What You Need To Know About The Battle of Portland

The city of Portland, Oregon is currently in the national spotlight after video evidence of federal agents driving rented vans and abducting activists went viral. This footage was taken in the early morning hours of July 15, and an Oregon Public Broadcasting article published on the 16th brought the matter out of the local social networks of Portland activists and on to the national stage.

As I write this, mainstream media personalities are beginning to parachute into Portland to cover what some have dubbed the “fascist takeover of Portland”. The word “Gestapo” is trending on Twitter.

The Beginning (...)

At a little before 11 p.m., several dozen protesters began to shatter the windows of the Justice Center. They entered the building, trashing the interior and lighting random fires inside. I watched all this happen from feet away, and it is my opinion that the destruction was unplanned, yet more or less inevitable — you could feel it in the mood of the crowd. The 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis had just burned: there was absolutely no way Portland wasn’t going to try to do the same thing.

Of course, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) arrived very shortly thereafter. In one of the more gentlemanly moments of the entire uprising, they gave a warning to people who’d brought their families and dogs, urging them to leave. A sizable chunk of more moderate demonstrators went home. A thousand or more protesters ranked up, and began shouting at the police. At a little after midnight, the PPB launched the first of what would eventually be hundreds of tear gas grenades into the crowd.

The crowd scattered, pushed by police in several different directions at once. They split into several groups. One rampaged through a series of downtown banks, shattering windows and lighting fires as they ran from the cops. Another, larger group of demonstrators tore through the luxury shopping district, sacking the Apple Store, Louis Vuitton, H&M and, eventually, looting a Target. The rest of the night was a messy haze of gas, flash-bangs, and burning barricades.

The Portland Police have stated that more than a dozen riots took place over the last fifty days, but May 29th remains the only night that truly felt like the actual people of this city were rioting. (...)

The Edge of All-Out War

On July 4th, Portland’s thirty-ninth consecutive night of protests, more than a thousand people assembled in front of the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse downtown. They began launching dozens of commercial-grade fireworks into the concrete facades of both buildings, prompting a response from the police and federal agents inside both buildings.

What followed resembled nothing so much as a medieval siege. The windows of both government buildings had been covered in plywood weeks ago, after the first riots. Officers inside fired out through murder holes cut in the plywood, pumping rubber bullets, pepper balls and foam rounds into the crowd, while the crowd formed phalanxes of shield-bearers to protect the men and women launching fireworks back in response. Federal agents dumped tear gas into the street, but Portland’s frontline activists had long since lost their fear of gas. The feds and the police were eventually forced to sally out with batons to drive the crowd back.

I reported on the fighting in Mosul back in 2017, and what happened that night in the streets of Portland was, of course, not nearly as brutal or dangerous as actual combat. Yet it was about as close as you can get without using live ammunition. At times, dozens of flash-bangs and fireworks would detonate within feet of us over the course of a few minutes. My ears rang for days afterwards. My hands shook. I could not write for days. (...)

Perhaps this will change as the protests continue. But thus far, the only escalation seen recently has been the federal agents now roaming the streets of downtown Portland in rented vans, arresting activists seemingly at random. These men display no identification, no name tag or badge number or anything else that might be useful identifying them. That fact has rightly shocked Americans across the country, but at this point, it is nothing new to Portland protesters.

Portland Police have been hiding their names for weeks, instead using numbers that cannot be correlated to names by any means available to citizens. Members of multiple different law enforcement agencies, all with different rules of engagement from the PPB, have been policing demonstrations since the very beginning. As Tuck Woodstock, a local reporter, noted on Twitter:

“This is the natural escalation of the last 7 weeks. This is what has come of Portlanders protesting police brutality for 50 days: more bizarre acts of police brutality. Portlanders are risking everything every day. Please notice.”

That is, in the end, what both the Portland press corps and the people out in the streets, protesting every night, seem to want from the rest of the United States. Please pay attention to the videos of officers ripping people’s face masks off to spray mace directly into their mouths. Please pay attention to the video of Donovan LaBella, blood gushing from his head, seizing on the ground. And, yes, please pay attention to the videos of men in full combat gear abducting activists off the street.

Pay attention, because it is my belief that all of this will not stay confined to Portland. Your city might be next.

by Robert Evans, Bellingcat |  Read more:
Images: Mason Trinca for The New York Times

[ed. Wow. Total craziness (with videos). Federal intervention is doing nothing but inflame an already bad situation.]

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New Psychedelic Research Sheds Light on Why Psilocybin-Containing Mushrooms Have Been Consumed for Centuries

A new study from the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine provides insight into the psychoactive effects that distinguish psilocybin from other hallucinogenic substances. The findings suggest that feelings of spiritual and/or psychological insight play an important role in the drug’s popularity.

The new study has been published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

“Recently there has been a renewal of interest in research with psychedelic drugs,” explained Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who is the corresponding author of the new study.

“Studies from the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research and elsewhere suggest that psilocybin, a classic psychedelic drug, has significant potential for treating various psychiatric conditions such as depression and drug dependence disorders. This study sought to address a simple but somewhat perplexing question: Why do people use psilocybin?”

“Psilocybin, in the form of hallucinogenic mushrooms, has been used for centuries for the psychoactive effects. Recent US survey studies show that lifetime psilocybin use is relatively modest and quite stable over a period of decades,” Griffiths explained.

“However, the National Institute on Drug Abuse does not consider psilocybin to be addictive because it does not cause uncontrollable drug seeking behavior, does not produce classic euphoria, does not produce a withdrawal syndrome, and does not activate brain mechanisms associated with classic drugs of abuse.”

In the double-blind study, 20 healthy participants with histories of hallucinogen use received doses of psilocybin, dextromethorphan (DXM), and a placebo during five experiment sessions. (...)

The researchers found that most of the participants reported wanting to take psilocybin again. But only 1 in 4 reported wanting to take DXM again.

“The study showed that several subjective features of the drug experience predicted participants’ desire to take psilocybin again: psychological insight, meaningfulness of the experience, increased awareness of beauty, positive social effects (e.g. empathy), positive mood (e.g. inner peace), amazement, and mystical-type effects,” Griffiths explained.

Nearly half of the participants rated their experience following the highest psilocybin dose to be among the top most meaningful and psychologically insightful of their lives.

“The study provides an answer to the puzzle for why psilocybin has been used by people for hundreds of years, yet it does not share any of the features used to define classic drugs of abuse. The answer seems to reside in the ability of psilocybin to produce unique changes in the human conscious experience that give rise to meaning, insight, the experience of beauty and mystical-type effects,” Griffiths said.

by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Breaking Into The Close-Knit World Of Country Music, While Keeping Distant

The early experiments in COVID-19-era concerts have been watched closely, because the stakes are clearly high on both sides of the coin: the possibility of salvaging lost musical livelihoods has to be balanced against any potential exposure risks for all involved. So far, country acts seem to have outpaced those in other genres when it comes to experimenting with live show layouts, from those that separate pods of attendees in vehicles or outdoor suites to those that let audience members cram in shoulder to shoulder, just like the good, old, pre-pandemic days.

But concerts aren't the only career-furthering events that the Nashville industry has been going without. Another type of gathering routinely happens out of public view, its function to promote new acts and new music to industry gatekeepers, tastemakers and professional peers. Often, a small bar or venue will be rented out for these boozy, schmoozy shindigs. It's about getting face time, as opposed to FaceTime, so artists will work the room making friendly conversation. If they're new to the game, they're likely to have a publicist by their side providing guidance and making introductions.Of course, lockdown brought those rituals to a halt too, but attempts to safely (and resourcefully) replace them have begun.

Country success tends to require staunch participation in the Nashville community. That's one of the many reasons that Lil Nas X's winking, cowboy-burlesquing, hip-hop virality seemed so out of step with country music's establishment, at least initially — he pulled it off without them.

Today's centralized country music industry is the result of once geographically, culturally and stylistically disparate and distinct threads being woven into a consolidated, popular (and artificially whitewashed) format, with its business and creative infrastructure and towering historical narrative staunchly headquartered in Nashville. It's not easy to launch and sustain a recording and touring career in this world without winning over some of its major players, securing the approval, opportunities, institutional support and media coverage they have to give. Performing know-how matters, but so does being eager and personable.

So the events where up-close access happens do serve a real purpose: The albums that were released rather than postponed just after the nation went into quarantine — which included established names at pivotal points in their careers, like Ashley McBryde, Sam Hunt, Kelsea Ballerini and Maddie & Tae, and promising country-pop newbie Ingrid Andress — likely forfeited some of the recognition they might have gotten if plans to promote them in person hadn't been canceled out of necessity. It's no wonder that record label, management and publicity staff are seeking innovative stopgaps.

Just over a week before the release of the debut country single by Shy Carter — a biracial, Memphis-bred, singer-rapper who had a decade of pop-R&B, hip-hop and country songwriting credits and guest spots under his belt, but was new to the Warner Nashville roster — a label rep emailed with the offer of an "At-Home Artist Visit." The proposed scenario involved Carter giving some sort of brief performance on a flatbed truck that would be parked in front of my residence. I was too curious, about both the extravagance of the scheme and the act it was meant to introduce, to decline.

As it turned out, what rolled up in front of my house around lunchtime that Friday wasn't an industrial hauler at all — just a shiny, silver pickup.

A guy who identified himself as Carter's brother hopped out the passenger side first, followed by Carter himself, both of them extending greetings. I asked Carter how many stops he'd already covered on his mini-tour that day. This was only his second, he reported brightly, implying the specialness of the visit.

The driver walked to the back of the truck, lowered the tailgate and slid a small portable PA onto it, while Carter's sole live accompanist swung his legs over the side of the truck bed and perched there, balancing an acoustic guitar on his lap. The remaining two members of the entourage, one of them a publicist, emerged from a second vehicle, keeping a respectable distance on the sidewalk. A few neighbors walked over and spread out in the yard to watch.

We were all wearing fabric face masks, but Carter removed his to sing into a microphone, revealing a luminous smile. He was a seasoned and charismatic enough entertainer to seem entirely unfazed by the awkwardness of serenading me from my sidewalk.

by Jewly Hight, NPR | Read more:
Image: Jewly Hight

Portland Burns

Portland Police Union Burns in Latest Night of Protests in Portland (The Stranger)
Image: Mathieu Lewis-Roland
[ed. See also: Federal and Local Police Team Up in Aggressive Response to Day 50 of Portland Protests]

Strike With the Band

The union for the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, late this June, refused to sign a contract that would cut its unionized musicians’ income by some 20 percent. The musicians were, in turn, locked out by management, which meant facing months without pay or health care. In a Baltimore Sun article, orchestra members told of their fears about losing homes and caring for sick loved ones. Perhaps the most striking interview in the report comes from a twenty-seven-year-old violinist who had done everything right: she was talented and worked intensively; after college she rose through the ranks from the second to the first violin section, finally landing her dream job with a union symphony. But before that, she went to the right schools, Oberlin Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music, at a cost of over $100,000 in student loan debt. This was debt she was determined to pay off by the time she was forty, if she continued her frugal lifestyle, living with a roommate near the concert hall. And now, here she was walking the picket line with her railroaded colleagues, who had also done everything right.

The world of classical music is neither noble nor fair, though its reputation says otherwise. This is partly because to be classically trained means being regarded among the highest caliber of skilled musicians. Those who achieve such heights are capable of playing the most complex, technically difficult music on equally complex instruments that take decades to master. The prestige that comes with this mastery is, of course, heavily dependent on rankings—orchestra rankings, seating charts, a general fetishization of skill and dedication. And classical music itself is considered the highest echelon of institutional art music, its practice spanning centuries, its history a tapestry of colorful personalities and political upheaval. Like fine art and classical literature, it is considered a high-water mark for culture, a pastime enjoyed largely by the rich, the old, and the snobby. But classical music can be other things, too: transcendental, lush, heartbreakingly emotional. Nothing captures pure rapturous anguish like the third movement of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto; the profound unrest of unrequited love can be found in the see-sawing feverishness and piercing cries of Janàcek’s Second String Quartet; and one still comes out of the 23rd Mozart Piano Concerto or a Mahler symphony in a swirling, euphoric trance.

These are musical experiences that can change the life of a young person. It can give them reason to believe in the power of art above all else, and it can encourage a desire to participate in this art at all costs. I was one of these young people. After seeing Vanessa-Mae on the Disney Channel at the age of three, I begged my parents to let me play the violin. They waited until I was four and had the motor skills to at least use a pair of scissors, and finally granted my wish. They rented my first violin, tiny and horrible sounding, from Johnson String Instruments. Growing up in rural North Carolina, I took violin lessons from a woman who lived in a trailer. She had a stern voice and wore muddy boots. I switched to private lessons from one of the local school teachers, before, in my senior year of high school, commuting to the nearest city to take precious few lessons with one of the musicians from the local symphony. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t play the violin. It was the backbone of my upbringing, my adolescence, my young adulthood. My formative human experiences, heartbreaks, desires, triumphs, and joys all revolved around playing the goddamn violin.

Meanwhile, I was discouraged from pursuing a number of different careers—botany, architecture, creative writing. But I was never, somehow, discouraged from pursuing a life in classical music. Growing up in a small Southern town, I was a shark in a little pond, better than my peers because I had a head start. Everyone thought I was talented, including myself, as I nabbed first chair after first chair. With every victory, the belief that the world was just and fair, and that the talented and hardworking would inherit it, became more and more cemented in my child-soul. When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to be a composer more than a violinist. I wrote my first pieces, little violin ditties, during my sophomore year. Pirated notation software expanded the ensembles to string and even chamber orchestra. I begged my parents to let me attend a pre-college summer program for composers at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

I should have thought twice about the career choice I had impulsively made at the age of seventeen when my parents explained they could only afford to send me to an in-state school instead of an out-of-state, high-end conservatory. My unshaken worldview relented, telling me that if I worked hard, I would succeed no matter which school I attended. I enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the fall of 2012. Frankly, I’m glad I went there and graduated debt free instead of going to an expensive conservatory, where the crushing of my dreams would have been far more expensive.

Elective Epiphanies

In music school, you have time to do two things: make music and drink. I threw myself into doing both. I spent the $5,000 inheritance left to me by my grandfather, the same inheritance my sister used for a down payment on her house, to go to expensive summer festivals where you get to spend an hour a week with a composer whose name looks good on your resume. This is where I began to see the writing on the walls, when I met other musicians: those born into artistic families in big cities, ingrained into classical music culture at a young age; those who matriculated expensive and prestigious music schools; those attending their third festival of the summer. Meanwhile, I worked almost every night at a minimum wage job in the school recording studio to make ends meet; and I turned down a career-changing unpaid internship in one of the most important new music institutions in the composer mecca of Brooklyn because neither I nor my parents could afford for me to live in New York for a summer.

One day, around the beginning of my junior year of college, it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to make it. I had already developed carpal tunnel and tendonitis from years of improper violin technique taught to me by my rural music teachers. I was out of money to go to festivals, and I had no way of making lasting, important connections in a field where who you know matters more than anything else. I had no serious job prospects, nor any hope for job prospects. At work one night, the falseness of the “work hard and you will succeed” ethic washed over me: the truth was the music world was a two-tiered system, and I was in the second chair. Hungover, in the comfort of a dark recording booth, I began to cry. Few things are as life altering as realizing your preferred life is unalterably a fucked impossibility.

I needed a way out. I threw myself into my work at the recording studio, thanks to the generous help of my boss and mentor, who frequently let me skip class in his office in order to do so. I memorized signal chains, did an independent study on piano microphone techniques, studied circuit diagrams, and built synthesizers on breadboards. I got a paid internship at a speaker company, applied to a single graduate program in audio science at the Peabody Institute, got in on scholarship, and still managed to accrue $44,000 of student loan debt, graduating embittered. In a twist of fate, my blog went viral, and I became a full-time writer. The end. That’s the end of the story of how I devoted my life to a singular cause for twenty years and then didn’t do it anymore. I picked up the violin a few months ago, after two years of carpal tunnel recovery, and found myself unable to play pieces I had mastered in the sixth grade.

The myth of meritocracy had swallowed my early life. It also swallowed the small lifetime of the young violinist on lockout at the Baltimore Symphony. And it swallowed the small lifetimes of the dozens of people I spoke to when writing this article, all of whom asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution in this tiny, vindictive world.

Classical music is cruel not because there are winners and losers, first chairs and second chairs, but because it lies about the fact that these winners and losers are chosen long before the first moment a young child picks up an instrument. It doesn’t matter if you study composition, devote years to an instrument, or simply have the desire to teach—either at the university level or in the public school system. If you come from a less-than-wealthy family, or from a place other than the wealthiest cities, the odds are stacked against you no matter how much you sacrifice, how hard you work, or, yes, how talented you are.

Vetted and Indebted

Despite its reputation as being a pastime of the rich and cultured elite, classical musicianship is better understood as a job, a shitty job, and the people who do that job are workers just as exploited as any Teamster. Classical music has a high rate of workplace injury, especially chronic pain and hearing loss. Many musicians don’t own their instruments, some of which can be as expensive as a new car. My high school orchestra teacher, who played in a regional symphony, was still paying off a viola that cost $20,000. Even the elite among players don’t own their instruments outright; many of these instruments, including Amati and Stradivari violins, are loaned by philanthropists as gifts. I had to rent violins from the same company for sixteen years before I had accrued enough credit to buy one outright at $7,000, right before I graduated from college. One percussionist I interviewed, who works as a middle school band teacher, told me: “As a percussionist, another point of privilege comes with equipment. To own everything we could ever need professionally is very costly, especially a marimba, vibraphone, and full set of timpani. So that’s another huge point of privilege when, for example, one of my middle school students . . . his parents bought him a marimba earlier in the year. Which is great for him, yet here I am with my master’s degree, and I definitely don’t own one yet. I probably won’t for a long time.”

by Kate Wagner, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Clemens Habicht
[ed. See also: The Prodigy Complex: On Children in Classical Music]

In Absentia

Clementina doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know her nine children, her grandchildren, or the names of her mother and father. She doesn’t know where she lives, where she has lived, or where she is now. People she has never met tell her that they love her. They say they are her daughter or her son. They assure her they used to play cards together — make wine in the bodega across from her house and chorizo on the patio after the local matanzas (pig slaughters). But Clementina doesn’t trust these people; she doesn’t know what they are talking about.

She didn’t trust me either when I first met her seven years ago. I was at my girlfriend’s family home in Villaveta, a dusty hamlet of dilapidated houses in the hinterland of Castilla y León, Spain. We were preparing lunch for the whole family. Clementina sat at the head of the table next to me. She was hunched by her 93 years, and her skin was wrinkled like a date. “Who are you my boy? she asked, squinting through creamy cataracts.

I mumbled that I was her granddaughter’s boyfriend and that I was from Scotland. “Oh, darling, you’ve traveled a long way today,” she croaked. “You must be hungry.”

Clementina looked away to ask one of her children something, but when she turned to me again, her brow crumpled. She felt for the contours of her face. She jolted her head back and forth: from her daughters and then back to me. But she found no answers. Then her hand, swollen like fresh ginger, seized my arm. “When are we leaving?” she whispered. “I don’t know these people.”

That was the first time I had met someone with dementia. I had never witnessed that type of fear or seen someone so threatened, by what, seconds before, had been familiar to them. Over the following years, I would return to the village with my girlfriend with relative regularity, and I watched as Clementina’s condition deteriorated. I saw how it weighed on the family.

When Clementina became frightened and refused to eat, when she had forgotten even her earliest memory, that’s when the family felt it most. I saw her daughters’ shoulders sink and her sons’ brows furrow; in fear and frustration.

Their mother’s decrepit frame warned of life’s fragility, or more precisely, its cruelty. Would this be their future in 20 years? Would they be the next to slurp on liquified meat and stare into the abyss? A somberness hung over the dinner table on those days. They all knew it, but talking meant facing too many complicated problems. There was grief, though no one had died.

I thought about this type of grief a lot over the following years; how it must take its toll — how it was possible to miss someone who was right there in front of you. And I thought about it more when my own grandmother died in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clementina’s story was in no way similar to my grandmother’s. In many ways, they were complete opposites. But over the days and weeks that followed, as across the world, tragedies pixelated into statistics across TV screens, when people talked about death and infection rates like they were football scores, each helped me better understand the other.

by Matthew Bremner, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Getty

Wild Ride to Nowhere: The Giant 5

The “Giant 5” – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook – had another good day on Friday, with their combined market capitalization rising by 0.6% to another new high of $6.64 trillion, continuing a spike that started on March 16 and now measures 62.2%. In dollar terms, five stocks gained $2.54 trillion in less than four months.

Since January 1, 2017, my “Giant 5 Index” has soared by 184%, or by $4.3 trillion, with two sell-offs or crashes or whatever in between.

Even these days, when trillions fly by so fast that they’re hard to see, that’s still a huge increase in market value of just five companies in the span of three-and-a-half years (market cap data via YCharts):

The market capitalization – the number of shares outstanding times the current share price – of the Giant 5 has reached a breath-taking magnitude:

Apple [AAPL]: $1.66 trillion
Microsoft [MSFT]: $1.62 trillion
Amazon [AMZN]: $1.60 trillion
Alphabet [GOOG]: $1.05 trillion
Facebook [FB]: $699 billion.

How big are they compared to the entire stock market?

And I mean the entire US stock market, and not just the S&P 500. The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index tracks all 3,415 or so US-listed companies. And the market cap of all those companies combined rose today to $32.47 trillion, up 44.4% from its crisis low on March 23.

But as the shares of the Giant 5 have surged, the weight of the Giant 5 in the overall stock market has spiked from 17.5% on June 8 – that date will crop up again in a moment – to 20.4% today, and has more than doubled since January 2017, when the Giant 5 accounted for an already amazing 10% of the Wilshire 5000 (Wilshire 5000 data via YCharts):

On June 8 – here’s that date again – the stock market hit a Crisis high. The S&P 500 closed at 3,232, and the Wilshire 5000 at 32,936. As of Friday’s close, both the S&P 500 and the Wilshire 5000 remain below those June 8 levels.

But the Giant 5 Index, which was at $5.78 trillion on June 8, has since surged by 14%, to $6.6 trillion.

While the rest of the market has declined, the Giant 5 have surged. And, this surge in the Giant 5 obscured the decline in the rest of the market.

In other words, without the Giant 5, the rest of the market combined was a dud. And this is what has been happening for years!

The Market Minus the Giant 5.

To see how the rest of the market is performing without these five stocks, I have created the “Wilshire 5000 minus the Giant 5 Index.” This shows what’s left of the entire stock market of 3,415 stocks, after removing these five giants.

The “Wilshire 5000 minus the Giant 5 Index” closed at $25,836 trillion today, still down 10.9% from the peak on February 19. Over the same period, the Giant 5 have soared 18.7%!

From the bottom in March, the “Wilshire 5000 minus the Giant 5” has surged 40.6%. The Giant 5 Index has skyrocketed 62.2%!

The “Wilshire 5000 minus the Giant 5 Index” is down 5.2% from June 8; down 10.9% from the high in February; down 1.2% from September 2018; and it’s just a tad below where it had been on January 26, 2018.

In other words, the rest of the stock market – all its winners and losers combined – without the Giant 5 and despite the horrendous volatility has gone nowhere since January 2018:

A miserable savings account would have outperformed the overall stock market without the Giant 5, and would have done so without all the horrendous volatility of the two sell-offs. Just five stocks whose market values have soared beyond imaginable magnitude pulled out the entire market.

And that’s a scary thought – that this entire market has become totally dependent on just five giant stocks with an immense concentration of power that have now come under regulatory security. And just as these stocks pulled up the entire market, they can pull down the entire market by their sheer weight.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:

Images: Wolf Street

"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]