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tomorrowusa · 2 months

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Four years ago today (March 13th), then President Donald Trump got around to declaring a national state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration had been downplaying the danger to the United States for 51 days since the first US infection was confirmed on January 22nd.

From an ABC News article dated 25 February 2020...

CDC warns Americans of 'significant disruption' from coronavirus

Until now, health officials said they'd hoped to prevent community spread in the United States. But following community transmissions in Italy, Iran and South Korea, health officials believe the virus may not be able to be contained at the border and that Americans should prepare for a "significant disruption." This comes in contrast to statements from the Trump administration. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Tuesday the threat to the United States from coronavirus "remains low," despite the White House seeking $1.25 billion in emergency funding to combat the virus. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on “The Exchange” Tuesday evening, "We have contained the virus very well here in the U.S." [ ... ] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the request "long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency." She also accused President Trump of leaving "critical positions in charge of managing pandemics at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security vacant." "The president's most recent budget called for slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control, which is on the front lines of this emergency. And now, he is compounding our vulnerabilities by seeking to ransack funds still needed to keep Ebola in check," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday morning. "Our state and local governments need serious funding to be ready to respond effectively to any outbreak in the United States. The president should not be raiding money that Congress has appropriated for other life-or-death public health priorities." She added that lawmakers in the House of Representatives "will swiftly advance a strong, strategic funding package that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called the Trump administration's request "too little too late." "That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola -- which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren't taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be," Schumer said in a statement.

A reminder that Trump had been leaving many positions vacant – part of a Republican strategy to undermine the federal government.

Here's a picture from that ABC piece from a nearly empty restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. The screen displays a Trump tweet still downplaying COVID-19 with him seeming more concerned about the effect of the Dow Jones on his re-election bid.

People were not buying Trump's claims but they were buying PPE.

I took this picture at CVS on February 26th that year.

The stock market which Trump in his February tweet claimed looked "very good" was tanking on March 12th – the day before his state of emergency declaration.

Trump succeeded in sending the US economy into recession much faster than George W. Bush did at the end of his term – quite a feat!. (As an aside, every recession in the US since 1981 has been triggered by Republican presidents.)

Of course Trump never stopped trying to downplay the pandemic nor did he ever take responsibility for it. The US ended up with the highest per capita death rate of any technologically advanced country.

Precious time was lost while Trump dawdled. Orange on this map indicates COVID infections while red indicates COVID deaths. At the time Trump declared a state of emergency, the virus had already spread to 49 states.

The United States could have done far better and it had the tools to do so.

The Obama administration had limited the number of US cases of Ebola to under one dozen during that pandemic in the 2010s. Based on their success, they compiled a guide on how the federal government could limit future pandemics.

Obama team left pandemic playbook for Trump administration, officials confirm

Of course Trump ignored it.

Unlike those boxes of nuclear secrets in Trump's bathroom, the Obama pandemic limitation document is not classified. Anybody can read it – even if Trump didn't. This copy comes from the Stanford University Libraries.

TOWARDS EPIDEMIC PREDICTION: FEDERAL EFFORTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN OUTBREAK MODELING

Feel free to share this post with anybody who still feels nostalgic about the Trump White House years!

#covid-19 #coronavirus #pandemic #public health #donald trump #trump's incompetent response to the pandemic #covid state of emergency #2020 #trump recession #51 days of trump pandemic dawdling #obama pandemic playbook #2010s ebola outbreak #nostalgia for trump administration #republicans #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who

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whosurisold · 2 months

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Are you better off now?

When they ask, Are you better off now than 4 years of a narcissistic lunatic! - add the thousands of people that lost their lives from COVID-19 when this lying POS said Covid was nothing, ConManDon threw away the Pandemic Response playBook developed by Obama/Biden team

#democrats #republicans #donald trump #trumpchumps #ivanka trump #doj #scotus #democracy #government #department of justice #president joe biden #vp kamala harris #ali velshi

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worldofwardcraft · 1 year

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Coming distractions.

November 24, 2022

Whenever there's Republican misconduct that the right would like to cram down America's memory hole, the GOP playbook recommends one fail-safe solution: fabricate an equally bad scandal for the Democrats and hype it unceasingly. Think Filegate and Travelgate during the Clinton years. Or the made-up Fast & Furious and Benghazi "scandals" of the Obama administration.

Recently, there's been plenty of Republican malfeasance they would prefer you not think about. Like the violent MAGA mob of thugs that tried to overturn a legitimate election. Or, the wave of right-wing terrorism sweeping the country. Or, the confiscation of abortion and voting rights by GOP legislatures. Or, the Trump family being nothing but a gang of thieves who can't seem to stop committing felonies. But, most important, are the innumerable criminal prosecutions facing Donald Trump himself. Time to bring out the old playbook.

Sadly, however, the Dems don't seem to be providing much in the way of scandal material of late. Not to worry. Now that they have regained the majority in the House, the ever-inventive Republicans assure us they will dream up all sorts of Democratic misdeeds to pique our interest.

Last week, Republican representatives Jim Jordan and James Comer announced they will be getting to the bottom of the "Biden Family Crime Syndicate," starting with an investigation into the president's son, Hunter Biden, and his infamous laptop. Which, they are certain, contains all sorts of juicy info about how Hunter used his connections in business dealings with Ukraine and China. However, as former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski observes,

The only thing that makes any of this relevant for a congressional inquiry is whether Joe Biden was directly involved or benefitted financially from what Hunter was up to. On that score, the evidence is sorely lacking.

We also learned that Georgia nutcase Marjorie Taylor Greene intends to investigate the Biden Justice Department's treatment of the January 6 defendants (they're political prisoners, don't you know) and will seek to defund the FBI for its jackbooted lawlessness in executing a legal search of arch-criminal Trump's Mar-a-Lago lair.

In addition, congressional Republicans have vowed to grill Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, over his role in the COVID pandemic (apparently, he was responsible for creating the virus). Tweeted House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy menacingly, "He owes the American people answers."

So, for the next two years, look for the House of Representatives to be a virtual three-ring circus of phony, ginned-up probes, inquiries and investigations. Because the GOP desperately needs to divert our attention. And discredit any revelations about Trump.

#republican lies #house republicans #hunter biden's laptop

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whatareyoureallyafraidof · 4 years

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#Mitch McConnell #McConnell #Moscow Mitch #Barack Obama #Obama #pandemic #Pandemic Playbook #lie #lies #lying #liar #Republican #Republicans #GOP

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sarcasticcynic · 4 years

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In 2016, the National Security Council issued its “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” This 69-page “pandemic playbook” was created in the wake of the government’s response to the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak. It included hundreds of tactics and key policy decisions and specific questions that should be asked and decisions that should be made at multiple levels, including:

34 “key questions” and 21 “key decisions” as soon as there is a “credible threat”;

Recommended discussions to be having on all levels, to ensure that there’s a structure to make decisions in real-time;

Sample documents intended to be used at coordinating meetings;

Steps to take if there’s evidence that the virus is spreading among humans, or the U.S. government declares a public health emergency;

Color-coded sections based on the relative risk — green for normal operations, yellow for elevated threat, orange for credible threat and red once a public health emergency is declared — and different strategies for policymakers based on the severity of the crisis;

Details on the potential roles of dozens of departments and agencies, from key players like the Health and Human Services department to the Department of Transportation and the FBI;

Recommendations that the government move swiftly to fully detect potential outbreaks, secure supplemental funding and consider invoking the Defense Production Act;

Recommendations for “early budget and financial analysis of various response scenarios and an early decision to request supplemental funding from Congress, if needed”;

Advice to question the numbers on viral spread (”What is our level of confidence on the case detection rate?”), ensure appropriate diagnostic capacity and check on the U.S. stockpile of emergency resources;

Shared lessons gleaned from past outbreaks;

Stress on the significant responsibility facing the White House to contain risks of potential pandemics; and

Calls for a “unified message” on the federal response, in order to best manage the American public's questions and concerns.

In 2017, the outgoing administration briefed the Trump administration on the playbook’s existence. But it was the Obama administration, alas, so of course Trump ignored it completely. “It just sat as a document that people worked on that was thrown onto a shelf.” The document rested with NSC officials who dealt with medical preparedness and biodefense in the global health security directorate; in 2018, however, Trump disbanded the directorate completely.

“It is not clear if the administration’s failure to follow the NSC playbook was the result of an oversight or a deliberate decision to follow a different course.”

Narcissism, malice, or just incompetence? Always the key question when trying to figure out why Trump does anything.

#White House #National Security Council #NSC #Donald Trump #President Donald Trump #coronavirus #Trump #President Trump #novel coronavirus #COVID19 #pandemic #pandemic playbook #IgnoramusInChief #Obama #Barack Obama #President Obama #POTUS #Obama administration

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2plan22 · 4 years

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RT @vermontgmg: This is a literal lie. The Obama admin literally left a “Pandemic Playbook,” here in PDF form, that Trump ignored. They literally did leave a “game plan.” https://t.co/bNd1gVdzBL https://t.co/aroygrlpb8 2PLAN22 http://twitter.com/2PLAN22/status/1260331299782492161

This is a literal lie. The Obama admin literally left a “Pandemic Playbook,” here in PDF form, that Trump ignored. They literally did leave a “game plan.” https://t.co/bNd1gVdzBL https://t.co/aroygrlpb8

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) May 12, 2020

#OLASC16 RT @vermontgmg: This is a literal lie. The Obama admin literally left a “Pandemic Playbook

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poetessinthepit · 3 years

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Being someone who is critical of Biden from a left perspective sometimes feels like I'm having an out of body experience. This is because the only mainstream criticism of Biden is from the right wing and it's patently obvious the right just makes up hollow reasons to criticize Biden rather than engaging in any serious criticism. It's truly criticism for the sake of criticism and its so transparent that it's just done for its political utility and yet it doesn't matter, because enough Americans are gullible enough. The right can't concede any of its power by admitting any sort of agreement with Biden, even though pretty much everything wrong with Biden comes from a right of center strain of politics. They can't criticize him on his attitude towards Israel for example, if only to say he doesn't excuse the deaths of Palestinian children enough. They can't criticize him for not holding to many of his more left of center campaign promises. So instead we get shit like the ridiculous idea that Biden is a Trojan horse for cultural Marxism or just injecting some non-existant "anti-American" or "radical" subtext in some absolutely banal statement put out by the administration and that's when they're actually trying for a semi-coherent narrative. Mostly, they don't give a fuck. In some ways, we've gone right back to the Obama era, where the right was far more invested in criticizing that Obama liked mustard on his burgers than criticizing his dronestrike policy but of course, since Biden is another bumbling old white dude, there isn't a weird racist element to all the rhetoric. It's just bizarre because we know the M.O. now, we know the playbook and here we are, living in the wreckage of a pandemic and economic recession, all aware we are watching this grand performance. Its hard not to be utterly nihilistic about about politics in the US when politics appears to this sort of elite theater divorced from all material reality that simply exists for its own sake. It's like cool, I just don't wanna die, but y'all go off I guess.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Taxes are for the little people

If you wanna do crimes, make them incredibly complicated and technical. Like the hustlers that came into the bookstore I worked at and spun these long-ass stories about why they needed money for a Greyhound ticket home.

Those guys shoulda studied the private equity sector.

Private equity's playbook is to borrow giant sums by putting up other peoples' companies as collateral (yes, really). Then they use that money to buy the company they mortgaged, and pay themselves a huge dividend.

Then they sell off the company's assets and pay themselves even more money. That leaves the company in a state of precarity - assets they once owned, like their buildings, they now rent. If the rent goes up, they have to find the money to cover it.

All of this forms a pretense for mass layoffs, defaulting on pension obligations, lowering product quality, stiffing suppliers and borrowing more money. If the company doesn't go bust, the PE looters can flip it to *another* PE company, that does it again.

Whenever you see something really terrible happening to a business that once offered useful products and services and paid decent wages, it's a safe bet that PE is behind it. Toys R Us, Sears, your local hospital - and that memestock favorite, AMC.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/12/mammon-worshippers/#silver-lake-partners

Private equity goons make their money in two ways: the first is by pocketing 20% of these special dividends and other extractive policies that hollow out business.

This is money at PE managers get paid for spending their investors' money. It's a wage, in other words.

But thanks to the "carried interest" loophole (a hangover from 16th-century sea captains that has nothing to do with "interest" on loans), they get to treat these wages as "capital gains" and pay far less tax on them.

The fact that we give preferential tax treatment to capital gains (money derived from gambling), while taxing wages (money derived from doing useful work) at higher rates really tells you everything you need to know about our economic priorities.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

The carried interest loophole lets PE crooks treat their salaries as capital gains, are taxed at a much lower rate than the wages of the workers whose lives they're destroying.

On top of the 20% profit-share that PE bosses get every year, they also pocket a 2% "management fee" for all the "value" they add to the companies they've taken over.

This is *definitely* a wage. The 20% profit-share at least has an element of risk, but that 2% is guaranteed.

But PE bosses have spent more than a decade booking that 2% wage as a capital gain, using a tax-fraud tactic called "fee waivers." The details of how a fee waiver don't matter because it's all bullshit, like the tale of the needful Greyhound ticket.

All that matters is that a legal fiction allows people earning *eight- or nine-figure salaries* to treat *all* of those wages as capital gains and pay lower rates of tax on them than the janitors who clean their toilets or the workers whose jobs they will annihilate.

Now, the IRS knows all about this. Whistleblowers came forward in 2011 to warn them about it. The Treasury even struck a committee to come up with new rules to fix it.

But Obama failed to make those rules stick, and then Trump put a former tax-cheat enabler in charge of redrafting them. The cheater-friendly rules became law on Jan 5, and handed PE bosses hundreds of millions in savings every year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/business/private-equity-taxes.html

The New York Times report on "fee waivers" goes through the rulemaking history, the technical details of the scam, and the gutting of the IRS, which can no longer afford to audit rich people and now makes its quotas by preferentially auditing low earners who can't afford lawyers.

But former securities lawyer Jerri-Lynn Scofield's breakdown of the Times piece on Naked Capitalism really connects the dots:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/06/private-inequity-nyt-examines-how-the-private-equity-industry-avoids-taxes.html

As Scofield and Yves Smith point out, if Biden wanted to do one thing for tax justice, he could abolish preferential treatment for capital gains. If we want a society of makers and doers instead of owners and gamblers, we shouldn't penalize wages and reward rents.

There's an especial urgency to this right now. As the PE bosses themselves admit, they went on a buying spree during the pandemic (they call it "saving American businesses"). Larger and larger swathes of the productive economy are going into the PE meat-grinder.

Worse still, the PE industry has revived its most destructive tactic, the "club deal," whereby PE firms collaborate to take out whole economic sectors in one go:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

We're at an historic crossroads for tax justice. On the one hand, you have the blockbuster Propublica report on leaked IRS files that revealed that the net tax rate paid by America's billionaires is close to zero.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#eat-the-rich

This has left the Bootlicker-Industrial Complex in the bizarre position of arguing that anyone who suggests someone who amasses billions of dollars should pay more than $0 in tax is a radical socialist (so far, the go-to tactic is to make performative noises about privacy).

At the same time, the G7 has agreed to an historical tax deal that will see businesses taxed at least 15% on the revenue they make in each country, irrespective of the accounting fictions they use to claim that the profits are being earned in the middle of the Irish Sea.

That deal is historical, but the fact that it's being hailed as curbing corporate power reveals just how distorted our discourse about corporate taxes has become.

As Thomas Piketty writes, self-employed people pay 20-50% tax in countries that will tax the world's wealthiest companies a mere 15%: "For SMEs as well as for the working and middle classes, it is impossible to create a subsidiary to relocate its profits to a tax haven."

Piketty, like Gabriel Zucman, says that EU nations should charge multinationals a minimum of 25%, and like Zucman, he reminds us that the G7 deal does nothing to help the poorest countries in the Global South.

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2021/06/15/the-g7-legalizes-the-right-to-defraud/

These countries and the EU have something in common: they aren't "monetarily sovereign" (that is, they don't issue their own currencies *and* borrow in the currencies they issue).

Sovereign currency issuers (US, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, etc) don't need to tax in order to pay for programs - first they spend new money into the economy and then they tax it back out again.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#the-deficit-myth

These countries can run out of stuff to buy in their currency, but they can't run out of the currency itself. Monetarily sovereign countries don't tax to fund their operations.

Rather, they tax to fight inflation (if you spend money into the economy every year but don't take some of it out again through taxation, more and more money will chase the same goods and services and prices will go up).

And just as importantly, monetary sovereigns tax to reduce the spending power - and hence the political power - of the wealthy. The fact that PE bosses had billions of tax-free dollars at their disposal let them spend millions to distort tax policy to legalize fee waivers.

Taxing the money - and hence the power - of wage earners at higher rates than gamblers creates politics that value gambling above work, because gamblers get to spend the winnings they retain on political influence, including campaigns to rig the casino in their favor.

This discredits the whole system, shatters social cohesion and makes it hard to even imagine that we can build a better world - or avert the climate-wracked dystopia on the horizon.

But for Eurozone countries (whose monetary supply is controlled by technocrats at the ECB) and countries of the Global South (whom the IMF has forced into massive debts owed in US dollars, which they can only get by selling their national products), tax is even more urgent.

The US could fund its infrastructure needs just by creating money at the central bank.

EU and post-colonial lands can only fund programs with taxes, so for them, billionaires don't just distort their priorities and corrupt their system - they also starve their societies.

But that doesn't mean that monetary sovereigns can tolerate billionaires and their policy distortions. The UK is monetarily sovereign, in the G7, and its finance minister is briefing to have the City of London's banks exempted from the new tax deal.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-08/u-k-pushes-for-city-of-london-exemption-from-global-tax-deal

Now, the City of London is one of the world's great financial crime-scenes, and its banks are responsible for an appreciable portion of the planet-destabilizing frauds of the past 100 years.

During the Great Financial Crisis AIG used its London subsidiary to commit crimes its US branch couldn't get away with. The City of London was the epicenter of the LIBOR fraud, the Greensill collapse - it's the Zelig of finance crime, the heart of every fraud.

UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak claims banks are already paying high global tax and can't afford to be part of the G7 tax deal. If that was true, it wouldn't change the fact that these banks are too big to jail and anything that shrinks them is a net benefit.

But it's not true.

As the tax justice campaigner Richard Murphy points out, the risk to banks like Barclays adds up to 0.8% of global turnover: "The big deal is that the 15% global minimum tax rate is much too low. Suinak has yet again spectacularly missed the point."

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/09/how-big-is-the-tax-hit-on-banks-from-the-g7-tax-deal-that-sunak-fears-really-going-to-be/

Image: Joshua Doubek (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRS_Sign.JPG

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

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marisatomay · 3 years

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okay queen WHO is ron klain and why do we hate him (this is mostly a joke ahsksjs but I would appreciate any insight you have as I do research, I have never heard of this guy)

alright so ron klain was biden chief of staff when he was VP has been an advisor to biden for years and he was also the person who was in charge of the ebola task force back in the day and successfully handled That and he co-wrote the pandemic playbook that the obama admin left for the trump admin that they not only refused to use but dismantled the pandemic infrastructure klain et al put in place to prevent the situation we’re in right now from happening and while i would not call him a progressive by any means he’s one of the few people in biden’s inner circle who has been publicly vocal about how the progressive wing of the party has shifted the overton window a lot in the past few years and the rest of the party should try to meet us where we are more so most activists and progressive groups like justice democrats are actually pretty happy with biden choosing klain as his COS but rando lefty twitter is mad because he was a hedge fund manager once so you know give and take

#you’ll find that most powerful people in government worked in finance etc before moving to the public sector #if anyone on twitter paying attention thought biden wouldn’t pick klain lmao that’s on them #people mad like their favorite podcasters are the children of hedge fund managers lmaooooooo

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tomorrowusa · 3 months

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Just so nobody can say this is out of context, here's a vid of the entire interview.

The Obama administration successfully contained the Ebola outbreak in the United States. The death toll for Ebola in the US was under a dozen. So before leaving office, the Obama National Security Council created a 69-page handbook on how to deal with a pandemic. Trump and his flunkies ignored it with disastrous results.

Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook

The US death toll from COVID-19 is in seven digits. Other industrialized countries with advanced technological infrastructure such as Canada, Taiwan, Germany, and New Zealand had lower fatality rates per capita.

Trump largely ignored the virus until well into March when it had a chance to spread across the US.

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life The president was aware of the danger from the coronavirus – but a lack of leadership has created an emergency of epic proportions

The Trump administration, at best, was in denial; at worst, it sabotaged the pandemic response.

youtube

Trump White House made 'deliberate efforts' to undermine Covid response, report says

Trump zombies who claim the economy was marvelous under Trump conveniently forget about everything that happened after February of 2020. Trump's early bungling of the pandemic plunged the economy into recession. The COVID supply chain problems and the economic stimulus required to prevent a depression led to the spurt in inflation which is finally receding.

People who are nostalgic about taking hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, drinking bleach, and sticking UV lights up their butts must be excited about the opportunity to vote for Trump again.

#donald trump #botched pandemic response #covid-19 #coronavirus #public health #anniversary of trump's awful covid-19 response #gross incompetence of the trump administration #the trump recession #trump tanked the economy #trump is a loser #vote blue no matter who #election 2020 #election 2024

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antoine-roquentin · 3 years

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The Fed said that the 2 percent target was symmetric. But in practice, the Fed’s reaction function was asymmetric. The asymmetry of the Fed’s response was so strong that it generated a systematic bias in the Fed’s forecast and actual inflation. While the technocrats at the Fed have persistently expected long-run inflation to be 2 percent, actual inflation has undershot the target in 80 percent of all quarters since 1995. But the problem went even deeper than the asymmetric response function of the Federal Reserve.

Long after its demise, the technocrats continued to believe and rely on the Phillips curve model of inflation which said that we should expect inflation to rise whenever labor markets tighten sufficiently enough. This theory of the inflation process was baked into every single quantitative model of the economy ever considered by the central bankers. But the inflation process had transformed out of recognition by the system-wide buildup of overcapacity and the rise of global value chains. What has determined inflation since at least the mid-1990s is not the tightness of domestic labor markets, even in the world’s largest economy, but the degree of slack in the global production system as a whole:

Where there should’ve been a new theory of the inflation process, there remained a mental rigidity acquired when the central bankers had been in graduate school at Berkeley and MIT in the 1970s.

These three rigidities of the mind structured the Fed’s reaction function, the logic of financial discipline to which all economic actors were subjected, and the possibility space contemplated by political authorities. This was the process of structuration that generated the secular downward cycle of the past fifty years. What has happened since the financial crisis is the process of destructuration whereby these intellectual rigidities have been abandoned one by one.

The first to go was the belief in the wisdom of financial markets. This was a direct consequence of the global financial crisis. Wall Street’s pretenses of being the smartest guys in the room were irredeemably destroyed when the market-based credit system erected by the dealers endogenously generated the greatest risk to economic fortunes world-wide since the 1930s. Despite suspicions that nothing much had changed at all, the megabanks were, in fact, tied down with a whole series of regulations that gave the Fed authority to directly control their capital ratios, liquidity ratios, and even decisions on whether and how to reward their shareholders. Anyone who doesn’t understand the scale of the transformation of the goings-on at the banks has not been paying attention. What we had in 2006 was unfettered global finance; what we have now is global finance closely supervised and controlled by technocrats at the Fed, whose authority has increased in leaps and bounds. We are very far indeed from high neoliberal global financial intermediation. So a central structural feature of neoliberal political economy was unmade quite early on after the financial crisis.

For a few years, this seemed to be enough. The political authorities and the technocrats came to believe that the Band-Aid was enough to restabilize the system. This was the ‘false dawn’ of the 2012 election that Adam Tooze wrote of in Crashed. In reality, the process of destructuration was far from complete. This was the risk of writing contemporary history for Tooze. Just as he began writing the conclusion to Crashed, the stable world that the Obama-era elites believed they had achieved began to unravel at the hands of forces that they were completely unaware of.

They knew that the neoliberal institutions had destroyed the working-class. The New Economy that obtained with the capitulation of social democracy had led to the rise of an overbearing class of prestige-schooled meritocrats who began to claim a larger and larger share of the income, esteem and even work. What obtained then was an ‘hourglass’ occupational structure where most of the new jobs created were either for the highly-skilled meritocrats who run everything from the New York Times to Goldman and Google, or for unskilled day laborers at fast-food chains and grocery stores. This dual economy echoed the Lewisian model in monstrous reverse: instead of workers leaving the traditional low-productivity sector for the modern high-productivity sector, working-class breadwinners were pushed out of middle-skilled occupations that vanished from the industrial sector and into either the low-productivity sector or to the margins of employment and a life of dependence and indolence.

The New ‘Hourglass’ Economy undermined the reproduction of the working class family, even as the middle class family was restabilized with divorce rates and child out of wedlock-rates falling for the latter but not the former. The unraveling of working-class families and communities led to an epidemic of ‘deaths of despair’ starting in 2000. Yet, for 15 years no one even noticed. It was only in 2015 that Case and Deaton would document the wholly exceptional rise in ‘deaths of despair’ among whites without college degrees — the bulk of the American populace.

Elite-mass relations began to break down almost immediately as anger among ‘the losers of neoliberal globalization’ began to grow. The blame was not placed on the owners of capital and corporate power of the Marxian imaginary, but rather on the new class of meritocrats who began to dominate the airwaves over ‘flyover country’ in a one-way traffic of symbolic production emanating from the coasts. The hated ‘coastal elites’ in turn began thinking of working class whites as stupid racist bigots who didn’t know what was good for them — this was the development that Thomas Frank described in his 2004 polemic, What’s the Matter With Kansas?

Even as working class whites increasingly abandoned the Dems for the GOP, the latter continued to espouse free-market orthodoxy and cultural hot-button issues that did nothing at all to address the elephant in the room — the decline of working-class families and communities with the vanishing of broad-based growth. The brutal process of downward mobility was accompanied by the demise of institutions that intermediated between the working-class and the political and economic elites, that Putnam has documented. All organic connections between elites and masses were thus severed with ‘the big sort’ whereby the social classes became geographically segregated from each other over time.

These developments left late-neoliberal elites completely clueless about was happening to the middling bulk of American society far from New York and San Fransisco. So when Donald Trump came down that escalator, he was simply dismissed as a buffoon. No one among the elites saw the threat in real time. But Trump had inadvertently tapped into something altogether bigger than electoral politics. To mix metaphors, Trump was carried along the tide of history by the tectonic forces of class politics. The masses had simply had enough of the fucking technocrats from Harvard and Yale. By 2015, they were ready to burn the world constructed by the elites to the ground.

Even after the shock of 2016, elite resistance to the recognition of political realities remained in place. But the process of destructuration began to accelerate. Elites became more and more convinced that something — anything — had to be done to re-stabilize the system and contain ‘the threat from below’ revealed by 2016 [Richard F. Hamilton, 1972]. Yet, metal rigidities continued to thwart real solutions. Stuck with the old habits of thought, the Yellen Fed began hiking in anticipation of inflation as labor markets tightened in 2016. Democratic primary voters threw their weight behind the equivalent of a safety school despite a charismatic cast of pretenders.

The first intimations of a structural break with the old ways of thinking began to emerge in the discourse of the New American Left. Although it would later be taken over by antiracist activists unconcerned with the fortunes of the working-class, Bernie’s revolution was initially focused on bread and butter issues of everyday people. While Democratic primary voters could not be persuaded to cast their lot with the radicals, the ideas that emerged on the left of the party would strongly condition what was to come later, after the pandemic. What was truly pathbreaking about the new intellectual movement afoot was the complete abandonment of any commitment to fiscal discipline. MMT was only the tip of that iceberg. The general idea gaining adherents on the left was that power was to be taken back from the technocrats by political authority and the state’s capabilities to improve the lives of people was to be reconstructed.

Before the pandemic, this idea of breaking completely with the neoliberal playbook was contained. A half asleep old white guy would be put in the White House by the risk-averse Democratic majority. So it seemed for a while that neoliberalism was to be resurrected. But the Schmittian emergency of the pandemic brought these ideas back to the center of the policy discussion. Power was to be taken back from the technocrats after all. The intellectual revolution within political circles was accelerated by the constraints of the electoral clock. After winning the Senate runoffs in Georgia, the Dems now owned all federal policy. And they had two years to show their work — otherwise they’d lose control of Congress. The idea thus began to emerge among Democrat political strategists that you had go in heavy with all guns brazing right from the start. This is how we got the $1.9 trillion package.

Meanwhile, frustration had been building among the technocrats themselves. With the policy rate close to the zero lower bound, they had been pushing on a string with bond purchases which stimulated asset prices but have only a weak effect on economic activity because the rich refused to spend their capital gains. The desire to effect a handover to fiscal policy thus began to grow. The Fed responded to the pandemic by pulling out the bazooka. But that was not nearly good enough. The desire to handover control over economic affairs to the politicians became all-consuming in 2020.

With the Biden White House contemplating a $1.9 trillion fiscal package, the only question was whether the Fed would play along. Would they start hiking in anticipation and kill the party before it got started? The answer became crystal clear yesterday.

Lael Brainard, the real hero of the story, had been the lone voice at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) arguing for abandoning the old way of thinking about the inflation process in the mid-2010s. Her idea got a shot in the arm when, in 2017, Bernanke presented a proposal to target the level of prices over the cycle instead of the rate of inflation. The proposal contained an implicit but damning critique of Fed policy. What it showed was that the Fed had been wrong to hike in anticipation of inflation — Fed policy, including and especially forward guidance, had been way too tight. Thus began a major rethink among the central banking technocrats. Brainard’s new way of thinking about inflation, supported by research from the Bank of International Settlements and a host of younger economists, began to gain influence within the FOMC.

Even before the pandemic, the Powell Fed had been moving to an empirical stance — actually waiting for inflation to overshoot instead of relying on model predictions ultimately based on the defunct Phillips curve. With the shock of 2016, the technocrats began to pay more careful attention to how their policies affected the fortunes of the working-class. They realized that containing ‘the threat from below’ actually required making progress on broad-based growth — the objective that had been abandoned in 1979. As the evidence began to come in after 2016 that one could run very tight labor markets without inflation reappearing, Brainard’s way of thinking became more and more compelling.

The central bankers had come to realize that the only way to achieve broad-based growth was to run the economy really hot. Only when labor markets get very tight (unemployment below, say, 5 percent) do working-class wages and the wages of minorities start growing as fast as middle class salaries. This idea of running the economy really hot to deliver broad-based growth could only work because, while inflation does not respond to excess demand in the way they had thought it would (the Phillips curve is dead), wages do (the Wage Curve is alive and kicking). That is, they could have their cake and eat it too: they realized that they could run the economy really hot and generate broad-based growth without unnecessarily running the risk of high inflation.

“The key to the whole thing,” as Chair Powell put it yesterday, is that almost no one believes that the Fed can’t tame inflation if it were to reappear — inflation expectations are firmly anchored on target. So they can afford to be very generous in bad times because everyone knows the Fed won’t let inflation expectations get de-anchored ever again — the great lesson of the 1970s’ stagflation crisis. In other words, they had come to realize that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And the systematic policy mistake of the past decade or decades was that they had been unnecessarily pessimistic and cautious.

So when Summers and Blanchard reached for the old ways of thinking, something entirely unexpected happened. Where there should’ve been a loud debate structured by the idea of fiscal discipline, there was one big yawn. The doyens were largely ignored or dismissed by both the technocrats and the politicians. This surprising development revealed that the intellectual revolution among elites, triggered by the Polanyian counter-movement from below that Trump rode to power, had been consummated. Yesterday’s press conference confirmed that the process of intellectual conversion of the technocrats is now complete.

Such were the makings of the perfect storm. With fiscal policy not only revived but virtually on steroids and with monetary policy accommodative for the foreseeable future, we’re now looking at the greatest economic boom in living memory. The Fed now reckons that the US economy will grow at 6.5 percent in 2021. Goldman is more bullish. The 38th floor at 200 West believes that the US economy will grow at 8 percent instead. The strategists are probably closer to the mark.

But this is the short-term conjuncture. Why would I call the turning point of the secular cycle?? The coming economic boom is not enough. The turning points of the secular cycle need not just the destructuation of features that generated the secular downcycle but also restructuration with features that generate the secular upcycle. What has created the conditions for new features to emerge and consolidate is the climate crisis. The success of climate activism has convinced elites that a solution must be found to the planetary impasse. Moreover, elites have come to believe that any solution to the climate crisis cannot come at the cost of the working-class — otherwise the threat from below will threaten the stability of the system as a whole. So the way is now open for at least a decade-long great green boom. The plan is now for the technocrats to handover control over economic affairs to the politicians, and for direct fiscal stimulus to give way to an infrastructure and green tech investment-driven economy. This is probably the only way out of the impasse of American class relations. Even those who don’t get it now will get it eventually.

quibbles with parts, but it’s a good narrative

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phroyd · 3 years

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In Pennsylvania, President Trump and Republicans loyal to him have sought to overturn his defeat by making false claims about widespread voting fraud in Philadelphia.

In Georgia, they have sought to reverse his loss by leveling similar accusations against Atlanta.

In Michigan, Republicans have zeroed in on Detroit, whose elections system the president has falsely portrayed as so flawed that its entire vote should be thrown out.

Lost on no one in those cities is what they have in common: large populations of Black voters.

And there is little ambiguity in the way Mr. Trump and his allies are falsely depicting them as bastions of corruption.

“‘Democrat-led city’ — that’s code for Black,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”

Mr. Trump’s fruitless and pyromaniacal campaign to somehow reverse President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the election rests on the wholesale disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters, a disproportionate number of them Black Americans living in the urban centers of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Notably absent from the effort has been any focus on predominantly white suburban areas where the president performed better, but where he lost ground compared with four years ago and arguably lost the election.

The campaign is not Mr. Trump’s alone. He has had help from supporters and allies throughout the country, as well as from the Republican National Committee and its state branches.

And, in a year in which the nation elected its first Black vice president, Senator Kamala Harris of California, the push represents a newly conspicuous phase of a decades-long effort by the Republican Party to expand power through the suppression of voters of color. Those voters have largely remained loyal to the Democrats while Republicans consistently win the white vote.

Over the past several years, that Republicans’ effort has consisted mostly of new state and local election laws that, in the name of combating fraud, have restricted voting in ways that often place a disproportionate burden on Black and Latino voters. Civil rights leaders and Democrats have cited these laws as not-so-subtle efforts at voter suppression, and, in several court cases, judges have agreed.

Mr. Trump has frequently maligned Black leaders and cities. He applauded Black voters who chose not to vote in 2016 even as he has claimed to have done more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln. And he has not flinched in pursuing what Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called “a return to very blatant Jim Crow tactics — to just try to throw out validly cast ballots and targeting certain cities that are Black-majority.”

Ms. Gupta, who was the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama, added: “People will say this isn’t the intent, the intent is more partisan. But I think what we are seeing through this election cycle is that in many instances it can appear motivated by partisan politics, but in the end the victims are Black voters.”

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump shared on Twitter his hope that the courts or state lawmakers would throw out the popular vote entirely in states he lost, effectively allowing legislatures to submit their own, pro-Trump slates of electors to the Electoral College.

His lawsuits trying to scuttle the state-by-state certification process that will cement Mr. Biden’s presidency at the Electoral College have failed miserably — including in a stinging dismissal on Saturday by a federal judge in Pennsylvania — and he has put more pressure on local officials to intervene on his behalf.

His effort faces two tests on Monday. Pennsylvania counties are set to submit their certified vote totals. And Michigan’s four-member state canvassing board has its deadline to certify the state’s election results. At least one of its two Republican members has indicated he may not do so because of minor irregularities in Wayne County, which includes Detroit.

State officials and election lawyers say it is highly unlikely that even a failure by the canvassing board to certify would ultimately cost Mr. Biden the state in the Electoral College. But the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the nation’s oldest civil rights law firm, is not taking any chances with the votes from Detroit, with a population that is 79 percent Black.

In a lawsuit it filed against Mr. Trump and his campaign over the weekend, the firm said, “Defendants are openly seeking to disenfranchise Black voters,” adding, “Defendants’ tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history, as Black Americans were denied a voice in American democracy for most of the first two centuries of the republic.”

The firm said Mr. Trump’s attempt to pressure the Michigan canvassing board and the State Legislature was a violation of the provision against voter intimidation in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

That provision, initially devised to crack down on tactics meant to drive Black and Hispanic voters away from the polls, stipulates that it is illegal “to intimidate, threaten or coerce any person for urging or aiding any person to vote or attempt to vote.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is asking the Federal District Court in Washington to order the party to cease its pressure campaign.

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 flatly prohibits defendants’ efforts to disenfranchise Black people,” the suit reads. “This is a moment that many of us hoped to never face. But here we are, and the law is clear.”

It was the Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson against the wishes of some of his fellow Southern Democrats, that truly started the Republicans on a path to impose limits on voting in the name of fighting election fraud, for which little evidence exists.

The G.O.P. was the original party of civil rights during slavery and afterward. But during the 1960s and beyond it sought to appeal to disaffected, segregationist Democrats through a so-called Southern strategy.

As the percentage of nonwhite voters in the country grew, Democrats began to gain an edge. Republican governors and legislatures enacted a raft of new voting laws, such as requirements that voters at the polls show types of official photo identification that Black and Hispanic people were disproportionately less likely to have.

Mr. Barber said the victory by Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris was all the more remarkable given that it came in the face of those changes in voting laws, showing that “when people have an opportunity to vote, they will clearly vote their interests.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign against the results has focused on moves by state and local officials to make voting easier during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly mail voting.

But the degree to which the president is now pinpointing voters of color for disenfranchisement is striking even by modern Republican standards, especially after he performed better with Black voters this year than he did four years ago.

Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee noted in an interview that Mr. Trump was hyper-focused on his city, which is about 39 percent Black and 19 percent Latino, and not on the predominantly white and Republican-leaning suburbs outside it, which had the same regulations that the Trump campaign was challenging in Milwaukee.

“We are absolutely witnessing in real time an effort to disenfranchise people of color throughout Milwaukee County,” said Mr. Barrett, a Democrat. (The president is also pressing for a recount in Dane County, a predominantly white area of Wisconsin with a considerable college student population.)

In Pennsylvania, Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia, also a Democrat, pointed to the Republican-led General Assembly’s refusal to allow election officials to begin processing absentee ballots early as a direct attack on the vote in his city, which would struggle under the sheer volume of votes while more rural and white counties would have a much easier time processing votes.

“There were efforts right from the very beginning,” Mr. Kenney said.

Perhaps nowhere was the targeting of Black votes more explicit than in Wayne County, Mich., home to Detroit. Though Republicans pressured the Wayne County board of canvassers not to certify the vote, the number of precincts with slightly mismatched data was lower than it was in 2016, when Mr. Trump won the states by a smaller vote margin that was certified unanimously.

In initially resisting the certification of Wayne County’s votes, one of the Republican board members, Monica Palmer, said she was willing to certify every municipality in the county except Detroit, even though some cities, like the largely white Livonia, had worse irregularities. (Ms. Palmer and her fellow Republican on the board, William Hartmann, did vote to certify but have since said they were unfairly pressured into doing so.)

The Republican effort this election cycle, and its focus on disenfranchising so many Black voters, threaten to have a lasting effect on the party, current and former party members said.

“The totality of what Trump is doing and the party is supporting, combined with having the first African-American female vice president — I think it’s difficult to comprehend how much this is going to have an impact,” said Stuart Stevens, a former Republican strategist for Mr. Bush and Mitt Romney who is now an adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project.

Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said, “How do any of the reported candidates for 2024 come back and say, ‘Oh well, we were silent while the president was trying to throw out the votes in Detroit and Milwaukee and Philadelphia, but overlook that, and support the party and support us now’?”

“It makes no sense,” he added, “for getting support in the Black community going forward.”

Phroyd

#gop #election2020 #disenfranchisement #racism

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