peoplespolicyproject | The People’s Policy Project is proud to release its first formal
paper. Co-authored by Ryan Cooper and Matt Bruenig and designed by Jon
White, it uses data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to track the
evolution of African-American wealth during the Obama presidency, and
how that wealth was affected by housing policy choices made by the
administration.
The paper finds that while President Obama had wide discretion and
appropriated funds to relieve homeowners caught in the economic crisis,
the policy design his administration chose for his housing program was a
disaster. Instead of helping homeowners, at every turn the
administration was obsessed with protecting the financial system — and
so homeowners were left to drown.
As a result, the percentage of black homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage exploded 20-fold from 2007 to 2013.
Most middle-class wealth is housing wealth. Obama’s failure meant that
while the top 10 percent of white households saw large increases in
wealth due to the bank bailout restoring stock market values, almost
everyone else in the country suffered serious losses.
Interviewer: Doctor, you
know the situation very well. You’ve worked since the beginning of the
pandemic with patients affected by the coronavirus. You are actually at
the Escorial Hospital, here in Madrid. Tell us, what is the situation
like, exactly? It’s worrying, is it not? Can you tell us about the
total saturation level? Are there hospitals that are beginning to
increase the number of beds? Can you confirm any of this?
Doctor: Ah, no, I don’t
believe so. I don’t know which hospitals you are talking about. It’s
true we are seeing an increase in the number of admissions. But until
last week there were none. Yesterday we had three. Three people, and
over one hundred beds, you understand? So no, I don’t believe we are
close to saturation levels. What’s more, the most crowded hospital, The
12th of October…
Interviewer: So The 12th
of October is the hospital that cancelled all surgical interventions
from its planning schedule and postponed less-urgent external
consultations.
Doctor: Okay, yes.
Yesterday, independent authorities published that there were 75
admissions – seventy five admitted in a hospital with 1,300 beds.
Interviewer: That’s right. And 540 infected!
Doctor: Are those sick or
just positive cases? Because the data can deceive and confuse us. In
the health centres, we administer only PCR tests, so we will find many
positives. Furthermore, we are now hospitalizing people tested in their
vehicles. We classify these positive PCR tests as Covid-19, even though
they are only people that have been tested in their cars. So we are
creating confusion by announcing, “Covid-19 cases are increasing!” when
in fact, it is not true. There is an increase, but not for patients who
have a pathology of Covid-19. A pathology of Covid-19 is what we saw
in the spring when our hospitals were indeed crowded. But at present, we
see an increase in cases that are the simple result of an increase in
PCR testing. And having a positive PCR test does not necessarily mean
that we are sick.
Interviewer: Tell
us, in your hospital, for example, what are you doing? Are you
preparing for September or October? Have the health staff returned?
Doctor: Why would they
return? they are on vacation like all our elected officials and
government personnel. There is no emergency. We are on alert, yes, but
not in an emergency.
Interviewer: Are there replacements? Replacement doctors or nurses?
Doctor: I have no idea
what was planned. As for the rest, the decision to suspend consultations
or surgeries affects the supply in the blood banks and personnel.
However, we haven’t yet seen the number of sick patients that we
received in the spring.
theautomaticearth | No, no matter how much I read and watch, I can’t shake the idea (less
so as I go along, actually) that the Democrats don’t really, honestly,
want to win the 2020 presidential election. Obviously, there are many in
the party who do, and voters too, but not the ones pushing the levers
and pulling the strings. Those, whoever they may be, that are picking
candidates, setting policy, maintaining media contacts, doctoring spins.
Because is there anyone among you who has ever seen a worse candidate
than Joe Biden? I’m not just talking about his dementia and gaffes, but
you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyone who can use Biden and
enthusiasm -let alone inspiration, or even better: exhilaration- in one
sentence that doesn’t include the word “no”. And isn’t that the #1
requirement for a candidate?
They ostensibly went with Kamala Harris to provide some of that, if
we may believe the press. She’ll whip up the voters into wild bouts of
inspiring enthusiasm! Only, Kamala bowed out of the primaries even
before 2020 started, after spending $40 million -part of which is still
not paid off- because she was stuck at 2% support and couldn’t generate …
any enthusiasm.
What you got is a really old man who couldn’t get a toddler excited
about ice cream, and a token black woman who nobody even in her own
party likes. Mix those ingredients into a convention that attracts just
half the viewers of the 2016 one and generates the excitement level of
an infomercial for kitchen appliances, and is it any wonder I doubt that
the “behind the curtain party” is in this to win?
As for the political program, the agenda, there is really only one
item on it: Donald Trump. And no matter how many millions of times it
may be repeated in speeches and news articles, NOT being something is in
the end NOT a positive message. You’re supposed to win on your own
merit, not someone else’s perceived lack of merit. Newsflash: “MOST
BIDEN SUPPORTERS SAY THEIR VOTE IS AGAINST TRUMP RATHER THAN FOR BIDEN –
WSJ/NBC News poll”.
This bit from the Guardian on Monday sums it up nicely, and it veers
into late night comedy territory while doing it (what more can one ask
for?):
The Democratic national convention begins on Monday with a star-studded lineup and heavy
emphasis on unity aimed at presenting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as
the US’s best hope for healing a deeply divided nation[..]
The Dems have a hard enough time uniting their own party, let alone
the nation. And there’s not a Trump supporter who would move into their
camp – other than the odd washed up GOP politician.
Even supposing the positive test is real, the vast majority of
“cases” are asymptomatic. Between false positives, unreliable tests and
asymptomatic infection, a “case” count for sars-cov-2 is borderline
meaningless.
Let’s say there are symptoms AND a positive test, and assume they’re
not just a false positive who has a cold or the flu. Well, even the vast
majority of the “symptomatic cases” will only ever be mildly ill. In
fact of the 6 million active cases in the world, only 1% are considered
severely ill. The majority of them will survive.
The CDC estimates the infection fatality ratio of Sars-Cov-2 to be
about 0.26%. A number perfectly in line with severe flu seasons.
Virtually every country in Europe is now reporting average, or even below average, mortality.
Broadly speaking, the vast majority of the world is, and will likely remain, absolutely fine.
But things aren’t going back to normal, are they? In fact, they are
getting worse. The governments have got their foot in the door, and they
have no intention of moving it.
Masks are now mandatory in the UK, and Australia, and New Zealand, and Germany and France. And many others. The Democrat’s nominee for President, Joe Biden, has said they should be mandatory in the US as well.
Every day there are more and more articles discussing the need for mandatory vaccination, or something even worse.
And everywhere the language is changing. “The New Normal” was about beating Covid19, but now it’s about “covid19 and future pandemics”, or the “other colossal challenges facing humanity”….which can mean literally anything they want it to mean.
All this is based on the ever-increasing number of cases, without any reference to the fact deaths are falling.
theinsideview | We can define civilizational collapse as a process wherein most
recognizable large-scale institutions of a society vanish, coupled with a
drop in material wealth, a drop in the complexity of material artifacts
and social forms, a reduction in travel distance and physical safety of
the inhabitants, and a mass reduction in knowledge.
Loss of knowledge is especially damaging, since it accelerates the
other aspects of collapse and ensures that they will be long-lasting.
Nearly all of the written evidence we have of societal decline comes
from elites. Historically, literacy was restricted to the traditional
elite class of a society, as they were the only ones with any use for
reading and writing. This accounts for the total disappearance of
writing after the Late Bronze Age collapse, since Bronze Age societies
had a very small literate class.
The result was a wholesale loss of
civilizational knowledge. When writing reappeared in the eastern
Mediterranean centuries later, it was based on the new Phoenician
alphabet, rather than the old hieroglyphic system that gave birth to the
cuneiform of the Assyrians or the Linear B of the Minoans. Such losses
of knowledge are a constant throughout human history: as with FOGBANK,
or as with the state of New Jersey recently scrambling to find a COBOL programmer with the ability to overhaul their legacy information systems.
Despite how difficult it can be to gather historical data, it’s still
a far better way to understand societal collapse than purely
theoretical models. Rather than picking and choosing our preferred
explanations of collapse beforehand, we should first recognize that
there are simply too many causal variables to control for. The best we
can hope for is rigorous cross-comparison with the historical record,
using sets of natural experiments between past societies. A broad
historical literature of collapse does exist, especially on the Late
Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire. But the scholars
that pose these questions often have particular—and popular—answers in
mind as to what causes collapse: environmental fragility, moral decline,
an overloading of systemic complexity, and so on.
The morality play is
written first, the facts are found second, and this often results in a
shoddy final product of a theory. Thus, the relevance of history for
investigating our own society’s potential collapse is also obvious:
without comparing the present to other civilizations, we can’t say much
of anything useful about it.
It is hard to come to a consensus on historical cause and effect. In
geology, we didn’t build another planet to discover the Earth’s plate
tectonics, but rather dug among the rocks on which we found ourselves.
In our macro-study of history and civilizations, we too must rely on
in-depth exploration of historical examples.
That exploration is still itself theory-driven. Good historians and
theoreticians explicitly acknowledge the theses they work with, so I
will do the same. My theory of history is great founder theory:
I propose that social technologies do not evolve out of mass action,
but rather are devised by a tiny subset of institutional designers.
Looking at history, we see that new organizations and social forms often
arise within a single generation, showing jumps in social complexity
far too rapid to be explained away by collective action or evolution.
This would be the equivalent of expecting a tornado tearing through a
junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747 or a Tesla Cybertruck.
Designing complex objects through collective action, or perhaps
through an intermittent individual strategy similar to the open software
approach, is tempting. However, unowned commons tend to be raided, and
individual visions tend to differ massively. It often takes an
exceptional individual with exceptional vision to create a new social or
material technology. It’s hard to remember nowadays that the smartphone
once had to be devised as a combination of the cell phone, the tablet,
and the camera, and did not merely emerge out of mass market sentiments.
It took a single individual, Steve Jobs, to see that while a
combination of the car, the airplane, and the submarine would produce an
inferior version of all three, the opposite case would be true in the
creation of the smartphone. And then that individual had to implement
the vision.
Very curious...look where Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew & one of two Clinton political appointees to the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Alexander Djerassi was workinghttps://t.co/B9CtK9fVqYhttps://t.co/eB70wDYIW1
thedailybeast | Now the celebrity tabloid OK! Magazine
is reporting that ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “gifted”
Maxwell’s nephew, Alexander Djerassi, a position within her department
when he was just out of college and gave him “special treatment.”
The
Daily Beast could not confirm details of Djerassi’s appointment with
the State Department nor if the role was in fact "gifted" by Clinton.
The
reports come as Maxwell, 58, awaits trial in a Brooklyn federal lockup
for allegedly grooming and trafficking girls for Epstein.
The
report also appears to reference Djerassi’s LinkedIn profile, which
lists his role as chief of staff for the “Office of the Assistant
Secretary of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs” from May 2011 to
June 2012. Djerassi served as special assistant to the office from May
2009 to May 2011, his online profile says.
Djerassi’s name also popped up in a collection of Clinton’s emails
hacked via WikiLeaks. In a November 2011 message, Assistant Secretary
Jeffrey Feltman referred to his “special assistant, Alex Djerassi.”
Feltman mentioned Djerassi again in a January 2012 email, according to
WikiLeaks.
Djerassi was also a nonresident associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A biography on the
endowment’s website states Djerassi’s research “focused on Tunisia and
U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East and North Africa.” The bio
adds, “From 2009 to 2012, Djerassi was chief of staff and special
assistant in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs, covering U.S. relations with Arab states, Israel, and Iran. He
worked on matters relating to democratization and civil society in the
Arab world, the Arab uprisings, and Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
“Djerassi
has served as a U.S. representative to the Friends of
Libya conferences, Friends of the Syrian People conferences, U.S.-GCC
Strategic Coordination Forum, and several UN General Assemblies,” the
profile concludes.
The role at the State Department wasn’t the nephew’s only Clinton-related gig.
From
September 2007 to June 2008, Djerassi was a policy associate for
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He listed his job duties as
such: “Researched and drafted memos, briefings, and policy papers for
candidate, senior staff, and news media on wide range of domestic and
foreign policy issues. Prepared for more than 20 debates.” (In late
2007, Epstein was under investigation for trafficking girls in Palm
Beach and working on a secret plea deal with federal prosecutors.
Maxwell is believed to be one accomplice who was protected under the
controversial agreement.)
The Yale and Princeton alum—the son of Maxwell’s sister Isabel—apparently returned for Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.
Djerassi lists a job as “national security policy planner” for the “Clinton-Kaine Presidential Transition Team” in 2016.
counterpunch | Just how much erosion has support for Israel suffered among Western
Jews under the age of 40? The polls are not much help, because they tell
contradictory stories. However, in anecdotal terms, there is a strong
sense that the gap is growing between an increasingly rightwing and
racist Israeli society and younger, liberal/progressive Western Jews.
The well-publicized recent interview with Seth Rogen, a comedian and
filmmaker with an “ability to capture the Jewish cultural conversation,”
and a fan base among Jewish millennials (i.e., those born between 1981
and 1996), may be a case in point.
On 27 July 2020 Rogen was interviewed on fellow Jewish comedian Marc Maron’s “insanely popular podcast” WTF.
While on Maron’s program, Rogen questioned why those with “a secular
Jewish identity” should feel “any cultural identification with the state
of Israel.” Indeed, he admitted that the notion of a Jewish state made
little sense to him. He said “Jewish statehood was the result of an
“antiquated thought process” and was in truth, counterproductive.
“Encouraging all Jews to live in one Jewish state is a nonsensical
strategy for the preservation of Jewish peoplehood.”
How did Rogen come to these conclusions? He credited his outlook to
overcoming an incomplete and deceitful Jewish educational process. He
explained that he had been “fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my
entire life. You know, they never tell you, that oh by the way, there
were people there.” In other words, the history of Israel he was taught
never mentioned the Nakba, Occupied Territories, and collective
imprisonment of the residents of the Gaza Strip and the like. It was
just the story of “only democracy in the Middle East” and the “most
moral army in the world.” As Marc Maron would say,
“WTF”!
Asked why a famous guy like himself had not previously spoken
publicly about Israel, he noted that “I’m afraid of Jews. I’m 100
percent afraid of Jews.” Presumably not all Jews, just those allied to
the State of Israel. Who can blame him? Most of the U.S. Congress feels
the same way.
Reaction from the Right: Standard Tropes
A few days after Rogen’s interview appeared, a quick retort appearedin the Jewish publication the Forward. Weirdly
entitled “Dear American Jewish boys, Please, please, take your Oedipal
rage and find another outlet for it.” It was written by Dr. Shany Mor, a
researcher at, among other places, the Israel Democracy Institute.
Mor’s objections to Rogen’s positions are reflections of standard
Zionist tropes.
Standard Trope One: As Mor’s title implies, his initial reaction to
Rogen’s statements is that they must reflect some form of self-hatred.
The “self-hating Jew” is an established, if rather despicable, Zionist
trope. Mor now uses it against Rogen, accusing him of being motivated by
“Oedipal rage” that is hatred of his parents because they did not tell
him about Israel’s bellicose origins. This is a ridiculous ad hominem
attack. It should be noted that it is probably the case that a majority
of Jewish children in the West, post 1948, were either lied to or left
in ignorance about the Palestinians and their fate. That some of them
should now express resentment is not evidence of some personality flaw
on their part. It is rather an expression their dismay of Zionists’
inability to admit to their own criminal behavior.
tabletmag | A few weeks ago, Americans learned, from a letter
sent by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to former National Security
Adviser Susan Rice, that Rice had sent herself an unusual “email for the
record” on Barack Obama’s last day in office. In the email, Rice
claimed to be memorializing a high-level meeting of Obama officials in
January 2017, at which they discussed whether to limit the information
they were sharing with President-Elect Donald Trump on the investigation
of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, writing at National Review Online,
concluded that the purpose of this meeting was to keep Trump in the
dark about the extent to which he himself was under investigation. He
concludes from the fact of the email’s existence and its odd timing that
the device of briefing Trump on limited portions of the documentation
was a tactic —one intended to obscure the fact that Trump was a target
of the investigation, even if he was not technically the subject of it. In fact, McCarthy wrote, given the type of investigation, Trump was effectively the main target.
In
establishing this, McCarthy alluded to an aspect of counterintelligence
investigations and surveillance that Americans tend to know little
about. This is McCarthy’s key passage (emphasis in original):
Whether
eavesdropping is done for national-security purposes under FISA [the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] or for law-enforcement purposes
under criminal statutes, the objective is always the same: to uncover
the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise.
The point is to identify
all of the conspirators, and especially to establish the complicity of
the most insulated leaders. Carter Page may have been the surveillancetarget named
in the FISA warrant, but he was of low rank in the alleged conspiracy.
The point of monitoring Page was to determine exactly what he was doing
and, just as crucial, who was directing him.
McCarthy’s
point here means that the surveillance authorized by the FISA warrant
wasn’t limited to the personal communications of Carter Page; it only
began there. To understand the “conspiratorial enterprise,”
investigators and analysts have to follow up on all the entities Carter
Page is in contact with.
And
they don’t stop there. A conspiratorial enterprise is bound to involve
communications beyond Carter Page’s first circle of direct contact, so
investigators need to look at the next circle as well. They may need to
look further, depending on the communications patterns they find in the
first two circles radiating from their named target. But under current
rules, it’s the first two that government investigators can routinely
gain access to in order to “uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial
enterprise,” without needing to apply for further warrants.
This convention is referred to as the “two-hop” rule, and, like many provisions of surveillance law, has come in for criticism by civil libertarians. The original FISA was passed in 1978, before the internet age. After 9/11, information technology enabled surveillance operators under the Patriot Act, which complemented and in some ways overlapped FISA surveillance, to inaugurate a “three-hop”
rule exploiting computer-networked communications to look well beyond
the first-order contacts of a central subject (under Patriot Act
surveillance, a terror suspect). This was done via presidential order
and came as an unwelcome surprise to the public when the practice was revealed, and initially dubbed “warrantless wiretapping,” in 2005.
realclearpolitics | News reports have downplayed the significance of former FBI lawyer
Kevin Clinesmith’s guilty plea, acknowledging he altered an official
document in the government’s Trump-Russia collusion probe. There has
been some coverage, mainly because it is so rare to see FBI agents
charged with a felony and because it is the first tangible result of
U.S. Attorney John Durham’s sprawling investigation of the
investigators. But mainstream news outlets have minimized its
importance. It’s only one count, they say, and it deals with a
relatively minor crime by a mid-level figure.
That’s spin, and it’s wrong. This plea is like finding water seeping
from the base of a dam. The problem is not one muddy puddle. The problem
is that it foreshadows the dam’s failure, releasing a torrent. That’s
what the Clinesmith plea portends.
What Did Clinesmith Admit?
Clinesmith acknowledges he altered an email from the CIA to the FBI,
answering a question about Carter Page. Page is an American citizen and a
Naval Academy graduate who spent considerable time in Russia. His time
abroad raised a question for the FBI’s counter-intelligence division.
Was Page a Russian agent? Or was he on our side, helping the U.S. gather
intelligence about the Kremlin? The CIA would know.
The answer mattered because the FBI and Department of Justice were
preparing warrants to spy on Page as a hostile foreign agent. The CIA gave them a clear answer in August 2016, before the first warrant was issued: Page was working for us.
That answer was given to a still-unnamed FBI case agent, and we don’t
know what he did with it. Did he show it to those preparing the warrant
applications? Why else would he even ask the CIA for the information?
In 2017, after Clinesmith was tasked to the Mueller investigation, their
team asked him to clarify Page’s relationship with U.S. intelligence.
That’s when he took the CIA document and added a single word, “not.” The
altered document said Carter Page was not a CIA asset. It was a deliberate lie.
thehill | President Trump’s reelection campaign in a new ad is attacking
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a
frequent target of the president’s.
The
ad, timed to coincide with the virtual Democratic National Convention,
contrasts footage of Biden speaking in 2015 and 2016 with clips of him
seemingly losing his train of thought in 2020.
"Did something
happen to Joe Biden?" reads the opening text of the ad, which then
juxtaposes Biden in 2015 saying in a speech that “he went and became
president, I didn’t go and I’m still vice president” and Biden in 2020
stuttering and repeating “in addition to that” in an interview.
“You
know there’s a, during World War II, uh, you know, Roosevelt came up
with a thing that, uh, you know, was totally different than a, than the,
he called it a, you know...” Biden says in a later clip from a 2020
interview.
Trump himself has repeatedly suggested Biden is in cognitive decline and touted his own performance on a neurological test in contrast. However, some within the Trump campaign were reportedly hesitant to incorporate the attack into campaign messaging, according to Axios. Several campaign advisers reportedly warned the line of attack could offend senior citizens, a demographic with which most polling shows Biden in the lead.
Ultimately, however, those in favor of the attack won out. "We think it's very important that voters fully assess Joe Biden's qualifications and fitness to be president," a senior campaign official told Axios. “Our data show that people are concerned about his ability to do the job.”
The official declined to provide the data in question to Axios.
"Donald Trump is spectacularly failing every conceivable strategic test by ramping up mentions of this subject at all," Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in response to the ad.nbsp;
strategic-culture | As investigative journalist Paul Sperry rigorously lays out in his
report, a major piece of the Russiagate puzzle was revealed when it
became known that the primary source used by Christopher Steele in
shaping his dodgy dossier was not the high level Kremlin insider which
the world was told, but rather a former Brookings Institute employee named Igor Danchenko.
This young Russian-born analyst who hadn’t been to Russia in decades
admitted to the FBI in January 2017 that he had no contacts with any
notable Russian operatives anywhere near the Kremlin (or even Russia
itself it seems), and was totally confused when he was asked why he
believed Steele hired him to put together an intelligence dossier on
Trump in the first place!
Such admissions didn’t seem to bother the FBI at this time, who
ignored the evidence of the dossier’s fraudulent foundations and
proceeded to use the Steele/Danchenko material to acquire FISA warrants
on Carter Page. This dossier also fueled the fires of the Russiagate
inquisition and first gave voice to the narrative that Russia “hacked”
the DNC emails (which have been completely refuted by former NSA insider Bill Binney).
The firestorm of revelations surrounding the Brookings Institute, have induced Rep. Devin Nunes to announce
a long-awaited probe on the powerful liberal think tank which has acted
as a controlling force in America’s deep state for decades and the
powerful figure of the Institute’s former president Strobe Talbott.
Nunes stated:
“You may remember that the State
Department was involved and there were additional dossiers that weren’t
the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier. And we
think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings
and those dossiers that were given to the State Department.”\
Strobe Talbott not only led Brookings for years, but served as former
Deputy Secretary of State of the Clinton White House, former director
of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the Trilateral
Commissions executive committee and also acted as Chairman of the
Foreign Affairs Policy Board of the Obama White House. It was Talbott
who deployed Danchenko’s Brookings Institute mentor Fiona Hill to acquire a job at the National Security Council in 2017 where she not only advanced an anti-Russian war plan but testified in Trump’s impeachment trial in 2019.
Hill, who had known Christopher Steele since 2006
and were in frequent discussion since 2016, co-authored two Brookings
Institute intelligence reports with Danchenko and endorsed him as a
“creative and accomplished analyst and researcher” which was posted on
his Linkedin account.
The “additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier” addressed by Nunes is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier
produced by Brookings-affiliated journalist Cody Shearer
(brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted explicitly to
validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele’s dossier.
medium | Bernie
Sanders thinks that we need a political revolution. I think that we are
going to get one whether we want one or not. And not the nicey nicey
1932 kind where we get health care and education. I want a full scale
revolution as much as I want a category five hurricane, but here we are.
We
live in a society where people die of easily treatable diseases and
others are driven to bankruptcy by the high cost of for-profit health
care. Before 1982 homelessness was so rare you needed a trained eye to
see it. Now we see armies of homeless people, half of whom are employed
but who cannot afford the rent in the city where they live. We live in a society where people are murdered everyday because we value guns more than human life.
Now
coronavirus is heightening all the contradictions of American finance
capitalism. It is no longer possible to deny that our society has become
dysfunctional, almost a failed state. Coronavirus promises to do for
American finance capitalism what World War One did for royal autocracy.
So
what is the role of the Christian in all this? First of all we must
commit to the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. No one can live up to
all that, but if we are honest with ourselves, we are not even trying. I
am referring to that part of the Christian community that is serious
about their faith, and exclude the greedy televangelists and their
delusional followers. We have been letting ourselves off too easily.
What is coming down from the pulpit that makes us OK with baby prisons,
endless war, and armies of homeless people? Why do we keep reelecting
politicians who enable these things?
Christians must recommit to the values of the Sermon on the Mount. No more nobody can do that, so I will just continue with business as usual and throw myself on the mercy of Christ. We have to at least try. We must put aside delusional thinking and, as a minister of mine once said, live fearlessly in truth.
So
what would that look like? What would it look like if we really
committed to living out the values of the Sermon on the Mount?
politico | Esper
rolled out the results of the first iteration of the defense-wide review
in February, revealing $5.7 billion in cost savings that he said would
be put toward preparing the Pentagon to better compete with Russia and
China, including research into hypersonic weapons, artificial
intelligence, missile defense and more.
But
the proposed health cuts, in the second iteration of the defense-wide
review, would degrade military hospitals to the point that they will no
longer be able to sustain the current training pipeline for the
military’s medical force, potentially necessitating something akin to a
draft of civilian medical workers into the military, the two defense
officials said.
The
second official noted the challenge in finding outside doctors given
longstanding complaints from some U.S. hospitals and researchers that
there aren’t enough physicians to serve civilians.
“How’s a 'draft' even going to work?” the official said “The U.S. is dealing with a doctor shortage.”
As
a result, the proposed reductions would hurt combat medical capability
without actually saving money, the officials argued. The Pentagon is
already significantly overspending on private sector care and TRICARE
because patients are being pushed out of undermanned military health
facilities to the private health care network, they said. The cuts also
would follow nearly a decade of the Pentagon holding military health
spending flat, even as spending on care for veterans and civilians has
ballooned.
The
officials blamed the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation
office, or CAPE, under the leadership of John Whitley, who has been
acting director since August 2019, for the cuts. CAPE conducts analysis
and provides advice to the secretary of defense on potential cuts to the
defense budget.
During Whitley's confirmation hearing to be the permanent CAPE director last week, Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) pressed him on the health cuts.
“Folks
in my state have expressed some concern and opposition to some of the
policies, which allow only active-duty service members to visit military
treatment facilities,” Jones said. “What do I tell those folks?”
“The
department does have work to do on expanding choice and access to
beneficiaries,” Whitley responded. “Sometimes that’s in an MTF,
sometimes that’s in the civilian health care setting.”
Whitley has specifically tried to eliminatethe Murtha Cancer Center as an unnecessary expense, said one senior official.
Last
fall, Whitley and CAPE also sought to close the Uniformed Services
University of the Health Sciences, which prepares graduates for the
medical corps, as part of the defense-wide review, the people said.
Although at the time Esper denied the proposal, CAPE is now seeking
major cuts to USU as part of the $2.2 billion. The reductions include
eliminating all basic research dollars for combat casualty care,
infectious disease and military medicine for USU, as well as slicing
operational funds.
NYTimes | Hosts are hiring
doctors to screen guests before they attend their gatherings, or
children coming in from out of town for sleepovers. Other people are
getting tests to provide peace of mind after a particularly wild night.
Event companies are offering rapid testing as a service to clients
alongside catering and music. Instagram influencers are even touting the
service.
Still, these rapid tests
aren’t totally reliable, said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, New York City’s
deputy commissioner of disease control. “Negatives are not definitive,”
he said. (And there certainly have been false positives.)
“No test is 100 percent,” Dr. Rashid said. “A negative test does not preclude one to not be carrying the virus.”
Indeed,
one reason rapid tests aren’t in widespread use is that they require
additional testing to confirm. “We have to retest all of our negatives,
so you’re doing two tests for everyone who is negative,” said Dr.
Daskalakis. “It’s a resource issue.”
He
also warned that the virus can take some time to show up in a test
result; though some test positive 48 hours after exposure, the two-week
possible incubation period that has dictated quarantine is generally
accepted. So if you were exposed to the virus even 10 days before your
test, the outcome is still uncertain. “You can’t go to a house party the
week before you see Grandma,” Dr. Daskalakis said. “That test doesn’t
matter.”
Ryan Choura, the founder of
Choura, an event and experience production company in Torrance, Calif.,
that arranges the tenting and furniture for the U.S. Open golf
tournament and the BeachLife Festival, believes so strongly that all
events should incorporate rapid testing that he created an arm of his
company to do it.
But as any
public-health expert will tell you, individual test results are not an
all-access pass to Life as It Was Before. “There is a false confidence
you get when you use a test for social decisions,” Dr. Daskalakis said.
“This is one of those things I lose sleep over.”
Nonetheless. receiving rapid testing for the virus has become a mark of status and, ergo, a trending topic on social media.
Tasha
Todd, 40, is a medical assistant in Dallas. When her former office, a
concierge medical group, first received the rapid testing kit, she
posted about it on Instagram, where she has nearly 28,000 followers,
to hype up the service. “I wanted to try to bring more business into
the company,” Ms. Todd said. “Not that we could have handled much more
volume. We were seeing 30 people a day, 25 of which were in for Covid
testing.”
“I got a lot of feedback,”
she said. “A lot of people were messaging about the prices, where the
office was, what the difference was between that and a regular test, and
how quickly the results come in.”
Her office charges $150 for a test,
but she knows of other clinics in Dallas that charge $500 or more.
Ms.
Todd said she felt frustrated that many of her followers wouldn’t be
able to afford one. “I would say rapid testing right now is for the
rich. It’s too expensive,” she said. “Who has 150 to 500 dollars just
lying around in the middle of the recession?”
tabletmag |Big Philanthropy. Today’s
Silicon Valley and Wall Street tycoons who endow foundations bearing
their names—Gates, Bloomberg, Milken—are little different from Andrew
Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller a century ago.
In
his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie, the immigrant
Scottish American steel magnate who built his fortune on brutal
treatment of American workers and the suppression of organized labor,
declared that society was better off when the benevolent rich were
allowed to spend their fortunes on charitable causes than when they were
taxed to pay for public spending directed by politicians. Recently Bill
Gates made a nearly identical argument, claiming that governments are
so incompetent that large-scale spending decisions are best entrusted to
enlightened billionaires like himself: “Philanthropy is there because
the government is not very innovative, doesn’t try risky things and
particularly people with a private-sector background—in terms of
measurement, picking great teams of people to try out new approaches.
Philanthropy does that.”
For
a century labor leaders and populists have replied to such self-serving
arguments by asking arrogant plutocrats like Carnegie and Gates an
obvious question: “If you have enough money to endow a foundation, why
don’t you pay your employees more?”
Theodore
Roosevelt, who despised Carnegie, observed privately: “All the
suffering from Spanish war comes far short of the suffering, preventable
and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works,
and among the small investors, during the time that Carnegie was making
his fortune ...”
Modernism in the arts. Even
in matters of art and fashion, American business elites and the
working-class majority have been at odds for a century. America’s
20th-century managers and capitalists as a rule have been more
avant-garde in their tastes than most of their fellow citizens. The
Rockefellers and other plutocrats patronized the Museum of Modern Art,
which during and after WWII dismissed the kinds of figurative art and
traditional architecture that the working class liked as “kitsch”
(trash) and smeared it by comparing it to Nazi and Soviet propaganda.
Despising popular figurative painters like Norman Rockwell and later
Thomas Kinkade has been a marker of ruling class membership for nearly a
century. Vulgar, rich arrivistes like Donald Trump may favor
traditional architectural ornament, but the taste-makers in the business
community for decades promoted sterile glass-box International Style
architecture and abstract painting and sculpture as the more or less
official style of corporate America and the Free World.
Now
more than a century old, the modern style long ago ceased to be modern.
Herbert Hoover’s ultramodern house, now owned by Stanford University,
was built in 1919-20. The ambition of many corporate executives and
professionals of the mid-20th century was to live in a home inspired by
the Glass House of Philip Johnson, the court architect of the
Rockefeller dynasty. The protoplasmic blob in an abstract painting on
the wall would gaze lovingly at a Noguchi coffee table, a glass amoeba
with two wooden pseudopods that bore The Joy of Sex on its back next to the latest issue of the New Yorker.
The
post-New Deal new normal, then, is very similar to the pre-New Deal old
normal. The present is not a rerun of the age of the age of robber
barons after the Civil War, but of the subsequent age in which
university-credentialed corporate elites have usually favored free
markets and free love and freedom from organized labor, while
working-class populations, white and nonwhite, have typically favored a
mix of moral traditionalism with pro-labor protectionism in economic
policy.
This
is not the second Gilded Age. It is the second Jazz Age. And from the
perspective of America’s disfranchised and alienated working-class
majority of all races, that is bad enough.
vanityfair | “All these rich people can’t stop themselves,” one person who is
close to a number of wealthy tech CEOs and venture capitalists told me.
“They just can’t stop themselves from throwing parties and going on
their jets and socializing as if everything was normal.”
In many
respects, to them, things are better than normal. Those on the top
billionaire lists have only grown richer over the past five months, as
tech has soared
on the S&P and NASDAQ, helping push the markets back to their
pre-COVID numbers, and adding double-digit billions to some tech CEOs’
personal net worths in a single day. Look no further than Apple or
Amazon as a prime example. While 16.3 million Americans are unemployed, Apple is now nearing a $2 trillion market cap and Amazon just posted record profits of $5.2 billion in the last quarter—double last year’s goal.
So
what are these elite tech founders doing with their wealth? Mostly
living life as they did before coronavirus. I’ve spoken to numerous
people who’ve described countless billionaires hitting the road, flying
around the country to wherever case numbers are lowest. One investor
worth several billion who has several homes told a friend—who then
parlayed the information to me in tones of shock and awe and more than a
tinge of jealousy—that he was in Miami when the numbers were lowest at
the start of the pandemic; hopped over to Los Angeles when Florida got a
bit dicey; and now that California is a hotbed, is in New York enjoying
the season’s outdoor dining. Another billionaire in Los Angeles has
been hosting lavish dinner parties (no social media allowed) where an
on-site nurse administers 15-minute coronavirus tests outside as guests
drink cocktails, and allows them in to dine once their test comes back
negative. And yet another investor told me about some of his colleagues
who chipped in for a massive $50,000-a-month compound in Palm Springs
that’s being used as a group party house. (I’ve heard about similar
setups in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.)
For those who don’t want to be in America (and let’s be frank, who
really wants to be in America right now?), there’s an easy solution. A report last week
found that the superrich are paying as much as $2.6 million for
international citizenships, then zipping out to said country on their
private jets. Not everyone owns their own jet, or “P.J.,” as they’re
called. As a result, jet rentals
are skyrocketing. A spokeswoman for NetJets, a private-jet rental
company, told me that inquiries for flights shot up from the previous
year, and have only continued to grow as the pandemic has stretched on.
In April, for example, calls to NetJets was up 60% for the year prior,
as of June, it was 195%, the spokeswoman said.
NYTimes | “An
obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left
and liberal types,” Professor Reed told me. “There’s this insistence
that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s
existence.”
These battles are not
new: In the late 19th century, Socialists wrestled with their own racism
and debated the extent to which they should try to build a multiracial
organization. Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, was
muscular in his insistence that his party advocate racial equality. Similar questions roiled the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1960s.
But
the debate has been reignited by the spread of the deadly virus and the
police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And it has taken on a
generational tone, as Socialism — in the 1980s largely the redoubt of
aging leftists — now attracts many younger people eager to reshape
organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, which has
existed in various permutations since the 1920s. (A Gallup poll late
last year found that Socialism is now as popular as capitalism among
people aged 18 to 39.)
The D.S.A. now
has more than 70,000 members nationally and 5,800 in New York — and
their average age now hovers in the early 30s. While the party is much
smaller than, say, Democrats and Republicans, it has become an unlikely
kingmaker, helping fuel the victories of Democratic Party candidates
such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, who beat a longtime
Democratic incumbent in a June primary.
In
years past, the D.S.A. had welcomed Professor Reed as a speaker. But
younger members, chafing at their Covid-19 isolation and throwing
themselves into “Defund the Police” and anti-Trump protests, were
angered to learn of the invitation extended to him.
“People
have very strong concerns,” Chi Anunwa, co-chair of D.S.A.’s New York
chapter, said on a Zoom call. They said “the talk was too dismissive of
racial disparities at a very tense point in American life.”
Professor
Taylor of Princeton said Professor Reed should have known his planned
talk on Covid-19 and the dangers of obsessing about racial disparities
would register as “a provocation. It was quite incendiary.”
newrepublic |For a variety of completely unacceptable reasons, federal and state governments have proven unwilling
to provide adequate relief that would have allowed more Americans to
avoid the more severe impacts of the pandemic. Lawmakers could have paid
workers to stay home, provided ongoing support to industries that
cannot safely open, or offered financial assistance to parents for child
care instead of rushing them back to school.
These sensible options weren’t on the table. After the first round of
paltry relief expired at the end of July, nothing has happened. Like
someone breaking their diet with one extra cookie and deciding they
might as well go HAM on a whole sleeve of Milanos, the nation’s leaders
have blown past their deadline and have thrown up their hands.
They’ve
tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas, man.
As
many have observed, the United States is broken, barely a country
anymore. Tens of millions of people are in truly desperate need of help.
Some need protection from eviction. Others require a rescue from the
dangerous conditions of nursing homes and prisons. Many more just need
the unemployment money that the state owes them. A portion of this
country larger than many European nations has been abandoned to
life-ruining chaos. Less than two weeks since the extra unemployment
benefit expired, lawmakers have quit the scene and the media has largely moved on to covering Kamala Harris.
The
question of why there are not widespread, large-scale protests or riots
specifically about this is worth considering. Perhaps it should be
surprising that no one has burned down an unemployment office. The
elusive detail is that we’re talking about people who have long been
left to wither; many were left abandoned during the last financial
crisis and its aftermath. Millions of ordinary Americans have lived
their lives as the frogs boiling in the water of austerity and
neoliberal neglect. Instead of channeling their rage into a broken
political system that has been unresponsive to their needs, they post
about committing suicide on Reddit.
There
is obviously a major problem in our political system, where the ongoing
disaster unfolding does not necessarily translate into an electoral
threat for the Republicans. As my colleague Osita Nwanevu noted
recently, the Republican Party is insulated from its own mistakes by
the absurdity of the Senate as an institution and their general success
in structuring the political system around their continued victory. Like
the rich boss’s nephew who gets an internship and spends it fucking
around on the internet and harassing his coworkers, the party knows what
it can get away with and by how much. Our democracy has been warped
such that one of the parties in charge in Washington can flamboyantly
embrace the mass death of impoverished Americans, knowing that the
consequences will be too minor to be of any real concern.
theweek | Over the last week, just under 1 million people
filed for ordinary unemployment benefits, plus another half-million
under the special pandemic unemployment program for people who don't
ordinarily qualify, a substantial decline from some of the numbers seen
since the beginning of the pandemic. At this rate, by mid-September or
so, new unemployment claims will be merely as bad as they were during
the worst of the Great Recession.
Those unemployment benefits, however, because this country has
systematically stripped and sabotaged its safety net, are extremely
meager and often nearly impossible to actually get. Hundreds of
thousands of private citizens who have lost their jobs are flocking to Reddit
for help and advice, as state unemployment bureaucracies are so janky
and swamped they often can't deal with the flood of applications.
In the past week, the r/unemployment subreddit has taken a dark turn with the expiration of the CARES Act's super-unemployment
and the failure of Republicans to even come to an agreement about what
they want in the next round of pandemic relief. It's become a de facto
support group for people whose lives are collapsing around them for
simple lack of income or jobs, and talk of suicide is common.
One wonders: Is America about to see bread protests, or even riots?
People around the country have been testifying how they are down to
their last dollar or flat broke, facing eviction or living on the
street, unable to afford vital prescriptions or even food. "I've got
$18.91 in my bank account this morning. My cupboards are getting low, my
dog will have to eat whatever me and my kids eat and my gas light will
be back on shortly," wrote one Redditor recently.
"My car payment was due today and I'm still $200 short, 500 counting
last month's. My phone bill is due in a few days. I'm a month behind on
the electric bill. I have about $60 to my name, I'm not going to make
rent and my [landlords] have already said they will not be giving any
allowances," wrote another.
"Well I've waited and now my power turns off at the end of today, in a
house where my entire family has moved in with me … worst of all I have
two toddlers and virtually nowhere to go.
'Rona and the government have
picked off my family one by one and this seems to be the final nail in
the coffin," wrote a third.
WaPo | “I’m just one guy with a camera,” Laita said. He monetized his YouTube channels days ago.
Laita
will give between $20 and $40 to people who are willing to tell their
stories, he said. Those who are more at risk of being exposed, such as
pimps, drug dealers or prostitutes, sometimes want more, costing him up
to $100.
On any given day, up to eight people line up willing to share a personal history that Laita uses only his gut to check, he said.
“I
am certain that not every dollar I’ve given to somebody on the street
has been spent on a blanket or a tent or shoes. What I’m doing is not
foolproof,” he said, considering his work to be a tool for awareness and
education.
Compensating his subjects shows a sign of respect for their time and the intimate details they’re willing to share, said Amy Turk, chief executive for Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles, the main service provider for women who live on Skid Row.
The
line of exploitation can be a thin one to balance if not done well, and
it can be “emotionally dangerous to have someone reveal so much deep
complexity about their life and walk away,” she said.
Turk,
a licensed clinical social worker, said the best way for someone to get
involved is to find an organization that’s aligned with their desire to
help and that matches their skills with a need.
“It’s
about understanding that something has happened to them,” she said,
adding that some people on her staff have heard of Laita’s channel and
saw a video of a woman the organization has assisted in the past.
“Sounds like [that’s] what Mark is tapping into.”
Stephany Powell, executive director for the Van Nuys, Calif.-based nonprofit Journey Out,
which helps women who have survived sexual exploitation, watched
Kelly’s story after the video popped up on her Facebook feed. She was
instantly concerned for Kelly’s safety because of her identity being
known and the amount of money raised for her.
“If she’s vulnerable enough to be trafficked, she might be vulnerable enough for a guy to befriend her,” she said.
People
are growing more aware about human trafficking, and Kelly seemed like a
likable person whom people perceived as undeserving of what had
allegedly happened to her, Powell said, contemplating why Kelly’s story
resonated with so many people compared with others on Laita’s channel.
The
retired Los Angeles Police Department sergeant said she’s heard stories
like Kelly’s too often in her years of service and now as leader of
Journey Out.
“A
lot of times it is not unusual for victims to not depict themselves as
victims or how some people think victims should present themselves,” she
said.
Money
isn’t curative for the type of trauma someone like Kelly experienced,
Powell said. She needs assistance with finding housing, securing
employment and attending counseling to help her cope with pain. People
like Kelly need a community that consists of professionals and former
sex-trafficking survivors to pull her forward, she said.
“You can give her that $30,000. If she blows through it, then what?” Powell asked.
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