The Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a regular feature of Daily Kos.
Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect writes—America’s One Public Bank Is Number One in Saving Small Businesses:
The $500 billion that Congress sent to the Treasury Department to stimulate the economy may be gathering mold in Steven Mnuchin’s backyard, and the PPP funds it sent to banks to distribute to small businesses may or may not have trickled down to Main Street, but at least there’s one bank with a uniquely stellar record of helping small-scale enterprises.
It’s America’s one publicly owned bank—the Bank of North Dakota, established in 1919 by the state government, then headed by onetime socialist and forever leftist Governor A.C. Townley, and never yet privatized in the 101 years since.
The Bank is the reason why North Dakota has distributed more funds per worker (more than $5,000) through the PPP program than any other state, according to a survey conducted by The Washington Post.
In normal times, the Bank doesn’t issue individual or retail loans (though it does issue student loans). But it partners with the state’s privately owned local banks on small-business loans and provides guidance to those banks and local businesses when they reach out to global markets and financiers.
Jessica Goldstein at The New Republic writes—When Will We Grieve the Covid Dead?
In the United States, we measure weight in pounds, distance in miles, and catastrophic losses in 9/11s. At press time, Covid-19 had claimed 88,754 victims in the U.S., a number that will surely be greater by the time you read this sentence. By our all-American metric, that’s nearly thirty 9/11s. We have, by far, the greatest number of Covid fatalities in the world. As we are so fond of chanting at the sporting events we won’t be attending en masse again before 2022: We’re number one!
These deaths are gutting friend groups, hollowing out families, and leveling communities, each individual loss producing a blast radius of pain, trauma, and despair. With nearly 90,000 dead, the total number of Americans grieving at this moment is vast. And yet we have done nothing, as a nation, to mourn alongside each other. Why has there been no collective national remembrance for our Covid dead?
Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times writes—When the Mask You’re Wearing ‘Tastes Like Socialism’
The partisan fight over the lockdown has shown us, once again, how differently the choices government leaders make look to different constituencies of our society. Whether you emphasize the imperative to save lives or the consequences of economic devastation, with more than 36 million unemployed as of May 14, determines what you think the proper response to the outbreak should be, to a degree that is astonishing even in our deeply polarized society.
The accompanying chart, based on data posted on May 7 by Pew Research, reveals the depth of the growing division between Republicans and Democrats as 80 percent of U.S. counties were under some form of lockdown order, and a quarter of the economy had ground to a halt, by April, under guidelines issued by the Trump administration.
The chart — documenting findings from two Pew surveys, one conducted April 7-12, the other April 29-May 5 — shows that in a matter of three weeks, Republican voters shifted from a modest majority (51-48) concerned that the restrictions would be lifted too quickly, to a similarly modest majority (53-47) concerned that the restrictions will not be lifted quickly enough. Democrats, on the contrary, went from a decisive majority who feared (81-18) that restrictions would be lifted too quickly to an even stronger concern (87-13).
Nathan Robinson at The Guardian writes—Wisconsin is starting to resemble a failed state:
Wisconsin’s Republicans have succeeded in capturing power in the state even without having to capture popular approval. As Michael Li of the Brennan Center documents, the state has been heavily gerrymandered, meaning Republicans can exercise power without having to win majority support:
“[G]errymandered maps make it virtually impossible for them to ever lose their legislative majority. Wisconsin’s maps were crafted with such micro-precision that even if Democrats managed to win a historically high 54% of the two-party vote – a level they’ve reached only once in the last 20 years — Republicans would still end up with a solid nine-seat majority in the state assembly. In fact, Wisconsin’s maps are so gerrymandered that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of house seats even with a minority of the vote. Analyses of the maps in the lawsuit challenging the maps showed that Republicans are a lock to win 60% of statehouse seats even if they win just 48% of the vote.”
In a supposedly democratic country, this should be an outrage. How can a government claim legitimacy if it does not require the people’s support?
Eric Rauchway at The Guardian writes—Roosevelt's New Deal offered hope in desperate times. We can do the same now:
[...]The depression had brought self-government into global disrepute. The apparent incapacity or unwillingness of elected officials eroded faith in representative government and emboldened dictators. Roosevelt wanted the New Deal public works programmes to prove that democracy worked, and for everyone. Recovery could not begin anywhere unless it began everywhere: “interdependence is the watchword of this age.” [...]
We might also take as a model the New Deal programme of public works that modernised the economy and adapted it to the world that was then new; advocates for a global “green new deal” have long contended that we need a new infrastructure to prepare ourselves for a more sustainable way of life.
We might also learn from the New Deal’s deficiencies. We should be bold, going bigger sooner and erring on the side of too much rather than too little, and uncompromising in seeking equity. And we should remember that the purpose of a jobs programme is not only to provide economic stimulus, but also the dignity of work at a decent wage under good conditions to all who can do it, and moreover to remind us that, should enough of us choose it, we can prove that democracy works.
Lauren Birchfield Kennedy and Katie Mayshak at The New York Times write—Say Hello to That New Spin Studio and Goodbye to Your Child Care:
As Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc on businesses, among the hardest hit are in industries that rely on the ability of customers to safely show up day after day — and to pay for the privilege. They range from the $32.3 billion fitness industry to the $47.2 billion child care sector. Hopefully, your neighborhood spin studio will survive. Unfortunately, your day care probably won’t.
Why? Because — despite all of our lip service to child care as “essential” to the modern American work force — we’ve flatly refused to finance it like the public good that it is. We accept that child care is a necessity for most families in America and that when it comes to preventing the education achievement gap, preschool is just as important as kindergarten and the grades that follow it. We know that child care is core to gender equity in the work force and that it directly affects a family’s financial security and opportunity for upward economic mobility.
Despite all of this, child care providers receive no meaningful public investment. As a result, they operate as small businesses. And Covid-19 has not been good to small business.
While nearly every other developed nation supports child care as a public good, the United States treats child care providers as private enterprises — more like gyms than K-12 schools.
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—Trump Doesn’t Want to Be President. He Just Wants to Win:
It is becoming clear that Trump and his campaign can’t agree on who to attack—the Democratic nominee or the president’s predecessor. But beyond that, what all of this signifies is that the president doesn’t have a platform of issues that he wants to run on. His plan for re-election is focused entirely on motivating his base by attacking his enemies.
The deeper issue at play here is that Donald Trump doesn’t really want to be president. For quite a while now we’ve known that he spends very little of his time addressing the issues we face as Americans. Instead, he devotes most of his day to watching Fox News and rage-tweeting.
When it comes to the election in November, Tony Schwartz captured the one thing that drives everything Trump does.
To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it… Trump grew up fighting for his life and taking no prisoners. In countless conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of obliteration.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Trump’s signal is his noise. Stop trying to distinguish between the two:
Stop trying to distinguish between the signal and the noise emanating from President Trump and his party. The noise is the signal. And it’s the sort of clamor that despotic leaders use to sow confusion, division and distraction.
Trump clearly knows that accurate, meaningful information is his enemy. Too many voters whose support he needs have decided that his epic mishandling of the covid-19 crisis has made both the pandemic and its economic consequences worse than they had to be.
As a result, chaos and mystification are his only friends. He wants the electorate and the media to focus on absolutely anything except the virus’s death toll and rising unemployment. Thus his targeting of former president Barack Obama on the basis of an entirely false narrative about the Michael Flynn case and his claim to be taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug whose use health experts declare unproven against the novel coronavirus — and potentially dangerous.
Frank Blethen at The Washington Post writes—In this moment of multiple crises, we need strong local journalism:
Over the course of 52 years at the Seattle Times, 39 as publisher, I thought I had seen it all in terms of big stories and damaging crises. [...]
Sadly, through the past two decades, we have watched ever-accelerating consolidation, disinvestment and monetizing devastate local newspapers. Newsrooms have been gutted, leaving many communities with ghost newspapers — papers with minimal staffing and almost no local news or relevance. Our nation’s Founding Fathers envisioned a robust, independent, free press protected by the First Amendment and subsidized through low-cost distribution. They did not envision that the value of localism and public service would be undermined by rapacious capitalists who bled their newspapers’ coffers dry. [...]
Ironically, local journalism has never been more important or sought after. Print and digital readership are soaring, even with fewer journalists. To be sure, there are other important voices in a community’s news and information ecosystem, but none have the scale or impact of the local print and digital newspapers: They still create 60 percent of all local journalism content, even though they comprise only 25 percent of news outlets, according to a 2018 Duke University study.
Thomas M. Hanna and Isaiah J. Poole at In These Times write—We Should Own the Internet—Not Silicon Valley Oligarchs. It’s time to stop treating high-speed internet as a luxury commodity and instead place it under democratic and public control:
In early May, the New York Times published a photo of Beth Revis, a fiction writer in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, scrunched into the back of a small vehicle in a parking lot. There, she was using her smartphone to try to teach a class, using the only reliable internet connection she had access to—the free Wi-Fi signal emanating from inside a local public elementary school.
As schools shut down and workplaces go remote as the result of the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of millions of Americans like Revis have become increasingly reliant on internet access for their jobs, education and social interactions.
This crisis has clearly illustrated how digital infrastructure—the core assets and services on which a vast array of information technologies rely—has become critical to the functioning of our economy and society. It is, in a sense, the modern equivalent of the interstate highways, railway tracks, telephone networks and electricity systems that formed the backbones of the 20th-century economy.
However, in the United States, market-led deployment of this critical infrastructure—along with service provision dominated by a small oligopoly of giant telecommunications corporations—has led to inadequate development and severe inequities.
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic writes—How Democrats Can Win Coal Country—and the 2020 Election:
Many of the states suffering from fossil fuel job losses are also battleground states in the 2020 election. Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia are all swing states home to sizable extractive sectors. Joe Biden’s campaign has further identified Texas—the hub of the oil and gas industry and facing mass layoffs—as a potential battleground state. As the Trump administration continues to shower fossil fuel executives with handouts, there’s an opportunity for Democrats to draw a stark contrast: offering tangible relief to the communities hit hardest by the fossil fuel industry’s crises while Trump bails out the industry’s bosses. So far, nobody in party leadership appears keen to do that.
The Republican Party seem to be offering Democrats an easy way to score political points: Despite frequently using coal industry employees as props on the campaign trail, the Trump administration has been cool to calls from the United Mineworkers and coal-state senators to extend protection to underground miners, whose close-quarters work has been deemed essential. White House loyalties, that is, lie mainly with fossil fuel executives, whose interests aren’t exactly simpatico with those of their employees. [...]
Democrats aren’t doing as much as they could to direct funds to unemployed workers rather than their ex-bosses. The ReWIND Act, introduced and endorsed earlier this month by several progressives in Congress, has tried to stop oil and gas executives from squirreling away stimulus funds meant for struggling workers and municipalities. Yet even some of the more expansive stimulus ideas from congressional Democrats have avoided tackling the hemorrhaging of fossil fuel jobs head-on. In oil, gas, and especially coal, there are potentially millions of jobs that simply aren’t coming back.
Karen J. Greenberg at The Nation writes—Covid-19 Is Destroying the Myth of American Exceptionalism:
In many ways, the current crisis has, of course, just exposed conditions that should have been attended to long ago. Much that suddenly seems broken was already on the brink when the coronavirus appeared. If anything, the pandemic has simply accelerated already existing trends. As a December 2019 Century Foundation report on “racism, inequality, and health care for African Americans” concluded, “The American health care system is beset with inequalities that have a disproportionate impact on people of color and other marginalized groups.” In fact, in 2019, the London-based Legatum Institute’s Prosperity Index had already ranked the American health care system 59th in the world for its standard of services.
As bad as Donald Trump and his administration have been, the growing American coronavirus disaster can’t simply be blamed on them. Covid-19 has brought home to the rest of us how over here over there really was. And now, the pathetic White House leadership in this crisis has raised another possibility: autocracy. [...]
With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope. Fading from sight are the days when this country’s engagement with the world could be touted as a triumph of leadership when it came to health, economic sustenance, democratic governance, and stability. Now, we are inside the community of nations in a grim new way—as fellow patients, grievers, and supplicants in search of food and shelter, in search, along with so much of humanity, of a more secure existence.
Nicholas Goldberg at The Los Angeles Times writes—I’ve gotten hate mail my whole career. But I’m shocked by the anti-Semitic rants from Trump supporters lately:
I’ve been in the newspaper business for a long time. So I’m no stranger to angry, profanity-filled letters and the occasional death threat. But when I went back to writing recently after many years as an editor, it was the anti-Semitic emails that I found particularly disconcerting. (The Anti-Defamation League reported last week that 2019 was a year of “unprecedented anti-Semitic activity” in the United States, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was.)
The emails came in response to a column in which I criticized President Trump, calling him “vindictive” and “irresponsible” and “lacking in empathy” and “averse to complex thinking,” among other things. I can see where his supporters might’ve gotten angry. And they did. One called me a “libturd.” Others called me “pathetic,” “embarrassing” and “FOS.”
But while those emails were crass, the anti-Semitic ones were chilling. All the more so since the column had nothing to do with Jews or Christians or religion or ethnicity.
Now, I don’t have any particular reason to believe Trump shares all the views of his nuttiest supporters. But like many people, I believe he encourages them.