Overnight, workplaces across the country were transformed into Scandinavian Edens of flexibility. Can’t make it to the office because your kid has to unexpectedly stay home from school? Last week, it sucked to be you. This week: What are you even doing asking? Go home, be with your kid! (...)

And wasn’t it almost funny how everyone and their doctor was suddenly extolling the benefits of government-funded health care for all? When the Trump administration told Congress that it was considering reimbursing hospitals for treating uninsured Americans who contracted Covid-19, Republicans who had long opposed this sort of “socialized medicine” were now conceding that, well, of course, they didn’t mean it quite so absolutely.

“You can look at it as socialized medicine,” Representative Ted Yoho, a Republican from Florida, told HuffPost. “But in the face of an outbreak, a pandemic, what’s your options?”

As I said, it’s almost funny: Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic. But the laugh catches in your throat, because the only joke here is the sick one American society plays on workers every day.

The truth is that we’re nowhere near turning into Denmark. Many of the newly announced worker-protection policies, like sick leave and flexibility, are limited, applying only to the effects of this coronavirus (the exception is Darden’s new sick-leave plan, which the company says is permanent). The administration’s proposed relief plan could well be vaporware. And Republicans’ interest in universal health care is ephemeral. Call it Medicare For All But Just For This One Disease.

But there’s an even deeper tragedy at play, beyond the meagerness of the new benefits. The true embarrassment is that it took a possible pandemic for leaders to realize that the health of the American work force is important to the strength of the nation. (...)

It is not yet clear how well the American system will respond, but the early signs are far from encouraging. What we’re learning is that our society might be far more brittle than we had once imagined. The virus has laid bare our greatest vulnerability: We’ve got the world’s biggest economy and the world’s strongest military, but it turns out we might have built the entire edifice upon layers and layers of unaccounted-for risk, because we forgot to assign a value to the true measure of a nation’s success — the well-being of its population.

Much of the danger we face now grows out of America’s tattered social safety net — the biting cost and outright lack of health care and child care and elder care, the corporate war on paid leave, and the plagues of homelessness and hunger. As the virus gains a foothold on our shores, many Americans are only now waking up to the ways these flaws in the safety net cascade into one another. If companies don’t pay workers when they’re off sick, they’ll have an incentive to work while ill, endangering everyone. If you don’t cover people’s medical bills, they may not seek medical help, endangering everyone.

There may be a silver lining here: What if the virus forces Americans and their elected representatives to recognize the strength of a collectivist ethos? The coronavirus, in fact, offers something like a preview of many of the threats we might face from the worst effects of climate change. Because the virus is coldly indiscriminate and nearly inescapable, it leaves us all, rich and poor, in the same boat: The only way any of us is truly protected is if the least among us is protected.

by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Scott Olson/Getty Images
[ed. See also: A Report from the Epicenter (TPM).]

Springing Into Non-Action

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the administration was looking into taking steps that could put hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S. economy to shield it from a slowdown brought on by the disruption from coronavirus. (...)

The White House is examining tax relief measures, loan guarantees, reimbursing workers for lost pay, aid to small and mid-sized businesses, and support for airlines, hotels and other travel businesses, Mnuchin said.

He likened the coronavirus outbreak to a hurricane, and said the costs needed to be picked up. But he said Trump felt strongly that U.S. companies needed to be protected, not bailed out.

“Whatever we do, kind of in the next 48 hours, that’s just the first step. We’ll be back. And I think there’s big bipartisan support. People understand that we have to help small and medium-sized businesses and certain industries,” Mnuchin told a House of Representative committee.

A central feature of the administration’s plan to counter the economic effects of coronavirus is payroll tax relief, although the extent and duration of the proposal were unclear. (...)

A package of Democratic proposals to address problems arising from the coronavirus outbreak could be voted on by the House as early as this week, including paid sick leave for those affected, a House Democratic aide said.

The bill, still under development, could also expand federal food aid programs, especially to low-income families whose children might not be able to attend schools where they receive meals.

by David Lawder, Susan Heavey, Reuters | Read more:
[ed. Predictable. After initially downplaying the seriousness of the virus, the Trump administration now springs into action (or will, eventually, soon, hopefully) with proposed tax breaks and bailouts for businesses, while lobbying the Fed for more rate cuts. [Update: And canceling all travel from Europe (but not from the United Kingdom, or for American citizens) What?]. Democrats are proposing assistance to people directly affected by the virus (see here).]

Thanks For All The Fish: A Wild Salmon Story

I had salmon on my mind when I decided to move to Alaska 20 years ago. My boyfriend at the time, who was trying to convince me to migrate north with him, grilled up delicious fillets of wild Alaskan sockeye for me. That deep red flesh lured me out of vegetarianism and to higher latitudes; a month after he packed the back of his old Volvo station wagon and hit the Alaska Highway, I stuffed a backpack and two duffels, hopped on a ferry and headed north to join him. When I arrived in a little community called Ketchikan, pink salmon thronged a creek that ran right through the middle of town. A thousand dorsal fins wriggled out of the water as the fish pressed upstream. I was hooked.

Though that boyfriend and I split, I’ve stayed north ever since. Now, I live in Homer, a small coastal town on a salmon-filled bay, with my husband and two daughters. Since moving here my life has revolved around these fish. I grew up along the tepid, tea-coloured creeks of Maryland that held minnows and crayfish and as a kid I had dropped small hooks into lakes in search of a sunfish or two, but soon after I arrived in Alaska I began fishing for salmon with a salvaged scrap of net in the bay that landed nearly a winter’s worth. Pulling gleaming fish from these murky waters that first time felt magical – and still does. Few things so wondrous in life are as free.

Today, my family and I bend the fleeting summer months – salmon season – around the opportunities to catch enough of them to fill our freezer, timing skiff trips across the bay to coincide with a run of sockeye up a rushing creek, or with the days when the snagging is good in a tidal lagoon nearby. The rest of the year, we pull fillets out of our large, second freezer or pluck jars of canned salmon off the shelf, and eat this fish dozens of different ways – grilled, baked, stir-fried, pickled, smoked, raw, and made into burgers, salad and soup.

I live in a place that’s wedded to salmon. Hundreds of local people in this town of 5,000 are commercial salmon fishermen, scores more fish for themselves or work in an industry tied to salmon. So it makes sense that the local calendar runs on these fish. Schools break up in late May so families can prepare for the salmon season. The ebb and flow of boats from the harbour and local boatyards follow salmon. Tourists do too, thronging into town just as the fish start filling local rivers.

It might be odd that Homer calls itself the “Halibut Fishing Capital of the World” when it’s salmon that truly captures locals’ hearts. Halibut are dun-coloured flatfish; we think of them as meat that swims. Their firm, white flesh is a mild and adaptable ingredient that makes for a good break from salmon. But no one feels a special kinship with halibut. No one gets tattoos of them, either. Go to an end-of-summer potluck here, and not only will you get to enjoy salmon on the grill (and prepared in a dozen other ways), you’ll be served an ample helping of salmon body art as well.

I love that my daughters – aged seven and ten – are growing up in this salmon world. My ten-year-old’s fourth-grade teacher is a commercial salmon fisherman and over the years two of my kids’ favourite babysitters have been commercial fishermen too: kind, strong young women who grew up helping out in their family’s fishing businesses. Maggie is now the captain of her own boat. Isabel, a whiz at running skiffs and picking fish from nets, has recently left the state for college but will, no doubt, come back for salmon season.

My own social world is a web of relationships that have something to do with salmon: Kara, my die-hard salmon-fishing partner, was also at the births of my two children; some days, I’m not sure which experience has been more foundational for our friendship. There’s Rebecca, who is frozen in my mind standing on her paddleboard in a wetsuit, holding up a huge silver salmon she had just hooked while our kids played together in the bay. Christine came up to Alaska to commercial fish and now is a nurse. Jason built a salmon smokehouse last summer in his yard. Meghan is raising her kids on the back deck of her commercial salmon gillnetter.

Salmon play a role in my marriage too. Each summer, when it’s time to smoke and can salmon, my husband and I reminisce about the first batch of fish we put up together, the one before we were married and long before kids, when we were living in a sunny, second-story apartment at the beach. That salmon, we remind each other, was the most beautiful fish we ever prepared. We had cut the fillets into tidy strips, brined and rinsed them before laying the fish on racks on the deck, where an ideal combination of sun and wind made them glisten like bars of ruby and gave them a perfect pellicle, the tacky skin that must form on the fish to seal in moisture before you smoke it. We’ve never managed a pellicle like that since. When we talk about that salmon, we’re speaking in code about the passing of beauty and time, about the ways we long for those carefree days at the beach. (...)

In Alaska, we pride ourselves on having a different salmon story. Alaska has more miles of coastline than all of the other states combined and the bulk of our coastal waters are salmon habitat. We think of our state as a place built on salmon. Native peoples have been eating salmon for more than 11,000 years, in many cases living lives that centred on these fish, catching them by net, spear, trap, dart, hook and weir; eating them year-round fresh, dried, smoked and fermented; and making the skin into boots and parkas.

For more than 150 years, people have come from all over the world for Alaska’s salmon. Canneries cropped up along the state’s coastlines as early as 1878, with segregated housing for Italian, Chinese, Scandinavian and, later, Filipino workers. It’s because of these fish that Alaska is one of the United States. When a David and Goliath battle broke out between local salmon fishermen and the Seattle-based companies that had blocked off the rivers with fish traps, local residents fought back, demanding local control and pressing for statehood, which was granted in 1959.

Since then, lack of development – we have only about one person per square mile here – and careful management of fisheries, have kept Alaska’s salmon runs viable, maintaining an industry worth billions of dollars that employs some 30,000 people per year. In Southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay, you’ll find the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery where last year more than 56m red salmon returned, a run more than 100 times that of all the wild salmon returning to Norway. (...)

Our state is a jumble of hippies, soldiers, recluses, artists and oil men, but salmon is something we all agree on. We want them in our lives – in our nets, on our lines, in our rivers and on our dinner plates. And more – we want to be able to catch them with our kids. In many ways, salmon define who we are as Alaskans – bolstering the cherished image we have of ourselves as tough, self-reliant people living at the edge of the wilderness. And in a world that is increasingly polarised, salmon remind us to embrace anything that brings us together.

by Miranda Weiss, The Economist 1843 |  Read more:

Image: Ian Willms

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Pelosi, Schumer to President Trump on Coronavirus Response: Put Health and Safety of American People Before Corporate Needs

Washington, D.C. – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer released the following joint statement today urging President Trump to prioritize the needs of American workers and their families before the needs of major corporations in the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak:

“We are hoping to work with the administration on a coordinated, government-wide plan to respond to the coronavirus. We are pleased that we passed an emergency response bill on an overwhelming, bipartisan basis that provided a significant increase in resources beyond the administration’s request.

“However, President Trump continues to manufacture needless chaos within his administration and it is hampering the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. In light of reports that the Trump administration is considering new tax cuts for major corporations impacted by the coronavirus, we are demanding that the administration prioritize the health and safety of American workers and their families over corporate interests.

• Paid sick leave — workers impacted by quarantine orders or responsible for caring for children impacted by school closures must receive paid sick leave to alleviate the devastating consequences of lost wages;
• Enhanced Unemployment Insurance — we must ensure unemployment insurance benefits are available and sufficient for workers who may lose their jobs from the economic impacts of the epidemic;
• Food security — we must expand SNAP, WIC, school lunch and other initiatives and suspend implementation of any regulations that weaken federal food assistance, in order to ensure vulnerable populations do not lose access to food during this epidemic;
• Clear protections for frontline workers — we must have clear standards and sufficient distribution of necessary protective equipment for health care and other workers who are in contact with people who have been exposed or are suffering from the virus as well as the people responsible for cleaning buildings and public facilities;
• Widespread and free coronavirus testing — to control the spread of coronavirus, the administration must ensure that all Americans who need an evaluation are able to access locations for cost-free testing and rapidly increase the unacceptably low daily test processing capacity inside the U.S.;
• Affordable treatment for all — patients must be reimbursed for any non-covered coronavirus-related costs, or else the epidemic will be worsened because Americans will fear they cannot afford the costs associated with treatment;
• Anti-price gouging protections — we must ensure that Americans are protected from price gouging of medical and non-medical essentials during this emergency;
• Increase capacity of medical system — we must use our emergency response mechanisms to mobilize resources and facilities in order to respond to surges in demand.

“The administration must move more quickly and seriously to address the severe impacts of the coronavirus on the financial security of America’s families.”

by Office of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi |  Read more:
[ed. Good recommendations, focused on people, we'll see how many are accepted. Of course, businesses are coming out of the woodwork with suggestions, too.]

Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden

If you are a Democrat, you may be thinking about the presidential primary something like this: Joe Biden doesn’t seem like a bad guy. He was a good Vice President under Obama, and he’s certainly better than the monster we have in the White House right now. Biden may not be our perfect candidate—but who is? Right now the race is between Biden and Bernie Sanders, and Biden is clearly the safe bet. Bernie wants to shake up the whole party and push a radical agenda that Americans aren’t ready for. I agree with Bernie on a lot of things, but it’s time to get serious about beating Trump. Super Tuesday showed that Democratic voters want someone stable and experienced; they don’t want to throw out the “establishment.” Bernie would be a reckless choice. Biden is likable and pragmatic, and we need someone who can end the craziness of the Trump era and return us to a time when things were at least relatively sane. I wish Barack Obama could run again, but he can’t, and Joe’s the closest thing we’ve got. I doubt he’ll be a historically great president, but he won’t be an awful one either, and I think he is an empathetic and well-meaning guy.

If this captures your thinking, I would like you to give me a chance to show that this argument for Biden, while tempting, is ultimately wrong in a very dangerous way. Biden is not what he seems to be, and there are some facts we need to confront. Democratic leaders have tried to conceal that Biden is actually more of an unprincipled political insider than an affable middle-class schlub, but a general election Donald Trump will expose it for all to see. Not only that, but when it comes to “electability,” Biden is weak and vulnerable, and while those weaknesses may be kept out of view in the primary, they will be on full display in the general election—with devastating results.

I would ultimately like to invite you to come and join with Bernie Sanders, to show you why we who support Sanders see things in such a different way, and to explain why I think you will be proud to have voted for Sanders and helped him become the nominee. I will be grateful to you for listening to me, because this election is an incredibly urgent historical moment and the decision you make could have serious ramifications for many millions of human lives.

Why Not Biden?

You’ve indicated to me that a big part of your reasoning for leaning Biden involves the desire to beat Trump and a feeling that, out of the two Democratic contenders, Biden is the man best positioned to do it. I am going to give you a very strong argument for why this is not the case, and Biden is not, in fact, the most “electable” of the two candidates. But first, and because it will ultimately be relevant to the electability question, I actually want to start with a different question. First let’s ask: which candidate would we choose if we felt they had the same chance of beating Trump? What if we were just picking the person we thought would make the best president? Who can we trust with power? Who is honest and principled? Let’s compare the candidates on these grounds first, and then I will discuss the ramifications for the “electability” issue. I’ll show why the answer to the question “Who would make the best president?” affects the answer to “Who would make the best candidate?”

Because you are a Democrat, I assume you believe in things. You deplore racism, sexism, and inequality. You believe that people shouldn’t die because they can’t afford healthcare, you are disturbed by needless destructive wars, you think climate change is real and urgent, and you think Democratic social programs like Medicare and Social Security are vital for keeping seniors comfortable in old age. You think the criminal punishment system can be harsh and excessive, that a woman’s right to choose is paramount, and that corporations shouldn’t take advantage of vulnerable people. Perhaps you wouldn’t describe yourself as a socialist like Bernie Sanders, but you do see how life for working people in America can be brutal and unfair, and you think it’s the government’s job to do something about it. The question, then, is which candidate can be trusted to best live up to your values, address the social problems that concern you, and fight for the things that are right.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Dear America, Please Stop This Nonsense Immediately. Love, The Rest Of The World. (Caitlin Johnstone); Biden loses it over gun control in Michigan (Reuters);  and How Democrats Should Approach the S-Word (The Atlantic):

Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank-deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

~ Harry S. Truman

How Seattle’s Patient Zero Spread the Coronavirus

The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he’d developed soon after returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China.

The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.

The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar.

County health officials located more than 60 people who’d come in contact with him, and none developed the virus in the following weeks. By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed.

All the careful medical detective work, it’s now clear, wasn’t enough to slow a virus moving faster than the world’s efforts to contain it. In February, firefighters in Kirkland, Washington, began making frequent visits to a nursing home where residents complained of respiratory problems —evidence of continuing transmission that burst into public view a week ago when officials announced the first in a series of deaths at the facility from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

The Seattle area, which had 118 infections and 18 deaths as of Sunday, is now the center of the most severe known U.S. outbreak as virus fears roil world markets, shut down commerce and schools and cause people to stock up on food and medicine. “We are past the point of containment and broad mitigation strategies—the next few weeks will change the complexion in this country,” Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.

This reconstruction of how the virus spread around Seattle, based on interviews with health-care providers, first responders, relatives of patients and academic researchers, offers lessons to places like Florida and California that are now reporting their first deaths. There were excruciating missed opportunities, especially at the nursing home. One shortcoming was a lack of testing in a critical six-week window when the virus was spreading undetected. Even recently, some patients said, hospitals weren’t taking enough precautions to protect staff and others from infection.

Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows the futility of travel bans in the face of a pathogen that’s sickened more than 110,000 people and killed more than 3,800 since authorities in China on Dec. 31 reported a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to an open-air seafood market. Governments are now bowing to the reality of unprecedented, economy-killing measures seen as Draconian just weeks ago. Italy early Sunday restricted travel in and out of the region surrounding Milan and ordered closings of schools, museums, pools, gyms and theaters, among other public places.

While a hard-and-fast lockdown of a U.S. city like Seattle is hard to imagine, something similar might happen, said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know, anything is possible,” he told Fox News.

by Peter Robison, Dina Bass, and Robert Langreth, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: SeaTac airport, Karen Ducey/Getty
[ed. And, expect to see much more of this: Officials: Flight Headed To New Jersey Diverted After Passengers Seated Next To Person Sneezing, Coughing Became Disruptive (CBS).]

Nothing to Worry About

“... it's a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.”
Image: Jaws

[ed. See also: Clearing Rallies and Crashes (Buckle Up); John P. Hussman, PhD, Hussman Funds.]

I'd Rather Be Golfing

Stocks plunge, coronavirus spreads and President Trump tweets image of himself playing a fiddle (MarketWatch).
[ed. From his soon to be ex-social media manager.]

Look Out Below

Here’s how the plunging stock market could cause a recession (MarketWatch)

Image: Getty

[ed. Shock and Awe. Well, that didn't take long. One circuit breaker and we're already seeing calls for various forms of fiscal stimulus (and the White House appears to be listening) ZH. Calculated Risk has additional suggestions.]

Gahee Park
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How To Surf Alaska's Bore Tide

How To Surf Alaska's Bore Tide (Smithsonian)
Image: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

We Are All Irrational Panic Shoppers

Costco diehards know that weekends are for amateurs. The true connoisseur of bulk condiments and discount televisions and multi-pack leggings avoids the choke of the Saturday-and-Sunday crowd, commandeering her oversized shopping cart only on weekdays, and especially on weekday mornings: the store opens its doors at nine, and it generally takes an hour of customer inflow for the winding aisles to reach a critical mass of mayhem. Being one of the first people inside Costco can be an oddly peaceful experience: the quiet hum of the refrigerator cases, the sweeping linoleum canyons with walls of neatly stacked inventory.

Panic, perhaps unsurprisingly, throws this rhythm into disarray. Fear of covid-19, the flu-like illness that has made its way from China to other cities around the world, including a growing number in the U.S., has sent many New Yorkers into crisis mode. (The city, as of Thursday, has two reported cases.) Health authorities, including the C.D.C., have advised to prepare for a period of social distancing; based on transmission-prevention efforts in China, South Korea, Italy, and Iran, it seems possible that Americans in some cities will eventually face full-on quarantine. This involves certain elements of what emergency managers call “shelter in place,” and doomsday preppers refer to as “bugging in”: enough supplies for a household to remain isolated for at minimum a few days, and ideally a few weeks. Where better to get your fix of canned beans than a store where the cans are gallon-size?

At eight-forty-five on a recent Monday morning, fifteen minutes before Costco’s official opening time, the crowd waiting to get inside the warehouse in Brooklyn was already about a hundred strong. Bodies and carts were jammed together inside the store’s open vestibule, pressing up against the still-locked doors; outside, spilling into the parking lot and blocking the flow of traffic, nearly twice as many shoppers fanned out around the vestibule entrances, aiming their carts with the tense energy of bobsledders waiting for the starting gun. An employee pushing a pallet cart shouted for people to get off the asphalt and instead wrap around the building, which everyone ignored, so instead he called out to a co-worker standing closer to the front of the throng: “Tell them they’ve got to open the doors early!” The second employee snaked his way through the crowd to the doors. As he turned sideways to fit between two logjammed carts, he muttered, “This is a madhouse.”

Inside the store, chaos descended almost instantly. Just past the entrance, and then again by the escalators to the second floor, hundreds of shrink-wrapped five-packs of Clorox Disinfecting Wipes (“Kills 99.9% of Viruses & Bacteria!”) were stacked like battlements, the walls slowly eroding as shoppers threw them into their carts. There was a traffic jam near the medical-grade nitrile gloves—hundreds of boxes remained of the small and medium size, but the store’s stock of large gloves (which are sized to fit most men’s hands) were down to the last dozen. The antibacterial soap and hand sanitizer were long gone before any of us had set foot in the store that morning, cleaned out by the weekend hordes.

In the past week, shoppers across the country have been sharing pictures of Costco’s denuded shelves on social media, with captions simultaneously horrified and entertained: the store is premised on a fantasy of endless abundance, and there’s something intensely satisfying in finding the bottom of the allegedly bottomless pit. There’s an element of fantasy in the panic, as well. Apocalyptic bug-in plans require emergency stores of water, but staying home for a few weeks isn’t quite nuclear holocaust: why, then, were shoppers filling entire carts with cases upon cases of Poland Spring? (Curiously, those bottles seemed to be moving more swiftly than Costco’s less expensive, in-house Kirkland brand of water—a Giffen-good irrationality also present in the toilet-paper department, where a fortress of name-brand Scott rolls was dismantled by shoppers in the space of forty minutes while a far more imposing fortress of Kirkland Signature Bath Tissue barely had a dent.) (...)

There’s an undeniable logic to bulk shopping in times of bulk need (or, at the very least, times of bulk panic-induced compulsion), but not everyone has a Costco membership. The same day I visited Costco, an appointment brought me to the Upper West Side, where I stopped by the Fairway on Seventy-fourth and Broadway. The store was day-before-Thanksgiving crowded: the first thing I saw when I stepped through the door was the tail end of a checkout line, one of three wending through the narrow aisles. The verdant jungle of the produce section was at stark odds with the dry goods and grocery shelves, which had been ravaged. All the beans, dried and canned, were completely gone; the dried pastas were well picked over, and what remained was in violent disarray. There was a closed-off squareness to people’s posture, a bulldozeriness to their gait—a clear transmission that no, sorry, we’re not actually all in this together, so you’d better back away slowly from the granola bars. (The mood probably wasn’t helped by the marquee for the Beacon Theatre, directly across the street from Fairway, promoting that night’s unfortunately timed rock show by flashing the words “Widespread Panic” in huge red letters.)

As more and more covid-19 cases are being confirmed in the United States (and as it becomes clear that the federal government’s ability to properly inform and protect the population is, at best, deeply flawed), health experts and epidemiologists are emphasizing that individual risk is quite low, as long as basic precautions are taken, and that those of us who are in general good health should refrain from hoarding masks and other resources that are more vital to those urgently in need of care. This is rational, well-considered advice; unfortunately, man is not a terribly rational creature. Fear is contagious: when we see people go out of their way to protect themselves from disaster, no matter how unlikely, we don’t want to be the only ones left undefended. The ultra-rich are ditching first class in order to fly private, where at least the germs are more rarefied; the D.I.Y.-minded are mixing rubbing alcohol with aloe gel to approximate the effects of hand sanitizer. In recent days, I’ve heard stories of friends and friends of friends making their own frantic grocery trips, walking in the door of Wegman’s or C-Town knowing intellectually that this kind of bunker mentality is unwarranted, it’s silly, it’s probably counterproductive—but coming home nevertheless with stacks of SpaghettiOs and canned green beans, or filling their freezers with Lean Cuisines. “I jokingly call it calamity capitalism,” David Sanders, the owner of Doomsday Prep, a company that sells survival supplies and gear, told Slate, about this deeply human drive to soothe uncertainty by buying and buying and buying. There is, of course, a German word for it: Hamsterkäufe, meaning to shop like a nervous, bulging-cheeked hamster.

by Helen Rosner, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency / Getty
[ed. I learned a new term today: Giffen Goods (Investopedia). And here (Wikipedia).]

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Can the Center Hold? It Never Does

Here we go again. Something is slouching in the general direction of Bethlehem, or whatever passes for “Bethlehem” these days, and as the slouching proceeds, a lot of people are saying that the center is coming undone.

America has suffered “a hollowing out of the political center,” one writer says. Another notes that revolution is “creeping closer as the political center collapses.” The New York Times is on the case, publishing a column helpfully titled, “The Center Cannot Hold.” Times readers get the reference.

What they get, of course, is a line from a William Butler Yeats poem that, over many years of earnest post-collegiate flogging, has been stripped of bark and flower, leaving it a bare ruined choir.

More than Yeats, however, it’s Joan Didion who deserves credit for this endlessly recycled trope about an uncentered center. Didion’s 1968 essay collection, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” borrowing another phrase from the same poem, is a cultural landmark much beloved by the sorts of people who write opinion pieces and headlines. (“Bare Ruined Choir” is a book title stolen from another poet, Shakespeare, by another journalist who gained fame in the 1960s, Garry Wills.) (...)

“Of course not all of the pieces in this book have to do, in a ‘subject’ sense, with the general breakup, with things falling apart,” Didion writes in the preface to her book. Maybe not. But if you’re inclined to see unraveling, Didion gives you plenty of what you came for. She chose the title, and chose to begin the book with the Yeats poem that stalks us still. You won’t find a middle to cling to here.

Indeed, the uneasy anchor of the book is the title essay, the collection’s longest, which occupies the physical center of a slender volume. It’s the void at the core of Didion’s creation.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is great journalism today. It must have induced chills when it was published. At a time when others went to the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in search of flower power, as if such a thing could exist, Didion descended in 1967 with another purpose in mind. “San Francisco,” she writes, “was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies’.”

Perhaps there was peace and love to be found. But Didion chronicled social disintegration with a side of youthful brutality, presaging the Manson murders that took place 380 miles and two years down the road. She quotes a pamphleteer who chronicled the hippie scene on mimeographed sheets.

Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy.

Didion provides no context for the violence, no judgment on the horror. It’s just an event that occurred in a particular time and place — Haight Ashbury, year of the Summer of Love.

Eventually, after Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and the Grateful Dead show up with groupies to spare, or share, and various characters trip or eat or simply surrender to the collective confusion, Didion gets down to business. “We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum,” she writes. “Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed.”

Having fled the world of adults, Didion’s children constructed an alternative filled with hopes and feelings and attitudes (and drugs) but lacking coherence, direction, rigor, order — a future. Wandering the psychedelic labyrinth, Didion eventually arrives at her story’s end, her ultimate lost child. She is guided to a girl named Susan who likes ice cream and wants a bicycle for Christmas. Susan is wearing white lipstick and reading a comic book on a living-room floor. She is 5 years old and high on acid.

In a documentary about Didion — it’s called “The Center Will Not Hold,” in case you had hoped otherwise — she is asked what she thought of that eerie scene. She pauses before offering this: “Let me tell you, it was gold. You live for moments like that if you're doing a piece.”

It’s a horrifying revelation, a jolting, sickening, aftershock, decades removed from the original quake. It turns out Didion was not a detached observer. She was an enthusiastic witness. Watching centrifugal forces pulling at the center, she rooted for the unraveling. Crashes make good copy.

Yet Didion’s perceptions were genuine, her focus on children shrewd. Her fragile subjects, and her insights about them, give her essay a disturbing, undiminished power. Indeed, the plight of youth might be what links the uncentering of 2020 to the anomie of 1967. It’s not just the rapier politics of race and resentment, the disorientation of high-speed culture or the pervasive, species-wide threat — more biological than nuclear at the moment. It’s their harrowing effects on a young generation reeling from overdoses of debt and doubt.

To be young in America in 2020 might be more perilous than it was in the late 1960s. The federal government keeps some migrant children in cages, awaiting processing. Others it stole from parents, then passed on to new homes without leaving a forwarding address. A bad trip.

Children born in America are also under duress. The cost of education is exorbitant; the dominion of drugs, conveyed by doctor’s prescription, pervasive. In 2015-2016, 18% of children under age 12, and 27% of adolescents ages 12 to 19, had used prescription drugs in the past 30 days.

George Wallace and Richard Nixon, who in 1968 both sought to carve up the nation for political advantage, have been supplanted by Donald Trump, who combines their most vicious instincts and venal appetites. Trump’s racial aggression, his most authentic contribution to public life, is felt most keenly by the young. The most common age of white Americans is 58. For black America, it’s 27. For Hispanics, 11.

As older whites cling to power, climate change bears down on the young — who wonder what, exactly, they stand to inherit. Nihilism, the unbranded version of Trumpism, is manifested in a deathly enthusiasm for carbon, by the president’s sabotage of any attempt to ameliorate its effects, and by his eagerness, even impatience, to release additional toxins, both chemical and metaphorical, into the world. The president amuses his followers by publicly attacking a teenage girl from Sweden whose sole offense is a desire for a healthier planet.

Between the bomb and the war, the Weathermen and the drugs, the youth surveyed by Didion came to their untethering honestly enough. But a generation coming of age today under planetary stress and political demagogy has every reason to suspect that the center has no place for it, and may well not hold its own. Investing their hopes in an odd and angry old man from Vermont seems as plausible a strategy as any.

So will the center hold? In truth, it never does. It collapses, reemerges, reconstitutes, adapting to new forces and new realities. The humans who occupy it, or orbit around it, evolve as well, recalibrating to align themselves to an emergent nucleus. That’s how societies keep from dying. At least until the center neither holds nor reconstitutes, but implodes altogether.

by Francis Wilkinson, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Robyn Beck/AFP

Tourism's Free Fall

This is all happening just weeks before high season is about to get under way. But with millions and millions of tourists voting with their feet by staying at home, one of Europe’s most important and (until four weeks ago) fastest growing industries is taking a hammering.

The world right now is full of places that should be teeming with people but are not, including many iconic tourist landmarks and attractions. In Italy, home to Europe’s third biggest tourism industry, large parts of the country are on lock down after being hit by the biggest outbreak of the COVID-19 outside of Asia. Many of the most famous tourist attractions have been closed and big international events, including the Venice Carnival, have been cancelled.

The impact on the country’s tourism industry has been brutal, prompting panicked representatives to warn that a “generalized panic” over coronavirus could “sink” the sector. “There is a risk that Italy will drop off the international tourism map altogether,” said Carlo Sangalli, president of Milan’s Chamber of Commerce. “The wave of contagions over the past week is causing huge financial losses that will be difficult to recoup.”

Even by late February, when the outbreak was still in its infancy, €200 million worth of travel and accommodation bookings in March had already been cancelled, reported Italian tourism association Assoturismo Confesercenti. That figure, based on data provided by Italy’s hotels, B&Bs and travel agencies, doesn’t include lost tourist revenue for transport, tour guides, bars, restaurants and shops. Bookings are also “sharply down” until June.

In the three most affected regions — Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna (in descending order) — cancellation rates on bookings of hotels, flights and apartments have reached as high as 90%. These three regions also happen to be the main motor of Italy’s economy, accounting for 40% of Italy’s GDP. The country’s financial capital (and capital of Lombardy), Milan, is like a ghost town, with many of its most important landmarks, including the Teatro alla Scala opera house, closed to visitors.

“In recent history Italian tourism has never experienced a crisis like this,” Vittorio Messina, National President of Assoturismo, stated in a press release. “It is the darkest moment. Not even 9/11 affected it so heavily.”

The industry group Confturismo- Confcomercio has forecast that the sector, which accounts for 13% of Italian GDP, will suffer total losses of €7.4 billion in the second quarter. It’s the small businesses that are most at risk, warns Messina: “If the situation of generalized panic continues, thousands of businesses, especially small ones, will first enter a liquidity crisis, then close their doors. We urgently need to work towards normalization.”

This unprecedented slowdown of a sector as vital as tourism does not bode well for a country whose economy has barely grown for 20 years and whose banking sector continues to be plagued by systemic problems, including dangerously high levels of non-performing loans (NPL). While the NPL ratio has fallen from a peak of 17% in late 2015 to 8.2% (in September 2019), its still way too high for comfort. In the coming months it’s likely to undergo a sharp resurgence as businesses and households struggle to generate enough income to cover their liabilities and service their debt. And that is the last thing that Italy’s already fragile financial sector needs.

In Spain, tourism is even more important to the national economy, generating approximately €180 billion a year — close to 15% of GDP. In 2019, Spain was the second most visited country in the world, attracting 83.7 million foreign tourists.

by Nick Corbishley, Wolfstreet |  Read more:

Image: Susan Wright via

[ed. Interesting tourism numbers. See also: Shock and Awe (Wolfstreet).]

The People of Las Vegas

It’s February in Las Vegas, and because I have managed to step on my glasses and break them, as I do at least once a year, I have gone to the LensCrafters at the Boulevard Mall, a faux deco artifact of midcentury Vegas that, like so many malls in America, is a mere husk of its former self. In a faculty meeting a few days earlier, I’d watched as one of my colleagues bent and manipulated a paper clip, then used it to refasten the left bow of his glasses, creating a tiny antenna at his temple. That’s not a look I’m after, so I am here, obsessively trying on frame after frame, as the young Iranian man who is helping me on this quiet Monday afternoon patiently nods or shakes his head: yes, yes; no, no, no.

I order two pairs. LensCrafters, the movie theater chain of eyeglasses, is always offering deals: half off a second set of frames, a supersize popcorn for fifty cents more. While I wait, I walk around the mall, a 1.2-million-square-foot monstrosity built on seventy-five acres, with a 31,000-square-foot SeaQuest aquarium and a 28,000-square-foot Goodwill.

Next door to LensCrafters, there’s a shop that sells gemstones, crystals, sage, and pink Himalayan salt lamps. The burning sage makes that end of the mall smell musky, animalistic—a strangely feral odor in this synthetic environment. Snaking its lazy way around the scuffed tile floor is an automated miniature train, the sort children might ride at the zoo, driven by an adult man dressed as a conductor; it toots loudly and gratingly at regular intervals. JCPenney and Macy’s and Dillard’s closed months and years ago, while Sears is limping along in its fire-sale days. At Foot Locker, I try on black-and-white Vans in an M. C. Escher print. At Hot Topic, I browse the cheap T-shirts printed with sayings like Keep Calm and Drink On and Practice Safe Hex. I eat a corn dog, fried and delicious, at a place called Hot Dog on a Stick. (I really do.) The atmosphere is depressing, in all its forced cheerfulness and precise evocation of the empty material promises of my ’80s-era youth.

I am almost three miles east of the Strip, but I could be anywhere, at any ailing mall in America. The only clues that I am in Las Vegas are a couple of clothing shops that carry items like six-inch Lucite stilettos and pearl-encrusted crop tops. And then, outside, a well-worn swimsuit someone has discarded on a pedestal near the entrance, where Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” blares. The swimsuit has a built-in corset-like bra, an exoskeleton of sorts—it could probably stand on its own—and it’s as if someone has left a part of her body behind. There’s no pool, I think. Who undressed here? Such odd Vegas-y details are everywhere in this city—the Elvis impersonator shopping in full-spangled regalia at my local health food store, the pink vibrator melting on Maryland Parkway in 110-degree heat—and I assume you eventually become blind to them, but after four years here, I still see them.

Las Vegas is a place about which people have ideas. They have thoughts and generalizations, takes and counter-takes, most of them detached from any genuine experience and uninformed by any concrete reality. This is true of many cities—New York, Paris, Prague in the 1990s—owing to books and movies and tourism bureaus, but it is particularly true of Las Vegas. It is a place that looms large in popular culture as a setting for blowout parties and high-stakes gambling, a place where one might wed a stripper with a heart of gold, like Ed Helms does in The Hangover, or hole up in a hotel room and drink oneself to death, as Nicolas Cage does in Leaving Las Vegas. Even those who would never go to Las Vegas are in the grip of its mythology. Yet roughly half of all Americans, or around 165 million people, have visited and one slivery weekend glimpse bestows on them a sense of ownership and authority.

by Amanda Fortini, The Believer |  Read more:

Image: Carrole Barraud

America Needs Her

‘America Needs Her’: Readers React to Elizabeth Warren’s Exit (NY Times)

Image: via

[ed. Post-it notes on Elizabeth's portrait at Harvard. See also: Elizabeth Warren Should Endorse Bernie Sanders — Not for Him, but for Herself and Her Mission (The Intercept). Also: Elizabeth Warren's American Leadership and The Rage and Sorrow of the Warren Supporter (New Yorker).]

My Brilliant Friend: Exploring the Joyousness of Dogs

The infectious joy of dogs figures large in On Dogs: An anthology, introduced by the actor and comedian Tracey Ullman. Although she is a devoted dog-lover, who hopes to die “covered in cashmere blankets and lots and lots of dogs”, the selections in the anthology are not all feel-good. Several are dark or poignant pieces on a dog’s death; others offer sour or sardonic comments on pet dogs. The collection is an eclectic mixture drawn from fiction, poems, anecdotes, and scientific or philosophical essays. (...)

For several of the contributors, the most prominent thread that runs through the book is love – both the love dogs have for people and the love that people return. Our love of dogs is in part a response to their happiness but also, as the legendary French actor and animal welfare activist Brigitte Bardot observes, to their wanting us to be happy. Our love, in effect, responds to their love. “Response”, perhaps, is not the ideal word. Certainly, love for a dog need not be an unconsidered, mechanical reaction to their affection. As Monty Don pointed out in his book on his golden retriever Nigel, a dog is an “opportunity” for a person to develop, shape and manifest love for a being that is not going to reject or betray this love. In a fine essay in the anthology, the late Roger Scruton argues that while dogs may rightly invite love, it must be of the right kind. Although dogs have been “raised to the edge of personhood”, they are not persons, and to ignore this will damage dog and owner alike. The owner will have unreasonable expectations that the dog is bound to disappoint, or a dog may suffer longer than necessary when an owner, viewing the pet as a person, refuses to have it euthanized.

If our love is a response to the dog’s, so, in turn, is the dog’s love a response to ours. It is not true, as Ullman maintains, echoing the popular view, that dogs “offer unconditional love and loyalty, no matter how badly we behave”. It is possible, indeed horribly frequent, for people to forfeit a dog’s love. Those dull-eyed, mangy and broken animals whose owners chain them up and ignore them no longer love these people. It is true that dogs do not impose conditions on us, but this, as Scruton explains, is because they cannot do so, not because they generously refrain from doing so. For a similar reason, it is questionable for Alice Walker to praise her labrador, Marley, for “how swiftly she forgives me”. Marley neither forgives nor blames, for these are actions that presuppose a range of concepts – responsibility, intention, negligence and so on – that are not in her or any other dog’s repertoire. A term better than “unconditional” for characterizing a dog’s love might be “uncomplicated” or “unreflecting”, neither of which is intended to detract from what Lorenz called the “immeasurability” of this love.

by David E. Cooper, TLS |  Read more:

Images: markk, Lucile

via: (source lost)