The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a regular feature of Daily Kos.
Noah Feldman at Bloomberg writes—America Has No Plan for the Worst-Case Scenario on Covid-19:
In the midst of the constant up-and-down of coronavirus news, both from science and the markets, it’s easy to lose sight of the scariest scenario of them all: the one where there’s no magic bullet. In this entirely plausible situation, there would be no effective Covid-19 vaccine or transformative therapy; the combination of testing and contact tracing wouldn’t successfully suppress the outbreak; and herd immunity would come, if at all, only after millions of deaths around the world.
Even raising this possibility is a big downer. But the fact that an outcome is terrible doesn’t make it impossible.
Since the end of February, I’ve conducted some 20 interviews with epidemiologists and virologists like Marc Lipsitch, Angela Rasmussen, and Carl Bergstrom; economists like Paul Romer, Stefanie Stantcheva and Larry Summers; and leaders at top hospitals and experts on government agencies whose names you may not know, but whose life’s work is preparing for moments like this one. Despite getting expert answers to dozens of my questions, the one question I haven’t been able to get an answer for is this: Who, exactly, is planning for the nightmare scenario in which we never get a vaccine or a breakthrough treatment.
Ideally, it would be the federal government’s executive branch, with its resources and bird’s-eye view of the problem. But the president, running for reelection, has every reason to insist on (unrealistic) optimism. In fact, the administration actually discussed disbanding its coronavirus task force.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times—The Killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Another black man falsely assumed to be a criminal is dead:
The recused prosecutor’s letter states: “Given the fact Arbery initiated the fight, at the point Arbery grabbed the shotgun, under Georgia law, McMichael was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself.” [...]
The Black Lives Matter movement that peaked a few years ago focused activism and protests largely around police killings of black people, but the moment was born of another phenomenon, one present in the [Trayvon] Martin case and again here: anti-black vigilantism.
This form of anti-blackness marks black masculinity as menacing, and state laws protect the vigilantes’ rights to involve their weapons and their power to end lives. [...]
As has too often been the case in this country, the law works to black people’s detriment and sometimes their demise.
Slavery was legal. The Black Codes were legal. Sundown towns were legal. Sharecropping was legal. Jim Crow was legal. Racial covenants were legal. Mass incarceration is legal. Chasing a black man or boy with your gun because you suspect him a criminal is legal. Using lethal force as an act of self-defense in a physical dispute that you provoke and could easily have avoided is, often, legal.
Andrew Bacevich at TomDispatch writes—A Greatest Generation We Are Not:
Of all Donald Trump’s myriad deficiencies, large and small, this may be the one that his establishment critics find most difficult to stomach: his resurrection of “America First” as a primary principle of statecraft suggests a de facto nullification of “Never Again.”
To Trump’s critics, it hardly matters that “America First” in no way describes actual administration policy. After all, more than three years into the Trump presidency, our endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; U.S. troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically. Even so, the president does appear oblivious to the historical antecedent -- that is, the imperative of standing ready to deal with the next Hitler -- that finds concrete expression in these several manifestations of U.S. national security policy. No one has ever accused Donald Trump of possessing a profound grasp of history. Yet here his apparent cluelessness is especially telling.
Not least among the unofficial duties of any president is to serve as the authoritative curator of public memory. Through speeches, proclamations, and the laying of wreaths, presidents tell us what we should remember and how. Through their silence, they give us permission to forget the parts of our past that we prefer to forget. Himself born barely a year after V-E Day, Donald Trump seems to have forgotten World War II.
Joshua Spivak at USAToday writes—Don't name a Cabinet, Joe Biden. It might get you a headline but it's terrible advice:
Democrats have been fretting over how presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, locked down in his basement, can compete with President Donald Trump for attention. One thing that should be off the table: announcing proposed Cabinet members.
Biden and plenty of past candidates have been encouraged to boost their campaigns by naming Cabinet choices, but this gimmick has never caught on. And for very good reason. While it may seem like a way to expand your base and prove your seriousness as a candidate, it does nothing of the sort. It is vastly more likely to result in losing votes and, based on how presidents have governed over the last two centuries, it is unlikely to tell us anything about a presidency.
Part of the problem is overstating how much voters care about anyone but the president. Polls have shown that even the choice of vice president — a vastly more important position that the president is stuck with for four years, unlike cabinet members — may not have much impact. Even if Biden were to create a supposed all-star team of cabinet officials, voters likely would not be swayed.
Sarah Enelow-Snyder at High Country News writes—Coming home to nature. There’s a stereotype that Black Americans don’t explore the outdoors. Historically, that hasn’t been the case.
When I was a young girl in rural Texas, my mother tended a garden next to our reddish-brown, Southwestern-style house. Under the shade of a simple wooden canopy, she grew cilantro and tomatoes, watching the sun so they wouldn’t fry to death. She showed me how to delicately pick a honeysuckle, bite off the end and suck out the flower’s nectar. “Hey now, get away from there,” she said to the deer snacking on the lower branches of our peach tree, gently waving them off. Then she helped me reach the upper branches to pick fruit for us to eat. We always had a dumb cane, or dieffenbachia, a houseplant that grew large, pointed green leaves. My great-grandmother gave that plant to my mother, who kept it alive for decades and eventually gave me a clipping.
These seeds of comfort with nature were planted deep within my Black family a very long time ago. In our family tree there were sharecroppers, who presumably had a close relationship to the humid wetlands and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. Many grew food, tended plants and tracked the seasons, and could teach one another about these things.
That land was the only home that some of my ancestors knew, but it could also be a source of terror. The wilderness of Jim Crow was a gut-wrenching place filled with strange fruit. One of my ancestors was lynched in 1883, according to records at the Equal Justice Initiative. Even if such events were too horrible for a family to discuss out loud, the painful memories quietly dripped down the branches of a family tree.
Today, some Black families avoid remote locations or far-off hiking spots, associating them with danger. Many Americans think of outdoor recreation as a majority-white activity. If you define outdoor recreation narrowly, that’s true: An estimated 71% of actively camping households are white, while only 9% are Black, according to a 2019 report from Kampgrounds of America. According to the National Park Service, park visitation was 78% white and 7% Black in the mid-2000s. But Black Americans have always maintained deep connections to nature and the outdoors.
Timothy Garton Ash at The Guardian writes—A better world can emerge after coronavirus. Or a much worse one:
The coronavirus crisis seems to be encouraging belief in radical change. An astonishing 71% of Europeans are now in favour of introducing a universal basic income, according to an opinion poll designed by my research team at Oxford university and published today. In Britain, the figure is 68%. Less encouraging, at least to anyone who believes in liberal democracy, is another startling finding in the survey: no less than 53% of young Europeans place more confidence in authoritarian states than in democracies to tackle the climate crisis. The poll was conducted by eupinions in March, as most of Europe was locking down against the virus, but the questions had been formulated earlier. It would be fascinating now to ask Europeans which political system they think has proved better at combating a pandemic, as the United States and China, the world’s leading democracy and the world’s leading dictatorship, spray viral accusations at each other.
Those two contrasting but equally striking survey results show how high the stakes will be as we emerge from the immediate medical emergency, and face the subsequent economic pandemic and its political fallout. What kind of historical moment will this turn out to be, for Europe and the world? It could lead us to the best of times. It could lead us to the worst of times.
Stephen A. Crockett Jr. at The Root writes—Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp: I Totally Messed Up Reopening the State, Growing Outbreak Is Stressing Resources:
Notorious thief and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp—who successfully stole the governorship from America’s darling and possibly Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, Stacey Abrams—warned Tuesday that he might be dumber than the current president.
Remember it was Kemp who walked out to a podium in front of God and errbody and said, in April—April!—that he just learned that coronavirus could be spread by people with no symptoms. Atlanta isn’t just the home of some of the greatest rappers, it’s also the home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nine miles from the governor’s mansion. And it was Kemp who ran out here bucket-ass-naked to reopen his state despite reports that the last thing Georgia should be doing is lifting a shelter-in-place order when coronavirus cases and deaths were still on the rise in the state. And it was Kemp who targeted the black community by opening nail salons, barber shops, and hair salons, knowing that it was damn near impossible for black people to go around their own homes looking like werewolves.
Well on Tuesday—and I’m paraphrasing a bit here—it was Kemp who came out and said, I’m totally a fucking idiot and now, because I opened the state up too soon and exposed people to the coronavirus, northeast Georgia is stressing resources because I’m totally a fucking idiot!
Elisabeth Rosenthal at The New York Times writes—We Knew the Coronavirus Was Coming, Yet We Failed. The vulnerabilities that Covid-19 has revealed were a predictable outgrowth of our market-based health care system:
[...] the saddest part is that most of the failings and vulnerabilities that the pandemic has revealed were predictable — a direct outgrowth of the kind of market-based system that Americans generally rely on for health care.
Our system requires every player — from insurers to hospitals to the pharmaceutical industry to doctors — be financially self-sustaining, to have a profitable business model. As such it excels at expensive specialty care. But there’s no return on investment in being primed and positioned for the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
Combine that with an administration unwilling to intervene to force businesses to act en masse to resolve a public health crisis like this, and you get what we got: a messy, uncoordinated under-response, defined by shortages and finger-pointing.
Lucy Diavolo at Teen Vogue writes—The Coronavirus Has Shaken What Little Faith I Had Left in Government:
It is not a novel concept to lack faith in the government. In many cases, it's just common sense. People all around the world, unfortunately, have ample reason to be skeptical of their leaders and how, specifically, the United States government operates.
A secondary symptom of the COVID-19 pandemic might be a feeling that our confidence in government is newly shaken or further deteriorating. In this moment, when political leaders are trying to balance saving human lives or maintaining an exploitative economic system, it’s hard to feel like there’s an outcome other than unnecessary, preventable death. The way our system forces officials to weigh these considerations is demoralizing, leaving us with a question of where we put our faith moving forward. [...]
I am, in so many ways, the product of our government. My parents, both public sector employees, met at a state school, and I was born in the same university’s medical center. My dad works as a parks and forestry supervisor in an Eagleton-esque suburb we likely never could have afforded to live in. My mom is a former Environmental Protection Agency staffer who became a public university professor at least in part to mitigate the burden of student debt my sister and I would take on.
People like them are the most compelling reason I have to believe in the government, because I’ve seen the good they’ve been able to do.
Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post writes—The White House model for ending the virus by May 15 is just not ambitious enough:
I have a bone to pick with the cubic model, which the White House is using to optimistically suggest that the coronavirus epidemic is well-nigh at an end. Simply put, a president capable of extending and contracting hurricanes with a single swipe of a pen should be able to think bigger when it comes to this model.
All it is doing now is saying that deaths will end abruptly by May 15 — almost the way the first 15 cases were supposed to vanish like a "miracle.” But this is not enough. A model capable of ending deaths with a snap, like that, should not stop there. Any model this optimistic must keep going!
I have taken the liberty of extending it; below are the remainder of the model’s predictions.
Starting May 16, everyone will be one inch taller and will grow an extra lung. [...]
Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect writes—Grim Reaper Mitch (R-KY):
Mitch McConnell is back in town, which, as ever, is bad news for the future of the human race. His current crusade is to enact legislation that relieves employers from legal liability should their workers sicken and die from coronavirus contracted at their workplace. Under McConnell’s doctrine of laissez-mourir, bosses could call their employees back to work and station them six inches apart, while pumping virus-laden air through the vents.
McConnell’s strategy appears to be to withhold financial support for states and cities—currently a leading demand of Democrats and labor—unless they agree to his Get Out of Jail Free card for even the deadliest of bosses. Democrats and labor are fiercely opposing McConnell’s proposal, with unions noting, correctly, that it would allow employers to recall their workers despite manifestly unsafe conditions. But if McConnell hangs tough, as he invariably does, some version of his proposal might actually be enacted if he refuses to pass any further pandemic assistance until his bill becomes law.
Blue states might be able to end-run this de facto back-to-work mandate by adopting a proposal that labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein advanced in our recent “Future of Labor” symposium: requiring all companies with more than 25 employees to have worker safety councils that would have the power to decide whether workplaces are safe enough to open or unsafe enough to close, and to monitor safety conditions on an ongoing basis. Let’s hope our nation’s workers don’t have to work under McConnell’s diktat, but if they do, let’s hope states like California can counter some of its consequences by boosting workers’ control over their own health and lives.
Zack Kopplin at The New Republic writes—Why Is the Pentagon Still Paying $10 a Gallon for Gas?
As any American who’s passed a gas station in the past two months knows, global oil markets are melting down. Even before coronavirus lockdowns led billions of people to halt their daily commutes, cratering demand for gasoline, Saudi Arabia and Russia had increased production of crude oil, the main component in refined fuels, in an attempt to drive each other out of business. Oil prices plummeted. For a brief period last month, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate Crude dropped 300 percent, to negative $37.63. Its price now hovers around $20 a barrel—less than 50 cents per gallon—and some experts warn that “the coronavirus oil shock is just getting started.” It’s a terrible time to be in the fuel business.
Unless, that is, you have the right Iraqi connections, and you’re selling to the United States military and its contractors.
On March 12, the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency signed a contract with a Virginia-based war-zone logistics company, DGCI, to deliver 333,000 gallons of jet fuel to the Erbil International Airport in Kurdistan, Iraq’s semi-independent northern region. Even though crude oil costs less to produce in Iraq than almost anywhere else in the world, the DLA agreed to pay DGCI $10.04 per gallon of jet-propulsion fuel 8, or JP-8. That’s three to five times more than the worldwide average price, $2 to $3 per gallon, that the DLA had paid for JP-8 earlier in March.
“I know the price of gas I’m paying” at the pump, said Shruti Shah, the president of the Coalition for Integrity, a Washington-based anti-corruption nonprofit, adding that a $10-per-gallon purchase price is “definitely a strong red flag of mismanagement.”
Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian writes—George W Bush paved the way for Trump—to rehabilitate him is appalling:
It is 2040. Coronavirus is a distant memory. Boris Johnson has fathered his 19th child. Toy Story 12 and Fast & Furious 32 are playing in cinemas. Donald Trump is a cuddly nonagenarian who is cooed over by liberals. “Remember the good old days when Donny joked about injecting bleach?” people will reminisce fondly. “What a legend!”
Does that last prediction sound improbable? It shouldn’t: just look at the ongoing rehabilitation of George W Bush. It is only 11 years since Bush left office, but widespread amnesia regarding his regressive record appears to have set in. People have already giggled over his adorable struggle to put on a poncho during Trump’s inauguration and praised his unlikely friendship with Ellen DeGeneres. Now many liberals are fawning over Bush for the incredible achievement of being an iota more sane than Trump.
On Saturday, Bush put out a video calling for compassion and national unity during the coronavirus crisis. In it, he declared: “We are not partisan combatants; we are human beings.” This is a lovely message; really, it is. It is just a shame he wasn’t so invested in our shared humanity when he used the fabricated threat of weapons of mass destruction to bomb Iraq into oblivion. It is a pity he didn’t think about “how small our differences are” when he fought LGBTQ+ rights. It is unfortunate he wasn’t so concerned about compassion during his botched and heartless response to Hurricane Katrina.