The “unmasking” has become a ridiculous right wing pseudo-scandal. They are in a full-fledged frenzy But, in case you’ve forgotten what it was about, it’s really very simple.
The Obama administration imposed sanctions on the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election. When they were informed that that phone surveillance of the Russian ambassador showed an unnamed American talking to him about how to respond to those sanctions. All US citizens names are “masked” when they are picked up in such foreign intelligence surveillance.
National security officials are authorized to request that such names are unmasked in cases of a national security threat and they did. The person turned out to be Michael Flynn, a top national security member of the Trump team.
There was absolutely nothing untoward about the Obama administration being concerned about an American speaking to the Russian ambassador about the sanctions. They would have been remiss if they didn’t request it.
And by the way, here are numbers on “unmasking” over the course of the Trump administration:
Are you concerned about these numbers Jonathan?
2016: 9200 2017: 9500 2018: 17000 2019: 10000
These are # of requests to NSA to unmask Americans. Who was President in 2018 and 2019?
And remember, all the Obama administration knew when they asked for the unmasking was that the person talking to the Russian Ambassador about ignoring the sanctions was an American.
What do these people think they were supposed to have done? Ignore it?
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
We have all wasted enough time analyzing the man-child, the heir of Abraham Lincoln brooding in the Oval Office. Of as much consequence are those intent (publicly) of giving him four more years to inflame the worst devils of our nature. How many they are, or will be come November, does concern us.
Eliding their own decades-long contribution to reanimating this creature sewn together from parts, Never-Trumpers now shudder at what their efforts have wrought.
Fine (if depressing) by @JVLast: "As…we have become a less serious country, one of the stories we have told ourselves was that we could become a serious people again if we faced a big enough shock or a stern enough test…This story might not be true."https://t.co/HUAaChh1RO
Bill Kristol points to Jonathan Last’s column in The Bulwark in which Last frets over the proportion of our non-enemies conspiratorially minded enough to believe a string of outlandish and contradictory theories about the novel coronavirus pandemic.
As all true patriots know, the virus is part of a plot by somebody somewhere to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. Godless Chinese communists cooked up COVID-19 in a lab funded by Anthony Fauci in collusion with Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, the Clintons, and George Soros. Or, it is the result of forcing vaccines into our arms for generations (Fauci again). Vaccines sap and impurify, etc., etc.
One would expect these groups to argue over their dark cosmologies, but they hold hands. “Which suggests that not one of these people actually believes what they’re selling,” Last argues.
Even after 80,000+ American deaths on his watch, Donald Trump, “the single person responsible for stopping this shadowy group,” comes out smelling like a rose (for those who have not lost their sense of smell).
The lesson here is that these stories aren’t really about vaccines or bioweapons or population control. Instead, they’re meta-parables about how the people telling them see themselves and feel about their place in the world.
Last (without providing data) sees an intersection between the conspiracy crowd and those who refuse to wear face coverings during the pandemic. In fact, he sees a broad overlap between the “don’t wear masks” movement and the “reopen immediately” movement. He argues this too is less about the virus or the economy than about how they see their place in the world.
But it is not the accuracy of Last’s Venn diagrams that is concerning as much as the presence of a non-trivial number of Americans so committed to “death before disbelief.” This faction has grown, disconnected from reality and from feelings of American esprit de corps that resurfaced temporarily after 9/11. It could be as many as 1 in 5, per this week’s Post-University of Maryland poll.
Last worries “the restless grumbling of the open-it-all-up, masks-be-damned crowd should concern us, not only because their actions endanger them and us, but also because of what it says about the American character.” Nothing good. And the world knows it.
Wearing masks is a public statement about Trump’s failure, tweets David Frum. It is a “MAGA hat in reverse.”
People are meaning-craving animals. Symbols communicating meaning. Very understandably, many, many Trump supporters interpret the mask to mean, “I was wrong.”
Which is true. They were wrong, and that’s what it does mean.
Few will ever admit it. I don’t care if they do. I only care that they vote against Trump or stay home this November, and quit supporting the clowns who enabled Trump to lead America down this dead-end alley.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been released from prison to serve the remainder of his sentence in home confinement because of concerns over the novel coronavirus, two sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
He appears to be “special” case (I wonder why) while Michael Cohen was denied a similar release. It’s pretty clear both were manipulated at the behest of Donald Trump.
I actually think this is fine. Manafort is 71 and he’s a high risk person who is no danger to anyone. I see no reason why anyone in his position isn’t being released and put under house arrest. Cohen should have been released as well. These people didn’t get the death penalty.
Over half the inmates at the federal prison in Lompoc are infected with coronavirus and one woman said her attempts at finding out whether her father is one of the patients have been futile.
“Infuriating, frustrating, scary,” Holly Mowry, whose father is incarcerated, said. Emotions come in waves as Mowry reads headlines on her computer in Florida. Mowry said news stories are the only official information she has about the coronavirus outbreak at the prison.
To help mitigate the spread of the virus, Federal Bureau of Prisons Public Information Officer Justin Long said phone use by inmates has temporarily been suspended at the prison.
Mowry said her only means of communication with her father, Charles Molesworth, is by mail. “The letters I’ve gotten from my dad basically said that if one person gets it, we’re all going to get it,” Mowry said.
Outgoing phone calls and emails are restricted through May 18, according to Long.
“This action was taken to prevent transmission of the virus by multiple people touching keyboards and telephone handsets,” Long said in an email statement. “FCI Lompoc will continue to evaluate this approach and will make these communication avenues available as soon as possible.”
Mowry’s 69-year-old father, who is serving a 5-year prison sentence, has yet to report he’s ill.
But over half of the 1,044 inmates confined at the prison in Lompoc are now infected with COVID-19.
California is often cited as an example of a state that has handled the COVID crisis right. It has. But it looks like it may not hold:
California hasn’t seen the huge death toll from the coronavirus like New York and other hot spots, but the state is still struggling with a growing number of fatalities and confirmed cases.
COVID-19 deaths in California remain at a stubborn plateau. Mirroring a trend seen nationally, California has not seen a dramatic and sustained decline in deaths over the past month, a Los Angeles Times analysis found. During the seven-day period that ended Sunday, 503 people in California died from the virus — the second-highest weekly death toll in the course of the pandemic and a 1.6% increase from the previous week’s toll.
The trends have some health officials expressing caution about widely reopening communities — especially those in urban areas hard hit by the virus — amid concerns about a wave of new cases.
Silicon Valley’s health officer, Dr. Sara Cody, announced Tuesday that Santa Clara County has no immediate plans to weaken its strict stay-at-home order, saying she couldn’t take that step without increasing the risk to public safety.
“We’re not there yet,” Cody told the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. “The conditions really haven’t changed in our county. … We don’t suddenly have a vaccine. We have exactly the same conditions we had in March. If we did ease up, we would see a brisk return of cases, of hospitalizations, and a brisk return of deaths, to be quite blunt.”
At the same time, many rural counties with fewer cases are pushing to reopen. The state said Tuesday that seven counties — mostly rural — have met conditions for additional businesses to resume operations: Amador, Butte, El Dorado, Lassen, Nevada, Placer and Shasta counties.
Talks are underway with 23 other counties on whether they can expand reopenings, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday, but he noted that conditions are still too serious in Los Angeles and San Francisco counties to modify the guidelines for resuming business .Los Angeles County’s stay-at-home orders will ‘with all certainty’ be extended for the next three months, Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said.
The Times asked UC San Francisco epidemiologist and infectious disease expert Dr. George Rutherford, a former epidemic intelligence service officer with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about why the plateau persists.
“As long as it’s going up, it has not ended. It’s got to come down for it to end,” he said.
Rutherford offered two reasons why the disease is persisting: a certain percentage of people are still going out, and people are getting fed up with staying at home.
Many people are going out because they have no choice. They are essential workers keeping the country functioning. And ,as we know, most of those essential workers are people of color and they tend to live in dense housing situations so there are many more of them being affected by this disease than others.
On the other hand, there are a lot of citizens acting as if they are immune and have no responsibilities toward anyone but themselves. And, of course, making political points.
Also a factor: People are getting fed up with the stay-at-home order and have been determined to enjoy the nice weather.
It’s a reason why disease forecasters are increasingly expecting the death toll to get worse than what was thought just a week ago. “They realized people weren’t really sheltering in place anymore and all the other states let their foot off the brakes,” Rutherford said.
Officials have expressed alarm at large crowds seen in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Park, Orange County beaches and in the downtown L.A. flower district.
There has been a steep rise in coronavirus cases reported in Orange County following the large crowds on the beaches on April 25-26.
On the week of April 20-26, there were 438 cases in Orange County. The week after that, 669 cases were reported, and the week after that, 759 cases. Further investigation is needed to determine whether the beaches were a source of spread for an outbreak or if the increase could be explained simply by other factors, like increased testing.
“But you know, just us looking at it, there was a big jump in Orange County that was temporally consistent with possible transmission from that crowd event,” Rutherford said.
[…]
Pasadena officials have shown have dropping social distancing can have bad results: a cluster of at least five coronavirus cases tied to a birthday party.
The party was held after the city issued stay-at-home orders March 19 and was attended by a large number of extended family members and friends who did not wear face coverings or stay six feet apart, the city said in a news release.
“One person showed up to the party exhibiting symptoms and joking she may have the virus,” Lisa Derderian, spokeswoman for the city of Pasadena, said in an email. “The aftermath affected several others who became seriously ill because of one person’s negligent and selfish behavior.”
Through contact tracing, a Pasadena Public Health Department disease investigation team discovered more than five laboratory-confirmed coronavirus cases among attendees of the party “and many more ill individuals,” the city said. The team identified the woman as the index case, or the first patient in the outbreak identified with the infection, officials said.
Sutter and Yuba counties defied Newsom and reopened many businesses with social distancing rules last week.
But the counties’ health officials later expressed grave concerns that many customers and workers were not keeping six feet apart or wearing face covering.
“I understand that some of your customers may strongly object to a facial-covering requirement, but the long-term safety of our community is at stake. We do not want to take any steps back in our phasing-in efforts,” the health director wrote.
I would say that mask usage in my neighborhood among people jogging, dog walking and biking has dropped by 60% in the last couple of weeks. Younger people are gathering in groups and not observing social distancing on the sidewalks, even when they encounter elderly people. It seems to me that a whole lot of people have just decided they aren’t going to bother anymore.
I think the biggest danger we face is COVID fatigue. People want to live their lives and a whole lot of them aren’t being political when they ignore the rules — they just do not see the danger to themselves and can’t register something as abstract as social solidarity. They just don’t think that way.
And as long as there is controversy among the leadership of the country over how dangerous this is, the Trump cult will go out of their way to figuratively (maybe literally?) spit in our faces to make a political point.
Essential workers are left without protection by the government and the rest of the population is put at risk by impatient citizens and political players. America in 2020 is simply not constituted in such way that more than half of our citizens are capable of or willing to adapt. I don’t see how we will possibly avoid a major second wave. In fact, I’m not sure the first one will ever substantially recede.
The worldwide pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus which causes COVID-19, has resulted in unprecedented responses, with many affected nations confining residents to their homes. Much like the rest of Europe, France has been hit hard by the epidemic and went into lockdown on the 17 March 2020. It was hoped that this would result in a sharp decline in ongoing spread, as was observed when China locked down following the initial emergence of the virus (1, 2). Following the expected reduction in cases, the French government has announced it will ease restrictions on the 11 May 2020. To exit from the lockdown without escalating infections, we need to understand the underlying level of population immunity and infection, identify those most at risk for severe disease and the impact of current control efforts.
Daily reported numbers of hospitalizations and deaths only provide limited insight into the state of the epidemic. Many people will either develop no symptoms or symptoms so mild they will not be detected through healthcare-based surveillance. The concentration of hospitalized cases in older individuals has led to hypotheses that there may be widespread “silent” transmission in younger individuals (3). If the majority of the population is infected, viral transmission would slow, potentially reducing the need for the stringent intervention measures currently employed.
The idea that we have a lot of “silent transmission” among young people who had the virus without knowing it or had just a very mild case and are now immune is one that all of us have been hoping was the case. It would mean more than just “herd immunity.” It would also mean that many people could safely go back to work without fear of getting sick or spreading the disease.
Unfortunately, this study is not good news about this:
France has been heavily affected by the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and went into lockdown on the 17 March 2020. Using models applied to hospital and death data, we estimate the impact of the lockdown and current population immunity. We find 3.6% of infected individuals are hospitalized and 0.7% die, ranging from 0.001% in those <20 years of age (ya) to 10.1% in those >80ya.
Across all ages, men are more likely to be hospitalized, enter intensive care, and die than women. The lockdown reduced the reproductive number from 2.90 to 0.67 (77% reduction). By 11 May 2020, when interventions are scheduled to be eased, we project 2.8 million (range: 1.8–4.7) people, or 4.4% (range: 2.8–7.2) of the population, will have been infected.
Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.
If this is true, we are in for a rough time in the fall. There are going to be too many places just opening up willy nilly and individuals throwing caution to the wind. And it appears that a whole lot of them will be spreading the virus into a population that still will not have anything close to herd immunity.
Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of a key federal office charged with developing medical countermeasures, will testify before Congress on Thursday that the Trump administration was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic and warn that the the US will face “unprecedented illness and fatalities” without additional preparations.
“Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities,” Bright is expected to say Thursday, according to his prepared testimony obtained by CNN.
“Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history.”
So… that’s interesting.
I know it’s depressing. But the best we can hope for right now is to unflinchingly face reality. It’s very hard to do in the Trump era but it’s never been more vital. We can get through this but it requires that we follow the facts and the science. It’s now up up to each of us as individuals, families, communities and states to do it ourselves since there’s no chance the Trump administration will do anything right. They are simply incapable of it.
(The ad above is a template for ads aimed at all the vulnerable GOP Senators, Tillis, McSally, Gardner, Ernst etc.)
These are all anti-Trump ads, obviously, with a few aimed at the GOP Senators. Biden is also putting out quite a few positive ads which you can see at the Biden for President youtube channel.
I’m featuring these because I think this election is a referendum on Trump’s monumental incompetence. It was before the pandemic but now there’s really nothing else to talk about. He’s been killing our democracy for years. Now he’s killing us too.
The person whose story on A1 of NYT on Feb 3 warned of a likely pandemic says bluntly the response was the president’s fault, not the Chinese. Also described the US as a “headless chicken” for those two months. https://t.co/akLoGztC4M
If true, the purge is not confined to Trump’s enemies from the Russia investigation. They are getting rid of anyone who could possibly stand in the way of Trump stealing the election.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, refused on Tuesday to rule out postponing the presidential election in November, a comment that fed directly into Democratic concerns that President Trump might use the coronavirus crisis to delay or delegitimize the contest and one that contradicted Mr. Trump himself.
“I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other, but right now that’s the plan,” Mr. Kushner told Time magazine in response to a question about whether the election could be postponed because of the pandemic.
The opinion of a White House staff member has no bearing on when the election is held. Even the president himself does not have the authority to unilaterally postpone Election Day, which by law takes place the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.Postponing or canceling the general election is highly unlikely. Here’s what that entails.
But Mr. Kushner’s comment raised alarms both because of the expansive power Mr. Trump has conferred on members of his family who serve in his administration and because it played into the worst anxieties of Mr. Trump’s detractors — that the president would begin to question the validity of the election if he feared he was going to lose.
It doesn’t just “play into the worst anxieties of Mr. Trump’s detractors.” It is clear evidence that Trump’s inner circle is more convinced of his dictatorial powers than ever or still doesn’t understand how the Constitution works. That the thought of postponing the election is even considered by such a high level, albeit ignorant, member of the Trump administration is just chilling.
The article makes clear that they don’t have the power to do this. But we used to think the president didn’t have the power to unilaterally ignore congress whenever it wanted either. And we once thought that the House and Senate would guard its prerogatives regardless of party but we’ve learned otherwise.
And, by the way, Trump and his cronies are idiots about vote by mail. It doesn’t advantage one party over another. Indeed, for years, the Republicans had the advantage with vote by mail, with their older constituency and the military. But vote-by -mail is harder to suppress so they are concerned that if there is an equal playing field they will lose. And that much is true.
On Monday afternoon, President Trump tried once again to declare victory in the fight against what he calls “the invisible enemy” by holding one of his so-called briefings in the Rose Garden to celebrate America’s allegedly successful testing program. As one would expect, trying to sell the assembled press on such a blatant lie did not go well. At best, the testing program has been “anemic and spotty,” as former President Obama has put it, and the long delays and dithering in the response have led to the deaths of 83,000 people, and counting, within just a couple of months.
It was a sad and perfunctory performance, ending with a racist attack on an Asian-American reporter, after which Trump flounced off the stage like a disappointed second runner-up at one of his sleazy pageants.
He is clearly very upset that the medical community hasn’t devised a magic cure and that the virus isn’t succumbing to his repeated exhortations to “just go away.” The grand reopening of the economy is a chaotic mess and the “numbers” he’s so obsessed with keep going in the wrong direction. But his friends in the media and his top henchman at the Department of Justice, Attorney General Bill Barr, have come up with something thrilling to distract him from his troubles and make the pain go away.
They’re calling it “Obamagate,” and on Mother’s Day Trump spent nearly the entire day tweeting about it in a hysterical frenzy. When asked at the press conference by the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker to explain what he had meant when he tweeted that Obama had committed “the biggest political crime in American history, by far,” Trump replied, “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”
Of course he doesn’t understand it, but then neither does anyone else. Salon’s Igor Derysh wrote up an excellent rundown on the main points of this so-called scandal and it’s the same old bizarro-world version of events in which the FBI didn’t sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign with the 11th-hour resurrection of the idiotic email scandal while keeping mum about Russian interference on Trump’s behalf. In the Trumpified version, the “deep state” was actually working on behalf of Clinton to take down Trump. Then, when he heroically thwarted their efforts they conspired to destroy him once he was in office by colluding with a long list of foreign actors, the entire intelligence community, the Democratic National Committee and the media to frame him with the Russia investigation in a slow-moving coup. (One that was highly ineffective, you’d have to say.)
The alleged new wrinkle is that the Michael Flynn case supposedly offers proof that Obama and Joe Biden were directing the conspiracy because they knew about Flynn’s perfectly innocent activities during the transition and trapped him into lying to the FBI.
None of it makes any sense whatsoever. As the Atlantic’s David Frum explained:
The “Obamagate” that Trump tweets about — like the comic-book universes on which it seems to be modeled — is a tangle of backstories. The main characters do things for reasons that make no objective sense, things that can be decoded only by obsessive superfans on long Reddit threads.
Needless to say, that doesn’t matter to the Trump supporters. They are as excited as five-year-olds on Christmas Eve, so overstimulated they are on the verge of wetting their pants. The full focus of right-wing media is on this now, both echoing Trump’s manic tweeting and feeding him more material.
On Fox News, the supposed straight-news anchors are as breathless as the Trump TV hosts in the evening. They can hardly find time to fit in their usual hydroxychloroquine features or loving paeans to armed protesters demanding haircuts. The coronavirus itself is now a secondary story at best.
On the episode of Fox News's "The Five" that is going on right now, "Obama" has been mentioned 17 times. The entire first segment of the show was devoted to "Obamagate."
Barr has clearly been whispering sweet somethings in the president’s ear about the “investigation of the investigation” being run by special counsel John Durham bearing some kind of fruit. Barr has already shown he’s willing to use the Department of Justice to pursue this ridiculous pseudo-scandal on Trump’s behalf with his crude interference in the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn cases. Although it’s highly unlikely that the attorney general has the guts to go after Obama or Biden themselves, he may find a way to indict some of Trump’s personal bête noires, such as former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI director James Comey or former FBI agent Peter Strzok.
Trump’s ecstatic followers are aquiver with anticipation, but none so much as the president himself. He is self-soothing with fever dreams of vengeance and exoneration, which allows him to ignore the reality he is facing as tens of thousands of Americans die on his watch and millions lose their jobs while he flounders about in public and fulminates against his political enemies.
But no matter how much Trump tweets about Obama, this pesky pandemic won’t go away. What he fatuously insisted was the “greatest economy the world has ever known” is quickly becoming the worst economy since the Great Depression. There might even be cracks emerging in the Republican establishment. Politico reported recently that Senate Republicans are actually balking at pursuing “Obamagate,” apparently unconvinced that staging a show trial in the middle of a global catastrophe is a winning electoral strategy.
According to Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair, Trump World is very nervous about this. Sherman quotes a former West Wing official saying “The numbers are fucking terrible. There’s massive anxiety in the GOP that he’s gonna take them all down with him.”
Trump’s dismal performance in this crisis should certainly make them anxious. Senate Republicans had the chance just four months ago to take a stand against his clear incompetence and corruption. Instead, they chose to back him to the hilt. By contrast, Governors around the country who have shown leadership and independence, of both parties, are seeing massive popularity while those who’ve acted as Trump sycophants are not doing so well.
Trump is polling worst of all. The new Washington Post-Ipsos and CNN polls show large majorities disapproving of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. His reaction? Embarrassing, childish jealousy:
Remember this, every Governor who has sky high approval on their handling of the Coronavirus, and I am happy for them all, could in no way have gotten those numbers, or had that success, without me and the Federal Governments help. From Ventilators to Testing, we made it happen!
Trump knows he has failed. But he doesn’t know what to do. So he’s gone back to nursing his grievances and stoking the resentments of his base. There still seem to be people who are happy to follow him down that rabbit hole. But as the bodies pile up and the food lines grow longer, the old Trump sideshows like “Obamagate” may not seem quite so amusing to the American people. As the rising reputations of numerous state governors show, in a crisis people look for competence and leadership. Trump’s antics can’t hide the fact that he is entirely lacking either of those qualities.
Unprecedented support for businesses has been matched by meager support for workers. Our idea of helping workers in the COVID-19 pandemic is a paltry $1,200 and sending them back to work in conditions that might end their lives.
House Democrats Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Haley Stevens (Mich.), Adam B. Schiff (Calif.) and Sean Casten (Ill) admit (last headline) that the three relief packages passed so far do not meet the scale of human needs. Implementation of the Paycheck Protection Program was haphazard, and large businesses swooped in (with the aid of their banks) to scoop up capital, leaving smaller and minority-owned businesses empty-handed when the money ran out.
“Many businesses will have to choose between shuttering permanently and ignoring public health guidance by reopening before it is safe,” they write. “Neither is acceptable.”
Instead, they propose the Paycheck Guarantee Act. Similar to programs implemented by Germany, Singapore and South Korea, it would cover workers’ paychecks and businesses’ operating costs directly without requiring intermediaries:
Here’s how it would work: After employers file a sworn statement with the IRS on the amount of revenue lost due to covid-19, the IRS would use 2019 tax filings to calculate a grant that totals the percentage of revenue loss multiplied by payroll and benefits for workers up to a salary cap of $90,000. Businesses would also receive an additional 25 percent to cover operating costs, such as rent, so they don’t close permanently.
Rather than relying on preexisting banking connections that too often leave out small and minority-owned businesses, the bill would facilitate payments straight from the IRS to the employer. Every employer, regardless of size, would be eligible because every business deserves an equal chance at survival regardless of whether they have lobbyists and connections to big banks.
The bill would also allow employers to rehire workers laid off or furloughed after March 1, immediately shrinking the unemployment rolls. It would be renewable on a monthly basis, scaleable to revenue loss, until key economic triggers are met. To prevent employers from gaming the system, the bill includes strong worker protections and fraud prevention measures to ensure quick implementation and oversight.
Efforts to date set up a desperate situation for families and businesses unable to pay their bills. It also sets up conditions for disaster capitalists to snap up failed businesses and properties and further concentrate control of the economy (and the government) in the hands of an elite few. Just what happened after the financial collapse of 2008.
Beating this virus means keeping people out of the workforce long enough to strangle its spread. This means relieving “the economic pressure that businesses and workers are reeling from right now.”
Film critic Roger Ebert (IIRC) once described the ethos of the teen-slasher genre as “Calvinism berserko,” i.e., “think of having sex and die.” The public policymaking corollary is “think of not working and die.”
Congress is quick to bestow public largesse on entrepreneur-investors and to give working people the hairy eyeball. In “Animal Farm” terms, “workers good, job-creators better.” Makers must be properly incentivized (positively) to keep generating returns for investors. Takers (hourly workers) must be properly incentivized (negatively) to keep turning the wheels. In this enlightened era, we’ve simply substituted the law for the lash. If they die, tough luck.
That is why provisions in the Paycheck Guarantee Act are likely to meet a cool reception on Capitol Hill. Conservative lawmakers (of both major parties) want the working class to feel the economic pressure to return to work in a deadly pandemic. Workers serve the economy. It need not serve them.
.@CNBC's @jimcramer utters the quiet part out loud when passionately proclaiming that @elonmusk is "dead right" to break the law & open Tesla during a deadly pandemic against health experts and law.
In praising Elon Musk’s claim Tuesday that he would restart Tesla production in defiance of Alameda County, Calif. rules, an exasperated Jim Cramer told CNBC’s audience, “It’s time to open up that factory … I don’t want to violate the law, but come on!” Cramer said he agrees that “the whole thrust of this country is to put people to work.”
PSA for all tempted to frame frontline workers as “superheroes”: Don’t. We cannot keep valorizing cult of hard work. It's gross and reduces people to their productive potential. Having to work under these conditions is the total shame of our collapsed society.
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
