Trump’s advisers have a brazen plot to gut Social Security

May 12, 2020 By Alex Lawson, Independent Media Institute
- Commentary


In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the policy Donald Trump is fixated on has nothing to do with ramping up testing, getting protective equipment to workers, or sending resources to nursing homes where tens of thousands of seniors are dying of COVID-19. Instead, he’s obsessed with cutting payroll taxes, Social Security’s dedicated revenue.

Now, Trump’s economic advisers and his unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner have another way to undermine Social Security: The so-called “Eagle Plan,” which would be more aptly named the Work ’Til You Die Plan. It would give people $10,000, but only if they agreed to sign away a portion of their future Social Security benefits. This plan asks desperate families, terrified of going without food or being thrown out of their homes, to sacrifice their retirement.

Plans like this one betray a willful refusal to understand the nature of Social Security, which is insurance, not a piggy bank. It replaces wages lost when a worker retires, becomes disabled, or dies leaving dependents. Workers earn these benefits with every paycheck.
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Turning Social Security from guaranteed insurance into a private account is a longstanding goal of Wall Street billionaires. Right now, Wall Street gets no money from Social Security. But if it were converted into hundreds of millions of private accounts, Wall Street would reap huge profits.

President George W. Bush infamously attempted to convert Social Security into a piggy bank for Wall Street, and was resoundingly rebuked by the American people in the 2006 midterm elections. Given this unpopularity, proponents of privatization are using sneaky backdoor tactics instead.

Back in 2018, Ivanka Trump released a parental leave plan with Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). They referred to this proposal as “paid leave,” but it actually asked parents to fund their own leave by forgoing future Social Security benefits. The plan was developed by the Independent Women’s Forum, a Koch Brothers-funded think tank whose president eagerly anticipated that it would be a first step toward privatizing Social Security.

The so-called “Eagle Plan” is strikingly similar to Ivanka’s fake paid leave plan, but even more cruel in the choice it would foist upon people in the middle of a pandemic. With over 32 million people newly unemployed, families across the country are in desperate need of income. Thanks to the Trump administration’s utter failure to manage the pandemic by implementing a widespread testing and tracing program, that desperation isn’t going away any time soon.

Yet the United States remains the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Congress just gave corporations a $4.5 trillion bailout. We can easily afford to both send families the income they need and expand their future Social Security benefits. Congressional Democrats are proposing to do just that by sending everyone in America $2,000 every month for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, while also expanding Social Security.

As long as Democrats stand united against Kushner’s terrible plan, it is a political gift to them. Workers across the country are already facing a retirement income crisis, and the pandemic is only making it worse. Voters overwhelmingly want to expand, not cut, Social Security’s modest benefits. The Trump administration’s attempts to undermine Social Security, whether through payroll tax cuts or through the “Eagle Plan” scheme, will be punished in November, as they should be.

Fortunately, the Democratic Party is on record in support of expanding, not cutting and certainly not privatizing, Social Security. During the Democratic primary, Joe Biden faced scrutiny for his past openness to cuts to Social Security. That said, as the presumptive Democratic nominee, he’s done the right thing by fighting to expand Social Security benefits to address the nation’s looming retirement income crisis. He’s also come out for an immediate across-the-board increase in response to the pandemic.

Seniors and people with disabilities are hit hardest by COVID-19. Democrats in both the House and the Senate have released plans to increase Social Security benefits in response to the crisis. Congress should ignore the monstrous “Eagle Plan,” and pass those instead.

Alex Lawson is the executive director of Social Security Works, a non-profit advocacy group that supports expanding benefits to address America’s growing retirement security crisis. Lawson has appeared on numerous TV and radio outlets and is a frequent guest host of The Thom Hartmann Program, one of the top progressive radio shows in the country.


This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Leaked White House data shows infections spiking more than 1,000% in rural areas that backed Trump

May 12, 2020 By Igor Derysh, Salon


A leaked unreleased White House coronavirus task force report showing cases spiking in areas across the country has undercut President Donald Trump’s claim that cases are declining across the nation.

“You know, the numbers are coming down very rapidly all throughout the country, by the way,” Trump declared at a Monday news conference. “There may be one exception, but all throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.”

This is, of course, not true. Though cases are decreasing in 14 states, they are rising in nine states, according to The New York Times. A lack of widespread testing in 27 other states, plus Washington and Puerto Rico, suggests that cases in those areas are being undercounted.

But a leaked coronavirus task force report obtained by NBC News shows that some parts of the country — rural counties in Tennessee and Kansas — have seen cases balloon by more than 1,000% in a matter of one week. Other counties in Missouri, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin saw increases of more than 400%.


Dr. John Ross, a professor at Harvard Medical School, pointed out that all but one of the top 10 counties that saw the largest increases voted for President Donald Trump in 2016.

The top 10 cities in the report, which was produced on May 7, saw cases increases by more than 72% over seven days. Some areas, like St. Louis and Central City, Ky., saw cases skyrocket by 650% over that span. St. Cloud, Minn., saw cases increase by more than 400%. Other cities like Gainesville, Ga., Racine, Wisc., and Nashville saw increases of more than 100% over a single week.

A separate graph listing “locations to watch” include Kansas City, Mo., and Charlotte, which saw increases of more than 200% over the previous week.


The report found that statewide cases in Minnesota increased by nearly 100% over a single week while New Mexico, Tennessee, Wisconsin and the nation’s capital saw increases of more than 40%.

Despite the alarming increases, Trump has continued to publicly and falsely claim that cases are falling nearly everywhere.

“Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere,” he tweeted Tuesday.

Medical professionals criticized Trump’s attempts to spin rising death counts.

“Anybody that claims we’re on a downward trajectory nationally is out of touch with reality,” Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told NBC News, adding that even the rising numbers do not tell the full story. “There isn’t a single state in the union that has sufficient testing.”

Though states like New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, which were hit hard early, have seen numbers decline, the nation has a rising curve when New York’s massive totals are excluded.

“It’s not appropriate to say the U.S. is consistently on a downward trend at all,” Redlener said. “In some places, it might be the direct opposite of that.”

Trump has also complained to advisers about the way that deaths are counted, arguing that the “real numbers are actually lower,” Axios reported last week.

But medical experts, including those on Trump’s own task force, say the opposite is true.

“Most of us feel that the number of deaths are likely higher than” the 80,000 that is currently reported, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to a Senate committee on Tuesday. “The number is likely higher. I don’t know exactly what percent higher, but almost certainly, it’s higher.”

Fauci also pushed back on Trump’s optimism and pressure on states to reopen businesses during the hearing.

“If some areas, cities, states or what-have-you jump over those various checkpoints and prematurely open up without having the capability of being able to respond effectively and efficiently, my concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks,” Fauci said. “I have been very clear in my message — to try to the best extent possible to go by the guidelines, which have been very well thought out and very well delineated.”

As Trump urges reopening, thousands getting sick on the job

Workers line up to enter the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Logansport, Ind., Thursday, May 7, 2020. In Cass County, home to the Tyson plant, confirmed coronavirus cases have surpassed 1,500. That’s given the county — home to about 38,000 residents — one of the nation’s highest per-capita infection rates. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

NEW YORK (AP) — Even as President Donald Trump urges getting people back to work and reopening the economy, an Associated Press analysis shows thousands of people are getting sick from COVID-19 on the job.

Recent figures show a surge of infections in meatpacking and poultry-processing plants. There’s been a spike of new cases among construction workers in Austin, Texas, where that sector recently returned to work. Even the White House has proven vulnerable, with positive coronavirus tests for one of Trump’s valets and for Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary.

The developments underscore the high stakes for communities nationwide as they gradually loosen restrictions on business.


“The people who are getting sick right now are generally people who are working,” Dr. Mark Escott, a regional health official, told Austin’s city council. “That risk is going to increase the more people are working.”

Austin’s concerns will likely be mirrored in communities nationwide as the reopening of stores and factories creates new opportunities for the virus to spread.

To be sure, there are plenty of new infections outside the workplace — in nursing homes, and among retired and unemployed people, particularly in densely populated places such as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and urban parts of New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Yet of the 15 U.S. counties with the highest per-capita infection rates between April 28 and May 5, all are homes to meatpacking and poultry-processing plants or state prisons, according to data compiled by the AP.


The county with the highest per-capita rate was Tennessee’s Trousdale County, where nearly 1,300 inmates and 50 staffers recently tested positive at the privately run Trousdale Turner Correctional Center.

In the federal prison system, the number of positive cases has increased steadily. As of May 5, there were 2,066 inmates who’d tested positive, up from 730 on April 25.

The No. 2 county on AP’s list is Nobles County in Minnesota, which now has about 1,100 cases, compared to two in mid-April. The county seat, Worthington, is home to a JBS pork processing plant that employs hundreds of immigrants.

“One guy said to me, ‘I risked my life coming here. I never thought something that I can’t see could take me out,’” said the Rev. Jim Callahan of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Worthington.

Nebraska’s Dakota County, home to a Tyson Foods meat plant, had recorded three cases as of April 15, and now has more than 1,000. There have been at least three COVID-19 deaths, including a Muslim woman from Ethiopia who was among 4,300 employees at the Tyson plant.


FILE - In this April 9, 2020, file photo, a construction worker wears a protective mask during the coronavirus pandemic as he unloads a truck standing in front of a sign reminding people to stay 6 feet apart, in downtown Miami. There's been a spike of new infections among construction workers in Austin, Texas, where that sector recently returned to work. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

“These are sad and dangerous days,” the imam of a regional Islamic center, Ahmad Mohammad, told the Siouxland News.

In northern Indiana’s Cass County, home to a large Tyson pork-processing plant, confirmed coronavirus cases have surpassed 1,500. That’s given the county — home to about 38,000 residents — one of the nation’s highest per-capita infection rates.

The Tyson plant in Logansport, Indiana, was closed April 25 after nearly 900 employees tested positive; it resumed limited operations Thursday after undergoing deep cleaning and installation of Plexiglas workstation barriers. Company spokeswoman Hli Yang said none of the 2,200 workers would return to work without being tested.
Full Coverage: Virus Outbreak

Also hard hit by recent infections are counties in Virginia, Delaware and Georgia where poultry-processing plants are located.

In New York, the hardest-hit state during most of the pandemic, a new survey suggests that factors other than the workplace were involved in many recent cases.

The survey of 1,269 patients admitted to 113 hospitals over three recent days confounded expectations that new cases would be dominated by essential workers, especially those traveling on subways and buses. Instead, retirees accounted for 37% of the people hospitalized; 46% were unemployed.

“We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work, that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case,” said Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

In Pennsylvania, of 2,578 new cases between May 4 and May 6, more than 40% were people living in long-term care facilities. Health officials in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County said of the 352 new cases between April 20 and May 5, 35% were residents in long-term care facilities and 14% were health care workers.

Though the elderly continue to account for a disproportionate share of COVID-19 cases, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the age ratio is changing. In January-February, 76% of cases involved people 50 or older. Since March, only about half the cases are of that age range,

Many health workers were among the earliest Americans to test positive. They continue to be infected in large numbers.

Gerard Brogan, director of nursing practice for the California Nurses Association, says as many as 200 nurses a day tested positive in California recently. Nationwide, he says the National Nurses United had tallied more than 28,000 positive tests and more than 230 deaths among health workers.

Among those recently testing positive was Dr. Pramila Kolisetty of Scarsdale, New York, who has a rehab and pain management practice in the Bronx and is married to a urologist.

Even after New York imposed an extensive lockdown, she went to her office two to three times a week while trying to transition to telemedicine.

“It took time for us to get ourselves organized,” she said. “We can’t just close the office and say, that’s it.”

Some of her staff fell sick with COVID-19, and she started feeling symptoms a few weeks ago. After testing positive, she isolated at home and is now practicing telemedicine.

Cuomo, the New York governor, said individual decisions could help slow the pace of new infections.

“Much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself,” Cuomo said at a recent briefing. “Everything is closed down, the government has done everything it could. ... Now it’s up to you. Are you wearing a mask, are you doing the hand sanitizer?”

____

AP data journalist Andrew Milligan in New Haven, Connecticut, and reporters Rick Callahan in Indianapolis, Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia, Deepti Hajela and Mike Stobbe in New York, and Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed.





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Spain’s UBI Is A Wake-Up Call For Americans
 & Canadians
Spain just passed a permanent universal basic income. So can we.
Nick Slater
filed 08 April 2020 in ECONOMICS


On the first night of Semana Santa, the Holy Week, Spanish citizens got their first bit of good news since the nationwide quarantine went into effect on March 14. No, the Lord hadn’t decided to end this most perfidious of His modern plagues, and no, the country’s hundreds of thousands of laid-off workers hadn’t somehow gotten their jobs back—but if you tuned in to TV channel La Sexta’s broadcast on Sunday night, you still witnessed something miraculous.

The miracle in question was the announcement of an ingreso mínimal vital, or universal basic income (UBI). In other words, it’s a monthly payment from the government to all Spaniards, which would ensure they could continue to eat and have a place to live regardless of their employment status. As Minister of Economics Nadia Calviño explained, the new policy was designed to ensure that “nobody is left out or left behind, starting with the workers.” This isn’t just a COVID-19 coping mechanism, either, as Spain’s UBI is expected to become a permanent part of the social fabric.

Officials are still sorting out many of the details. There’s no concrete start date yet, though Calviño has said that the Spanish government aims to roll out the new program “as soon as possible.” It’s also unclear what the monthly sum will be, and how it will be determined. Calviño hinted that some families might receive more or less “depending on their circumstances,” which sounds like some sort of means-testing. It’s a massive undertaking, to say the least, and many wrinkles remained to be ironed. But make no mistake: This is a huge fucking deal.

Spain has been battered by the COVID-19 pandemic worse than any other country in Europe (with the possible exception of Italy), and its death toll now exceeds 11,000. Not only has Spain closed its borders with the outside world, it’s even banned travel between provinces in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. A curfew has been in place for weeks, and the police are enforcing it with vigor. Life has ground to a complete halt from Barcelona to Bilbao.

This is a nightmare scenario by any conceivable definition, and one that the United States will soon be facing itself. However, while U.S. politicians pit states against each other to bid on dwindling supplies of basic medical equipment and encourage vulnerable citizens to go stand in line to vote during the worst pandemic of the past century, Spain is taking a novel approach to disaster management: What if we tried to make it easier for our people to stay alive?

ELECTORAL LOGO OF THE PSOE, THE RULING SPANISH SOCIALIST WORKERS’ PARTY.

Under Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez, Spain has already nationalized the country’s private hospitals (it’s worth mentioning the Spanish universal healthcare system had earned the World Economic Forum’s top ranking even before this move). Despite strong opposition from right-wing parties like Vox and Partido Popular (PP)—the latter was founded by former ministers of Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship—Sánchez has successfully fought to create a “social shield” to help protect ordinary Spaniards. Just days after the lockdown started, his government announced a relief package aimed at helping working families, which included reducing social security payments for the self-employed and allowing people with dependents to take off as much time as they need to provide care. Equaling 20 percent of Spain’s GDP, Sánchez billed it as “the greatest mobilization of resources in the country’s entire democratic history.” And all that was before his administration got around to a UBI.

If you’re an American—or someone unlucky enough to be stuck in the United States right now—headlines like these have a bit of a surreal quality. Universal healthcare alone is supposed to be “pie in the sky,” at least according to the Democratic Party establishment (who, were they plucked from Washington and deposited in Madrid, would make a more agreeable coalition partner for the far-right PP than Sánchez’s PSOE). And while former presidential candidate Andrew Yang might have introduced the concept of UBI to the American public, his often-less-than-serious campaign failed to make inroads with voters who didn’t adhere to Yang’s peculiar brand of benevolent technolibertarianism. His subsequent PR stunts, like giving away $500,000 to a random New York town that has yet to be named, have only cemented the impression among “serious audiences” that UBI is the stuff of science fiction.

And yet it’s happening. In real life. In a Western democracy that you, dear reader, may have visited once upon a time when moving freely from place to place was a thing that (some) humans could still do. So many things that were supposed to be impossible, like breaking the insurance industry’s stranglehold on the healthcare system or lavishing ordinary citizens with the kinds of benefits usually reserved for banks or hedge funds, are now revealed to be eminently achievable—assuming a country has the political will.

It’s clear that neither of the major parties in the United States have that will. We expect this from Republicans, of course. The GOP is composed of crooks all the way down, from the president pitching unproven miracle cures made by a company in which he has “a financial interest” to the unelected senator making millions off insider trading during a pandemic to the wealthy donor putting thousands of lives at risk to show how much God loves America. But by now, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the Democrats have shown themselves to be similarly scruple-free. In state after state, centrist Democrats have urged voters to head to the polls to vote for an alleged rapist who proudly boasts that “no one’s standard of living would change” under his administration. It doesn’t seem to bother Biden’s backers that “getting out the vote” during a pandemic contributes to spikes in infection rates and fatalities. For the Democratic establishment, the important thing is (and always has been) to maintain some semblance of the status quo.

But this is not what we need right now.

Americans—at least the ones who aren’t personally invested in the maintenance of petty fiefdoms in politics, media, and the corporate world—understand that profoundly fucked-up times call for solutions that seemed “radical” in the recent past. That’s why strikes at companies like Amazon and Whole Foods are becoming a weekly occurrence, while militant labor agitation is growing among everyone from gig economy workers to graduate instructors to engineers at General Electric. A nationwide general strike now looks like a real possibility in the near future. This newfound restlessness, more than any of the insulting and insufficient measures proposed by an impotent Congress, is our best hope for salvation.

Right now, we’re experiencing a collective thirst for revenge. Not only is this understandable, it’s justified. When we hear Wall Street overlords casually suggest that sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of workers would be a reasonable price to pay for keeping stock prices up; when we pay thousands of dollars to powerful institutions for services that are never delivered and when we ask for a refund we get a dance video from the boss, but no check; when we see the casino industry getting billions upon billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money, even as they refuse to open up their thousands of empty hotel rooms to our fellow human beings who are forced to sleep in parking lots during a fucking pandemic—are we not supposed to Google “how to build a guillotine?”

Sometimes the sheer unrelenting torrent of shit flowing toward us feels like too much to handle. Many of us were barely hanging on—in both a financial and spiritual sense—even before the coronavirus hit. Looking around at the ghostworld we now inhabit, and the seemingly bleak prospects for our futures, it’s tempting to crawl into the nearest hole and pray for oblivion.

There’s an alternative, though, and that’s to become more furious than you’ve ever been in your entire life. One way forward is to channel some of that anger into supporting Bernie Sanders’ platform however you can—even though he’s dropped out, his policies are still the ones we urgently need right now, and there are many down-ballot candidates who support his vision and need your help.

But also, just give yourself permission to be mad. Feel the rage in every last one of your cells. Take a minute and scream your fucking lungs out. Curse the names of Donald Trump and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Jared Kushner and Jeff Bezos and Hillary Clinton and Lloyd Blankfein and Richard Burr and Alyssa Milano and Thomas Friedman and Neera Tanden and Mike Bloomberg and Dianne Feinstein and every other callous piece of shit who would happily sacrifice you and everyone you care about if it meant their net worth would increase by a few percentage points. The only measurable difference between one team and the other is that the Democrats would claim the Republicans forced them to do it.

Be angry at these people. They are despicable monsters who sold their souls long ago. More importantly, be angry at the systems they support and defend. For-profit healthcare, precarious employment, exploitative housing markets, threadbare social safety nets…none of those are accidents. These systems were constructed with careful, deliberate effort over the course of decades. Hideous policy was stacked on top of hideous policy until they formed a demonic Jenga tower of such monstrous enormity that it blocked out not only the sun but the sky itself.

As the Spanish have shown us, that tower can be toppled. But it won’t fall of its own accord—we’re going to need to fight for it. This might be uncomfortable for a lot of us. For the last 40 years, we’ve been told that if we just kept our mouths shut and worked hard, everything would be fine. If we only studied a little more, spent a few more hours on self-improvement, sacrificed a little more free time, we too could make it. This has always been a lie.

The people who control our lives—our politicians, bosses, landlords, lenders, and so on—are under the impression that they can push us far as they like. They can refuse to pay us for the work we’ve done, even if that means we’ll starve. They can suspend mortgage payments for wealthy homeowners but not rent payments for people living paycheck to paycheck. They can repeatedly give away trillions of dollars to the financial sector, while expecting working families to subsist on a one-time offering of crumbs. They think they can keep fucking us over and over again without fear of repercussions. They’re wrong.

It’s time we showed them, through both speech and action, that we won’t be pushed another goddamn inch. As Frederick Douglass once said, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”

For all the Spanish government’s many flaws, it seems to have grasped an important truth: It exists to serve the people of Spain, and to make their lives better in tangible ways. It arrived at this conclusion not by accident, but because the people made it clear that a half-assed response to the greatest crisis of our age would not go well for those in charge.

It’s time for Americans to send their ruling class the same message.

Nightmare #3: A Disturbing Turn in Right-Wing Thought

“What if, instead of free healthcare and a guaranteed income, we just let the virus run rampant and kill a lot of people?”



It is strange to think about the disease from where I am sitting, because outside the window everything looks relatively normal. I am still in a quiet residential neighborhood, in an empty vacation house, quarantined for two weeks before going to stay with my parents. From time to time a person goes by the window on a bicycle, or walks by with their dog. But this neighborhood was sleepy before and is sleepy now.

The disease therefore has this strange kind of unreal quality. I know it’s out there, I know it is killing people in gruesome and excruciating ways, that there are hundreds of newly bereaved families dotted around the country. But I neither see nor hear them. Coronavirus seems to live solely in my laptop and phone. If I look at a news site, there is nothing but the disease. But it’s difficult to see the thing as fully real from within a cosy room. Of course, when I go out, the shops are closed. I do not go out, though.

This distance between my own immediate experience and the reality of the disease partly explains, I think, why we have recently seen a dangerous and horrifying turn in conservative opinion.

* * *

I had assumed that it was a consensus that we needed to keep people home from work until such time as public health officials and the medical community said we could lift the lockdowns, and that the discussion would then turn to the questions of: (1) how to drastically increase our ability to test for the disease, trace down who has it, isolate cases, and ramp up the production of critical medical supplies and the capacities of hospitals to absorb corona patients (2) how to mitigate the economic consequences for all the people who no longer have work. We would need to make sure they’re provided for, need to make sure the parts of the economy that are indispensable to our survival keep humming, and need to figure out how to achieve a dramatic reduction of work while keeping workers afloat and that the businesses that need to be put “on ice” would not go bankrupt in the interim, and would be ready to come back online. The theory of how to get past this disease is: an indefinite lockdown buys us time and hopefully keeps the virus from overwhelming the medical system too badly. We need that time so that we can make sure we’re ready for what happens when the lockdown is lifted.

But influential conservatives have taken things in a different direction: Instead of asking what the government needs to do to mitigate the economic fallout of the radical social distancing, they have begun to wonder whether we should just ignore the medical community and return to work after an arbitrary short length of time. As Politico reports, public health leaders have been “horrified” as President Trump floats the idea of restarting the economy within 14 days, and filling churches for Easter services. The line adopted by Trump, and many on the right, is that the “cure will be worse than the disease.” “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” he said, saying that if the doctors had their way, the country would be shut down for years. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, figures on FOX News, and crackpot economists like Larry Kudlow and Arthur Laffer are all urging Trump to “open the country up.” Adviser Stephen Moore says it is “not a viable option” to “keep the economy shut down for the next seven to 10 weeks.”

It is not clear exactly what Trump intends by “opening America for business again.” We have seen in Italy what happens when the disease gets out of control: Hospitals are quickly overwhelmed. Italy is not talking about ending its lockdown—in fact they are thinking of increasing penalties for violating it. Their priority is not “opening for business again,” but stopping a highly contagious disease from ravaging the population.

Of course, health experts say that the sooner we end the lockdowns, the greater the risk that the disease will end up killing millions of Americans. But some conservatives have gone so far as to suggest that if allowing the disease to spread kills the elderly in vast numbers, it is worth it, because it would preserve “the country.” (By which they seem to mean the stock market.)
“Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country” — Glenn Beck
“If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” — Jesse Kelly, Federalist contributor
“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 is the exchange, I’m all in.” — Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick

Note that these men are almost certainly not the ones who would die. Glenn Beck is not nobly sacrificing himself for the good of the Markets. He’s sacrificing my dad, and perhaps yours too. They are wishing death on other people. Glenn Beck will be safe in his giant house. The least-wealthy nursing homes, homeless populations, prisoners: These people will suffer horribly. And they will not all be old: The young and healthy can suffer too. (And it is worth remembering just how bad dying of coronavirus can be. In many cases we will not just be sentencing them to death, but sentencing them to be tortured to death. And their family will not even get to be near them in their dying moments.)

Now, I do want to be fair here, because when you point out how monstrous this position is, they have an argument. “Killing the economy” would also kill people, they say. If people suddenly lose their jobs and their health insurance, and cannot afford to pay their rent or their mortgage, they will suffer terribly, and their health will suffer too. First, let’s note that actual economists, rather than right-wing pundits, believe that since you cannot even really have a functional economy with a deadly pandemic raging through the population and destroying the health system, the shutdown is necessary. As economist Justin Wolfers says, social isolation will “save many many more people from COVID-related deaths than the ensuing economic dislocation will cause. We economists actually measure stuff like this, and it’s not even in the neighborhood of being close.” There is a consensus among both economists and public health experts that “lifting the restrictions would impose huge costs in additional lives lost to the virus — and deliver little lasting benefit to the economy.” Even Larry Summers was “appalled,” and if Larry Summers is appalled by the callousness of a cost-benefit argument you know it’s bad. It’s only far right crackpots and New York Times columnists (how thin the line between them so often is) who dispute the public health experts, which is probably why other countries battling COVID-19 have not been having the ludicrous argument we now find ourselves having.

But there is another premise in the Kill The People, Save The Economy theory that needs examining, namely the idea that all of the most extreme economic harms caused by a lockdown are unavoidable. Thomas Friedman, in his column on how to get America “back to work,” says that:

Lost wages and job layoffs are leaving many workers without health insurance and forcing many families to forego health care and medications to pay for food, housing, and other basic needs.

This, of course, is true. But note the false dichotomy here: between letting the disease take its course and depriving millions of workers of their livelihoods. (Friedman, naturally, concludes that we need a moderate approach somewhere in the middle, isolating the most vulnerable while easing up on restrictions on everyone else, perhaps in as little as two weeks.) But what if we stopped to ask why workers are left without health insurance and have to forgo care when they lose their jobs? Or why they can’t pay for food and housing?

Well, the reason is that we do not live in a social democracy, where the government provides the basics to people and makes sure they don’t suffer horribly from material deprivation. Instead of just offering free-at-point-of-use healthcare to all, we tie insurance to employment, so that losing work is scary and devastating because it means losing healthcare. We do not provide a basic income, or paid sick leave, or quality public housing, and are unwilling to consider measures (like pausing rent payments and mortgage payments, and halting evictions) that would hurt rich property-owners. The threat that conservatives are holding over people’s heads (“go back to work or misery will ensue”) is the product of a choice. If we choose not to soften the blow for people during the period they can’t work, then it will be a calamity for them.

The “economy” is an abstraction, and saying we need to “restart” or “open” it is highly imprecise and unhelpful. There are some activities that are clearly essential (such as making sure everyone can eat, and have healthcare, and that the lights and the internet are on), while others do not need to be done if doing them means increasing the risk of a pandemic spreading further and overwhelming the hospital system. For example, let us take a housekeeper for idle rich people. There is no reason for that housekeeper to have to expose herself needlessly to the virus before it is contained. Her work is hard but ultimately, the rich person can clean their own damn house if necessary. “Ah, but she will be thrown out of work!” Yes, but it’s physically possible that, during the pandemic, she could be paid to stay home rather than to go out and clean. It is not because her task itself must be done, but because even in a pandemic the idea of paying people not to work is unthinkable to conservatives, and therefore that the false choice is supposedly between firing her and having her go to work.

In fact, I think one reason conservatives are so determined to get back to “business as usual” is that the disease has threatened many of their most cherished dogmas. For example: It’s very clear that coronavirus testing and treatment needs to be free for patients. If patients are getting $9,000 bills for tests, they’re not going to want to get tested. But if coronavirus treatment should be free, it opens up more questions: What about treatment for other diseases that worsen because hospitals are overwhelmed with coronavirus patients? Are we okay with having those people bankrupted by medical expenses? Why shouldn’t we just make healthcare free? If you’re in the Army, you get government-funded and operated Tricare services. You get a lot of free-at-point-of-use services, because the government understands that its Army needs to be fit and healthy. But what about the general population?

I am not surprised that a libertarian like Richard Epstein insisted coronavirus was overblown and would only cause 500 deaths in this country (he wrote that on the 16th, and we’re already well past that; he’s upped it to 5,000 and says it’s what he meant all along). If the disease is not overblown, it requires massive centralized state action to solve. China has gotten coronavirus under control, but how did they do it? It is a problem the free market will not solve, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal are reluctant to admit there are problems the market doesn’t have an answer for.

Economist Dani Rodrik is surprised at Trump’s reluctance to use the authority of the Defense Production Act, which allows the government to give orders to private industry in a national emergency. I am much less surprised, because if this worked, it would force conservatives to concede that there are certain circumstances in which the state directing industry produces good outcomes, which many will never admit.

The crisis is shattering dogmas left and right. It is showing that outsourcing U.S. manufacturing might have produced horrible consequences when we needed to ramp up domestic manufacturing of a crucial supply as quickly as possible. It is showing that our government could have given us a social safety net all along and chose not to. It is showing that making people pay their debts is not always a good thing. It is showing that we can house the homeless if we try, or lower our prison population. It is showing that there is such a thing as “society,” that there are collective problems requiring collective solutions. No wonder Ron Paul wanted so badly to think coronavirus was a hoax! (His son got coronavirus soon after.) No wonder Trump wants to think it’s just like the flu and we can all go back to business as usual soon! If the crisis can’t be solved with a miracle cure, it might require a dose of FDR-style social democracy. (The Democrats also have this generation’s FDR waiting to take charge (hint: it’s Bernie, not Cuomo), but unfortunately seem to be on the verge of nominating someone whose crisis leadership skills are dubious.)

* * *

I would like to come back, though, to where I started: the unrealness of the virus to me right now. This is not just the case for me as an individual. It’s the case for all of those who do not yet personally know someone who has gotten sick, and to whom the sickness exists as words and images on a screen. This includes Donald Trump. He and others on the right live in a world of image, where they think if they can change the narrative they can change the reality. It is almost like a belief in magic.

But how long can this illusion last? The virus is spreading, and it is spreading quickly. I do not think Trump wants to accept this. Neither does Richard Epstein or Ron Paul. I don’t want to believe it myself. Sooner or later, though, we will have little choice. Atlanta’s ICUs are apparently already at capacity. Medical supplies are running low in many places. And there is no reason to think that, at least until the effect of social distancing kicks in, the number of cases will not continue to explode.

Stay safe, everyone.

Nathan J. Robinson
filed 25 March 2020 in THE VIRUS
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/03/notes-on-a-nightmare-3-a-disturbing-turn-in-right-wing-thought

Welcome to IDF Fantasy Camp

In which intrepid reporter Elle Hardy learns how to shoot, fight, love, and become quietly terrified of the Christian Zionists who are practicing for the End Times.

Elle Hardy
filed 01 April 2020 in INTERNATIONALhttps://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/04/welcome-to-idf-fantasy-camp

Giddy with mental images of action-film heroics, we hold our lines as the commanders inspect the positioning of our shotguns.

“What is the foundation of the Israeli Defense Force!” shouts Moshe, the chiseled special forces leader.

“Love! The IDF is built on morals and values!” we yell back.

A sudden bang, and we are jolted from our formation by a man running at us with a knife. We scatter like bowling pins as trained soldiers crash through our sagging lines, shouting and shoving us out of the way before taking him down.

The “terrorist” is an actor, of course. Our shotguns are wooden props, the knife was made of rubber, and we—a group of Americans playing at being IDF soldiers for a day—are certainly no elite fighting unit. Once the terrorist has been “subdued” and taken off his mask, Moshe tells us with all due solemnity: “It is important that you take note of details. How many attackers were there? Two, four… did I hear someone say we took down eight? The New York Times will arrive and ask you. And if you say eight, they will report eight.”

The whole thing would make a great sitcom sketch, complete with live fire on metal targets filling in for canned applause. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that you could imagine in an episode of Seinfeld: Kramer, his lanky frame knocking over the cardboard marketplace set; George in some sort of action-hero fantasy charging in blinded rage at one of the implausibly buff, disciplined IDF men; our four heroes slowly realizing that their fellow IDF cosplayers are all Christian fundamentalists.

There’s a good reason that Seinfeld comes to mind. I’m at Caliber 3, “the premier academy for counter terror and security,” made infamous last year when Jerry Seinfeld visited with his family and took photos with the instructors. Caliber 3 posted the photos of Seinfeld on their Facebook page, bragging about the visit: “Finally we are allowed to tell you! Jerry Seinfeld and his family were in Caliber 3. During their visit to Israel last week, they came to us for a special and exciting activity with displays of combat, [the Israeli martial art] Krav Maga, assault dogs and lots of Zionism. It was great.”

As Jerry himself might say, what’s the deal with spending your holiday at an anti-terrorist training center? Set up in 2003 and run by active members of the IDF, Caliber 3 is a sort of fantasy camp for the people who think that “creeping Sharia” is a threat to our way of life, and an increasingly popular stop on the evangelical tourist trail through Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Not that we hear that word “Palestinian” at all during our “adventure.” The identity of the terrorists goes without saying, just as the stated assertion that they have “forfeited their right to life” also goes without challenge. The evangelical tour group’s leader, Ross Nichols, a Louisianan who really puts the MAGA into the eagle-and-sword Krav Maga t-shirt he’s wearing, says it more bluntly: “Israel is a sheep among the wolves.”

It’s not as though my fellow travelers are frothing at the mouth fundamentalists. They’re perfectly pleasant, red state suburbanites who quietly welcome war with Iran to bring about the end of days.

Nichols himself doesn’t identify as either Christian or Jewish, having assembled his own belief system from the religious currents of what he considers his two homelands. Once a self-described fundamentalist Christian, he was ordained as a minister of the Hebrew Faith through something called the United Israel World Union, Inc. in 2003 and believes that “Christianity was not the religion of Jesus, rather a religion about him.” But perhaps most tellingly, Nichols describes himself as an “ardent Zionist” and “active in the Anti-BDS [Boycott Divestment Sanctions] movement” working on “many fronts to present the Jewish State in a positive light.” To this end, he informs his flock, creepily, that “every Jew is a miracle, so we are seeing not just one miracle but miracles all over the nation of Israel.”

The tour group itself may mostly be made up of more standard-issue evangelical Christians than Nichols represents, but they nevertheless embody the relatively-recent philosemitism of much of America’s Christian right. Only a few decades ago, they might have been calling Moshe and his crew “Christ killers”, but today they are fervent disciples of the gospel of “Judeo-Christian values.” This profound shift is as much political as it is religious.

The driving force here is the looming apocalypse, and the prospect of setting it in motion. For most Christian Zionists, supporting Israel is a stepping stone for God’s plan for the end of days. The prophecies in the Book of Revelation suggest that all Jews need to return to the land of Israel, where supposedly the Jewish state will rule the world before the final conflict can begin. But when the Rapture arrives, it’s not so great for the Jewish people, who must convert or die.

This newfound conservative love for the Jewish people comes from the top down, with Trump last year happily quoting a supporter who called the president “King of Israel,” aping claims by evangelicals that he is their “King Cyrus”, the biblical Persian ruler who freed the Jews from Babylon. Trump might have thrilled hardline Christians and Jews alike when he moved the United States embassy to Jerusalem, but he’s also relied heavily on anti-Semitic tropes. “I’m a negotiator like you folks were negotiators,” he told pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC in 2015. More recently, he said to a Jewish audience, “you’re brutal killers, not nice people at all,” but they have to vote for him, else “you’re going to be out of business in about 15 minutes.” He finished by invoking the age-old stereotype of “dual loyalty” saying there are Jews who “don’t love Israel enough.” Some Jewish groups were quick to condemn the statement, but AIPAC has continued to work with and praise the president in spite of his remarks.

This seeming dissonance has a long history. The Christian right’s firm alliance with modern Israeli Zionism began with the establishment of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin found strategic common ground with President Ronald Regan’s evangelical adviser. Today, perhaps the most influential body of American Christian Zionism is Christians United for Israel, formed by John Hagee in 2006, boasting some 8 million members. It routinely advocates for expansion of settlements, increased military aid to Israel, and war with Iran.

Gush Etzion, where Caliber 3 is located, is itself home to many settlements. Swathes of the region were purchased by Jewish settlers in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when Palestinian lands were often bought from wealthy Arab families outside of Palestine whose names were on the registers due to a quirk of the old Ottoman system. The agricultural villages that were subsequently built on the land were destroyed by the Arab Legion in the years prior to the outbreak of war in 1948. It was left outside of Israel in the 1949 armistice lines, yet Jewish settlements were rebuilt after the 1967 Six-Day War, along with new communities that have expanded the borders of the Etzion bloc.

Today, the enclave is home to around 75,000 largely American-Israelis who moved there in the 1970s. According to international law, and accepted by almost every country outside of America and Israel, the Jewish settlements in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 are illegal, including the 22 settlements of Gush Etzion.

Of course, both this history and the present day reality are noticeably absent from the fantasy camp canon. Neither Nichols nor our IDF commanders mention that this enclave, which melds the dramatic mountainscapes of the region with a dusty suburban ordinariness, is also home to an infamous Israeli detention center. Palestinian activist Issa Amro, 39, has been detained there numerous times, most recently six months ago after he was arrested for filming Israeli settlers in Hebron as they harassed Palestinians on the street.

“It is very close to the tourist camp, but the tourists don’t come to see the situation in the detention centers,” he tells me on the phone from his hometown, where he also leads walking tours to show the other side of the story. “But the terror tourists don’t want to know the real image of the occupation.”

In the West Bank, there are around 100 fixed checkpoints and hundreds more “flying checkpoints”—random stops at the whim of the Israeli military—plus a permit system that severely restricts Palestinians’ freedom of movement, separates families, and causes problems for everything including accessing healthcare to holding a job outside of their immediate neighborhood. It’s bad enough in ordinary times, but recently the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the poor conditions, with thousands of Palestinian workers waiting in cramped lines each day to pass through the checkpoints. For activists like Amro, the constant navigation of discipline and surveillance is part of everyday life. He says that he is routinely detained at the Gush Etzion interrogation center for up to eight days, which (legally) is the longest you can be imprisoned without charge.

“Tourists aren’t coming here to see what it is to be living under military law,” he says. “The idea of training tourists and civilians to use guns is not about justice or fighting terror, it is incitement against the Palestinian people. Tourists are here for a fantasy, and that is to see and practice power. And we Palestinians are cheap targets.”

As Caliber 3 shows, the significant evangelical portion of the 900,000 Americans who are arriving in the Holy Land each year don’t want to be mere spectators. The IDF soldiers like to paint themselves as “the only good guys in a bad neighborhood,” but it’s the more immediate neighborhood that is the true illustration of the terror fantasy camp project.

On the range Moshe asks again if we’re “ready to fight evil.” Our terrorist targets are dressed in Western clothing rather than Palestinian keffiyeh, but we already have the abstract picture in our heads of our villains and heroes. In Moshe, with his jawline that could be a weapon itself, dark stubble, and combat-ready physique, we are able to indulge in the fantasy of the good guy action star that we all imagine ourselves to be—even though, when the actor ran in with his rubber knife earlier, our first instincts were to run. But that’s normal. Of the “three Fs”—freeze, flight, fight—the commanders tell us that only about 10 percent of people will immediately go Rambo on the terrorist. Of that 10 percent, Moshe is in the top 0.1 percent of IDF soldiers, able to respond to a command and shoot in under 1.2 seconds.

Moshe and his combat Belgian Shepherd show us what they can do to a padded-up “terrorist” in those split seconds (“the dog always goes for the butt”). After that, it’s our turn for action, which means 10-foot sprints, squats, and spinning around before target practice with live rounds and a friendly commander gripping our shoulders to make sure we don’t do a Dick Cheney on one of our own.

Concentrating on the job at hand momentarily quietens my moral outrage at the Caliber 3 project. Even though I know perfectly well that Caliber 3 is geared more toward fomenting our politics than improving our combat skills, I find that, strangely, I secretly want to be told that I have the instinct, or the crack shot, or something that justifies the exhilaration I feel at pulling a soft trigger at the smiling photo 10 feet in front of us. At least, I think it’s smiling. I’m too embarrassed to tell the commanders that I still can’t see the orange dot in the target of my live fire, even once I put my glasses on.

Still, I’m high on seeing puffs of dust as I miss the targets and hit the sandstone walls behind them. As are my fellow tourists, who are hooting and cheering as they too feel the rush of hitting anything in sight.

“Why is it that Americans would come to Israel to shoot guns?” Moshe lands the day’s killer gag, to great laughter. “Israelis are bad-ass,” my teammate Bobby says, high from firing a round through a pink balloon 15 feet from us. A barrel-chested, boyish man in his late 30s, he’s here from California on the holiday of a lifetime with his mom. Hearing war tales from a bunch of IDF commanders is, for them, as much a religious experience as visiting the Wailing Wall.

As Moshe pointed out, these guys can go shooting in America any time they want. Many of them already do. The fantasy in this camp isn’t firing a weapon, or taking down a “terrorist,” or even the idea of doing it all in the biblical promised land. The fantasy is Israel itself, with its walls and checkpoints, its constant state of militarism, and the everyday display of “toughness” and “love.”

After a commander steers my gun to pop the last of the balloons, we march back to headquarters for a graduation ceremony, where Moshe tells the story of a fallen comrade, “killed by the terrorists in Gaza,” which inspired them to open Caliber 3. His story of the “the humanity of the IDF soldiers,” is the keepsake that we should go back home to share with our friends and families.

And with that, united by our tepid war skills and a whole lotta love, our group is deployed in the gift shop, elbows and shoulders at the ready against a group of Korean tourists inspecting the tactical caps and Star of David morale patches before their adventure begins.

“I feel so much safer,” a middle-aged woman from Indiana says to her husband.

“I’m buying three,” he replies, holding up the Caliber 3 logo t-shirt. “The IDF is so bad-ass,” he says to no one in particular.

Of course, we’re a world away from the only bad-ass thing actually going on out here: the activists like Issa Amro who are resisting Israeli occupation against impossible odds. For us, this experience consists only of a handsome dude with a few stories to tell, and his dog who can maul either a tennis ball or a terrorist. Perhaps that’s the most disturbing part, that this jovial version of the IDF is the place where we can launder our most violent fantasies against those who don’t share the so-called “Judeo-Christian” dream.

Just like the IDF commanders, we’re performers too, only the stage is the serious business of morals and values. In the two decades after 9/11, that something like the Gush Etzion range even exists shows the extent to which terror and mass violence is now something that is being gamified—not only by the perpertrators, such as the mass shooter in El Paso Walmart last year, but here, in the dusty hills of the Palestinian desert, by the most ordinary of people. Instead of empathy and understanding, we are simulating “authentic” exciting experiences to see how we might handle dangers we’ll never face. While we might be intermittently prompted to shout about love, we’re willing conscripts for a spectacle designed to excite already hardened hearts and minds.

And right now, with U.S. sales of guns and ammunition soaring as coronavirus leads to fears of social unrest, there’s a risk that this fantasy roleplay could turn into a horrible reality. This is the whole point of MAGA theology—we have to terrify ourselves and everyone else into thinking that things are only going to get worse until the End Times, where it comes down to Us versus Them. The final test of our faith will be our willingness to go out with a bang.

The Cults of Capital

What happens when an apocalyptic pandemic meets the apocalyptic death-cult of neoliberalism?

Daniel Walden
filed 30 March 2020 in THE VIRUS
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/03/the-cults-of-capital

The phrase “business as usual” evokes a wry glance or a cynical snort even under normal political circumstances. In the face of the crisis in which we now find ourselves, the phrase sounds positively delusional. And yet “business as usual” is precisely what the Democratic leadership seems to be offering us, even as we are now so far from anything “usual” that many of us are probably not readily able to remember what the word even means. On March 17th, the congressional Democrats touted a bill that would, for the first time, mandate paid leave for workers around the country…with such broad exceptions that only 20 percent of workers would actually benefit. (They passed it on March 27th.) Despite the Democrats’ constant self-promotion as the party of Facts and Reason and Solutions, they seem completely incapable of treating a pandemic with the seriousness that it warrants. In plague-stricken New York, a panel convened by Andrew Cuomo—current darling of “solutions”-oriented Democrats—recently proposed $400 million in cuts to Medicaid spending over the next year, while in D.C. Nancy Pelosi now believes that a Republican stimulus bill that doles out a paltry one-time $1,200 to individual people “has moved sufficiently to the side of the workers.” These are not the words and actions of reasonable people—they are symptomatic of a deep-seated denial that reaches down to the core, to the place where we keep our most serious moral and religious commitments. This is the denial of the fervent religious believer who has, to their mind, discerned God’s will and will carry it out to the end, regardless of what God might have to say about it.

This kind of denial is also, appropriately, characteristic of apocalyptic scenarios, or in some cases, of their conspicuous absence. Doomsday cults are not a new phenomenon especially in American history: This country has birthed a number of religious movements whose central animating belief was that the world would end on a particular day. The Millerites, for example, were a Christian movement who believed that Jesus would return physically to earth on October 22, 1844 and cleanse the world of sin and impurity. I am not arguing that the Democratic Party has been predicting the end of the world: In fact, they have continued to proclaim the inverse, that the world will not end and business as usual will continue. But much as the Millerites were destined to see October 22 come and go without a bodily appearance of Jesus, anyone who commits to the idea that business will perpetually continue as usual, and the economy will simply grow forever, is placing a losing bet.

The key to understanding Democratic irrationality and intransigence in the face of this crisis lies not merely in their commitment to the neoliberal consensus, but in what exactly neoliberalism is. The term is somewhat muddy, but a good starting definition is “the conviction that market competition is the most efficient method of allocating any resource, and therefore should be introduced into every sphere of life,” a definition expansive enough to cover the governing American consensus on such diverse issues as healthcare (buy what you like, get only what you pay for), global trade (open borders for capital and goods, closed borders for human beings), and education (make public schools “compete” for funding by introducing high-stakes testing and unregulated charter schools). This commitment to total marketization is not merely a policy commitment: It carries with it a complete worldview about human nature and the nature of the good, as well as precepts for how to live life so as to be judged among the righteous (that is, the rich, or at least the financially stable) and avoid the wrath of the omnipotent and all-seeing market (that is, poverty). Such judgments stretch even into valuing lives in purely monetary terms, as Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein did in 2004. Because younger people are more economically productive and have more years of productivity left, “a program that saves younger people,” he writes, “is better, in this sense, than an otherwise identical program that saves older people.” To any morally healthy person, a statement like that is symptomatic of profound spiritual disease, but it is paradigmatic of the neoliberal soul. Human beings are only as valuable as their productive capabilities; it is their ability to serve the market that matters, not their lives or their happiness. As historian Eugene McCarraher describes it:


The Market suffuses the Great Chain of Being; it’s the marrow of neoliberal divinity. Far from merely allocating goods and resources, the Market is the ontological architecture of the universe, an inerrant, pansophical quintessence wiser than any puny and fallible human being…It’s the newest impersonation of God.

Neoliberalism is, by any reasonable social definition, a religious worldview, one which assures its adherents that so long as the market is appeased on both an individual and social scale, prosperity will inevitably follow. If an individual fails to thrive, they simply haven’t hustled hard enough; they haven’t sacrificed enough of their blood, sweat, energy, and time to the market.

For some time, the Democratic consensus was that prosperity would continue and all we needed to do was tinker with the basics, a consensus that has now been unmasked as a delusion roughly on par with that of a man who believes that he can keep moving forward even though he is standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Since the 1990s, the Democratic establishment has been controlled by committed neoliberals, a group which cemented their power with the election and re-election of Bill Clinton. Senior Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden were all active participants in Clinton’s re-writing of Democratic priorities away from the power of labor and toward bipartisan plans to minimize the “market distortions” supposedly caused by overly generous, outdated policies like welfare and domestic labor law. It is this philosophy of minimalism and twiddly market fixes that has been caught with its pants not only down but in tatters, since highly contagious diseases will not heed calls for bipartisan cooperation or step up to the negotiating table to agree on a reasonable death toll. The Democrats’ insistence on treating a viral epidemic—or fascist Republicans—as something with which they can negotiate and which will respond to the “nudging” programs that crawled out of Cass Sunstein’s fever dreams (and which formed the core of the U.K.’s disastrous mitigation strategy) is the coping mechanism of a sect that has witnessed a failed prophecy.

As it happens, there is ample precedent for this in the history of apocalyptic sects. The failure of the Millerite prophecies in 1844 engendered a wide range of reactions in believers. Many simply gave up their beliefs and tried to return to their previous lives, but others reacted much more strongly. A sizeable contingent of ex-Millerites joined the Shakers, the famously celibate sect who believed Christ had already come again (the group also made wonderful furniture). Others began behaving like children in public, based on an idiosyncratic reading of the gospel of Mark. (Mark 10:15: Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.) But a substantial number persevered in their faith and revised their understanding of the prophecies. Christ, they said, had indeed begun the work of his final judgment by entering the Heavenly Sanctuary, so that despite the lack of any earthly events, the prophecy was in fact completely correct.

The “actually we were right all along” strategy of prophetic revision is the one being pursued by Democratic elites at the moment, most visibly in their continued support for a mostly absent Joe Biden. What America needed all along, goes the argument, was steady and familiar leadership that wouldn’t change much, and this crisis, rather than obviously disproving everything we have always believed about the economy, only underscores the belief that we need to stay the course. That this leadership seems incapable of actually doing anything at all and has, for the most part, steadily avoided any kind of public spotlight is beside the point: What actually matters is that the Democratic leadership can retain its dogmatic commitments to minimal market intervention and corporate bailouts, as Pelosi’s wholesale approval of the dreadful Republican “relief” bill demonstrates (in marked contrast to AOC’s fierce denunciation of its corporate-friendly provisions, and Bernie Sanders’s successful threat to hold the bill until Republicans dropped their objections to unemployment expansion). You see? The bill passed! The corporate bailout stayed in, because it had to stay in. They were right all along!

Of course, there is always another option, one that Democrats have already begun to test. Throughout the years, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, the publishing arm of the religious group known as Jehovah’s Witnesses, has made a number of apocalyptic predictions. Most notably, it predicted that the Hebrew patriarchs would be resurrected bodily in 1925, inaugurating the thousand-year earthly reign of Christ, and again it predicted that Christ’s thousand-year reign would commence in 1975. Both of these predictions were widely seen by members to have failed, and each time a steep drop in membership ensued. But still the remaining members of the group maintain that it continues to be divinely guided and that strict adherence to its latest teachings is the only way members can be assured of salvation.

The “don’t pay attention to our glaring mistakes, we never actually made them” strategy was on full display before the coronavirus fully hit. You could see it during Joe Biden’s debate with Bernie Sanders, during which he repeatedly lied about his own record in supporting the Iraq War. The Democratic establishment has gone along with this, because of course many of them also supported that disastrous undertaking, and major news media organizations have elected not to comment on it, because while they critique Fox News’ dishonesty they have implicitly adopted the most radical caricature of postmodern attacks on “truth,” and consider truth to be fully subordinate to the needs of powerful Democrats, embodied most fully in the near radio silence about the credible allegations of sexual assault leveled by Tara Reade against Biden. In theological terms, these politicians are diabolist dupes, unaware that their reasonable compromises, in destroying the lives of the poor, do the work of infernal powers, to whom they remain bound by the chains of their own pride.

An apocalypse is, fundamentally, a revelation or forced disclosure: The Greek term apocalypsis means an uncovering, an unveiling. In its most fundamental religious usage, it refers both to the book by John of Patmos describing his vision and to the events of that vision, which would reveal the resurrected Christ, his lordship over the universe, and the ultimate destiny of every person. This reflects, I think, a long awareness that crises tend to lay bare the workings of power and the characters of people. The Democratic establishment has been unveiled to us as the delusional cult of money it always has been—a conclave of mad prophets exhorting us to seek no further for the kingdom of God than the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, the Republicans have been unmasked as an even more ferocious death cult of the same, willing to burn countless hecatombs of poor and elderly people in blood rites to satiate their pecuniary wicker man. In a very real sense, one of our chief responsibilities is to see this apocalypse through, to finish tearing away the veil that conceals the diabolical allegiances of our rulers (whether you view this in a metaphorical or a literal sense) and hides from sight the needs and sufferings of ordinary people upon which the present order is built. In doing so we will also reveal the degree to which these wealthy neoliberals are fundamentally unnecessary: Their disregard for life is not the downside to their tough but necessary realpolitik but pure defect, a gap in their humanity. And in caring for one another, in filling the void with genuine love, we show what kind of future we might build for one another. We can build a world in which the sick are cared for, in which the hungry are fed, in which the captive are free. These are not utopian impossibilities: They are real courses of action that have been thoroughly thought out by many generations of left-wing activists and intellectuals. Our lives need not be bound to the market’s ersatz divinity—what is best in us comes not from the wealth we hoard but from the love and support that we give. We have barely scratched the surface of human cooperation; we cannot now imagine what we will be able to accomplish in love together. As a prophet with AIDS says in the final monologue of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work begins.”

Cartoon of ‘Campus Seen Through the Eyes of Conservatives’ goes viral because right-wingers didn’t understand it was satire

 May 12, 2020 Common Dreams










A progressive political magazine and editorial illustrator took to Twitter Monday to clarify that artwork that previously appeared in Current Affairs magazine entitled “The Campus Seen Through The Eyes of US Conservatives” was in fact satire after social media users suggested conservatives were sharing the image unaware of the parody.


the cuck zone campus art was originally created by a left-wing artist to parody what right-wingers think colleges are… and now we’re having conservatives take it seriously

pic.twitter.com/Vl5lbpzaX0

—

COSMO

(@cosmoisntme) May 11, 2020

The work in question was created by New York-based artist and illustrator Chelsea Saunders and appeared in the November-December 2018 issue of Current Affairs. It depicts a satirical campus that includes a stadium for “Oppression Olympics,” pronoun police dragging someone away, a College of Grievance Studies building, a Karl Marx fountain, and a banner that says, “Friendly reminder: it’s not OK to be white.”

On Twitter the hashtag #CuckZone was trending, the name of a student bar depicted in the cartoon.

Glad this piece I drew for @curaffairs is getting some love. To clarify: yes, this is satire, and was originally titled “The Campus Seen Through The Eyes of US Conservatives.”  

https://t.co/P2bkWs6W1a

— Chelsea Saunders (@che_saunders) May 11, 2020


Current Affairs also noted the renewed interest in the image. “Right-wing idiots didn’t realize the joke is on them not the students,” the magazine wrote in a Twitter thread Monday.

The magazine echoed the message of some of the artwork’s fans, who suggested the fictional campus would be quite fun. One said it appears to be “the dopest college campus ever.”

Fans of Saunders’s work can bring the fictional campus to their homes—a poster of the artwork is available for purchase at the Current Affairs store.

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