Good morning, everyone!
Robert J. Shapiro of Washington Monthly with a warning that if Republicans continue to delay passage of a COVID-19 relief package, there will be no bottom to the economic downturn and devastation.
Worse times may be right on the horizon if Trump and his allies continue to delay and diminish a second round of emergency assistance. We can estimate what would happen to personal incomes, consumption spending, and GDP if this second spike of infections produces shutdowns and unemployment in August and September akin to the first spike in April and May, although without the emergency aid from the government. Personal income would fall 7.0 percent below the depressed levels in the second quarter, or more than $1,424 billion. Personal consumption, which declined at an annual rate of $1,528 billion from March through May, would be further depressed by the absence of another $1,055 billion (the $1,420 billion in emergency aid minus the 25.7 percent saved). From July through September—the months leading up to the election—Americans would spend nearly 18 percent less than they did from January through March.
That means the GDP would not begin to recover at all. The overall economy would be nearly as depressed in the third quarter as it was in the disastrous second quarter, and possibly worse. This is the fire that the Trump administration and Congress are playing with, and it could burn down a good part of the U.S. economy.
In a week or two, the White House and congressional Republicans will likely try to avoid this dire scenario—or at least the responsibility for it—by pushing a sharply pared down version of the emergency package passed more than two months ago by House Democrats. .
Contrary to Republican claims that more COVID-19 relief aid is an incentive for Americans not to work, Annie Lowrey reports for The Atlantic that even before the age of COVID-19, a sizable number of working Americans wanted more work because they are underemployed.
Not only are 18 million Americans unemployed; millions more are now underemployed, their lost hours translating into lost wages translating into lost consumer spending, while emergency unemployment-insurance payments expire, eviction moratoriums lapse, and Congress remains deadlocked.
A new analysis from the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), an anti-poverty research and advocacy group, suggests that underemployment was far more common than government statistics indicated even before the pandemic recession hit. A kitchen-table economic crisis was hiding in plain sight. Now the pandemic threatens to make the situation far worse.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures underemployment primarily through a single measure: a count of workers who have part-time jobs but want full-time jobs. People who might like but cannot accept more hours, because they cannot afford child care, for instance, are not included in the measure. (The technical term is underemployed for economic reasons.) Before the recession hit, roughly 4 million workers slotted into this category, for a national underemployment rate of 3 percent.
For example: I am back to work at reduced hours and still eligible to receive unemployment benefits. Nothing to do with me not wanting to work; I am working and happy to be working.
Greg Sargent of the Washington Post on a report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) concerning whether and specifically how a potential Biden Administration might legally pursue the corruption of the present occupying administration.
The CAP report suggests beginning with the Justice Department, with a full review of special treatment accorded to Trump allies, such as Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, both of whom Trump championed.
Also worth examining might be the attorney general’s efforts to discredit his own agency’s conclusions about a massive foreign attack on our democracy, as Trump implicitly but relentlessly demanded.
But, crucially, CAP suggests that such a review must not involve the White House at all. It would instead involve career Justice Department officials or the inspector general, and Congress (if it’s controlled by Democrats) would potentially have a major role.
Which immediately highlights an interesting conundrum: to what degree members of a Biden administration could undertake such an internal examination without involving Biden in any way, since that would risk straying into the sort of politicization that is the problem under Trump.
Astead Herndon of the New York Times on what some of the progressive wins this past Tuesday night may— and may not— portend.
This week, the progressive activist Cori Bush defeated Representative William Lacy Clay Jr. of Missouri, a 10-term incumbent and member of a powerful political dynasty that had represented the St. Louis area for more than 50 years. Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan also cruised in her primary against the more moderate Detroit City Council president, proving the staying power of the group of progressive congresswomen known as the “Squad.”
Earlier primary contests led to other victories for the left: Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal, ousted the longtime incumbent Representative Eliot L. Engel in the Bronx and Westchester, the progressive lawyer Mondaire Jones won a House primary for an open seat in New York’s Rockland County, and Marie Newman defeated an anti-abortion Democrat in Illinois. And so what began for the party’s left wing as a year of “what could’ve been” is turning into a promise of “what can be,” as the successes provide a new road map of political possibilities.
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This does not mean that the progressives are without challenges, or that their current ascension in the Democratic Party is linear or inevitable. Incumbents have beaten back progressive challengers in Ohio, New York and Texas this year, and Mr. Biden’s victory ensures that a moderate voice will lead the party at least for the near future.
Some Democrats also believe the grass-roots energy is a consequence of the unique political environment, with liberals’ anger toward President Trump supercharging fund-raising and political interest in a way that could dissipate in the future.
The Editorial Board of the Houston Chronicle on the necessity of an accurate census count for Texas (a case that could be applied to any state or locality).
The so-called “Enumeration clause” requires a census of all persons within the U.S. borders to be taken every 10 years to determine the reapportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the number of Electoral College votes the state can cast. The count also decides how billions of dollars in federal funding will be sent to the states over the next decade.
For Texas, the 2020 count could mean the difference between having 38 or 39 representatives pleading our case in the U.S. House, whether we have 40 or 41 votes in presidential elections and determine Texas’ share of $1.5 trillion annually in federal spending distributed by congressional districts. In addition, the census informs how business leaders, researchers, historians and many others make judgments — everything from health-care facilities to bus routes and grocery stores. They need good numbers to make good decisions.
So, while you don’t hear a lot of people shouting for their Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 rights at rallies and protests, enforcement of this section of the law will determine the proper allocation of political power and substantial financial resources until after 2030.
That’s why it’s crucial that Congress and the courts stand up to the Trump administration’s latest attempt to short-circuit the census, this time by cutting off the count a month earlier than planned.
Dylan Scott of Vox writes about the possible ramifications of two ruby-red states (Missouri and Oklahoma) having just approved of Medicaid expansion via ballot initiatives.
Missouri voters passed a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid during Tuesday’s primary elections; 53 percent of voters supported the measure and 47 percent opposed it. That vote comes about a month after Oklahoma voters also decided to expand Medicaid via ballot referendum by less than 1 percentage point.
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It is difficult to ignore that these ballot initiatives passed in right-leaning states in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, when millions of Americans have lost their jobs and, with them, their employer-sponsored health insurance. This is partly a coincidence — the signatures were collected to put the Medicaid expansion questions on the ballot long before Covid-19 ever arrived in the US — but the relatively narrow margins made me wonder if the pandemic and its economic and medical consequences proved decisive.
Crises have a way of changing political attitudes. And right now, disapproval of the Affordable Care Act is at a low ebb, with just 36 percent of Americans saying they have an unfavorable view of the law in the Kaiser Family Foundation’s July 2020 poll. More than 80 percent of Americans also signaled support for providing more financial assistance to help people who don’t get health insurance through their jobs and for increasing federal funding for state Medicaid programs. Ashley Kirzinger, a member of Kaiser’s polling team, told me that their surveys had detected an uptick in support for Medicaid during the pandemic, as more people say they or somebody they know is relying on the program.
Ed Kilgore of New York magazine muses on the future of political party conventions in light of the what has happened to the 2020 conventions of both major political parties.
Back in May, Democrats had set up a system of remote voting on convention business — and on the formal balloting for president and vice-president — which made necessary, at most, a minimal presence in Milwaukee. The rest of the show inevitably left a city with its own public-health worries.
Because they initially resisted a virtual convention and never completely committed to one, Republicans can’t entirely abandon Charlotte the way they abandoned the temporary replacement city of Jacksonville; a few hundred delegates will actually assemble in North Carolina to conduct essential business (including the nominations), carrying proxies from the rest of the delegates. At this point, it’s not even clear that those activities will be open to the media and the public. Trump is still figuring out where to give his acceptance speech, but it almost certainly won’t be in Charlotte.
What’s less clear is whether these developments are pandemic hiccups that will give way in four years (or whenever big live gatherings are a thing again) to a return of old-school national political conventions in their bloated and bloviating glory — or if these will be mercifully consigned to history as the atavistic and gratuitous events they have become in recent decades since losing their deliberative function. News media may well pull the plug on the already radically reduced coverage of future conventions, making them just another stop on the campaign trail. And like so many other accommodations to the pandemic made in so many areas of life, the work-arounds Democrats and Republicans developed this year for financing and energizing general-election campaigns could become permanent.
Having attended some of the public sessions of the 2018 summer Democratic meeting in Chicago, I would say that too much party business gets done at something like a party convention for a convention, itself, to be cancelled.
But I think that the party conventions every presidential year are pretty ostentatious and should be done away with. But party business will still need to get done.
Samuel J. Abrams of the Los Angeles Times reports on a recently released survey (?) that shows that residents of Republican-led states are very unhappy with their leadership...and that residents of blue states don’t feel much better.
Nationally, residents of both blue and red states are also largely unhappy with how their state governments are managing the outbreak. Only 25% of Americans believe that their state governments are handling the pandemic very well. Residents in blue states, which have tended to be more aggressive in shutting down business and imposing public health orders, gave their state governments higher approval (29%) compared with people in red states (21%). For California, a traditionally blue-leaning state, the figure is 25%.
The survey also found that state governments that most resisted closure measures — presumably because they are following the lead of the White House — have even lower approval ratings than red states generally.
In Florida, for instance, only 18% of people believe that the state government under Gov. Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally, has been handling the situation with COVID-19 very well; that number is 17% for Georgia’s state government led by Gov. Brian Kemp. Approval rates are significantly higher in blue states with stricter coronavirus controls, including Michigan at 29% under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been consistently attacked by Trump. In New York, 37% support the Andrew Cuomo administration’s coronavirus response in New York, even though many generally disliked Cuomo prior to the pandemic.
These numbers show a real disconnect between red state leadership and their conservative-leaning residents. Americans, regardless of whether they are living in red or blue states, are of the same mind about the impact of COVID-19.
Felix Light of The New Statesman writes about the international “pandemic brinksmanship” being played in the rush to attain a COVID-19 vaccine.
“The vaccine development process has become a political competition, with every country looking after its own interests first,” says Kalipso Chalkidou, director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C. based think tank. “A pandemic is necessarily a global problem, and requires a global response. However, it’s very hard to sell leaders on shipping vaccines to other countries before their own people have received it.”
Moreover, as a number of vaccine candidates move through clinical trials, experts are increasingly concerned that this attitude of national one-upmanship could undermine the global fight against the virus. Last week, an essay in Foreign Affairs warned against “vaccine nationalism”, as a “morally and ethically reprehensible” impulse that may yet sabotage distribution efforts.
Government protectionism in response to the pandemic is nothing new. As the crisis dawned, governments were quick to ban exports of personal protective equipment and ventilators, while Donald Trump is reported to have attempted to lure CureVax, a German biotech firm into relocating to America and producing a vaccine there, raising fears in Berlin that it would be made available to Americans only.
Victor Vazquez-Hernandez writes for the Miami Herald that the Biden campaign needs to reach Puerto Rican voters everywhere that they are, especially battleground states.
It seems odd and counter-intuitive for the Biden campaign to appear tone deaf to the fact that in both Florida and Pennsylvania, Puerto Ricans make up a majority of the Hispanic Democratic vote. In Florida, field organizers were removed from Central Florida (the famed I-4 corridor that runs from Orlando to Tampa). In South Florida, where 400,000 Puerto Ricans reside, there are no Puerto Rican field organizers at all. In Pennsylvania, there appear to be no Puerto Rican field organizers, either.
Why does this matter?
Puerto Rican voters, like voters of many other communities, are finicky. They want political campaigns to cater to them, to consider their issues and, as important, to speak to them directly. Hispanics are not a monolithic group and, as such, require a more-nuanced approach. In Florida and Pennsylvania, Puerto Ricans are going to be mobilized by other Puerto Ricans, especially, if they come from those same communities. It is baffling that the Biden campaign does not seem to get this point.
In Florida and Pennsylvania, two important swing states the ultimate margin for victory may again be small. In Florida, in 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 112,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, the margin was even tighter: 44,000 votes. Florida has the largest Puerto Rican population in the United States and Pennsylvania the fourth largest. In Florida, there could be close to 600,000 eligible Puerto Rican voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents; in Pennsylvania that number is 300,000. Though Puerto Ricans in Florida tend to vote at 50-55 percent, in the 2018 midterm elections, that number was 70 percent in many precincts in Central Florida. With Puerto Rican field organizers in Florida and Pennsylvania those communities can swing the election.
South China Morning Post noted the similarities of Tuesday’s industrial explosion in Beirut to a disaster in Tianjin, China five years ago.
The lessons of a terrible industrial disaster in China five years ago this month provide food for thought today. No one could have imagined that history would repeat itself on Tuesday in Beirut, and that if heeded those same lessons might have prevented a human catastrophe.
In both cases fire in a port warehouse area ignited massive explosions of illegally stored combustible ammonium nitrate, an agricultural chemical, flattening the surrounding area and severely damaging adjacent residential buildings.
The Tianjin blasts killed 173 people, including 110 first-responder firefighters and police unaware of the presence of an 800-tonne ammonium nitrate time bomb. Lebanon’s death toll is more than 100 and rising as rescuers reach collapsed buildings.
The Lebanese Red Cross says more than 4,000 were injured, with many in bloodstained clothes queuing at the doors of hospitals already stretched to capacity by the coronavirus pandemic. Estimates of those left homeless have exceeded 200,000.
(I was able to find some video of the Tianjin blast.)
A Staff Editorial of the Baton Rouge Advocate writes about the need of some sort of relief package for live music venues and businesses for the state’s vital live music scene.
Live music isn’t just a vocation for some Louisianans, it’s a key ingredient in the state’s celebrated joie de vivre as well as a major driver of tourism. It’s also uniquely threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.
Think about it. The very things that make like music so enticing — the singing and playing and dancing with abandon, the big crowds packed into tight spaces — also heighten the risk of viral spread, and fly in the face of safety precautions like masking, social distancing and limitations on gatherings. Behind the scenes, factors such as travel restrictions also make a return to normal daunting.
That’s why, as Preservation Hall Jazz Band creative director Ben Jaffe put it, “venues and live music events are most likely going to be some of the last businesses to reopen,” — that is, if they can hold on until some unspecified future date at all.
The main form of government aid approved in an earlier round of relief, the Paycheck Protection Program aimed at helping businesses reopen, doesn’t address the prospect of lengthy closures with no revenue. Without more targeted help, according to the National Independent Venue Association — a group that represents 27 clubs and theaters in and around New Orleans and Baton Rouge — as many as 90% of its members surveyed could shut permanently.
Finally this morning, The Angry Grammarian writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer about The Damn Fool’s sinister use of...question marks?
Over the years Trump has thrown countless bombs posed as questions, whether about Joe Scarborough (“When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”); voter fraud (“Rigged Election!!! 20% fraudulent ballots?”); Joe Scarborough again (“So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator? Read story!”); something about Democrats wanting people to die (“The Democrats want the Virus to win?”); systemic perjury (“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come. Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?”); uh, Joe Scarborough again (“A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly?”); and so many more.
And it’s not just tweets: Such allegations-as-questions were de rigueur for his 2016 presidential campaign, when he posed such queries about immigrants as, “Somebody’s doing the raping … Who’s doing the raping?” and, about Ted Cruz’s father, “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the shooting?”
The beleaguered question mark wasn’t designed to withstand this kind of abuse. Scholars date the mark to the eighth century, when Alcuin of York, an intellectual in Charlemagne’s court, first dropped the punctus interrogativus into his writings. It would be 500 years before its use was standardized. Spanish flips it upside down and adds it to the start of a question (¿), and Arabic uses a mirror image (⸮), but otherwise it’s undergone relatively few changes over centuries of writing, while other marks, letters and spellings have mutated many times over.
Everyone have a good day!