The COVID-19 economy is Alive!

To put this rant in context, we are in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic (recall pandemic means entire planet is affected) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. U.S. intelligence services had been warning "POTUS" DJT for months that the growing epidemic in China would become a major problem in the U.S. In those same months, DJT and Republicans raised no alarms to the American public nor did they make any preparations for the oncoming epidemic. In fact, one Republican warned rich donors of a possible economic downturn and he, along with other public servants sold stocks ahead of the recent stock market decline.

It wasn't until March 13th that DJT declared a state of emergency... after tens of people died in Washington State, after hundreds of Americans tested positive, after the lack of testing became an international embarrassment and even now, we do not know the extent of the problem due to lack of infection data... So the Administration was seemingly taking the problem seriously (I can't even talk about the lie filled clownish daily Coronavirus media events staring "POTUS DJT").

But with the past two days, three media statements:

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick: 

“No one reached out to me and said as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren. "And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

DJT tweeted/said:

WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!

“We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself”

From Buzzfeed:

President Donald Trump suggested Monday that he may encourage businesses to reopen and encourage people to stop isolating “very soon,” contradicting public health experts who say businesses may need to stay closed and workers stay home for several months to help contain the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s bad, and obviously the numbers are going to increase with time and then they’re going to start to decrease,” the president said at his daily coronavirus press conference, before quickly pivoting to say, “We’re going to be opening our country up for business because our country was meant to be open and working with others.”

DJT wants the economy 'working' again... because his rich friends and donors are losing money from falling stock prices and most of the Trump brand hotels are closed and losing money from stay-at-home and social-distancing recommendations.

My issue with so called 'getting the economy working again':

1. The economy is working. (Most) Essential goods and services are being produced and delivered on a timely basis. Shortages are due to panic buying and not a supply problem. The shortages of protective equipment for medical staff are the result of larger global production trends - outsourcing all production to cheapest producing countries. This could be addressed by invoking the Defense Production Act to force private industry to make essential goods/services.

2. The stock market is not the economy. Economies exist and function without stock markets so stock prices are a moot point in terms of economic activity.

3. Economies are emergent properties of human interactions. So long as two or more people exist, an economy exist from the exchange between them. Neither epidemic nor pandemic endanger the existence and/or function of economies.

4. People engage in exchange to benefit each other; to improve their lives; to improve their standard of living; to live longer and safer. If stock prices are the reason to justify the end of life-saving social-distancing, then stock markets are endangering people's lives; stock markets are doing the opposite of what economies exist to deliver... stock markets are anti-economic. Stock markets should either be banned from trading during the duration of the emergency or perhaps eliminated altogether for the benefit of humanity. [A standard debate question has long been "Has religion been a benevolent or malevolent influence on mankind?" ... A much more important and relevant question would be "Have stock markets been a benevolent or malevolent influence on mankind?"]

Difference between Democrats and Republicans...

... from the perspective of the 2020 elections:

planet earth = terminally ill cancer patient suffering great pain

treatment options from Republicans/Democrats:
Republicans: assisted suicide
establishment Democrats (party organization): non-prescription analgesics and smiles
progressive Democrats: try to push patient into remission... that will buy time to try to find a cure

Be smarter

A thought exercise for shopping:

The job of any retailer or seller is to persuade or trick or con you (as a consumer) to buy what they are selling. This includes slick advertising full of fake images of fake people.

[Rich people get richer by (1) stealing from their workers - paying them poorly or tax cuts/rebates paid by workers or (2) persuading consumers to buy more and more of the stuff their workers make.]

The job of a responsible consumer is to limit the extent to which sellers trick you into buying stuff you don't need or want or may even be damaging.

... So as a Consumer, be smarter than the seller. Don't be tricked into spending more than you need or want.

What does it take to be a Trump supporter?

DJT is an objectively horrible person and an objectively horrible POTUS. He's a misogynist, racist... autocrat. His failings are so obvious that his supporters must completely lack analytical thinking and all judgement to vote for him.

So I'm wondering how dependent DJT supporters are on the benefits of civilized society? Would DJT supporters be able to grow & raise their own food, educate their children, doctor their ills, organize themselves to produce everything they need for a functioning society?

Modern republicans and libertarians forget that society and culture is in itself 'socialism'. Economic 'socialism' is about shared economic ownership but in the larger context, socialism is about some shared aspect; for example, insurance is socialism in the sense of shared risk. Culture is shared experience and context. The spread and integration of new technology is the socializing of innovation. In other words, innovators/inventors benefit the society at large. The most telling examples are modern medical technologies that saves lives.

Would DJT's supporters exist without socialized innovations? Does the socialism of cultural norms protect them from the outcomes of their poor judgement? Without seat belt laws, drunk driving limits, built in safety features, vaccination rules, etc., what proportion of DTJ's supporters would Darwin Award themselves out of existence?

I'm not a Democrat but the cruelty of Trump Republicans is goes beyond pale.

Wasteful capitalism

Stuart Varney of Fox Business Network (sorry) and his guest John Lonski were railing about a Fox News Poll where 34% of respondents think the rich do not pay enough taxes.

At some point Lonski said:

".....if you start taxing this wealth...may have the unwanted effect of reducing the incentive of people that are very talented and very rich to go ahead, expand their businesses, and make jobs and drive the economy higher."

My snarky comment:

But those very talented poor people... they're just pigeon poop on the sidewalk. There's no benefit to incentivizing them to work hard to improve their lives and the lives of their families and neighbors.

But I really want to emphasize how wasteful the American economy and culture really is. Amy Goodman interviewed Albert Woodfox a former political prisoner who spent over 43 years in solitary confinement in American jails. Watch and admire the dignity, grace, astonishing strength of this man. During his youth in the United States of America, it was more important to control this young man by locking him up than growing his strengths and talents; talents that could have advanced the nation economically and culturally. We are jailing young people in the prime of their life. Then our current 'Secretary of Education' Betsy DeVos actually claims American schoolchildren may benefit from less investment in their education. 

Now contrast the lack of investment in American youth to little gossip blurbs about Kim Kardashian's kid's lavish birthday party or Beyonce's kid at a fashion show. This encapsulates the problem with the current economy. It's a system that allows the largely poor population go hungry, uneducated and often imprisoned while the rich indulge in luxuries that add no meaningful value to their lives. And rich people are rich because they lie, steal and cheat the wages of the working poor.

So back to tour treatment of young people, I'm reminded of the slogan of the United Negro College Fund: A mind is a terrible thing to waste... we are and have wasted the minds of generations of Americans. We can do better.

Do robots serve us or do we serve the robots?

Amy Goodman interviewed Shoshana Zuboff who wrote: “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”. Her premise is that the frontier of capitalistic innovation is capitalizing prediction of individual (and likely) group behavior. These themes have explored in science fiction and coming to fruition in reality. We need to decide if we serve the interests of our (collective human) creations or do the controllers of these creations control our destinies?

Part 2 of this interview emphasizes the role of information control/secrecy in these developments... a theme I've been writing about for years.

Reality Asserts Itself with Lester Earnest

Paul Jay at TRNN has a series of interviews posted with Lester Earnest, an early computer innovator. It is well worth watching.

It's all legal

Comment at Smirking Chimp (it's a quick and worthy read):

The true conflict is not between the U.S. and Russia/China/N.Korea/Syria/Mexico or Saudi Arabia & Yemen or any other nation-vs-nation aggression. The real fight is between the power elite and everyday working people on the planet. Any 'special' interest (such as Jeff Bezos, Koch bothers, Sheldon Adelson, Robert Mercer, big pharma, oil industry, military industrial complex, health insurance industry) that lobbies Congress for policies/laws/rules that increases their profits at the expense of the well being (health/education/standard of living) of their workers and consumers is participating in a long campaign against public interests. 

As every maker knows, the quality of any end product is largely determined by the quality of the starting material. This also hold true for economies; the quality and productivity of an economy is largely determined by education and health of its starting material of workers and consumers. Neo-liberal economics are marketed on the contrary principle that strong foundations are not necessary for strong economies. The Trump tax cut directly depletes economic foundations by removing money from a slowly growing economy - and he tells taxpayers it will grow faster. Unless neo-liberals have cracked the secret of creating something from nothing (aka, Big Bang), our current economic trajectory offers no hope of better conditions to workers.

Brett Kavanaugh is playing semantics

DJT's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh supposedly said to Susan Collins that Roe v. Wade is 'settle law'. C&L posted Lindsey Graham's comments.

My opinion:

It is highly disingenuous for any nominee to the Supreme Court including Brett Kavanaugh to call any Supreme Court decision "settled law." For any American not sitting on the Supreme Court, all their decisions 'settle law' (as determined by the U.S. Constitution. Justices on the Supreme Court use their Constitutional power to 'settle'/'resettle' law according to their procedures. As a non-Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh can legitimately claim he personally considers Roe v. Wade 'settled law'. But as a potential Supreme Court justice, that statement is using semantics to deceive the public. Lawmakers know this; Brett Kavanaugh knows this and Brett Kavanaugh's nomination shepherds know this. It is the people most impacted by Supreme Court decisions who do not know this and in a democracy, that is reprehensible.

New value system needed

Good interview at TRNN with climate scientist Will Steffen.


My comment:

"All of these [efforts to mitigate climate change] need to be underpinned by new value systems that value stabilizing the earth's systems as the highest priority that any economy must strive for." 

This should be the take home message of every economics course/lecture from now on. Economics and the values of economics must be defined beyond goods/services and financial return. My preferred definition of economies are self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants. Capitalism would not be an acceptable primary economic system under this definition because it is not self-sustaining... using fossil fuels will eventually degrade the environment to the point where it cannot sustain human life as we know it. Placing profit and 'economic growth' above all else is the source of climate change, income inequality, health care crisis and many other social ills. But economies are human made social constructs; humans made/make them, humans can reshape them.

When lies are/aren't lies?

Every schoolchild has heard the thought experiment: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it,does it make a sound?

I was thinking about this with regards to 'POTUS' DJT's incessant lying. With any lie, there are two participants - the liar and the recipient. Does the intent of the liar or perception of the recipient change the value or intent of the lie? For the U.S., this is not merely a thought experiment. The answer will have broad and long lasting implications for the future of the country, especially in regards to Constitutional rights, freedom of press/speech and transparency.

If a lie is told by someone without the intent of lying, is it a lie? [American press tends to say no. The intent of the liar is more relevant than correcting the lie for the sake of viewers.]

If every pronouncement is presumed to be a lie, is it a lie? [In some respects, this is fiction... But we are currently living under a president who seemingly cannot utter a truthful statement.]

Why not?

DJT is apparently considering pulling out of NATA. 

My comment:

DJT's strategy to "Make America Great Again" is to attack the *real* pillars of American exceptionalism (tolerance, melting pot, economic mobility, reliable ally) and bolster the *very worst* of its character (nativism, hubris, racism, militarism, religiosity - to shield everything, class structure).

BTW, although my observation is written from the perspective of an American progressive, I do not think nation-states are the best way to organize societies - I don't actually believe in 'American exceptionalism'.

How do the GWB and DJT administrations differ?

Based on the economic/social 'shocks' described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine:

GWB had the 'civility' to wait for economic/social 'shocks' to occur before triggering his anti-democratic agenda. In particular, September 11 to change the balance of power in the Middle East and any number of domestic power grabs.

Every incident of DJT operating outside of 'normality' is DJT throwing bombs to purposefully manufacture economic/social 'shocks': travel ban, trade wars, 'good people on both sides', Dropping Paris Climate Agreement, dropping Iran Nuclear Deal, meeting Kim Jong-un, splintering asylum seeking families... As this is happening, DJT's Cabinet and the Republican Congress are destroying consumer/environmental protection, civil rights protection, and stacking the courts against democratic governance. And that's only the start.

posted as comment as C&L

It's just the capitalistic way

Digby pointed out the Trump administration is selling American foreign policy for private gain. The Trump cabal sees it as an extension of capitalism - profiting from the sale of a sought after service.

Biased journalism

Ben Norton at TRNN introduced a segment with Gideon Levy with the following: "Today I’m joined by the award-winning journalist Gideon Levy. Gideon is a columnist for the major Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and a member of its editorial board. We’re going to be discussing the protests that have been going on in Gaza for the past six weeks, the so-called “Great March of Return,” which have been very brutally repressed violently by the Israeli military. On Monday, May 14, at least 60 Palestinians were killed, and more than 2200 were injured in a brutal crackdown. That is in addition to the dozens more killed over the past six weeks and the thousands who have been injured."

My comment:

The host of this segment made a big mistake by labeling the Great March of Return the "so-called “Great March of Return”." 

Gazans were exercise the right to protest their repression by the Israeli government. They organized and gave their social operation a name. I do not know Israel's laws regarding free speech but if Israelis have freedom to speak, Israeli's violent response to the Great March of Return was a flagrant violation of the right of Gazans to speak out against their treatment. Labeling their name 'so-called' further denigrates and invalidates their attempt to speak out. Freedom to speak and the free press is under attack in many places of the world, including the U.S. with DJT's 'fake news' moniker. As one of the first countries to codify the right to speak freely into the Constitution, all Americans should respect the right of a people to self-identify, self-organize and freely associate for the purpose of expression. As a [so-called] journalist, the host of this segment should have, at minimum, done the same.

A discussion at TRNN asked if a universal basic income were Progressive or Regressive?

My comment:

"What do you think of this basic income, and is it progressive or is it a regressive tool?" 

Her answer already says it's the wrong question. The right question: does basic income change the balance of power in that a few people become more powerful? The answer is yes; the people charged with the power to collect and distribute these monies become more powerful. Further concentrating power is dangerous because those in control will never give up power and eventually power corrupts their original good intentions... just look at the U.S.... many social problems intended to assist/benefit the needy/low income are under constant assault by politicians of both major parties. Instead of creating (political) solutions to inequality (collect and redistribute money), change the system so capital is distributed more equally in the first place. 

"...the idea is that, if the minimum wage were eliminated, then hiring workers would be less expensive and firms would be more likely to hire them, as opposed to investing in labor-saving technology." 

Robots do not eat food, buy shelter nor wear clothing. No-income people cannot eat food, buy shelter nor wear clothing. How do robots which don't earn money and people without money build a functioning economy which requires movement of money? Mass automation will create a class of people without access to traditional money who survive through an underground economy, likely with a lot of bartering... the implosion of capitalism.

This is a huge error in reasoning on part of the interviewer!

Arms 'Marketing'

Short video of William Hartung at TRNN describing how the MIC profits from war and government policy. My comment:

William Hartung hit the nail right square on the head. A popular meme spouted by many pro-capitalist economists is that in free markets, market forces (consumer spending/consumption) drives what gets produced. But somehow, these same economists never examine the 'market forces' of the planned military arms economy (created by governments, especially by the U.S. government). The planned military economy creates forces of lobbyists and special interests who advocate for constant war and continuous arms race. Instead of buying food, childcare, medical care, education and intact ecosystem for our children and grandchildren, American taxpayers are buying updated nuclear weapons and other military hardware, war game exercises, ill-will from hundreds of foreign military bases and global instability from waging and fomenting war. These are economic decisions and American voters need to understand the spending priorities of their government in that light. 

Another useful tool maybe to redefine what economies are. The word 'economy' has Greek roots meaning house or home. The common definition of economy is focused on production/consumption of consumer goods for the purpose of generating profit, a far cry from house/home. A much better definition would be self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants. This would automatically make some sectors of the modern economy 'uneconomic' because they do not promote well-being... the entire offensive arms/military industrial sector.

Name of piece: Code Pink Conference: The Arms Industry Hides Behind Euphemisms (December 29, 2017)

Commonalities

I caught a little bit of the NPR program 1A on hazing. A male guest (academic anti-hazing advocate) said that given the opportunity, he would choose to repeat his experience because it produced strong bond with his friends...

This sounds a lot like the bonding that happens in the military which can result from the shared torture of basic training or combat.

This also sounds like tight sibling bonds that occur in chaotic households, think abusive situations.

...so questions: Do these phenomena have same psychological basis? If so, can they be triggered without trauma... how can be triggered without trauma? The point is informed decision making by people who choose to join the military or fraternity.

Looting by any other name

 DWT has a post discussing the effect of the Ryan-Trump Tax Bill on education. My comment:

-Leverage buyout 'investment' (see Mitt Romney a la Bain Capital).-Agriculture caused desertification (Dust Bowl, expanding deserts in Africa, desertification in Latin America).
-Surface mining (includes strip mining, open pit mining and mountain top removal). All forms of looting with specialized knowledge. They are characterized by (1) speed - victims don't have time to realize danger and mount defenses; (2) dirty - function of speed; (3) crude - function of speed; (4) cheap operating costs - minimum investment in workers, capital, safety, etc. The goal is to strip a resource of everything that can be sold for money as quickly and cheaply as possible. The result is rich looters and no resources - businesses without capital to produce; land without water for farming; land without clean water, soil capable of supporting life and contaminated with introduced toxins and mine tailings. The Ryan-Trump Tax Bill loots the public commons by tax policy. Taxes are the resources of a nation; they pay for the public commons of education, healthcare, infrastructure, public services, defense, etc. By reducing the tax payments of the wealthy, this tax plan is effectively looting the public commons. The danger is the destruction will be so deep and thorough, recovery will be nigh impossible.

Opposition Strengthens

TRNN re-posted a series of interviews with Ed Herman who died recently. I watched the first one and left this comment:

Thanks for highlighting this interview. I will listen to the other segments when time permits. One take home lesson from this segment is the importance of opposition. As a leftist, Herman was attacked by other leftist for being too left. A strong version of left tribalism today are HRC supporters who fault Bernie's supporters for her loss and the Bernie-or-bust tribe. Unquestioning tribalism is how bad ideas become entrenched and normalized. Our Founding Fathers understood this so they made press freedom and free speech the first among guaranteed rights. Diversity is a strength of the Democratic Party. When the party establishment suppresses opposing ideas and challenges, they are rejecting the aspiration ideals of the Constitution the party is modeled after and they weaken the party overall.