"Cancel Culture," Race and the Greed of the Billionaire Class

The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.
—Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is latest to weigh in on the “cancel culture” wars, saying what any number of widely cancelled others have said before him (for example, Matt Taibbi in this public post; he’s even more pointedly analytical in a later, subscriber-only piece).

But Hedges summarizes the situation so well, he’s well worth quoting: (...)

The cancel culture — the phenomenon of removing or canceling people, brands or shows from the public domain because of offensive statements or ideologies — is not a threat to the ruling class. Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis. Police, which along with the prison system are one of the primary instruments of social control over the poor, have taken the knee, along with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the serially criminal JPMorgan Chase, where only 4 percent of the top executives are Black. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world whose corporation, Amazon, paid no federal income taxes last year and who fires workers that attempt to unionize and tracks warehouse laborers as if they were prisoners, put a “Black Lives Matter” banner on Amazon’s home page. 

The rush by the ruling elites to profess solidarity with the protestors and denounce racist rhetoric and racist symbols, supporting the toppling of Confederate statues and banning the Confederate flag, are symbolic assaults on white supremacy. Alone, these gestures will do nothing to reverse the institutional racism that is baked into the DNA of American society. The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.

To repeat: Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis.

In addition, we’re drowning in corporate self-polishing-apple ads, like those from Nike and MacDonalds touting how much they care about the market that buys their products, even as they exploit that market for all they can get take it for.

Is it not more than obvious at this point, that corporate America and the purchased “free-market” liberals they keep in office are using this racially charged moment — a moment that should be racially charged — to distract from the other crisis facing America, the one where “minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state,” to cite just one of the hundred brutal tortures they inflict on us daily? (...)

As one wag put it, Jeff Bezos is having a very good crisis.

Companies large enough to survive this event are flush with cash and gobbling failed competitors hand over fist. It’s been rightly said that when Covid has done its work, we won’t recognize the country it left behind.

The “cancel culture” war is a distraction, important though it is we have that discussion. While we watch the knife fight in the corner, cheering one side or the other on, the main event, the torched and burning town we all inhabit, consumes itself behind us.

by Thomas Neuberger, (Down With Tyranny) via Naked Capitalism | Read more:

[ed. From the comments:]

Joe
July 17, 2020 at 4:28 am

This captures many of the thoughts I’ve been having for the past few weeks. I live in Houston, a city with the highest rate of uninsured people in the U.S., who are mostly black and brown. Our ICUs are overloaded with COVID patients, and our morgues are filling up rapidly. Across the country, millions of Americans are about to lose their unemployment insurance, get laid off, evicted, foreclosed on, or some combination thereof. Thanks to a bipartisan commitment to socialism for the rich only, the billionaire class is getting richer and consolidating even more wealth and power in their hands. But where is the left? Instead of either a coherent strategy to help the unemployed, the foreclosed, the evicted and the sick and dying, or to challenge the oligarchs and the politicians they control, I am stunned to see our largely university-based, middle class left relitigating the same debates about political correctness and identity politics they had thirty years ago (now rebranded as the “cancel culture”), almost oblivious to the economic suffering around them....  I am not even talking about folks toppling Confederate monuments, which I support. I am talking about all the bullshit chatter about “cancel culture” this and “woke” that from Jacobin DSAers to New Yorker liberals. The massive amount of energy expended on arguing over symbolism at a time like this just shows how out of touch the middle class left is with working people and their needs. It makes me sick.

Peter Keane

The Next Disaster Is Just a Few Days Away

Millions of unemployed Americans face imminent catastrophe.

Some of us knew from the beginning that Donald Trump wasn’t up to the job of being president, that he wouldn’t be able to deal with a crisis that wasn’t of his own making. Still, the magnitude of America’s coronavirus failure has shocked even the cynics.

At this point Florida alone has an average daily death toll roughly equal to that of the whole European Union, which has 20 times its population.

How did this happen? One key element in our deadly debacle has been extreme shortsightedness: At every stage of the crisis Trump and his allies refused to acknowledge or get ahead of disasters everyone paying attention clearly saw coming.

Blithe denials that Covid-19 posed a threat gave way to blithe denials that rapid reopening would lead to a new surge in infections; now that the surge is upon us, Republican governors are responding sluggishly and grudgingly, while the White House is doing nothing at all.

And now another disaster — this time economic rather than epidemiological — is just days away.

To understand the cliff we’re about to plunge over, you need to know that while America’s overall handling of Covid-19 was catastrophically bad, one piece — the economic response — was actually better than many of us expected. The CARES Act, largely devised by Democrats but enacted by a bipartisan majority late in March, had flaws in both design and implementation, yet it did a lot both to alleviate hardship and to limit the economic fallout from the pandemic.

In particular, the act provided vastly increased aid to workers idled by lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. U.S. unemployment insurance is normally a weak protection against adversity: Many workers aren’t covered, and even those who are usually receive only a small fraction of their previous wages. But the CARES Act both expanded coverage, for example to gig workers, and sharply increased benefits, adding $600 to every recipient’s weekly check.

These enhanced benefits did double duty. They meant that there was far less misery than one might otherwise have expected from a crisis that temporarily eliminated 22 million jobs; by some measures poverty actually declined.

They also helped sustain those parts of the economy that weren’t locked down. Without those emergency benefits, laid-off workers would have been forced to slash spending across the board. This would have generated a whole second round of job loss and economic contraction, as well as creating a huge wave of missed rental payments and evictions.

So enhanced unemployment benefits have been a crucial lifeline to tens of millions of Americans. Unfortunately, all of those beneficiaries are now just a few days from being thrown overboard.

For that $600 weekly supplement — which accounts for most of the expansion of benefits — applies only to benefit weeks that end “on or before July 31.” July 31 is a Friday. State unemployment benefit weeks typically end on Saturday or Sunday. So the supplement will end, in most places, on July 25 or 26, and millions of workers will see their incomes plunge 60 percent or more just a few days from now.

Two months have gone by since the House passed a relief measure that would, among other things, extend enhanced benefits through the rest of the year. But neither Senate Republicans nor the White House has shown any sense of urgency about the looming crisis. Why?

Part of the answer is that Trump and his officials are, as always, far behind the coronavirus curve. They’re still talking about a rapid, V-shape recovery that will bring us quickly back to full employment, making special aid to the unemployed unnecessary; they’re apparently oblivious to what everyone else sees — an economy that is stumbling again as the coronavirus surges back.

Delusions about the state of the economic recovery, in turn, allow conservatives to indulge in one of their favorite zombie ideas — that helping the unemployed in a depressed economy hurts job creation, by discouraging people from taking jobs.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
[ed. Not to mention eviction protection, unevenly applied throughout the states, but scheduled to expire in many (most?) states on July 31, 2020. To check your state's status, see: Emergency Bans on Evictions and Other Tenant Protections Related to Coronavirus (NOLO); and Eviction Looms for Millions of Americans Who Can’t Afford Rent (WSJ)]

Who Will Save the Food Timeline?

In the long timeline of human civilization, here’s roughly how things shook out: First, there was fire, water, ice, and salt. Then we started cooking up and chowing down on oysters, scallops, horsemeat, mushrooms, insects, and frogs, in that general chronological order. Fatty almonds and sweet cherries found their way into our diet before walnuts and apples did, but it would be a couple thousand years until we figured out how to make ice cream or a truly good apple pie. Challah (first century), hot dogs (15th century), Fig Newtons (1891), and Meyer lemons (1908) landed in our kitchens long before Red Bull (1984), but they all arrived late to the marshmallow party — we’d been eating one version or another of those fluffy guys since 2000 B.C.

This is, more or less, the history of human eating habits for 20,000 years, and right now, you can find it all cataloged on the Food Timeline, an archival trove of food history hiding in plain sight on a website so lo-fi you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a GeoCities fanpage. When you look past the Times Roman font and taupe background, the Food Timeline happens to be the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet, with thousands upon thousands of pages of primary sources, cross-checked research, and obsessively detailed food history presented in chronological order. Every entry on the Food Timeline, which begins with “water” in pre-17,000 B.C. and ends with “test tube burgers” in 2013, is sourced from “old cook books, newspapers, magazines, National Historic Parks, government agencies, universities, cultural organizations, culinary historians, and company/restaurant web sites.” There is history, context, and commentary on everything from Taylor pork roll to Scottish tablet to “cowboy cooking.”

A couple of years ago, I landed on the humble authority of the Food Timeline while doing research on bread soup, a kind of austerity cuisine found in countless cultures. The entry for soup alone spans more than 70,000 words (The Great Gatsby doesn’t break 50,000), with excerpts from sources like Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food, John Ayto’s An A-Z of Food and Drink, and D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully’s Early French Cookery. Before long, I fell into the emotional condition known as an internet K-hole, following link after link after link for hours on end. From olla podrida to hodge podge to cassava to taro to Chex Mix to Johnnycakes, the Food Timeline covered everything. Did you know that mozzarella sticks go as far back as the Middle Ages, but back then they called them “pipefarces”? I bookmarked the site and returned to it time and time again, when I was researching, writing, or just bored and hungry.

Despite the Food Timeline’s incredible utility, few people I spoke to had ever heard of it. Those who had always marveled at its breadth. “Oh my god, it’s nirvana,” Taste of the Past podcast host Linda Pelaccio said to herself when she first stumbled onto the Food Timeline. Sandy Oliver, a food historian and fellow fan, was stunned by its completeness and simplicity. “It was one of the most accessible ways of getting into food history — especially if you were a beginner — because it was just so easy to use,” she told me. “It didn’t have a hyperacademic approach, which would be off-putting.”

When Oliver learned that the thousands of pages and countless resources on the Food Timeline were compiled and updated entirely by one woman, she couldn’t believe it. “Oh my lord,” she thought. “This is an obsessed person.”

The Food Timeline, in all its comprehensive splendor, was indeed the work of an obsessed person: a New Jersey reference librarian named Lynne Olver. Olver launched the site in 1999, two years before Wikipedia debuted, and maintained it, with little additional help, for more than 15 years. By 2014, it had reached 35 million readers and Olver had personally answered 25,000 questions from fans who were writing history papers or wondering about the origins of family recipes. Olver populated the pages with well-researched answers to these questions, making a resource so thorough that a full scroll to the bottom of the Food Timeline takes several labored seconds.

For nearly two decades, Olver’s work was everyone else’s gain. In April of 2015, she passed away after a seven-month struggle with leukemia, a tragedy acknowledged briefly at the bottom of the site. “The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015, her obituary), reference librarian with a passion for food history.”

In the wake of Olver’s death, no one has come forward to take over her complex project, leaving a void in the internet that has yet to be filled — and worse, her noble contribution to a world lacking in accurate information and teeming with fake news is now in danger of being lost forever.

It isn’t often that we are tasked with thinking about the history of the food that we eat, unless it shows up in a Jeopardy! question or we ask our informal family historians to detail whose mother passed down this or that version of pound cake. But there are plenty of reasons to pay close attention: for curiosity’s sake; for deepening an appreciation of and respect for cooks, food, and technique; and for gathering perspective on what came before us. “Very few (if any) foods are invented. Most are contemporary twists on traditional themes,” Olver wrote on the Food Timeline. “Today’s grilled cheese sandwich is connected to ancient cooks who melted cheese on bread. 1950s meatloaf is connected to ground cooked meat products promoted at the turn of the 20th century, which are, in turn related to ancient Roman minces.”

The problem is that these days we’re overloaded with bad information that can be accessed instantaneously, with few intermediaries running quality control. “I think it’s a little too easy to turn to the web,” Oliver, who was also a longtime friend of Olver’s, told me as we talked about the legacy of Food Timeline. “What I worry about is that people aren’t learning critical thinking skills. Once in a while I run into someone who has never used a primary source — wouldn’t know it if it hit them on the head. Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.” Or, if not a library, a mammoth resource compiled by a certified reference librarian herself. Whenever a reader would write in asking a question, or when Olver herself would become interested in the provenance of a certain food, she’d turn to her personal library of thousands of food books, and her litany of professional resources and skills, and write out detailed answers with sources cited on her website.

by Dayna Evans, Eater | Read more:
Image: D’Ara Nazaryan

Jules Maes Closes

The historic Jules Maes Saloon, one of the oldest bars in Seattle, has closed after 132 years. The local anchor & landmark, a rare pre-Prohibition saloon, dates back to 1888, when #Georgetown was its own city filled with breweries (Georgetown was once the 6th largest beer-producing district in the world), brothels, a racetrack & general vice, before it was annexed by #Seattle in 1910. In 1912 Belgian immigrant Jules Gustaf Maes, “The Mayor of Georgetown” bought Rainier Bar at 5953 Duwamish Ave (now #AirportWay). In 1928 the name changed to Jules Maes & in 1937 moved to 5919 Airport Way. Once known as “The Brick Store,” over the years the space was mostly home to taverns & poolhalls, but also other biz on the ground floor (like a hardware store, door store & grocer), with pigeon races to newspaper publishing to apts on the upper floor. In 1920 the Georgetown Merchants baseball team formed in the back room (also was once a bookie joint). June Espeland was owner & barkeep from 1988-2005(?), then owners John & Vanessa LeMaster owned/operated the bar for past 15 yrs. #JulesMaesSaloon had been closed since March due to COVID shutdown. LeMaster said the permanent closure is due to a 27% rent hike by the landlord (although landlord released a statement - details on Eater - saying the increase was not 27% & that Jules Maes said they did not want to renew the lease). #JulesMaes is one of my faves (#VanishingSeattle had an early historic-watering-hole meetup there) & it’s hard to imagine Georgetown without it. #JulesMaes used to have punk shows in the back room (who else remembers this?) In 2009 I saw a reunion of Peter Bagge’s ‘90s band The Action Suits (members included Fantagraphics staffers) play a @fantagraphics after-party, plus Bagge & Steve Fisk’s new band Can You Imagine? Luckily Jules Maes is looking to possibly re-open, maybe in White Center. Altho, they admit it just won’t be the same without the location it’s occupied for nearly a century, & they’re sad to go. Share your Jules Maes ❤️ & memories! #seattlelandmark #seattlehistory #historicseattle #endofanera #seattlecommunity #seattleculture #seattlecharacter #seattlesoul #oldseattle #vivaseattle

via: Vanishing Seattle (vanishingseattle.org on Instagram)

[ed. See the post following this one. My favorite Seattle bar/restaurant. Spent so many pleasurable times there.]

Vanishing Seattle

Maybe nobody’s business is hotter right now than Cynthia Brothers’.

OK, it’s more of a hobby than a business. But with what’s going on in Seattle these days, “it has ended up kind of taking over my life,” Brothers says.

Brothers chronicles loss. Most days at her website, Vanishing Seattle, she tries to document the city’s “displaced & disappearing institutions, businesses, communities & cultures.” Lately it’s been like taking photos while going over a waterfall.

There was the landmark theater Cinerama, gone. Ballard’s Bop Street Records, with its half-million albums, closed. Bavarian Meats, gone from the Pike Place Market, where it’s been since the World’s Fair. The Rebar, the Seattle club that became a cultural pioneer by realizing it didn’t have to be pigeonholed as either a gay bar or a straight bar, closed and moving out of downtown.

As the pandemic vise tightened again this summer, the sea change appears to be accelerating. The Seattle Times reports that at least 20 more restaurants have folded, including Bill’s Off Broadway, which was there on lower Capitol Hill for 40 years. And unimaginably, Jules Maes Saloon, arguably the oldest bar in Seattle, which had survived in the industrial Georgetown neighborhood since 30 years before the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

“I get overwhelmed at times, at the pace of the loss,” Brothers said the other day during a break in her day job, as a nonprofit program officer.

When she went down to Georgetown this past week to photograph the Jules Maes closing, with its Depression-era pendant lights and mounted deer heads on the walls, she paused to also note the other holes growing in that strip. Guitar lovers’ favorite Georgetown Music, moving out to Burien. The drag queen mecca the Palace Theater, dark for good.

Obituaries like this are being written across the city. Fremont’s Red Door, one of the first craft beer bars in the country. The Big Picture, a speakeasy-style movie theater near the Market. Innervisions, the U District poster shop that has decorated generations of dorm rooms.

Even the infrastructure has felt of late like it’s slipping away.

“We’re praying for you West Seattle Bridge,” read one Vanishing Seattle post.

Brothers, 38, started Vanishing Seattle in 2016, to mark how her home city was being remade by gentrification and development. It was essentially a site about how money was changing the physical landscape, removing the old buildings, the dumps, the dive bars, all the stuff in the way of shiny new tech Seattle.

“Just walking around and seeing what was here disappearing, I had an urge to document it,” she says.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Danny Westneat / The Seattle Times
[ed. Oh NO. Jules Maes' is closing. I can't belive it. It's everything best about Seattle, along with Georgetown itself. Just so, so sad. See also: The Bar That Won't Go Away (The Stranger)]

Working from home
via:

via:
[ed. See also: A 10-year-old boy was dragged off a boat by a shark on the Australian coast (Yahoo News).]

Open Letter: 1Day Sooner

New York, NY— In an open letter to Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 15 Nobel Laureates are joined by over one hundred prominent figures and over two thousand 1Day Sooner challenge volunteers in advocating for the potential of challenge trials to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development. The signatories come from a range of disciplines including epidemiology, medicine, economics, psychology, and philosophy.

“If challenge trials can safely and effectively speed the vaccine development process,” the letter states, “then there is a formidable presumption in favor of their use, which would require a very compelling ethical justification to overcome.”

The NIH, which has funded the work of 160 Nobel Laureates, has been at the forefront of medical research for decades. While the NIH has committed to producing the virus, Dr. Collins has stated that COVID-19 challenge trials are “on the table for discussion — not on the table to start designing a plan.”

In contrast, Adrian Hill, Director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford and signatory of the open letter, writes in a public statement that “collaborative human challenge studies should be feasible and informative in the coming months.” This is the first public statement from a vaccine developer about their plans to conduct a COVID-19 human challenge trial.

As 1Day Sooner and Oxford’s Jenner Institute collaborate on human challenge trial preparation, it is essential that Dr. Collins and the NIH do not lag behind by neglecting preparation for these trials. As the signatories write, “we appeal to the government and foundation funders around the world to support this effort.”

1Day Sooner is an organization that advocates on behalf of COVID-19 challenge trial volunteers.

[ed. The letter:]

Dear Dr. Collins,

The COVID-19 pandemic must be fought urgently on many fronts, but it is hard to picture robust economic and social recoveries in the absence of a vaccine. We are writing to underscore the vast importance of human challenge trials as a method to help develop vaccines.

In April, thirty-five members of the US House of Representatives called upon U.S. regulators to consider allowing volunteers to be infected with the pandemic coronavirus to speed vaccine testing—in so-called human challenge or controlled infection trials. In addition, over a hundred vaccine candidates are already under development around the world, at least ten of which have moved into the clinical trial phase. In May, the World Health Organization published guidance supporting trials of that form, if done ethically, and in June published a draft laying out a practical roadmap for their implementation.

The undersigned urge the U.S. government (including, but not limited to the Coronavirus Task Force, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Congress), its allies, international funders, and world bodies (e.g. the World Health Organization), to undertake immediate preparations for human challenge trials, including supporting safe and reliable production of the virus and any biocontainment facilities necessary to house participants.

Background

The rationale for human challenge trials is that they can greatly accelerate the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Human challenge trials can provide information much faster than conventional efficacy trials, which take months longer. In such trials, volunteers still receive the vaccine candidate or a control. Instead of resuming life as usual and waiting to “catch” a virus, volunteers are deliberately exposed to the pathogen under controlled conditions. Beyond being faster than conventional trials, a challenge test is likelier to conclude with interpretable results, e.g. should the presence of virus around the study site begin to fade over time.

If challenge trials can safely and effectively speed the vaccine development process, there is a formidable presumption in favor of their use, which would require a very compelling ethical justification to overcome.

Human research demands caution and oversight. Crucial protections must be extended to protect the health and autonomy rights of volunteers. Guidance from the World Health Organization clarifies that human challenge trials are ethical when they meet certain criteria. The following are some protections that should clearly be in place.

● Trial participants should be relatively young and in good health. The mortality risk of the coronavirus to 20-29 year-olds, healthy and unhealthy, is similar to that of living kidney donors , a relatively common procedure, similarly justified by the donor’s informed consent and the benefits to society. Excluding participants with preexisting conditions would lower the risk significantly.

● It is crucial that all trial participants be provided the highest quality medical care with frequent monitoring. A significant percentage of the population will likely become infected and their access to medical care may be limited. As a result, the guarantee of excellent medical care in the study means that infection would be safer in the controlled, medically supervised, and isolated conditions of a challenge trial.

● Ethical and scientific review must be of the highest quality. In the U.S., that would mean not only the usual FDA and IRB review but a vigorous public discussion and perhaps even an additional, independent ethics and science taskforce representing, among others, challenge volunteers.

● The autonomy of the volunteers is of paramount concern. This means that the informed consent process must be robust (e.g. no children, no prisoners, multiple tests of comprehension). It also means that the wish of informed volunteers to participate in the trial ought to be given substantial weight. Providing some input over trial development and procedure to those interested in becoming volunteers (e.g. in the design of isolation conditions) could both enhance their agency and improve study design. Decades of psychological research on highly altruistic behaviors has demonstrated that a large, and likely growing, fraction of the general population is willing to undergo meaningful risks to benefit others due to genuinely altruistic motivation rather than insensitivity to risk, psychopathology, or other ethically concerning motives.

If done properly, live Coronavirus human challenge trials can be an important way to accelerate vaccine development and, ideally, to save the lives of millions around the world as well as help rescue global economies. We strongly recommend that production of the unattenuated virus begin immediately consistent with good manufacturing practices for potential use in trials that balance risks and benefits and respect the safety and autonomy of volunteers. It is also vitally important that there is both full transparency on the vaccine development and trial process and a diverse group of trial participants necessary to provide a broadly effective and universally available vaccine. We appeal to the government and foundation funders around the world to support this effort.

Sincerely,

Initial Signatories in italics. Institutional affiliations for identification purposes only:

[ed. Here]

The Terrifying Next Phase of the Coronavirus Recession

Failed businesses and lost loved ones, empty theme parks and socially distanced funerals, a struggling economy and an unmitigated public-health disaster: This is the worst-of-both-worlds equilibrium the United States finds itself in.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has railed against shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, tweeting in all caps that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” and pushing for employees to get back to work and businesses to get back to business. But the country has failed to get the virus under control, through masks, contact tracing, mass testing, or any of the other strategies other countries have tried and found successful. That has kneecapped the nascent recovery, and raised the possibility that the unemployment rate, which eased in May and June after nearly reaching 15 percent in April, could spike again later this year.

The economy seized in unprecedented terms this spring as states and cities mandated lockdowns. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed, and millions of workers were furloughed or laid off. But instead of setting up a national viral-control strategy during this time, as other rich countries did, the United States did close to nothing. Congress underfunded disease research and contact-tracing efforts. No federal agency coordinated the procurement of personal protective equipment. Months into the pandemic, health professionals were still reusing masks for days at a time. The Trump administration punted responsibility for public-health management to the states, each tipping into a budgetary crisis. After a springtime peak, caseloads declined only modestly. Outbreaks seeded across the country. States reopened, and counts exploded again.

Now the economy is traveling sideways, as business failures mount and the virus continues to maim and kill. New applications for unemployment insurance, for instance, are leveling off at more than 1 million a week—more than double the highest rate reached during the Great Recession, a sign that more job losses are becoming permanent. After rising when the government sent stimulus checks and expanded unemployment-insurance payments, consumer spending is falling again, down 10 percent from where it was a year ago. Homebase, a provider of human-resources software, says that the rebound has hit a “plateau,” in terms of hours worked, share of employees working, and number of businesses open.

The next, terrifying phase of the coronavirus recession is here: a damaged economy, a virus spreading faster than it was in March. The disease itself continues to take a bloody, direct toll on workers, with more than 60,000 Americans testing positive a day and tens of thousands suffering from extended illness. The statistical value of American lives already lost to the disease is something like $675 billion. The current phase of the pandemic is also taking an enormous secondary toll. States with unmitigated outbreaks have been forced to go back into lockdown, or to pause their reopening, killing weakened businesses and roiling the labor market. Where the virus spreads, the economy stops.

That is not just due to government edicts, either. Some consumers have rushed back to bars and restaurants, and resumed shopping and traveling. Young people, who tend to get less sick from the coronavirus than the elderly, appear to be driving today’s pandemic. But millions more are making it clear that they will not risk their life or the life of others in their community to go out. Avoidance of the virus, more so than shutdown orders, seems to be affecting consumer behavior. Places without official lockdowns have seen similar financial collapses to those with them, and a study by University of Chicago economists showed that decreases in economic activity are closely tied to “fears of infection” and are “highly influenced by the number of COVID deaths reported” in a given county.

In other ways, the spread of COVID-19 is keeping Americans from going back to work. The perception of public transit as unsafe, for example, makes it expensive and tough for commuters to get to their jobs. Schools and day-care centers are struggling to figure out how to reopen safely, meaning millions of parents are facing a fall juggling work and child care. This is a disaster. “The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance,” the former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem has argued in The Atlantic. “Four months of stay-at-home orders have proved that, if schools are unavailable, a city cannot work, a community cannot function, a nation cannot safeguard itself.”

International comparisons are enlightening. Countries that successfully countered the virus seem to have enjoyed better financial recoveries; countries that did not shut down saw major hits to their economy anyway. In Sweden, authorities declined to enact strict public-health measures as the virus took hold. It has seen significantly higher case counts and more deaths than its neighbors, such as Norway, and its economy tanked. Or consider South Korea. With aggressive contact tracing and mass testing, it kept many of its commercial and educational facilities open as it quashed the pandemic. (The country has tallied just 288 deaths from COVID-19, compared with roughly 135,000 in the United States.) The unemployment rate there is 4.2 percent, and the economy is expected to contract just a small amount this year, due in part to falling exports.

In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did a “little dance” to celebrate the country’s reopening one full month ago. In Taiwan, thousands of fans cheered from the stands at a baseball game last week, unafraid of disease. In France, one of the hardest-hit countries in Europe, families are back to going on vacation, eating in cafés, and visiting loved ones in hospitals. In the United States, outbreaks are shutting everything down yet again.

by Anne Lowrey, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Spenser Platt/Getty
[ed. See also: America Should Prepare for a Double Pandemic (The Atlantic)]

Congress Passes Bill To Build New 35-Mile Overpass Capable Of Housing Millions Of Evicted Americans

WASHINGTON—In an effort to help ease the economic burden of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress passed a new bill Wednesday that approved $3 trillion in funding for a 35-mile overpass capable of housing millions of recently evicted U.S. citizens. “We know the American people are struggling, and we are thrilled to finally be able to offer them substantive relief in the form of this massive bridge structure that they can huddle under to avoid the elements,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, telling reporters that the overpass authorized by bill H.R. 487 would include plenty of shelter from the sun and wind as well as a generous 5-foot median to give a wide swath of unhoused Americans a place to sleep. “All men, women, and children participating in the program will automatically be given a supply of trash bags and old grocery circulars, and we’re also thrilled to announce that $12 billion has already been earmarked for the manufacture of shopping carts for carrying belongings. We know times are tough, but together, we will get through this pandemic.” Pelosi added that, obviously, lewd behavior or drug use would not be tolerated and much of the allocated funding would go towards weekly police sweeps of the overpass to ensure compliance.

by The Onion |  Read more:

[ed. See also: City Enters Phase 4 Of Pretending Coronavirus Over]

Cake Art

Tuba Geçkil, Red Rose and Cake Bakery

This Is The Woman Responsible For Those Eerily Realistic Cakes That Have Been Flooding The Internet (Buzzfeed).
Image: YouTube
[ed. See also: How Cakes in Disguise Got Out of Hand (Eater).]

Muddling Through

As I read George Scialabba’s new book How To Be Depressed, I recalled that I’d been introduced to his writing almost a decade ago by a schizophrenic, manic-depressive homeless man. R. might have protested that term—technically, he lived in a small garage that a fellow parishioner at the church we all attended let him use. It was shocking to visit him there for the first time; nearly every square inch of the place was filled with musty stacks of the New York Review of Books, assorted newspapers, and books, leaving only a narrow path that led to a mattress. Before adding something to one of these piles, he’d open his latest acquisition and run his finger down its pages, searching for matches or “sparks” that might cause a destructive fire—a phobia caused by a traumatic incident in R.’s childhood.

My friends and I tried to look after R., taking him to dinner or paying his phone bill or letting him do laundry in our homes. I was drawn to R. partly because I couldn’t help but see some of myself in him, and had a gnawing fear that his plight would one day be my own. He was, in his way, an intellectual, who actually read at least a few of the periodicals he collected and enjoyed arguing about politics. I’d often see him in the local used bookstore I frequented, and that must have been where he pressed Scialabba’s What Are Intellectuals Good For? into my hands. “This is the good shit,” he solemnly professed, and he was right. R. had been an alcoholic, and I’d gleaned that when he finally kicked booze the withdrawal caused a breakdown from which he’d never quite recovered. I knew I sometimes drank too much, too, and for the wrong reasons—enough to watch myself. We shared both hypochondria and a dread of visiting the doctor. I wasn’t a manic depressive, but for much of the time I knew R. I was in the throes of the worst severe depression of my life.

One feature of that depression was that I developed an acute fear of becoming homeless—deepened, I think, by my friendship with R. If you spend any amount of time actually getting to know homeless people, you realize how quickly a life can become undone: an addiction that spirals out of control at the wrong time; a mental breakdown without family and friends to sustain you; a bad decision followed by a bad break. The depressed mind, usually so lethargic, nevertheless manages to conjure up the most elaborate scenarios of doom. However ridiculous it might seem, I made a number of my closest friends swear on their honor to take me in if I got to such a point. That fear of falling came back to me when I read this passage from the notes of one of Scialabba’s therapists:

He now has multiple fears of losing control, which he fantasizes would result in his becoming passive, being unable to hold a job, going on welfare or into a hospital, and not being able to take care of himself.

Such consuming worry about “losing control,” about being unable to keep it together, is a recurring theme in the literature about depression—not merely intense sadness, but the threat of personal dissolution. William Styron, in Darkness Visible, relays a conversation with a suffering friend who told him that his depression made him feel “helpless.” An especially wrenching scene in Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon is when his father literally has to feed him. Depression makes ordinary tasks appear as looming impossibilities. Work suffers; social occasions become exhausting burdens; getting out of bed takes heroic effort.

This underlies one of the paradoxes of depression: it renders you unable to do what would help you tame your affliction. When I was depressed, I knew exercise stood a chance of minimizing my symptoms, but summoning the will to go for a jog or head to the gym was often beyond me. For years I resisted trying medication. The thought of finding a doctor, setting up an appointment, and then navigating insurance forms brought me close to panic. I only received treatment after bottoming out, nearly destroying the life I was keeping a tenuous hold on. One morning while lying in bed, not long after spending a night in jail, I had a brief moment of clarity: I crawled over to my desk and emailed my priest, telling him I needed help. Could he arrange for me to see a doctor? I still remember walking out of the doctor’s office a few days later, prescription in hand, crying from relief. It would take weeks for the Lexapro to take effect; the point was that I’d finally done something. For the first time in a long time, I’d moved forward.

As I slowly, if unevenly, learned to deal with my depression, I begged R. to see a doctor too, and perhaps try medication. He refused, pointing me to an old magazine article that cast doubt on such pharmaceutical interventions, while hinting at darker conspiracies about the mental-health profession’s role in our society. We argued and argued. I offered to set up an appointment with the doctor I’d seen, and gave him a blank signed check to cover the cost of his visit. He wouldn’t budge. Depression can leave us not only unable to love, but unable to accept love.

Depression forces itself through the cracks of one’s life, finding the weak spots particular to the person it inundates. Like consciousness itself, depression seems to dwell in that hazy realm where matter and spirit meet, and we turn inward to pursue its elusive essence. Exploring what caused a person’s depression, however, what set it off on the particular course it ran, necessarily ends in an overdetermined tangle—one reason why the shelves overflow with depression memoirs. We keep trying to pin depression down, but fail again and again. Styron’s depression set upon him when he was around sixty years old, likely “triggered” when he suddenly gave up alcohol and began taking a dangerous sleeping medication. But as Styron meditates on what happened to him, the chain of causation extends ever backward—he realizes three main characters in his novels kill themselves, a fact that suggests the storm had been gathering for many years. Then he presses on to childhood wounds. Would a man who’d led a different life sink into depression after he quit drinking? Styron gets to the end of Darkness Visible and confesses, “The very number of hypotheses is testimony to the malady’s all but impenetrable mystery.”

by Matthew Sitman, Commonweal | Read more:
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man (also known as At Heaven's Gate), 1890, detail (Alamy Stock Photo)

Doomscrolling

You’re Doomscrolling Again. Here’s How to Snap Out of It. (NY Times)

Image: Shutterstock/Bob McCarroll via:

Pebble Redux: The Bears of Amakdedori

There are few icons of wilderness as powerful as the bears of southwest Alaska. With thousands of them living wild on the Alaska Peninsula, they play crucial roles as ecosystem curators and economic drivers, drawing wildlife lovers from all over the world who support the region’s lucrative sustainable bear viewing industry.

Once regarded as untouchable, the best brown bear habitat in the world faces the risk of becoming a mining district, causing indelible harm to the pristine ecosystem at the headwaters of Bristol Bay. The enormous open-pit mine and transportation infrastructure would affect vast tracts of protected land: Katmai National Park, McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, and Lake Clark National Park protect habitat that supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, the largest congregation of bears in the world, and the incalculable riches of untouched wilderness. Those protections now hang in the balance.

Our new short film Pebble Redux: The Bears of Amakdedori brings us to the shores of Pebble’s proposed “Southern Route” transportation corridor. Last month, the Army Corps of Engineers changed which transportation corridor it recommends, highlighting it’s “Northern Route” that cuts through land owned by several Bristol Bay entities that refuse to grant Pebble access to their properties. In either case, the world’s best habitat for Brown Bears is threatened, and Wildlife Photographer and Bear Expert, Drew Hamilton, will show you exactly why.

via: Cook Inletkeeper

Florida Man

Florida is undoubtedly the most curious, wackiest and unusual state in the US, inhabited by the weirdest people ever. And no wonder, as the local Floridians have to deal with alligators, venomous snakes, seasonless climate, mosquitos and such high humidity that leaves you all wet in a second on a hot one, every day. Also, bona fide Florida state inhabitants have an old tradition of living for today, no matter the dire consequences. We are not only talking about those people who chose to live in the Everglades, as Miami Floridians are also quite kooky. And if the dire consequences do happen, it is a law to make every arrest public information, thus putting every deed of these crazy people on the spotlight.

There are tons of unbelievable headlines out there about situations that have bewildered everyone, and while there are many different individuals involved in these stories, Florida Man always takes the cake with some of the most mind-boggling examples. Thanks to a Twitter account named Florida Man that gathers "Real-life stories of the world's worst superheroes" we can share these stories of funny people with you and it's truly amazing.

Take a look at some of the best headlines about the shenanigans of Florida Man.

by Vaiva Vareikaite, Bored Panda | Read more:
Image: Twitter
[ed. See also: I'm from Florida. Our coronavirus crisis doesn't surprise me (The Guardian via Yahoo News).]

Gutting NEPA

President Trump on Wednesday is set to unilaterally weaken one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines. (...)

Revising the 50-year-old law through regulatory reinterpretation is one of the biggest deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, which to date has moved to rollback 100 rules protecting clean air and water, and others that aim to reduce the threat of human-caused climate change. (...)

Republican lawmakers, the oil and gas industry, construction companies, home builders and other businesses have long said the federal permitting process takes too long, and accused environmentalists of using the law to tie up projects they oppose.

“This will modernize and rationalize the permitting process so that we can get these projects built at a state and local level,” said Martin Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. The expected final rule, he said, “is a big step forward and it’s about our nation maintaining its global competitiveness.”

The final rule sets new hard deadlines of between one and two years to complete environmental studies, according to two people who have seen the document but were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The rule will also allow agencies to develop categories of activities that do not require an environmental assessment at all.

And in one of the most bitterly contested provisions, the rule would free federal agencies from having to consider the impacts of infrastructure projects on climate change. It does so by eliminating the need for agencies to analyze a project’s indirect or “cumulative” effects on the environment and specifying they are only required to analyze “reasonably foreseeable” impacts.

“This may be the single biggest giveaway to polluters in the past 40 years,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. He accused the Trump administration of “turning back the clock to when rivers caught fire, our air was unbreathable and our most beloved wildlife was spiraling toward extinction.” (...)

Conservationists like to call the National Environmental Protection Act the “Magna Carta” of environmental law. Just as the charter of rights protected English citizens from monarchical rule, activists note, the foundational environmental policy gives United States citizens a voice in every federal road, housing project, airport or major infrastructure development.

It requires agencies to analyze and disclose the extent to which proposed federal actions or infrastructure projects affect the environment, from local wildlife habitat to the projected levels of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

Activists opposed to fossil fuel expansion have used the environmental policy to challenge a proposed major coal terminal in Washington state. Last year a federal judge found that the Obama administration did not adequately take into account the climate change impact of leasing public land for oil gas drilling in Wyoming, a ruling that also presented a threat to Mr. Trump’s plans for fossil fuel development. (...)

Mr. Trump, a former real estate developer who has had personal run-ins with state-level versions of the law, had made weakening it a top priority of his administration.

But despite tasking at least a half dozen people from various agencies to finish the regulation this summer, the final rule is not likely to be safe from the Congressional Review Act, a law that had hardly been used until Mr. Trump took office. Under the law, Congress can overturn a federal agency’s rule-making within 60 days of its finalization, something Democrats have pledged to do next year if they have the votes. Otherwise, the rule is expected to be subject to a lengthy court battle.

The revisions, if they hold up in court, are expected to lead to more permitting for pipelines and other projects that worsen global greenhouse gas emissions. It could also make roads, bridges and other infrastructure riskier because developers would no longer be required to analyze issues like whether sea-level rise might eventually submerge a project.

by Lisa Friedman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

[ed. If you care about the environment, weakening NEPA is one of the biggest threats imaginable. It's also a good example of why government doesn't work these days - after years and decades of this type of death-by-a-thousand-cuts subversion, all that's left are zombie laws and regulations that no longer fulfill their intended purpose but exist only to give a false impression of government oversight and accountability.]

America is Not Prepared for Schools Opening This Fall

The public school district in Charlottesville, Virginia, has proposed a model for schooling this fall that resembles what most districts are trying to do. Because state health officials recommend putting three to six feet between students, and because classrooms were already crowded and schools over-enrolled, the district leadership has decided to alternate attendance. Half the student population will attend Mondays and Wednesdays. The other half will attend Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays will be for teacher preparation and deep cleaning.

As a working parent of a school-age child, the prospect of my child attending school for two days a week, and staying home alone to do school work (or not) the three days a week, is frustrating. I have the means, flexibility and job security to cope with it. My kid will be able to get lunch every day. She has good wifi and multiple computers at home. But she would still have to write off an entire year of high school as a wasted opportunity. The course quality will be lousy and she’ll have minimal social engagement. No club meetings. No homecoming. No “Friday night lights”. It’s heartbreaking. But because we have the resources, she will be fine in the long run.

It will be even harder for other people. Consider my neighbor. She’s a single parent with three school-aged children in three different schools. She works for an hourly wage as a food-service contract worker at the local university. She was furloughed in March when the university shut down. She hopes to work full-time this fall, but with most university classes moved online, there is no guarantee that she’ll get the hours she needs to pay her bills.

So she might have to pick up another hourly job as well – if any exist during the looming economic crash in this college town. Her kids don’t have the advantages that mine has. Under Covid-19 things will be even tougher for them than the general injustices of this country have already put on them.

Then consider my brother-in-law, a public school teacher married to my sister, who is immuno-suppressed after intensive cancer treatment. He looks at classroom plans for the fall and sees almost nothing to protect him from the aerosol spread of the virus. Once winter comes, air will recirculate among closed classrooms. Schoolchildren are hard to manage in normal times, and they cough on whatever is close. Given that many more children will be facing crises at home as parents and grandparents lose their jobs or their health or both, behavior will be even harder to manage. And given that he might only see each child two days a week, building trusting relationships will be impossible. Teaching online in the spring was a miserable failure, so his students will be well behind grade level in most subjects, making the task of catching them up even more daunting. He has already said goodbye to dear colleagues who have decided to leave the profession rather than deal with this impending disaster. (...)

Like Denmark, South Korea and dozens of other decently run countries around the world, the US could have schooling this fall five days a week – had we committed hundreds of billions of dollars to construction, desk separators, masks, internet and software upgrades (especially in rural communities), HVAC and ventilation fixes, food service delivery to classrooms, viral testing and tracing, and school nurses (most US schools did away with full-time nurses decades ago).

We would have had to have started all these projects in March. Instead, we’re in July, just weeks from schools opening, and almost nothing has been done.

President Donald Trump, invoking his power of positive thinking, has declared that schools will be open full-time this fall, regardless of consequences. Vice-President Mike Pence, acknowledging that the US Centers for Disease Control guidelines make that impossible, has pledged that the guidelines will change because Trump wants them to – thus destroying the CDC’s credibility, yet doing nothing to help schools.

Instead of massive infusions of federal funds, every school district faces budget cuts from reduced state and local taxes. So you can write off the education and safety of almost all American children. Millions will be at home alone, where they are most likely to be hurt or killed. Millions will be with abusive relatives. Millions will be without lunch or nurse care.

Americans are uncomfortable with situations like this. We’re used to relying on our myths and stories of innovation, mobilization and triumph. If we had a good run during which such myths were true enough to inspire confidence and drive us toward progress, that run is over. This realization isn’t just true of long-term, global maladies like climate change. Our inability to solve or even avoid devastating problems is now immediate, local and clear.

by Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: Cj Gunther/EPA
[ed. See also: What Do College Students Think of Their Schools’ Reopening Plans? (New Yorker).]

It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?

It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.

But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.

Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.

And American politics — while still divided in many of the same ways it was before the virus — has entered a new era.

All of this, obviously, is conjecture. The future is unknowable. But the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach, and the United States is suffering through a new virus surge that’s worse than in any other country.

With help from economists, politicians and business executives, I have tried to imagine what a post-Covid economy may look like. One message I heard is that the course of the virus itself will play the biggest role in the medium term. If scientific breakthroughs come quickly and the virus is largely defeated this year, there may not be many permanent changes to everyday life.

On the other hand, if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.

Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out (even if they would eventually be replaced by different restaurants).

The changes that I’m imagining in this article are based on neither an unexpectedly fast or slow resolution, but instead on what many scientists consider the baseline. In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.

Before we get into the details, there is one more caveat worth mentioning: Many things will not change. That’s one of history’s lessons.

The financial crisis of 2007-9 didn’t cause Americans to sour on stocks, and it didn’t lead to an overhaul of Wall Street. The election of the first Black president didn’t usher in an era of racial conciliation. The 9/11 attacks didn’t make Americans unwilling to fly. The Vietnam War didn’t bring an end to extended foreign wars without a clear mission.

Yet if the pandemic really does shape life for the next year, it will probably be remembered as a more significant historical event than those precedents. It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression. Events that hold the world’s attention for long stretches — and that alter the rhythms of everyday life — do tend to leave a legacy.

Weak companies will die

“It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

His point is that companies with flawed business models can look healthy in good times. Out of habit, many customers continue to buy from them. But when the economy weakens, people have to make decisions about where to pull back. They often start with products and services that they find the least valuable or that they can replace with a cheaper alternative.

A downturn, says Emily Oster, a Brown University economist, “is an opportunity to revisit inefficiencies.” And the coronavirus is likely to cause a larger version of this phenomenon than a typical recession.

Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling, because Google, Facebook and Craigslist had taken away their main source of revenue: print advertising. Between 2008 and 2019, American newspapers eliminated about half of all newsroom jobs.

The virus has led to further declines in advertising and more job cuts — and could end up forcing dozens more papers to fold or become tiny shells of their old selves. If that happens, their cities will be left without perhaps the only major source of information about local politics, business, education and the like.

Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores. Many Americans have decided they prefer either specialty stores (like Home Depot) or discount stores (like Costco) over the one-stop-shopping experience that Sears, Macy’s and J.C. Penney have long offered.

Now the virus has interrupted in-person shopping and caused many consumers to shift even more business online, to Amazon, Target and Walmart. “The retailers doing fair to poorly are absolutely not coming out of this,” said Mark Cohen, a former executive at Sears and Federated Department Stores who teaches at Columbia Business School. “Many, many of them are going to fail, have already failed or will fail when they reopen.”

If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic. The roughly 250 fancier malls around the country, like The Westchester in suburban New York and The Galleria in Houston, are likely to survive, Mr. Cohen predicted. Some will convert old stores into spaces for experiences, like dining, bowling, medical care or a golf driving range.

But many of the country’s remaining 1,100 or so traditional malls are at risk of failing. Even before the virus, Amazon turned two former malls near Cleveland into warehouses, a physical manifestation of changing shopping habits.

A third at-risk industry — higher education — is a bit different from the others, because it’s so heavily subsidized by the government. Yet dozens of colleges, both private and public, are facing real trouble.

College enrollment in the United States has been growing almost continually since the Civil War. It kept growing even after the baby boomers finished college, because a rising percentage of young people were enrolling. But the 150-plus-year boom appears to have ended about a decade ago. Undergraduate enrollment fell 8 percent between 2010 and 2018.

Why? Birthrates have fallen, and the percentage of young people going to college isn’t rising significantly anymore. The population trends are especially stark in the Northeast and Midwest, where many colleges are. Late last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a bracing report called, “The Looming Enrollment Crisis.”

The virus is exacerbating almost every problem that colleges faced. They have already lost revenue from summer school, food service, parking fees and more. Perhaps most significant, the recession is hammering state budgets, which will probably lead to future cuts in college funding.

The immediate question is whether colleges will be able to bring back students this fall, as administrators are desperately hoping. If they can’t, enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.

Yuval Levin, a conservative policy expert and the founding editor of National Affairs, put it this way: “The top 20 schools are probably not going to change. But what is actually higher education — more than 4,000 universities — I think will change a lot.”

Of course, business failures can be healthy. They are part of the “creative destruction” that the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described, allowing more efficient and innovative rivals to rise. The disappearance of many old department stores won’t be a tragedy if they are replaced by stores people prefer.

But some of the virus-related destruction will have damaging side effects. When local newspapers close, corruption and political polarization tend to rise, while voter turnout tends to fall, academic research has found. Cuts to higher-education budgets could make it even harder for poor and middle-class students to graduate.

“The biggest danger that we face as a sector,” Ted Mitchell, a former college president who now runs the American Council on Education, an industry group, told me, “is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”

by David Leonhardt, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by Zak Tebbal; Photographs from Getty Images

[ed. I expect it to get a lot worse, but some efforts might help. For example, we might finally resolve our epidemic homelessness problem by repurposing malls and similar large facilities with on-site improvements: apartments, medical services, security, government offices, etc. (assuming a potential tidal wave of homelessness just around the corner); modernizing and improving our national infrastructure (roads and bridges and dams, electric grid, water and sewage facilities, broadband, rail, shoreline protection, parks, etc.) with a massive WPA type effort designed for the 21st century (and impending climate change), employing every class of expert and worker: engineers, construction companies, managers, laborers, planners, scientists, etc.); funding to keep our creative class alive, providing subsidies for a variety of artistic endeavors, with enough economic support to find expression in a variety of venues; affordable health care for all that's simple, straightforward and cost-efficient; a new political system that prioritizes constituent services and legal protection over corporate predation and economic inequality. Is this all possible? Yes. Is it likely? Nope. It would take a complete realignment of political thinking and will, and extraordinary leadership, the likes of which we've never seen in our lifetimes (even during FDR's time, and worse now because the forces preventing it have become so institutionalized). So, my feeling is, we're pretty much screwed. But that's to be expected at the end stages of empire.

See also: Naomi Klein: 'We must not return to the pre-Covid status quo, only worse (The Guardian).]

Meet the Company That Sells Your Lost Airplane Luggage

Imagine this: An airline loses your checked bag. After an extensive search, customer support comes up empty-handed. They compensate you and life goes on.

But life goes on for your suitcase, too. Written off as “unclaimed,” it sits in a musty collection depot for 3 months. Eventually, the airline sells it — along with hundreds of other lost suitcases and cargo shipments — to a private company, sight unseen.

The new owner cracks the lock, sifts through your former possessions, and marks them for sale.

A few days later, a retired mechanic named Charlie buys your grandfather’s watch for $150. A 19-year-old line cook acquires your Beats headphones. And a nurse from Florida becomes the proud new owner of the scarf your mom knitted you for Christmas.

This is the bizarre secondary market for lost luggage.

Every year, 4.3B bags are checked by airlines around the world. Around 25m of them (5.7 per 1k bags checked) end up lost or misdirected. The 0.03% of bags that are still not reunited with their owners after 90 days are sold by the airline.

Chances are, they are purchased by a company called Unclaimed Baggage.

Nestled in the small town of Scottsboro, Alabama (pop: 14.7k), Unclaimed Baggage holds the distinction of being “the nation’s only retailer of lost luggage.” Its massive 40k-sq-ft warehouse holds thousands of treasures lost in transit, ranging from rare instruments to monogrammed engagement rings.

Every now and then, a piece of luggage contains something truly extraordinary, like a suit of armor, an Egyptian artifact, or a camera used in NASA’s Space Shuttle program.

What are the ethics of reselling travelers’ intimate items? How does the process work? And how did one company come to monopolize this niche market?

The story begins 50 years ago

Back in 1970, a man named Hugo Doyle Owens was at a crossroads.

Born and raised in Scottsboro, Owens had served in the Korean War and returned to his hometown to sell insurance. Between shifts, he spent every waking hour by his ham radio, using radio frequency spectrum to communicate to friends and strangers. At 39, he was restless and looking for his next adventure.

One day, through the radio chatter, he learned that a bus company in Washington, DC, had an enormous stack of unclaimed luggage it was looking to get rid of.

In those days, unclaimed bags were often thrown away or auctioned off to local junk shops. Few saw value in travelers’ lost wares. But to Owens, the suitcases — and the intrigue of their contents — were a perfect foundation to build a business on.

So, he borrowed $300 (~$2k in 2020 dollars) from his father-in-law and purchased the whole lot.

On the edge of town, Owens set up an informal storefront, crafted a sign (“Unclaimed Baggage”) by the door, and, with the help of his wife and 2 sons, splayed out his acquired items on card tables. He ran a small ad in the local paper, informing Jackson County deal-seekers of his new venture.

In less than 24 hours, he sold out of inventory and pocketed a tidy profit.

The novelty of sifting through lost luggage soon spread by word-of-mouth and Owen’s repeated the process. His boss eventually gave him an ultimatum: Sell insurance, or sell baggage. He quit and set out to turn his side hustle into a full-time job.

By 1978, Owens had struck deals to buy luggage from Eastern Airlines, National Airlines, and Air Florida (now defunct). In constant transit between DC, Miami, Cleveland, and Dallas, he was soon acquiring 3k pieces of luggage per month, with help from a staff of 6 people.

“We never know what’s in those suitcases until we open them,” he told the AP that year. “It’s like buying a pig in a poke.”

Even the most macabre of items seemed to intrigue his customers: A marble tombstone inscribed with a name and a date of death was purchased by a gentleman who made it into a coffee table. An Amazonian shrunken head (found in a suitcase in the pre-TSA days) found a home with a doctor in Birmingham.

Over the years, the business expanded — largely thanks to a number of secretive, exclusive deals Owens inked with major airlines, hospitality groups, and cargo carriers.

By the time he died in 2016, he’d received 3 keys from 3 different Scottsboro mayors. Everyone in town knew his name. And his one-of-a-kind business had become an internationally recognized tourist destination.

by Zachary Crockett, The Hustle |  Read more:

Image: Peter Morris/Fairfax Media via Getty Images