The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a regular feature of Daily Kos.
David Smith at The Guardian writes—Trump is seizing the courts – only a Democratic win in November can stop him:
The Trump administration has brought a laser-like focus to nominating and winning Senate confirmation for 193 judges – two supreme court justices, 51 circuit court judges (a quarter of the total), 138 district court judges and two US court of international trade judges – at a pace unmatched since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
“I’ve never in my lifetime seen an election whose stakes were higher,” said Laurence Tribe, who was born in 1941 and is a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “The transformation of the federal judiciary into a series of puppets for a very rightwing ideology will have lasting impact for decades.”
Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, aim to guarantee a long-term conservative skew on decisions that affect millions of people, including abortion rights, environment regulations, gun control, immigration rules and access to healthcare (having failed to overturn Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act on Capitol Hill, the administration is now trying to do so in the courts).
The new wave of judges is dominated by young white men often rushed through the Senate with little regard for standard procedure. Critics say the chief criterion for selection is no longer experience or qualifications but ideology.
Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times writes—Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s:
American labor is at its lowest point since the New Deal era. Private-sector unionization is at a historic low, and entire segments of the economy are unorganized. Depression-era labor leaders could look to President Franklin Roosevelt as an ally — or at least someone open to negotiation and bargaining — but labor today must face off against the relentlessly anti-union Donald Trump. Organized capital, working through the Republican Party, has a powerful grip on the nation’s legal institutions, including the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority appears ready to make the entire United States an open shop.
The inequities and inequalities of capitalist society remain. American workers continue to face deprivation and exploitation, realities the coronavirus crisis has made abundantly clear.
The strikes and protests of the past month have been small, but they aren’t inconsequential. The militancy born of immediate self-protection and self-interest can grow into calls for deeper, broader transformation. And if the United States continues to stumble its way into yet another generation-defining economic catastrophe, we may find that even more of its working class comes to understand itself as an agent of change — and action.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The class war against front-line workers:
The problem workers face, said Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project, is that while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has provided “guidance,” it has so far “declined to issue any requirements” for coronavirus safety at the plants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also issued “guidance.” But Berkowitz noted that it’s “very vague” and “keeps getting vaguer.”
“Trump has created a false choice between worker safety and feeding America,” Berkowitz, who has spent decades working on safety issues in meat processing, said in an interview. “We can do both. Other parts of the economy are doing both.”
And it’s not just meatpacking employees who find themselves at risk. An important report in The Post by Rachel Chason, Ovetta Wiggins and John D. Harden noted exceptionally high rates of coronavirus infections in Maryland’s Prince George’s County. One of the country’s wealthiest majority-black counties, it lies just outside Washington. One key reason for the high infection rate: “many residents are front-line workers exposed daily to the virus.”
Ilhan Omar and Leah Hunt-Hendrix at The Guardian write—Trump's isolationism won't work. We have to think global – and the US should lead:
As a global superpower, it is more important than ever that the US takes a leadership role in the international response to this crisis. And yet, so far, President Trump has placed his own near-term political interests above the country and world, placing blame for the virus on other countries, even taking the extreme step of halting funding for the World Health Organization. In a world as connected as ours, an isolationist strategy will be devastating to millions of people around the world and here at home. The US should instead seize this opportunity to lead the global response and reinvest in diplomacy. [...]
First, we should ensure that the coronavirus vaccine, once found, is available to everyone, everywhere, for free. While European leaders are giving assurances that they would make the vaccine available globally, the US and China are already in an arms race to be the first to own the patent. Corporate lobbyists are arguing that a vaccine won’t be found without patent protections and lobbying to this effect. But this vaccine is a public good. The Cares Act allocated billions of taxpayer dollars to research. Plans must be made to ensure that countries around the world can access the vaccine once it is created.
Second, wealthy nations should forgive unsustainable debt burdens [...]
Third, we must lift US economic sanctions.[...]
Lastly, we must halt deportations during this outbreak. [...] By deporting Covid-19 patients to countries with weaker healthcare infrastructure, we are actively spreading the virus.
Bess Levin at Vanity Fair writes—Trump’s Coronavirus Testing Chief Confirms Trump Has No Earthly Clue What He’s Talking About:
One of the biggest problems with Donald Trump’s desire to reopen the country ASAP is the fact that the United States does not currently have a robust testing (or tracing) regimen in place to determine who is and who isn’t sick with the novel coronavirus. Of course, that hasn’t stopped the president from lying about the country’s testing capacity at nearly every turn, from claiming in March that “anybody” who needed a test could get one to busting out the whopper last week that the U.S. has performed more tests than every country in the world combined. Not surprisingly, the lies continued on Tuesday, when Trump told reporters that the government would be able to run 5 million tests a day “very soon.” But in this particular instance we got a real-time fact-check from one of his own officials.
Speaking to Time magazine shortly before Trump’s news briefing, Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of health who is in charge of the government’s testing response, said “There is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even 5 million tests a day.” While Giroir was responding to a study from Harvard University, which concluded the U.S. would need to run at least 5 million tests a day by early June and 20 million by late July in order to safely reopen the economy, it’s almost as though some small part of him knew, on a subconscious level, that Trump would come out with one of his most absurd lies yet and was trying to head things off.
Unfortunately, our pathological liar in chief didn’t get the memo in advance of yesterday’s press conference, though having since been made aware of it he’s been able to course correct by claiming he never said the thing he said in full view of cameras and reporters, as is his wont:
Dayton Martindale at In These Times writes—A Federal Jobs Program for Contact Tracing. To safely reopen the economy, we need a public health corps:
To safely reopen the economy without new waves of infection and death, virtually everyone who has written on the topic has been repeating the same urgent recommendation for months: The United States must ramp up testing, and with it employ a robust program of “contact tracing.” That is, we must reach out to those who test positive, determine who they have been in close contact with, alert these contacts that they may have been exposed, and ensure that these contacts are able to effectively quarantine. While technological tools play a role in this, providing personalized support will take people power.
In response, several cities and states have begun bringing on paid staff and volunteers for tracing, but these local actions are far from the scale needed. Experts suggest the United States will need a bare minimum of 100,000 to perform this task, while former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Tom Frieden has suggested as many as 300,000. And this is only one of many pandemic-related tasks for which our badly understaffed public health system needs new recruits and fast.
In short, we face two interrelated problems: More people than ever are newly out of a job, and the government needs to rapidly expand its own workforce. The solution may seem obvious, and indeed a wide range of actors have called for federal hiring programs.
Unfortunately, Congress has thus far seemed more concerned with bailing out big business than with public health or unemployment. But recent proposals from a working group of Senate Democrats—and even, on Monday, from Joe Biden—suggest that there may be increased momentum behind something like a New Deal-era federal jobs program: a large civilian corps of public health workers hired primarily from the ranks of the unemployed. There’s no reason to wait: The next coronavirus bill should include funding for hundreds of thousands of public health jobs, including an explicit provision for 300,000 full-time, salaried contact tracers, managed by the CDC, to be recruited, trained and hired as soon as possible.
Olivia Nuzzi at New York magazine writes—The American People Should See Trump’s Coronavirus Briefings in Their Entirety:
Throughout the spring, liberals had publicly campaigned against the briefings while, in private and sometimes meekly out loud, the president’s Republican allies in Washington urged him to make them shorter, or not appear at all. Most networks began cutting away from them instead of airing them in their entirety. This was based on the belief that Trump was spewing self-serving lies and giving him a platform to do so was journalistically imprudent. Starve the president of the attention he craves, the argument goes, and it will prevent him from disseminating false and dangerous theories to the public. [...]
What a lot of Trump critics miss is that the biggest threat to his presidency isn’t the pandemic and the collapse of the global economy. It’s Trump. The more we see him — rambling, ranting, casually spitballing about bleach and sunlight — the clearer that becomes. But that’s not the media’s problem, and taking the spotlight off of him as he displays the full extent of his inadequacies would only serve to help him and to make the public less informed about what the federal government is doing — or not doing.
Watching Trump dangerously improvise is, in itself, information. It’s pure access to his thoughts and ideas and emotional state, presented to the world in real time. Trump’s presence at the briefings is not valuable if what we hope to get from them is factual information about the pandemic. But if we want to learn more about what the government is doing, and why it’s doing what it’s doing, what could be better than this?
Edna Bonhomme in The Baffler writes—Ill Will:
IN 1992, THERE WAS A SILENT EPIDEMIC running through New York City jails. A drug resistant strain of tuberculosis proliferated throughout the damp cells, leading Morris E. Lasker, federal judge for the Southern District of New York, to decree a state of emergency on January 24. In his order, he demanded that the New York City Department of Corrections create forty-two isolation beds for the highly contagious inmates with tuberculosis. He was prompted by the death of thirteen New York City inmates from TB over the course of the previous year, all of whom were HIV positive. Investigators and medical practitioners found that immunosuppressed prisoners who were HIV positive were especially vulnerable to tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other communicable diseases.
The outbreak was happening at the height of the HIV epidemic, years before the first antiretroviral drug for HIV became widely available to people with the virus. As is the case today [with COVID-19 raging], the prisoners at Rikers Island were disproportionately black and brown, and they were made to be susceptible to tuberculosis in part by poor ventilation in the prisons, which allowed bacteria to spread easily through the air. For many people awaiting the end of their sentence, isolation and proper ventilation could have prevented them from being infected. [...]
For the mostly black and brown prisoners in the New York City jails in the early 1990s, the tuberculosis epidemic was so pernicious because there was, at first, little will to do anything about it. This was long before the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow; most Americans did not yet see a relationship between slavery and the criminal injustice system, and the incidents of drug-resistant tuberculosis in New York State jails in the early 1990s did not warrant a call to action from most of society. As a result of this lack of action, during the eighteen months of this tuberculosis outbreak in New York state, at least twenty-seven prisoners and one prison guard died. […]
Even when the world is aware of these inequalities, how we react is a product of the empathy we extend to the sick and dying: those who look like us, and those who do not. For the poor and disenfranchised, the experience of living through epidemics shows how microbial contagions mutate with a society’s pre-existing prejudices.
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic writes—Don’t Let Larry Summers Block Climate Progress Again:
There are many reasons the average news reader might not like Larry Summers. A longtime friend of convicted predator Jeffrey Epstein, Summers deregulated the banking sector as Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, helping to set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. While serving as chief economist of the World Bank, he put his name to a memo suggesting industries dump toxic waste in Africa because it was “underpolluted,” later claiming the memo was intended as “sardonic counterpoint.” In 2005, while president of Harvard University, he posited that women’s brains weren’t well suited for math and science.
Less discussed, however, is how Summers worked during the Obama years to torpedo America’s last best shot to make itself a low-carbon society. The issue has become newly relevant in the past few weeks: As reported last week by Bloomberg News, Summers is now serving as an adviser to Joe Biden’s campaign. With Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee for the November presidential election, Summers could soon find himself in a position to repeat his mistakes. [...]
As during the Clinton administration, Summers was leery of moving too quickly to curb carbon emissions, urging a lenient timetable for polluters; any real reforms, he reasoned, would have to wait for legislation. [A Crisis Wasted author Reed] Hundt also writes that Summers rejected his proposal to have Obama’s stimulus create a green investment bank and build energy efficiency infrastructure and high-voltage transmission lines. This Green Recovery and Investment Program, or GRIP, as it was known, would have been more extensive than the roughly 10 percent of the stimulus eventually spent on clean energy. Summers thought it would create too much debt. He rejected the concept of creating new institutions, preferring a strategy of spending as quickly as possible, and saw the sole goal of the recovery as boosting demand and gross domestic product with a quick injection of federal cash. Staring down the barrel of double-digit unemployment in December 2008, Summers said, “Our economic problem is that the country has too much debt.”
Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic writes—A Woman’s Worth in a Pandemic:
At recent protests demanding that states drop stay-home orders and other coronavirus prevention measures, events engineered for maximum viral potential on social media, a kind of paean to personal care emerged as a meme: Government overreach had denied protesters a haircut. Or getting their roots done, as one woman told reporters. These women had something like a collective demand, even if made in very bad faith: to be served. [...]
The women at these protests don’t just want a haircut; they want the woman who likely cuts their hair to get back to work. Doing her job may put her at risk of contracting a lethal virus, and not doing it may mean she can’t pay the rent—but then again, the work was never all that secure. Whether intended or not, the protests have made service work’s precarious, feminine face more impossible to ignore, as the virus itself has. A New York Times analysis of census data and federal guidelines on “essential work” found that one in three jobs held by women in this country “has been designated as essential.” Women of color were more likely to be doing these jobs than anyone else, the same analysis found. In this way, the pandemic is a “lightning flash,” as Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research and co-author of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, put it in an interview with Clio Chang at Vice, “like coronavirus lights up the skies.”
Much of what’s been deemed “essential work” now is what socialist feminists have long termed social reproduction. In health care, in childcare, in education, in eldercare, and domestic work, social reproduction is the work of “life-making,” Tithi Bhattacharya, professor of history and the director of global studies at Purdue University and also a co-author of Feminism for the 99%, told Sarah Jaffe at Dissent. This work is undervalued because mostly women do it, and it’s mostly women who do it because it’s undervalued. What’s more: Women also devalue it, even in a pandemic.
Jim Gibney at Bloomberg Opinion writes—The Coronavirus Is Not Trump’s Vietnam. More Americans have died from COVID-19, but it’s not worthy of serious comparison:
Sentient humans like to benchmark their successes and failures. So it’s understandable that in trying to put the coronavirus’s toll in perspective, some Americans have fastened their eyes on one particular grim milestone: The 58,300+ deaths in the U.S. from Covid-19 over the last three months have now surpassed U.S. casualties from the Vietnam War (58,220 deaths recorded from 1956 to 2006, according to the National Archives).
But juxtaposing those casualty figures is one thing. It’s something else entirely to call the coronavirus “Trump’s Vietnam” — a historical analogy that’s getting increasing screentime. At a White House press conference earlier this week, for instance, a reporter asked, “If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be re-elected?”
To be clear: President Donald Trump’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus will go down as a landmark failure of leadership. But to compare his feckless mendacity and the senseless deaths it has so far caused to the U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War is also to commit a form of historical malpractice — one that obscures Trump’s culpability and slights an earlier, greater American tragedy.
The two events are radically different in cause, scope and ultimate consequence. Put in the simplest actuarial terms, the wars in Indochina led to more than five million deaths; the current global toll of the pandemic is about 215,000. One represents an inexorable collision of history’s seismic plates; the other is a tremor that, in the case of the U.S., has badly rattled a termite-infested house tended by a malicious and incompetent landlord.
Michael T. Klare at TomDispatch writes—The Beginning of the End for Oil? Energy in a Post-Pandemic World:
As 2019 drew to a close, most energy analysts assumed that petroleum would continue to dominate the global landscape through the 2020s, as it had in recent decades, resulting in ever greater amounts of carbon emissions being sent into the atmosphere. For example, in its International Energy Outlook 2019, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy projected that global petroleum use in 2020 would amount to 102.2 million barrels per day. That would be up 1.1 million barrels from 2019 and represent the second year in a row in which global consumption would have exceeded the notable threshold of 100 million barrels per day. Grimly enough, the EIA further projected that world demand would continue to climb, reaching 104 million barrels per day by 2025 and 106 million barrels in 2030. [...]
Only now has that agency begun to change its tune. In its most recent Oil Market Report, it projected that global petroleum consumption in April would fall by an astonishing 29 million barrels per day compared to the same month the previous year. That drop, by the way, is the equivalent of total 2019 oil usage by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Still, the IEA analysts assumed that all of this would just be a passing phenomenon. In that same report, it also predicted that global economic activity would rebound in the second half of this year and, by December, oil usage would already be within a few million barrels of pre-coronavirus consumption levels.
Other indicators, however, suggest that such rosy predictions will prove highly fanciful. The likelihood that oil consumption will approach 2018 or 2019 levels by year’s end or even in early 2021 now appears remarkably unrealistic. It is, in fact, doubtful that those earlier projections about sustained future growth in the demand for oil will ever materialize.
Dr. Seth Berkely is the president of the Vaccine Alliance, a private-public partnership working to help provide vaccines to developing nations. At The New York Times, he writes—At Least 89 Vaccines Are Being Developed. It May Not Matter. A coronavirus vaccine won’t stop the pandemic without all countries having access to it:
If an effective and safe coronavirus vaccine were available today, would it be enough to stop this pandemic? That would depend on whether everyone who needs it can get it. But if what took place during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic happens again, then the answer is no.
As swine flu swept across the globe, the vaccines that were developed ended up mostly in wealthy countries, while the rest of the world went without them. That’s what goes wrong when manufacturing agreements or domestic export policies in countries producing vaccines place restrictions on their international availability.
Fortunately, the H1N1 pandemic turned out not to be much more severe than a normal flu season — as many as 285,000 may have died worldwide — though it struck people younger than 65 particularly hard. But if the same thing happens with a coronavirus vaccine as happened with the swine flu vaccine, the current pandemic, which has already killed at least 212,000 people worldwide, will continue to spread and kill across the globe.
The first priority for any country, of course, is to protect its own citizens. But countries must think globally when the world faces an infectious disease. An outbreak anywhere is a risk everywhere. World leaders need to act now to ensure that everyone who needs the vaccine when it becomes available gets it.