Yankton chose to cancel its fireworks rather than risk crowds in a two-mile area spreading coronavirus. Yankton has also canceled Riverboat Days in August and postponed its June Ribfest until fall. Dozens of summer events around the state have been canceled, costing communities millions in economic activity:
Tourism is big business in South Dakota and a major revenue source for communities across the state, especially during local events, [Tourism Secretary Jim] Hagen said. According to state data, 14.5 million people visited the state in 2019, spending $4.1 billion and generating $308 million in state and local taxes and supporting more than 55,000 jobs.
Hagen said revenue in the tourism industry in South Dakota is estimated to be down by about 70% so far this year, with some hotels reporting occupancy rates of only 15% to 30%, far below normal. The festival cancellations are adding to the industry woes [Bart Pfankuch and Nick Lowrey, “Cancellation of Festivals Costing S.D. Communities Money and Momentum,” South Dakota News Watch, 2020.06.03].
Governor Kristi Noem says tourism tax revenues to the Department of Tourism are down 3.1% so far this year, and gasoline tax revenue is down 14% from last year. Visit Rapid City reports a 50% decline in tourism revenue so far this year.
But remember: increasing tourism means accelerating the coronavirus peak:
…the South Dakota Department of Health’s model… showed West River’s peak infections would be early July. However, the actual numbers show the peak time may hit in a few weeks or late June. So why now?
“Tourism plays into that, we know that we are getting busier with tourism, we don’t know what percentage of those people will practice social distancing,” Michelle Stephens, [Monument Health] VP of Operations, said.
Also playing a factor are all of the businesses that are opening back up.
“The only way we can stop the spread is to not gather in large numbers, keep your social distance, observe hand and respiratory hygiene and really protect the vulnerable in this population. So that’s to all of us. We owe it to each other, we have to take care of each other,” Dr. [Shankar] Kurra said [Sydney Thorson, “Peak of COVID-19 Cases Could Come Sooner Than Predicted West River,” KELO-TV, 2020.06.04].
You can have low rates of coronavirus infection and death, or you can have festivals and tourism dollars. You can’t have both.
Meanwhile, Sweden is proving to be just as damn dumb as trump’s US. Coronavirus live news: Sweden sees third consecutive day of over 1,000 new cases; virus ‘under control’ in France.” Oh to be like the French! Good wine, cheese and culture.
Say then, how is that pandemic going here in the United States? Better hope the Chinese come up with a vaccine that they will give for free, because we sure as hell will try to charge $500 bucks a shot for it, and if you have insurance, $2,000 bucks.
“You can have low rates of coronavirus infection and death, or you can have festivals and tourism dollars. You can’t have both.”
What do you mean we can’t have both? :-)
While Yankton is pulling the plug, Gnome and SD tourism secretary Jim Hagen are gearing up for their Trump extravaganza, expecting an attendance of 7500 people at Mt. Rushmore for July 4th. No provisions will be taken for social distancing whatsoever, and if anyone is concerned they should just stay home.
Ergo, while we may have lower rates of infection in Yankton, we’ll have festivities, excitement and spectacle here in the Black Hills.
“It’s truly going to be spectacular,” Gov. Kristi Noem said during a news briefing Thursday morning. https://www.keloland.com/keloland-com-original/trump-expected-to-be-at-fireworks-at-july-3-mount-rushmore-noem-says/
South Dakota to mission control:
https://www.facebook.com/tina.riley.184/posts/2350151155282851
Yale trained Adam Tooze:
Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States was a moment of political rebirth…
…conservatism had long fostered a reactionary counterculture, which defined the push for civil rights as oppression, resisted the equality of women and the transgression of conventional heterosexual norms, pilloried the hegemony of the liberal media, and was suspicious of globalism and its corporate liberal institutions, including the UN and the WTO. Already in the 1950s this reactionary politics had secured a niche on the right wing of the GOP.
It was reenergized by the Goldwater campaign and the conservative backlash against the social revolutions of the 1960s. Reintegrated into the mainstream GOP by Ronald Reagan, it then flared into the open in the ferocious hostility to the Clintons in the 1990s. With Trump it finally claimed center stage. For the right, the explosion of “truth-speaking” by Trump and his cohorts, the unabashed sexism and xenophobia of his administration, and its robust nationalism on issues of trade and security need no justification… [upsetting the] narrative of progress from the Civil War to the New Deal to the civil rights movement to the election of Barack Obama. This was a self-conception of the United States carefully cultivated by cold war liberalism [?] and seemingly fulfilled in the Clinton era of American power. *** New York Review 6.6.19 (cont.)
In this extraordinary moment trump and noem attempt to cement a 5th face to survive prison, a mediocre SD political career, and the death spiral of the present Republican Party. By 2050 the protesters will have to fundamentally change American democracy or it will not survive. Asia economies will dominate the US by many times. More pressing is global warming and economic inequality. Denuclearization will be an issue. We can do this. Survive.
Good comment Leslie. However, I don’t think we have 30 years to save the USA. You said 2050. I believe that will be way too late. I’m sure there are millions like me, probably you and most of the regulars here, who will never give up on American democracy, but I think we have to swamp the traitors on every level this November.
No question. David Runciman, cited w/i above, took the long, positive view (2050) suggesting it’ll be our kids who create the new democracy. “How Democracy Ends (2019?)
I agree that the current 50+ year olds may not save it, but we’ve got to keep the egalitarian heart beating.
(Cont from 16:12 immediately above)
At this “moment when accelerating climate change, the last great burst of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and the rise of Asia, driven by China’s authoritative capitalism, are transforming the world” we can hardly look back at “WWII, the Guilded Age, the Civil War, or the Revolution. ***If undemocratic liberal technocracy (Silicon Valley) is the ultimate driver of the popular revolt, how can a technocratic list of solutions offered by a technocratic think tank be a solution. How can efforts to ensure the people “feel” in charge rather than a program of politics that actually empowers them, not sound like obfuscation?***Democracies are fragile because they depend on competing parties accepting common norms…. Without them “constitutional checks and balances do not serve as bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be.”
Once placed in a position of power and freed by the erosion of democratic norms, elected authoritarians will seek to influence the referees in the system, forcing judges to retire, stifling the press and tilting the playing field permanently against their opponents. There can be no doubt that America’s political system at this moment is under threat on all three fronts.***In the US today the problem lies first and foremost with the GOP. It has repeatedly behaved like an anti-systemic party that does not consider itself bound by common democratic norms.***For the GOP to transform itself must America need to experience a catastrophe similar to that of Germany in WWII?…we must seek to understand Russia, Ukraine, the EU and the US as one history….Putin’s attendance at a NATO conference in Bucharest…acrimonious…proposal…sponsored by the Bush administration for accelerated membership…to NATO by Ukraine and Georgia …provoked a hostile reaction…no interest in seeing Ukraine welcomed into the exclusive European club. … speech to the Munich security conference in 2007….
[As stated we can thank Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. I self-learned this lesson less than a year out of law school, while octogenarian lawyer McConnell and by virtue of his apprentice who also does not]. (Cont.)
At this “moment when accelerating climate change, the last great burst of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and the rise of Asia, driven by China’s authoritative capitalism, are transforming the world” we can hardly look back at “WWII, the Guilded Age, the Civil War, or the Revolution. ***If undemocratic liberal technocracy (Silicon Valley) is the ultimate driver of the popular revolt, how can a technocratic list of solutions offered by a technocratic think tank be a solution. How can efforts to ensure the people “feel” in charge rather than a program of politics that actually empowers them, not sound like obfuscation?***Democracies are fragile because they depend on competing parties accepting common norms…. Without them “constitutional checks and balances do not serve as bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be.”
Once placed in a position of power and freed by the erosion of democratic norms, elected authoritarians will seek to influence the referees in the system, forcing judges to retire, stifling the press and tilting the playing field permanently against their opponents. There can be no doubt that America’s political system at this moment is under threat on all three fronts.***In the US today the problem lies first and foremost with the GOP. It has repeatedly behaved like an anti-systemic party that does not consider itself bound by common democratic norms.***For the GOP to transform itself must America need to experience a catastrophe similar to that of Germany in WWII?…we must seek to understand Russia, Ukraine, the EU and the US as one history….Putin’s attendance at a NATO conference in Bucharest…acrimonious…proposal…sponsored by the Bush administration for accelerated membership…to NATO by Ukraine and Georgia …provoked a hostile reaction…no interest in seeing Ukraine welcomed into the exclusive European club. … speech to the Munich security conference in 2007….
[As stated we can thank Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. I self-learned this lesson less than a year out of law school, while octogenarian lawyer McConnell has not].
Cont…(almost finished)
I often speak of the destruction of the Republican Party, the GOP and its voters all who enable the tragedy now playing out in the world. HRC’s prophetic warning of the vast right wing conspiracy has yielded incompetent Trump who has placed us on track for 400,000 deaths of virus by next spring. The posts above@ 16:01 and 19:46(6/5); @ 19:44 and 20:04(6/7); and @ the following post.
finally….
“Post-cold war geopolitics was in action from Russia, as well as France and Germany. They had no interest in seeing Ukraine welcomed into the European club and no desire to raise tensions in Moscow. Putin’s speech to the Munich security conference in 2007 was a clearly enunciated articulation against American unilateralism”.
[Thanks Cheney and Bush neocons.] In 2013 negotiations in Kiev broke down concerning Ukraine’s prospective membership in the EU prompting Putin’s intervention. Westernization, containment and hardening eastern fortifications against Russia, as well as Hillary Clinton’s 90’s unipolar triumphalism in her term as Secretary of State, left little interest for Moscow in Clinton’s election, especially with Trump as the alternative. She made no secret of her opposition, though she may not have fomented Russian protests in 2011, as Putin believes. All-pervasive forces of Russian neofascism is illuminating.
Democracy is unlikely [or maybe it is closer, now] to die with a bang. Maybe more like a whimper. “There doesn’t seem to be the level of solidarity that would be required to address the challenge of mounting inequality by raising income and wealth taxes or undertaking comprehensive welfare reform– the reforms that were the achievements of the mid-twentieth century and that were in large part spurred by the huge mobilization efforts of the two world wars….Democracy has no clear answer for the mindless operation of bureaucratic and technological power. We may indeed be witnessing its extension in the form of artificial intelligence and robotics. Likewise after decades of dire warning the environmental problem remains fundamentally unaddressed.***Bureaucratic overreach and environmental catastrophe are precisely the kind of slow-moving existential challenges that democracies deal with badly. Given the West’s failure to address them, we should expect to see ever-louder calls for energetic authoritarian answers….We live under the shadow not of Moscow but of Beijing.”
Authoritarian meritocracy increases the likelihood of catastrophic missteps. “Finally, the threat de jour: corporations and the technologies they promote. “Face Book or others, are more extensive than any state hierarchal state organization. Zuckerberg is far more dangerous to democracy than Trump, though trying “to seem the mild mannered sort, eager to spout the platitudes of corporate social responsibility and susceptible to political pressure…. Democracy has a life span” and “we are in the late middle age.” The risks in a confrontation with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were enormous but by comparison, our troubles with Putin are trivial, and the “perils of a new cold war with China will not be.” “How Democracy Ends”, David Runciman (Basic Books 2019) reviewed by Adam Tooze, NY Review, 6.6.19.
In conclusion, watching daily as positive infections wash up on the shores of my home on the island in the prairie, it is clear that the president is an utter failure in a crisis we knew would happen, and have dreaded. Equally, our incompetent Governor is merely a political animal with a large election war chest. Republican “governing” is farcical, over and over, mainly relying on disinformation, misinformation, outright lying, and aggressive authoritarian capitalism and cronyism. The Harvard Global Health Director has today announced his prediction that the death toll will reach 300, 000 in September according to CBS news tonight, and 400,000 by next spring according to NPR this morning, 6.10.20. The next predictable disaster awaiting America is a queered November national election feared to be specifically engineered and executed by the GOP. Russia, Iran and China will also likely attempt to affect the outcome.
Bump this thread b/c steve higgins (tag team partner with tim highins-who threw steve under the bus!) seems to be worried about what i have been up to.