Blowing In The Whirlwind

... I sorely hate undercutting any argument against Biden, I do believe it is possible for old Joe to defeat Trump. Here’s how it’s likely to play out, if Biden is the nominee.

Both he and Trump will lumber around the country for months, dribbling out word salad to adoring supporters who don’t have the slightest interest in what the doddering old men at the rostrum are saying. Both will spout inane and barely coherent platitudes without offering anything remotely resembling actual policies or programs or solutions to the myriad of dire crises we face. Both will have their contentless, incoherent ramblings presented as cogent “debating points” and “policy positions” suitable for “deep analysis” by the shallow savants of the national press. There will be various gaffes, outrages, mini-scandals, along with a crazy quilt of polling numbers changing wildly by the day, even by the hour.

And none of it will matter. America’s electoral politics are so far removed from the actual reality of how power is really exercised in our society – and from the actual state of degeneration our dying society is really in – that it is nothing more than a badly rendered cartoon, a medicine show with clowns and con-men, a white noise machine howling down any genuine thought and feeling. It is, quite literally, sound and fury, signifying nothing: precisely because it no longer has any connection to the true operations of power and the reality of decay.

Trump recognized this first, but the Democrats have caught up. You don’t have to have any real policies. You don’t have to offer any real hope. You don’t even have to make any sense. Most people are so battered by the decay and tormented by the white noise that all they can do is grab hold of some emblematic figure offered to them by the system and project all their hopes and dreams and fears and desires onto them. (...)

There seems to be the feeling that we can’t really do anything at all about the problems that are bearing down on us like a runaway train – climate disruption and all its ever-rippling repercussions; the rise of hyper-powerful rich elites manipulating our increasingly hollowed-out institutions for their own benefit; the economic demise of industry after industry, region after region, community after community; the endless wars, covert and overt, with their gargantuan corruption and pointless cycles of violence; the healthcare atrocities that leave millions of people literally begging on the internet to obtain even the barest minimum of medical help, and so on. In the face of all this, many people long to embrace some figure or another who promises us a return to the “status quo”: either some mythologized post-war era when America was “great,” or just back to the Obama years, when things were “normal.”

Overwhelmed, battered, beset, anxiety-ridden, suffering, confused, many people don’t want to hear that hard work and big changes will be necessary if we are to have a chance for things to get better. They just want to latch on to something that will let them feel – if only for a moment – that the anxiety can go away, that someone up there in the circles of power will take care of it for us.

This is not the wisest course when faced with overwhelming crises – but it is an entirely natural and understandable one. When you couple this natural reaction to extremity with the aforementioned systematic effort to undermine and thwart the Sanders’ campaign, then it’s not surprising you end up with a blank screen like Joe Biden as your candidate.

And consider this: the blank screen of Donald Trump has now had four years in power, yet still those overwhelming, battering, confusing anxieties have not gone away – indeed, they’ve only multiplied. In this situation, it’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that enough people will turn away from the torn screen of Trump and try a new cure for their anxiety. (...)

What matters that he is a fresh screen where our most unworthy fears and unrealistic hopes can be projected, for a time; where we can forget, for a time, the massive disasters that are looming ahead and pretend that things can somehow go back to “normal.”

Of course, this can only be done by ignoring that it was the previous “normality” that brought us here in the first place – and by ignoring the fact that big changes and upheavals are coming no matter who is elected. We can’t escape it. The only question is: do we want to try to manage these big changes for the greater common good – or will we just allow them to ravage our lives in the worst way possible while we pine for a status quo of peace and quiet that never was, and thus can never return?

by Chris Floyd, Counterpunch |  Read more:

Image: Nick Roney

[ed. With all the virus panic these days, thought it might be nice to lighten things up with a little politics. See also: Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism’ (Vice).]

A Week at the Epicenter of America’s Coronavirus Crisis

We stopped touching one another on a Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday? Information came at us so fast—confirmed cases, public-health warnings, deaths—you could swear the days of the week had been transposed, their order jumbled like everything else. Certainly by Wednesday the handshakes stopped. Hugs weren’t far behind. Even among longtime friends and family. This would soon happen elsewhere in the country, to a degree, but here in the Seattle area, where by week’s end covid-19 would kill nearly twenty of us, evading physical contact carried extra urgency. Every avoidance felt like an act of heroism. You told yourself you were saving lives, and you were probably right.

Days earlier, on Saturday, February 29th, we woke to news of the first U.S. death from the virus, a man in his fifties, at a hospital in Kirkland, eight miles northeast of Seattle. At nearby Life Care Center of Kirkland, two patients tested positive. The number of confirmed cases tripled within twenty-four hours. By Monday, five were dead, four of them patients at Life Care in their seventies and eighties. Out came declarations of emergency, from the Seattle mayor, Jenny Durkan; the King County executive, Dow Constantine; and Governor Jay Inslee.

We didn’t know it yet, but we were living in a kind of laboratory of the country’s future. We were the first. The first to see bus drivers don face masks; the first to take seriously, citywide, singing “Happy Birthday” twice in a row as we washed our hands. The first to experience a unique kind of isolation. Circumventing handshakes helped avoid spreading disease—the elbow bump won out as the preferred alternative—but it also fostered a sense that none of us should be anywhere near one another. On the bus you chose to stand rather than share a seat with a stranger. You thought about crossing the street when approaching too many other pedestrians on a sidewalk. Officials would eventually advise—then demand—that we avoid large public gatherings. We were still out in the world, but barely of it. Alone together.

In that isolation, you had time to notice just how many objects your fingers touch throughout the day. Door handles, crosswalk-signal switches, elevator buttons. Every surface was suspect. The elbow bump diversified, became an all-purpose tool. You elbow-tapped to select your floor, and used the same elbow to hold the sliding doors for someone rushing to get to work on time. (Then stood as far away from her as possible on the ride up.)

We also contended with Seattle’s new role on the world stage. We’re used to being in the news for our innovations, here in the home of Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and the original Boeing. If we’re lucky, the Seahawks play a decent enough season for everyone else to hear about it. Now we were known as ground zero of a deadly epidemic poised to sweep the continent.

On Tuesday night, NBC News, sharing its story on the crisis, tweeted, “Seattle a ‘ghost town’ as residents face uncertainty of growing coronavirus outbreak.” We laughed it off and clapped back. It was a gross exaggeration. Those of us downtown could see the city wasn’t empty. But we recognized some truth in it, too. The weekday bustle was there, but anesthetized.

All the while more news issued out of Kirkland. In daily briefings, officials from Public Health—Seattle & King County shared the vaguest of details. “A female in her 80s, a resident of LifeCare, was hospitalized at EvergreenHealth. She is in critical condition.” “A male in his 70s, a resident of LifeCare, hospitalized at EvergreenHealth. . . . The man had underlying health conditions, and died 3/1/20.” The death toll kept rising, but without names and specifics the epidemic could feel unrelated to any real danger, as if it only consisted of inconvenient rules, an invisible event that merely compelled people to bruise elbows and hoard toilet paper and Purell. Then the families started talking.

by James Ross Gardner, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Chona Kasinger
[ed. See also: Why Washington state is at the center of the US coronavirus outbreak (Guardian); Saying Goodbye to Your Favorite Seattle Restaurant (The Stranger); and finally, 'He's an idiot' (Guardian).]

Roy Lichtenstein, Reflections on Interior with Girl Drawing (1990)
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The Fed Did Not Just ‘Spend’ $1.5 Trillion

This week, the Federal Reserve announced that it would inject as much as $1.5 trillion into the short-term money markets, an intervention designed to ease the pressure on the financial system and lower the chances of a financial crisis.

This action received a lot of criticism from the left. The progressive standard-bearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that “the amount that the Fed just injected almost covers all student loan debt in the U.S.,” and that “we need to care for working people as much as we care for the stock market.” Senator Bernie Sanders said, “When we say it’s time to provide health care to all our people, we’re told we can’t afford it. But if the stock market is in trouble, no problem! The government can just hand out $1.5 trillion to calm bankers.” Others described the injection as a gigantic subsidy for Wall Street.

The progressive frustration was understandable: The Fed is a technocratic institution that has offered immediate resources to aid the markets. Yes, that makes bankers better off. No, that does not feel fair, not given the administration’s flailing, too-little, too-late response to the viral pandemic, something that is costing lives and livelihoods already. Broker-dealers get instant help; families get to wait for a meager expansion to food stamps.

Still, the online commentary was inaccurate both about what the Fed was doing and about why it was doing it. And there is a good progressive case for the Fed doing as much as it can to help the financial markets—and for Congress doing even more to help regular people.

A few technical points: The Fed did not spend $1.5 trillion. This was not a $1.5 trillion bailout. It did not cost Americans $1.5 trillion. It was not a $1.5 trillion subsidy for hedge funds and the like. It did not use up $1.5 trillion in resources that could have gone to another cause, whether Wall Street bailouts or Medicare for All.

The Fed works in weird ways, but here goes: The central bank announced that it would offer financial firms up to $1.5 trillion in short-term, collateralized loans. A firm can borrow $100 in cash overnight, for example, but only if it gives the Fed $100 in Treasury securities backed by the full faith and credit of the American government, and pays a small amount of interest too. Doing this costs the Fed nothing, and costs the American taxpayer nothing; when all is said and done, the central bank will probably make a small amount of money off the interest payments.

The Fed chose to do this not as a payoff for Wall Street or to calm the stock market. (It has nothing to do with the stock market at all, though equities crashing is in part a sign of the very financial strain the Fed is attempting to soothe.) It did it to help make sure that the market for Treasury bonds continues to function normally. It was not using taxpayer dollars to juice a money-losing industry, but instead acting as an emergency backstop for the markets writ large.

Signs indicate that it needs to do more, not less, in the coming days: The markets continue to act in strained and strange and erratic ways. Investment banks expect the central bank to drop interest rates to zero soon, and to begin purchasing huge sums of assets, something called “quantitative easing.” There is some chance, as well, that the Fed might end up setting up special facilities to supply liquidity to the financial system, as it did during the 2008 debacle.

There’s a lot for average folks to like about what the Fed is doing, as much as it might seem arcane or technocratic or unfair. For one, recessions complicated by financial crises are much, much harder to fight, and much, much worse than plain-vanilla downturns: If the Fed and other central banks keep the markets functioning, that benefits everybody. But a credit crunch would hurt everybody. Businesses are already seeing revenue evaporate. Many will seek loans to help tide them over. Low interest rates and liquid markets will help those businesses, the families that rely on them for work, and the communities they serve.

That said, there’s a lot not to like too. Morgan Ricks, a law professor at Vanderbilt University and an expert on financial regulation, questions why markets needed this kind of emergency oxygen now, and whether the Fed should be doing more to make markets work, even in times of crisis, without the government’s help. The Fed’s repo transactions may not cost anything, but the Fed is still propping up the financial sector.

More broadly, one could argue that the extraordinary measures the Fed has taken in the past and is taking today contribute to the country’s inequality. There’s a deep, intuitive unfairness to monetary policy going to the mattresses when fiscal policy has not even gotten out of bed: The Fed is helping rich financiers, while poor families are unsure whether aid is coming.

But the economy needs both monetary policy and fiscal policy. The trillion-dollar repo facility did not create some kind of either-or scenario, with aid to hedge funds and financiers crowding out aid to student-loan borrowers and gig workers. And the real fault here—both during the Great Recession and now—lies not with the Fed, but with Congress, particularly Republicans in Congress.

Democrats, acting with panicked muscle memory from the miserable exercises of the previous crisis, have proposed very aggressive fiscal policy, up to and including sending large monthly checks to every American household. A proposed rescue plan includes expanded unemployment insurance, paid sick leave, and more money for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Republicans, still dismissing the severity of the pandemic, have suggested wan policies and slowed down the process. That means monetary policy is acting on its own. That means more joblessness and a sharper slowdown. That means lower-income families reliant on temporary work have no chance of recovering as fast as high-income families reliant on dividends and market returns.

Why couldn’t the Fed get creative and get into the fiscal-policy game? Why couldn’t it create $1.5 trillion and shower it on Americans? No less an authority than Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair who helped the country muddle through the Great Recession, has considered that scenario. It is possible, and at some point might become necessary. But it is not an option open to the Fed at the moment, since it would likely require a new legal framework and definitely require a lot of new policy infrastructure. (In one scheme, every American would incorporate as a kind of bank, then seek zero-interest loans. It would be weird.) Fed intervention in fiscal policy would also require, I imagine, Congress flat-out refusing to do its job and letting a downturn become a severe recession.

by Anne Lowry, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Scott Applewhite

[ed. I can't figure out the Fed. Initially, it was supposed to alleviate financial crises by maximizing employment, stabilizing prices, and moderating long-term interest rates. That's it. A Bank for banks. However, over time its function evolved (without corresponding legislation) so that now it pretty much has free reign to do whatever it wants with US dollars - including propping up the stock market, causing severe price discovery problems, unknown risk, distortions in valuation, and inherent moral hazard. Even the Fed itself can't seem to decide what it's role should be: one component says it has three functions, another says five, and all are extremely broad.]

C.D.C: Worst Case Estimates

Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and epidemic experts from universities around the world conferred last month about what might happen if the new coronavirus gained a foothold in the United States. How many people might die? How many would be infected and need hospitalization?

One of the agency’s top disease modelers, Matthew Biggerstaff, presented the group on the phone call with four possible scenarios — A, B, C and D — based on characteristics of the virus, including estimates of how transmissible it is and the severity of the illness it can cause. The assumptions, reviewed by The New York Times, were shared with about 50 expert teams to model how the virus could tear through the population — and what might stop it.

The C.D.C.’s scenarios were depicted in terms of percentages of the population. Translated into absolute numbers by independent experts using simple models of how viruses spread, the worst-case figures would be staggering if no actions were taken to slow transmission.

Between 160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to one projection. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.

And, the calculations based on the C.D.C.’s scenarios suggested, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the U.S. could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill.

The assumptions fueling those scenarios are mitigated by the fact that cities, states, businesses and individuals are beginning to take steps to slow transmission, even if some are acting less aggressively than others. The C.D.C.-led effort is developing more sophisticated models showing how interventions might decrease the worst-case numbers, though their projections have not been made public.

by Sheri Fink, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
[ed. See also: The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors (Atlantic).]

Masters Tournament Postponed

Augusta National Golf Club is postponing the 2020 Masters amid concerns for the coronavirus pandemic, according to a statement released by tournament chairman and club president Fred Ridley on Friday.

Sources told Golf Digest Thursday that Augusta National was reviewing contingencies include limiting patron access or banning patrons from the course entirely, as well as cancellations of practice rounds, the Par-3 Contest, the ANWA and the DCP. Multiple sources insisted that canceling the tournament "is not expected at this time."

However, as every major sports league suspended its operations—including the PGA Tour, which cancelled the Players Championship and its next three weeks of events—and awareness grew of the battle ahead against COVID-19, the club altered its approach to the 2020 tournament.

"Unfortunately, the ever-increasing risks associated with the widespread Coronavirus COVID-19 have led us to a decision that undoubtedly will be disappointing to many, although I am confident is appropriate under these unique circumstances," said Ridley in a statement. "Considering the latest information and expert analysis, we have decided at this time to postpone the Masters Tournament, the Augusta National Women’s Amateur and the Drive, Chip and Putt National Finals.

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: David Cannon

[ed. Oh, no. Also: Players 2020 canceled after one round, along with next three tournaments (Golf Digest).]

Neon
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Talks on a Sweeping Aid Package Stumble

Talks on a sweeping aid package stumble on paid sick leave and, improbably, abortion.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, canceled a recess that had been planned for next week, as House Democrats and the administration continued to negotiate a deal on a sweeping coronavirus relief package.

House Democrats delayed a scheduled vote on their package on Thursday as their negotiations with the White House continued behind the scenes. A vote could still come later in the day.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, and Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, spent Thursday negotiating privately over the contours of the measure, which would provide a substantial new paid sick leave program, enhanced unemployment insurance, free coronavirus testing and food assistance.

Many Republicans are opposed to the paid sick leave proposal, complaining that Democrats are using the coronavirus crisis to accomplish a long-held domestic priority that is exceedingly costly.

But another improbable sticking point has emerged: Republicans are trying to insert abortion restrictions into the emergency bill. The Republicans want to include the Hyde amendment, which would bar the use of federal funds for abortions, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. Republicans routinely push to include the language in legislation that governs the distribution of federal money.

by NY Times |  Read more:

[ed. No comment.]

Reza Afrookhteh, 1957
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Symptoms Are Not Enough: Strict Rules Limit Who Gets Tested

Matt McNamara, 46, was concerned when he developed a sore throat, cough and fever last Friday.

“Those were the three things that were markers for me to say this is definitely different,” he told Yahoo News.

McNamara is a field operations manager at Spectrum and drives for Uber on weekends, so he was concerned about showing up to work sick and possibly infecting others. After going to Adirondack Urgent Care in Queensbury, N.Y., he tested negative for seasonal influenza and was told he had an unknown virus before being sent home.

But after reading that a pharmacist at a local CVS where he shops had tested positive for COVID-19, McNamara wondered why he hadn’t been tested for coronavirus himself and decided to follow up with the urgent care unit.

The frustrating response he received gives an insight into the experience of many Americans who are seeking the tests, which continue to be in limited supply despite reassurances from the Trump administration.

“They said, ‘Well, we didn’t test you because, No. 1, we don’t test for it here. You’d have to go somewhere else,’” McNamara recounted. “‘But we didn’t recommend any testing because you did not meet the CDC’s criteria of having traveled outside the country to a known nation or place that has it, and you also have not been in contact with anybody who has it.’”

Still concerned, McNamara said he followed up with the Warren County Health Services. But they also told him he did not meet the CDC’s criteria for testing.

J'nelle Oxford, public health program coordinator at Warren County Health Services, told Yahoo News, “It's still cold and virus season,” and symptoms of coronavirus alone are currently not grounds for coronavirus testing. She said they are still prioritizing those who are “high risk” and “high exposure,” including those who had been to a country with a level 2 or level 3 travel health notice or in close contact with someone who has been diagnosed with coronavirus.

The CDC defines “close contact” as being within six feet of an infected person for a prolonged period, or having direct contact with “infectious secretions” of a COVID-19 patient.

"Frequenting” the CVS where a pharmacist tested positive “does not qualify," Oxford said.

So what can you do if you think you should be tested for coronavirus?

Federal health officials insist that Americans cannot seek out a test for coronavirus on their own — contradicting a claim by President Trump that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.”

“You may not get a test unless a doctor or public health official prescribes a test,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alexander Azar said at an off-camera briefing at the White House on Saturday. “That is our medical system in the United States, in the same way that you may not get a cardiac medicine if your doctor doesn’t prescribe that.” (...)

But at present, the odds that a doctor’s visit or concerned phone call to your physician will result in a test are incredibly low. Only 6,563 Americans have been tested as of Tuesday morning, according to the CDC.

And for many Americans, the unpredictable process of determining who gets tested and who doesn’t can be frustrating. After returning from a work trip involving stops in Thailand and South Korea, Washington, D.C. native Maggie McDow wrote on Facebook that her doctor was “furious” when the Department of Health refused to run a coronavirus test after she showed respiratory symptoms, despite her travel history. Her post received over 28,000 shares.

“Do I have Covid-19? Who knows. Do we have a broken public healthcare system that is utterly failing during a health pandemic? Absolutely,” McDow wrote in her Facebook post on Saturday.

by Rebecca Corey, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: California Department of Public Health via AP

[ed. Hard to tell with so much disinformation floating around, but 6,500 tests is woefully inadequate. CDC says the number is closer to 11,000 but that's still a very small number (Coronavirus: US admits 'failing' on testing, says Fauci - BBC). See also: 'We are flying blind': Lawmakers fume amid lack of coronavirus testing and answers (CNN). Finally, it's  not just tests that are limiting but a lack of ventilators and ICU beds as well (NY Times). [Update: White House Knew Coronavirus Would Be A 'Major Threat' — But Response Fell Short (NPR).]

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

via:

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.]