Food to GoGo

After a cease-and-desist shut down their attempts at a Boober Eats food delivery service, Portland strip club Lucky Devil Lounge has found another new way to keep the lights in this pandemic. "You pull in and you get one or two songs with the gogos, then we bring your food out to you and then you go on your way," explains owner Shon Boulden in the video above.

According to Oregon Live, the service costs $30 per car, plus $10 for each additional occupant, plus a mandatory food purchase. You can still get Boober Eats, too, only now it's served under a different name.

But honestly it just looks like something out of Blade Runner or Neuromancer. I'm just glad the dancers are given some kind of PPE.

Pandemic drive-thru strip club is pure cyberpunk dystopia (Boing Boing)

[ed. Where there's a will, there's a way.]

My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?

On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered. I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngest’s socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late.

For 10 days, everyone in my orbit had been tilting one way one hour, the other the next. Ten days of being waterboarded by the news, by tweets, by friends, by my waiters. Of being inundated by texts from fellow chefs and managers — former employees, now at the helm of their own restaurants but still eager for guidance. Of gentle but nervous pleas from my operations manager to consider signing up with a third-party delivery service like Caviar. Of being rattled even by my own wife, Ashley, and her anxious compulsion to act, to reduce our restaurant’s operating hours, to close at 9 p.m., cut shifts.

With no clear directive from any authority — public schools were still open — I spent those 10 days sorting through the conflicting chatter, trying to decide what to do. And now I understood abruptly: I would lay everybody off, even my wife. Prune, my Manhattan restaurant, would close at 11:59 p.m. on March 15. I had only one piece of unemotional data to work with: the checking-account balance. If I triaged the collected sales tax that was sitting in its own dedicated savings account and left unpaid the stack of vendor invoices, I could fully cover this one last week of payroll.(...)

Everybody’s saying that restaurants won’t make it back, that we won’t survive. I imagine this is at least partly true: Not all of us will make it, and not all of us will perish. But I can’t easily discern the determining factors, even though thinking about which restaurants will survive — and why — has become an obsession these past weeks. What delusional mind-set am I in that I just do not feel that this is the end, that I find myself convinced that this is only a pause, if I want it to be? I don’t carry investor debt; my vendors trust me; if my building’s co-op evicted me, they would have a beast of a time getting a new tenant to replace me.

But I know few of us will come back as we were. And that doesn’t seem to me like a bad thing at all; perhaps it will be a chance for a correction, as my friend, the chef Alex Raij, calls it.

The conversation about how restaurants will continue to operate, given the rising costs of running them has been ramping up for years now; the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time. The past five or six years have been alarming. For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured. These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable. But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.

Since Prune opened in the East Village, the neighborhood has changed tremendously in ways that reflect, with exquisite perfection, the restaurant scene as a whole. Within a 10-block radius of my front door, we have the more-than-100-year-old institutions Russ & Daughters and Katz’s Delicatessen. We have hole-in-the-wall falafel, bubble tea and dumpling houses, and there’s a steakhouse whose chef also operates a restaurant in Miami. There’s everyday sushi and rare, wildly expensive omakase sushi, as well as Japanese home cooking, udon specialists and soba shops. There’s a woman-owned and woman-run restaurant with an economic-justice mission that has eliminated tipping. Bobby Flay, perhaps the most famous chef on the Food Network, has an 125-seater two avenues over. We have farm-to-table concepts every three blocks, a handful of major James Beard Award winners and a dozen more shortlisted nominees and an impressive showing of New York Times one- and two-star earners, including Madame Vo, a knockout Vietnamese restaurant just a few years old. Marco Canora, who started the country’s migration from regular old broth to what is now known by the name of his shop, Brodo, has published a couple of cookbooks and done a healthy bit of television in the course of his career. He still runs his only restaurant, 17-year-old Hearth, on First Avenue.

But block after block, for so many years now, there are storefronts where restaurants turn over so quickly that I don’t even register their names. If Covid-19 is the death of restaurants in New York, will we be able to tell which restaurants went belly up because of the virus? Or will they be the same ones that would have failed within 16 months of opening anyway, from lack of wherewithal or experience? When we are sorting through the restaurant obituaries, will we know for sure that it was not because the weary veteran chef decided, as I have often been tempted myself in these weeks, to quietly walk out the open back door of a building that has been burning for a long time?

It gets so confusing. Restaurant operators had already become oddly cagey, and quick to display a false front with each other. You asked, “How’s business?” and the answer always was, “Yeah, great, best quarter we’ve ever had.” But then the coronavirus hits, and these same restaurant owners rush into the public square yelling: “Fire! Fire!” They now reveal that they had also been operating under razor-thin margins. It instantly turns 180 degrees: Even famous, successful chefs, owners of empires, those with supremely wealthy investors upon whom you imagine they could call for capital should they need it, now openly describe in technical detail, with explicit data, how dire a position they are in. The sad testimony gushes out, confirming everything that used to be so convincingly denied.

The concerns before coronavirus are still universal: The restaurant as we know it is no longer viable on its own. You can’t have tipped employees making $45 an hour while line cooks make $15. You can’t buy a $3 can of cheap beer at a dive bar in the East Village if the “dive bar” is actually paying $18,000 a month in rent, $30,000 a month in payroll; it would have to cost $10. I can’t keep hosing down the sauté corner myself just to have enough money to repair the ripped awning. Prune is in the East Village because I’ve lived in the East Village for more than 30 years. I moved here because it was where you could get an apartment for $450 a month. In 1999, when I opened Prune, I still woke each morning to roosters crowing from the rooftop of the tenement building down the block, which is now a steel-and-glass tower. A less-than-500-square-foot studio apartment rents for $3,810 a month. (...)

For the past 10 years I’ve been staring wide-eyed and with alarm as the sweet, gentle citizen restaurant transformed into a kind of unruly colossal beast. The food world got stranger and weirder to me right while I was deep in it. The “waiter” became the “server,” the “restaurant business” became the “hospitality industry,” what used to be the “customer” became the “guest,” what was once your “personality” became your “brand,” the small acts of kindness and the way you always used to have of sharing your talents and looking out for others became things to “monetize.”

The work itself — cooking delicious, interesting food and cleaning up after cooking it — still feels as fresh and honest and immensely satisfying as ever. Our beloved regulars and the people who work so hard at Prune are all still my favorite people on earth. But maybe it’s the bloat, the fetishistic foodies, the new demographic of my city who have never been forced to work in retail or service sectors. Maybe it’s the auxiliary industries that feed off the restaurants themselves — the bloggers and agents and the “influencers,” the brand managers, the personal assistants hired just to keep you fresh on “Insta,” the Food & Wine festivals, the multitude of panels we chefs are now routinely invited to join, to offer our charming yet thoroughly unresearched opinions on. The proliferation of television shows and YouTube channels and culinary competitions and season after season of programming where you find yourself aghast to see an idol of yours stuffing packaged cinnamon buns into a football-shaped baking pan and squirting the frosting into a laces pattern for a tailgating episode on the Food Network. (...)

I cannot see myself excitedly daydreaming about the third-party delivery-ticket screen I will read orders from all evening. I cannot see myself sketching doodles of the to-go boxes I will pack my food into so that I can send it out into the night, anonymously, hoping the poor delivery guy does a good job and stays safe. I don’t think I can sit around dreaming up menus and cocktails and fantasizing about what would be on my playlist just to create something that people will order and receive and consume via an app. I started my restaurant as a place for people to talk to one another, with a very decent but affordable glass of wine and an expertly prepared plate of simply braised lamb shoulder on the table to keep the conversation flowing, and ran it as such as long as I could. If this kind of place is not relevant to society, then it — we — should become extinct.

by Gabrielle Hamilton, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Philip Montgomery for The New York Times
[ed. See also: Can the Restaurant Industry Be Saved? (Rolling Stone)

How Pandemics End

How Pandemics End (NY Times)
Image: A Sicilian fresco from 1445. In the previous century, the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population. Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
[ed. See also: The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them (Erin Bromage).]

Walk of Fame
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Jackson Browne & David Lindley

Trump’s Bid to Stand Above the Law

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear lawyers argue the president’s claim that he has absolute immunity while in office.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear one of the most consequential cases ever considered on executive privilege. Trump v. Vance concerns a subpoena issued by the Manhattan district attorney to President Trump’s accountants demanding the release of tax returns and other financial documents to a grand jury.

What is at stake is no less than the accountability of a president to the rule of law.

Mr. Trump claims that a president has “temporary absolute immunity,” meaning he cannot be criminally investigated while in office. Indeed, in oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, his lawyers said that if the president were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, he could not be investigated or indicted until after he left office.

If the justices endorse this extreme view, they will make it impossible to hold this president, and all future presidents, answerable in courts for their actions.

Mr. Trump’s legal position contradicts clear Supreme Court precedent. In U.S. v. Nixon, a unanimous Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over Oval Office tapes subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. In Clinton v. Jones, a unanimous court held that a sitting president can be forced to testify in response to a subpoena in civil litigation. Taken together, these cases make it clear that the president is not immune from investigation, whether criminal or civil, while he is in office.

Mr. Trump’s claims of absolute immunity are even weaker than the assertions by Presidents Nixon and Bill Clinton. The subpoena was issued by a state, rather than a federal prosecutor. The 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows states a certain degree of autonomy in investigating and prosecuting crimes. Although grand jury proceedings are secret, Mr. Vance is probably also investigating whether the president’s company, the Trump Organization, falsely accounted for hush-money payments made in the run-up to the 2016 election to two women who claim they had affairs with Mr. Trump. To deny New York the right to exercise its “police powers” over serious financial crimes should give the court’s conservative justices pause.

In addition, the subpoena was not issued to Mr. Trump, but to Mazars, his accountants. Mr. Trump maintains that the immunity of a sitting president is so strong that it extends to his entire business empire and even to third-party businesses that possess his personal information. By this logic, President Clinton could have blocked a subpoena to Monica Lewinsky’s dry cleaner, had she had one, to prevent it from handing over the infamous blue dress before laundering to the independent counsel investigating him.

Mr. Trump’s legal team asserts that federal law pre-empts state law, arguing that his immunity descends directly from the president’s constitutional authority under Article II of the Constitution. We filed an amicus brief in the case opposing this sweeping assertion of presidential immunity, on the grounds that the language of Article II, the history of its drafting and its subsequent interpretation by federal courts contradict Mr. Trump’s interpretation.

Moreover, his claim conflicts with the administration’s position in another recent Supreme Court case over states’ rights, Kansas v. Garcia. The administration’s solicitor general had sided with Kansas against an immigrant’s claim that federal immigration law prevented Kansas from prosecuting him for identity theft.

The same should apply in Trump v. Vance: The Constitution gives the Manhattan district attorney broad latitude to investigate possible financial misconduct of businesses headquartered in New York unless federal law expressly forbids it. No federal law does.

The authorities usually cited for the proposition that a sitting president cannot be indicted are two Justice Department memorandums. Rather than offering a legal analysis based on Article II, the memos are largely pragmatic, advising that it would be unwise to distract a president with legal processes when he needs to focus on the national interest. As such, these memorandums are merely advice to Justice Department prosecutors. They are not binding in any way on state prosecutors. (...)

If the Supreme Court sides with Mr. Trump in the Vance case and agrees with his other assertions of executive authority, here is where presidential accountability will stand: A sitting president cannot be prosecuted or investigated through the authority of state or federal courts, and he cannot be investigated by Congress or tried in a meaningful way upon impeachment in the Senate. And under Mr. Trump’s broad theory of his authority over the executive branch, a president will be able to press federal agencies into service to hide corruption from public view.

by Claire O. Finkelstein and Richard W. Painter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Christopher Lee for The New York Times

[ed. See also: William Barr’s Perversion of Justice (NY Times)

Sure, Velociraptors are Still on the Loose, But That's No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park

Hello, Peter Ludlow here, CEO of InGen, the company behind the wildly successful dinosaur-themed amusement park, Jurassic Park. As you’re all aware, after an unprecedented storm hit the park, we lost power and the velociraptors escaped their enclosure and killed hundreds of park visitors, prompting a two-month shutdown of the park. Well, I’m pleased to announce that, even though the velociraptors are still on the loose, we will be opening Jurassic Park back up to the public!

As some of you know, Dr. Ian Malcolm, our lead safety consultant, had recommended that we wait until the velociraptors have been located and contained before reopening the park, so he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the news. I believe his exact words were “you were so preoccupied with whether you could reopen the park, you didn’t stop to think whether you should.” Talk about a guy on a high horse.

That said, you’ll be pleased to know that, rather than double down on our containment efforts, we’ve decided to dissolve the velociraptor containment task force altogether, and focus instead on how we can get people back into the park as quickly as possible. So rather than concentrating on so-called life-saving measures like “staying in designated safe areas” or “masking your scent,” we’ll be focusing on the details that will get our customers really excited, like a wider selection of fun hats, a pterodactyl-shaped gondola ride to the top of the island, and a brand new Gordon Ramsay designed menu at the Cretaceous Cafe.

In addition to satisfying our customers, the decision to reopen the park is also about allowing the furloughed employees of Jurassic Park to get back to the work they love. Could we have continued to pay their salaries for several months until we got the velociraptor situation under control? Definitely. We’re the wealthiest nature preserve on the planet after all. And will some of the employees returning to work have their limbs torn off and tossed into the air like a juggler tossing bowling pins? Undoubtedly. But we’re confident that with a few safety precautions put in place, we’ll be able to keep the level of workplace injuries and deaths just below levels that would elicit widespread public outrage. And keeping things just below widespread public outrage levels is our gold standard for all of the decisions we make here at Jurassic Park.

And speaking of injuries, I want to take a moment to thank our Jurassic Park EMTs. They’re the real heroes here, am I right? In the process of responding to velociraptor attacks, many of our EMTs get mauled and dismembered by velociraptors themselves. That’s why, as a sign of appreciation, we will be repainting the Jurassic Park ambulance with the words “Hero Mobile” in big bubble letters. We think this is a far more meaningful token of gratitude than the salary increase they requested.

by Carlos Greaves, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Jurassic Park/Universal Pictures

Mikhail Baryshnikov & Ana Laguna, Choreographer

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The Problem With Bluetooth for Virus Contact Tracing

The Problem With Bluetooth for Virus Contact Tracing (The Intercept)
Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

America's Crowded Prisons are About to Create a Coronoavirus Crisis in Rural America

For the past several decades, rural America’s economic lifeline has been the construction and operation of prisons and immigrant detention centers, both public and for-profit. The 1980s saw the collapse of American manufacturing and a farm crisis that ripped through the countryside. Mass incarceration was well-timed to fill the gap, producing jobs where they were needed.

But those lifelines have transformed into vectors for coronavirus, putting rural communities at risk of outbreaks. For many Americans, the plight of prisoners produces little sympathy. But in a twist on JFK — “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free” — those outside the prison walls are not immune from what goes on inside them. Those jobs that made the campuses so attractive to local communities are staffed by people who go in and out each day — and what they bring with them could make all the difference in communities where hospitals were already shutting down, a trend exacerbated by Covid-19.

It’s next to impossible to social distance in jails and prisons. “Correctional facilities are overcrowded, often badly,” explained Aaron Littman, a UCLA School of Law professor who focuses on jail conditions. “It’s important to remember that when we say overcrowded, we mean dozens of people sleeping inches within each other’s faces. They’re using the same toilets. Most don’t have access to liquid hand soap. In short, they are ideal sites for incubating respiratory viruses.”

Guards and other jail staff have to share tight spaces and physically handle the prisoners — and then they go home at night. In some rural areas, there are not many other career choices beyond working in a jail or prison. The average national salary for a prison correctional officer is $47,013.

In an essay titled “Building a Prison Economy in Rural America,” public policy researcher Tracy Huling points out that there are more prisoners than farmers in some swaths of the United States. She notes that in the 1990s, a new prison or jail sprung up in a rural area at a rate equivalent to every 15 days. So it’s not surprising that there have been outbreaks in areas that don’t otherwise have risk factors, such as crowded public transportation in densely populated urban centers. Marion County, Ohio, has 2,332 confirmed cases, in a population of 66,501. The Marion County prison is currently the top cluster site in the country by far, according to a New York Times analysis.

“When I read about institutions like in Ohio that are able to test a lot of people, of the positive, most are asymptomatic,” Cheshire County jail superintendent Richard Van Wickler said. “My god, how do you possibly protect other inmates and staff?”

Last week, PBS reported that of federal prisoners who had been tested, 70 percent were found to have the coronavirus. A breakdown of New York Times data tracking Covid-19 cluster sites on April 26 revealed that out of 100 top cluster sites, 35 were tied to correctional facilities. In comparison, 28 percent of infections were linked to nursing homes. Those numbers are astounding when you consider that nursing home residents are at much higher risk of serious infection because of their age, while incarcerated people and prison staff vary in age. Seven of the top 10 cluster sites are linked to American prisons or jails. As the Marshall Project reported, so-called prison towns like Palestine, Texas, where correctional facilities are a community’s primary employer, have already seen an explosion of cases. An ACLU report released last week estimates that 100,000 more people will die because of America’s crowded jails. “The United States’ unique obsession with incarceration has become our Achilles heel when it comes to combating the spread of COVID-19,” the ACLU concluded.

When politicians like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo hail the heroism of America’s “essential workers”— be they doctors, police officers, EMTs, grocery workers, or bus drivers— prison and jail staff go unmentioned. It’s a strange lapse, but perhaps an unsurprising one, given that the solution — large scale decarceration — remains politically difficult.

by Tana Ganeve, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Alex Kormann/Star Tribune/Getty Images

People and Jobs? Or Wealth?

Yves here. I wish I had written this must-read post. Richard Murphy lays out the case for whose interests need to be sacrificed for the economy to have any hope of surviving under the conditions being imposed on businesses to keep workers and customers safe. Unfortunately, his well-reasoned recommendation, that landlords, banks, and pensioners need to take hits to save jobs and businesses, is not likely to find support in official circles. But Murphy’s argument, in essence, is that these groups are toast under any scenario, and they can’t be allowed to weigh down the productive sectors of the economy.

By Richard Murphy... Originally published at Tax Research UK

Summary

This blog post is, in effect, an essay of almost four thousand words. I did not intend that when I started to write it. If I had known it would be that long I might have used a different style. But as I wrote it just kept growing. That is because what I think it is about is vital, in the sense that the issues I address cannot be avoided.

What I am suggesting is that whatever we think or do we are heading for the most almighty economic crash. The things that we have treated as stores of value – which are mainly shares and both commercial and residential property – are massively overvalued now. And there is nothing we can do to prevent the value of them crashing because the Ponzi style financialisation that has gripped western economies – and those of the US and UK in particular – for the last forty years was always heading for a massive crash, and now it has arrived. The genie is out of the bottle and it will not go back in again.

But that is not to say that our government (and other governments) are left powerless in the face of this. They are not. They can still make a decision about which factor of production – labour, business (enterprise), banks (capital) or landlords they wish to favour in the crisis to come.

If they favour people and business and sacrifice landlords (whos assets will survive, come what may, albeit at considerably less worth) and banks (which will inevitably need to be nationalised) then more people and many more businesses might make it through the coming crisis. If they favour landlords and banks – as the UK government is at present – then the chance that much business at all will survive this is pretty remote. And in the end, nor will the banks or the landlords either. That’s my bleak prognosis. And either way, pension funds and pensioners are in deep trouble: most will now be dependent on the state, which means much more generous provision has to be thought about now than we have ever previously imagined.

I didn’t enjoy writing this post. I’m not suggesting it’s a fun read. It is not. And yet, I do see hope. Our economies have been blighted by the curse of financialisation. I would not have chosen to end it the way that it’s going to happen. But wise governments will realise that the end of financialisation is now nigh, and act accordingly.

And some won’t.

On that decision rests the fate of millions of people.

I wish I thought I could rely on our government to make the right choice. Time alone will tell if they will. 

The lockdown threat to business viability

At the beginning of May 2020 it is very apparent that life is not returning to normal. Plans to end lockdown do, according to the Financial Times, include staggered working hours; rules to require social distancing in the workplace and shops; a ban on workplace canteens; a requirement that employers provide extra car parks (seemingly overnight) so that employees need not share lifts to work; a reduction in the number of people allowed to share lifts and a great deal more that makes it apparent that whatever work might be like after lockdown it will be nothing like what it was before it.

It is easy for the government to say this. And the rules could, possibly, be enforced. But the consequences need to be thought through, because they are staggering.

Of course it is theoretically possible that some companies could actually survive the substantial new costs that this way of working will impose. But I stress that the word ‘theoretically’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence. That is because the reality is that in all likelihood almost none can, or will. Our economy is not geared to work in this way. And by geared I do not mean physically, where it is apparent that our capacity for adaptation is already quite phenomenal. Instead I refer to financial gearing, interpreted broadly.

The financial burden on business

Like many households, a great many businesses are massively debt-burdened. They have both significant financial borrowings and / or substantial rent payment commitments. That is because they are both under-capitalised in many cases and do not own their own properties, with rent in that case pretty much representing interest on an expensive loan that they might have had to take if they were to have bought their property instead.

Importantly, these obligations are fixed at present. The government might have shrunk official interest rates to near enough zero, but the reality is that in the actual economy that is not the case. The burden on businesses to repay loans, interest on those loans, and rents, might have been subject to some minor concessions for strictly limited periods at present, and then only for some lucky businesses, but for many the obligations will be ongoing. And there has been not a hint, so far, of long term support on these issues. Instead new government-backed loans under coronavirus schemes will just add to these debt mountains.

What this will mean is that companies working with reduced efficiency and increased costs in markets where demand will be reduced will be under enormous stress. They will, absolutely inevitably, suffer reduced profitability from their trading activities, but will nonetheless be facing fixed financial obligations created in an entirely different era and market and, quite crucially, legally these obligations are not re-negotiable in most cases.

It does not take a financial genius to realise that this is a situation that literally cannot work. The vast majority of businesses cannot now survive if they are to meet those financial obligations. We are seeing this on High Streets already, where refusal to pay rents is becoming commonplace, but the problem will now extend to every industrial estate, office block and workshop in the country.

The tiny minority of businesses with no borrowings and their own, paid for, freehold premises might make it through this crisis. In addition, micro-enterprises working at home and with almost no employees might also do so. But with the lockdown conditions that are going to be imposed, the rest cannot. It will be as simple as that. I cannot be more blunt: on this occasion comments based on the extrapolation of obvious heuristically derived conclusions that reduce analysis of a situation to its barest essentials are both necessary and true.

The choice the government has to make

In that case it is also true that in the economy to come some fairly stark decisions have to be made if it is the plan of the government that we survive this crisis. Of these the most important (as ever when the reality of these situations is faced) is whose interests are to be prioritised?

Is it labour, and the need to preserve jobs, that has the highest priority?

Or is it enterprise, meaning that the preservation of trading entities becomes the core goal?

Alternatively, assuming that this can be done, is banking to be pre-eminent to prevent a crash? In other words, is capital preserved?

Finally, might instead the interests of landlords feature most highly?

To go right back to this most basic of economic questions, which factor of production is to have priority? Unavoidably, that question does, of course, have implicit class connotations attached to it.

Right now it seems quite clear that the government is setting its priorities in the reverse ordering of the above list.

To be precise, landlords have not really been asked to make any sacrifices to date: their interests and income streams appear to have survived almost unscathed to date.

Banks on the other hand are already subject to massive support for which they did not pay and are also now enjoying significant effective additional funding for loans from which they will make money. Quantitative easing has also helped them, and it’s back on the agenda.

Business loans, most especially to larger companies are getting through, but as loan capital those funds simply defer the day of reckoning that is to come because, as yet, the government is quite unable to differentiate cash flow, liquidity and solvency, let alone loans from capital. As such the wrong support is being provided, and the stress is growing as a result.

And furlough just disguises the fact that more than 6 million people are now likely to be unemployed in the UK. When the self-employed whose businesses have failed are added in it could be much higher.

My point is that this ranking of priorities – so natural to a political party established to support the interests of unearned wealth – is fundamentally misjudged now.

by Richard Murphy, Tax Research UK via Naked Capitalism | Read more:

[ed. Comments section is worth a read as well. See also: Federal Funds Must Go to State and Local Governments (Ian Welsh).]

photo: markk

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Party On

Some people are intentionally flouting health recommendations by exposing themselves and others to COVID-19 in Walla Walla County, officials said.

Meghan DeBolt, director of the county’s Department of Community Health, told the Union-Bulletin that contact tracing has revealed that some are attending parties with the idea that it is better to get sick with the virus and get it over with.

New positive test results in the county have resulted from such gatherings, she said.

“We ask about contacts, and there are 25 people because: ‘We were at a COVID party,’ ” DeBolt said.

She called the parties irresponsible and unacceptable.

Walla Walla Police Chief Scott Bieber noted that disobeying Gov. Jay Inslee’s March 23 “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order is illegal.

“We’re not going to overreact,” he said. “But we’re going to contact people who tested positive and follow up with a phone call, making them aware of the potential gross misdemeanor offense of disobeying the governor’s orders. If we find intentional violations, we will refer them to the city attorney.”

by AP/Seattle Times |  Read more:
Image: via
[ed. No shortage of nominees for this year's Darwin awards.]

Seattle Abandoned

McConnell Protégé Takes Center Stage

In March, after Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh took time off from his Supreme Court duties to swear in Justin Walker to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky in Louisville, the newly minted judge recognized how he had gotten there at the age of 37, with zero trial experience but a pedigree in conservatism.

His mother had supported a rising Republican star named Mitch McConnell when her son was just 8, Judge Walker recalled: “I’ve got to hand it to you, Mom. It has been extremely important to me that Kentucky’s senior senator is Mitch McConnell.”

Then he turned to Justice Kavanaugh as he addressed the justice’s liberal opponents: “What can I say that I haven’t already said on Fox News?” said Judge Walker, who gave 119 interviews to the news media and several speeches paid for by the Federalist Society rebutting Kavanaugh critics. “In Brett Kavanaugh’s America,” he said, “we will not surrender while you wage war on our work, or our cause, or our hope, or our dream.”

He closed with a broadside against the American Bar Association, which had given him a rare “Not Qualified” rating for his absence of courtroom work, categorizing the professional organization among his “opponents.” “Although we are winning we have not won. Although we celebrate today, we cannot take for granted tomorrow — or we will lose our courts and our country to critics who call us terrifying and who describe us as deplorable.”

Barely two months later, Judge Walker will appear Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee as Mr. McConnell’s handpicked nominee to a new seat: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, long seen as the second-most powerful court in the land and a potential springboard to the most powerful, the Supreme Court.

In his quest to remake the American judiciary, Mr. McConnell is not done with his protégé, Judge Walker, the grandson of a millionaire power broker in Kentucky and a soldier in the Senate majority leader’s judicial push. Calling senators back to Washington amid a pandemic, Mr. McConnell plans a swift confirmation for the youngest nominee to the District of Columbia appellate court since 1983 to replace the retiring Judge Thomas B. Griffith.

The appellate court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, opened the door to an inquiry into whether Mr. McConnell had improperly pressured Judge Griffith to retire so he could replace him with a young conservative in case President Trump loses re-election. But in a statement late Tuesday, Judge Griffith cited his wife’s chronic illness as the reason for his departure, saying, “My decision was driven entirely by personal concerns and involved no discussions with the White House or the Senate.”

Republicans promote Judge Walker as a “drain the swamp” Washington outsider, who triumphed over a hardscrabble upbringing in Kentucky to reach the heights of American jurisprudence 11 years out of law school.

“He’s young, brilliant and conservative,” said Mike Davis, who leads the Article III Project, a judicial advocacy group that has pushed President Trump’s appointments to the federal bench.

Democrats see the appointment differently. “I don’t think Mitch cares much about who is appointed to these spots as long as it’s someone he knows and he has confidence will be a conservative,” said Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat who represents Mr. McConnell’s hometown, Louisville, and who has known Mr. McConnell for decades.

“It’s the ultimate wielding of power,” he added, “and that’s what Mitch lives for.”

Judge Walker’s biography has received something of a makeover during his judicial ascent. Last year, he described his mother, Deborah Walker, as “a single working mom” who “made indescribable sacrifices to provide me, the first in my family to graduate from college, with the opportunities she didn’t have herself.”

But his maternal grandfather, Frank R. Metts, was a millionaire real estate developer and a Kentucky transportation secretary who was one of the state’s most powerful officials in the early 1980s.

by Elizabeth Williamson and Rebecca R. Ruiz, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

Reflections on a Disaster (Update - 5/4/2020)

From the initial Duck Soup post: Reflections on a Disaster (4/1/2020). Updated occasionally to see how closely we're following the script.

Update (4/7/2020): I forgot to add the main issue of conflict once the response/execution process is in full swing (actually, the main issue right from the beginning): More Harm Than Good. At the time of this writing we're closing in on what experts hope will be peak contagion/recorded deaths. Expect to see an escalating struggle between health experts/politicians/others vs. economists/politicians/business leaders/others on the issue of when to ease up on social distancing measures (basically, defining "success"). I'm already seeing calls to isolate the most vulnerable (old, underlying health conditions, etc.) and letting everyone else take their chances (possibly developing 'herd immunity' in the process). In other words, pitting numbers of deaths against numbers of unemployed and the health of the economy - which itself is on life-support at the moment.

***

Ok folks, here we are a week and a half later (4/16/2020). How are things going? (I'm not doing millions of links, so Google them yourselves): Well, the President is pushing some vague authority to reopen the economy (even though he never shut it down in the first place, and governors are pushing back, forming regional coalitions). The small business stimulus program has already run out of money (some businesses never seeing a dollar). No money for individuals yet. The financial sector is a black hole and could blow up at any time on any number of issues including over-leveraged and inter-connected risk, and things like loan defaults on car and house payments (some kind of cascading failure process, like 2008). Rent and mortgage payment relief proposals are mired in the weeds. No widespread virus/antibody testing yet (still several weeks off at best). No expansive contact tracing. No widespread availablility of masks. No killer vaccine on the horizon, maybe new year at the earliest (and no clear leading candidate). Respiratory intubation procedures should be avoided if at all possible. Secondary infections and virus mutations reported (!), a significant setback for vaccine production if true. More to come. See original post.] 

***

Update 5/4/2020. More than half the country is now 're-opening' in various phases (still without adequate testing and contact tracing in place). What 're-opening' means - practically, economically, medically will be revealed in the next couple of weeks. Deaths continue to rise in many of the re-opened states. Also a sense that a lot of people are nearing the breaking point, saying "if I get it, I get it", just to remove the uncertainty of living in limbo for some indeterminate time (even with indications that other organs might be at risk, like heart functions; and immunity possibly a fleeting/temporary benefit). It's the uncertainty of everything from broken supply chains to school schedules, shelter in place restrictions to testing and vaccine development, massive unemployment and housing insecurity - basically everything - that's driving a lot of frustration. Also an emerging debate on what an "acceptable" number of deaths might be, both to get the economy going again and developing "herd immunity". Finally, hard to imagine a health threat being politicized, but here we are. If there's a resurgence of infections and re-imposition of lockdowns, the country could be in for some serious civil unrest. Scary times.

[... also, I don't know about you but all the tv commercials and emails from corporations and businesses telling me how much "we're all in this together" (while cutting back on, or trying to sell me more services) are really beginning to get on my nerves.]

[ed. See also: Everything is Broken (Bob Dylan)]

Ben Edge, Pink Hare Moon, 2019
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