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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 10 months

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 15, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 16, 2023

Extremist Republicans today shut down House business by refusing to pass a procedural vote to take up a spending bill, as they had threatened to do in retaliation for the passage yesterday of the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. This is the fourth time the extremists have defeated special rules in the House this year, and as deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) Aaron Fritschner pointed out, their doing so is highly unusual. In the previous 20 years the House voted down no such measures at all.

Although they were in the middle of a 17-vote series, the Republicans then recessed the House until after Thanksgiving.

Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus made it clear they are angry that their own demands are not being met. “We’re sending a shot across the bow,” caucus chair Scott Perry (R-PA) told reporters. “[W]e are done with the failure theater here.”

Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) angrily said to his colleagues: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”

In contrast, the Democrats with the same slim majority in the last Congress passed a series of sweeping bills that are already changing the country. Today marks the second anniversary of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that invested $1.2 trillion—$550 billion of it new spending—in roads, water systems, electrical grids, broadband, bridges, and so on.

So far, that act has seen the start of more than 37,000 projects across the country. Bridges, airports, and supply chain projects are underway, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Democrats today emphasized that they are delivering on the things that make people’s lives easier, and the White House listed a number of Republicans who voted against the measure only to boast of the benefits of the infrastructure investments to their constituents.

“And,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a video in which he echoed the tagline of the administration: “the great news is, we’re just getting started.”

The investment in infrastructure is part of what has created a booming U.S. economy. Growth is far better in the U.S. than in Europe or China, where a property bubble and local government debts have led to deflation.

That economic strength is standing behind President Joe Biden in San Francisco, where he traveled yesterday for a summit of the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum (APEC groups economies, not nations). APEC economies make up almost half of world trade and about 62% of global gross domestic product.

Today, Biden met with Chinese president Xi Jinping in a much anticipated second meeting since Biden took office. But even before today’s discussion, the two leaders announced a new climate agreement. The U.S. and China are the world’s two largest climate polluters, accounting for 38% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

China did not agree to phase out coal, which is the dirtiest fossil fuel, but both countries agreed to ramp up renewable energy capacity around the world and to reduce emissions in their power sectors overall. This is the first time China has agreed to cut emissions. In two weeks the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Dubai. Observers hope the willingness of China and the U.S. to make this announcement, even with its limitations, will jump-start negotiations there.

Remarks by Biden and Xi before their meeting were cordial but tense. Biden emphasized that their “meetings have always been candid, straightforward, and useful,” telling Xi: “I value our conversation because I think it’s paramount that you and I understand each other clearly, leader to leader, with no misconceptions or miscommunication. We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict. And we also have to manage it responsibly—that competition.”

Xi responded that the China-U.S. relationship “is the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” and while it “has never been smooth sailing over the past 50 years and more…, it has kept moving forward amid twists and turns. For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option. It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other, and conflict and confrontation has unbearable consequences for both sides.”

In their four-hour meeting, the two leaders agreed to recommence military communications more than a year after China broke them off when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. The two countries also agreed to strengthen cooperation on stopping the flow of what are known as precursor chemicals—the chemicals needed to make street fentanyl—which are produced in China and shipped to drug operations primarily in Latin America. The U.S. has cracked down hard on that trade; additional Chinese cooperation will be welcome.

They agreed to continue to work together to address climate change, as well as to address the risks of artificial intelligence.

On the rest of their discussions, concerning Taiwan, human rights, the Middle East, and Ukraine, the two leaders “exchanged views,” according to the White House readout. Later in the day, meeting with business leaders who have grown nervous about investing in China, Xi assured them that China wants to be friends with the U.S., and “does not seek spheres of influence, and will not fight a cold or hot war with any country.”

In his remarks welcoming APEC leaders this evening, in the city of the famous Golden Gate Bridge, Biden emphasized the power of building bridges to span space and time, the past and the future. He spoke of connecting diverse communities: “All across the traditions, cultures, and languages, we find the common dreams we share for ourselves and for our children.”

Biden urged his audience to “take full advantage of this summit to make new connections and spark new partnerships, because every step we take to deepen our cooperation, to launch a new venture, to tackle the challenges that impact on all of us is a step toward realization of the enormous potential of our Asian Pacific future…, a future where our economics are strong, vibrant, and sustainable because our workers are empowered and protected; women and girls are full and equal participants in every aspect of our society; young people…can envision for themselves the lives and hope for unlimited possibilities.”

The strongest tools we have to meet this era’s challenges, he said, are “connection, cooperation, collective action, and common purpose. That’s why we’re all here.”

Late tonight, by a vote of 87 to 11, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. One Democrat and ten Republicans voted no.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#extremist republicans #MAGAnazi #Heather Cox Richardson #China #international relations #the economy #election 2023 #elections 2024 #Xi #Infrastructure #government shutdown

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things2mustdo · 4 years

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The Ascent Of Money by Niall Ferguson is an introduction to modern finance and the rise of money lending, presenting a favorable view of their effects upon the world.

…financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance from wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosperity that so many people know today.

…poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channeled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.

…approximately $1 of every $14 paid to employees in the United States now goes to people working in finance. Finance is even more important in Britain, where it accounted for 9.4% of GDP in 2006.

The book gives an interesting history of some of the world’s most famous bankers and the power they accumulated, particularly the Medicis and Rothchilds, who brought value by facilitating trade and commerce while reducing transaction prices. It also described the role of European bankers during the American Civil War.

Though others had tried before them, the Medici were the first bankers to make the transition from financial success to hereditary status and power They achieved this by learning a crucial lesson: in finance small is seldom beautiful. By making their bank bigger and more diversified than any previous financial institution, they found a way of spreading their risk.

One of the biggest financial innovations was fractional reserve banking, pioneered by the Swedes. Other European countries improved finance while the Spaniards, still obsessed with silver and gold in their American colonies, kept defaulting time and time again, not understanding that the true nature of money lay in debt and not mineral reserves. One of the more interesting parts of the book was its description of the bond market and its powerful stranglehold on world governments.

…the bond market is powerful partly because it passes a daily judgement on the credibility of every government’s fiscal and monetary policies. But its real power lies in its ability to punish a government with higher borrowing costs. Even an upward move of half a percentage point can hurt a government that is running a deficit, adding higher debt service to its already high expenditures.

…countries that defaulted on their debts risk economic sanctions, the imposition of foreign control over their finances and even, in at least five cases, military intervention.

While the book paints a rosy view of finance, it also highlights cases where the abuse of it through hook and crook caused problems for entire economies, particularly through price inflation. A recent example of that was Goldman Sachs’ commodity manipulation that caused the price of common foodstuffs to rise. On the other hand, ignoring finance and having inflexible monetary policy can turn recessions into depressions. He suggests that Helicopter Ben Bernanke actually did the right thing in showering Wall Street with money to prevent a depression. He also thinks Alan Greenspan is a great man for admitting he shouldn’t have kept interest rates so low.

Economies that combined all these institutional innovations—banks, bond markets, stock markets, insurance and property-owning democracy—performed better over the long run than those that did not, because financial intermediation generally permits a more efficient allocation of resources then, say, feudalism or central planning. For this reason, it is not wholly surprising that the Western financial model tended to spread around the world, first in the guise of imperialism, and then in the guise of globalization.

You’ll also read about:

The abysmal effects of Britain’s weflare system on their economy

Argentina’s failed destiny to become an economic superpower due to bad economic decisions and poor leadership

How the “risk free” LTCM fund imploded and almost took the world economy with it

My problem with the book is that his explanations were too light. He glossed over tough concepts like sovereign bonds and other financial instruments without providing much in the way of examples, unlike a writer such as Matt Taibbi who explains the most complex concept in a way that laymen can understand. I felt like I had to read this book in front of Google so that I could look up things he mentioned only in passing.

The book also seemed hurried with its historical research, especially towards the end when it become a jumbled mess. Overall it’s an okay book but I don’t recommend it for the neophyte.

…it’s not owning property that gives you security; it just gives your creditors security. Real security comes from having a steady income.

Read More: “The Ascent Of Money” on Amazon

https://www.returnofkings.com/10595/there-is-no-hedge-against-inflation

You’ve seen him: an older man sitting next to a roaring fire or maybe walking the grounds of his ranch or he might be in a suit facing the camera. The messages are all the same: something about “troubling times” and “safety and security” —maybe they mention the federal reserve or money printing. Times are bad and could get worse, but they can help you. They have the answer. What is this company selling? GOLD.

Why would you want a gold coin or bar? It doesn’t earn interest and it doesn’t grow or produce anything. It is vulnerable to theft. The price can move down with astonishing speed as we saw last April (as of the time of this writing it has retraced over 50% of that selloff). But could it go up in value, could it “skyrocket” as the gold shills say?

Keep in mind that gold has already gone up a lot recently, about fivefold in the past ten years. And to simply say that gold is a hedge against inflation is misleading. If you compare the price today, let’s say $1500 per oz, to the average price in 1974, about $150/oz, it actually exceeded inflation. Using CPI over this period gold’s value increased at about double the rate of inflation. However, if you bought gold in 1980, average price that year about $600/oz, you’d have to wait until 2006 for the price to come back to that level and not inflation adjusted dollars either (inflation destroyed about 65% of the purchasing power in that timeframe – and this is using CPI which notoriously understates real world prices). Gold prices and inflation are not as closely correlated as the gold sellers would have you think.

But what about “these troubling times”? It’s different now, right? It might be. This is basically what they’re talking about: the federal government and the federal reserve have been acting in tandem to recapitalize the U.S. economy after the 2008 crisis. The government has been spending like crazy and running huge deficits (and buying lots of votes, funny how that works out for them). These deficits are financed by the issuing of bonds of which the federal reserve bank has been the main buyer under the guise of Quantitative Easing and the Zero Interest Rate Policy. This what they mean by printing money – the fed can buy whatever it wants and it has been buying these bonds that are loans to the government.

The Fed doesn’t need money, rather, it creates it. It is the central bank and it can just put the bonds on its balance sheet. A lot of people, this author included, think the government and the Fed are nuts to think that this course would enable economic growth and it will probably only lead to inflation which could become severe and maybe uncontrollable. Without turning this into a financial doomer article, let’s just say both sides make their case and we won’t know which one is right until this QE and ZIRP experiment is over.

This is what it comes down to: if the price of gold in dollars goes exponential in a hyperinflationary situation everything else priced in dollars is going to do the same. You can’t expect that your gold coin will buy the same goods that it would buy now if this happens. The actual purchasing power of your gold will surely decline as day-to-day essentials become prioritized. Put another way, if 1500 this week buys you one gold coin or 250 basic meals, in a hyperinflationary situation that gold coin might exchange for the equivalent of 100 meals or maybe not even twenty. Of course, 1500 in a bank account or your mattress would be worth much less – maybe not even one meal. The possible hyperinflation scenario is the most compelling reason to hold gold now. It’s not about getting rich. It’s about retaining some savings in the face of a massive financial collapse.

In reality, nothing keeps up with inflation like you will want. Agriculture futures are seasonal and your position has to be rolled over every so often costing you fees and changing your cost basis. Your inflation hedge could get destroyed by a good harvest or weak global demand. Stocks are typically seen as an inflation hedge but in a real collapse your brokerage company or even your local bank might not even exist anymore. You may eventually be made whole on the companies you own but this will take years.

Outside of a financial crisis the case for gold is weak. If you’re holding gold the best case scenario is unclear. Perhaps the price rises faster than inflation but that’s probably a longshot. Consider that if interest rates start to rise, if the Fed sees the light on the harm ZIRP is doing, and if inflation is mild then those holding gold are going to be screwed as many decide to sell, preferring actual cash. Expect gold to lose at least 30% from today’s prices and it could happen in a day or two. Don’t ��expect your dealer to give you a good price or even answer your call or email if everyone comes in selling.

The risk of gold losing value in the face of an improving economy is something you need to be aware of and in a crisis it won’t provide the kind of financial safety that the gold bugs allege. If you still need a place to park your savings you might consider silver. It’s incrementally cheaper to get into and has more industrial value than gold though it is historically more volatile. Or what about booze? A case of good whiskey or rum is highly barterable, doesn’t spoil, tracks inflation as well as anything, and if times get better (or worse), you can always drink it.

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violetsystems · 4 years

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Silvio Gesell hated money. A German entrepreneur who moved to Argentina for business in the late 19th century, he witnessed a massive financial crash in 1890 that convinced him that money was behind the world's economic problems: poverty, inequality, unemployment, stagnation.

The problem, Gesell believed, was that money served two roles that often came into conflict: It was a way for people to store wealth, and it was the thing everybody needed to conduct business. The fact that money could store wealth meant its holders had a reason to cling to it, especially in crises like the one he saw in Argentina, when opportunities to safely put that money elsewhere looked grim. It was a typical story. When people got scared, they hoarded cash and brought business to a standstill. It led, Gesell said, to a situation of "poverty amid plenty."

Gesell wanted to create a new kind of money — a money that would "rot like potatoes" and "rust like iron" so no one would want to hoard it, a money that was "an instrument of exchange and nothing else." And the crazy part is that he did create it. Through a series of pamphlets, articles and books, Gesell inspired a worldwide movement that introduced a completely new form of money. It's one of the most fascinating, and largely forgotten, stories in economic history.

But after 70 years of obscurity, Gesell is making a comeback. All of a sudden, this obscure radical from another age has his name and ideas popping up in unlikely places — like speeches of leaders at the U.S. Federal Reserve, research papers of the International Monetary Fund and the pages of the Financial Times. As the industrialized world grapples with stagnation and as markets signal another recession, policymakers are struggling to figure out what to do. Could Gesell provide an answer?

Money with an expiration date

Gesell was born in 1862 to a German father and a French mother, and he was raised in what is now Belgium. Back then, it was part of the expanding Prussian empire. At 24, he moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked as an importer and manufacturer and did well for himself. On the side, he taught himself economics.

In 1891, hoping to end the depression in Argentina, Gesell published his first work, "Currency Reform as a Bridge to the Social State." He proposed a new kind of paper money that would have an expiration date. To avoid expiration, the bills would have to be periodically stamped for a fee. With no new stamp, they would become worthless. In this system, saving money would cost you money. Savings, in other words, would have a negative interest rate. Only by spending or investing it would you be able to avoid stamp fees.

Gesell called it "free money" (or Freigold) — "free" because he believed it would be freed from hoarding and also because it would encourage bankers to lend money without charging interest. The logic was this: If you're holding on to something that's dropping in value, you'll happily part with it — even if it means that it won't make you more money than you started with. It's like a game of hot potatoes. You want to pass it on. Gesell believed this would keep money whizzing through the system, preventing future depressions and increasing public prosperity.

It was a completely radical idea, especially during a time when nations were on the gold standard. That system latched money to the stable value of gold, which meant currency was a pretty safe place to store wealth. Gesell was saying he didn't want money to be like gold. He wanted it to be like most other objects, which decay and rust and go bad. Of course, many people hated this idea, especially people with a lot of money.

In 1899, Gesell began moving back and forth between Europe and Argentina, spreading the gospel of free money and writing extensively on other matters as well. He had a bunch of eccentric views, criticizing monogamous relationships and advocating free love. He lived in a vegetarian commune near Berlin for a time. He was a bohemian utopian who advocated for peace between nations. He was critical of big business and finance, but he believed in individual freedom and market competition. And he was a committed anti-racist. As fascism rose in Germany, Gesell would call the scapegoating of Jews for the nation's problems "a colossal injustice."

Wikimedia Commons

After World War I, Gesell watched Europe descend into political and economic chaos. In 1919, anarchist revolutionaries in Munich, Germany, took the helm of the short-lived Bavarian Republic, and they persuaded Gesell to become their finance minister. Led by pacifist poets and playwrights, it has been called "one of the strangest governments in the history of any country." Gesell began pursuing a program that included land reform, a basic income for women with children and, of course, stamped money. But the job lasted less than a week — ending after another group of revolutionaries, this time led by hard-line communists, overthrew the anarchist poets and playwrights. A year later, after the German government reasserted control, Gesell was tried for treason. But, successfully arguing that his only role and purpose was to rescue the Bavarian economy, he was acquitted after a one-day trial and went back to writing.

Free money becomes real money

For decades, money that expired unless stamped was mostly a theory. It took the Great Depression to make it a reality. As the economy went into a free-fall, people scrambled to find solutions. And in towns scattered throughout Europe and the United States, they found their solution in Gesell. The money reformer, who died in 1930 of pneumonia, would not live to see it.

In 1932, in the small town of Wörgl, Austria, a town leader, Michael Unterguggenberger, got Wörgl to issue stamped money as a way to combat skyrocketing unemployment and business closures. The town used it to pay the unemployed to do public works, and by all contemporary accounts, the system worked to lift the town out of misery.

The press dubbed it the "miracle of Wörgl," and it was one in a series of local experiments with stamped money. These experiments inspired many other struggling cities, like Hawarden, Iowa, and Anaheim, Calif., to do the same. It was around then that Gesell's work was finally published in English. With classical economics discredited by the prolonged depression and with leading economists scrambling to figure out what to do, many were inspired by Gesell. Among them were Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, two of the most influential economists of the 20th century.

In 1933, Fisher wrote a short book inspired by Gesell's ideas called Stamp Scrip. Fisher was an economist at Yale University, and he's now somewhat unfairly remembered for making overly optimistic predictions before the crash of 1929. He lobbied Congress to institute stamped money to provide relief to a distressed America. U.S. senators introduced a bill (S. 5125) that would have issued a billion dollars of stamped money to be distributed nationally. But it did not end up becoming law. Perhaps that's because that year was already seeing huge changes, with newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt implementing the New Deal and taking the U.S. off the gold standard.

Keynes, in 1936, dedicated five pages to Gesell in a concluding chapter of his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. While critiquing some of Gesell's overall theory, Keynes concluded, "The idea behind stamped money is sound."

Why do we care about this now?

After World War II, the industrialized world entered a remarkable period of economic growth. And central banks, now off a rigid gold standard, played a greater role in managing money to ease the ups and downs of the market. Negative-interest money lost its allure, and Gesell was mostly forgotten.

But the world's central banks are now thinking about how to keep money moving again. When the economy enters a downturn, they usually cut interest rates to encourage spending. But interest rates are already close to zero, which could be a huge problem in another recession. For a long time, economists believed rates couldn't go negative for a simple reason: If saving in places like a bank costs people money, they will instead just hoard cash, which won't cost them money. Cash becomes a roadblock to economic stimulus. One way around this is higher inflation, which devalues or "taxes" money in real terms, but central banks like the Fed have been showing that they have much less power to increase inflation than previously thought.

Central banks in Europe and Japan have been experimenting with teeny-tiny negative interest rates as a way to stimulate the economy, but the issue still remains that people will start hoarding cash if rates go significantly negative. It's why serious economic thinkers consider Gesell relevant again.

In our technological age, a Gesellian system of unhoardable cash wouldn't actually have to involve stamping paper bills for a fee. It could involve high-tech physical cash, such as magnetic strips that allow the government to impose a "Gesell tax" on holding cash, as one economist proposed some years ago. Harvard University's Kenneth Rogoff has been advocating we get rid of paper money altogether and move almost completely to a system of electronic cash. He believes it could give central banks the power to impose negative interest rates deep enough to rescue our economy from future recessions. In all of this, Gesell was a pioneer.

Silvio Gesell has been called everything from a "libertarian socialist" to an "anarchist" to a "free spirit" to a "crank." John Maynard Keynes had a much more affectionate term for him: a "strange, unduly neglected prophet."

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somethingusefulfromflorida · 4 years

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13 Keys to the White House: Final Update

Original (May 25)

Update (June 2)

The results are in, Professor Allan Lichtman has released his official prediction for the 2020 presidential election, and he has called it for Joe Biden.

Lichtman has successfully predicted every election since 1984, and his method retroactively accounts for every election since 1860. He understands that voters are not monoliths, they don’t just follow the leader blindly, they will reward an punish the president based on how they have driven the country. Lichtman asks 13 yes/no questions, the 13 keys, to assess the performance of the incumbent party over the last few years; if less than 5 of the keys are false, the incumbent party wins another term. If 6 or more are false, the challenging party takes over.

He predicted Ronald Reagan would win re-election in 1982, well before the Democrats had even chosen a candidate. He predicted George H.W. Bush would win in early 1988, when he was trailing behind Michael Dukakis. The only hiccup came from the year 2000, when he predicted that Al Gore would win, which by all rights he did! He won the popular vote, and had the Florida recount not been stopped by W’s brother and the conservative majority Supreme Court, he would have won the electoral college too. Lichtman even predicted that Gonad Lump would win in 2016. His track record is impeccable.

The Keys are as follows:

Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections. FALSE (Democrats took control of the House in 2018)

Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. TRUE (Trump had no challengers)

Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. TRUE (barring a debilitating brain aneurysm, he’s the Republican nominee)

Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign. TRUE (The Libertarians and the Greens aren’t being given nearly as much spoiler traction as they were in 2016, and Kanye West is a joke)

Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. FALSE (Welcome to the Great Shutdown, the second once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse in the last 15 years, and we��re still in the first half of it)

Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. FALSE (The GDP has fallen so much that growth is in the red; it took George W. Bush 8 years to tank the economy, but Trump did it in 3 1/2. Even if we get another stimulus package, it will take years to dig ourselves out of this hole.)

Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. TRUE (Trump has alienated out allies and flattered our enemies. His foreign policy advances the interests of dictators, and his domestic policies help only the oligarchs. Because Congress is split, no laws are being passed, so he has been signing a record number of Executive Orders to do whatever he wants with no repurcussions; EOs are law until Congress or the courts strike them down, but Congress can’t do anything, and he and Bitch McConnell have packed the courts in his favor. The country has taken a total 180 in the last 4 years)

Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term. FALSE (The George Floyd Protests have been going strong for almost 3 months now, with no end in sight. The media has stopped reporting on them, but the people are resilient; they will not take it lying down anymore! 2020 will go down in history as the new 1968. Change is coming, sooner rather than later)

Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. FALSE (Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, impeachment, enemies list, bribing porn stars, tax returns, perjury, underlings indicted/jailed, the post office, and 170000 people are DEAD)

Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. TRUE (America hasn’t technically been defeated, though pulling out of Syria so the Turks can kill the Kurds is pretty shitty if you ask me)

Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. FALSE (we’re still in Afghanistan, North Korea still hasn’t gotten rid of its nukes, and the US has lost its all credibility on the world stage in record time.)

Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. FALSE (His base reveres him as the second coming of Christ, but he has never had majority approval. In fact, he has consistently had majority DISAPPROVAL. Even Republicans are getting tired of him; the Lincoln Project is very good at getting under his skin! Charisma is subjective, but Lichtman compares candidates to the likes of the Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan. Trump doesn’t even come close)

Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. TRUE (Joe Biden is the Walter Mondale of Al Gores. He’s the Jimmy Carters of John Kerrys. He’s the Michael Dukakis of Hillary Clintons. He is old and unappealing to anyone under the age of 45, “competent,” but not extraordinary. Liberals and moderates love him, but he’s way too conservative for progressives. Republicans are acting like he’s a radical left-wing socialist when he is pretty much a Republican in all but name! They would have no problem with him if he wore a red tie instead of a blue one, they just don’t want to concede an inch. They want to shift the overton window so far to the right that Joe Biden looks like Joe Stalin; in a few years, Republicans will nominate someone so conservative they’ll make Donald Trump look like Bernie Sanders. 2024 is going to be a dark year for our Republic)

The final tally is 6 true, and 7 false. Trump needed 8 true to win, so Biden is predicted to take the White House in November!

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Biden will win the popular vote and lose the electoral college a la 2000/2016. He’s pulling ahead in the swing states, but it only takes a little fuckery to undo his progress; Florida is notorious for stopping election counts (Gore won in 2000, and Gillum won in 2018, but they just decided to stop counting in several blue cities), so it’ll come down to the Big 3; Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They were super close in 2016, and up until that point they were considered part of the Blue Wall, impenetrable Democratic strongholds. The fact that they flipped for Trump would be like if Georgia and Texas flipped for Clinton.

Only time will tell.

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Headlines

Canada’s other health crisis (Washington Post) The novel coronavirus was on the march across Canada, but it was a different public health crisis that turned Shannon Krell’s world upside down. Her brother hadn’t shown up for work, which was unusual. She called the police to have someone check on the 46-year-old, but a friend arrived first and made the sad discovery. Ryan Krell had died of an accidental drug overdose—another life lost to a crisis that has killed more than 15,400 people in Canada since 2016. Their number has increased in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. British Columbia, the epicenter of the crisis, recorded its deadliest month in May—and then surpassed it in June. Nearly four times as many people in the province have died of a suspected overdose this year as have died of the coronavirus. Overdose deaths in the Yukon territory this year are double last year’s tally. Paramedics in the city of Saskatoon last month responded to a record weekly number of overdose calls.

Taller cubicles, one-way aisles: Office workers must adjust (AP) Bergmeyer, a design firm in Boston, has erected higher cubicles, told employees to wear masks when not at their desks and set up one-way aisles in the office that force people to walk the long way around to get to the kitchen or the bathroom. “The one-way paths take me a little out of the way, but it was easy to get used to,” said Stephanie Jones, an interior designer with the company. “It actually gives me the opportunity to see more people and say a quick hello when I might have just walked directly to my desk before.” Around the U.S., office workers sent home when the coronavirus took hold in March are returning to the world of cubicles and conference rooms and facing certain adjustments: masks, staggered shifts, spaced-apart desks, daily questions about their health, closed break rooms and sanitizer everywhere. Employers in some cases are requiring workers to come back to the office, but most, like Bergmeyer, are letting the employees decide what to do, at least for now. Some firms say the risks and precautions are worth it to boost productivity and move closer to normal.

Postal Crisis Ripples Across Nation as Election Looms (NYT) Each day, when Nick Casselli, the president of a Philadelphia postal workers union, sits down at his desk, his phone is full of alarmed messages about increasing delays in mail delivery. Mr. Casselli and his 1,600 members have been in a state of high alert since Louis DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and an ally of President Trump’s, took over as postmaster general in May. Overtime was eliminated, prompting backups. Seven mail-sorting machines were removed from a nearby processing center in West Philadelphia, causing further delays. Now, post offices are being told to open later and close during lunch. Similar accounts of slowdowns and curtailed service are emerging across the country as Mr. DeJoy pushes cost-cutting measures that he says are intended to overhaul an agency suffering billion-dollar losses. But as Mr. Trump rails almost daily against the service and delays clog the mail, voters and postal workers warn a crisis is building that could disenfranchise record numbers of Americans who will be casting ballots by mail in November because of the coronavirus outbreak. At risk are not just the ballots—and medical prescriptions and paychecks—of residents around the country, but also the reputation of the Postal Service as the most popular and perhaps the least politicized part of the federal government.

California power problems (NYT) A heat wave is scorching the Southwest and has forced intermittent power shut-offs in California. Thermometers are cracking 110 degrees Fahrenheit in some cities. Californians used so much electricity trying to stay cool Friday night that, for the first time in 19 years, the agency that oversees much of the state’s power grid shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers for several hours to avoid a damaging overload. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for much of the West Coast. The sweltering heat comes as coronavirus cases are on the rise in California, creating a dilemma for those who could not stay cool at home.

Bald Eagle Sends Government Drone Into Lake Michigan (NYT) A squabble in the sky over Lake Michigan left one bald eagle victorious and one government drone mangled and sunken. Hunter King, a drone pilot at the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, was surveying an area of the lake near the state’s Upper Peninsula last month when the $950 drone started “twirling furiously” after it indicated that a propeller had been torn off. “When he looked up, the drone was gone, and an eagle was flying away,” said the department, whose name is abbreviated E.G.L.E. The department speculated that the eagle could have attacked because of a territorial dispute, because it was hungry “or maybe it did not like its name being misspelled.” Julia Ponder, executive director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, said that it was likely because the drone had encroached on the eagle’s territory. “They’re the king of the skies,” she said.

National Debt To Surpass $78 Trillion By 2028 (Forbes) The coronavirus pandemic pushed the government into the proverbial corner, prompting it to borrow heavily from the future to ward off a serious threat today. Without this intervention, the U.S. economy would be in a much worse recession or possibly even a depression. Even though borrowing excessively may have been the lesser of two evils, the burgeoning debt will have ramifications in the future. With the debt approaching $27 trillion, and projected to rise to $78 trillion by 2028, it will present significant challenges.

French government pushes for wider mask use (AP) After France recorded its highest one-day rise in virus infections since May, the government is pushing for wider mask use and tighter protections for migrant workers and in slaughterhouses. But France still plans to reopen schools nationwide in two weeks, and the labor minister says the government is determined to avoid a new nationwide lockdown that would further hobble the economy and threaten jobs. France’s infection count has resurged in recent weeks, blamed in part on people crisscrossing the country for weddings, family gatherings or annual summer vacations with friends. Britain reimposed quarantine measures Saturday for vacationers returning from France as a result.

Lukashenko under pressure as rival protests planned in Belarus capital (Reuters) Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko was under growing pressure on Sunday with rival protests due to converge on the capital a week after a contested presidential election that has thrown his country into turmoil. Lukashenko, in power for 26 years, has faced down a week of street demonstrations and refused demands for a re-run of an election protesters say was massively rigged to disguise the fact that he has lost public support. Often emotional in state TV appearances, the 65-year-old leader has alleged a foreign-backed plot to topple him. Russia, which has had a troubled relationship with Lukashenko, is watching closely as Belarus hosts pipelines that carry Russian energy exports to the West and is also viewed by Moscow as a buffer zone against NATO. The EU is gearing up to impose new sanctions on Belarus in response to a violent crackdown in which at least two protesters have been killed and thousands detained. Protesters show no signs of backing down.

Campus-based Thai protest movement extends reach to streets (AP) Anti-government protesters gathered in large numbers in Thailand’s capital on Sunday for a rally that suggested their movement’s strength may have extended beyond the college campuses where it has blossomed. Thousands of people assembled at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, a traditional venue for political activities. Hundreds of police were also present, as well as a small contingent of royalists opposed to the protesters. There was no reliable estimate of the crowd size, though it appeared to be one of the biggest demonstrations in several years. The student-led movement has three core demands: holding new elections, amending the constitution and ending the intimidation of critics of the government. Thailand has experienced a successful coup roughly every six years on average since the army toppled the absolute monarchy in 1932 and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy. But it has been under military rule for much of the time since then.

10 killed in Somalia in extremist attack on Mogadishu hotel (AP) A Somali police officer says at least 10 people have been killed and more than a dozen others injured in an ongoing siege at a beachside hotel in Somalia’s capital where security forces are battling Islamic extremist gunmen who have invaded the building, Capt. Mohamed Hussein told The Associated Press that the attack started with a powerful car bomb which blew off the security gates to the Elite Hotel.

#headlines #news

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tracyk13 · 5 years

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36 and what a world I have seen

Honestly I’ve been terrible at journalling lately. Love handwriting in quill and ink style, but my current life leaves me exhausted after work and most of my time spent in education. But currently the Covid-19 pandemic made me consider the important world events I have witnessed.

Born in 1984 I lived in a world of rapidly changing technology but still being forced outside to play. We always had an Apple computer in our house for as long as I can remember. Played the Oregon Trail in black and white, then in color. That was the standard computer game of my childhood. Mom got us Mario Teaches Typing, probably the only “video game” I ever played at that point. AOL was a thing. All those CDs in the mail with updates. I never really got into it, but my twin sister did.

Also a child of the Disney Golden Age of animation. Dramatically influenced my life to the point I went to work for Walt Disney World after college. Still a Disney fanatic to this day.

Apparently my family visited Yellowstone National park (age 4? too young to remember anyway) then not too long after the park had the fire.

Was alive though not conscious of world events when the Berlin Wall fell. Watch the birth of CNN during the first Desert Storm when my dad was there overseeing some of the first drone flights. The military required a pilot on hand for those flights. He told us later how some Iraqis would surrender to the drone plane, not that it was ever one of the ones he supervised. And according to my mom I frequently asked to NOT watch the 24 hour stream of news because it was too depressing and I knew that’s where dad was.

Really started to pay attention to news (not that l enjoyed it but that’s the timeline for how chidden develop) during the O.J. Simpson trial.

By that point I had lived on both coasts of the USA, crossed country twice, lived in many different environments from Washington’s cold wet seasons to California’s deserts California’s coast to landlocked suburbia of Georgia.

Where I learned to drive, had a single Nokia phone for me and my twin in our tiny Cabrio convertible (I hate convertibles). Got a personal computer for the first time, where before it was a single family computer. The iMacs were coming out right when we were heading to college. My sister got the desktop, I got the laptop and have never looked back. Still have my gumstick shuffle iPod floating around and it still works.

Got to watch the insanity of Indecision 2000 and appreciate political humor for the first time.

I’ve been to 9 different schools for 12 years of school, not including college. That would make it ten. Was a freshman in high school when the Columbine shootings happened. Some weeks later we had a pipe bomb threat at our school which forced all the students out to the football field. From the top of the bleachers we could see the bomb squad and their dogs entering the school. All I could think of was if someone really wanted to kill at lot of people, there on the bleachers would be the place to do it. Then at some point in my adult life someone did it at a movie theater showing The Dark Knight.

Saw the images of the Oklahoma City bombing. Heard about the Unabomber. Watched the Waco Texas incident.

But my senior year was the time of 9/11. My math class was out in the hallway doing a math related science type experiment, can’t tell you what it was. But that day was the only day I have ever heard a school of nearly 5,000 students absolutely silent during class change. Thus Desert Storm part two happened.

Right before I headed off to college. So I wasn’t super savvy about applying to colleges. I only applied to one. Didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve done a wide variety of sports, been writing fiction since at least 10 years old, drew and painted fairly well, thought about doing animation or architecture (did a semester learning thing with a local firm, decided it wasn’t for me).

Ended up getting a degree in two foreign languages but not fluent in either. It did greatly improve my understanding of the English language. And I had the privilege of an exchange program for a school year to Japan, plus of study abroad summer to Germany. Would never regret any of that. Even if it didn’t get me a degree that got me a job.

Instead I went to Disney World as part of their internship program. Been in foods and hospitality for a significant portion of my life (thus far). Loved working there. Got to work with the Characters and it was fabulous. Even with the frustrations of all work environments.

But it couldn’t last. Minimum wage was raised, but the cost of living out stripped the earnings for a single person living alone. Prompting a move back home with parents to get another degree. Then the Housing bubble burst, loans defaulted, mortgage crisis, resulting in the Great Recession. It did get me a house in my name but basically an income property for my mom as her inheritance from my grandmother. All the while I’m going to school to be a nurse.

Now let’s not forget about the many weather crises I’ve witnessed via the news. Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Maria to name the ones I easily remember. The Class 5 tornado that wiped out a midwestern town. The volcano in Iceland rerouting planes. The tsunami in Indonesia and Sumatra. The massive earthquake in Haiti. These are only the ones that easily come to mind without researching what happened during the years I’ve been alive.

Not to mention the diseases that I’ve seen via the news. First to mind was the Ebola outbreak while I was in nursing school. Saw the hype on the Swine Flue, SARS, Avian flu to name a few easily remembered. Those never reached me personally. Now it’s Covid-19 unfolding. Called SARS-CoV-19 now, but that later.

But its not all disasters. Went to the Atlanta Centennial Olympics still have the t-shirt. Was alive during the first black president.

Took part in the massive phenomena that was Harry Potter and still love it to this day. It showed me that fiction/fantasy could be a mainstream genre to write for. I started writing FanFiction at that time to fill in the long spaces between books. Started when fan fiction.net had the 7or 8 main characters to choose from for tagging. It was like the Wild West of figuring out what you were about to read. Learned about Slash, yaoi, lemons and such the hard way. But being exposed to it that way did open my eyes to what goes on in other people’s heads. Knew immediately that just because I didn’t like something didn't mean I had to hate on it. I left it alone once found and kept going. Really helped increase my tolerance to other cultures and thoughts.

Met my best friend on a role playing site and we wrote nonstop during our college years. Went to her wedding, have a lovely Renaissance style dress as a bridesmaid gift. Still am in touch with her. We don’t write together any more as we have moved in our lives with adulting. But I still have all those stories and hope to turn them into something.

Had my first camera cell phone in Japan as just a basic free phone. Was shocked to find cameras in the States were not standard. One of my friends in Japan kept doing selfies before they were called selfies. Blind positioning of the camera for pictures. Then came the iPhone and the world never looked back.

Joined Facebook when it required a college email. Used MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger to communicate with people around the world. Didn’t join the Twitter or Tumblr movement until after they became established. Saw the boom and bust of the Dot.Com bubble. Watched the Dow Jones numbers increase without the income to invest the way they said to.

Lived right above the poverty line during the Recession. Not knowing if I could make it the next month. Never being able to claim poverty on the tax forms. Caught in the income dead space of not being able to afford health insurance from the markets but in a state that didn’t allow for Medicaid expansion.

But I do not have the worry now thankfully.

Jobs wise I’ve been a telemarketer, dishwasher, a line cook, a hostess, server, janitor, assistant manager, and now I’m a nurse. I started on med/surg, ED, Cardiac, and ICU. In a small rural hospital getting smaller in a time when rural were shutting down because of no funding. They serve areas with a high rates of unemployment, uninsured, drug and alcohol abuse.

Worked at a busier hospital were no bed was left empty. Sicker patients. Work in a mid-size place. Some days super busy, some slower.

Covid-19 had the affect of somehow doing both. First few days was almost empty, now it fluctuates. Mostly rule outs. And the protocols are changing hourly which makes life frustrating for us. It’s the constant unspoken threat of going into work not knowing if you’ll have the right equipment to do the job. I’m not scared of the virus itself, not even of the collapse of the economy. I’m scared of the surge that will put my coworkers at risk.

I live alone (my little sister lives with me now) so very little contact with others. But they have kids and a much closer physical distance to their older parents. I know I will add days to my weeks if they have to stay out for any length of time.

So this is the first time a world event as truly affected me. It is a terrifying time which prompted this summary of my life so far.

I went into a restaurant and saw no one. I never thought I’d see that day. I don’t want people to loose their income, but if people were to go about their daily activities we would loose so many in one go. All I can do is my job.

The more I watch the more depressed and stressed. At work is worse.

I’m teaching myself a new craft because of this. I have taken up leather working to make masks. It helps the creativity outlet. I started drawing class early in 2020 and was set to continue drawing and add painting when the social distancing started. I admit it felt overblown in the beginning. Now the numbers are changing rapidly and we are really seeing what happens in close communities. Just keep working. It’s part of life now. No matter how much if feels like a movie plot line.

But back to other things I’ve seen.

LGTBQA and others coming into the forefront of society. Saw legalization of gay marriage. Quite thrilled with that.

Didn’t hear the term Asexual in reference to a sexual preference until my early 20s. Immediately recognized similar stories to me. Never had an interest in sex or having a partner. A name did make things more relatable, but I will never fully understand people who seem to base their entire existence on their sexual preference.

I’ve been call sir many times based on how I dress. I still sound like a female. Can’t fault anyone for using the appropriate pronoun for what they see in front of them. But that’s a culture that’s growing. Preferred pronouns. But I have to admit that an online friend referred to me as “they” despite a lady being in my username and it felt nice. So in honor of the Special Snowflake term that floated around, I’m an nonbinary aromantic asexual. Probably with a fem-romanitic leaning.

Saw the rise of the Millennials. I’m caught between Gen X and the Millennials. Now that all the Millennials are of age to vote, perhaps change is underway?

I’m back in college for my 3rd and then 4th degree. In nursing. Online. Watching the world combat a virus.

A US that is split down the middle politically. A world with more pollution problems than we can handle. Governments preferring to coverup mistakes and corruption than help their citizens. The term Public Servant is obviously not taken seriously in some places. See Flint, MI and their water. Lobbyists creating bills that benefit corporations rather than people. Politicians that never retire and keep getting lucrative reelection donations from those very corporations.

The rise of narcotic drug use, prescription drugs. Pill mills.

Sex scandals taking center stage in the news rather than things that actually affect daily life. Among things I will never understand is the fear of Transgender women in the women’s restrooms when it was always a straight conservative man who was the center of all these sex scandals.

Asexual brain at work. I simply do not understand. Conclusion: If you look like a certain gender, you’ll most often be treated as that gender.

What I do miss were the kid shows and cartoons in the 90s. They were super progressive with great literature themes. I knew the story of some of the greatest classic literature simply by the references in those shows.

Also the era of War on Drug commercials. Recycling promoted.

My favorite: Captain Planet. Not only was it pushing for a cleaner earth it had different nationalities. Stereotypical, but a far better representation than what I am seeing in kids shows today. It was diverse in that multiple skin tones were seen on screen together rather than specific skin tones marketed to that specific demographic. Now I do like how many more cultures are represented, I just want them shown in ways where color and culture is not the primary focus.

It also surged a desire to protect the planet. The knowledge that we need clean water and air. Educational shows like Magic School Bus and Bill Nye explained what is happening in the environment long before Global Warming became political. With the global shut in we see the world cleansing itself.

Now the marijuana legalization issue. No one has died from overdosing on weed. Unlike Alcohol. Yes smoke isn’t good for your health like cigarettes, but the complications are not as prevalent, well studied, or as life threatening with what is known. The disconnect of state legalization and national illegalities is mind blowing. I hope to see that break so we can study it.

Overall I know I have seen a lot of historical events and I hope to live another 36 plus years to see more. 3 decades, the change of a century and the change of the millennia. Y2K hysteria included.

The world is changing. The outcome is unknown. Peace be upon us all.

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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WE ARE LIVING IN A FAILED STATE

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

By George Packer | SPECIAL PREVIEW: JUNE 2020 Issue | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 21, 2020 |

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.

We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.

The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.

The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.

[ Francis Fukuyama: The thing that determines a country’s resistance to the coronavirus]

Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.

So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.

In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.

To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline “Underlying Conditions.”

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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

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GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

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Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others

COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled.

By James Hamblin | Published April 21, 2020 10:41 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 21, 2020 |

The COVID-19 crash comes suddenly. In early March, the 37-year-old writer F. T. Kola began to feel mildly ill, with a fever and body aches. To be safe, she isolated herself at home in San Francisco. Life continued apace for a week, until one day she tried to load her dishwasher and felt strangely exhausted.

Her doctor recommended that she go to Stanford University’s drive-through coronavirus testing site. “I remember waiting in my car, and the doctors in their intense [protective equipment] coming towards me like a scene out of Contagion,” she told me when we spoke for The Atlantic’s podcast Social Distance. “I felt like I was a biohazard—and I was.” The doctors stuck a long swab into the back of her nose and sent her home to await results.

Lying in bed that night, she began to shake, overtaken by the most intense chills of her life. “My teeth were chattering so hard that I was really afraid they would break,” she said. Then she started to hallucinate. “I thought I was holding a very big spoon for some reason, and I kept thinking, Where am I going to put my spoon down?”

An ambulance raced her to the hospital, where she spent three days in the ICU, before being moved to a newly created coronavirus-only ward. Sometimes she barely felt sick at all, and other times she felt on the verge of death. But after two weeks in the hospital, she walked out. Now, as the death toll from the coronavirus has climbed to more than 150,000 people globally, Kola has flashes of guilt and disbelief: “Why did my lungs make it through this? Why did I go home? Why am I okay now?”

[ Read: The best hopes for a coronavirus drug]

COVID-19 is, in many ways, proving to be a disease of uncertainty. According to a new study from Italy, some 43 percent of people with the virus have no symptoms. Among those who do develop symptoms, it is common to feel sick in uncomfortable but familiar ways—congestion, fever, aches, and general malaise. Many people start to feel a little bit better. Then, for many, comes a dramatic tipping point. “Some people really fall off the cliff, and we don’t have good predictors of who it’s going to happen to,” Stephen Thomas, the chair of infectious diseases at Upstate University Hospital, told me. Those people will become short of breath, their heart racing and mind detached from reality. They experience organ failure and spend weeks in the ICU, if they survive at all.

Meanwhile, many others simply keep feeling better and eventually totally recover. Kola’s friend Karan Mahajan, an author based in Providence, Rhode Island, contracted the virus at almost the same time she did. In stark contrast to Kola, he said, “My case ended up feeling like a mild flu that lasted for two weeks. And then it faded after that.”

(Related Podcast: Listen to James Hamblin interview Kola and Mahajan on an episode of Social Distance, The Atlantic’s podcast about life in the pandemic)

“There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University. “It’s very unusual. None of this variability really fits with any other diseases we’re used to dealing with.”

This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, people around the world have heard the message that older and chronically ill people are most likely to die from COVID-19. But that is far from a complete picture of who is at risk of life-threatening disease. Understanding exactly how and why some people get so sick while others feel almost nothing will be the key to treatment.

Hope has been put in drugs that attempt to slow the replication of the virus—those currently in clinical trials like remdesivir, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. But with the flu and most other viral diseases, antiviral medications are often effective only early in the disease. Once the virus has spread widely within our body, our own immune system becomes the thing that more urgently threatens to kill us. That response cannot be fully controlled. But it can be modulated and improved.

One of the common, perplexing experiences of COVID-19 is the loss of smell—and, then, taste. “Eating pizza was like eating cardboard,” Mahajan told me. Any common cold that causes congestion can alter these sensations to some degree. But a near-total breakdown of taste and smell is happening with coronavirus infections even in the absence of other symptoms.

Jonathan Aviv, an ear, nose, and throat doctor based in New York, told me he has seen a surge in young people coming to him with a sudden inability to taste. He’s unsure what to tell them about what’s going on. “The non-scary scenario is that the inflammatory effect of the infection is temporarily altering the function of the olfactory nerve,” he said. “The scarier possibility is that the virus is attacking the nerve itself.” Viruses that attack nerves can cause long-term impairment, and could affect other parts of the nervous system. The coronavirus has already been reported to precipitate inflammation in the brain that leads to permanent damage.

Though SARS-CoV-2 (the new coronavirus) isn’t reported to invade the brain and spine directly, its predecessor SARS-CoV seems to have that capacity. If nerve cells are spared by the new virus, they would be among the few that are. When the coronavirus attaches to cells, it hooks on and breaks through, then starts to replicate. It does so especially well in the cells of the nasopharynx and down into the lungs, but is also known to act on the cells of the liver, bowels, and heart. The virus spreads around the body for days or weeks in a sort of stealth mode, taking over host cells while evading the immune response. It can take a week or two for the body to fully recognize the extent to which it has been overwhelmed. At this point, its reaction is often not calm and measured. The immune system goes into a hyperreactive state, pulling all available alarms to mobilize the body’s defense mechanisms. This is when people suddenly crash.

Bootsie Plunkett, a 61-year-old retiree in New Jersey with diabetes and lupus, described it to me as suffocating. We met in February, taping a TV show, and she was her typically ebullient self. A few weeks later, she developed a fever. It lasted for about two weeks, as did the body aches. She stayed at home with what she presumed was COVID-19. Then, as if out of nowhere, she was gasping for air. Her husband raced her to the hospital, and she began to slump over in the front seat. When they made it to the hospital, her blood-oxygen level was just 79 percent, well below the point when people typically require aggressive breathing support.

Such a quick decline—especially in the later stages of an infectious disease—seems to result from the immune response suddenly kicking into overdrive. The condition tends to be dire. Half of the patients with COVID-19 who end up in the intensive-care unit at New York–Presbyterian Hospital stay for 20 days, according to Pamela Sutton-Wallace, the regional chief operating officer. (In normal times, the national average is 3.3 days). Many of these patients arrive at the hospital in near-critical condition, with their blood tests showing soaring levels of inflammatory markers. One that seems to be especially predictive of a person’s fate is a protein known as D-dimer. Doctors in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus outbreak was first reported, have found that a fourfold increase in D-dimer is a strong predictor of mortality, suggesting in a recent paper that the test “could be an early and helpful marker” of who is entering the dangerous phases.

These and other markers are often signs of a highly fatal immune-system process known as a cytokine storm, explains Randy Cron, the director of rheumatology at Children’s of Alabama, in Birmingham. A cytokine is a short-lived signaling molecule that the body can release to activate inflammation in an attempt to contain and eradicate a virus. In a cytokine storm, the immune system floods the body with these molecules, essentially sounding a fire alarm that continues even after the firefighters and ambulances have arrived.

At this point, the priority for doctors shifts from hoping that a person’s immune system can fight off the virus to trying to tamp down the immune response so it doesn’t kill the person or cause permanent organ damage. As Cron puts it, “If you see a cytokine storm, you have to treat it.” But treating any infection by impeding the immune system is always treacherous. It is never ideal to let up on a virus that can directly kill our cells. The challenge is striking a balance where neither the cytokine storm nor the infection runs rampant.

Cron and other researchers believe such a balance is possible. Cytokine storms are not unique to COVID-19. The same basic process happens in response to other viruses, such as dengue and Ebola, as well as influenza and other coronaviruses. It is life-threatening and difficult to treat, but not beyond the potential for mitigation.

At Johns Hopkins University, the biomedical engineer Joshua Vogelstein and his colleagues have been trying to identify patterns among people who have survived cytokine storms and people who haven’t. One correlation the team noticed was that people taking the drug tamsulosin (sold as Flomax, to treat urinary retention) seemed to fare well. Vogelstein is unsure why. Cytokine storms do trigger the release of hormones such as dopamine and adrenaline, which tamsulosin can partially block. The team is launching a clinical trial to see if the approach is of any help.

One of the more promising approaches is blocking cytokines themselves—once they’ve already been released into the blood. A popular target is one type of cytokine known as interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is known to peak at the height of respiratory failure. Benjamin Lebwohl, director of research at Columbia University’s Celiac Disease Center, says that people with immune conditions like celiac and inflammatory bowel disease may be at higher risk of severe cases of COVID-19. But he’s hopeful that medications that inhibit IL-6 or other cytokines could pare back the unhelpful responses while leaving others intact. Other researchers have seen promising preliminary results, and clinical trials are ongoing.

[Read: The best hopes for a coronavirus drug]

If interleukin inhibitors end up playing a significant role in treating very sick people, though, we would run out. These medicines (which go by names such as tocilizumab and ruxolitinib, reading like a good draw in Scrabble) fall into a class known as “biologics.” They are traditionally used in rare cases and tend to be very expensive, sometimes costing people with immune conditions about $18,000 a year. Based on price and the short supply, Cron says, “my guess is we’re going to rely on corticosteroids at the end of the day. Because it’s what we have.”

That is a controversial opinion. Corticosteroids (colloquially known as “steroids,” though they are of the adrenal rather than reproductive sort), can act as an emergency brake on the immune system. Their broad, sweeping action means that steroids involve more side effects than targeting one specific cytokine. Typically, a person on steroids has a higher risk of contracting another dangerous infection, and early evidence on the utility of steroids in treating COVID-19, in studies from the outbreak in China, was mixed. But some doctors are now using them to good effect. Last week, the Infectious Diseases Society of America issued guidelines on steroids, recommending them in the context of a clinical trial when the disease reaches the level of acute respiratory distress. They may have helped Plunkett, the 61-year-old from New Jersey. After three days on corticosteroids, she left the ICU—without ever being intubated.

Deciding on the precise method of modulating the immune response—the exact drug, dose, and timing—is ideally informed by carefully monitoring patients before they are critically ill. People at risk of a storm could be monitored closely throughout their illness, and offered treatment immediately when signs begin to show. That could mean detecting the markers in a person’s blood before the process sends her into hallucinations—before her oxygen level fell at all.

In typical circumstances in the United States and other industrialized nations, patients would be urged to go to the hospital sooner rather than later. But right now, to avoid catastrophic strain on an already overburdened health-care system, people are told to avoid the hospital until they feel short of breath. For those who do become critically ill and arrive at the ER in respiratory failure, health-care workers are then behind the ball. Given those circumstances, the daily basics of maintaining overall health and the best possible immune response become especially important.

The official line from the White House Coronavirus Task Force has been that “high-risk” people are older and those with chronic medical conditions, such as obesity and diabetes. But that has proven to be a limited approximation of who will bear the burden of this disease most severely. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first official report on who has been hospitalized for COVID-19. It found that Latinos and African Americans have died at significantly higher rates than white Americans. In Chicago, more than half of the people who have tested positive, and nearly 60 percent of those who have died, were African American. They make up less than one-third of the city’s population. Similar patterns are playing out across the country: Rates of death and severe disease are several times higher among racial minorities and people of low socioeconomic status.

[Read: What the racial data show]

These disparities are beginning to be acknowledged at high levels, but often as though they are just another one of the mysteries of the coronavirus. At a White House briefing last week, Vice President Mike Pence said his team was looking into “the unique impact that we’re seeing reported on African Americans from the coronavirus.” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has noted that “we are not going to solve the issues of health disparities this month or next month. This is something we should commit ourselves for years to do.”

While America’s deepest health disparities absolutely would require generations to undo, the country still could address many gaps right now. Variation in immune responses between people is due to much more than age or chronic disease. The immune system is a function of the communities that brought us up and the environments with which we interact every day. Its foundation is laid by genetics and early-life exposure to the world around us—from the food we eat to the air we breathe. Its response varies on the basis of income, housing, jobs, and access to health care.

The people who get the most severely sick from COVID-19 will sometimes be unpredictable, but in many cases, they will not. They will be the same people who get sick from most every other cause. Cytokines like IL-6 can be elevated by a single night of bad sleep. Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of daily and hourly stressors accumulate. Ultimately, people who are unable to take time off of work when sick—or who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home, or who lack access to good food and clean air—are likely to bear the burden of severe disease.

Much is yet unknown about specific cytokines and their roles in disease. But the likelihood of disease in general is not so mysterious. Often, it’s a matter of what societies choose to tolerate. America has empty hotels while people sleep in parking lots. We are destroying food while people go hungry. We are allowing individuals to endure the physiological stresses of financial catastrophe while bailing out corporations. With the coronavirus, we do not have vulnerable populations so much as we have vulnerabilities as a population. Our immune system is not strong.

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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

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JAMES HAMBLIN, M.D., is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is also a lecturer at Yale School of Public Health and author of the forthcoming book Clean.

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xtruss · 5 years

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Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19

For years, I was puzzled why the Roman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by barbarians. Looking at the West's response to COVID-19, I know now.

Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19

— 25 March, 2020 | RT

Colosseum and Arch of Constantine during the Coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19). Rome (Italy), March 19th, 2020

By Dr. Luboš Motl, Czech theoretical physicist, who was an assistant professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. He writes a science and politics blog called The Reference Frame

Many think Covid-19 is some kind of alien invasion that spells the end of the world. But the real threat to us is a much deadlier virus: a hatred of all the values that have underpinned our civilisation for centuries.

For years, I was puzzled as to why the Roman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by communities that were uncivilized by comparison. How and why could mankind’s progress reverse in this way? Recent experience has eliminated the mystery. No special devastating event was needed; the cause of Rome's demise was simply the loss of its people's desire to support their ‘empire’ and its underlying values. And as it was 1,500 years or so ago, so I fear it is now.

The Covid-19 crisis – specifically, the reaction to it – demonstrates that people have grown bored, detached, and easily impressionable by things that have nothing to do with the roots of their society. We are all – or too many of us – fin de siècle Romans now.

A large number of Westerners are happy to accept the suicidal shutting down of their economies to try to halt a virus that predominantly causes old and sick people to die just a few weeks or months before they would have anyway. Just as they enthusiastically endorse proclamations such as that there are 46 sexes, not two; that the flatulence of a cow must be reduced to save a polar bear; that millions of migrants from the Third World must be invited to Europe and assumed to be neurosurgeons; and so on.

The widespread opinion that everything, including economies, must be sacrificed to beat coronavirus is a revival of medieval witch hunts; the sacrifice seems more important than finding an effective method to deal with the problem.

Our increasingly decadent mass culture has gradually become more ideological and openly opposed to the values Western civilization is based upon. And while it boasts of being ‘counter-culture’ and independent, it’s acquired a monopoly over almost all the information channels that determine opinions, including mainstream media and political parties.

Our leaders have become sucked into this group-thinking and happily institute policies that unleash shutdowns that may cause the worst recession in history. Thousands of businesses are closing and long-term prospects are bleak.

Governments are stepping in to pay wages and fund other services. As tax revenue will be virtually non-existent, public debt will soar. Some governments may default on their debts or resort to printing money, causing soaring inflation. These countries may be unable to fund healthcare, their police or their military, and be so weakened they will be invaded by others and be erased from the world map.

That may be a worst-case scenario, but it’s almost certain that the impact of the shutdowns will be a recession comparable to the Great Depression. Yet what do most Western citizens make of it? Well, they are either unaware, uncaring, or they’re happy about it. They don’t seem to appreciate the consequent dangers. Instead, they are more obsessed with the latest celebrity who’s caught the virus.

The consumers of this mass culture haven't built anything like what our ancestors did – enlightenment, the theory of relativity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, major advances in philosophy, science, literature and engineering. They don't have to defend any real values against a tangible enemy, because hiding in a herd with uniform group-think is good enough for them.

Our ancestors had difficult, short lives; they had to work hard, produce enough to survive, fight enemies, and defend what they’d inherited. Numerous lasting values emerged from those efforts. The current generations of Westerners are good only at producing and escalating irrationality and panic.

If a two-month lockdown isn’t deemed enough to contain the virus, they’re happy to extend it to six months, if not years. China decided to impose strict policies, but they were assertive enough to be relatively short-lived; many Westerners want less perfect policies to last for a much longer time. That’s clearly an irrational approach; instead of ‘flattening a curve’, rational leaders (like Beijing’s) try to turn the curve into a cliff. The faster you eliminate the virus, the cheaper it is.

Immortality As An Entitlement

This support for economically suicidal policies didn't start with Covid-19. Westerners have spent recent decades amid a prosperity in which they took material wealth and good healthcare for granted. They forgot what hunger (and, in most cases, unemployment) meant. They got used to demanding ever deeper ‘entitlements’, such as the ‘right not to be offended’.

Activists sensationalised smaller and more implausible threats and demanded that governments mitigated them. In particular, the climate change movement advocated that the 1-2 °C of warming caused by CO2 emissions in a century was equivalent to an armageddon that had to be avoided, whatever the cost.

In this context, it could be expected that the first ‘real challenge’ – and a new flu-like disease is certainly one – would make people fearful. Because if people were led to believe that 1-2 °C of warming was basically the end of the world, is it surprising that they're absolutely terrified of a new disease that has the potential to kill a few million old and sick people?

The existential threat posed by coronavirus – or at least, our irrationality towards it – is greater than the climate threat (though still very small). Westerners who haven't seen any real threats for a long time have developed a condition – termed "affluenflammation" by the American musician Remy – which is a pathological habit of inflating negligible threats. When this inflation of feelings is applied to a real threat, namely a pandemic, they lose their composure.

The context of Covid-19, where every death is presented with horror, makes it clear that ‘immortality’ is just another ‘human right’. This wisdom says that our leaders are failing because they cannot defend this so-called right. But this excessive sensitivity is just one part of the problem.

Many Westerners actively want to harm their economies, corporations, rich people, and governments, because they don't feel any attachment to or responsibility for them. They take security and prosperity for granted. Their money and food arrive from ‘somewhere’, and they don’t care about the source.

And they believe that the structures which allow them to survive – the governments, banks, and so on – are ‘evil’. Some are just financially illiterate. But others know what they are saying, and rejoice in demanding that trillions be sacrificed in order to infinitesimally increase the probability that a 90-year-old will avoid infection and live a little bit longer. They don't accept their dependence on society and the system at all. They don't realise that their moral values, their ‘human rights’, are only available if paid for by prosperous societies.

I have used some dramatic prose, so let me be clear: the scenario I’ve outlined – ending in the suicide of the West – is avoidable, and I hope and believe it will be. I know some who are willing to fight for its survival.

But even if this acceleration towards shutdowns is reversed and countries restore their pre-virus businesses, our world won't be the same. Many people will conclude that the crisis was exciting, and try to kickstart a repetition. The curfew is likely to reduce CO2 emissions this year, so climate activists may try for similar results in the future. Terrorists may deploy some new disease – which, after all, is likely to be more effective than any stabbing or bombing.

It's conceivable that the West’s brush with mortality will lead people to regain some common sense and survival instincts. Perhaps several nations going bankrupt will be a wake-up call. Maybe people will realise that the reaction to the coronavirus was disproportionate. But even if that is so, I’m afraid it won’t be enough.

We need to accept that the positive relationship of Westerners to the roots of their civilization will be still missing – and that this is a virus that poses a much more fundamental existential threat than Covid-19.

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bowsetter · 5 years

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Three Bank Failures Open New Chapter in Never-Ending Financial Crisis

The collapse of three banks on three different continents indicates a new global crisis is brewing. But it may also show that the last one never really ended and the tools used to manage the global economy simply don’t work.

Also read: Side Effects of Economic Growth: Is Snowden Right to Say Bitcoiners Shouldn’t Be Bankers?

US Bank Fails for the First Time Since 2017

More than 10 years have passed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which burned almost $10 trillion in market capitalization in global equities within a month. Back then, it was determined that banks, large and small, had gotten themselves into trouble with mortgage-backed securities, the price of which turned out to be significantly overestimated.

Now, following waves of quantitative easing and huge bailouts for those deemed “too big to fail,” indications have emerged that the traditional banking system is heading towards its next big disaster. The main question that remains to be answered is what the trigger will be.

Analysts have warned it may be the record high level of global debt currently standing at well over $240 trillion, which is three times the size of the global economy. Others are pointing to China’s deeply indebted financial system. Europe’s banking sector, as deleveraged as it may seem, still has its unresolved issues, especially acute and chronic in some countries of its southern flank.

When America sneezes, however, the world usually catches cold, as the saying goes. This year, the U.S. registered its first bank failure since 2017. On the last day of May, the Texas Department of Banking closed Enloe State Bank. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) then took steps to arrange the assumption of the bank’s insured deposits by Legend Bank, N.A.

The Enloe State Bank is a small institution with only one branch. It controlled a little over $36 million in assets and only about $31 million in deposits. Nevertheless, its demise is an event that deserves a mention. Bank failures in the U.S. peaked in 2010, according to FDIC data, when 157 banks closed. Since then, the number of failing financial institutions has been decreasing – 92 in 2011, 51 in 2012, 24 in 2013, 18 in 2014, eight in 2015, five in 2016, six in 2017, and most notably – zero in 2018.

The FDIC maintains a database of all U.S. banks that failed since Oct. 1, 2000. It’s a terrifying list to go through as it has 23 pages of institutions that for various reasons were forced to abandon their business and seek rescue. The table contains the name of the troubled bank, the city and state it’s based in, its certification number, closing date, and the acquiring institution. The list already has a staggering 556 entries added since the beginning of the millennium.

Undoubtedly, the fact that in 2018 no bank failed for the first time since 2006 indicates that the banking sector in the Untitled States has strengthened since what’s now often called the Great Recession. But the fact that a bank went down this year shows there are still underlying problems and weaknesses in the market that have to be addressed.

The industry has been consolidating as most troubled banks have been bought by bigger institutions. On the backdrop of economic expansion, corporate tax cuts and new safety measures, it’s been reported that the six largest of them are expected to reach a record profit of more than $100 billion. The question is, will bigger be better when the next crisis hits?

World’s Oldest Bank Bailed Out Against Europe’s Rules

Despite some positive changes implemented in the past decade, the traditional banking system is still facing numerous challenges that are mounting once again. Europe, where a more conservative approach to dealing with the 2008 troubles created a generally safer environment, is still struggling to overcome the problems that have dogged banks in many of the southern member states of the European Union which took a hard blow from the global financial bust 10 years ago.

After governments commissioned huge bailouts and introduced stricter regulations, the capital balances of many European banks improved. Countries such as Greece and Italy, however, continue to register a high proportion of bad loans. At the same time, unlike the United States, larger banks in these and more stable economies are experiencing low profits due to not only the large share of non-performing loans, but also the unprecedented low interest rates across the Eurozone and the larger EU.

Between 2007 and 2009, financial institutions, from Ireland to Austria, had to be saved by governments or acquired by banks in better financial condition. The heightened standards players in the industry were obliged to meet and the new rules they now have to comply with improved the stability of surviving banks, increased their capital ratios and reduced the share of bad loans in subsequent years. Still, when the European Central Bank conducted a health check in 2014, 25 out of the 130 largest Eurozone banks failed the stress test. The capital shortfall estimated by the ECB amounted to €25 billion.

Again, unlike the U.S., 2018 was not a very good year for banks on the Old Continent. Towards the end of the summer and during the last quarter they turned out to have some of the worst performing stocks. The losses reported by mainstream media were remarkable. In just four months, the price of Dankse Bank shares declined by almost 32%, Commerzbank over 31%, Deutsche Bank close to 30%, Unicredit and BNP Paribas around 24%.

However, it’s not so much about the suffering banks, which can survive, but about those financial institutions that could not make it on their own and had to be saved with taxpayer money. The case with the Italian Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA is a symbolic one. Two years ago, the oldest operating bank in the world, founded in 1472, needed almost $6.2 billion to avoid bankruptcy. The government in Rome granted it state aid to avoid triggering a nationwide banking crisis. The bailout was executed despite a report by a team of ECB inspectors, quoted recently by Bloomberg, who doubted the bank’s solvency even back in 2015.

The financial institution was funded regardless of the experts’ concerns that the attempt to keep it running might not succeed. The rescue also breached the European Union’s own rules on bailout eligibility. Monte Paschi’s resurrection, considering its bad shape, is a move that undermines ECB’s credibility as a banking regulator and raises questions about accountability and transparency, when it comes to spending public funds on saving failed private enterprises. Are we going to see more rule-violating bailouts? That’s an important question to ponder if a new financial crisis is on its way.

Small Bank Collapse Triggers Credit Crunch in China

A growing number of analysts believe the next financial crisis is likely to start from China and its indebted banking system. A recent incident substantiates these fears. Baoshang, a small lender based in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, collapsed in the end of May, despite its numbers from a few weeks having given no indication that this was going to happen. According to its most recent report filed with financial authorities, the bank registered a $600 million profit in 2017. It also had approximately $90 billion in assets, while its bad loans were under 2%.

But then Baoshang suddenly failed and Chinese regulators seized the bank – the first act of this kind in the People’s Republic this century – quickly blaming its owner of misappropriation of funds. Observers note, however, that the significance of Baoshang’s collapse stems from the fact that it was caused by the country’s first default on interbank obligations. It has since become very hard for smaller institutions to access the interbank lending market, on which they are heavily reliant.

And while the collapse of an Inner Mongolian bank may not sound like a Lehman-size event, in China quantity has a quality all of its own. Numerous small and medium-sized Chinese banks combined are in fact as large as the big players. All of them are now facing difficulties when trying to convince larger financial institutions they are stable enough to receive new loans.

This situation forced the People’s Bank of China to intervene and inject 600 billion yuan ($125 billion) to sustain liquidity while introducing full guarantees for all retail deposits. Nevertheless, credit has already become harder to get and much more expensive for small banks in a time of worsening economic prospects amid an ongoing trade dispute with the U.S.

Under these circumstances, one thing is sure: trust in the global financial system, based on constantly inflated fiat currencies, will continue to diminish. And while new barriers are being raised to free economic interaction, often out of geopolitical considerations, the need for an independent vehicle for global money flows will continue to grow. Whether cryptocurrencies can fulfill that role remains an open question, the answer to which may arrive sooner than many think.

What do you think about the collapse of these banks and the measures taken by governments and central banks to deal with the financial crisis? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, FDIC.

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