Good morning to all.
So yesterday, The Damn Fool did some things that really weren’t much of a thing at all; things rather kindly described by Daily Kos’ own Jessica Sutherland as “an incoherent shi*show.”
Things that, if enacted, if legal, would cut the funding to Social Security. Among other things.
This nightmare can’t end soon enough.
86 days until Election Day.
To the pundits!
Sam Stein and Asawin Suebsaeng, reporting for the Daily Beast, reminds us of how accurate Ms. Sutherland’s description of Trump’s actions is: After all, during the negotiations between the White House and Congress, Trump didn’t do sh*t.
Trump is acutely aware that his political fortunes depend on the state of the economy and has shown no reservation about spending massive sums of money to keep things stable. But with federal assistance to the unemployed and small businesses in jeopardy, his party is divided, save in their rejection of Democrats’ demands that more money be spent over a longer period of time.
The risks are reputational too. The image of Trump as the prototype dealmaker—unique in his ability to levy threats and slap a few backs—may end up appearing for more and more voters to be what his critics have long alleged: a myth.
For Trump’s allies, his absence from the talks is a negotiating ploy itself, one that is bolstered by his ability to take executive action—and look as if he’s delivering when Congress is not—should the talks fail. The president may instinctually favor a major stimulus. But, they argue, there is no need for that now—with previous COVID-related relief money still unspent—and, hence, no rush to bend to Democratic demands.
Emily Cochrane and Nicholas Fandos of the New York Times write about the political risks being taken by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
...Ms. Pelosi is pushing for a sweeping package that includes billions of dollars for state and local governments and schools, food and rental assistance, and additional aid for election security and the Postal Service.
All the while, Ms. Pelosi has made it clear that she does not much trust President Trump’s advisers — she has taken to asking negotiators to turn over their electronic devices before entering sessions in her office — nor does she think highly of their ability to forge a compromise. “You’ve never done a deal,” she has reminded Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff and former congressman, according to a person familiar with the talks who described them on the condition of anonymity.
Ms. Pelosi’s strategy carries substantial political risk and real collateral damage, at least in the short term. In holding out for a sweeping relief package, Democrats have swatted away Republican pleas to pass weeklong extensions of the expired $600-per-week in extra federal jobless pay that millions of Americans have relied upon, drawing Republican charges of obstruction.
The impasse prompted Mr. Trump to take unilateral action on Saturday to provide relief on his own with a series of executive actions — though it remains unclear if he has the legal authority to do so. And it has sown uneasiness even among some rank-and-file Democrats, particularly those who represent politically competitive districts and are eager to show voters their party is capable of bipartisan compromise on pressing issues.
And now: The summer installment of how the Trump Administration completely botched the COVID-19 response by the Washington Post team of Philip Rucker, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, and Robert Costa.
Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force — which includes Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads — as a burden that has to be managed, officials said.
Yet the virus rages coast to coast, making the United States the world leader, by far, in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. An internal model by Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data.
The forecast has alarmed the president and his top aides, even as some have chosen not to believe it, arguing that some previous projections did not materialize. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to insist publicly that the virus is “receding,” as he described it recently.
David Zweig, writing for WIRED, says that the “hybrid model” for reopening schools; that is, a blend of distance learning and in-class instruction, makes no sense.
“The hybrid model is probably among the worst that we could be putting forward if our goal is to stop the virus getting into schools,” says William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “I don’t see how, in the end, this helps teachers,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I don’t fully get the hybrid model.”
Their argument is simple: If you want to limit children and teachers’ exposure to infection, it’s better to have students spend their time within a consistent group of peers.
In a hybrid model, when students are kept out of school for multiple days each week, or every other week, a sizable percentage of them are likely to intermingle with other children and adults. This is especially so for younger kids with working parents, as the kids may need to be in day care, exposing them to another set of social contacts and all of their possible infections. Meanwhile, older kids and adolescents will be inclined to hang out with their peers on their copious "off" days. (In many districts, remote learning plans include just a short amount of livestreamed teaching every day, leaving many hours to fill in other ways.) The hybrid model, Nuzzo says, “only works if students stay home, alone, during all of that time they are out of school.” This is a strangely unrealistic assumption by policymakers.
Kim Sweet writes for the New York Daily News that if distance learning will be in effect for at least part of the time in New York City schools, then improvements must be and can be made in teaching basic literacy skills to students.
Now that we know students will continue learning remotely for at least part of the time, we have to act quickly and creatively to address the crisis in skill development and improve online learning for the coming school year, or we risk producing a generation of young people permanently hampered by the system’s growing inequity.
One area demanding immediate focus is reading instruction. Foundational literacy skills are essential to all future learning; indeed, students who are not proficient readers by third grade fail to graduate high school on time at four times the rate of children with strong third-grade reading skills.
Even before COVID-19, over half of NYC’s students in third through eighth grades did not read proficiently, according to state tests, with Black and Hispanic students, as well as students with disabilities and English Language Learners, lagging disproportionately behind their peers. The months of in-person instructional time lost to the pandemic threaten to widen these already unacceptable disparities further, as the students most likely to struggle with reading are the same students who have experienced the greatest difficulty accessing remote learning.
Megan Scudellari of Nature muses on how the COVID-19 pandemic might look in 2021.
The pandemic is not playing out in the same way from place to place. Countries such as China, New Zealand and Rwanda have reached a low level of cases — after lockdowns of varying lengths — and are easing restrictions while watching for flare-ups. Elsewhere, such as in the United States and Brazil, cases are rising fast after governments lifted lockdowns quickly or never activated them nationwide.
The latter group has modellers very worried. In South Africa, which now ranks fifth in the world for total COVID-19 cases, a consortium of modellers estimates2 that the country can expect a peak in August or September, with around one million active cases, and cumulatively as many as 13 million symptomatic cases by early November. In terms of hospital resources, “we’re already breaching capacity in some areas, so I think our best-case scenario is not a good one”, says Juliet Pulliam, director of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis at Stellenbosch University.
Annie Linsky and Issac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post write about various ways that both the Biden campaign and women’s groups will defend the eventual vice-presidential pick from sexist (and possibly racist) attacks.
The posture by Biden’s campaign and women’s groups is meant to be far more aggressive than the way gender attacks were dealt with in 2016, when Hillary Clinton, the first female presidential nominee of a major political party, often tried to downplay or ignore such gibes and was not taken seriously on occasions when her team did point to sexism. It’s also a reflection of the changed environment since then, as women expanded their political power with nationwide marches and the #MeToo movement ushered in fights against sexism in business, the media and politics.
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Their work includes engaging a research firm to identify images already being circulated online, and preparing to call on platforms like Reddit or Facebook to remove images as they emerge from the dark corners of the Internet.
They’re also lining up surrogates ready to call out gendered or racist attacks — if the nominee is a woman of color — and have gathered research on how male vice presidential candidates have been described, as a means of comparison.
David von Drehle of the Washington Post on Cori Bush’s upset win over Lacy Clay in Missouri’s First Congressional District and, more generally...the political death of moderates?
Generational house-cleanings are a recurring feature of American politics, where nothing is forever. (Except maybe Michigan’s Dingell Dynasty. Every Congress since 1933 has included a Dingell from the suburbs of Detroit — father John, son John Jr. and now John Jr.’s widow, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D). Having won her primary, she appears certain to keep the streak going.) Americans of a certain age will remember the young veterans of World War II, of whom John F. Kennedy said “a torch has been passed to a new generation.” The “Watergate generation” of reformist Democrats rolled into Washington around 1975, followed by Reagan revolutionaries on the right.
The current uprising highlights an intellectual flabbiness among moderates, of whom Clay, Engel and Crowley are all rather tired examples. To be moderate in today’s politics has become an indictment — in both major parties. Moderates supposedly lack passion, don’t care, won’t fight and, therefore, can’t win.
It hasn’t always been thus. Moderation has often been on the leading edge of philosophy. Aristotle, in his “Nicomachean Ethics,” argued that every human virtue lies at the center point between some deficiency and some excess. The ideal political liberty, for example, will be found midway between no freedom and unlimited freedom. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel spoke of political “dialectics,” in which opposites — the “thesis” and its “antithesis” — are resolved into a “synthesis.” In religion, John Henry Newman developed (for a time) a theology of the “via media,” or middle way.
Aaron Ross Coleman of Vox writes that Cori Bush’s upset win over Lacy Clay signals the return of the “protestor-politician.”
It’s tempting to paint Bush’s victory as solely about the candidates’ differing engagement with the Black Lives Matters movement. Ferguson activists describe Clay as absent from the local protests in recent years, and Clay has eschewed activists’ calls to “defund the police.” Beyond policing, however, Bush also represented an anti-corporate insurgency that has been brewing in the Democratic Party more broadly.
“In any primary challenge, you have to tell voters why the incumbent is out of touch,” said Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats, a national PAC that supported Bush and aims to challenge incumbent Democrats from the left in primaries. “Cori hit him on numerous vulnerabilities, which included that he opposed President Obama’s efforts on reining in predatory lending — Clay was taking money from the predatory lenders.”
Clay is in some ways firmly in the progressive camp, supporting Medicare-for-all and a Green New Deal. But like many other Democrats and Congressional Black Caucus members, he has extensive connections to a cadre of corporate funders. Clay opposed the Obama administration’s efforts to fight the payday lending industry, and his fundraising traces deep connections to big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and lobbyists like the American Financial Services Association. Similarly, news accounts have linked the Congressional Black Caucus’s fundraising to companies including BP, General Motors, Philip Morris, and Coca-Cola.
Mr. Coleman does a really good job of presenting “voting” and “protesting/activism” as operating as a sort of dichotomy in much of Black political life from the end of the 1960’s to the Ferguson protests in 2014; a “Hegelian dialectic,” perhaps?
But what’s the synthesis?
The American University tandem of David C. Barker and Sam Fulwood III write for The Conversation that young African American voters are still not sold on Joe Biden...or Democrats...or even voting.
Our new survey of 1,215 African Americans in battleground states – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia – reveals that while those over 60 remain among the most reliable of Democratic voters, and those between 40-59 are still pretty locked in as well, those under 30 (whom we oversampled to comprise half of our sample) are anything but.
Only 47% of those Black Americans under 30 years old that we surveyed plan to vote for the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden. That’s roughly the same percentage who have anything positive to say when asked what “one or two words come to mind” about the former vice president.
Cathy Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who studies Black youths’ political views, summed up this attitude in a recent podcast: “They’ve seen the election of Black mayors, they’ve seen the election of the first Black president, and they’ve also seen that their lives have not changed.”
I seem to recall that three years ago, pollster Cornell Belcher said that young African American voters should probably be treated as Democratic “swing voters”: I even wrote a diary about it but, considering the way that the diary was “ratioed,” I guess there wasn’t a receptive audience to that message then.
Having said that, I also get the feeling that young black voters are no more or no less jaded than their white peers, albeit for different reasons.
A part of me sympathizes with the youngins’ and wishes that their elders would listen more to what they are saying and why they are saying it.
Another part of me simply wants to cuss them out...but I’ve done all of the cussin’ in this pundit round-up that I’m going to do.
Diana Hodali writes for Deutsche Welle on how last Tuesday’s industrial explosion in Lebanon exposes the “lucrative corruption” of the Lebanese government.
But how ever one looks at it, the huge explosion on Tuesday is the result of the dire corruption within numerous Lebanese governments. For years, politicians from all parties and factions have looted the country and driven it to ruin. Even politicians on opposing sides have joined together in this corrupt system to enrich themselves — when it came to lining their own pockets, they were always in agreement.
This catastrophe is just the most recent and most horrifying example of how one Lebanese government after the other has failed to fulfill its most basic tasks: looking after the citizens' welfare and well-being. For years, electricity has gone off for several hours a day. Why? Because the so-called generator mafia — rich businesspeople who either come from politics or are closely associated with it — profits when people have to pay for additional power.
And then there are the mounds of garbage. For years, huge piles of trash have been growing up near the airport, there has been plastic lying almost everywhere on the beaches and chemical waste has not been properly disposed of, posing a risk to the population. To compound these problems, there is the trade in illegally imported waste, which is also not disposed of in the way it should be.
When the worst wildfires in decades raged in October 2019, the government didn't have any firefighting aircraft available: Someone had forgotten to maintain and fuel them. What else needs to be said?
I am aware of Oz Katerji’s post at Foreign Policy that compares the industrial explosion in Lebanon to Chernobyl.
Chernobyl was not just the story of a disastrous testing accident in a Soviet nuclear power plant. It was the product of how endemic arrogance, negligence, careerism, and authoritarianism created a system that allowed that disaster. It was the Soviet Union in a microcosm, a deadly outcrop of decades of political failure and negligence that would ultimate help bring down the entire nation. The handful of local officials convicted and sentenced were guilty enough—but they weren’t the ultimate culprits.
Likewise, the story of the Beirut warehouse blasts is not one of a construction accident leading to a tragedy. It’s the tale of how a gang of warlords carved up a country and governed with prejudice, incompetence, and a total indifference to human suffering while robbing a helpless and defenseless population blind.
Finally this morning, Max Hayward of the New Statesman on...idleness.
We are used to thinking of idleness as a vice, something to be ashamed of. But when the British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, idleness was an unavoidable reality for the millions who had lost their jobs. Russell realised that his society didn’t just need to confront the crisis of mass unemployment. He called for nothing less than a total re-evaluation of work – and of leisure.
Russell believed that we don’t only need to reform the economic system in which some are worked to the bone while others suffer jobless destitution, we also need to challenge the cultural ethic that teaches us to value ourselves in proportion to our capacity for “economically productive” labour. Human beings are more than just workers. We need to learn how to value idleness.
Russell’s call could hardly be more relevant today, as we face the prospect of another great recession. Millions may lose their jobs in the coming months and, as automation and technology continue to advance, the jobs lost during the pandemic may never return.
Today, reformers point to the possibility of a universal basic income as a way to prevent widespread poverty. But, as many have learned while locked down at home on government-sponsored furloughs, a life without work can feel desolate even when supported by a steady income. Does a jobless future condemn us to live less meaningful lives?
Everyone have a good morning!
