Even if scientists (and dogs) get coronavirus under control, the United States will have to work really hard to dig us out of the pandemic recession. We’ll have to do that hard work in close cooperation with everyone else in the global economy:
Assuming the United States finally gets the coronavirus pandemic under control, the long road to economic recovery will require two things: a lot of money, and a cooperative global economy. The first part isn’t too hard if the U.S. Federal Reserve and Congress keep their eyes on the ball. The second part is a problem, especially after last week’s disappointing jobs numbers, which underscored the extent of the economic damage. Even if some businesses have bounced back since the worst phase of the pandemic in March and April, extending that bounce will require strong demand for U.S. products and services abroad, ample global financial flows to underwrite ballooning U.S. debts, and a more predictable geopolitical outlook that doesn’t subject the market to continuous shocks.
The good news is that the United States can help ensure the global economy plays along. The bad news is that Washington must be prepared to engage in some deft economic diplomacy, if not a reset of relations with the rest of the world.
…For all its inconsistencies, the Trump administration’s economic statecraft has been focused on bringing back manufacturing jobs, often at the expense of other traditional priorities. Trump’s earliest messages to Beijing were that “everything is on the table,” implying that issues around Taiwan and North Korea would all be negotiable in the pursuit of a better trade deal. In much the same way, complaints about European steel and auto exports were joined, in Trump’s mind, with questions surrounding European defense spending and military commitments to NATO. The result has been deteriorating relations that weaken the United States and U.S. jobs lost to rising tariffs [Christopher Smart, “To Avoid a Coronavirus Depression, the U.S. Can’t Afford to Alienate the World,” Foreign Policy, 2020.07.28].
Translation: Elect Joe Biden.
Translation 2: Andrew Yang was right, though 2 years ago when he wrote, “The War on Normal People” he could not foresee the Covid19 pandemic. Covid19 accelerated the issues Yang addressed and strives to resolve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ0f4GlbSUw
https://movehumanityforward.com/
NPR reports Civil War trauma led to militarized discipline and training of volunteer fire departments and law “enforcement” officers ripening into KLU KLUX KLAN hate groups. Daughters of the Confederacy, southern white churches and public funds sponsored Lost Cause statues and monuments to an alternate reality.
This is a pathology of hate that “a reset of relations with the rest of the world“ Cory suggested, may derail; but a good start from octogenarians but competent leaders like Fauci, Biden and Ginsberg may get us there.
“Reset” is the understatement of the century.
Today is the day! August 2, 2020! Two weeks since the cause of the trump virus spoke of the new republican healthcare plan being released. Thank gwaaad, and not a moment too soon.
“It was a bold claim when President Trump said that he was about to produce an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system, at last doing away with the Affordable Care Act, which he has long promised to abolish.
“We’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan,” Trump pledged in a July 19 interview with “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace.” WAPo 8.2.2020
Don’t you feel released from the burden of worry now? Let’s ask EB5 Short Rounds when he will be presenting it to his daddy, Fat Nixon.
The things trump and the republicans destroyed in 4 years will take a minimum of 10 years to rebuild and with that, probably 50 years to restore our reputation with the rest of the planet.It will also require people working together.Perhaps, I’m being to much of an optimist.
9 dead Marines off the coast of California. Wonder if Kushner will collect the bounty’s from Putin. Nothing from Fat Nixon on this tragedy. There is so much death from the trump virus, there can be no time to mourn the loss of our servicemen to this accident. What a pity.
Like cibvet said, it will take a long time for us to claw our way back to (at least) second world nation ststus.
I’ve been wary of globalism—my Wendell Berry/Kirkpatrick Sale human-scale philosophy is not dead yet—but we cannot retreat to selfish isolationism or regress to belligerent imperialism. We need to spend the rest of this century reawakening the sensibilities of the men and women who built the United Nations and refocusing our policies on the oneness and interconnectedness of humanity. One man’s suffering is every man’s suffering. One nation’s grief is every nation’s grief. One people’s oppression is every people’s oppression.
Europe-wide study of wind power subsidies from Imperial College confirmed last week that UK projects were likely to be the world’s first “negative-subsidy” offshore windfarms.***
Dr Iain Staffell, from Imperial’s centre for environmental policy, said the new windfarms would be “pivotal” in helping the UK reach its net zero carbon emissions targets “with the added bonus of reducing consumers’ energy bills”. https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/02/wind-farm-subsidy-scottish-power-limit-auction?
I read in the Strib that China is buying more US corn and soybeans. Anyone else hear about this?
I did, Ms. Geelsdottir. I get mailings in my email from the Strib all the time, and they did tell me that the Chinese are buying more corn from Iowa, where Mr. mike is from, and beans from all over the belly of the US. It is true.
Fu*king Koch Bros living and dead! The difference in Koch sponsored compromised PBS NOVA environmental “documentaries” which BARELY touch on global warming, and others like Arthur Vining Davis Fndn’s “When Whales Walked” concerning the new age Anthropocene epoch (human) arrival of the 6th great extinction event, is a clear capitalistic corporate sellout of the public trust.
Act like an unwelcome, closed government and suffer the consequences of brain drain.
Hundreds of thousands left and are leaving the UK for the EU due to BREXIT – the highest skilled employees.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/02/brexit-fuels-brain-drain-as-skilled-britons-head-to-the-eu
US hands Canada an opening to develop its high tech economy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-25/u-s-immigration-policy-gives-canadian-tech-a-great-opportunity
there’s one planet that is hospitable to humans. Even if we colonize the moon or Mars one day, neither one of those bodies is really going to be able to support seven billion of us. So, we need to take care of this planet.” https://www.space.com/pale-blue-dot-voyager-1-photo-30th-anniversary.html (feb 2020)
China has been buying significant quantities of corn and
soybeans with some regularity. The problem now is
that we have a realistic possibility of record crops this
year. And so it goes.
So…”almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. 1.)A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. 2.) Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. 3.) Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. 4.) The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. 5.) The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191
Well, yeah. That pretty much sums it up, Leslie. And all of that in the past 60 years can be laid at the feet of the GOP. That’s an enormous load of shame for them.
The Atlantic: “In the early days of Trump’s presidency, many believed that America’s institutions would check his excesses. They have, in part, but Trump has also corrupted them. The CDC is but his latest victim. On February 25, the agency’s respiratory-disease chief, Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of school closures and saying that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems to have benched the entire agency. The CDC led the way in every recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and template for public-health agencies around the world. But during the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted COVID‑19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didn’t hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopening the country were shelved for a month while the White House released its own uselessly vague plan.”
***
We all should know by now Kristi Noem and Donald Trump shut down CDC meet packing requirements at Smithfield on April 22 (we still do not know numbers of infections and deaths in Sioux Falls’ hot spot) while two days earlier stiff CDC requirements were implemented in Greeley’s JBC packing plant.
Meat
According to Harvard history prof, the shame goes back to the LEFT in 1789! The right intelligentsia loves it!!
Adrian Vermeule
@Vermeullarmine
If Biden wins there will not be a right-wing version of #Resistance. Since 1789 the right side of the Assembly believes, deep down, that its losses are entirely legitimate, whereas the left believes, deep down, that its own losses are a betrayal of the constitutional order.
11:09 AM · Aug 2, 2020
A Texas law professor is however, incredulous: Steve Vladeck
@steve_vladeck
·
23h
We’ve somehow reached the point where serious people are vigorously debating whether, in 1860, Republicans or Southern Democrats were better understood as “the right side” of the polity.
SO MUCH FOR REPUBLICANS CALLING THEMSELVES THE PARTY OF LINCOLN.
The CDC was hijacked at warp speed by Trump at the beginning, when he grabbed control of the task force and named his own people to the task force, all of whom were to answer to him. As soon as he became aware that the secret of the approaching pandemic could not be contained he executed his power grab so that he could control the people involved, what they issued to the press, what the press is allowed to publish, the PPE, the testing and tracing, and everything connected to the pandemic. The only thing he couldn’t control was the virus itself. He didn’t even try. No one should EVER have stopped listening to the doctors, and no one should EVER have listened to anything Trump & Co. have to say about it. I know we’re counting on the election to take him out, and I guess we’ll have to, but I can’t figure why we’ve waited so long to remove him from office.
How the pandemic defeated America. We can go to Sturgis, but we can’t go to Canada. We can go to the bar, but we can’t go to the Bahamas. We have been defeated and everyone knows it because we won’t fight it. We listen to lying liars rather than science because we uneducated. Europe doesn’t want us soiling up their linens. That’s how low we’ve sunk.
“How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/?utm_source=email-promo&utm_medium=cr&utm_campaign=ed-yong-cover-top-prospects-B&utm_content=20200803&utm_term=sep-20&silverid-ref=NTE2ODgyMTU3Mzc0S0
So then, how are trump and the republican’s still considered a political party?
It’s so heartbreaking, Jerry. We have to get this back. We have to save our beautiful country.
I read an article this afternoon about Hong Kongers, as they call themselves, fighting so incredibly hard to maintain a level of autonomy. They’re going through deprivation, pain and suffering and They. Won’t. Stop.
We must be like that. We must be relentlessly and endlessly determined.
Thx Robin. This story implicates: “OSHA [like CDC] is missing in action,” says Debbie Berkowitz, who worked at the agency during the Obama administration and now advocates workers’ rights at the National Employment Law Project. In early March, Berkowitz and labor advocates including the AFL-CIO urged OSHA to issue a temporary emergency requirement that employers keep their workers safe from the coronavirus.
Instead, *in late April the agency issued voluntary guidelines* suggesting that plants tweak the alignment of workstations “if feasible” and “consider” making signs to urge workers to physically distance.
[sounds like Kristi’s CDC/SMITHFIELD coup de grace of voluntary recommendations. Remember Greeley JBC meatpacking has about the same infection hotspot that Sioux Falls has, resulting in CDC “requirements” two days earlier.]
Presiding over this hands-off response is Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late right-wing Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. But Scalia’s influence over OSHA extends beyond his Cabinet role. Decades ago, as a “management side” labor lawyer, he led an industry-funded effort to limit OSHA’s efficacy. Due to his efforts back then, the agency has “had a much harder time getting meatpacking plants to implement safe practices,” Berkowitz says—setting the stage for the COVID-19 meltdown.
During the 1990s, OSHA sought to better regulate grueling workplaces like meatpacking plants by devising rules to protect employees from common repetitive-stress injuries. The [OSHA] Ergonomics Program Standard targeted jobs that involved “repetition, awkward posture, force, vibration, and contact stress” and caused serious musculoskeletal pain or lasting symptoms. The proposal would require employers to establish an “ergonomics program,”… the standard would have prevented about 4.6 million repetitive-stress injuries over the following decade, resulting in a net annual savings of about $4.6 billion on health care and other costs.
Berkowitz said the rules would likely have forced meatpackers to slow down their lines—which, when the coronavirus hit, would have allowed workers to spread out more and limit their close contact.***
Then, the National Coalition on Ergonomics, led by [Justice Scalia’s son] had a $600,000 war chest to lobby against the rules. Its effort found allies in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), which proceeded to attach riders to budget bills preventing OSHA from rolling out the rules. Simultaneously, Scalia ramped up a scorched-earth PR effort against the plan, penning articles attacking ergonomics as “weird science,” “junk science,” “quackery,” and a “concession to union leaders.”***
At a June 15,2020 speech before the conservative Heritage Foundation …Scalia praised his department’s response to the pandemic. He insisted that its voluntary approach had proved to be the “best means to protect workers and give employers guidance and confidence in the steps to be taken to provide a safe workplace and satisfy their obligations.” By doing so, he continued, he was following the guidance of the Founding Fathers. “The genius of our Constitution,” he declared, “is the autonomy it allows the people, and the ways it checks and limits government so that private individuals and institutions may thrive.”
A few days later, Tyson announced 227 positive COVID-19 tests at its Springdale Arkansas meatpacking plant. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/07/labor-eugene-scalia-meatpacking-osha-stress-carpal-tunnel-coronavirus-covid/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=naytev&utm_medium=social
Jerry: https://newrepublic.com/article/158675/2020-election-republican-party
The 2020 Election Doesn’t Really Matter to Republicans.
The GOP is mostly insulated from the consequences that voters might be inclined to dole out in November.
…while President Trump and a few Republican incumbents seem to be in genuine trouble, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are certain to keep their jobs. In the Senate, most Republicans aren’t up for reelection, and most of those who are aren’t facing particularly competitive races.