Good morning everyone and...we’re jumping right into it!
Dan Balz of the Washington Post delves into the reason why America, again, is unprepared for a crisis.
The country and its leaders were caught off guard when terrorists on hijacked airplanes attacked the homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. The financial crisis of 2008, which turned into a deep recession, forced drastic, unprecedented action by a government struggling to keep pace with the economic wreckage. The devastation from Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 exposed serious gaps in the government’s disaster response and emergency management systems.
“We always wait for the crisis to happen,” said Leon Panetta, who served in government as secretary of defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the House. “I know the human failings we’re dealing with, but the responsibility of people elected to these jobs is to make sure we are not caught unawares.”
In interviews over the past two weeks, senior officials from administrations of both parties, many with firsthand experience in dealing with major crises, suggest that the president and his administration have fallen short of nearly every standard a government should try to meet.
Mr. Balz writes a long, lengthy and detailed overview. Surely the fact that all of these poorly managed national crises happened under Republican administrations is simply a coincidence.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker writes this week on the transformational nature of the politics and the economics of the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump is no F.D.R., of course, and the virus, unlike the Axis Powers, is an invisible enemy. But the record shows that lethal pandemics and major wars can both have enormous political and economic consequences. In his 2017 opus “The Great Leveler,” Walter Scheidel, a Stanford historian, described them as two of the “four horsemen” that have flattened economic inequality throughout human history. (The other two levelling forces that Scheidel identified were revolutions and state failures.) By decimating the population of medieval Europe, the Black Death made labor scarce, which raised wages and undermined the feudal system. The Civil War abolished slavery and gave rise to the Homestead Act of 1862. The First World War changed the role of women in the economy and paved the way for their political emancipation. The Second World War elevated the role of labor unions and led to the explicit adoption of Keynesian full-employment policies, through the 1946 Employment Act. In Europe, it facilitated the creation of a postwar welfare state, including the National Health Service in Britain.
These violent ruptures lasted years. We can hope that this horrible public-health crisis will also be temporary. And yet, the “wartime” metaphor is in many ways apt. Daily life has been transformed; in just two weeks, almost ten million Americans have filed unemployment claims; and earlier this week a White House task force said the death toll could eventually reach two hundred and forty thousand. Just like in wartime, people are frightened, public attitudes are changing, and the circumstances are necessitating a big expansion of the government’s role.
At least on the economic front, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times is saying pretty much the same thing.
Kali Holloway of The Daily Beast is singing a symphony...Millie Jackson-style, that is
As it turns out, those of us predicting the absolute worst—just based on, you know, observable reality—were right. Donald Trump has been a cruel, crude, unethical conman of a president whose ineptitude, narcissism and incapacity for empathy continually endangers countless lives. His administration has fatally harmed immigrant kids and families, been careless in foreign conflicts, and worsened racist violence. It was always clear that Trump was going to get a lot of people killed. As coronavirus ravages the country and racks up a body count, remembering the gaslighting from naysayers proffering condescension or dumb optimism is all the more enraging. Trumpism is the white supremacist capitalist kamikaze mission we warned you about.
The president is an obvious horror show, but he’s enabled by members of a movement most saliently characterized by its racism and vengeance, and by apologists who insist the rest of us must understand and respect that movement. We know from multiple studies conducted before and after the 2016 election that what united Trump voters—including those who previously cast ballots for President Obama—wasn’t economic anxiety but racism.
Most white Americans have fever-dreamed a country where the racial hierarchy is now topsy-turvy and they’ve become victims of anti-white discrimination. (Though they admit they haven’t experienced it firsthand.) White Republican voters, specifically, report that they face as much racism as black people. That self-imposed victimhood led them to vote for the guy who promised that he’d effectively punish the blacks, Mexicans and Muslims they saw as taking a country they truly believe is solely, rightfully theirs.
Please read Ms. Holloway’s entire piece. Listen to what she is saying. Feel what she is saying.
I’ll unroll this Twitter thread in the comments as each of the seven tweets is accompanied by a news story. Do go into the Twitter thread and read those links.
Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post looks at the ethics of The Brothers Cuomo show.
Sometimes comical, sometimes somber, sometimes emotional, their joint TV appearances have become one of the strangest outgrowths of the coronavirus pandemic — almost as compelling as another favorite distraction of this hunkered-down nation, the true-crime documentary miniseries “Tiger King.”
Not everyone approves of the Cuomo Brothers show.
“This is something I cannot wrap my head around,” Fabian Reinbold, Washington bureau chief for a large German news organization told me in an email this week. “It would be considered highly inappropriate and corrupt back home.” He was particularly taken aback by Chris Cuomo’s choice to actually participate in Thursday’s news conference, piped in via videoconference to hold forth to the gathered press corps. He wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the name of his CNN show, “Cuomo Primetime,” further blurring the roles of brother and anchor.
That moment may have proved too much for competitors Fox News and MSNBC, who cut away from the New York governor’s briefing soon after.
Others have questioned the journalistic propriety of repeatedly interviewing one’s brother on prime-time TV, as Chris Cuomo has been doing for weeks.
Jens Thurau writes for Deutsche Welle on another world leader that's received an Andrew Cuomo-like bump in approval ratings for their handling of the coronavirus crisis: Angela Merkel
Its approval ratings are the highest of any governing coalition in 23 years. Merkel, who had largely avoided public appearances since the beginning of the year, enjoys the highest ratings ever of this legislative period.
Citizens clearly tend to place trust in the political leadership they know during times of crisis. Two further factors, however, also help account for this approval rating boost. One is that the government has appeared level-headed in its actions. The other is that Germany, the country where many had grown exasperated over leaders' inability to complete the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, or properly maintain schools and roads, has so far weathered the coronavirus crisis considerably well — especially by international comparison.
Merkel is heeding advice provided by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany's public health agency. Not only that. Merkel, who many had believed lacked talent in holding public speeches, recently made a emphatic television address, in which she shared important facts. Granted, there might be the occasional disagreement with state premiers. But Germany's federal system, which is often severely criticized, has proved particularly apt at responding to different stages of coronavirus infections across the country. Germans far and wide have come to realize what a good job the country's countless district administrators, public health workers and mayors are doing. Hopefully, Germans will now be embarrassed just how much abuse, at times physical, these decisionmakers have endured by radicals and crazies.
Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee, penned an open letter to Jeff Bezos for the Guardian.
I have worked at Amazon for five years. Until I was fired last week from the Staten Island warehouse in New York City, I was a manager assistant who supervised a team of about 60-100 “pickers”, who pick items off the shelves and put them on conveyer belts to get sent out for shipment.
At the beginning of March, before the first confirmed case of coronavirus at the facility, I noticed people were getting sick. People had different symptoms: fatigue, light-headedness, vomiting. I told HR. I said: hey, something’s wrong here. We need to quarantine the building. I wanted us to be proactive not reactive. Management disagreed and assured me they were “following CDC guidelines”.
The lack of protections worried me. Inside the warehouse, there are gloves, but they are not the right kind. They are rubber instead of latex. There are also no masks. Hand sanitizer is scarce. There are limited cleaning supplies. People are walking around with their own personal hand sanitizer, but good luck finding one in a local grocery store.
Because of those conditions, I didn’t feel safe, so I took paid time off to stay home and avoid getting sick. Eventually, though, I ran out of paid time off and I had to go back to work. Other colleagues don’t have that option. Many of my co-workers and friends at the Amazon facility have underlying health conditions. Some have asthma or lupus or diabetes. Others are older people, or pregnant. They haven’t gone to work in a month, so they haven’t been paid. They’re only doing that to save their lives: if they get the virus they could be dead. One of my friends, who has lupus, is living with his relatives so he doesn’t have to pay rent. Can you imagine if he couldn’t do that? He’d probably be homeless.
Finally this morning, The South China Morning Post, based in Hong Kong, has become one of my must daily reads and for their magazine section, Lisa Lim writes a brief history of a topic that everyone is talking about: the word “toilet”...and toilet paper.
The word “toilet” originally referred to a piece of cloth serving as a covering or bag for clothes or nightclothes (16th and 17th centuries), or placed over the shoulders during shaving or hairdressing (17th century). Its origins lay in Middle French toilette, diminutive of toile (“cloth, net”), with the English word continuing to be influenced by developments in French.
Toilet also referred to a cloth cover for a dressing table, formerly often of rich material and workmanship, to the dressing table itself, and to the articles used in applying make-up, arranging the hair and dressing (17th to 19th centuries).
This last meaning is still found in words such as “toiletries” and “toilet water”, the latter from French eau de toilette, for a lightly scented, dilute perfume.
The meaning of toilet extended to encompass the whole process of washing, grooming and dressing, especially at the beginning of the day or for a special occasion: phrases included “at one’s toilet” or “to make one’s toilet” – personal grooming, in other words.
The washing sense of toilet applied to non-human entities, too (animals, places, tools (19th and 20th centuries), and to cleansing after surgeries.
Everyone have a good morning!