Wow, rubber-vs-glue as a rhetorical tactic. I quiver, I shiver, I quake.
If you expect better quality responses, try starting with better quality posts.
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Huh, perhaps those companies could, I don’t know … build or support some domestic sources where people are paid living wages?
The 80’s/90’s called, they downsized your job and shipped it overseas to save 10 cents per unit. Welcome to 2020 btw.
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If you expect people to respect your antiquated idea that we have to deal with despots to save a few pennies on material goods. go peddle your Reagan-influenced macroeconomics somewhere else; you ain’t Thomas Friedman, the world ain’t flat, and buying Chinese goods perpetuates and reinforces a totalitarian state.
I buy stuff from China only when I have no choice. I often have no choice because of educated economists who are too dumb to see how saving pennies costs very, very much more than that.
Yup. And in the 80s/90s, the xenophobia wasn’t against the Chinese as much as the Japanese, who we were sourcing innovative, really high-end, high-tech components from then. New decades, new scapegoat, same old racism.
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Thanks for confirming my point: Saving pennies per unit at the cost of a functioning society is no way to go on, isn’t it?
I don’t think you’re making friends or influencing people.
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Well, that’s not my intention. I like comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. I like asking people why they claim to be liberal but encourage sweatshop slave labor. I like asking people why they don’t make things in America, and if they say “It’s too expensive,” I call them illiberal fools, which they are. If you don’t like being called an active supporter of despots when you are, you can either blame the person who pointed out the truth, or change that truth.
Have a lovely day,
February 27, 2020 (Thursday)
It appears we are in the chaos that churns in between more stable eras.
The coronavirus is grabbing the headlines, and it is a huge story in its own right, but it also lays bare the rot in the Republican Party that has put Trump in the White House. The coronavirus is a pandemic now, meaning it is a disease that has appeared on a number of continents, and it is killing people, although the numbers of infections and the death rate is so premature that I would not draw any conclusions yet. We know it’s not good, but just how not good it might turn out to be is still unclear.
But the coronavirus and the subsequent selling-off in the stock market of the last several days reveals what feels to me like an endpoint of a political era.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the White House by arguing that the activist government of the New Deal, the laws that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure, were destroying American liberty. “Government is not the solution to our problem;” Reagan said in his inaugural address, “government is the problem.”
After 1981, America entered a period when we turned for solutions not to educated experts informing government policy, but rather to individuals who claimed to be outside that sphere of government expertise: men of the people. As we celebrated those “self-made” individualists—usually men-- Congress cut taxes and regulation to free them to run their businesses as they saw fit. After 1981, wealth began to move upward, and yet the Republican Party continued to howl about socialism and insist that we would not have true freedom until all regulations, all taxes, and most government programs were abolished. In their place we would have businessmen who had proven their worth by creating successful businesses. They would run our country in the best way for all of us.
That this system worked well for everyone was a fiction, of course. Republican leaders stayed in power not because a majority of voters agreed with their ideology, but because as their policies moved wealth upward and hurt most Americans, they blamed those economic hardships on people of color, women, and other minorities: “special interests” who were demanding government policies paid for by the taxes of hardworking white men. They also increasingly jiggered the political system to make sure they stayed in power. They disenfranchised Democratic voters and carved up districts so that in 2012, for example, Democrats won a majority of 1.4 million votes for candidates to the House of Representatives, and yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority.
The election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 was the high water mark of this political mindset. He was an outsider who posed as a successful businessman, disdainful of politics, who promised to gut government bureaucrats—the swamp-- and put into office only the best people, people known for their business acumen or their family connections to others with that skill. Expertise and loyalty to the American government was unimportant—even undesirable. What mattered was the ability to make money and be loyal to the president.
Following in his predecessors’ footsteps, Trump slashed regulations, opened up resources to businessmen, and passed a huge tax cut for the wealthy, a tax cut which was supposed to stimulate investment in the economy and promote economic growth. In the midst of growing administration scandals, Trump banked on the fact that a strong economy would keep him in office for a second term and insisted that those opposing his administration, regardless of party, were hostile Democrats who wanted big government “socialism.”
Now, a virus from China is exposing the hollowness of a generation of relying on businessmen to manage our government. The administration’s response to the coronavirus has been shockingly bad. In 2018, it got rid of the government leadership for handling a pandemic, so we have no one in charge who is trained to handle such a crisis. Then, when the virus broke out, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own test, rather than using the guidelines established by the World Health Organization. Their test didn’t work, making health officials unable to test people in danger before they got sick. Then, over the advice of the CDC, administration officials decided to evacuate 14 infected patients who had been stranded on a cruise ship in Japan along with healthy travelers. We learned today from a whistleblower that, once landed in the U.S., workers came and went from the facility that housed the patients with no precautions. Now, we have our first case of the coronavirus that appears to have appeared here on its own, and it happened in the same place where these workers came and went (although it is too early to say if there is definitely a connection).
Trump has excused his dismissal of all the experts by saying that they were easy to rehire when necessary, but it has not turned out to be that easy. Today, he appointed a third person to be in charge of the response in addition to the two others he has already named, and, angry at the CDC official who warned Americans that the virus would arrive here sooner or later, he arranged for all statements about the disease to be cleared through Vice President Mike Pence’s office. He also revealed his key interest in protecting the stock markets today when he named two new members to the coronavirus task force: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow, who has insisted on television that the virus is “contained.”
In a moment that perfectly encapsulated the problem of handling a public health crisis of this magnitude when you are equipped only to promote business, today Secretary of Health and Human Services Alexander Azar, a former drug company executive and pharmaceutical lobbyist, told Congress that when scientists manage to make a vaccine for the coronavirus (12 to 18 months out, by all accounts), not everyone will be able to afford it. “We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price, because we need the private sector to invest. Price controls won’t get us there.”
This is the modern Republican Party laid bare. Profits before lives, because only businessmen, not government policy, can manage the country.
This moment makes it really clear what happens when the Republicans’ ideology comes up against reality. While GOP leaders over the years, and Trump of late, have managed to silence opponents by calling them socialists or making sure they cannot vote, the virus is not going to stop simply by changing the narrative or the body politic. Investors know this, and the dropping stock market shows their realization that you cannot shut down entire countries and keep supply chains and consumer goods moving. The stock market has fallen 11.13% in the past four days, erasing a third of the gains it has made since Trump was elected. We are facing an economic downturn, one that will strain an economy that was excellent indeed for those at the very top, but not good for those who now will be vital to keep consumption levels up… but those very people will be hard pressed to come up with extra income in an economic downturn. It is a problem that the markets are acknowledging with their biggest drops since the 2008 crisis.
This is a crisis that demands expertise and coordinated government health programs, but we no longer have those things. Instead, Trump and his surrogates on the Fox News Channel are falling back on the old arguments that have worked so well for GOP leaders in the past: Democrats are hyping the coronavirus and spooking the markets to hurt the president.
Trump, and Americans in general, are about to discover that there comes a point when image can no longer override reality. We are in the churn of that chaos now. But on the other side of it, we have the potential to rebuild a government that operates in reality, and that works for all of us.
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Clearly, she has read The Three Body Problem. Great book!
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unfortunately we don’t need extraterrestrials to rob us of our scientists. as she point out, we’ve got the republican party instead
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February 28, 2020 (Friday)
Today, Trump and his supporters doubled down on the idea that the coronavirus is a “hoax,” as Trump said, perpetrated by Democrats eager to tank his presidency. That would explain the dramatic drop of the stock market this week as nothing but an emotional reaction to “fake news.” It would mean that the strong economy Trump has hyped as his major contribution to the country—he denies that his predecessor Barack Obama had anything to do with it, although economic numbers under Obama were as good or better than today’s—remains intact, so long as people will ignore those dastardly Democrats… the Democrats that Donald Trump, Jr. says are hoping the coronavirus “comes here and kills millions of people so that they can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning.”
This is one heck of a gamble, and it reveals the corner into which the administration’s reliance on a false narrative has painted it. Under Trump, the country is great again… so the virus can’t be a problem. The rising stock market has proved that the economy is brilliant and Trump gets all the credit for it… so the falling stock market must be fake, or else the fault of jealous Democrats.
But the virus isn’t playing Trump’s game. It is spreading. Today, after we learned there are more than 85,000 known cases in the world and more than 2,900 known deaths, the director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program warned “every government on the planet” to “wake up. Get ready. You have a duty to your citizens. You have a duty to the world to be ready.” The WHO raised its risk assessment of the virus to “very high,” and just tonight, we have learned that the United States has its third case of coronavirus in a patient who has had no known contact with the infection, which indicates the virus is spreading within the community. Since we have not yet tested extensively, how far it has spread is unclear.
The stock market isn’t buying Trump’s rosy assessment, either. It has slid for seven days, shedding more than 13% of its value, taking $4 trillion from global stock values. Worried, White House officials are talking of tax cuts to boost consumer confidence, but consumer confidence cannot address the fact that the virus has interrupted supply chains; cut into air travel, tourism, and entertainment; and hobbled economies as people stay home. Fears of infection are starting to slow down air travel within the U.S., too, as companies are calling off conferences and Americans stop traveling for vacations.
Reports tonight suggest that China’s draconian quarantine measures actually worked, slowing the spread of the virus to enable health-care facilities to manage cases, but those measures also slowed economic production. Trump is depending on a strong economy to be reelected this fall. So, rather than encouraging us to take the simple precautions that would slow the virus enough to stagger our dangerous cases so healthcare facilities can manage them, Trump is urging his followers to adopt a religious view of coronavirus: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” To make sure the administration’s message cannot contradict him, government scientists may not speak directly to the media; all news about the virus must be cleared through Katie Miller (who recently married White House advisor Stephen Miller) at Vice President Pence’s office.
Trump’s increasing insistence on ignoring the coronavirus reminds me of Nixon’s increasing paranoia when he became convinced “enemies” were working against his reelection in 1972 (and, of course, Roger Stone is a common denominator between these two presidents and their reelection campaigns). Nixon hunkered down with his own men around him and turned more and more toxic toward those he thought were working against him.
Today, Trump announced he would nominate Texas Republican congressman John Ratcliffe to be his permanent Director of National Intelligence, despite the fact that when he tried to insert Ratcliffe before into the position to replace Dan Coats, lawmakers of both parties expressed concern about his lack of qualifications and his role as one of Trump’s key partisans in Congress. Since the DNI will be in charge of protecting the 2020 election against Russian interference, Trump’s insistence on reintroducing Ratcliffe into that role now suggests Trump is worried about his reelection, and is less interested in protecting our nation than in having a loyalist in a position key for the upcoming election.
People are asking me a lot about that election, especially about whether or not Trump will call it off, or whether he will refuse to leave the White House even if he loses. My take on it is that I think it’s way too early to worry about either of those things. So much is happening in America these days we cannot predict even what will happen next week, and that election is more than eight months out. Want proof of how fast things are moving? The Ukraine Scandal broke slightly more than five months ago. And I looked back over these Letters to see when I first dedicated one to the coronavirus. It was forever ago, right?
It was Tuesday.
We could all use a break.
Aside from everything else, tonight’s big takeaway is: wash your hands a LOT, don’t touch your face, eat right, get enough sleep (I know, I know…), read reputable sources about how best to handle public health…
And we will ride this out together.
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Amen. Especially the hand-washing and not touching your face parts.
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February 29, 2020 (Saturday)
Today we had our first fatality from the coronavirus in America, a man from Washington state in his 50s with underlying health issues died of the illness.
More reporting from inside the White House suggests the administration is unprepared to deal with the coronavirus as officials try to stave off an economic downturn with assurances that the administration has handled the crisis well and the coronavirus will hit America lightly.
Still, Eric Lipton at the New York Times noted today that the Port of Los Angeles is expecting to see that its container volume traffic dropped 25% this month because of coronavirus slowdowns.
Getting less news coverage is that the United States today signed an agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, apparently to get us out of the nineteen-year engagement. Trump has made it a priority to begin the process of drawing down troops there before the 2020 election.
Initial reactions to this deal were mixed. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper cheered that the agreement would bring home U.S. troops. But Tom Malinowski, Former Assistant Secretary of State and now a congressman from New Jersey, tweeted: “Two weeks ago in Munich, [Secretary of State Mike Pompeo] made a commitment to me and other members of Congress: the Afghan peace deal would NOT require the Afghan gov’t to release Taliban prisoners. Today’s deal requires them to release 5000.”
Laurel Miller, the deputy and then acting Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Department of State from 2013 to 2017, offered a more nuanced read on the deal between the U.S., the Taliban, and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. “Easy part first,” she wrote. “There’s nothing new in the Joint Declaration signed in Kabul today. It reaffirms existing commitments and it re-states some of US-Taliban agreement. Its purpose is evidently political symbolism.”
She explained: It includes the Afghan government and its opposition in future discussions. It draws down US troops to 8600 people—the number who were there when Trump took office, and promises “all” will be gone within 14 months. The 8600 drawdown has long been planned. In exchange, the Taliban will “not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qa’ida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” UN sanctions against Taliban figures will end within the next three months; US sanctions will end by August 27. The US says it will release up to 5000 Taliban prisoners. There is not, though, any firm date for a ceasefire between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Miller’s conclusion: The Taliban got a lot. It got its main goal—a clear timeline for US withdrawal—and fast removal of sanctions and prisoner releases. the US got the power to decide whether “vaguely-stated conditions are met, so that in reality can withdraw when it chooses—will be political not mil[itary] decision.” The Afghan government didn’t get much, but “this deal wasn’t really about the Afghan government.”
As I look at the news these days, it increasingly seems like our leaders are making national government decisions based on what will keep Republicans in office, regardless of whether they are good decisions for the majority of Americans.
In a speech to the National Religious Broadcasters’ Convention on February 26, Attorney General William Barr said “Politics is everywhere. It is omnipresent. Why is that?”
His answer was illuminating. He believes we are in the midst of a conflict “between two fundamentally different visions of the individual and his relationship to the state. One vision undergirds the political system we call liberal democracy, which limits government and gives priority to preserving personal liberty. The other vision propels a form of totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda. It subverts individual freedom in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective.”
Barr’s defense of “personal liberty” against “collectivism” is the same argument made by elite slaveholders before the Civil War, and made by the country’s richest industrialists in the 1890s and the 1920s. They argued that the government’s only role in society was to protect the liberty of individuals to accumulate as much as they could, because only such leaders knew what was best for society. They would become wealthy and powerful, and use that wealth as stewards of the nation to promote civilization by funding libraries and social programs and advancing American interests overseas. If the government became involved in regulating the economy, or providing social welfare, or promoting infrastructure, it would destroy society by promoting a redistribution of wealth designed to make everyone equal, a sort of socialism. Wealth would become more evenly distributed. Those at the top would not be able to accumulate fortunes, and society would no longer advance.
Such a stark division of the world meant that those in power must stay in power, no matter what it took, in order to protect “liberty,” or their opponents would destroy America through a sort of communal leveling. “[T]he difference between the parties is as the difference between the light and darkness, day and night,” said Republican President Benjamin Harrison in 1889, shortly before his party added six new states to the Union to try to guarantee they would never again lose control of the government. “Either the Republican party must be right and the Democratic party wrong, or the conditions must be reversed. One is certainly right, and if so, obviously the other is wrong.”
But one of our greatest political thinkers, Abraham Lincoln, disagreed that the government’s role was to protect liberty and property alone. In his day, the parties were reversed, and extremist Democrats set out to monopolize the government to protect the liberty of large slave owners to enjoy the economic system based on human slavery that brought them huge profits.
Lincoln recognized that their dominance would destroy democracy. He denied that the role of government was simply to protect individuals. “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.” They could not prosecute crime on their own, of course, but aside from that, there was more that the government should do. It should do “all which… requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.”
This was a positive goal for a government designed to create a more perfect union of equal citizens, rather than simply keeping a party in power so it could continue to protect its leaders.
Lincoln handled the national crisis of enslavement by signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 knowing it would undercut his chances of reelection the following year. He seems a better model for our leaders than Benjamin Harrison as they grapple with the coronavirus, a potential economic recession, and the longest war in American history.
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March 1, 2020 (Sunday)
Today saw America’s second COVID-19 death, as well as initial cases in Rhode Island, Florida, and New York. Like the first US COVID-19 death, the second was near Seattle, and testing revealed that the two victims did not know each other and could not have contracted the virus in the same place. This makes experts worry that this coronavirus has been spreading undetected in the Seattle area for six weeks while the government resisted the idea that we needed more widespread testing. Until a few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested only people who had been to China or were in contact with someone who had been there, even if a patient presented with symptoms that suggested COVID-19.
As of Sunday night, there were 87 known cases in America and almost 90,000 worldwide. About 3,000 infected people have died. Do not make the mistake of reading those statistics onto what will happen in America, though: there are still too many unknowns to know what our situation will look like. There is, however, no doubt that this is a disease to take seriously.
And yet, we seem to have been caught flat-footed.
On Twitter, Jeremy Konyndyk, who managed the US response to the Ebola outbreak and now researches humanitarian aid and pandemic preparation, had a fascinating thread explaining just how this might have happened. Konyndyk compared the Trump administration’s fumbling of the coronavirus preparedness to the George W. Bush administration’s insistence on going to war with Iraq. In both cases, the president’s priorities were so clear that analysts and advisors skewed the information the presidents received.
Trump has made it crystal clear that his top priority is to be reelected, and to do that, he needs a strong economy. To that end, his only plan for COVID-19 was to keep it out of the country, and keep the markets calm. He and his advisors operated from the assumption that the virus could be contained. So they did not test for the virus here. Their own new kits were faulty, but they could have used kits from the World Health Organization (which has provided kits for more than 50 countries). Other countries have done so quite successfully. South Korea’s infection numbers are high because they have made it so easy to get tested: they can test at drive-through clinics, and have tested about 80,000 people.
Lots of people called for more testing—including Trump’s own former FDA commissioner-- but the CDC limited testing to those who had been in China, outside the country. They simply assumed the virus was not spreading here and focused instead on keeping it out of America. But it apparently was spreading here.
Konyndyk is more forgiving than I am on this. He sees it as “an honest but avoidable mistake, driven by groupthink, unexamined assumptions, and process failure.” I think it was a massive failure, brought about by aligning government with an extremist ideology rather than reality.
Trump and his remaining supporters are convinced that he must stay in office to advance their ideological vision of a government that focuses solely on the liberty of individuals to run their businesses as they see fit, unhampered by regulations or taxation. Anyone who disagrees with them is, in their eyes, an enemy, working to bring socialism to America. So their top priority must be to protect Trump and get him another four years in office. Even now, rather than focusing on the spread of the virus after inaction has made it worse than it should have been, they are spinning the problem to attack Democrats, who, they say, are “weaponizing” COVID-19 unfairly to hurt Trump. Bots and trolls have so uniformly and forcefully taken up the call that the true villains of this play are neither the disease nor the officials who bungled the response, but rather the Democrats, that it looks to me like Russian disinformation.
Before Trump put Pence in charge of messaging about the virus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was booked on the Sunday political shows, but cancelled after the change in messaging. Instead, Trump’s people are reciting talking points. When CBS reporter Margaret Brennan today asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Alexander Azar to project how many Americans he expects will come down with COVID-19, he refused to answer, saying only “the risk to average Americans remains low.” And on CNN today, Vice President Pence refused to disagree with Donald Trump Jr.’s statement that Democrats want the coronavirus to kill millions of people to hurt Trump.
This. Is. Bonkers. No one wants millions of dead. We want intelligent strategies, designed by experts, to slow the spread of the disease and help us survive it.
But we are not getting them, because what is important to the Trump White House is getting Trump reelected, and Republican leaders are on board because he is advancing their ideology. This is quite literally the opposite of the “conservatism” they claim to embrace. In 1790, the father of modern conservatism, Irish statesman Edmund Burke, looked at the excesses of the French Revolution and warned about government run by ideology. Ideologues made the terrible mistake of thinking that their abstract theories were more powerful than reality. In their drive to make their theories real, they ran the risk of becoming tyrants. Governments must, he said, support longstanding human traditions like religion and family, because they provided stability. Governments must also, he insisted, be based in reality rather than ideology, using intelligence and experience to govern wisely.
It is high time we stopped calling members of the Trump Party “conservatives.” They are the dangerous ideologues Burke warned against, determined to force us to accept their imagined version of the world even as this coronavirus demands-- in no uncertain terms-- that we focus on reality.
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Damn.
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I disagree. I think that Trump (and his effluvium) would be quite happy with millions of Democrats dead. It’s all about projection with these assholes.
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South Korea’s infection numbers are high because they have made it so easy to get tested: they can test at drive-through clinics, and have tested about 80,000 people.
I wonder if that accounts for the high infection numbers in Italy (of all places) too.
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Barr is right on that, but I think he has his sides backwards. Individual freedom is predicated by the ability to do something, anything other than scratch away a living constantly in service to corporate masters.The vision he’s laid out in previous speeches is a path to religious genocide and slavery of all who are left to the few grifters who get selected as “righteous” enough.
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it’s the philosophical precursor to ayn rand, and i think its really a false spectrum.
if he really wanted complete liberty, he would go live on a deserted island. but, there’s not much to do there. what he really wants the spoils of common society without any of the responsibilities that go with sharing in that society.
it’s messy business, and – from his point of view – he shouldn’t have to be bothered by any of the details of people who aren’t as well situated as him.
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