#For real though where does True Federal’s budget come from?

[gremoria411]

There is a problem with looking at so many mobile suit designs in that you can wander quite far sometimes. Sometimes to odd places. For instance, I’ve been wanting to watch Gundam Narrative recently, but ended up watching Gundam Twilight Axis instead (they have a similar plot to me). Twilight Axis has the Tristan, a derivative of the Alex. Another derivative of the Alex would be the Full Armour Alex, which appears along with the Striker Custom in Mobile Suit Gundam Katana.

I’m gonna get two things out of the way first: I haven’t finished reading Gundam Katana, because I don’t like Gundam Katana.

Oh, the arts wonderful and I like a lot of the original mechanics, but I absolutely despise the protagonist (the plot’s not great but it’s essentially a blip compared to how much the main character bothers me).

I don’t want this to be just a rant post so I’ll be brief; The Protagonist of Gundam Katana, Ittou Tsurugi, is a prick. In that way that only a brat with a silver spoon in their mouth (on in this case, at their side) can be. He’s handed a super custom ms and a force of followers that follow him absolutely, despite the fact that he has no experience with command (and more to the point, no experience with failure). In addition, he’s also got those bad reader self-insert characteristics (always in the right, excels at everything he strives to do, knows things that he probably shouldn’t at that point in time). Two examples I just want to call out, the first being when he gets mugged at the docks by a group of five. The muggers attempt to justify their behaviour because of the ongoing economic depression and the claim that the Earth Federation spends more on its military than on other things. Ittou defeats them easily (fair enough), but then has the gall to turn around to them and say that they should work harder because of the recession. Ittou, a military brat, heir to his household and with a legion of followers to cater to his every need. The second example is that after fighting Zeon Remnants on the Moon (which is a whole other thing), Ittou has a chance encounter at the flight terminal with none other than Quattro Bajeena, who’s on the moon on business. Now, Quattro’s real identity in Zeta eventually became an open secret within the AEUG until Char’s Dakar Address. However, many members of the AEUG suspect Char’s real identity (Blex), fought against him in the OYW (Bright) or eventually hear enough rumours that they suspect anyway (everyone else). Ittou has never met Char, never seen Char so there is no reason as to why he should be able to recognise someone who fought with a mask throughout the entire One Year War. But he does, because he’s apparently just that good. (As an aside, the whole deification of Char post-OYW as this ace of aces bothers me a little, since he’s only really relevant to the White Base crew and there were plenty of other aces running around. It makes sense post-Dakar and post-Gryps, but prior he should be just another ace).

Anywho, the reason I wanted to talk about Katana is because I like quite a lot of it’s original mechanics. I say original, because it uses a lot of units that were originally from videogames, so I’m only going to be talking about the Striker Custom, Full Armour Striker Custom, Full Armour Alex and GM Striker Custom.

The Striker Custom is the main mobile suit of the series (and yes, I did choose that second picture to show off its weaponry). It’s probably my weakness for close-quarters suits talking, but I really like it. It is essentially a GM Striker with a Gundam Head and new backpack, but as custom units go I find that honestly quite charming. Despite the two pictures shown here it’s actually quite well-armed, starting with the standard Vulcan guns and twin beam sabers. Following this it has a further two beam sabres, snazzier ones with a longer blade, that can be combined into a beam naginata. It is also armed with a set of Knuckle Daggers, mounted on the backpack when not in use, which are essentially a sort of axe-shaped beam blade mounted in the hands (they can be seen in the second picture). It can also be armed with the Spark Knuckle (essentially an electrified, handheld brass knuckle, based on the electrical weaponry Zeon used) and the Burst Knuckle (punch to attach mine, punch again to detonate, because there’s totally no way for that to go wrong). It can also be armed with a 100mm machine gun (or as GBO2 is wont to, a GM II Beam Rifle), but typically isn’t, because Ittou’s a lousy shot. I really like the knuckle daggers - I don’t really think that they’d be more practical than a beam saber (longer reach and all), but they are cool as heck, giving the suit a boxing vibe that I quite enjoy. The Spark and Burst knuckles are typically used sparingly, which helps my opinion of them - the spark knuckle’s lovely, but there isn’t much defence against electric weaponry other than range, so it’s good it doesn’t get overused. The Burst Knuckle…. I don’t dislike it, it just seems horribly impractical. That said, I can only really recall it being used once, so it’s not like I typically remember it. The Striker Custom is also fitted with a “Demon Blade” AI System, a derivative of the EXAM system (*shot*), whiiiiich…… is fine? It’s probably the fact that I stopped reading before it became a major factor (I remember it being introduced, but little else) but I don’t really have a big opinion on it. It makes sense for a close-quarters suit to have it, especially as a trump card to pull out in dire situations. It’s more of the “can be mastered” system than the “WILL mess you up” one though (the original EXAM system was pretty harrowing, as I understand it and the HADES aren’t exactly a nice walk in the park either).

Form and armour wise, it’s pretty good. A large part of that is going to be inherited from the GM striker, yes, but the Striker Custom feels very agile, and light on its feet. It probably is the boxer influence (even the head looks like it’s got a head guard on), but I like it because it feels like a very straightforward design - get close and hit things. Specifically, I like how it feels like a “gundam-ified” version of the GM Striker in the same vein that the Gundam Marine Type “Gundiver” is to the Aqua GM. It really sets your mind going as to what other “upgraded GM’s” there could be (like a Gundam Night Seeker, or Gundam Guard Type). I’m fine with the colours - I typically dislike it if a protagonist suit is “just” white and blue, but in this case it’s actually got a purpose because the main rival suit, the Full Armour Alex, is Red, so it shows the contrasting personalities of their pilots (and it works pretty well with its pink beam weapons). I will admit that I’ve repainted it to Titans Colours in GBO2 though - it’s about the right time period for them to be around (some even show up in the early chapters) and honestly I like imagining the AEUG stealing one (plus, I think it looks really nice).

Now if only it had a better pilot.

It’s upgraded form is the Full Armour Striker Custom, build with spare parts from the Full Armour Alex. Cards on the table, I haven’t read up to the part in the manga where this shows up, so this is purely on the design and it’s weaponry (as seen in GB02). I do like the bulkier look (the original has a nice agility to the design, but I don’t mind the additional weight), however I do think that it’s overarmed. This is a common problem I have with Full Armour upgrades - they just cram a bunch of additional weaponry on for the sake of it. I like heavily armed suits, but just adding bulk to an existing design doesn’t work for me because the end result just ends up looking sluggish. Speaking of those armaments, let’s run down the list, shall we? The Vulcan Guns remain, as per usual. As do the twin beam sabers, though one of them has been moved to the front of the right shoulder. The Knuckle Daggers are now mounted in the…. What is a apparently supposed to be a shield, but looks to me more like a weapons rack on the left arm. There’s an EXAM unit 3-style double beam cannon as it’s primary ranged armament on the right arm - that’s essentially standard armament for FA (Full Armour) Units, so absolutely no issues there. It’s also got a back rocket cannon and chest missile bays, likely modelled after the regular FA Gundam, and rounding out the loadout is a set of missile pods on the legs. In addition to all this, it’s armed with a brand new sword weapon called Fukusaku - a long sword roughly three-fifths the size of the mobile suit itself. I find it to be a textbook case of a mobile suit being overarmed. I can see how - the striker custom brings its close quarters weaponry and the FA Gundam Brings its long-range weaponry, but it just seems to be fighting for space on the suit - the Beam Saber on the front armour (a very dangerous position, given what happens to beam sabers when they’re shot) and the “shield” that’s essentially mounting two especially large beam sabers on the left arm are just the most obvious examples. Fukusaku is odd, because it looks completely unique, and all the sources I can find state that it’s a cold saber - essentially an electric saber, typically used when stealth is required, such as on the Efreet Nacht. Thing is, it looks to be an mobile suit sized Katana, meaning it was forged, but it still has beam effects over the…… Hamon? Of the sword (that wavy bit on katanas that’s formed as the sword cools). Oddities aside, it makes sense that the main suit in “Mobile Suit Gundam Katana” would recieve a fancy katana, but it doesn’t exactly help with the suit having two other paired melee weapons already. I do like the bulk added by the additional armour to the Full Armour Striker Custom, it creates the sense of a slower, more methodical fighting style (“one strong cut” to the striker custom’s barrage of punches), but I think the weapons weigh it down too much, especially since I know it’s going to be used in space. Honestly, I feel like if you took off the Knuckle Daggers and Chest Missile Bays, maybe moved the saber mountings around, it’d look much better. I like the splash of purple added in the paint scheme, but I don’t notice it’s absence much in GBO2. The Full Armour Striker Custom’s design is busier (especially around the chest), so it doesn’t look quite as good in Titan’s colours, but there’s some lovely details on the back (like the leg thrusters) that really pop.

The GM Striker and GM Striker Kai are largely identical, save for the backpack. Indeed, the Striker Custom is essentially a modified GM Striker Kai (with perhaps a little of the blue destiny units sprinkled in). They are armed differently however, with the GM Striker Kai being armed with beam sabers like the ones the Striker Custom has, and the regular GM Striker being armed with a twin beam spear that can convert into a scythe. I like the regular GM Striker, I think it’s an excellent up-armoured version of the GM, with the twin beam spear being an appropriately imposing melee weapon for it. I very much like the colours as well, with a lovely green, yellow and blue-grey scheme. The blue visor also draws attention nicely to the head. The GM Striker Kai is the space-use version, having the backpack of the Striker Custom in addition to its weaponry. Overall, I think it’s a nice GM unit with the additional armour doing a lot to distinguish it from the pack.

Lastly, the Full Armour Alex. I found it quite difficult to find a decent picture of the Version seen in Gundam Katana. The Full Armour Alex is…. a little of an odd one for me, because though I know it’s just differing artist interpretations, I tend to consider the original (Green and White, right) and the version seen in Gundam Katana (Red, Left) as separate designs (for the most part). I’ll go over the one seen in Gundam Katana first. It’s piloted by Kotetsu, a cyber-Newtype of True Federal in the series (True Federal have a vested interest in having as many newtypes on their side as possible, but they don’t seem to be going for the inhuman experimentation that the Titans did.) who functions as an early, personal foe for Ittou, here to drop subtle hints about the organisation and provide an actual challenge. The Full Armour Alex is essentially a brute - it’s got the strength and power to easily match most anything else in one-on-one combat, and functions as True Federal’s one-man clean-up crew. I think it’s used well in the series - it’s a FA unit, with lots of weaponry that’s geared towards ranged combat - a natural counter to the Striker Custom, which focuses on close-quarters. It spends much of its initial appearance holding Ittou back by sheer volume of fire alone - he’s forced to do little else but dodge. But it’s meaty firepower never allows it to feel unthreatening.

Design-wise….. it’s just fine. I like the red colour scheme in the context of their pilots - Kotetsu’s far more emotion-driven than Ittou, so it makes sense for their contrasting personalities. But in the context of red mobile suits in Gundam….. it doesn’t work. Red is a signifier of Char, or something related to Char (or a char clone), but the Full Armour Alex is neither. I have been seeing some “regular” rivals using it as of late (see the Pixy (LA), but in those cases it just comes off as forced. It’s just red because it’s a rival and rivals are red. The form and body’s fine - it’s a good example of the artist’s style and the muted colours really mean your attention’s drawn to the knees, skirt, head and gun. As a full armour unit, it doesn’t get many dynamic melee shots, so it’s imposing and weighty stature helps it look imposing, particularly the back rocket cannon and it’s targeting camera.

However, I must confess I completely prefer the Original (Green and White) design, as featured in Mobile Suit Gundam 0080 MSV. It just feels so much sleeker and faster, selling that the NT-1 is an improvement over the original Gundam. The green and white colour scheme is still eye catching, clearly drawing a distinction between the original and its additional parts, while helping to sell just how protective the armour would be, since the parts of the original Alex peeking through help emphasise just how beefed-up it is. Furthermore, you can easily believe that there’s space in the armour for the chest missile bays, without significantly compromising its protection. It’s only got two other integrated weapons - the back rocket cannon and the twin beam cannon, but it feels like an appropriate amount of additional firepower. It feels significant, since they’re both clearly visible on the design and the grey plays off the rest of the colour scheme - there’s only a few other small details, like the collar and “ribs”. The Full Armour Alex does retain its built-in arm gatlings, but they cannot be used since the armour covers them. I think the fact that the armour doesn’t cover the leg thrusters, and has dedicated gaps for the AMBAC system are why it feels so much sleeker to me - the Full Armour Alex was intended to be a backup plan for the Chobham Armour, and looking at it it might have even been more agile. I also very much like the head - I assume it was just artist interpretation, or perhaps the NT-1’s design hadn’t been finalised when it was made, but the yellow eyes, red forehead jewel and sleeker face really appeal to me, while helping it have its own identity other than “just the Alex, but bigger”. It’s just really rather neat.

[nothingnessreality]

last vote

This may be your last chance to vote in a real election.

Here is something that most people don’t know. According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), about 1.5% of all males are psychopaths and about 4% are sociopaths. A psychopath is defined as a person who is born with zero empathy, and thus sees all people as just objects to be used. Sociopaths on the other hand also have no empathy but are made that way growing up, and so do mostly petty crimes.

So if you combine the two we have 6 million Americans who have no empathy, but that gets worse because this is on a scale from the lowest empathy to the highest and there are another 10 million Americans who have little to no empathy or caring for others outside the people they know. They are antisociety.

This 16% of Americans, believe it or not, is fairly normal, but in the last 40 years the number of Americans who only care about their family and friends has grown to well over 100 million Americans, a third of America!!! They are now the Radical Right, Trump cult. If this doesn’t shock you then maybe you have become one of the 100 million who are antisociety.

Why is that, and why have we become so divided? The answer is simple; we have been divided on purpose.

One Australian study found that 1 in 5, 20%, of corporate CEOs and lawyers are psychopaths! Other studies now show that when most people become wealthy they lose their caring for anyone outside their circle, So today 75% of the wealthy have no feeling or caring for anyone outside their circle. Thus they are antisociety in general, and many, 20% to 50%, are psychopaths. In other words this group of rich people don’t care if you live or die, and most would kill you if you stood between them and their money.

There are around 600 billionaires in the US, and if just 20% are psychopaths or sociopaths, which is easily true, we are talking about at least 100+ billionaires who would love to take control of the US, and do not care who they hurt doing it. With their billions they could easily create a secret group which would have all the money they would ever need to pay for subversion, propaganda, or anything else they needed to divide us. Guess what, that is just what is happening.

A large group of sociopathic billionaires, which the New York Times thinks may be around 400 members, has started a secret group who’s major goal is to take as much control of America as they can, and turn it into an oligarchy, where only they can vote. Because they have kept what they are doing a secret, what is going on has only started to come to light in the last ten years.

We now know that the head of this subversive organization is Charles

Koch, CEO of Koch industries. He has an annual income of 110 billion, according to Forbes. His Father was cofounder of the John Birch Society, in the 1950s, and before starting the John Birch Society he wrote a 30 page anti communism booklet, which contained a way that the US could be taken over. It was poorly thought out, but his two sons are now using the writings of Vladimir Lenin to try and do it for real. The John Birch Society is the most radical right wing organizations in American history, and was condemned by the Republican Party at the time, but all of their radical ideology has now become main steam Republican ideology, through the uses of propaganda and subversion.

At minimum 75%+ of Republicans are now as radical right wing as they can get. They hate society, government, blacks, gays, Unions etc., and think they should have total free will, to hell with the other 320 million Americans.

Some of the first members of the Koch organization were Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon Banking and Gulf Oil; Harry and Lynde Bradley, defense contracts; John M. Olin, chemical and munitions Companies; Coors brewing family, and the DeVos family of Amway marketing.

I call them the Oligarchy because that is what they are trying to do, become the Oligarchy over the US, where only the wealthy can vote, and the 4 keys to subversion they use are Fear, Intimidation, Distraction, and Division. It has worked. We now are more divided than ever, in the whole of our history.

The Oligarchy budgeted 800 million to buy the president in the 2016 campaign, and every republican presidential candidate, except Donald Trump, had signed on and pledged allegiance to the oligarchy. Yes, literally signed a contract. Donald Trump used his own money to get elected by creating a cult following, just like Adolf Hitler did in Germany, and Benito Mussolini did in Italy. The oligarchy denounced Trump during the campaign, but once he got elected they made a deal with him to use members of the oligarchy in his cabinet.

Trump keeps saying he will be president for 12 more years. Where is he getting that? The president is term limited to 8 years and he has already had 4. I speculate that it may be part of the deal. Once they take control of the US he gets to have 12 more years.

So, for the past 4 years the Koch oligarchy has been setting up the US from the inside of the government to take control of it. Including packing the courts with their Judges, all trained at the Federalists Society, which is an oligarchy sponsored foundation for Lawyers.

Between 2015 to 2017 Mitch McConnell refused to seat any of Obama’s 100+ federal judges, including Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. Then when Trump was elected McConnell quickly filled all the seats with Federalist Society Judges.

Keep in mind that it was the Radical Right Bolshevik party that took over Russia in the 1920s, and made Vladimir Lenin their leader. It was the Radical Right fascist party that took over Italy in 1922, and made Benito Mussolini their leader. It was the Radical Right Nazi party that took over Germany in 1933, and made Adolf Hitler their leader, it was the Radical Right Red Guard

that took over China in 1966, and made Mao Zedong their leader, and the list goes on. It is always the Radical Right that takes over a country and turn the country into an authoritarian government, and that is now happening in the US. It looks like it is our turn; the US now has a Radical Right that would rival any of these.

The best-documented book on the Koch’s and their syndicate, and how secretive they are, comes from an investigative reporter of the New York Times, Jane Mayer. Her book is called “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”

Another book that shows, beyond any doubt, what the Koch syndicate is trying to do comes from Nancy MacLean, a social historian, who stumbled across a large stash of secret documents left behind after the death of a member of the Koch syndicate. Her book, after going though these secret files, is called “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.”

If you want to know more about how Trump created a cult following read: “The Cult of Trump” by Steven Hassa. Dr. Hassa is a psychologist who studies cults. He got started because when he was a young man in college he got sucked into a Cult, and has first hand knowledge of how they work.

Too many Americans live in the illusion that it can’t happen here, but it absolutely can and is. If you refuse to believe that this is true you had better open your eyes, and do some research. Before you say this is hype you should at least read Nancy MacLean’s book. I can guarantee you that if they get control of the US your civil rights will be gone, and the first things they will do will be to ban all guns and get rid of anyone who is a threat to the government.

Today the Koch syndicate is well over 100 think tanks whose main goal is to take controls of America. Most of these foundations are charitable foundations on the surface, but in the basement is a large staff that does nothing but look for ways to subvert, radicalize, and divide American Democracy.

The more divided we become, the more control they have. They can use the Electoral College to their advantage, and that is how Trump got elected; this is why we are so divided, it is on purpose. The Oligarchy now literally owns just about every Republican in the House and Senate, who does just as they are told. Their only allegiance is to the Republican Party, and it is 100% controlled by the oligarchy.

If Trump gets reelected, and that is very likely because of the oligarchies use of voter suppression, and use of the Electoral College, it will be all over, the end of American Democracy. Because by the end of his next term they will have massed so much control working from inside the government that there will be no turning back, and I’m betting if this happens the US will split up because the blue states won’t cooperate with an authoritarian government, and the world’s longest standing constitution will melt away.

The reason Trump was able to con so many people is because they where set up before hand by the propaganda coming from the Koch syndicate, which, as I said, is a spin off of the John Birch Society, which had a surge of

membership in 2010. So, you better wake up as to what is really going on or the US will become an oligarchy where only the rich can vote.

Don’t think for a second that the Democratic Party leadership doesn’t know about this. A number of them have endorsements in the front of Nancy MacLean’s book, “Democracy in Chains.” But if they talk about it in public it will be turned into a political football. Joe Biden has said, “If Trump gets elected it may be the end of America as we know it.” So, this may be your last chance to vote in a real election.

[qqueenofhades]

alone, i fight these animals [alone, until i get home]: ii

I.... have no clue if this qualifies as a proper multichapter, but I discovered myself wanting to do a second part to this, so that is what I did. It was mostly an excuse to write some Frank/Madani and Frank/Matt frenemy BROTP, because I have a need for that.

If this turns into a real fic, I will post it on AO3. I have no idea at this point, and have not actually done something sensible like plotting it out, but yes.

The engine dies with a rumble, as Frank switches it off and leans back in the driver’s seat, watching the docklands with a wary eye. The car is an old beater of a Chevy, outwardly indistinguishable from any other low-slung growler that might be cruising around here, but he doesn’t go to meetings like this without enough horsepower to make a fast getaway. Frank modified it himself and keeps it in the garage with the battle van, which luckily he hasn’t had to bust out for a while, and it’s a little less eye-catching than that big black beast. Serves the same purpose, though. He tends to change up the paint job, add or remove accessories. Doesn’t want to get distinctive, identifiable.

He’s said that he’ll be here for ten minutes exactly and then he’ll leave, so Madani, if she’s coming, better be fuckin’ punctual. He doesn’t know that he trusts her to look like anything other than a federal agent rolling up to a clandestine meet with a confidential informant, but she must have climbed the ladder by not being an idiot. There’s still the chance that she’s going to spring handcuffs on him for that scene the other night, but Frank doesn’t think so. She needs his help with catching the rest of the ring, whether or not she’ll admit it. That’s the reason for this. Everything else is brass tacks and haggling.

It’s minute seven and forty-three seconds when Madani, having apparently decided that she doesn’t want to time their arrivals to coincide exactly, but conscious of the deadline, turns in. Frank can’t tell it’s her at first, which is a good sign, but does make him reach momentarily for his gun. Then the other car parks with a crunch of gravel, a slight figure in a jacket, hooded grey sweatshirt, and jeans gets out, and strolls across the icy pavement to his. He clicks the door to unlock it, and Madani ducks into the passenger seat, wrinkling her nose. “You ever heard of Febreze, Castle?”

“Don’t think you came here to complain that my shit stinks, huh?” Frank glances at her, trying to judge her temperament for being difficult. Her dark curls wave out of the hood, she probably has her badge clipped right under her sweatshirt, and he can just feel her longing to brandish it in his face. “Or if that’s your opening line, you already know you’re backed into a corner, and you need to act like you can throw your weight around before you ask for a favor.”

Madani gives him a searing look. “I have no idea why I came here.”

“You asked for it.” Frank leans back in the seat, hands behind his head. “And I think we’re past you pullin’ rank on me, acting all fuckin’ superior, aren’t we?”

Madani chews that over for several moments, which means she can’t dispute it. “Fine,” she says at last. “I still don’t necessarily think you’re a good man, Frank, but you don’t give a rat’s ass whether I think that or not, and in this job, you don’t get the luxury of working with Mother Teresa all the time. You were, admittedly, effective with breaking the pedophile ring. We did run some diagnostics on their computers, and we have more names.”

Frank snorts – breaking the pedophile ring is the most goddamn government-jargony way he has ever heard to say blew their fucking brains out, and he used to work for an actual black-ops hit squad. “You’re welcome,” he says, since she’d probably choke on it. “Told you.”

“Yeah, all right, fine.” Madani waves an irritated hand. “Anyway, there has been a lot of red tape in the office recently, bullshit with the budget, obsession with going after softer targets. You know this administration and the kind of people it thinks are a threat. So – ”

“And you, as Special Agent in Charge, don’t always agree with the strings they pull to make you dance?” Frank could gloat over this a little more, but there will be time for that later. “Going rogue? You want to talk to me because you know I get results, when those dickheads just sit there with their thumbs up their ass and do jackshit to actually help?”

“Something like that.” It’s clear that Madani has plenty of frustrations, whether or not she’s going to let on to him. “I still believe in our institutions, no matter who’s running them, but it’s true that things are taking a… turn right now, and I’m under a lot of scrutiny. If I can’t even push through an operation to take a bunch of child abusers off the street, then…” She trails off. “I still don’t know whether to thank you for that or not, by the way. They’re dead, but it looks like I blew it and once again, a vigilante had to wipe the U.S. government’s ass. They want an excuse to fire me, Frank. I’m asking you to help not give them one.”

Frank takes that in without answering, He can guess that Madani is too female and too ethnic to make the douchebags of record very comfortable; as the daughter of Iranian immigrants, even a thoroughly Americanized one, these chickenshits are constantly going to be looking for an excuse to pull the trigger, so to speak. And if Madani goes, whatever tenuous protection he has from DHS reopening his case goes as well. There are plenty of assholes jockeying to take over her chair, and all of them would love to make a big splash by catching the Punisher. Normally, Frank thinks, they bend over fuckin’ backwards to defend white men with guns, but not when he won’t play ball with you. That’s different.

“Fine,” he says. “And to save your ass, you’re the one here asking for more help from me. What do you think I’m going to do?”

“I can transmit the intelligence to you,” Madani says. “Names, aliases, assets, last known whereabouts, everything the analysts have managed to piece together. These guys are nasty, Frank, they aren’t just making kiddie videos on the Deep Web. They’ve got a lot of other interests, and all of them are equally bad. I need you to track them down.”

“And?” Frank stares at her, one eyebrow cocked. “What do you think I’m gonna do next? Give them fuckin’ milk and cookies?”

“Of course not.” Madani sounds exasperated. “You really think I don’t know what you do, Frank? But as it happens, yes, I’m asking you not to kill them. Track them down, capture them, hurt them if you have to, but don’t kill them. I need them, I need them physically to show the brass and to prove that I succeeded. After that, all the stuff they’re in, the prosecutors can probably push for the death penalty. They’ll die one way or another, if that’s what you want. But if I don’t get them alive, it all falls apart.”

“I’m not a goddamn bounty hunter,” Frank snaps. “I’m a killer. I don’t take prisoners, Madani. I’m supposed to – what, get on a plane with these assholes tied up in a line behind me? If you’re asking me to go outside the rules and get them, you want them dead.”

“It’s not like I’m defending them!” Madani barks back. “I know they’re terrible! But if they just die mysteriously, I have pretty much no shot at keeping my job, and then there are going to be people looking for you, Frank. Looking for you and Karen. How much do you want to risk that? It seems like you’re a little more settled these days. Have something to lose.”

“You threatening me?” Frank whirls on her. “You threatening me, huh?”

“No.” Madani, to her credit, keeps her composure, though her nostrils flare. “I’m warning you. If I’m not in charge of DHS, it’ll look for you. Whoever you’re with is going to come into the firing line too. I’m sure you don’t want anything to happen to her.”

Frank doesn’t answer, though his finger twitches so violently that his entire hand jumps on his thigh. Goddamn it, Madani. She has his balls in a fuckin’ vise, has him bent over a barrel, and the worst thing is that she probably knows it. He can’t play games with Karen’s safety, even if every one of his natural instincts is to just cap the bastards in the head and call it a day. Madani needs them alive for her little stage play, and Frank – whether or not he wants to admit it – needs Madani where she is right now. It’s at least in some part due to her that he can walk around New York as a free man, even one ostensibly called Pete Castiglione. That’s a flimsy alias, and any digging, or anyone even looking too long at his face and a newspaper front page, would be able to piece it together. If he wants to keep this life, whatever it is, he can’t just charge in, blow shit up, and charge out. He needs to be strategic about this. Long-term. Fuck.

“So what?” he growls at last. “You give me the intel, I track down these bastards, I give them to you for a Christmas present? You do Christmas?”

“Yeah.” Madani rubs under her eyes with both fingers. “My parents thought it was an important part of an American upbringing. Any other questions?”

“And after you show them to the bosses, you check whatever godforsaken boxes you have to check, you prove you’ve run the operation, they die.” Frank is willing to help her, if it contributes to keeping Karen safe, but he isn’t going to budge on that point. “They don’t get some cushy life in protected custody. You’re going to arrange it somehow that they die, and I don’t mean waiting ten years on death row. Got it?”

Madani’s cheeks flush a dull red. “I really don’t want to be an accomplice to extrajudicial murder, Frank. No matter how terrible they are.”

“Well, that’s what makes you and me different.” Frank grins mirthlessly. “Besides, you play your cards right, it doesn’t stick to you. You know you’re taking a hell of a chance here, don’t you? All these under-the-table arrangements with me come out, you’re finished one way or the other. But you think you can do it on your own, you’re welcome to run back to your department and sign all your paperwork and follow procedure. Have fun.”

The silence is briefly and overpoweringly enormous. Then Madani says, “Fuck you, Frank.”

“Take that as a no?” It’s starting to get chilly in the car, with the engine off and the temperature below freezing, and Frank blows on his hands. “No, you can’t do it alone?”

“I obviously would not be here if I thought things were going well on my end.” Madani sounds like she would prefer to have her fingernails ripped out rather than admit it, but she doesn’t have a lot to lose now. “Obviously, I’m sure I can trust you to total discretion. If you need money or something else, I can arrange it. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I can handle money.” They’re obviously not living on Karen’s newspaper/paralegal salary alone, and David gave him a nice chunk of change a while ago, which is kept in a bank in the Caymans. “But last time one of us sent the other some kind of sensitive information – when David sent you the Zubair video – we know what fuckin’ happened next. If anything, if any bit of this, catches up to Karen in any way, we’re done, Madani. We’re done. I will rip anyone who comes after her to fucking pieces, and I don’t give a shit if they’ve got a government badge or not. I’ll help you stay in DHS if DHS is going to mind its goddamn business. But if you get some other kind of conspiracy going, anything like Rollins, I’m warning you right now. I will kill all of you. I am not fucking joking.”

Madani takes that without answering, though her lips tighten. “I’m aware,” she says at last. “You’re a loose cannon, Frank, but we want the same things, the same people taken down. Let’s start there. You let me handle my end of the BS, I let you handle yours. Sound good?”

“Yeah,” Frank grumbles, even though he still has plenty of misgivings. Maybe he should leave, should move out and get his own place somewhere, even if he doesn’t want to move back into that goddamn basement with David again. It feels like it’s too unforgivably dangerous to keep living with Karen, but letting her alone is even worse. Jesus. “Send me the information and be careful with it. I’ll maybe talk to Lieberman, see if he wants to help, but he’s got his family back. I’m also telling you now, nothing happens to Sarah and those kids. They’ve been through enough. See to it.”

Madani pauses, then nods. They reach out, shake hard enough as if trying to break each other’s fingers, and then she jerks the door open and climbs out, striding back to her car. Frank scans to see if anyone’s parked on a rooftop or has been loitering too long by the underpass, but their meeting looks to have been unobserved. He swears again under his breath and switches back on the engine, firing up the heater, and waits until Madani’s car has vanished down the alley before he throws the Chevy into reverse and peels out in the other direction. Well, that was a whole bunch of shit, and he doesn’t even know how far he’s already dug himself into it. Maybe if he had just left it alone to start with and never went after the ring, but that’s more than he was prepared to countenance. Makes him see red every time he thinks about it. Frank doesn’t see himself as some kind of sainted protector of the city. Far from it. But he was born in Long Island, he grew up here, he left for the first time at age eighteen on his first deployment, and while he’s been plenty of places since, there’s still something about New York that has a hold on him, broken and blackened and painful as it’s become. He loves this place, even if it hates him. He wasn’t letting them live in it.

Frank guns it down the service road back to the main thoroughfare, turns out, and drives back to the out-of-the-way garage where he keeps this car and the battle van. He pulls in, unlocks the chain link fence, rolls through, and parks, then can’t help searching for any signs of intrusion or forced entry. He has no idea who he would expect to be here, if anyone, but that long-ingrained urge to look over your shoulder, to check your six, that never goes away. Madani said the pedos had plenty more nasty friends. Could be any one of them.

Everything, however, looks ordinary. Frank makes a note to ask David for some more cameras, keep more of an eye on this place from afar, and wonders if he can really ask him to strap back on and wade into the shit again. David isn’t a soldier, and he got involved in this to start with to clear his name and be reunited with his family. He got that. Not much incentive to risk them all over again, much as he might personally want to help Frank out or feel indebted to him. Frank has some tech know-how, but he’s probably overall comparable to David trying to fire an AK-47. In other words, totally fucked.

Frank thinks that the lack of a partner has never bothered him before, the fewer people he can involve in this low-level shitstorm the better, and he’ll work out what he needs to. Having finished his sweep, he locks up, battens down, and catches a bus into midtown, briefly tempted to stop by Nelson, Murdock, and Page just to make Foggy choke on his tongue. Stroll in and bring Karen lunch, just because. But now, he wants to be cautious about going straight from a meetup with Madani to the office. He hasn’t told Karen about this new wrinkle yet, and he still doesn’t know whether he should. Probably. They just had a fight about it, and he can’t just disappear for days or weeks without an explanation. It’s always easier to do this work when you have no one to account yourself to, but he can’t lose her.

Still coming up with no apparent solution to his dilemma, Frank buys a hot dog from a sidewalk cart and sits on a park bench to eat it, scattering the remains of his bun to a flock of ravenous pigeons when he’s done. It’s cold but clear, New York running around and getting ready for Christmas, and he once more feels that impulse, that wish that he could kick back and enjoy it. But who knows. Who fuckin’ knows.

Frank sits there a moment more, then growls, “Shit.” This doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t even really make him feel better, but it’s an acceptable reaction to what he has to do. David is a glib son of a bitch who’s great with a keyboard – and has admittedly saved Frank’s ass a couple times – but if this is going to come down to brass-knuckle diplomacy, which it almost assuredly will, Frank needs someone who can fight, who is just as annoyingly dedicated to getting bad guys off the street and out of New York, and is equally insane enough to keep running full speed into punches. Yeah, they have some pretty major philosophical oppositions, but still. This looks like a two-vigilante job, at fuckin’ least, and besides. Maybe they should be, you know. Friends. For Karen’s sake.

Frank swears again, then pulls out his phone, scrolls through it to “R,” and hits the number. He swiped it from Karen’s, and the recipient doesn’t know he has it, so this is going to be a surprise, and could of course horribly backfire. But he waits a few more moments until it’s answered. “Murdock.”

“Uh.” Frank blows out a breath. “Hey, Red.”

There is a very long silence on the other end, as Frank realizes that they’ve never had an actual conversation where he’s made it clear he knows the deal. But come on. He ain’t fuckin’ stupid. (Plenty of people would disagree, but nearly all of them are dead.) He sat up there on that rooftop with Red yammering at him, then he sat in court with Murdock going on just as annoyingly, he put two and two together. He’s always acted like he didn’t know, just because Red has a bug up his ass about the secret identity shit, and besides, Karen knows, Karen told him anyway. Not that Frank would say that, because he figured it out himself, and he’s not gonna throw her under the bus if Murdock gets pissy. Well, this is already fun.

“Frank,” Matt says at last, sounding… well, let’s just say, not goddamn thrilled. “Why are you calling me?”

This is a fair question, and Frank hunts for some kind of explanation that won’t immediately make him hang up. “Karen’s fine, Karen’s fine,” he says, in case that’s what Matt thinks would be the only reason to make him get in touch. “Not any of that. I actually had a suggestion. For some work. If you were interested.”

“Work?” Matt sounds leery. “What the hell kind of work, exactly?”

“The kind you and me both do, Red. Take some bad people off the streets.”

“I didn’t realize you – ” Matt starts, then stops. “I didn’t know you… knew.”

“Yeah, well, we already established you were a dense motherfucker.” Frank switches the phone to the other shoulder, even as it belatedly occurs to him that maybe he shouldn’t be insulting the guy whose help he is, regrettably, asking for. “You were my goddamn lawyer, think I don’t know how you talk?”

There is another mulish silence as he can hear Matt chewing over that, wanting to ask how long he’s known, if he’s told anyone else, all that. Murdock might be tangentially aware that Frank and Karen are knocking boots, but does not want to have to actually refer to it in any capacity, and Frank is tempted to make a smart remark on that topic, just cuz. But he’s not going to be a dick to Karen, even in absentia, to score a couple cheap macho asshole points on a blind lawyer in a Halloween costume. Instead he says, “You want to know more or not?”

“Does this involve murdering the bad people? Because if so, you know I can’t agree to that.”

“Jesus, Red. They’re about as bad as you can get, even you don’t want to hand-hold these bastards and take them to Sunday school. I can send you the details once I get ‘em, but either way, they need to be stopped. Doing some fucked-up shit, a lot of fucked-up shit, actually. So?”

“Fine,” Matt growls, as Frank figured he eventually would. “Let me know the intel whenever you get it.”

“You need some Braille shit or something?” Frank asks. “Or you have something that reads your email for you?”

“I got through Columbia Law, you know I’m not actually an idiot. Just send it, I’ll work on it from there.” Matt pauses. “You told Karen about this?”

Frank feels like Matt Murdock is the least qualified individual to give anyone advice on this subject whatsoever, especially about this woman, and it’s only with difficulty that he bites himself back from something designed to cut. “No,” he says. “Not yet.”

It’s hard to tell what Matt thinks of that, especially over the phone. Then he says, “Obviously, I think the one thing we can agree on is that we don’t want this to spill over onto her. So whatever we’re chasing here, we need to keep her safe.”

Frank knows that wanting to keep Karen out of this has worked exactly like jackshit in the past, and he knows too that she’s strong and capable and no wilting hothouse flower, would probably shoot some of the dicks herself if she had half a chance. But he understands what Matt’s saying, given that he just outright threatened Madani to be sure none of this touched Karen, and doesn’t want to torpedo their alliance at this preliminary stage. “Yeah,” he grunts. “She stays out of it, much as we can. That’s not a problem. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Matt says. “You’re still a total asshole.”

“Get that a lot.” It is not, Frank feels, entirely inaccurate, even as he rolls his eyes, because Christ, it’s rich coming from this prick. “Talk to you later, Red.”

With that, feeling as if it’s better to get out of there before things go any more south, he hangs up and stares at the phone, not sure he feels a whole lot better. He’ll go to the safe house tonight, where David still keeps his computers and surveillance setups, since that’s where Madani will be transmitting the information, and Frank likes to periodically check for signs of interference anyway. He gets up, chucks the hot dog paper tray away, and heads out. Takes a different route than he did in. Gets off a stop too early, and doubles back a few times. Once he’s finally satisfied that nobody followed him, he reaches the safe house, unlocks the chains, and heads inside. They’re not actually living in this shithole anymore, thank God, but it still gives him a momentary shudder.

Frank switches on the monitors, scans his retina, and waits until everything has booted up. There are about five passwords he has to enter before he can access the message that there’s a new file waiting for him, and he approves; Micro doesn’t fuck around with cyber security, especially given that there’s gotta be a lot of fishing for this. It’s a plaintext ASCII file, scrubbed of all identifiable electronic traces, and Frank pauses, then clicks to open it. It’s a list of names, social security numbers, addresses, email and phone numbers, known aliases and associations, everything that DHS has pulled from the servers on the remaining members of the pedophile ring. A separate file contains any mugshots on record, grainy jpegs, or driver’s license photos or anything else on public record.

Frank plugs in an encrypted flash drive, types more passwords to unlock it, and transfers everything onto it. He considers sending some kind of acknowledgement back to Madani that he got the information, but she can probably fuckin’ guess, and he doesn’t want to leave too many digital fingerprints. He checks that the files have copied over correctly and haven’t glitched, then deletes all the originals and clears every kind of cache he can think of. Obviously, he doesn’t think anyone is going to be in here working over these machines, and good luck getting through David’s firewalls, but better safe than sorry.

Having finished the retrieval, Frank figures the best way to hand the information over to Matt is probably in person – maybe he can drop by tonight after dark, see if Red wants to slap on that stupid fuckin’ horned helmet and they can go right away. Some of these bastards still have to be in town, right? They can’t all have made it out of New York. They’ll have guessed it’s too dangerous to travel under their real names, with an APB out for them, and fake identities take at least a little time to process, even if they have a good hookup. Try to stay hidden and wait for the smoke to blow over, feel like moving’s more dangerous. Frank’s counting on that, anyway, but if they’re backed into a corner, this won’t be pretty.

Frank pauses, then ejects the flash drive, puts it into a zippered pocket on his jacket, and powers everything down. He locks up, leaves everything as he found it, and heads out. It’s getting on in the afternoon by now, the day short and chill, and he wonders if Karen’s heading back to the Liebermans’ place tonight. At least it will keep her distracted from wondering where he is, but it admittedly feels a little like cheating. He should tell her, right? They’re trying to do that now. Not everything, maybe, but more.

Dusk is falling over the city by the time Frank makes it back to central Manhattan, a few stops more on the subway, and steps out into Hell’s Kitchen, which looks beautiful at this hour, all the lights coming on and Christmas trees glowing in windows and people hurrying by eager to be somewhere warm. Frank’s breath steams in the chill as he walks up to the apartment, lets himself in, and heads upstairs. Karen should be home by now. He’ll do it, he promises, he will maybe even ask her help. She’s a goddamn good journalist, she’s like a dog with a fuckin’ bone. She’ll gnaw and gnaw until she finds out whatever she needs to. But if he does that, he makes her a legitimate target, and when he’s promised himself this is the last one, the last mission, before he really settles down and tries to make a new life with her, he can’t quite shake the fear. Everyone knows what happens to the cop who takes this one last job before he’s supposed to retire, or whatever. He always gets killed.

The apartment, however, is dark and quiet, and it doesn’t look like Karen’s there. Frank wonders if he should call, just in case, but he doesn’t want to act like her goddamn babysitter; she’s a grown woman, she can look out for herself. Still, the ever-present prickle of anxiety whenever he doesn’t 100% know that she’s safe is difficult to dispel, he has often had reason to pay attention to this instinct, and he groans, pulls out his phone, and hits her number. Just pick up, Karen, Jesus Christ. Don’t give me a fuckin’ heart attack.

She doesn’t; it goes over to voicemail.  Frank hangs up, reminds himself there are plenty of non-nefarious reasons for this, and struggles not to immediately jump to the conclusion that she’s been kidnapped by a lot of angry perverts and they’re holding her for ransom – or worse – against the death of their fellows. He rubs both hands over his face. It’s not that far to Red’s place from here. Ten-minute walk, less if he runs.

Frank gets together a decent selection of guns, throws them into his bag with extra boxes of ammo, straps a nine-millimeter to his ankle holster, and shoves his Ka-Bar into its sheath at his hip. Then, with a final look around, and wondering if he should just get David to install a tracking device on Karen’s phone (he did once tell David that Sarah would cut his nuts off if she discovered the Lieberman house spy cameras, but still), he heads back out. He jogs down the stairwell, and emerges into the chilly evening, glancing around once more just in case the subway was late or something and Karen’s getting home now. Jesus, this relationship shit is stressful. Can’t deal with his heart always walking around somewhere else again. Especially when that heart is as feisty and independent and fuckin’ reckless as Karen. He isn’t the right man to tell anyone to take a goddamn chill pill, but jeez.

It’s eight minutes later when Frank reaches Matt’s street, turns in, and leaps up the steps two or three at a time, reaching the hallway and banging on the door of his apartment. He better be in, or Frank’s really gonna have a problem, and indeed, Matt jerks it open a moment later.  “Frank? What the hell? I thought you were going to send an email.”

“Plans changed.” Frank shifts tensely from foot to foot. “Look, throw on your pajamas and your fuckin’ hat with the horns, huh, Red? Let’s go, yeah?”

Matt raises both eyebrows. After a moment he says, “Your heart rate’s off the charts. What’s wrong? Are you sure Karen’s okay? Frank, Jesus, you know I don’t like this, whatever it is, with you two, but if you can’t even look after her – ”

“Yeah, because what we really needed was your goddamn opinion.” Frank clenches both fists, reminds himself that he has no solid evidence that anything is awry at all, and takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself. A soldier who runs into the middle of a fight frantic and haywire and not focused usually gets shot in the first few seconds, and he’s definitely not letting Matt see (or whatever, echolocate, he doesn’t know exactly how all that works) him at less than his best. “We can probably get to some of these assholes tonight, that’s all. Checked the addresses, a dozen of ‘em live in a ten-block radius in Queens. I take one half, you take the other, we could close the book. You up for it or no?”

Matt hesitates. It’s clear that his first instinct is also to rush in and take on the baddies, even if he is leery about doing it with Frank. At last he says, “If you’re putting Karen in danger, you know the right thing to do would be to walk away.”

Frank starts to say something, then stops. It’s worse that he’s had that idea himself, that he keeps having the impulse to bail out and disappear and never be seen again, but if that’s what Matt thinks he should do, well, it’s clearly wrong. Same guy who lied to Karen for months and months, keeps dropping out of her life and then reappearing and expecting that things will just be the goddamn same between them, jerking her around and causing her heartache and worry and still too unable to realize that there’s a cost to living this way, there’s a cost. Frank isn’t gonna judge Matt on the vigilante thing, though for goddamn sure he judges him on a lot of others. He knows that compulsion to do what you know is right, no matter if anyone else understands it that way or not. But he’s never been under any illusions that it’s compatible with a normal life, with keeping people in it, with thinking they’ll see it the same way and you can just split into two halves, two halves that will always stay separate from the other. He called Matt on it before. Was it you that did those things, or was it the mask?

“Yeah,” Frank says. “I didn’t come here for your bullshit romantic advice, Red. You can help me or not, but either way, I’m going.”

Matt once more starts to respond, then stops. “Still not sure when you worked out it was me.”

“Come on. First thing I ever said to you, when you walked into my hospital room, was that I knew who you were. You think I only meant your shitty fuckin’ law firm?”

Matt chews over that, and (wisely) decides not to rebut.  Finally he says, “Meet me in the alley. Five minutes.”

Frank rolls his eyes, guesses that there’s some mystique that has to be preserved, can’t see Murdock shimmying bare ass into his fancy long johns or whatever, and takes his leave. Five minutes later, he’s in the back alley as instructed, when Red leaps down in full devil glory and jerks his head. “Let’s go.”

They wend their way through the shadows, across some rooftops, then get a cab part of the way. Frank imagines that even this is not the weirdest thing the driver has seen in his life, waiting at a red light like everything’s normal with goddamn Daredevil and the Punisher sitting side by side in the backseat and determinedly not looking at each other, but it’s probably close. He does keep trying not to steal glances at them in the rearview mirror, though. Finally says, “You boys out for the evening?”

“Just drive,” Frank orders him. “Yeah?”

Wisely, the guy does so, reaches Queens in another fifteen minutes, and as they get out of the cab, Frank shucks out a big tip and hands it over with the fare. “Don’t need to tell you that you saw nothin’,” he reminds him. “So you keep your trap shut.”

“Yes, sir. Got it.” The driver takes the money and nods awkwardly. “Have a – good night.”

With that, he lays rubber getting out of there, Frank watches him go with a sardonic expression, and then hefts his bag of guns with a clunk. “This way,” he informs Matt. “Stay sharp. One of them had a .38 last time, and I’m guessing they’re waiting for someone to turn up and try to sic ‘em. Feds or otherwise.”

He can feel Matt wanting to say something about the guns, wanting to ask how they’re going to deal with this, exactly, or maybe sensing that if they’re going to split this half and half and make any success of it, they’re just going to have to turn a blind eye (literally) to what the other’s doing. Frank snaps the stock on his carbine into place, and glances ahead. There’s a light on, in the first floor of the somewhat seedy office park. That matches the intel, where they had another meet-up spot. If the pedos are in there now, Red better not get in his way.

He glances sidelong at his – for the moment – ally. Matt raises a hand, listens, then – whatever he hears, Frank can’t tell, but he’s deciding to trust it – nods once.

Time to go.

[phroyd]

This has been going on for over 5 years, funded by the Koch brothers, to take State Legislatures, turn them Republican, and use ALEC to draft Agreements for passage in those states to Agree on an Article V Constitutional Convention. They have secured 28 out of the necessary 34 States needed for approval. - Phroyd

Mark Levin's bestselling book, The Liberty Amendments, contains some radical notions about a complete overhaul of the US constitution, but to debate the specifics of their merits is to ignore the larger insanity of the project.

He proposes 11 amendments, intended to be affixed more or less immediately (well, as soon as can be achieved), and the number alone is – ahem – audaciously hopeful. Remember, since 1789, the constitution has only been amended 27 times; ten of those amendments were accomplished when passed as a group with the adoption of the bill of rights. There have been over 11,000 proposed amendments. A simple assessment of odds puts any one amendment at about a 0.2% chance of getting passed. The chances of all 11 getting passed is beyond my limited recall of high school mathematics. Then again, in the fantasy world where one of Levin's amendments gets ratified, all of them have 100% chance.

In the real world, almost no one believes conservatives could accomplish what Levin has put forward. He begins the book with a blustery denouncement of the current administration familiar to anyone who's surfed over the AM radio spectrum in recent years. And give Levin credit: his rhetorical style has the ornate filigree of a 19th century lawyer – all embedded clauses and rat-a-tat 50-cent words:

Social engineering and central planning are imposed without end, since the governing masterminds, drunk with their own conceit and pomposity, have wild imaginations and infinite ideas for reshaping society and molding man's nature in search of the ever-elusive utopian paradise.

Levin channels his silken outrage into a generous read of the constitution's article V, which he describes as a mechanism for "restoring self-government and averting societal catastrophe (or, in the case of societal collapse, resurrecting the civil society)". The parenthetical aside is telling: he means to impress upon readers – ahem, again – "the fierce urgency of now". With the alarm bells ringing so loudly, we hardly notice the improbability of actuallyusing article V, which theoretically allows state legislatures to directly propose constitutional amendments – amendments that would not be filtered through Congress. (Congress is part of the problem, of course: it "operates not as the framers intended, but in the shadows.")

State legislatures, as Levin fully knows, have become increasingly conservative over recent years – due to the older, whiter, smaller electorate that turns out in off-year contests. If any layer of our government is likely to approve of the amendments Levin puts forward, it's them. Indeed, as he points out, many states already have adopted, for instance, terms limits and balanced budget provisions in their constitutions.

Levin's complaints and his ideas about how to solve them have the perfect structure of a luminous Mobius strip: if you believe his indictments, then you'll believe his solutions. But once you leave his twilit logic, the structure crumbles. Phyllis Schlafly, who plays on the same ideological team as Levin, wrote a response to his article V plan that could be summed up as "LOL": Levin and his supporters are "fooling themselves" if they believe an article V convention can achieve their goals. They can "hope and predict, but they cannot assure us that any of their plans will come true …The whole process is a prescription for political chaos, controversy and confrontation."

It's no wonder that many conservatives have chosen to believe anyway. Levin's fantasy world is elaborate and specific: he presents his amendments as necessary to recapture the intent of the founders, even as the very proposal of so many "reforms" goes against the founders' explicit design of a constitution that is very difficultchange. The meat of his proposals would be, I think, just as unpalatable to their view of the constitution as a broad outline for governance, one more inclined to negative than positive prescriptions. One fellow conservative noted that Levin seems less interested in reforming a corroded document than "tinkering" with it.

Indeed, the specificity of his recommendations – he includes an amendment that would set an upper limit to government spending as "17.5% of the nation's gross domestic product for the previous calendar year" (the number seems to be drawn out of thin air) – suggests that Levin is working less to save the constitution from "Statists" (capital S, always) than just backwards-engineering his personal ideal.

Indeed, there's no arguing that his recommendations are not largely (if not solely) designed to reshape the country as conservatives desire and to disenfranchise or otherwise disempower anyone who might disagree with those objectives. Levin may be able to muster Federalist Paper-footnoted arguments for term limits for supreme court justices, a national voter ID law, and the strengthening of states' ability to override federal law and supreme court decisions, but the real-world impact of such amendments would be to turn America back toward the Federalist era in terms of civil rights as well.

Levin's ideas are not conservative in political philosophy at all, at least in the sense of "standing athwart history and yelling 'stop'". He is liberal to the extreme when it comes to using the tools of the founders beyond what they intended. He seems to confuse his admiration for the logic and writing of our early leaders with ahistorical alignment with them. The Liberty Amendments is heavily larded with passages lifted from their correspondence as well as the Federalist Papers. And by "heavily larded", I mean give-Paula-Deen-pause "larded". Heart attack-inducing larded. You could fry Levin's book and serve it at a state fair.

But it does not come fried, only half-baked. The passages from the founders are not invigorating (or tasty), but dry coughs of rationalization. Yet, it is their frequency that makes Levin's book curiously impressive: it debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. And it is as boring as a phone book – or a recitation of the Affordable Care Act.

Though sprinkled throughout with the ranty denouncement of "soft tyranny" that energizes likeminded listeners to his radio show, the odd genius of The Liberty Amendments isn't that he has riled up his base with fiery rhetoric, but that he seems to have riled it up without it. Given the ludicrousness of his specific "fixes" and the near-impossibility of achieving them, Levin has produced something I have to concede I admire – as a literary trope, if nothing else – speculative fiction disguised as documentary. I admit I liked it better in World War Z.

It is true that Levin's amendments are dead on arrival, but his are zombie ideas that may yet attack. Levin has been mentioned as a possible moderator for the Republican national committee's 2016 primary debates. The committee intends them to be more substantive and less theatrical than the clown-car contests of 2012.

The notion that Levin would lend gravitas, via his originalist fixations, to the events has understandable appeal. But gravitas only comes from plans that are grounded, and Levin's are just wishes, conjured out of thin air.

Phroyd

[aion-rsa]

10 Best Movies of 2021 (So Far)

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Can you ever really go home? Millions of cinephiles are likely asking themselves this as summer 2021 winds down with doubt again lingering over their favorite movie houses. For a time, theaters were once again open for big business in the U.S. and UK, and remain so in at least one of those venues. But box office reports paint an ambiguous future, and many casual moviegoers clearly remain reluctant about returning to the cinema.

Nonetheless, it’s still good to be back in those old familiar places, as well as to have an ever expanding list of options to discover on streaming. Compared to last year, 2021 feels like a sunny balm, particularly now that the heaviest hitters and biggest surprises of July and the dog days of summer have landed.

It’s why we typically save our “mid-year” ranking for that deep breath between the end of summer escapism and the awards season push that begins in September. There have been some real treats on the 2021 calendar, so whether you’ve seen the entire list below or are looking for something you missed, sit back and enjoy a collection of the best movies of 2021. So far.

10. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar

Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo wrote and star in this bizarre, brightly colored, and utterly joyful comedy that defies expectations throughout. The two are middle-aged best friends who take their very first vacation to Florida together to visit the idyllic Vista del Mar.

But it’s not all cocktails and banana boats. Behind the scenes, super villain Sharon Fisherman (also played by Wiig) has an evil plan for the resort. With shades of the best of Austin Powers (though far more sincere) Barb and Star is a good natured friendship comedy through a surrealist lens, which could scratch an itch for anyone missing a bit of beach time this year.

9. Psycho Goreman

Unexpected gem of the year surely goes to this utterly bonkers grue-filled cosmic horror B-movie which is also really funny and kind of sweet at the same time. It follows annoying little shit Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) who bullies her brother Luke (Owen Myre) mercilessly. After defeating him in a game of “crazy ball,” Luke’s punishment is to dig his own grave (!) but instead the pair discover an artifact which turns out to be the key to controlling a universal evil imprisoned on earth for trying to destroy the galaxy.

So of course Mimi names him Psycho Goreman and forces him to hang out with her family and friends despite his insistence that he will bathe in their blood the moment he is freed. From Steven Kostanski, the director of 2016’s The Void, Psycho Goreman is a spot-on blend of brutal slaying and hardcore gore, a cosmic plotline involving an alien council and a wholesome family comedy. An unexpected delight.

8. Cruella

Emma Stone is a punk rock designer in the mold of Vivienne Westwood in this vibrant London-set comedy, which is on paper a prequel to 101 Dalmatians. But in reality, take it as a standalone and you’ll have way more fun.

Up and coming fashionista Estella manages to impress one of the leading designers The Baroness (Emma Thompson) and secures a coveted job at her world famous fashion house. But when Estella discovers a dark secret relating to her own past, she takes on the outrageous alter-ego Cruella to destroy The Baroness by out-fashioning her at every opportunity.

Packed with banging tunes and great dresses, Cruella is a high energy spectacle but it’s the sparring of the two Emmas that brings the real electricity. Forget any future she might have as a puppy killer, in her own film, Cruella is a legend. 

7. In the Heights

The sunniest film to hit theaters this season, Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights was as sugary sweet as the frozen Piragua Lin-Manuel Miranda hocks around this movie’s block. Based on the Hamilton composer’s earlier Tony winning musical, the picture was the rare thing: a Broadway adaptation that actually soars as high as its stage production and (rarer still) the first Hollywood blockbuster with an all-Latinx cast.

Read more

Movies

How Cruella Got That Crazy Expensive Soundtrack

By Don Kaye

Movies

In the Heights: You Need to Stay for Post-Credits Scene

By David Crow

The film came under fair criticism on social media for not being as inclusive as it could be, but that shouldn’t be the last word on such a big-hearted achievement. From the buoyant performances which have already opened doors for Anthony Ramos and Leslie Grace’s immense charisma, to the Latin, salsa, and hip-hop infused melodies which celebrate a culture long left out of the Hollywood image of American life, In the Heights is a jubilant celebration. There really hasn’t been a giddier time at the multiplex this year. Plus, those “96,000” and “Carnaval del Barrio” sequences really are fire.

6. Zola

Based on a “true” story which was told via a series of tweets posted back in 2015 (and the subsequent Rolling Stone article that brought the tale to prominence), Zola is a stranger-than-fiction saga seen through the lens of social media. An ultra contemporary, experimental, low budget comedy-thriller with a backdrop of abuse and sex trafficking, the film is as willfully uncomfortable to watch as it is massively entertaining.

From the jump, Zola (Taylour Paige) is a Detroit waitress and part time exotic dancer who meets a customer named Stefani (Riley Keough) and agrees to take a trip with her to Florida to hit up strip clubs where Stefani promises they’ll make a lot of money. With them are Stefani’s feckless boyfriend (Succession’s Nicholas Braun) and her obviously dodgy roommate. Sometimes told through spoken tweets with switches in perspective, this marks director Janicza Bravo as a compelling new voice, and her cast of leads as nothing short of captivating.

How much of what you’re watching actually happened? Well, that’s the elusive quality of social media…

5. Judas and the Black Messiah

Fred Hampton was murdered with the consent and planning of law enforcement at both federal and local jurisdiction levels. That Judas and the Black Messiah made this common knowledge would be reason enough for consideration. Yet that director Shaka King tells Hampton’s story so thrillingly here elevates his film into one of the most compelling crime dramas in years—only with the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO program being the primary criminal element.

Told from the perspective of the man who spied on the Black Panthers and eventually facilitated the raid that took Hampton’s life, Judas radiates a despairing quality which somehow can still feel electrifying whenever Daniel Kaluuya’s powerhouse performance takes center stage. Which is pretty much any time the Black Panther chairman takes the microphone. Kaluuya deserved his Oscar, but LaKeith Stanfield’s paranoid turn as Bill O’Neal, the poor bastard coerced into being a snitch while still a kid, is what gets under your skin and walks beside you after the credits roll.

4. Pig

Are there really folks out there who wandered into a screening of Pig and assumed they’d get the Nicolas Cage knockoff of John Wick? I like to think so, just as I love to imagine what they said to each other afterward. To be sure, Michael Sarnoski’s Pig sounds on paper like something in that ballpark: Cage plays a hermit living in self-exile from his past life when ruffians steal his beloved… truffle pig. In response, he comes down from the mountain, ready to reengage with the old ways.

Read more

Movies

Judas and the Black Messiah Remembers Fred Hampton Was a Man of His Words

By Tony Sokol

Movies

The Suicide Squad Character Guide, Easter Eggs, and DCEU References

By Mike Cecchini

Yet when you realize those old ways involve being the greatest chef in his state—and reengagement means partaking in a fight club that’s far more pitiful than it sounds and simply cooking gourmet meals—the more apparent it is that this is a sophisticated, nuanced allegory about grief and self-identity. Anchored by Cage’s best performance in a long, long time, Pig is a gentle and revelatory experience that slowly unpacks its brilliance piece by piece, vignette by vignette. For those coming in wanting fast food, this probably will be a disappointment. For all others, it’s a resplendent five course meal.

3. The Suicide Squad

For once the marketing wasn’t kidding. Writer-director James Gunn does have a horribly beautiful mind, and we at last get to see it fully unleashed on a superhero property. Yes, the filmmaker made many cry over a CGI tree and talking raccoon in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, but perhaps not since Logan has a storyteller seen such free rein over valuable studio IP. Gunn didn’t waste it.

The Suicide Squad plays very much like the men and women on a mission ‘60s capers its director grew up on, but that structure is channelled here through a filthy and deranged sensibility. How else can you describe a picture that makes you want to cuddle a land shark who just swallowed a bystander whole? The Suicide Squad does that and more while providing a showcase for sure things like Margot Robbie’s irresistible Harley Quinn, as well as the dregs and rejects of DC Comics who ultimately steal the movie: David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man and Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2, namely. Box office be damned, this is one of the best superhero films ever made and will be a classic in the years to come.

2. The Green Knight

When you hear the name “King Arthur,” certain elements spring to mind. It’s one of those classic properties which have been adapted, exploited, and parodied with killer rabbits ad nauseam. Even so, it’s safe to say you’ve never seen the lore become as foreboding and startling as this. Reimagined through the gaze of writer-director David Lowery, the 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at last takes on a trippy and witchy connotation. An interpretation that pulls as much from medieval paganism as it does obsessions with chivalry and Christian virtue, The Green Knight successfully reinvents its Arthurian quest into a journey toward certain doom.

Read more

Movies

The Green Knight: Why David Lowery and Dev Patel Reimagined Arthurian Legend

By David Crow

Movies

The Green Knight Ending Explained

By David Crow

As the central figure on that mission, Dev Patel reveals superstar charisma and the ability to completely command the screen. His version of Gawain, the wayward nephew of King Arthur (Sean Harris), is vain, cowardly, selfish, and somehow wholly sympathetic as he searches for Ralph Ineson’s Green Knight: a godlike creature who has promised to behead Gawain when they meet again. Through it all, Lowery and company craft a sumptuous world that in every shot looks like the most transportive Dungeons and Dragons cover you’ve ever seen. The atmosphere is oppressively brooding, and it will not appeal to everyone. Yet like the very best films released by indie distributor A24, there is a touch of mad genius at work here that demands to be seen and then seen again.

1. Inside

As arguably the best piece of art to come out of 2020’s torments, Bo Burnham’s Inside was not marketed or even conceived of as a film. Nevertheless, it slowly transformed into one throughout its months-long production process, which forewent mere sketch humor to reveal an undeniably cinematic, experimental, and ultimately bleak heart. In other words, it’s a perfect distillation of how all mediums are blurring into that loathsome word: content.

Through heavily edited, conceived, and revised set-pieces, the film’s director, star, writer, and composer lays his insecurities and vanities bare. Filmed inside Burnham’s home studio space, Inside is the result of the young filmmaker behind Eighth Grade becoming acutely aware he’s regressed to his early resources as a teenage YouTube star: a camera, a music keyboard, some synth programs, and hours of idle boredom.

Within those numbing hours, Burnham built something both reflective and suspicious about technology, the internet culture which gave him his career, and even his own self-image. With a catchy songbook of synthesized bangers, many of which echo ’80s pop ballads, Burnham crystallizes better than any typical three-act film the anxieties and delirium of a year spent mostly at home. He also provides a scathing critique of how our concepts of communication and identity have been co-opted and undermined by tech companies whose products incite division for profit—all while still releasing his film on the biggest streaming platform in the world. It’s a challenging, self-loathing, and haunted piece of work that will invariably become a time capsule for its moment in history.

Runner ups that almost made the cut: Annette, Black Widow, Coda, Mr. Soul, No Sudden Move, Raya and the Last Dragon, Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, The Sparks Brothers, Val.

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The post 10 Best Movies of 2021 (So Far) appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[shirlleycoyle]

Where Does the USPS Go From Here?

This is the final edition of The Mail, Motherboard’s pop-up newsletter about the USPS, voting, labor, and democracy. If you hadn’t already, there’s no point in signing up now. You’re too late.

In early September, I was on the phone with a letter carrier in the northeast while he was on his rounds. In the background, I could hear the postal truck's door slide open and shut every so often. Sometimes the engine took a little bit of convincing to turn back on. The postal worker, who asked me not to use his real name because the USPS has warned employees not to speak to the media, said I could refer to him as "Adrian." He started working for the post office about four years ago. It seemed like the best option to him at the time because he didn't have a college degree. For the first three years, he was a city carrier assistant (CCA), one of many entry-level positions across the USPS that account for about one-fifth of all employees. 

These hourly wage positions have few limitations on what management can make them do, minimal benefits, and have no meaningful protections for time off. Employees who work in these non-career positions are relied on to plug the gaps in the USPS's staffing issues, the result of decades of austerity. 

"You're always on call as a CCA," Adrian said. Even if you have a scheduled day off, your boss can call the night before and tell you to come in anyways. Supervisors frequently call CCAs the morning of their days off to ask them to come in. At that point, CCAs can refuse to pick up the phone without penalty, but, as Adrian put it, the requests put employees in a position of asking themselves "do you value your mental health or your social life, or do you value money?"

Most non-career employees, particularly those who deliver mail, end up working frequent 60-100 hour weeks until they "make regular" and become a career employee with designated routes, federal employee benefits, a pension, and vacation days. Career employees work overtime, too, but they have more leeway in deciding when and how much overtime they work.

Those three years as a CCA were hard on Adrian. He once had to work 30 days in a row, and seven-day work weeks were common. He also said as a CCA he would have to work while sick because his manager would tell him he simply could not take a sick day. "A lot of times I just wouldn't sleep," he conceded, and his mental health suffered.

Adrian is hardly alone. I heard similar stories from other CCAs around the country. But to see for yourself, the USPS subreddit has nearly-daily posts by exhausted, stressed non-career employees. Two recent posts, both from the same day, are titled “Anyone else need a therapist because of this job?” and “Burned Out.”

But now that he's a regular, Adrian says it was all worth it. And, thanks to all the overtime as a CCA, he was making more money than many of his friends who had college degrees. He's still young, but has his own house and no student debt. 

In retrospect, Adrian feels good about sticking with the post office through those three hard years. But it could have been longer. There is no set amount of time a non-career employee has to stick it out before making regular. It is done by seniority as spots open up. You know where you stand in line, but not how quickly the line will move. Some get lucky and make regular after only a few months. But it usually takes years. And, most CCAs—which has an annual turnover rate of 45.8 percent according to the Office of Inspector General—don't stick it out. 

For the last few months as a CCA, Adrian knew he would be making regular at a certain date which made the final slog more tolerable. But he wasn't sure how much longer he could have stuck it out had he not known. I asked what kept him going before he got word he would be making regular. "For me, I had no other opportunities to make a living," he said. "This was very much something I had to do."

Most people don't imagine working for the post office as the "American Dream," the respectable middle class life that is neither ostentatious nor impoverished. But for roughly the last century, working for the post office has been perhaps the most consistent and available means to the middle class life, especially for people for whom other doors were unfairly closed.

To pick just one example, the post office was the way for African Americans to earn a middle class living prior to World War II when white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of rampant, overt discrimination made typical middle class employment nearly impossible for them. In the years after the Civil War, "Postal job opportunities represented a relative oasis for blacks in a desert of American white occupational exclusion," wrote the postal historian Philip Rubio in his book There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality. Working for the post office also "served as a dramatic validation of [their] citizenship by making them representatives of the federal government." By 1940, 14 percent of all African Americans earning above the national median income worked for the post office. In future years, immigrants, veterans, and women, to varying degrees, found steady, dignified careers at the post office.

This is all still true to an extent—the USPS does employ a disproportionate number of veterans and minorities—although the barrier for employment in other sectors as a result of racial, ethnic, or gender discrimination is not as high as it used to be. But, as Adrian alluded to, the post office serves as a different kind of middle class dream today. The quality of jobs available, especially to those without college degrees, is much worse. People with college degrees often struggle to find steady livings as well.

Paradoxically, the post office has also participated in this societal shift. Full-time employment peaked in the late 1990s, before the Bush administration kicked off the recent round of USPS austerity that has continued to this day, even though the number of delivery points continues to increase.

Data source: USPS

To put this in perspective, the USPS—which is legally required to deliver mail to virtually every person in the country—has about as many full-time workers now as it did in 1967 even though the U.S.'s population has increased by 129.5 million since then. The USPS is able to still function partly because of increased productivity and automation, but also because it relies more on non-career employees like CCAs. Since 2009, the number of career employees fell by 20 percent, but the number of non-career employees increased by 54 percent, according to the USPS Office of Inspector General.

Source: USPS OIG

In other words, the USPS has been gradually replacing solid, reliable occupations with temporary, unsustainable working arrangements because it provides the illusion of savings (in the long run, high turnover, constant overtime wages, and staffing shortages resulting in worse service and lost business may negate much of the savings non-career employees offer depending on the accounting methods used). The larger irony here is, amid all the calls for the USPS to function more like its private sector frenemies like Amazon and FedEx—both of which have been called out for questionable labor practices—by slashing labor costs, the USPS has been doing so for as long as Amazon has existed if not longer. If anything, Amazon is learning the labor lessons the USPS taught, not the other way around. There are still hundreds of thousands of good jobs at the USPS, but hundreds of thousands fewer than there used to be.

I began this newsletter in August with a story about a postal worker who had dreamed of working there since she was a little girl. Obviously, most people who work for the post office can't say the same. Still, these jobs often mean the world to the people who have them. I cannot count the number of times I got on the phone with a postal employee who seemed to have an endless list of complaints about the way the post office works before they added something to the effect of but I'm so grateful to have this job. Some postal workers even refused to be interviewed because they didn't want to risk losing, as one put it, "the best job I ever had."

There was a man from a different part of the northeast than Adrian who had loved his job as a high school history teacher until he was laid off in a round of austerity budget cuts. A worker in Portland who had been an artist. Another in Ohio who worked in the kitchen of fast food chains. 

"We're all just a bunch of misfits," Adrian said of his post office. He meant this in a loving way, adding "I've never met a nicer group of people than the people I work with as a carrier." As he went on to explain, they're "misfits" in the sense that the post office is where they all ended up because Plan A didn't pan out. 

For many Americans, Plan B has increasingly become not a respectable middle class life in a profession they tolerate, but a tenuous existence of low-wage labor in independent contractor or "gig economy" positions with erratic hours and few if any benefits. What makes the post office unique is not that it has bucked this trend. Indeed, it has contributed to it with the increase of non-career labor. What makes the post office special is it still has one foot in a past, where "innovation" and "efficiency" weren't catchy buzzwords for labor abuses, worker misclassification, and mass layoffs. 

The biggest question for the post office going forward is: which way does the trend line go? Do the graphs and charts continue as they have been for the past few decades in which fewer and fewer workers are squeezed harder and harder? Or does Congress recognize the untenability of the situation and drop the fiction of the USPS as a business that ought to pay for itself? If the USPS is not worthy of our tax dollars, what is?

This question feels all the more existential as we're bludgeoned by the unavoidable reality that the entire Republican party is committed to making government as messy and dysfunctional as it possibly can. We're past the point of even the pretense of honest disagreement between parties about what government is and how it should work. As Louis DeJoy has made abundantly clear through action and deed over the past few months, he is not interested in a functioning post office, just as the political party to which he has been a loyal donor is not interested in a functioning government. Broad, existential questions apply to so many of our institutions these days. If a massive deadly global pandemic is not the time to put politics aside as much as humanly possible to save lives and livelihoods, when is? If a smooth transition of power between presidents is no longer on the table, what's left on it? If every vote not cast in favor of a Republican is fraudulent, then what system of government do we actually have?

What's next for the post office is one of the many small questions lurking below the much larger one of what's next for our shattered, pathetic country.  Unfortunately, these questions are likely to become increasingly urgent in the coming months. As far as the post office is concerned, DeJoy has made no secret of his desire to make big, sweeping changes to the post office, many of which will be for the worse. And if his previous employment history is any guide, he has little respect for worker rights and dignity. As for the country as a whole, there are no good answers to all of the questions above. It is very difficult to have a functioning government when half the country doesn't believe in its legitimacy.

I don't want to end this newsletter on such a downer, even though that would be very much in keeping with my personality and current events. So, I will end with this: we've all learned over the last year or so there's no shame in valuing the small things or the small group of people that make us happiest. And over the last few months, this newsletter and the people who read it have brought me happiness. I have learned so much researching and writing this newsletter and have met some wonderful postal workers who are everything you would want public servants to be. A big thank you goes out to all of them, without whom this project would have been nothing.

And another big thanks goes out to all of you. We're nothing without our readers. And an extra big thank you to everyone who subscribed to the zine. Hopefully we'll be able to keep them coming.

And a final thank you to everyone who sent in postcards. All of them were so much fun and made me smile. Whenever we return to our office, we're going to display them in some form or fashion. 

The Mail mail (Harriet the cat for scale)

You can always contact me at aaron.gordon@vice.com. I'd love to hear from you. Better yet, send me a letter. 

VICE Media c/o Aaron Gordon

49 S 2nd St.

Brooklyn, NY 11211

Wash hands

Wear masks

Write letters

Aaron

Where Does the USPS Go From Here? syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Energized by the successful passage of tax cuts, some Republicans are eying a new target: entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. House Speaker Paul Ryan is leading the charge, arguing that the only way to break the cycle of rising deficits and surging debt is to reduce entitlement spending.

Political resistance is likely to be fierce, not only because these programs are massively popular, but also because President Trump opposed any such cuts during his campaign. Even if the political hurdles can be cleared, though, the bigger problem is that this push for entitlement reform attacks the wrong target.

There is no wide-reaching entitlement funding crisis, no deep-rooted connection between runaway debts and the broad suite of pension and social welfare programs that usually get called entitlements. The problem is linked to entitlements, but it’s much narrower: If the U.S. budget collapses after hemorrhaging too much red ink, the main culprit will be rising health care costs.

Aside from health care, entitlement spending actually looks relatively manageable. Social Security will get a little more expensive over the next 30 years; welfare and anti-poverty programs will get a little cheaper. But costs for programs like Medicare and Medicaid are expected to climb from the merely unaffordable to truly catastrophic.

Part of that has to do with our aging population, but age isn’t the biggest issue. In a hypothetical world where the population of seniors citizens didn’t increase, entitlement-related health spending would still soar to unprecedented heights — thanks to the relentlessly accelerating cost of medical treatments for people of all ages.1

What’s needed, then, is something far more focused than entitlement reform: an aggressive effort to slow the growth of per-person health care costs. Or — if that’s not possible — some way to ensure that the economy grows at least as fast as the cost of health care does.

Diagnosing the debt: It’s not about demographics

America’s long-term budget problem is very real. Already, the federal government has a pile of publicly held debts amounting to around $15 trillion, or about 75 percent of the country’s entire gross domestic product. That’s the highest level since the 1940s, yet the debt burden is expected to double by 2047 and reach 150 percent of the GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office.2

It makes sense to list entitlement spending among the culprits for the growing national debt, given that these programs have grown from costing less than 10 percent of the GDP in 2000 to a projected 18 percent in 2047. Part of this is simple demographics: As America ages, more of us become eligible for Social Security and Medicare, thus driving up expenses.3

But there’s a crack in this demographic explanation: It only makes sense for the next 10 to 15 years. That’s the period of rapid transition when graying baby boomers will boost the population of seniors from around 50 million to more than 70 million. A change like that should indeed produce a surge in entitlement spending as those millions submit their enrollment forms.

By 2030, however, this wave will start to ebb, leaving the elderly share of the population at a roughly stable 20 to 21 percent all the way through 2060, based on the size of the population following the boomers and slower-moving forces like lengthening lifespans.

But think what this should mean for entitlement spending. As the population of seniors levels out in those later years, costs should naturally stabilize — at least, if demographics were really the driving factor.

This is exactly what you see for Social Security. The CBO expects total Social Security spending to leap up over the next decade but then settle at just over 6 percent of the GDP, at which point it will cease to be a major contributor to rising entitlement spending or growing debts. Social Security is thus a minor player in our long-term budget drama; if you cut the program to the bone, shrinking future payouts so that they won’t add a penny to the deficit, the federal debt would still reach 111 percent of the GDP in 2047.4

Likewise, cuts to welfare and poverty-related entitlements like food stamps and unemployment insurance are unlikely to improve the debt forecast. In fact, spending on these entitlements has been dropping since the high-need years around the Great Recession and is expected to shrink further in the decades ahead — partly because payouts aren’t adjusted to keep up with economic growth, and partly because the birth rate has been falling and several programs are geared to families with children.5

But the scale of the problem is totally different when you turn to health care. Spending on entitlement-related health programs — including Medicare, Medicaid and subsidies required by the Affordable Care Act — will never shrink or stabilize, according to projections. The CBO predicts these costs will grow over 65 percent between now and 2047 — and then go right on growing after that, heedless of the fact that the percentage of the population that’s over 65 should no longer be increasing.

Why is health care eating the budget? Per-person costs

Demographics aren’t responsible for the projected explosion in health care costs. More important than the growing number of elderly Americans is the growing cost per patient — the rising expense of treating each individual

The CBO found that the lion’s share — 60 percent — of the projected increase in health spending comes from costs that would continue to increase even if our population weren’t getting older.

The reasons for this are many, including the rising cost of prescription drugs and the fact that hospital mergers have reduced competition. But since 2000, per capita health costs in the U.S. have, on average, grown faster than the GDP. And while these costs rose more slowly after the Great Recession and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, analysis from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services suggests this slower growth rate won’t last.

Which is bad news for these programs, because if the problem were demographic, it’d be easier to solve. By mixing the kind of program cuts Republicans generally support with targeted tax increases favored by some Democrats, you could meet the short-term challenge posed by retiring baby boomers and raise enough money to cover the larger — but stabilizing — population of eligible seniors. But with ever-rising costs, there is no stable future to prepare for. To keep these programs funded, you’d need a wholly different approach — indeed a whole new perspective on mounting federal debt and the role of entitlements.

The future is a race between rising health care costs and economic growth, a race that the economy is losing. Each time health costs outpace the GDP, it creates what the CBO calls “excess cost growth,” which feeds the federal debt. If the government could close this gap, the long-term budget outlook would be a lot rosier.

There are two ways to solve this issue: Either contain health care costs — say through price regulation or more competitive markets — or boost economic growth enough to pay for this expensive health care. Success on either front would make health care spending look more manageable over future decades and lighten the debt load.

Entitlement reform needs health care reform to work

Few of the proposals that commonly fall under the heading of entitlement reform target the health care cost problem, which limits their ability to reduce the long-term debt.

Even when they do address health care, often the result is to shift — rather than solve — the problem. Say lawmakers decide to dramatically cut Medicare. That would indeed ease the government’s debt problem. But the underlying dynamic — the race between health costs and the GDP — wouldn’t really change. Seniors would still need health care, and per-person costs would likely still grow (maybe even faster, since Medicare is a relatively efficient program).

On top of all this, there’s also a deep-seated political barrier: It’s no good if one party picks its favored solution only to watch the other party dismantle it when they next take over. You need political consensus to make changes stick, and America is notably short on consensus right now.

In the end, though, it won’t do to just throw up our hands. Absent some workable solution, spending on health care will sink the federal budget, generating levels of debt that would hold back the economy and potentially spark a global crisis of confidence in the United States’ ability to borrow.

If Republicans are serious about addressing this challenge and reducing America’s debt, they need to find an approach to entitlement reform that can both reduce out-of-control health costs and also survive under Democratic governance.

[geeksfromfuture-blog]

Can Technology Save Judges?

What does technology have to do with the future of judges? Is it possible for judges to be able to check out their cases, judge it and determine whether or not a particular case can go forward. There are a number of interesting observations that have been made as to what has happened in regards to technology in regards to the court system. For instance, in many cases, juries find evidence that has not been presented in the courtroom. The judge has allowed it. It is only through technology that the case can be presented in the court room, not through a computer that would be sitting in front of the judge. However, in many instances, judges have suggested that the computers might be distracting for jurors because of the colorful images of the game consoles that have been used. The reality is that this is just the most visible part of the issue. The issue that is being talked about is how technology can help, not only in enhancing the quality of the courtroom, but also how it can help people who are involved in the case involve. If this is done properly, the jurors will more than likely not be distracted. They will be focused on the case and on the evidence that they need to find. If the information is really presented in a way that allows the judge to see all of the case, then the evidence can be made easier to read. This would mean less time on the clerk's desk and more time to hear the case. Judges can look at case files with less distractions. It is expected that they will look at the things that they need to do in terms of the evidence. It is expected that they will be able to make more meaningful decisions from the trial. The electronic presentation of information through video format is another tool that can be used to help the judge to do his job. This will allow them to see everything that the evidence contains, whether or not the judge decides that a certain piece of information is relevant or not. This is done in real time. Judges will then be able to make decisions. Not just an initial decision, but to review the evidence and the case based on the evidence presented, with a lot more weight to be given to evidence. Although the technology has not been used yet in courts, there are those who believe that it can help judges do their jobs better. All judges should consider this as technology becomes more advanced. If judges are constantly impressed by the technology that is introduced into the courtroom, then a problem will not occur. I think that any time that technology is used in the courthouse, judges should carefully examine what it does, and if it can benefit them. If they are not given the opportunity to do this, then the technology will be looked at as a distraction and not a help. We are at a point in time where the use of these technologies should not be a concern. However, it is up to the judges to ensure that the technology used in the courtroom does not hinder them from doing their jobs.

Will Technology Save Judges?

Will technology save judges? Yes, it will! It's been proven time again that judges in the current legal system are underpaid, overworked, and undervalued. In fact, there is currently a class action lawsuit filed against the US Court of Appeals. The latest lawsuit revolves around a federal appeals court which, according to legal websites, is "The New York Times of the US." This federal appeals court, as well as most of the other appellate courts in the country, rules on the cases that come before them. The main court of appeals is one of the most important courts in the nation. There is more to this lawsuit than a lack of salesmanship. Consider the following: The complaints against the court (as with most appellate courts) center on the long and tedious "time consuming" process of sending out the various petitions that are submitted to the court. Although some of these claims may be true, the lengthy and at times disorganized process is certainly not a reason to deny the most fundamental aspect of our judicial system--our judges. It's a fact that the appeals court has recently had its budget cut by the House Appropriations Committee. To pay for this shortfall, however, the panel decided to eliminate grants intended to help litigants obtain attorney compensation in their legal cases. There is also a need to ensure that the court system is able to deal with the vast amount of data that is coming through the mail. Most people do not realize this but the court system houses hundreds of thousands of cases. These cases are not ranked in order of importance and must be put into chronological order. One of the main concerns that is raised by the court is that the level of communication is essential to maintaining the public trust. Simply put, what happens if a judge decides that a criminal defendant was actually innocent? What is a judge supposed to do with all of this new system? Obviously, no one wants to hear that they are going to be expected to submit to the whims of a "reformer." The Americans, and indeed many other folks around the world, feel as though the system is broken. They see a group of men and women who seem to have absolutely no direction or purpose and seem to view any changes that are made to the legal system as positive measures to improve things. For the past two years, we have seen the slow demise of this system and the clamor to get it back to its rightful place. Please consider all this and think on it.

Read the full article

[exploringsocialinformatics]

Blog #2: Do Androids Dream Of Tenured Positions?

I wrote this in response to the article “Imagine How Great Universities Could Be Without All Those Human Teachers” by Allison Schrager and Amy Wang. I chose to write about it because of my background in education, because I feel like I really benefited a lot from the personal connections I made with my human professors in undergrad and also because I’m scared of robots.

I admit that the concept of AI does terrify me a little so I really had to reevaluate my anti-robot bias as I tried to figure out exactly where I stood in the fairly confusing lane between AI technology as a helpful assistant and AI technology as a terrifying force coming to steal jobs from professors. After careful consideration, though, I’ve come to a firm conclusion: not only should AI/automation in general not be wholesale replacing human labor, we don’t actually have to let it wholesale replace human labor. Inevitability sometimes only exists because we make something inevitable. The robots aren’t making themselves.

Or. . .I guess they kind of are, but--you know what I mean.

The choice to replace any job with AI technology instead of utilizing AI and adapting that job to both benefit the worker and to add more diverse tasks that couldn’t be accomplished by a machine is fundamentally a choice in favor of profit over people. I realize that it’s naive to think that major corporations or even universities might choose people over profit but, with the smallest percentage of hope I have left for the world, I know that it’s at least an option.

For example, the McKinsey Institute (not a group of folks who I would assume would be pushing for human decency) has laid out plans for the future of retail workers when automation is more of an established presence in their establishments. They reference already existing examples, writing, “Several grocers, for example, are creating new roles for in-store pickers and e-commerce distribution centers. [. . .] Meanwhile, McDonald’s has not only introduced table service in restaurants but also rolled out self-service ordering kiosks. Best Buy has pushed further into adjacent services, creating new customer-service roles in its In-Home Advisor and Total Tech Support programs and retraining employees for them” (Begley, Hancock). The ideal here is shifting labor, not replacing it.  

With all of that in mind, I feel compelled to take a moral stance here: this is less an issue of technology and more an issue of properly compensating employees. The human ones with skin and hearts and stuff, whose humanness is often a key factor of their job. And this is especially true of educators, whether K - 12 or higher education.

The notion that AI can replace professors just goes to show the fundamental disrespect that we as a society have for educators. This is something that we can see in how little they’re paid (especially adjuncts, who don’t nearly make enough to survive [Douglas-Gabriel]). It’s also ignoring the possibility of shifting their labor. This argument requires that we’re all on the same page that higher education should be about expanding knowledge: replacing the day to day work of grading or answering easily answerable questions with the help of AI, in an ideal world, wouldn’t mean job losses for TAs or potentially un-tenured professors. If universities properly focused their money (for example, focusing more on professors than administration [Lewis]), academics and robots could peacefully co-exist. Imagine a world where professors won’t have to worry about minutiae and instead have time to focus on research and writing and other things that are the reason they got into academia and that will actively make them better teachers. Imagine a world where TAs get real world experience actively helping with that research. Professors who have more time to work with students one on one! To write grants! To live more fulfilled and meaningful lives!

It’s exciting!

Again, naive and probably idealistic, especially considering that this would require universities to radically change their budgets. It would be also likely require more funding and more specified funding from the federal government for public universities. These are both very large feats.

In his paper Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? David H. Autor backs up my idyllic academic vision when he states that, on top of replacing labor, “automation also complements labor, raises output in ways that lead to higher demand for labor, and interacts with adjustments in labor supply” (2015). Essentially, the purpose of automation should be to make life easier for people, not to displace them.

There are a few significant arguments in favor of focusing more funds on AI in academic institutions that I find compelling, many of them focused on the students. On a base social level, I would probably have been more comfortable addressing a robot as an anxious undergrad than I would my professors and having a resource that would be available more frequently than a human could possibly be would be a comfort. Schrager and Wang explain the software created by the company Hobsons and how it can figure out demographics that might be struggling and use it to identify specific students that are close to dropping out. This is described as “granular,” (3) which is important--after all, professors are notably human. They can’t catch and parse small things like that, especially with crowded classrooms.

Another argument is that investing in technology that can directly help students and takes over the bulk of teaching saves money because you can hire fewer professors; ultimately, this could be worth the loss (7 - 8). If AI can do the menial labor behind teaching, why pay a human to do it when that requires a consistent salary and when the money could be used in ways that would more directly benefit--as was already mentioned--far more students than a single professor could reach? Kristin Houser writes, on the online publication Futurism, in regard to K - 12 teachers being replaced that “after the initial development costs, administrators wouldn’t need to worry about paying digital teachers. This saved money could then be used to pay for the needed updates to education facilities or other costs” (“The Situation to Our Education Crisis”), which seemingly supports the same claim about colleges. She also adds--and I find the idea that this technology would function so efficiently and without bias far more idealistic than anything I believe, but it’s still good to think about--that “digital teachers wouldn’t need days off and would never be late for work. Administrators could upload any changes to curricula [. . .] and the systems would never make mistakes. If programmed correctly, they also wouldn’t show any biases toward students based on gender, race, socio-economic status, personality preference, or other consideration” (Houser). These are all certainly elements that could positively impact education if they functioned well enough.

Even with both sides of the coin, though, there’s some evidence that the coin itself is less relevant than we think. There have been several studies which point out that automation isn’t killing off manufacturing jobs at nearly the rate that people have been expecting. Jared Bernstein, former chief financial advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, wrote in the Washington Post that the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs after 2000 had more to do with trade than it did automation (“Contrary to Popular Wisdom”). This was also a contentious moment in a Democratic Primary debate last fall between Senator Elizabeth Warren and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, with the former supporting Bernstein’s claim and the latter supporting the issues with automation. According to Politifacts, both the candidates were effectively right (Greenberg). So, essentially, this isn’t to say that automation isn’t part of the problem, it’s just that the situation is likely not as dramatic as economists and others have made it out to be.

Also, there certainly aren’t clear indicators that automation will be taking over academia specifically anytime soon. To say otherwise seems unnecessarily fear-inducing. As I said, though, I might be naive. Maybe college professors and TAs should be stocking up on whatever weapons are most effective against a robot uprising (. . .water?) or at least updating their resumes. If this does become a trend, though, I sincerely hope that the inherent value of good, earnest, sentient human educators is considered. As someone who primarily took undergrad classes in the humanities, the lived experiences of a professor often go hand in hand with their own education to make them more effective at relating to students. Giving up a fully realized, authentic education just for a more efficient one isn’t worth it.

Resources

Autor, D. H. (2015). Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30.

Begley, S, Hancock, B. (n.d.). Automation in retail: An executive overview for getting ready. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/automation-in-retail-an-executive-overview-for-getting-ready

Bernstein, J. (2018, July 12). Contrary to popular wisdom, automation is not a job killer in U.S. manufacturing. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/12/contrary-to-popular-wisdom-automation-is-not-a-job-killer-in-u-s-manufacturing/

Douglas-Gabriel, D. (2019, February 15). 'It Keeps You Nice and Disposable': The Plight of Adjunct Professors. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/it-keeps-you-nice-and-disposable-the-plight-of-adjunct-professors/2019/02/14/6cd5cbe4-024d-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html

Greenberg, J. (2019, October 16). What's the Manufacturing Job Killer, Automation or Trade? . Retrieved from https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/oct/16/both-trade-and-automation-hurt-and-helped-jobs-whi/

Houser, K. (2018, January 17). The solution to our education crisis might be AI. Retrieved from https://futurism.com/ai-teachers-education-crisis

Lewis, N. (2017, February 17). U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go? Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/02/17/u-s-colleges-where-does-the-money-go/

Schrager, A., & Wang, A. X. (2017, September 27). Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers. Retrieved from https://qz.com/1065818/ai-university/

[macimoff]

TV tip for Monday

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We reserve the right to delete comments that violate our terms of use or criminal or civil law norms or damage the reputation of DVD-Forum.at without giving reasons. No claims can be made against these steps. In the event of repeated violations, an exclusion from our community is to be expected, furthermore DVD-Forum.at reserves the right to notify and / or make claims for damages in the event of serious violations such as criminally relevant facts. But real terrorists interfere in the due pronunciation ... With a gigantic budget of $ 100 million at the time, James Cameron was allowed to practice for "Titanic" and delivered a fabulous material battle - with Oscar-nominated tricks, a lot of irony and a stunning dream couple. Meanwhile, Aziz and the rest of his people reach Miami, take Harry's daughter Dana hostage, and entrench themselves with the last warhead in a skyscraper. Harry "borrows" a Harrier whiz kid to chase. True Lies disappointed at the checkout, but is now seen as evidence of the dream factory's self-irony, which the regular audience could not or did not like. "True Lies" thoroughly takes the martial bombast cinema to its shovel. How harmful is hair bleaching to hair? I would love to try it, but I'm afraid of damaging my hair. I have already searched the Internet Movie Database, but there are still enough films left. Does anyone know where the dance scene occurs?

The film started on August 18, 1994 in German cinemas. Who does not remember today how Jamie Lee Curtis (57) put on a more or less lascivious pole dance for Arnold Schwarzenegger (69) in the blockbuster "True Lies" in underwear? There has long been speculation about a sequel to the film by James Cameron (62), now the actress has spoken up on the subject and would have a plausible action ready for the sequel, writes the page "TV3". The killer with the mask is back! November their 61st birthday. It's hard to believe that her appearance in "Halloween" was 41 years ago. The careers of the following acting greats are based on sheer horror and a good dose of tension. Directed by James Cameron, the agent thriller starring Curtis and Schwarzenegger became a huge hit at the box office worldwide in 1994. In reality, however, Harry is a top agent in a federal counter-terrorism organization called the "Omega Sector", which insists on strict confidentiality that not even his wife knows about his real work. Harry is currently working on the persecution of art dealer Juno Skinner, who iphone 11 bazooka phone case is paid to smuggle several nuclear warheads from the former Soviet Union into the interior of ancient statues in order to threaten the United States. Even though Harry has already hit the terrorist organization violently, its leader Salim Abu Aziz manages to escape him.

[xmarisolx]

MotherJones 

Peter’s Choice 

I asked my student why he voted for Trump. The answer was thoughtful, smart, and terrifying. 

RICK PERLSTEIN JAN/FEB 2017 ISSUE 

Mike McQuade 

This past October, I taught a weeklong seminar on the history of conservatism to honors students from around the state of Oklahoma. In five long days, my nine very engaged students and I got to know each other fairly well. Six were African American women. Then there was a middle-aged white single mother, a white kid who looked like any other corn-fed Oklahoma boy and identified himself as “queer,” and the one straight white male. I’ll call him Peter. 

Peter is 21 and comes from a town of about 3,000 souls. It’s 85 percent white, according to the 2010 census, and 1.2 percent African American—which would make for about 34 black folks. “Most people live around the poverty line,” Peter told the class, and hunting is as much a sport as a way to put food on the table. 

Peter was one of the brightest students in the class, and certainly the sweetest. He liked to wear overalls to school—and on the last day, in a gentle tweak of the instructor, a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. A devout evangelical, he’d preferred former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at the start of the primary season, but was now behind Donald Trump. 

One day the students spent three hours drafting essays about the themes we’d talked about in class. I invited them to continue writing that night so the next morning we could discuss one of their pieces in detail. I picked Peter’s because it was extraordinary. In only eight hours he’d churned out eight pages, eloquent and sharp. 

When I asked him if I could discuss his essay in this article, he replied, “That sounds fine with me. If any of my work can be used to help the country with its political turmoil, I say go for it!” Then he sent me a new version with typos corrected and a postelection postscript: “My wishful hope is that my compatriots will have their tempers settled by Trump’s election, and that maybe both sides can learn from the Obama and Trump administrations in order to understand how both sides feel. Then maybe we can start electing more moderate people, like John Kasich and Jim Webb, who can find reasonable commonality on both sides and make government work.” Did I mention he was sweet? 

When he read the piece aloud in class that afternoon in October, the class was riveted. Several of the black women said it was the first time they’d heard a Trump supporter clearly set forth what he believed and why. (Though, defying stereotypes, one of these women—an aspiring cop—was also planning to vote for Trump.) 

Peter’s essay took off from the main class reading, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Its central argument is that conservative movements across history are united in their devotion to the maintenance of received social hierarchy. Peter, whose essay was titled “Plight of the Redneck,” had a hard time seeing how that applied to the people he knew. “These people are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and they, seemingly, have nothing to benefit from maintaining the system of order that keeps them at the bottom." 

“We all live out in the wilderness, either in the middle of a forest or on a farm,” he wrote. “Some people cannot leave their homes during times of unfortunate weather. Many still dry clothes by hanging them on wires with clothespins outside. These people are nowhere near the top, or even the middle, of any hierarchy. These people are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and they, seemingly, have nothing to benefit from maintaining the system of order that keeps them at the bottom.” His county ended up going about 70 percent for Trump. 

Concerning race, Peter wrote, “In Oklahoma, besides Native Americans, there have traditionally been very few minorities. Few blacks have ever lived near the town that I am from…Even in my generation, despite there being a little more diversity, there was no racism, nor was there a reason for racism to exist.” His town’s 34 or so black people might beg to differ, of course; white people’s blindness to racism in their midst is an American tradition. As one of the African American students in the class—I’ll call her Karen—put it, whites in her town see “racism as nonexistent unless they witness it firsthand. And then it almost has to be over the top—undeniable acts of violence like hate crimes or cross burnings on front lawns—before they would acknowledge it as such.” But it’s relevant to the story I’m telling that I’m certain Peter isn’t individually, deliberately racist, and that Karen agrees. 

Still, Peter’s thinking might help us frame a central debate on the left about what to make of Trump’s victory. Is it, in the main, a recrudescence of bigotry on American soil—a reactionary scream against a nation less white by the year? Or is it more properly understood as an economically grounded response to the privations that neoliberalism has wracked upon the heartland? 

Peter knows where he stands. He remembers multiple factories and small businesses “shutting down or laying off. Next thing you know, half of downtown” in the bigger city eight miles away “became vacant storefronts.” Given that experience, he has concluded, “for those people who have no political voice and come from states that do not matter, the best thing they can do is try to send in a wrecking ball to disrupt the system.” When Peter finished with that last line, there was a slight gasp from someone in the class—then silence, then applause. They felt like they got it. 

I was also riveted by Peter’s account, convinced it might be useful as a counterbalance to glib liberal dismissals of the role of economic decline in building Trumpland. Then I did some research. According to the 2010 census, the median household income in Peter’s county is a little more than $45,000. By comparison, Detroit’s is about $27,000 and Chicago’s (with a higher cost of living) is just under $49,000. The poverty rate is 17.5 percent in the county and 7.6 percent in Peter’s little town, compared with Chicago’s 22.7 percent. The unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent. 

The town isn’t rich, to be sure. But it’s also not on the “bottom.” Oklahoma on the whole has been rather dynamic economically: Real GDP growth was 2.8 percent in 2014—down from 4.3 percent in 2013, but well above the 2.2 percent nationally. The same was true of other Trump bastions like Texas (5.2 percent growth) and West Virginia (5.1 percent). 

Peter, though, perceives the region’s economic history as a simple tale of desolation and disappointment. “Everyone around was poor, including the churches,” he wrote, “and charities were nowhere near (this wasn’t a city, after all), so more people had to use some sort of government assistance. Taxes went up [as] the help became more widespread." 

He was just calling it like he saw it. But it’s striking how much a bright, inquisitive, public-spirited guy can take for granted that just is not so. Oklahoma’s top marginal income tax rate was cut by a quarter point to 5 percent in 2016, the same year lawmakers hurt the working poor by slashing the earned-income tax credit. On the "tax burden” index used by the website WalletHub, Oklahoma’s is the 45th lowest, with rock-bottom property taxes and a mere 4.5 percent sales tax. (On Election Day, Oklahomans voted down a 1-point sales tax increase meant to raise teacher pay, which is 49th in the nation.). 

As for government assistance, Oklahoma spends less than 10 percent of its welfare budget on cash assistance. The most a single-parent family of three can get is $292 a month—that’s 18 percent of the federal poverty line. Only 2,469 of the more than 370,000 Oklahomans aged 18 to 64 who live in poverty get this aid. And the state’s Medicaid eligibility is one of the stingiest in the nation, covering only adults with dependent children and incomes below 42 percent of the poverty level—around $8,500 for a family of three. 

But while Peter’s analysis is at odds with much of the data, his overall story does fit a national pattern. Trump voters report experiencing greater-than-average levels of economic anxiety, even though they tend have better-than-average incomes. And they are inclined to blame economic instability on the federal government—even, sometimes, when it flows from private corporations. Peter wrote about the sense of salvation his neighbors felt when a Walmart came to town: “Now there were enough jobs, even part-time jobs…But Walmart constantly got attacked by unions nationally and with federal regulations; someone lost their job, or their job became part-time." 

It’s worth noting that if the largest retail corporation in the world has been conspicuously harmed by unions and regulations of late, it doesn’t show in its profits, which were $121 billion in 2016. And of course, Walmart historically has had a far greater role in shuttering small-town Main Streets than in revitalizing them. But Peter’s neighbors see no reason to resent it for that. He writes, "The majority of the people do not blame the company for their loss because they realize that businesses [are about] making money, and that if they had a business of their own, they would do the same thing." 

It’s not fair to beat up on a sweet 21-year-old for getting facts wrong—especially if, as is likely, these were the only facts he was told. Indeed, teaching the class, I was amazed how even the most liberal students took for granted certain dubious narratives in which they (and much of the rest of the country) were marinated all year long, like the notion that Hillary Clinton was extravagantly corrupt. "After continually losing on the economic side,” he wrote, “one of the few things that you can retain is your identity." 

Feelings can’t be fact-checked, and in the end, feelings were what Peter’s eloquent essay came down to­—what it feels like to belong, and what it feels like to be culturally dispossessed. "After continually losing on the economic side,” he wrote, “one of the few things that you can retain is your identity. What it means, to you, to be an American, your somewhat self-sufficient and isolated way of life, and your Christian faith and values. Your identity and heritage is the very last thing you can cling to…Abortion laws and gay marriage are the two most recent upsets. The vast majority of the state of Oklahoma has opposed both of the issues, and social values cannot be forced by the government." 

On these facts he is correct: In a 2015 poll, 68 percent of Oklahomans called themselves "pro-life,” and only 30 percent supported marriage equality. Until 2016 there were only a handful of abortion providers in the entire state, and the first new clinic to open in 40 years guards its entrance with a metal detector. 

Peter thinks he’s not a reactionary. Since that sounds like an insult, I’d like to think so, too. But in writing this piece, I did notice a line in his essay that I had glided over during my first two readings, maybe because I liked him too much to want to be scared by him. “One need only look to the Civil War and the lasting legacies of Reconstruction through to today’s current racism and race issues to see what happens when the federal government forces its morals on dissenting parts of the country.” The last time I read that, I shuddered. So I emailed Peter. “I say the intrusions were worth it to end slavery and turn blacks into full citizens,” I wrote. “A lot of liberals, even those most disposed to having an open mind to understanding the grievances of people like you and yours, will have a hard time with [your words]." 

Peter’s answer was striking. He first objected (politely!) to what he saw as the damning implication behind my observation. Slavery and Reconstruction? "I was using it as an example of government intrusion and how violent and negative the results can be when the government tries to tell people how to think. I take it you saw it in terms of race in politics. The way we look at the same thing shows how big the difference is between our two groups." 

To him, focusing on race was "an attention-grabbing tool that politicians use to their advantage,” one that “really just annoys and angers conservatives more than anything, because it is usually a straw man attack.” He compared it to what “has happened with this election: everyone who votes for Trump must be racist and sexist, and there’s no possible way that anyone could oppose Hillary unless it’s because they’re sexist. Accusing racism or sexism eliminates the possibility of an honest discussion about politics." 

He asked me to imagine "being one of those rednecks under the poverty line, living in a camper trailer on your grandpa’s land, eating about one full meal a day, yet being accused by Black Lives Matter that you are benefiting from white privilege and your life is somehow much better than theirs." 

And that’s when I wanted to meet him halfway: Maybe we could talk about the people in Chicago working for poverty wages and being told by Trump supporters that they were lazy. Or the guy with the tamale cart in front of my grocery store—always in front of my grocery store, morning, noon, and night—who with so much as a traffic violation might find himself among the millions whom Trump intends to immediately deport. 

I wanted to meet him halfway, until he started talking about history. 

"The reason I used the Civil War and Reconstruction is because it isn’t a secret that Reconstruction failed,” Peter wrote. “It failed and left the South in an extreme poverty that it still hasn’t recovered from.” And besides, “slavery was expensive and the Industrial Revolution was about to happen. Maybe if there had been no war, slavery would have faded peacefully." 

As a historian, I found this remarkable, since it was precisely what all American schoolchildren learned about slavery and Reconstruction for much of the 20th century. Or rather, they did until the civil rights era, when serious scholarship dismantled this narrative, piece by piece. But not, apparently, in Peter’s world. "Until urban liberals move to the rural South and live there for probably a decade or more,” he concluded, “there’s no way to fully appreciate the view." 

This was where he left me plumb at a loss. Liberals must listen to and understand Trump supporters. But what you end up understanding from even the sweetest among them still might chill you to the bone. 

Read Peter’s full essay at motherjones.com/oklahoma.

[vsplusonline]

Tokyo Olympics: Many questions, few answers in face of coronavirus pandemic

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/tokyo-olympics-many-questions-few-answers-in-face-of-coronavirus-pandemic/

Tokyo Olympics: Many questions, few answers in face of coronavirus pandemic

The Tokyo Olympics were postponed a month ago. But there are still more questions than answers about the new opening on July 23, 2021, and what form those games will take.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, will the Olympics really start in 15 months? If so, in what form? With fans? Without fans? Can they open without a vaccine? TV broadcasters and sponsors provide 91% of the income for the International Olympic Committee. How much pressure will they exert on the form these Olympics take? What about the Beijing Winter Olympics, opening in February 2022. China is where the coronavirus was first discovered, and the authoritarian government has been draconian in terms of lockdowns and travel restrictions.

IOC President Thomas Bach has already said there is “no blueprint” in assembling what he called this “huge jigsaw puzzle.”

“I cannot promise ideal solutions,” he said. “But I can promise that we’ll do everything to have the best possible games for everybody.”

Q: Some scientists are skeptical the delayed Tokyo Olympics can open in 15 months. What are the prospects?

A: Many scientists believe an Olympics with spectators can’t happen until a vaccine is developed. That is probably 12-18 months away, experts say, and then there will be questions about efficacy, distribution, and who gets it first. Kentaro Iwata, a Japanese professor of infectious disease, said last week: “I am very pessimistic about holding the Olympic Games next summer unless you hold the Olympic Games in a totally different structure such as no audience or a very limited participation.” Yoshitake Yokokura, president of the Japan Medical Association, came to the same conclusion in a recent interview. An Olympics in empty venues is looking more likely, which is the scenario for many sports. Fans hungry for some action may have grown accustomed to this configuration by the time the Olympics arrive.

Q; Postponing the Olympics will be costly. Who will pick up the expenses?

A: In two words: Japanese taxpayers. Japanese organizers and the IOC have said they are “assessing” the added costs. They have not ventured an estimate — at least not publicly. Estimates in Japan range from $2 billion to $6 billion. Host country Japan is bound by the terms of the Host City Contract signed in 2013 to pay most of the bills. The IOC has already said the delay will cost it “several hundred million dollars.” IOC member John Coates, who oversees preparations for Tokyo, said this money will go to struggling international federations and national Olympic committees, and not to Japan organizers. The bills keep piling up. Japan originally said the Olympics would cost $7.3 billion. Officially the budget is now $12.6 billion, although a national audit board says it’s twice that much. All but $5.6 billion is public money. And now come the costs of the delay. Tokyo organizers were upset last week with the IOC. On its website, it had Prime Minister Shinzo Abe saying Japan would pick up the added costs. The IOC deleted the statement, even though in principle it is correct.

Q: Where do we stand with venues and the Olympic Village?

A: Not much word so far. CEO Toshiro Muto has said it will take time to see if all these venues can be used. Of course, some may require renegotiated contacts. Proprietors of all venues will be under tremendous pressure to cooperate so the original competition schedule can be maintained. Tokyo’s Big Sight convention center is likely to remain the media center. Muto said it has been configured for the Olympics and hinted it would likely stay that way. The Olympics draw 11,000 athletes from 206 nations. The Paralympics add 4,400 more.

Q: What about tickets?

A: Organizers have said they will try to honor tickets already purchased. Officials say a total of 7.8 million are available. Organizers budgeted $800 million in revenue from ticket sales, and unprecedented demand has pushed that to $1 billion. That’s roughly 15% of the $5.6 billion of the privately funded operating budget. This income can’t be sacrificed with the bills piling up. Same is true for $3.3 billion sold in local sponsorships. The problems will arise if ticket holders are not allowed to attend and want refunds. Tickets carry a “force majeure” clause, which might free organizers from the obligation to provide refunds. However, it’s not clear that COVID-19 will stand up as a justification.

Q: How reliant is the IOC on income from broadcasters and sponsors?

A: A massive 91% of IOC income is from those two sources — broadcasters and sponsors — and 73% is from broadcasters. Bach has said the IOC does not have “cash flow” problems, and the committee reportedly has a reserve fund of about $1 billion. But it stages only two events every four years, almost the entire source of its $5.7 billion income in a four-year cycle. It’s not like a soccer or baseball league with thousands of matches. It needs the Summer Olympics. American broadcaster NBC pays more than $1 billion to air each Olympics. The IOC will push the Olympics to go forward, in whatever form.

Q: Where is the Olympic flame, which arrived from Greece on March 26?

A: It was taken off public display earlier this month in Fukushima prefecture, located 250 kilometers (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo. Muto said after the Olympic torch relay was canceled that “the Olympic flame was put under the management of Tokyo 2020. Obviously, in the future there is a possibility it might be put on display somewhere. However, for now, it is under the management of Tokyo 2020 and I’m not going to make any further comment on the issue.” There are suggestions the IOC is thinking of taking the flame on a world tour, hoping to use it as a public-relations tool and a symbol of the battle against the virus. However, any tour would be impossible until travel restrictions are lifted. Taking the flame away from Japan could also upset the hosts. China took the flame on a world tour in 2008, which was met with protests over China’s human rights policies. At the time IOC President Jacques Rogge said the “crisis” threatened the Olympics. World tours with the flame have not been held since.

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Paul Krugman Warns of Fiscal Time Bomb If Relief Is Insufficient

The Nobel Prize-winning economist says we will likely need a stimulus bill as large as $4 or $5 trillion.

April 2, 2020 15+ min read

This story originally appeared on Business Insider

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the author of many books including the recently published “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.” Krugman spoke with the Business Insider editor-at-large Sara Silverstein to discuss why this recession was different from any we had ever dealt with. Following is a transcript of the video.

Sara Silverstein: Paul, your newest book is about zombie ideas, which are basically things that we know are false. We can prove they’re false, but people still believe and they still impact our policies and our economy. How does this idea of zombie ideas apply to the coronavirus crisis?

Paul Krugman: This is new. No one was — I mean, it’s not true that no one saw this, but there wasn’t — virus denial wasn’t an industry before this hit. But the reactions to this, to the whole handling — the coronavirus has been like global warming, but at about a hundred times speed. Right? The same thing. “The scientists are in a conspiracy against President Trump and trying to bring socialism with false warnings.” All of that is what sort of laid the groundwork. You basically carried over the whole set of attitudes that came from climate denial, which is one of the most important zombies out there, straight into the coronavirus until like two days ago.

Silverstein: How does that affect how we’re reacting to the crisis?

Krugman: We’ve been far behind the curve. It was already obvious in January that this was extremely high risk and we should have been doing massive ramping up of testing. We should’ve been doing social distancing. We should’ve been doing all these things that help to contain it. We really didn’t get serious or Washington didn’t get serious, again, until just a few days ago about any of this.

Even now, we’re not doing what you always do when you have an emergency, which is you federalize the production of essential equipment. We still haven’t done that. We still have this wild uncoordinated scrambled for ventilators and all of that.

The denial, virus denial, which is basically the same as climate denial, has been critical. I mean tens of thousands of people will die unnecessarily in this country because of it.

Silverstein: If you were responsible for writing the response, and we could talk about the policy response, what we’re calling the $2 trillion stimulus package, what would it look like?

Krugman: There’s first of all, there’s the epidemiological response, which is — the one thing I know about epidemiology is I’m not an expert.

The economics thing, I’m kind of annoyed that people keep calling this a stimulus bill because it mostly is. We want GDP to decline. We want lots of people to stay home and not work while we get this thing under control. The goal is not so much to sustain the economy per se as it is to give this thing time to work and to alleviate hardship. This is mostly a disaster-relief bill.

The things that are really important are unemployment benefits, cash to families, loans to small business that allow the most affected people to get through this with the minimum of financial hardship. It also provides some stimulus. There are parts of the economy that are still alive. We don’t want them collapsing because nobody has money to spend. There is some stimulus in there too, but this is mainly a giant disaster-relief bill, which unfortunately despite its size is probably not big enough.

Silverstein: How big do you think it’s going to need to be, and how should we finance it?

Krugman: Well, something like … We’re still groping here, but something like 20, 25% of the economy is going to be shut down for an extended period and you really want to think of aid that’s on the scale of that shutdown. We’re basically trying to replace the incomes of those people, and we don’t do total replacement, but mostly. We’ve got a $20-trillion-a-year economy, so it’s not hard to make the case this might end up being $4 trillion or $5 trillion that we really should be doing it. The answer is borrow the money.

The private sector is not investing. Mortgage applications have collapsed. Business, who’s going to be building office parks and all of that in the middle of a plague? Private saving for sure has gone way, way up. Maybe people are spending some of the money they’re not spending at restaurants on other things, but a lot of it is just being saved. We have this huge surplus in the private sector of all of this excess money looking for someplace to go. They’re offering it to the government for free. Real interest rates are negative. So, borrow it.

Silverstein: The unemployment insurance provision, you said makes sense. What do you think about the way that they’re spending the rest of the 2 trillion?

Krugman: Well, there’s different pieces. The small-business side looks like it’s pretty well designed. It’s loans that turn into grants for small businesses to maintain the payroll. So, that’s good.

Just a flat-out check of $1,200, that’s good. They’re making it more difficult. It should be going automatically to people whether or not they filed tax returns as long as they’re in the record someplace. So they’re making it harder to get.

The big-business lending has an inspector-general provision to prevent corruption, which Trump has already said he’s going to disregard. I’m worried about that — as are we all — so there could be a lot of corruption at that end.

I’d say this is about 80% a reasonable bill and then 20% of … we don’t know, but they’re missing pieces. State and local governments really need a lot of help, and there’s not remotely enough money in there. In a way, I think this crisis is going to be prolonged even once the pandemic subsides by the fact that we’re going to have state and local governments that are in desperate financial constraints.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask you about the longer-term implications of some of these. Can you talk more about how that will impact ordinary people, the state and local governments’ financial hardships?

Krugman: Sure. State governments, local governments, unlike the federal government have to balance their budgets each year. All of the … They’re losing tax revenue. They’re having extra expenses. They’re going to have to make that up in the near future, which means that they’re going to be laying off … It’s going to be a lot like what happened after the 2008 crisis when layoffs of school teachers, layoffs of government employees were a big factor in holding back recovery and we’re going to be … Yeah, just as the pandemic starts to fade, we hope, we’re going to be seeing state and local governments cutting back severely.

Also, by the way, the extra unemployment benefits are only for the next four months. A lot of the financial support that we’re going to be providing now is going to be going away just when we’re hoping the economy will bounce back. I’m really worried that the economic fallout may last much, much longer than people are thinking.

Silverstein: As we start to bounce back, I don’t know how deep unemployment will get during the pandemic, but once jobs start coming back, where is going to be the new normal? Are we going to come back to full employment?

Krugman: Well, eventually, yes. Nothing about this has changed. Workers haven’t lost their skills. People haven’t lost their taste for all of the things that they want. But it is true that we had an economy that was … the economy’s weaker than we like to think even though we had full employment just the other day. We probably lost more jobs already than we did in the whole of the Great Recession. But just before that we were at full employment, but we are at full employment only with very, very low interest rates. To the extent that there’s been a lot of financial damage that comes out of this to balance sheets of companies and households have been really savaged by it, which they will have been by the time this comes to an end.

Getting enough demand to restore full employment may be a challenge. We may really … the White House has been talking about for the 17th time, they’re talking about infrastructure, but maybe after this we really should talk about how the economy really needs a big infrastructure push. Partly because we need the infrastructure, but also to ensure full employment.

Silverstein: You shared a chart showing that during the 1919 influenza pandemic, the stock market actually rose. What’s the difference between what happened then and what’s happening now?

Krugman: I’m not sure. It may be that there was actually less social distancing then, people just died. There was a fair bit, but it may have depressed the economy less that time. Also, we came into this with stocks basically priced for perfection. This may have just served as a warning that we don’t actually have perfection. This could be different, but I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually stocks do well because interest rates are very low. Stock market is a really poor guide and in general to the state of the real economy.

Silverstein: So few Americans are actually represented in the stock market and benefit or are hurt by changes in the stock market directly. Is there any reason that individuals should be worried about other people’s balance sheets and what the stock market is doing?

Krugman: Well, sure. A lot of people, most stocks are owned by … A great majority of stocks are owned by a small fraction of the population, but those people do account for a disproportionate share of consumer spending. They’re feeling poorer now, so that’s another reason that we’re going to be seeing some economic difficulties heading forward. People who were feeling rich and laying out on vacations and expensive restaurant meals may not be quite willing to do that even once the restaurants reopen and once the airlines are back up and running again.

Silverstein: You say that interest rates make it look like the — sorry, that’s my cat — interest rates make it look like investors are expecting a long-term recession. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

Krugman: Well, I wouldn’t quite … Interest rates have been extremely low for a long time now. The market seems to have bought into this jargon phrase, secular stagnation, which doesn’t really mean that the economy stagnates, but it means that the economy has a persistent shortage —  there just isn’t enough investment demand to use all the savings that people want it to make. The markets seem to have capitulated even before the coronavirus hit. The markets basically capitulated to the view that that’s where we were.

And they’re not so much signaling the necessarily that we’re in a recession for years, but we’re, they’re signaling that we’re going to have an economy that is always on the edge of a recession for the foreseeable future. That’s really, I think, one way to think about what secular stagnation means. The markets could be wrong, but it is clearly quite remarkable. A year and a half ago, markets were starting to act as if maybe the old days were coming back and normal levels of interest rates, and nobody seems to believe that now.

Silverstein: Can you walk us through your model for the coronavirus recession where nonessential employees versus essential employees and how the savings on one side and where everybody’s going to sort of fall out?

Krugman: Yeah, so I like to think of the economy, it’s stylized, too simple. But think of it as just two parts of the economy. There’s nonessentials, which means either stuff that really isn’t essential or stuff which we shouldn’t be doing because it spreads the disease. We can do without it. Then there’s essentials, or at least harmless. I’m not sure that Amazon orders aren’t essential but, delivery services we can keep going.

We are basically deliberately and appropriately shutting down the nonessential stuff. We’re doing, I would say it’s like a medically induced coma where you shut down major parts of the brain basically to give it a chance to heal from damage, and which is appropriate. It’s good. We need to do that if we don’t want lots of lots of people to die, but the trouble is, first of all, all those people who are left unemployed because of this, what are they going to live on? All the businesses that are not able to operate, how are they going to survive? Which is why we need a big aid package, which is basically relief. That’s the important part.

Now there’s a secondary consequence, which is if you don’t provide enough relief, all of those people whose businesses have been shut down can’t buy other stuff, and so you’ve got a sort of a conventional recession laid on top of that and that’s what we’re trying to prevent in addition. It’s mostly disaster relief, but there’s also stimulus to try and head off that conventional recession on top of the coma.

I think that’s the way to think about it. If you’re thinking that this is just a replay of 2008, you’re missing probably the bigger part of the story, but there are pieces. Part of this is like a replay of 2008, and that’s what we need. That part should be avoidable if we act forcefully enough, which we haven’t so far.

Silverstein: We haven’t so far acted forcefully enough in terms of relief?

Krugman: Yeah. There’s not enough money. The unemployment benefits, that’s a big deal. The small-business lending, that’s a pretty big deal. There’s not remotely enough aid to state and local governments. We’re making it too hard for people to get those checks.

Financial markets, thank God for the Fed, which at least is one bastion of competence that remains out there, and so they have been doing a yeoman work and getting the financial markets stabilized, although even there it takes time.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask, what do you think about the Fed’s response? Can you elaborate on what the Fed is doing right?

Krugman: Well, the Fed is basically stepping in. Financial markets were starting to shut down the same way they did in 2008 because so many balance-sheet losses because of the virus that investors were afraid of anything that wasn’t risk-free and highly liquid. You were watching corporate — even as interest rates on federal debt were plunging, corporate borrowing costs were soaring. Commercial paper rates were soaring. Basically money wasn’t available for keeping the business going.

Now the Fed has stepped in to basically do the lending that the private sector won’t. It’s been buying longer-term bonds. It has said it’s willing to buy corporate bonds if it needs to. They’re going to be doing commercial paper. There’s a commercial paper facility that they had back in the financial crisis, which I had a relative working for that, so I was pretty familiar with its operations and there are restarting it, but although that apparently won’t be up and running until next week.

The Fed is kind of … they’ve seen this movie and they’re making an effort to make sure that they get it under control. They’ve been doing a pretty good job. They went big aggressively. They realized that the risks of doing too little vastly outweigh the risk of doing too much and they’ve made the right call.

Silverstein: Should the Fed be buying municipals and corporate bonds or should they even go further and be able to buy stock?

Krugman: Well, I would say munis for sure because the state and local is a big issue. Corporate bonds, I think they certainly need to do, but they don’t, which is to say we are willing to do it. It may not be necessary actually to do it. There’s a lot of those of us who follow European affairs or, you know, this is our whatever-it-takes moment like that moment when Mario Draghi said he was willing to buy the bonds of distressed countries. It turns out he never actually had to do it. Just saying it was enough to stabilize the markets. Maybe that’s it, but you need to be willing to do it.

Stocks possibly, we haven’t reached that point yet, but that’s a possibility. There are limits to what the Fed much as some of my liberal friends say, “Why can’t the Fed just send to everybody money?” And unfortunately, that’s not within their legal remit, but they should be willing to buy again, whatever it takes, any kind of assets that they need to.

Silverstein: Should the Fed have been raising rates in retrospect when the economy was growing?

Krugman: No, no. It was clear that they overstated the recovery. They shouldn’t have raised rates as much as they did. They overshot. They should have … Yeah, some of us were saying, “Wait until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes.” And that really looks like good advice now. I’m not sure how much harm it did, but this is not why we’re in the mess we’re in now. Those rate hikes were premature, but they didn’t cause the virus.

But no, I mean the Fed maybe will come out of this with an understanding that whatever you thought was normal, based on the way the world looked 15 years ago is not normal in this world.

Silverstein: If you look at the US response from a health and an economic perspective versus other countries around the world, how do you think we fared? Is there anything to learn from other places?

Krugman: Yeah, don’t be like America. We screwed up on multiple levels. We totally failed. The other people can tell you more about the health response, but clearly we totally fell down on testing. We’ve totally fell down on medical equipment. We waited far too long on social distancing. All of that.

Other countries are doing … the economic response is better than ours. Ours was better than I feared it was going to be. There was a point where it looked like Republicans were going to say tax cuts are the answer to everything. But look at Denmark, which is corporations that keep their workers on payroll. The government is picking up 75% of the tab. That’s the kind of thing that really would be great. Unfortunately, I don’t think America is politically in that universe, but we’re in some ways having the weakest economic response of certainly of the G7 countries.

Silverstein: Finally, just to make you do my job. Where do you think the media is really missing the point? Is there anything that you would complain you wish that people would ask you?

Krugman: I think, well, I think the media had really, I mean other people can talk and take on the health-affairs stuff, but the media I think really still have missed the extent to which this is not a normal recession. We’re still hearing it discussed in terms of stimulus. We’re still hearing it as if this were the usual kinds of problems, and there’s some of that, but, I don’t think the fact that the essential thing is limiting hardship has really made it.

Every time I see stimulus in a headline about the tax bill, I get mad because that’s missing the point. I actually have seen almost nobody talking about what happens four or five months from now when hopefully the pandemic has subsided, but then you have financial crises at the state level and the unemployment benefits have expired. We have a huge fiscal time bomb, which we can see is being … the timer has been set on it as we speak, and I’ve seen almost no coverage of that.

Silverstein: What happens then? Let me ask you, Paul.

Krugman: Well, what happens is that just as the economy is ready to recover, mass layoffs of school teachers, mass cutoff of unemployment benefits undermine the nation’s recovery. This could end up being in a way, a little bit like what happened in 2008-2009 when we had a pretty effective response to the crisis, but then went to fiscal austerity, which meant that the recovery was very, very slow.

Even though this is a very different kind of crisis, we could have the same kind of story. I think at the moment, unless there’s another major round of legislation that is going to be the story.

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Paul Krugman Warns of Fiscal Time Bomb If Relief Is Insufficient

The Nobel Prize-winning economist says we will likely need a stimulus bill as large as $4 or $5 trillion.

April 2, 2020 15+ min read

This story originally appeared on Business Insider

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the author of many books including the recently published “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.” Krugman spoke with the Business Insider editor-at-large Sara Silverstein to discuss why this recession was different from any we had ever dealt with. Following is a transcript of the video.

Sara Silverstein: Paul, your newest book is about zombie ideas, which are basically things that we know are false. We can prove they’re false, but people still believe and they still impact our policies and our economy. How does this idea of zombie ideas apply to the coronavirus crisis?

Paul Krugman: This is new. No one was — I mean, it’s not true that no one saw this, but there wasn’t — virus denial wasn’t an industry before this hit. But the reactions to this, to the whole handling — the coronavirus has been like global warming, but at about a hundred times speed. Right? The same thing. “The scientists are in a conspiracy against President Trump and trying to bring socialism with false warnings.” All of that is what sort of laid the groundwork. You basically carried over the whole set of attitudes that came from climate denial, which is one of the most important zombies out there, straight into the coronavirus until like two days ago.

Silverstein: How does that affect how we’re reacting to the crisis?

Krugman: We’ve been far behind the curve. It was already obvious in January that this was extremely high risk and we should have been doing massive ramping up of testing. We should’ve been doing social distancing. We should’ve been doing all these things that help to contain it. We really didn’t get serious or Washington didn’t get serious, again, until just a few days ago about any of this.

Even now, we’re not doing what you always do when you have an emergency, which is you federalize the production of essential equipment. We still haven’t done that. We still have this wild uncoordinated scrambled for ventilators and all of that.

The denial, virus denial, which is basically the same as climate denial, has been critical. I mean tens of thousands of people will die unnecessarily in this country because of it.

Silverstein: If you were responsible for writing the response, and we could talk about the policy response, what we’re calling the $2 trillion stimulus package, what would it look like?

Krugman: There’s first of all, there’s the epidemiological response, which is — the one thing I know about epidemiology is I’m not an expert.

The economics thing, I’m kind of annoyed that people keep calling this a stimulus bill because it mostly is. We want GDP to decline. We want lots of people to stay home and not work while we get this thing under control. The goal is not so much to sustain the economy per se as it is to give this thing time to work and to alleviate hardship. This is mostly a disaster-relief bill.

The things that are really important are unemployment benefits, cash to families, loans to small business that allow the most affected people to get through this with the minimum of financial hardship. It also provides some stimulus. There are parts of the economy that are still alive. We don’t want them collapsing because nobody has money to spend. There is some stimulus in there too, but this is mainly a giant disaster-relief bill, which unfortunately despite its size is probably not big enough.

Silverstein: How big do you think it’s going to need to be, and how should we finance it?

Krugman: Well, something like … We’re still groping here, but something like 20, 25% of the economy is going to be shut down for an extended period and you really want to think of aid that’s on the scale of that shutdown. We’re basically trying to replace the incomes of those people, and we don’t do total replacement, but mostly. We’ve got a $20-trillion-a-year economy, so it’s not hard to make the case this might end up being $4 trillion or $5 trillion that we really should be doing it. The answer is borrow the money.

The private sector is not investing. Mortgage applications have collapsed. Business, who’s going to be building office parks and all of that in the middle of a plague? Private saving for sure has gone way, way up. Maybe people are spending some of the money they’re not spending at restaurants on other things, but a lot of it is just being saved. We have this huge surplus in the private sector of all of this excess money looking for someplace to go. They’re offering it to the government for free. Real interest rates are negative. So, borrow it.

Silverstein: The unemployment insurance provision, you said makes sense. What do you think about the way that they’re spending the rest of the 2 trillion?

Krugman: Well, there’s different pieces. The small-business side looks like it’s pretty well designed. It’s loans that turn into grants for small businesses to maintain the payroll. So, that’s good.

Just a flat-out check of $1,200, that’s good. They’re making it more difficult. It should be going automatically to people whether or not they filed tax returns as long as they’re in the record someplace. So they’re making it harder to get.

The big-business lending has an inspector-general provision to prevent corruption, which Trump has already said he’s going to disregard. I’m worried about that — as are we all — so there could be a lot of corruption at that end.

I’d say this is about 80% a reasonable bill and then 20% of … we don’t know, but they’re missing pieces. State and local governments really need a lot of help, and there’s not remotely enough money in there. In a way, I think this crisis is going to be prolonged even once the pandemic subsides by the fact that we’re going to have state and local governments that are in desperate financial constraints.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask you about the longer-term implications of some of these. Can you talk more about how that will impact ordinary people, the state and local governments’ financial hardships?

Krugman: Sure. State governments, local governments, unlike the federal government have to balance their budgets each year. All of the … They’re losing tax revenue. They’re having extra expenses. They’re going to have to make that up in the near future, which means that they’re going to be laying off … It’s going to be a lot like what happened after the 2008 crisis when layoffs of school teachers, layoffs of government employees were a big factor in holding back recovery and we’re going to be … Yeah, just as the pandemic starts to fade, we hope, we’re going to be seeing state and local governments cutting back severely.

Also, by the way, the extra unemployment benefits are only for the next four months. A lot of the financial support that we’re going to be providing now is going to be going away just when we’re hoping the economy will bounce back. I’m really worried that the economic fallout may last much, much longer than people are thinking.

Silverstein: As we start to bounce back, I don’t know how deep unemployment will get during the pandemic, but once jobs start coming back, where is going to be the new normal? Are we going to come back to full employment?

Krugman: Well, eventually, yes. Nothing about this has changed. Workers haven’t lost their skills. People haven’t lost their taste for all of the things that they want. But it is true that we had an economy that was … the economy’s weaker than we like to think even though we had full employment just the other day. We probably lost more jobs already than we did in the whole of the Great Recession. But just before that we were at full employment, but we are at full employment only with very, very low interest rates. To the extent that there’s been a lot of financial damage that comes out of this to balance sheets of companies and households have been really savaged by it, which they will have been by the time this comes to an end.

Getting enough demand to restore full employment may be a challenge. We may really … the White House has been talking about for the 17th time, they’re talking about infrastructure, but maybe after this we really should talk about how the economy really needs a big infrastructure push. Partly because we need the infrastructure, but also to ensure full employment.

Silverstein: You shared a chart showing that during the 1919 influenza pandemic, the stock market actually rose. What’s the difference between what happened then and what’s happening now?

Krugman: I’m not sure. It may be that there was actually less social distancing then, people just died. There was a fair bit, but it may have depressed the economy less that time. Also, we came into this with stocks basically priced for perfection. This may have just served as a warning that we don’t actually have perfection. This could be different, but I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually stocks do well because interest rates are very low. Stock market is a really poor guide and in general to the state of the real economy.

Silverstein: So few Americans are actually represented in the stock market and benefit or are hurt by changes in the stock market directly. Is there any reason that individuals should be worried about other people’s balance sheets and what the stock market is doing?

Krugman: Well, sure. A lot of people, most stocks are owned by … A great majority of stocks are owned by a small fraction of the population, but those people do account for a disproportionate share of consumer spending. They’re feeling poorer now, so that’s another reason that we’re going to be seeing some economic difficulties heading forward. People who were feeling rich and laying out on vacations and expensive restaurant meals may not be quite willing to do that even once the restaurants reopen and once the airlines are back up and running again.

Silverstein: You say that interest rates make it look like the — sorry, that’s my cat — interest rates make it look like investors are expecting a long-term recession. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

Krugman: Well, I wouldn’t quite … Interest rates have been extremely low for a long time now. The market seems to have bought into this jargon phrase, secular stagnation, which doesn’t really mean that the economy stagnates, but it means that the economy has a persistent shortage —  there just isn’t enough investment demand to use all the savings that people want it to make. The markets seem to have capitulated even before the coronavirus hit. The markets basically capitulated to the view that that’s where we were.

And they’re not so much signaling the necessarily that we’re in a recession for years, but we’re, they’re signaling that we’re going to have an economy that is always on the edge of a recession for the foreseeable future. That’s really, I think, one way to think about what secular stagnation means. The markets could be wrong, but it is clearly quite remarkable. A year and a half ago, markets were starting to act as if maybe the old days were coming back and normal levels of interest rates, and nobody seems to believe that now.

Silverstein: Can you walk us through your model for the coronavirus recession where nonessential employees versus essential employees and how the savings on one side and where everybody’s going to sort of fall out?

Krugman: Yeah, so I like to think of the economy, it’s stylized, too simple. But think of it as just two parts of the economy. There’s nonessentials, which means either stuff that really isn’t essential or stuff which we shouldn’t be doing because it spreads the disease. We can do without it. Then there’s essentials, or at least harmless. I’m not sure that Amazon orders aren’t essential but, delivery services we can keep going.

We are basically deliberately and appropriately shutting down the nonessential stuff. We’re doing, I would say it’s like a medically induced coma where you shut down major parts of the brain basically to give it a chance to heal from damage, and which is appropriate. It’s good. We need to do that if we don’t want lots of lots of people to die, but the trouble is, first of all, all those people who are left unemployed because of this, what are they going to live on? All the businesses that are not able to operate, how are they going to survive? Which is why we need a big aid package, which is basically relief. That’s the important part.

Now there’s a secondary consequence, which is if you don’t provide enough relief, all of those people whose businesses have been shut down can’t buy other stuff, and so you’ve got a sort of a conventional recession laid on top of that and that’s what we’re trying to prevent in addition. It’s mostly disaster relief, but there’s also stimulus to try and head off that conventional recession on top of the coma.

I think that’s the way to think about it. If you’re thinking that this is just a replay of 2008, you’re missing probably the bigger part of the story, but there are pieces. Part of this is like a replay of 2008, and that’s what we need. That part should be avoidable if we act forcefully enough, which we haven’t so far.

Silverstein: We haven’t so far acted forcefully enough in terms of relief?

Krugman: Yeah. There’s not enough money. The unemployment benefits, that’s a big deal. The small-business lending, that’s a pretty big deal. There’s not remotely enough aid to state and local governments. We’re making it too hard for people to get those checks.

Financial markets, thank God for the Fed, which at least is one bastion of competence that remains out there, and so they have been doing a yeoman work and getting the financial markets stabilized, although even there it takes time.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask, what do you think about the Fed’s response? Can you elaborate on what the Fed is doing right?

Krugman: Well, the Fed is basically stepping in. Financial markets were starting to shut down the same way they did in 2008 because so many balance-sheet losses because of the virus that investors were afraid of anything that wasn’t risk-free and highly liquid. You were watching corporate — even as interest rates on federal debt were plunging, corporate borrowing costs were soaring. Commercial paper rates were soaring. Basically money wasn’t available for keeping the business going.

Now the Fed has stepped in to basically do the lending that the private sector won’t. It’s been buying longer-term bonds. It has said it’s willing to buy corporate bonds if it needs to. They’re going to be doing commercial paper. There’s a commercial paper facility that they had back in the financial crisis, which I had a relative working for that, so I was pretty familiar with its operations and there are restarting it, but although that apparently won’t be up and running until next week.

The Fed is kind of … they’ve seen this movie and they’re making an effort to make sure that they get it under control. They’ve been doing a pretty good job. They went big aggressively. They realized that the risks of doing too little vastly outweigh the risk of doing too much and they’ve made the right call.

Silverstein: Should the Fed be buying municipals and corporate bonds or should they even go further and be able to buy stock?

Krugman: Well, I would say munis for sure because the state and local is a big issue. Corporate bonds, I think they certainly need to do, but they don’t, which is to say we are willing to do it. It may not be necessary actually to do it. There’s a lot of those of us who follow European affairs or, you know, this is our whatever-it-takes moment like that moment when Mario Draghi said he was willing to buy the bonds of distressed countries. It turns out he never actually had to do it. Just saying it was enough to stabilize the markets. Maybe that’s it, but you need to be willing to do it.

Stocks possibly, we haven’t reached that point yet, but that’s a possibility. There are limits to what the Fed much as some of my liberal friends say, “Why can’t the Fed just send to everybody money?” And unfortunately, that’s not within their legal remit, but they should be willing to buy again, whatever it takes, any kind of assets that they need to.

Silverstein: Should the Fed have been raising rates in retrospect when the economy was growing?

Krugman: No, no. It was clear that they overstated the recovery. They shouldn’t have raised rates as much as they did. They overshot. They should have … Yeah, some of us were saying, “Wait until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes.” And that really looks like good advice now. I’m not sure how much harm it did, but this is not why we’re in the mess we’re in now. Those rate hikes were premature, but they didn’t cause the virus.

But no, I mean the Fed maybe will come out of this with an understanding that whatever you thought was normal, based on the way the world looked 15 years ago is not normal in this world.

Silverstein: If you look at the US response from a health and an economic perspective versus other countries around the world, how do you think we fared? Is there anything to learn from other places?

Krugman: Yeah, don’t be like America. We screwed up on multiple levels. We totally failed. The other people can tell you more about the health response, but clearly we totally fell down on testing. We’ve totally fell down on medical equipment. We waited far too long on social distancing. All of that.

Other countries are doing … the economic response is better than ours. Ours was better than I feared it was going to be. There was a point where it looked like Republicans were going to say tax cuts are the answer to everything. But look at Denmark, which is corporations that keep their workers on payroll. The government is picking up 75% of the tab. That’s the kind of thing that really would be great. Unfortunately, I don’t think America is politically in that universe, but we’re in some ways having the weakest economic response of certainly of the G7 countries.

Silverstein: Finally, just to make you do my job. Where do you think the media is really missing the point? Is there anything that you would complain you wish that people would ask you?

Krugman: I think, well, I think the media had really, I mean other people can talk and take on the health-affairs stuff, but the media I think really still have missed the extent to which this is not a normal recession. We’re still hearing it discussed in terms of stimulus. We’re still hearing it as if this were the usual kinds of problems, and there’s some of that, but, I don’t think the fact that the essential thing is limiting hardship has really made it.

Every time I see stimulus in a headline about the tax bill, I get mad because that’s missing the point. I actually have seen almost nobody talking about what happens four or five months from now when hopefully the pandemic has subsided, but then you have financial crises at the state level and the unemployment benefits have expired. We have a huge fiscal time bomb, which we can see is being … the timer has been set on it as we speak, and I’ve seen almost no coverage of that.

Silverstein: What happens then? Let me ask you, Paul.

Krugman: Well, what happens is that just as the economy is ready to recover, mass layoffs of school teachers, mass cutoff of unemployment benefits undermine the nation’s recovery. This could end up being in a way, a little bit like what happened in 2008-2009 when we had a pretty effective response to the crisis, but then went to fiscal austerity, which meant that the recovery was very, very slow.

Even though this is a very different kind of crisis, we could have the same kind of story. I think at the moment, unless there’s another major round of legislation that is going to be the story.

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Paul Krugman Warns of Fiscal Time Bomb If Relief Is Insufficient

The Nobel Prize-winning economist says we will likely need a stimulus bill as large as $4 or $5 trillion.

April 2, 2020 15+ min read

This story originally appeared on Business Insider

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the author of many books including the recently published “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.” Krugman spoke with the Business Insider editor-at-large Sara Silverstein to discuss why this recession was different from any we had ever dealt with. Following is a transcript of the video.

Sara Silverstein: Paul, your newest book is about zombie ideas, which are basically things that we know are false. We can prove they’re false, but people still believe and they still impact our policies and our economy. How does this idea of zombie ideas apply to the coronavirus crisis?

Paul Krugman: This is new. No one was — I mean, it’s not true that no one saw this, but there wasn’t — virus denial wasn’t an industry before this hit. But the reactions to this, to the whole handling — the coronavirus has been like global warming, but at about a hundred times speed. Right? The same thing. “The scientists are in a conspiracy against President Trump and trying to bring socialism with false warnings.” All of that is what sort of laid the groundwork. You basically carried over the whole set of attitudes that came from climate denial, which is one of the most important zombies out there, straight into the coronavirus until like two days ago.

Silverstein: How does that affect how we’re reacting to the crisis?

Krugman: We’ve been far behind the curve. It was already obvious in January that this was extremely high risk and we should have been doing massive ramping up of testing. We should’ve been doing social distancing. We should’ve been doing all these things that help to contain it. We really didn’t get serious or Washington didn’t get serious, again, until just a few days ago about any of this.

Even now, we’re not doing what you always do when you have an emergency, which is you federalize the production of essential equipment. We still haven’t done that. We still have this wild uncoordinated scrambled for ventilators and all of that.

The denial, virus denial, which is basically the same as climate denial, has been critical. I mean tens of thousands of people will die unnecessarily in this country because of it.

Silverstein: If you were responsible for writing the response, and we could talk about the policy response, what we’re calling the $2 trillion stimulus package, what would it look like?

Krugman: There’s first of all, there’s the epidemiological response, which is — the one thing I know about epidemiology is I’m not an expert.

The economics thing, I’m kind of annoyed that people keep calling this a stimulus bill because it mostly is. We want GDP to decline. We want lots of people to stay home and not work while we get this thing under control. The goal is not so much to sustain the economy per se as it is to give this thing time to work and to alleviate hardship. This is mostly a disaster-relief bill.

The things that are really important are unemployment benefits, cash to families, loans to small business that allow the most affected people to get through this with the minimum of financial hardship. It also provides some stimulus. There are parts of the economy that are still alive. We don’t want them collapsing because nobody has money to spend. There is some stimulus in there too, but this is mainly a giant disaster-relief bill, which unfortunately despite its size is probably not big enough.

Silverstein: How big do you think it’s going to need to be, and how should we finance it?

Krugman: Well, something like … We’re still groping here, but something like 20, 25% of the economy is going to be shut down for an extended period and you really want to think of aid that’s on the scale of that shutdown. We’re basically trying to replace the incomes of those people, and we don’t do total replacement, but mostly. We’ve got a $20-trillion-a-year economy, so it’s not hard to make the case this might end up being $4 trillion or $5 trillion that we really should be doing it. The answer is borrow the money.

The private sector is not investing. Mortgage applications have collapsed. Business, who’s going to be building office parks and all of that in the middle of a plague? Private saving for sure has gone way, way up. Maybe people are spending some of the money they’re not spending at restaurants on other things, but a lot of it is just being saved. We have this huge surplus in the private sector of all of this excess money looking for someplace to go. They’re offering it to the government for free. Real interest rates are negative. So, borrow it.

Silverstein: The unemployment insurance provision, you said makes sense. What do you think about the way that they’re spending the rest of the 2 trillion?

Krugman: Well, there’s different pieces. The small-business side looks like it’s pretty well designed. It’s loans that turn into grants for small businesses to maintain the payroll. So, that’s good.

Just a flat-out check of $1,200, that’s good. They’re making it more difficult. It should be going automatically to people whether or not they filed tax returns as long as they’re in the record someplace. So they’re making it harder to get.

The big-business lending has an inspector-general provision to prevent corruption, which Trump has already said he’s going to disregard. I’m worried about that — as are we all — so there could be a lot of corruption at that end.

I’d say this is about 80% a reasonable bill and then 20% of … we don’t know, but they’re missing pieces. State and local governments really need a lot of help, and there’s not remotely enough money in there. In a way, I think this crisis is going to be prolonged even once the pandemic subsides by the fact that we’re going to have state and local governments that are in desperate financial constraints.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask you about the longer-term implications of some of these. Can you talk more about how that will impact ordinary people, the state and local governments’ financial hardships?

Krugman: Sure. State governments, local governments, unlike the federal government have to balance their budgets each year. All of the … They’re losing tax revenue. They’re having extra expenses. They’re going to have to make that up in the near future, which means that they’re going to be laying off … It’s going to be a lot like what happened after the 2008 crisis when layoffs of school teachers, layoffs of government employees were a big factor in holding back recovery and we’re going to be … Yeah, just as the pandemic starts to fade, we hope, we’re going to be seeing state and local governments cutting back severely.

Also, by the way, the extra unemployment benefits are only for the next four months. A lot of the financial support that we’re going to be providing now is going to be going away just when we’re hoping the economy will bounce back. I’m really worried that the economic fallout may last much, much longer than people are thinking.

Silverstein: As we start to bounce back, I don’t know how deep unemployment will get during the pandemic, but once jobs start coming back, where is going to be the new normal? Are we going to come back to full employment?

Krugman: Well, eventually, yes. Nothing about this has changed. Workers haven’t lost their skills. People haven’t lost their taste for all of the things that they want. But it is true that we had an economy that was … the economy’s weaker than we like to think even though we had full employment just the other day. We probably lost more jobs already than we did in the whole of the Great Recession. But just before that we were at full employment, but we are at full employment only with very, very low interest rates. To the extent that there’s been a lot of financial damage that comes out of this to balance sheets of companies and households have been really savaged by it, which they will have been by the time this comes to an end.

Getting enough demand to restore full employment may be a challenge. We may really … the White House has been talking about for the 17th time, they’re talking about infrastructure, but maybe after this we really should talk about how the economy really needs a big infrastructure push. Partly because we need the infrastructure, but also to ensure full employment.

Silverstein: You shared a chart showing that during the 1919 influenza pandemic, the stock market actually rose. What’s the difference between what happened then and what’s happening now?

Krugman: I’m not sure. It may be that there was actually less social distancing then, people just died. There was a fair bit, but it may have depressed the economy less that time. Also, we came into this with stocks basically priced for perfection. This may have just served as a warning that we don’t actually have perfection. This could be different, but I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually stocks do well because interest rates are very low. Stock market is a really poor guide and in general to the state of the real economy.

Silverstein: So few Americans are actually represented in the stock market and benefit or are hurt by changes in the stock market directly. Is there any reason that individuals should be worried about other people’s balance sheets and what the stock market is doing?

Krugman: Well, sure. A lot of people, most stocks are owned by … A great majority of stocks are owned by a small fraction of the population, but those people do account for a disproportionate share of consumer spending. They’re feeling poorer now, so that’s another reason that we’re going to be seeing some economic difficulties heading forward. People who were feeling rich and laying out on vacations and expensive restaurant meals may not be quite willing to do that even once the restaurants reopen and once the airlines are back up and running again.

Silverstein: You say that interest rates make it look like the — sorry, that’s my cat — interest rates make it look like investors are expecting a long-term recession. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

Krugman: Well, I wouldn’t quite … Interest rates have been extremely low for a long time now. The market seems to have bought into this jargon phrase, secular stagnation, which doesn’t really mean that the economy stagnates, but it means that the economy has a persistent shortage —  there just isn’t enough investment demand to use all the savings that people want it to make. The markets seem to have capitulated even before the coronavirus hit. The markets basically capitulated to the view that that’s where we were.

And they’re not so much signaling the necessarily that we’re in a recession for years, but we’re, they’re signaling that we’re going to have an economy that is always on the edge of a recession for the foreseeable future. That’s really, I think, one way to think about what secular stagnation means. The markets could be wrong, but it is clearly quite remarkable. A year and a half ago, markets were starting to act as if maybe the old days were coming back and normal levels of interest rates, and nobody seems to believe that now.

Silverstein: Can you walk us through your model for the coronavirus recession where nonessential employees versus essential employees and how the savings on one side and where everybody’s going to sort of fall out?

Krugman: Yeah, so I like to think of the economy, it’s stylized, too simple. But think of it as just two parts of the economy. There’s nonessentials, which means either stuff that really isn’t essential or stuff which we shouldn’t be doing because it spreads the disease. We can do without it. Then there’s essentials, or at least harmless. I’m not sure that Amazon orders aren’t essential but, delivery services we can keep going.

We are basically deliberately and appropriately shutting down the nonessential stuff. We’re doing, I would say it’s like a medically induced coma where you shut down major parts of the brain basically to give it a chance to heal from damage, and which is appropriate. It’s good. We need to do that if we don’t want lots of lots of people to die, but the trouble is, first of all, all those people who are left unemployed because of this, what are they going to live on? All the businesses that are not able to operate, how are they going to survive? Which is why we need a big aid package, which is basically relief. That’s the important part.

Now there’s a secondary consequence, which is if you don’t provide enough relief, all of those people whose businesses have been shut down can’t buy other stuff, and so you’ve got a sort of a conventional recession laid on top of that and that’s what we’re trying to prevent in addition. It’s mostly disaster relief, but there’s also stimulus to try and head off that conventional recession on top of the coma.

I think that’s the way to think about it. If you’re thinking that this is just a replay of 2008, you’re missing probably the bigger part of the story, but there are pieces. Part of this is like a replay of 2008, and that’s what we need. That part should be avoidable if we act forcefully enough, which we haven’t so far.

Silverstein: We haven’t so far acted forcefully enough in terms of relief?

Krugman: Yeah. There’s not enough money. The unemployment benefits, that’s a big deal. The small-business lending, that’s a pretty big deal. There’s not remotely enough aid to state and local governments. We’re making it too hard for people to get those checks.

Financial markets, thank God for the Fed, which at least is one bastion of competence that remains out there, and so they have been doing a yeoman work and getting the financial markets stabilized, although even there it takes time.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask, what do you think about the Fed’s response? Can you elaborate on what the Fed is doing right?

Krugman: Well, the Fed is basically stepping in. Financial markets were starting to shut down the same way they did in 2008 because so many balance-sheet losses because of the virus that investors were afraid of anything that wasn’t risk-free and highly liquid. You were watching corporate — even as interest rates on federal debt were plunging, corporate borrowing costs were soaring. Commercial paper rates were soaring. Basically money wasn’t available for keeping the business going.

Now the Fed has stepped in to basically do the lending that the private sector won’t. It’s been buying longer-term bonds. It has said it’s willing to buy corporate bonds if it needs to. They’re going to be doing commercial paper. There’s a commercial paper facility that they had back in the financial crisis, which I had a relative working for that, so I was pretty familiar with its operations and there are restarting it, but although that apparently won’t be up and running until next week.

The Fed is kind of … they’ve seen this movie and they’re making an effort to make sure that they get it under control. They’ve been doing a pretty good job. They went big aggressively. They realized that the risks of doing too little vastly outweigh the risk of doing too much and they’ve made the right call.

Silverstein: Should the Fed be buying municipals and corporate bonds or should they even go further and be able to buy stock?

Krugman: Well, I would say munis for sure because the state and local is a big issue. Corporate bonds, I think they certainly need to do, but they don’t, which is to say we are willing to do it. It may not be necessary actually to do it. There’s a lot of those of us who follow European affairs or, you know, this is our whatever-it-takes moment like that moment when Mario Draghi said he was willing to buy the bonds of distressed countries. It turns out he never actually had to do it. Just saying it was enough to stabilize the markets. Maybe that’s it, but you need to be willing to do it.

Stocks possibly, we haven’t reached that point yet, but that’s a possibility. There are limits to what the Fed much as some of my liberal friends say, “Why can’t the Fed just send to everybody money?” And unfortunately, that’s not within their legal remit, but they should be willing to buy again, whatever it takes, any kind of assets that they need to.

Silverstein: Should the Fed have been raising rates in retrospect when the economy was growing?

Krugman: No, no. It was clear that they overstated the recovery. They shouldn’t have raised rates as much as they did. They overshot. They should have … Yeah, some of us were saying, “Wait until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes.” And that really looks like good advice now. I’m not sure how much harm it did, but this is not why we’re in the mess we’re in now. Those rate hikes were premature, but they didn’t cause the virus.

But no, I mean the Fed maybe will come out of this with an understanding that whatever you thought was normal, based on the way the world looked 15 years ago is not normal in this world.

Silverstein: If you look at the US response from a health and an economic perspective versus other countries around the world, how do you think we fared? Is there anything to learn from other places?

Krugman: Yeah, don’t be like America. We screwed up on multiple levels. We totally failed. The other people can tell you more about the health response, but clearly we totally fell down on testing. We’ve totally fell down on medical equipment. We waited far too long on social distancing. All of that.

Other countries are doing … the economic response is better than ours. Ours was better than I feared it was going to be. There was a point where it looked like Republicans were going to say tax cuts are the answer to everything. But look at Denmark, which is corporations that keep their workers on payroll. The government is picking up 75% of the tab. That’s the kind of thing that really would be great. Unfortunately, I don’t think America is politically in that universe, but we’re in some ways having the weakest economic response of certainly of the G7 countries.

Silverstein: Finally, just to make you do my job. Where do you think the media is really missing the point? Is there anything that you would complain you wish that people would ask you?

Krugman: I think, well, I think the media had really, I mean other people can talk and take on the health-affairs stuff, but the media I think really still have missed the extent to which this is not a normal recession. We’re still hearing it discussed in terms of stimulus. We’re still hearing it as if this were the usual kinds of problems, and there’s some of that, but, I don’t think the fact that the essential thing is limiting hardship has really made it.

Every time I see stimulus in a headline about the tax bill, I get mad because that’s missing the point. I actually have seen almost nobody talking about what happens four or five months from now when hopefully the pandemic has subsided, but then you have financial crises at the state level and the unemployment benefits have expired. We have a huge fiscal time bomb, which we can see is being … the timer has been set on it as we speak, and I’ve seen almost no coverage of that.

Silverstein: What happens then? Let me ask you, Paul.

Krugman: Well, what happens is that just as the economy is ready to recover, mass layoffs of school teachers, mass cutoff of unemployment benefits undermine the nation’s recovery. This could end up being in a way, a little bit like what happened in 2008-2009 when we had a pretty effective response to the crisis, but then went to fiscal austerity, which meant that the recovery was very, very slow.

Even though this is a very different kind of crisis, we could have the same kind of story. I think at the moment, unless there’s another major round of legislation that is going to be the story.

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[scpie]

Paul Krugman Warns of Fiscal Time Bomb If Relief Is Insufficient

The Nobel Prize-winning economist says we will likely need a stimulus bill as large as $4 or $5 trillion.

April 2, 2020 15+ min read

This story originally appeared on Business Insider

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the author of many books including the recently published “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.” Krugman spoke with the Business Insider editor-at-large Sara Silverstein to discuss why this recession was different from any we had ever dealt with. Following is a transcript of the video.

Sara Silverstein: Paul, your newest book is about zombie ideas, which are basically things that we know are false. We can prove they’re false, but people still believe and they still impact our policies and our economy. How does this idea of zombie ideas apply to the coronavirus crisis?

Paul Krugman: This is new. No one was — I mean, it’s not true that no one saw this, but there wasn’t — virus denial wasn’t an industry before this hit. But the reactions to this, to the whole handling — the coronavirus has been like global warming, but at about a hundred times speed. Right? The same thing. “The scientists are in a conspiracy against President Trump and trying to bring socialism with false warnings.” All of that is what sort of laid the groundwork. You basically carried over the whole set of attitudes that came from climate denial, which is one of the most important zombies out there, straight into the coronavirus until like two days ago.

Silverstein: How does that affect how we’re reacting to the crisis?

Krugman: We’ve been far behind the curve. It was already obvious in January that this was extremely high risk and we should have been doing massive ramping up of testing. We should’ve been doing social distancing. We should’ve been doing all these things that help to contain it. We really didn’t get serious or Washington didn’t get serious, again, until just a few days ago about any of this.

Even now, we’re not doing what you always do when you have an emergency, which is you federalize the production of essential equipment. We still haven’t done that. We still have this wild uncoordinated scrambled for ventilators and all of that.

The denial, virus denial, which is basically the same as climate denial, has been critical. I mean tens of thousands of people will die unnecessarily in this country because of it.

Silverstein: If you were responsible for writing the response, and we could talk about the policy response, what we’re calling the $2 trillion stimulus package, what would it look like?

Krugman: There’s first of all, there’s the epidemiological response, which is — the one thing I know about epidemiology is I’m not an expert.

The economics thing, I’m kind of annoyed that people keep calling this a stimulus bill because it mostly is. We want GDP to decline. We want lots of people to stay home and not work while we get this thing under control. The goal is not so much to sustain the economy per se as it is to give this thing time to work and to alleviate hardship. This is mostly a disaster-relief bill.

The things that are really important are unemployment benefits, cash to families, loans to small business that allow the most affected people to get through this with the minimum of financial hardship. It also provides some stimulus. There are parts of the economy that are still alive. We don’t want them collapsing because nobody has money to spend. There is some stimulus in there too, but this is mainly a giant disaster-relief bill, which unfortunately despite its size is probably not big enough.

Silverstein: How big do you think it’s going to need to be, and how should we finance it?

Krugman: Well, something like … We’re still groping here, but something like 20, 25% of the economy is going to be shut down for an extended period and you really want to think of aid that’s on the scale of that shutdown. We’re basically trying to replace the incomes of those people, and we don’t do total replacement, but mostly. We’ve got a $20-trillion-a-year economy, so it’s not hard to make the case this might end up being $4 trillion or $5 trillion that we really should be doing it. The answer is borrow the money.

The private sector is not investing. Mortgage applications have collapsed. Business, who’s going to be building office parks and all of that in the middle of a plague? Private saving for sure has gone way, way up. Maybe people are spending some of the money they’re not spending at restaurants on other things, but a lot of it is just being saved. We have this huge surplus in the private sector of all of this excess money looking for someplace to go. They’re offering it to the government for free. Real interest rates are negative. So, borrow it.

Silverstein: The unemployment insurance provision, you said makes sense. What do you think about the way that they’re spending the rest of the 2 trillion?

Krugman: Well, there’s different pieces. The small-business side looks like it’s pretty well designed. It’s loans that turn into grants for small businesses to maintain the payroll. So, that’s good.

Just a flat-out check of $1,200, that’s good. They’re making it more difficult. It should be going automatically to people whether or not they filed tax returns as long as they’re in the record someplace. So they’re making it harder to get.

The big-business lending has an inspector-general provision to prevent corruption, which Trump has already said he’s going to disregard. I’m worried about that — as are we all — so there could be a lot of corruption at that end.

I’d say this is about 80% a reasonable bill and then 20% of … we don’t know, but they’re missing pieces. State and local governments really need a lot of help, and there’s not remotely enough money in there. In a way, I think this crisis is going to be prolonged even once the pandemic subsides by the fact that we’re going to have state and local governments that are in desperate financial constraints.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask you about the longer-term implications of some of these. Can you talk more about how that will impact ordinary people, the state and local governments’ financial hardships?

Krugman: Sure. State governments, local governments, unlike the federal government have to balance their budgets each year. All of the … They’re losing tax revenue. They’re having extra expenses. They’re going to have to make that up in the near future, which means that they’re going to be laying off … It’s going to be a lot like what happened after the 2008 crisis when layoffs of school teachers, layoffs of government employees were a big factor in holding back recovery and we’re going to be … Yeah, just as the pandemic starts to fade, we hope, we’re going to be seeing state and local governments cutting back severely.

Also, by the way, the extra unemployment benefits are only for the next four months. A lot of the financial support that we’re going to be providing now is going to be going away just when we’re hoping the economy will bounce back. I’m really worried that the economic fallout may last much, much longer than people are thinking.

Silverstein: As we start to bounce back, I don’t know how deep unemployment will get during the pandemic, but once jobs start coming back, where is going to be the new normal? Are we going to come back to full employment?

Krugman: Well, eventually, yes. Nothing about this has changed. Workers haven’t lost their skills. People haven’t lost their taste for all of the things that they want. But it is true that we had an economy that was … the economy’s weaker than we like to think even though we had full employment just the other day. We probably lost more jobs already than we did in the whole of the Great Recession. But just before that we were at full employment, but we are at full employment only with very, very low interest rates. To the extent that there’s been a lot of financial damage that comes out of this to balance sheets of companies and households have been really savaged by it, which they will have been by the time this comes to an end.

Getting enough demand to restore full employment may be a challenge. We may really … the White House has been talking about for the 17th time, they’re talking about infrastructure, but maybe after this we really should talk about how the economy really needs a big infrastructure push. Partly because we need the infrastructure, but also to ensure full employment.

Silverstein: You shared a chart showing that during the 1919 influenza pandemic, the stock market actually rose. What’s the difference between what happened then and what’s happening now?

Krugman: I’m not sure. It may be that there was actually less social distancing then, people just died. There was a fair bit, but it may have depressed the economy less that time. Also, we came into this with stocks basically priced for perfection. This may have just served as a warning that we don’t actually have perfection. This could be different, but I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually stocks do well because interest rates are very low. Stock market is a really poor guide and in general to the state of the real economy.

Silverstein: So few Americans are actually represented in the stock market and benefit or are hurt by changes in the stock market directly. Is there any reason that individuals should be worried about other people’s balance sheets and what the stock market is doing?

Krugman: Well, sure. A lot of people, most stocks are owned by … A great majority of stocks are owned by a small fraction of the population, but those people do account for a disproportionate share of consumer spending. They’re feeling poorer now, so that’s another reason that we’re going to be seeing some economic difficulties heading forward. People who were feeling rich and laying out on vacations and expensive restaurant meals may not be quite willing to do that even once the restaurants reopen and once the airlines are back up and running again.

Silverstein: You say that interest rates make it look like the — sorry, that’s my cat — interest rates make it look like investors are expecting a long-term recession. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

Krugman: Well, I wouldn’t quite … Interest rates have been extremely low for a long time now. The market seems to have bought into this jargon phrase, secular stagnation, which doesn’t really mean that the economy stagnates, but it means that the economy has a persistent shortage —  there just isn’t enough investment demand to use all the savings that people want it to make. The markets seem to have capitulated even before the coronavirus hit. The markets basically capitulated to the view that that’s where we were.

And they’re not so much signaling the necessarily that we’re in a recession for years, but we’re, they’re signaling that we’re going to have an economy that is always on the edge of a recession for the foreseeable future. That’s really, I think, one way to think about what secular stagnation means. The markets could be wrong, but it is clearly quite remarkable. A year and a half ago, markets were starting to act as if maybe the old days were coming back and normal levels of interest rates, and nobody seems to believe that now.

Silverstein: Can you walk us through your model for the coronavirus recession where nonessential employees versus essential employees and how the savings on one side and where everybody’s going to sort of fall out?

Krugman: Yeah, so I like to think of the economy, it’s stylized, too simple. But think of it as just two parts of the economy. There’s nonessentials, which means either stuff that really isn’t essential or stuff which we shouldn’t be doing because it spreads the disease. We can do without it. Then there’s essentials, or at least harmless. I’m not sure that Amazon orders aren’t essential but, delivery services we can keep going.

We are basically deliberately and appropriately shutting down the nonessential stuff. We’re doing, I would say it’s like a medically induced coma where you shut down major parts of the brain basically to give it a chance to heal from damage, and which is appropriate. It’s good. We need to do that if we don’t want lots of lots of people to die, but the trouble is, first of all, all those people who are left unemployed because of this, what are they going to live on? All the businesses that are not able to operate, how are they going to survive? Which is why we need a big aid package, which is basically relief. That’s the important part.

Now there’s a secondary consequence, which is if you don’t provide enough relief, all of those people whose businesses have been shut down can’t buy other stuff, and so you’ve got a sort of a conventional recession laid on top of that and that’s what we’re trying to prevent in addition. It’s mostly disaster relief, but there’s also stimulus to try and head off that conventional recession on top of the coma.

I think that’s the way to think about it. If you’re thinking that this is just a replay of 2008, you’re missing probably the bigger part of the story, but there are pieces. Part of this is like a replay of 2008, and that’s what we need. That part should be avoidable if we act forcefully enough, which we haven’t so far.

Silverstein: We haven’t so far acted forcefully enough in terms of relief?

Krugman: Yeah. There’s not enough money. The unemployment benefits, that’s a big deal. The small-business lending, that’s a pretty big deal. There’s not remotely enough aid to state and local governments. We’re making it too hard for people to get those checks.

Financial markets, thank God for the Fed, which at least is one bastion of competence that remains out there, and so they have been doing a yeoman work and getting the financial markets stabilized, although even there it takes time.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask, what do you think about the Fed’s response? Can you elaborate on what the Fed is doing right?

Krugman: Well, the Fed is basically stepping in. Financial markets were starting to shut down the same way they did in 2008 because so many balance-sheet losses because of the virus that investors were afraid of anything that wasn’t risk-free and highly liquid. You were watching corporate — even as interest rates on federal debt were plunging, corporate borrowing costs were soaring. Commercial paper rates were soaring. Basically money wasn’t available for keeping the business going.

Now the Fed has stepped in to basically do the lending that the private sector won’t. It’s been buying longer-term bonds. It has said it’s willing to buy corporate bonds if it needs to. They’re going to be doing commercial paper. There’s a commercial paper facility that they had back in the financial crisis, which I had a relative working for that, so I was pretty familiar with its operations and there are restarting it, but although that apparently won’t be up and running until next week.

The Fed is kind of … they’ve seen this movie and they’re making an effort to make sure that they get it under control. They’ve been doing a pretty good job. They went big aggressively. They realized that the risks of doing too little vastly outweigh the risk of doing too much and they’ve made the right call.

Silverstein: Should the Fed be buying municipals and corporate bonds or should they even go further and be able to buy stock?

Krugman: Well, I would say munis for sure because the state and local is a big issue. Corporate bonds, I think they certainly need to do, but they don’t, which is to say we are willing to do it. It may not be necessary actually to do it. There’s a lot of those of us who follow European affairs or, you know, this is our whatever-it-takes moment like that moment when Mario Draghi said he was willing to buy the bonds of distressed countries. It turns out he never actually had to do it. Just saying it was enough to stabilize the markets. Maybe that’s it, but you need to be willing to do it.

Stocks possibly, we haven’t reached that point yet, but that’s a possibility. There are limits to what the Fed much as some of my liberal friends say, “Why can’t the Fed just send to everybody money?” And unfortunately, that’s not within their legal remit, but they should be willing to buy again, whatever it takes, any kind of assets that they need to.

Silverstein: Should the Fed have been raising rates in retrospect when the economy was growing?

Krugman: No, no. It was clear that they overstated the recovery. They shouldn’t have raised rates as much as they did. They overshot. They should have … Yeah, some of us were saying, “Wait until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes.” And that really looks like good advice now. I’m not sure how much harm it did, but this is not why we’re in the mess we’re in now. Those rate hikes were premature, but they didn’t cause the virus.

But no, I mean the Fed maybe will come out of this with an understanding that whatever you thought was normal, based on the way the world looked 15 years ago is not normal in this world.

Silverstein: If you look at the US response from a health and an economic perspective versus other countries around the world, how do you think we fared? Is there anything to learn from other places?

Krugman: Yeah, don’t be like America. We screwed up on multiple levels. We totally failed. The other people can tell you more about the health response, but clearly we totally fell down on testing. We’ve totally fell down on medical equipment. We waited far too long on social distancing. All of that.

Other countries are doing … the economic response is better than ours. Ours was better than I feared it was going to be. There was a point where it looked like Republicans were going to say tax cuts are the answer to everything. But look at Denmark, which is corporations that keep their workers on payroll. The government is picking up 75% of the tab. That’s the kind of thing that really would be great. Unfortunately, I don’t think America is politically in that universe, but we’re in some ways having the weakest economic response of certainly of the G7 countries.

Silverstein: Finally, just to make you do my job. Where do you think the media is really missing the point? Is there anything that you would complain you wish that people would ask you?

Krugman: I think, well, I think the media had really, I mean other people can talk and take on the health-affairs stuff, but the media I think really still have missed the extent to which this is not a normal recession. We’re still hearing it discussed in terms of stimulus. We’re still hearing it as if this were the usual kinds of problems, and there’s some of that, but, I don’t think the fact that the essential thing is limiting hardship has really made it.

Every time I see stimulus in a headline about the tax bill, I get mad because that’s missing the point. I actually have seen almost nobody talking about what happens four or five months from now when hopefully the pandemic has subsided, but then you have financial crises at the state level and the unemployment benefits have expired. We have a huge fiscal time bomb, which we can see is being … the timer has been set on it as we speak, and I’ve seen almost no coverage of that.

Silverstein: What happens then? Let me ask you, Paul.

Krugman: Well, what happens is that just as the economy is ready to recover, mass layoffs of school teachers, mass cutoff of unemployment benefits undermine the nation’s recovery. This could end up being in a way, a little bit like what happened in 2008-2009 when we had a pretty effective response to the crisis, but then went to fiscal austerity, which meant that the recovery was very, very slow.

Even though this is a very different kind of crisis, we could have the same kind of story. I think at the moment, unless there’s another major round of legislation that is going to be the story.

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