Showing posts with label coronavirus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coronavirus. Show all posts

Monday, March 16, 2020

In the Good Old Hunkertime

Before the CNN Go! app which streamed the Democratic debate got up and went, I managed to watch about half of last night's show. Either Joe Biden was fed massive doses of a secret stimulant drug before airtime, or what we saw was a cyborg standing in for Joe Biden. He utterly failed to meet expectations for one of his epic freeze-ups or terminal meltdowns. Pick your metaphor. Because  Biden actually sounded more coherent than he has in many years.

He sounded especially and chillingly cogent when he echoed the neoliberal talking point that Medicare For All is not the miracle drug we need to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Look at Italy, he scoffed. They have guaranteed care and people are still dying. What we need is a surge, folks, as in the military. Never mind that the military enjoys its own socialistic health care delivery system.

As far as Bernie was concerned, what a thrill that not once did he utter the dreaded words "Joe is a good friend of mine" during the debate. Although Joe "won" the night simply by sounding minimally and shockingly coherent, Bernie won the night by expressing more empathy for suffering people than Biden has ever been capable of in the whole last half century of his right-wing political career.

With massive lock-downs being ordered by the hour and state primaries being cancelled, it is even becoming doubtful that Biden will have the requisite number of delegates to win the nomination in the traditional way. The other week, I was half-joking when I speculated that the convention will be cancelled and that a small group of elite Democratic officials will nominate Biden or another corporate tool aboard billionaire megadonor Dave Geffen's deep-cleaned jumbo luxury yacht.

And that brings up the general election itself. Although Donald Trump does not have it within his emergency powers to call it off, states themselves could postpone the election if the virus is still raging. By the time November comes around, we may have full-fledged anarchy, or rule by military junta (Biden's "surge") or at best, rule by individual mayors, governors and local councils.

The "future" as a concept has been turned right on its ear. So has the all-American religion of consumerism.

Either wealth begins to be immediately redistributed to ordinary people in the form of a permanent and universal guaranteed income, or ordinary people will begin taking matters into their own hands if they don't first begin succumbing to starvation, chronic maladies, violence, exposure and despair in such record numbers that they will swamp the COVID-19 morbidity and mortality rates.

I hate to clue Uncle Joe in, but we're in the middle of a revolution right now, whether he likes it or not. He can take a return to the glorious Obama years and shove it.

Thursday, March 12, 2020

Love and Greed In the Time of Coronavirus

The tipping point finally arrived on Wednesday. It was the day most people realized that the coronavirus pandemic is not a minor, "this too shall pass" inconvenience, or the kind of economic downturn amenable to the usual massive government bailouts of the rich and the comfortable, and punishments for everyone else.

This time is different. It was only a couple of days ago that the rich were still smugly kvelling that yes indeed, they are different from you and me. That famous observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald and its retort, allegedly by Ernest Hemingway - "yes, they have more money!" - have not been viewed by the Ruling Class Racketeers as either a withering critique or joke. It was both a compliment and a badge of honor.

Even as the new plague was overspreading a woefully unprepared globe, Wall Street erupted with glee last week when Joe Biden crushed Bernie Sanders in Democratic primary elections. On the day after Super Tuesday, predatory insurance companies gained $48 billion in "market value."

Today, that same stock market effectively crashed as Donald Trump unilaterally banned airline travel from Europe to the United States.

If that wasn't bad enough, Hollywood megastar and Democratic Party donor Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife had contracted the coronavirus. Although one may assume that they have excellent private health insurance and a whole team of round the clock doctors and nurses catering to their every health care need, the news that the rich's bodies are not so different from yours and mine - that they are made up of the same immune systems, flesh and bone and tissue - is vying with news of rationed ventilators in Italy and toilet paper shortages everywhere.

The plague suddenly has gotten very real. Everything is being cancelled, from the basketball playoffs to the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City, which actually threatens to be de-gentrified as the wealthy flee to their country homes and their yachts, much as the nobility fled the cities during the plagues of the Middle Ages.

To call these ripple or even domino effects is a bit bland. Wait until the Amazon fulfillment centers can no longer fulfill. Not only because their underpaid and overworked and uninsured workers get sick, but because the merchandise is no longer being delivered, let alone manufactured.

Maybe then they'll finally start calling it a plague.

As Albert Camus wrote in his famous novel of the same name (La Peste):
"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise....
"When a war breaks out, people say 'it's too stupid, it can't last long.' But though a war may well be 'too stupid,' that doesn't prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack for getting its way, as we should see if we were not so much wrapped up in ourselves."
The current plague will either be the end of globalized neoliberal capitalism, or it will be the toxic engine turning our carceral/surveillance oligarchic system into a full-fledged global totalitarian police state.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's solution to the catastrophe - besides building both virtual and physical walls to keep the enemy immigrants and germs out - is to bail out his own hotel chain and to offer low interest loans to businesses. He also aims to stealthily destroy the Social Security trust fund by imposing a "temporary" payroll tax holiday.

For their own part, the congressional Democrats are offering insufficient increases in nutrition programs, mandatory sick days and expanded Medicare  for coronavirus, but not for other medical conditions. Think of the deliberately complicated paperwork and stress on an already over-stressed health care system. Think of the deliberate shortage of government bureaucrats necessary to handle the paperwork. "We meant well" will be repeated by the minute.

 To put the paltriness and the downright cynicism in perspective, the $250 million in additional funds they propose for Meals on Wheels tor the vulnerable elderly is less than half the amount that Michael Bloomberg just spent on his aborted presidential run.

Bernie Sanders has one last chance to make a moral case for his agenda when he debates Joe Biden in Arizona in D.C. this weekend. If we don't acknowledge that we're all in this together, we might as well start placing bets on what will kill us first: the coronavirus, or pathological neoliberal capitalism.

******

On to New York Times comments.

Paul Krugman is calling for a permanent stimulus package. Unfortunately, since he aimed his post at what he calls "a very wonky audience" and not normal people, it did not get the prominent placement in the regular opinion section or the audience it deserved. Perhaps if it had contained the requisite Bernie-bashing to accompany its dig at Joe Biden, it would have fared better in the product placement department. This one was a bit of an off-brand outlier, published when the Times was still publishing coronavirus updates next to a weirdly cheerful BP-ish avatar. He writes:
OK, if you’re still with me: I hereby propose that the next U.S. president and Congress move to permanently spend an additional 2 percent of GDP on public investment, broadly defined (infrastructure, for sure, but also things like R&D and child development) — and not pay for it.
Of course, Krugman waited until Bernie had been safely trounced by Biden to espouse what sounds awfully close to the anti-austerian Modern Monetary Theory championed by Sanders's economic adviser Stephanie Kelton and others, and which Krugman has previously derided.

My published comment:
If you're a normal human being reading this post, it makes perfect sense even if you don't understand the wonky charts and math. The message of a more humane and rational way of doing things still comes through.
 Trouble is, the politicians running the place are not normal human beings in that their fealty to the donor class of plutocrats has literally removed them from reality. The only norms they seem to care about are the rhetorical ones that Trump violates each and every day. It's that he is just so darned vulgar about trampling over the poor and working class.
 Never mind just him and a possible President Joe not welcoming Paul Krugman's suggestion for a permanent stimulus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked the spirit of her guru, the late billionaire austerian Pete Peterson when she successfully restored the "PayGo" rule last year. Only three of her Democratic members (including AOC) dissented from the requirement that all new deficit spending be offset by cuts to other programs. Exceptions would be made for emergencies like pandemics but of course then everything goes back to abnormal as soon as is inhumanely possible.
  You'd think, wouldn't you, that all the critics of single payer health care would finally realize that allowing 80 million people to remain underinsured or lack any coverage all is not only cruel to them but injurious to the economy. The louder the centrists shriek "but how you gonna pay for that" at presidential debates, the more abnormal they sound.
And here's my response to Krugman's subsequent column, on Trump's refusal to acknowledge that a pandemic even exists - all of a piece with the whole history of right-wing denialism. (Of course, the Democrats at least have the grace to admit when a problem exists before not solving it, for which we should be eternally grateful!) His column was written before Trump finally went on TV Wednesday night to struggle through a tortured teleprompter rendering of "if we think it, it will leave."

My published comment:
Not that I wish anybody ill, but you do have to acknowledge the serendipity of Trump being exposed by N degrees of separation to the coronavirus at CPAC. If that's not the height of irony in this age of willful reactionary ignorance, I don't know what is.
 It turns out that Republicans are a lot more fact-based than they want to admit, once they start quarantining their own depraved cowardly selves out of an abundance of self-protective caution and everybody else be damned.
Today it's Ted Cruz in Texas. Dare we hope that tomorrow it might be Trump in Mar-a-Lago? While he's resting up and luxuriating in a tubful of gallons of black market hand sanitizer, he might even be convinced (lulled? terrorized?) to sign legislation sending stimulus checks to every man, woman and child in America - if only as a blatant Hail Mary pass to stimulate his fevered base's enthusiasm for his increasingly fragile reelection campaign.
 But seriously, I can also foresee him cancelling the election entirely due to the state of emergency that he himself has exacerbated by dint of his own criminal narcissism. His pal Rudy Giuliani almost succeeded in cancelling the mayoral election after the 9/11 panic, after all.
As far as the "market" and investor anxiety over the plutonomy is concerned, pardon me if I don't feel as sympathetic as I probably should. If Wall Street finally stops profiting off pollution, wars, and the misery and preventable premature deaths of others - I say tough cookies.

Sunday, March 8, 2020

The Aesthetics of Disaster Capitalism

Why does the New York Times's digital masthead graphic of the deadly coronavirus bear such an uncannily perverse resemblance to the BP logo?


New York Times Serene Green Virus
Cheery Major Polluter Logo



If you thought Donald Trump was the only propagandist trying to soft-pedal a major disaster, think again. 

Think back, for example,  to when the Obama administration engaged in its own shameful cover-up of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion for months until underwater footage of gushing oil finally compelled the president to take one of his kids for a quick dip in the Gulf to prove that no disaster is too horrible to abandon our inner Doctor Pangloss.





 Just as BP still tries to portray itself as an environmentally friendly corporate citizen, it seems that the subtle aim of the Times and the ruling class it serves is to quell fears of the deadly virus by painting it in soothing glossy colors. The Gray Lady's pleasant zen-like Mandala is the exact opposite of the microscopic images which more realistically portray Covid-19 as an angry red ball with spikes,or only slightly less alarmingly as a brownish grayish blob festooned with little hairy tentacles.




Scary, Ugly Reality

New York City, the global wealth capital of the world, now threatens to overtake China and Italy as the Covid-19 capital of the world. The governor declared a state of emergency as known cases statewide have spiked to 89 and are exponentially increasing by the day. Since the viral disease is covered by the corporate media as even more of a  deadly threat to Wall Street profits and plutonomic growth than it is to the health of mere mortals, it is incumbent upon the citizens and readers of the Times to panic responsibly. 

Maybe if we meditate upon the Gray Lady's mandala version of a deadly pathogen we will be more apt - if we're in the wealthy minority - to valiantly continue taking in Broadway shows and shopping at Bergdorf-Goodman for the latest in the increasingly rare lines of designer face masks and hand sanitizers.

The Times, liberal science-believing purveyor of propaganda that it is, at least has the decency to place a realistic yet very discreet black border around its mellow yellow/green serene virus illustration. That proves resistance to Donald Trump, who persists in oafishly viewing the pandemic through his terminally cracked rose- colored glasses. His soul brother Rick Santelli even went on TV to suggest that we quickly infect ourselves just to get it over with, as if we were toddlers whose mothers once thought it was as good time as any to expose the kids to chicken pox before they started school to avoid falling behind the rest of the class.

As far as the still-existing, wildly profitable, unaccountable and climate- destroying BP is concerned, it has recently emerged that the effects of the Gulf "spill" are even worse, nearly 10 years later, than we first thought. Satellite imagery had only revealed two thirds of the total damage. In other words, according to a new study, the hundreds of millions of crude extended to a geographical area 30 percent larger than originally reported. 

And the Trump administration continues to drill down both in criminal ignorance and in grossly accelerated off-shore drilling. Unluckily for the current cast of characters occupying the White House, they can't hide sick and dying and dead people as well as the last occupants were able to hide a sick and dying and dead ocean.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

$ound and Fury At the Democratic Debate

On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control warned that the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) will inevitably hit the US with an historic vengeance, both the inept CBS moderators and the "moderate" candidates on Tuesday night's stage nevertheless persisted in castigating Bernie Sanders's Medicare For All campaign platform.

Maybe once people start dying in the street by the thousands because they can't afford a doctor visit or a day off from work when symptoms hit or they've become exposed, maybe once our consolidated for-profit "health care systems" (hospitals) become unable to cope with a possible epidemic, maybe once children can no longer attend school, the neoliberal Ruling Class Racketeers will finally stop asking "But how you gonna pay for it!?!" 

Maybe once the lords and ladies of capitalism themselves become inconvenienced, they might belatedly realize that their selfishness comes with a high price. Guaranteed universal health care would not only help the sick, it would also trickle up to maintain the fortunes and health of the wealthy.

All the boutique hospitals and all the concierge healh care in the world will not shield the rich from being infected by the hoi polloi or even by the private medical personnel they pay so handsomely to attend exclusively to their needs and to their needs only.

Of course, I could be wrong. Lloyd Blankfein could go down gasping that he'll vote for Trump in the next life, and smarmy Pete Buttigieg will be doing his Obama impersonation and "turning the page" in that great McKinsey consulting corner office in the sky, and Chris Matthews' nightmares of Bernie Central Park executions will follow him right into the corporate media bardo green room.

But back to Tuesday night's South Carolina debate, of which I do have one nice thing to say. And that one nice thing is that CBS made it readily available for viewing on YouTube. Unlike in last week's NBC/Comcast spectacular, I didn't even have to download a special app so that they could send me ads to enhance my experience. I was able to cast the show right to my cable-free TV instead of peering at it on my cheap smartphone. The train-wreck became almost life-size. And sound-wise, it was even screechingly larger than life.

Michael Bloomberg, whose $60 billion fortune will immunize him from neither infectious disease nor from the epidemic viral video clips covering his entire predatory career, had the best revelatory line not only in the debate but possibly also in his whole predatory career. Scoffing at Joe Biden's boast that he'd helped turn the House of Representatives blue in 2018, Bloomberg drawled in that trademark nasal monotone of his:

"Let's go on the record, they talk about 40 Democrats - 21 of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the Democrats that came in put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave Congress the ability to control the president. I bough - I got them."

It might appear at first glance that Bloomberg spent his millions in bribes unwisely, given that not only have his handpicked political servants failed utterly to "control" Trump, they have given him most of what he wants, from his anti-immigrant militarized border, to his pro-corporate reworking of NAFTA, to his grotesque Space Force, and $700 billion for his expanded war machine, to even most of his right-wing judicial nominations. In other words, they gave Bloomberg everything he wanted.

If you think Bloomberg is in the race primarily to defeat Trump, think again. He's here to defeat Bernie the nominee. Failing that, he'll try to defeat Bernie the president.

In case you were confused when the audience erupted in cheers upon Bloomberg's Freudian slip acknowledging that he is one of the country's leading oligarchs in full control of the corrupt American duopoly,rest assured that the audience was largely comprised of his fellow oligarchs, as well as the various lackeys, consultants and others he had paid handsomely to be there for him. They, in turn, had paid the Democratic Party the hefty exclusive price of admission to the extravaganza. Tickets ranged from $1,750 to $3,200.

Since the manufactured outrage over Bernie's past praise of Cuba's literacy rate under Fidel Castro nearly caused the debate stage to spontaneously combust, there was sadly not enough time to discuss the climate catastrophe that is rapidly combusting the actual world. 

The inept CBS "journalists" who failed so miserably to moderate the immoderate flamed-out centrists sucking up all the oxygen on the stage also failed miserably to bring up the name of journalist Julian Assange, whose treatment as a joint US-UK political prisoner has more than a passing resemblance to the show trials common in 1930s Stalinist Russia. 

Only hours before the debate aired, news emerged that on the first day (Monday) of his extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court in London, the WikiLeaks founder had been handcuffed, stripped naked and had his case records confiscated in order to prevent him from appearing and taking part in his own trial.

Because Assange exposed US war crimes, and because the CIA had him under surveillance while he was living in exile at the Ecuador embassy, and because the CIA is also actively interfering in the current presidential election by linking both Trump and Sanders to "Russian interference," and because both the Democratic Party and the corporate media airing the debates have an intimate working relationship with this unaccountable fourth branch of government, it was probably deemed much safer to let the red-baiting of Bernie proceed as scheduled.

And since the"Intelligence Community" has, as Senate Minority Chuck Schumer acknowledged in an epic Freudian slip worthy of Bloomberg, "six ways from Sunday to get back at him (Trump)" if he doesn't kowtow to the CIA, Bernie himself is taking no unnecessary chances. He already has been "briefed." And he appears to have received the message loud and clear that he'd best go along to get along with the contrived and diversionary Russiagate Narrative by issuing the required obligatory denunciations of Vladimir Putin.

Bernie could well win the nomination and then beat Trump. But the Surveillance State, birthed some 70 years ago by the very plutocratic establishment  ("The Georgteown Set") whose ideological heirs he so vociferously campaigns against, will still be calling most of the shots.