The deadly coronavirus does not discriminate. It will attack anyone, regardless of socio-economic background, nationality or religion.

The virus, first detected in China late last year, has spread around the world faster than many expected. Doctors, scientists and research specialists in viruses have been trying to establish a pattern. The virus seems most serious for the elderly and people with underlying health conditions, including those whose immune system are weakened by age or illness. However, it also affects young and healthy people.

It does not matter if a potential victim prays in a mosque, church or another sacred place, all are vulnerable.

Scientists have established that crowds contribute to the spread of the coronavirus because it can be transmitted from one person to another with relative ease. With that in mind, authorities should look closely at upcoming religious holidays that typically attract large numbers of people in relatively small places.

As unpopular as directives postponing or cancelling religious festivals, pilgrimages and processions that typically attract tens of thousands, are, the outcome would be far more beneficial than allowing the gatherings to take place and having to deal with a huge surge in deaths and increase in number of people infected with the novel coronavirus

Iran, which has been particularly hard hit by the virus, has sites in the country that are sacred to Shias. So do other countries in the region.

The Shia site of Karbala, visited annually by an average of 8 million pilgrims in central Iraq, is the grave of Hussain ibn Ali, as well as those of martyrs of the battle of Karbala in 680.

More than 1 million people visit the city each year for Ashura, which this year falls on August 28-29. The Ashura processions draw huge crowds in Tehran, Karbala and Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon. Men of all ages utter religious chants while striking their bodies with a sharp knife or machete until they draw blood that flows over a white cloth.

In Syria, the Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque is in the southern suburbs of Damascus. Twelver Shia Muslim tradition holds that the mosque contains the grave of Zaynab, daughter of Imam Ali and Fatima, and daughter of the Prophet Mohammad. (Sunni Muslims and Ismaili Shia place Zaynab’s tomb in the mosque of the same name in Cairo.)

The mosque in Syria became a popular destination of mass pilgrimage by Twelver Shia Muslims beginning in the 1980s. The height of the pilgrimage season normally occurs in the summer.

Allowing Shia pilgrims to visit holy sites and parade through the streets of the city in large processions, as they traditionally do, would result in the death of many.

The problem cuts across sectarian lines. Ramadan, the holy month of Islam when people fast from dawn to dusk, begins April 23. If there is no strong public awareness, it is likely to draw Muslims, Shias and Sunnis, to mosques, streets, coffee shops and family gatherings, even if quarantine measures remain in effect. Ramadan should not be an excuse to flaunt confinement orders.

Salafists and other hard-line Islamists have challenged governments’ restrictions, including mosque closures. They tried to invest in the religiosity and fatalism of segments of the population. Widely circulated fatwas insist that those who die because of an epidemic are considered martyrs.

Ultra conservatives ignore the fact that preservation of human life is considered by most mainstream Muslim scholars as the first priority of the faith. Religion should help contain the virus not spread it.

There can be no excuse for governments and populations not acting prudently. There is a dire need to replace the destructive narratives of zealots with sound health education so the danger of the virus can be understood by the populace. The time to act is now because later will be too late.

Governments should draw on the lessons about the cost of unbridled religious gatherings in the time of the coronavirus.

The issue is not exclusively reserved for Muslim pilgrims. In the southern United States, some preachers refused to abide by orders to stay at home but rather welcomed their congregations, saying that God would provide on the protection they need. Eventually, police shut down the services.

In Eastern France, the Evangelical church’s mass gatherings are suspected to be at the source of many of France’s virus spread. It was also the case in South Korea.

Governments ignoring on dangerous Shia or Christian religious processions and similar gatherings will have but themselves to blame. Religion is not the culprit. People are.

Claude Salhani is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 02 April 2020

Word Count: 750

—————-

I was telling someone yesterday I’m worried about sounding too cold-blooded here at the Editorial Board. There’s enough literal death happening, given we’re in the middle of an Old Testament plague. I don’t need to pile on with a fatalist tone, I said. I should express more optimism, because Americans need hope in times like this, right?

Well, yes, but Americans must also contend with White House press corps that will not recognize empirical observable reality. It will not, or cannot, come to a moral conclusion about a president who will not, or cannot, put the nation’s interests above his. In the past, I said this isn’t just amoral. It’s anti-moral. It’s hostile to morality.

Until that changes, here I am, saying what needs saying, in plain English, so normal people can see what they need to see. The result, unfortunately, might sound fatalist.

There’s something else going on, though. When it comes to the presidency of Donald Trump, or any presidency, the press corps behaves as if the office contains a great mystery ordinary mortals can’t possibly understand. Reporters act as if the Oval Office itself were a kind of sanctum sanctorum, a holy place in which every decision has world-changing significance and every word uttered rings with multiverses of meaning.

This is not what you’d expect from highly educated and, for the most part, highly affluent professionals who dedicate their lives to gathering facts and seeking the truth without fear and favor. But then again, why not expect that? History is rife with characters who denied empirical observable reality in light of The Truth. History is rife with celebrants who turned anything, even the presidency, into a fetish of the occult.

There is, in fact, no mystery. The president really is preventing governors from getting enough coronavirus testing in order to keep low the official number of sick and dead. The president really is trying to keep the stock market from crashing more than it already has, therefore jeopardizing his chances of getting reelected this year, by shoveling billions in cash into the economy. The president really does not value human life. He does, however, value what human life can do for him. As Sarah Kendzior wrote: “Everything to Mr. Trump is transactional, and you — all of you — are the transaction.”

To be sure, none of this is kind. None of this is charitable. All of this, however, is based on empirical observable reality, variations of which have been repeated ad nauseam for four years. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote Tuesday: “HE WILL NOT CHANGE AND IS FUNDAMENTALLY INCAPABLE OF DOING THE JOB. That’s the story. I know it’s fun to watch the bouncing ball, but it doesn’t change. That’s it” (his emphasis).

Hayes was commenting on a press briefing in which the president said his “goal” was keeping the body count from the COVID-19 outbreak from surpassing 240,000. That “goal” would exceed the number of Americans who died fighting in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined. That “goal” would rival the number of Americans who died fighting in World War II’s European and Pacific theaters. That “goal” was not the most important fact, evidently. The New York Times’ Peter Baker could not help but notice “Trump sounding different today. Scale of death appears to have changed his tone, at least.”

Tone is what Hayes means by “bouncing ball.” Two weeks ago, Trump declared a national emergency. The press corps reported en masse the president’s new “somber” tone. Then came the week in which he moved to “reopen” the country despite the mounting death toll. That was nuts, but not disqualifying. Reporters continued to believe he’d act presidential and when he did, it was not a bug but a feature — not of his administration but of their faith in the power and the glory of the presidency.

“Fetish” is the right word to describe the press corps’ approach to the office. A fetish is a thing, or idea, that represents something that it is not. A hand is a hand, but a hand fetish has more to it than a hand. The hand represents something the fetishist projects onto it. Trump’s tone may represent something the press corps projects onto him.

That something may be natural fear that our leader is terrible and that lots of people are going to die from a global pandemic in which the US is now the epicenter. Maybe reporters, who understand the dire circumstances we face, are trying to will him into taking appropriate action and proper responsibility. But then again, maybe not.

It may be the press corps can’t believe an American president would undermine the nation’s effort to combat a disease. It may be reporters can’t believe a president would favor friends and punish enemies in the middle of an Old Testament plague. It may be they can’t believe what their own eyes are telling them and trust instead their true faith in the mysteries of a sanctum sanctorum only they have the power to understand.

History is rife with celebrants who turned anything into a fetish of the occult.

Now may be no different.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 01 April 2020

Word Count: 855

—————-

There’s a fake argument circulating that goes something like this: The president isn’t to blame for the coronavirus pandemic that has now killed more Americans than were murdered on Sept. 11, 2001. Instead, the Democrats are to blame. They distracted Donald Trump with their pointless impeachment and failed attempt to remove him.

The “lost month,” as the New York Times called it, wasn’t the result of indifference, paranoia and/or dereliction of duty on the part of the chief executive, but instead the result of petty partisanship and senseless hate of a president fighting for the American people.

Or something like that. It’s hard to say. These talking points are never well-thought out. Just speaking them, as if they were spells and incantations, is what matters to the sycophants, golems and ghouls the president enjoys surrounding himself with.

In any case, we know the truth.

US intelligence officials briefed Trump in early January, warning that a contagion was coming the likes of which we have never seen before. The president did nothing. Senators from both parties were briefed in early February. They urged Trump to ask for emergency funding to counteract COVID-19’s spread. The president did nothing.

On Saturday, the US death toll reached 2,000. Three days later, it reached 3,000. Sept. 11, 2001, had 2,977 victims. At this rate the body count might actually eclipse the number of Americans who died fighting in World War II (about 300,000). Indeed, that seems likely. The White House’s point-person, Dr. Deborah Birx, told the Today show Monday we can expect as many as 200,000 dead “if we do things almost perfectly.”

The fake argument gets something right, though. It gets right the connection between the president’s acquittal and his malign negligence. Think about it for a minute.

He was acquitted of treason (extorting a foreign leader so he’d interfere with an election). He was acquitted of sabotage (undermining the constitutional authority of the Congress.) Thanks to the GOP, there’s virtually nothing Trump has to do to honor his oath to defend the US from all enemies. There’s nothing he has to do to “take care” that our laws are faithfully executed. Nothing, because who’s going to make him?

Well, public opinion might. That can be addressed by signing into law (so far) three rounds of stimulus that will shovel mountains of cash into the economy, buoying Wall Street confidence and keeping high the Dow and S&P 500. That can also be addressed by preventing the public from knowing how many people are dead from COVID-19.

If that means malicious lying, so be it. If that means prohibiting hospitals from getting tests, ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE), so be it. If that means subverting states’ rights and sovereignty, so be it. If that means mass death, so be it. Trump was acquitted of putting his interests above the nation’s. Why stop now?

The Times reported a phone call Monday in which the governors, Republican and Democrats, confirmed two vital facts. One, that the federal government has been outbidding states with vendors selling tests, ventilators and PPE. Two, and at the same time, the federal government has not provided states with enough tests, ventilators and PPE. “I haven’t heard about testing being a problem,” Trump said, which is code for, “I don’t want to hear about testing being a problem so I literally won’t hear it.”

Yes, Trump will block the states from getting coronavirus testing in order to keep the national number of dead artificially low. Yes, that’s a terrible thing to presume of one’s president, but seriously. What did you expect? Is any of this all that surprising?

This is the same president who ordered the confiscation of babies from immigrant mothers; who banned Muslims from entering the US from certain countries; who attacked civil liberties and undermined impartial justice; who inspired acts of antisemitism, racism and mass murder; who stole daily from public coffers; and who got away with treason, complaining all the while that he doesn’t get enough credit.

The only people left in America capable of surprise are those who voted for his promise to punish people for the fun it. The only people left in America capable of surprise are those who don’t think it’s fun anymore, not when they are getting punished. They might say what a Trump voter said about a year ago: “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Don’t think Trump is in trouble with his base, though. It’s as masochistic as it is sadistic. The GOP itself has a high tolerance for high frequency death, even if Republicans are among the dead. After all, gun massacres happen in red states, too. Instead of tightening their gun laws, however, they seek to loosen them more.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 31 March 2020

Word Count: 803

—————-

Before I found myself “sheltering in place,” this article was to be about women’s actions around the world to mark March 8th, International Women’s Day. From Pakistan to Chile, women in their millions filled the streets, demanding that we be able to control our bodies and our lives. Women came out in Iraq and Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Peru, the Philippines and Malaysia. In some places, they risked beatings by masked men. In others, they demanded an end to femicide — the millennia-old reality that women in this world are murdered daily simply because they are women.

In 1975 the future was female This year’s celebrations were especially militant. It’s been 45 years since the United Nations declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and sponsored its first international conference on women in Mexico City. Similar conferences followed at five-year intervals, culminating in a 1995 Beijing conference, producing a platform that has in many ways guided international feminism ever since.

Beijing was a quarter of a century ago, but this year, women around the world seemed to have had enough. On March 9th, Mexican women staged a 24-hour strike, un día sin nosotras (a day without us women), to demonstrate just how much the world depends on the labor — paid and unpaid — of… yes, women. That womanless day was, by all accounts, a success. The Wall Street Journal observed — perhaps with a touch of astonishment — that “Mexico grinds to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of women paralyzed Mexico in an unprecedented nationwide strike to protest a rising wave of violence against women, a major victory for their cause.”

In addition to crowding the streets and emptying factories and offices, some women also broke store windows and fought with the police. Violence? From women? What could have driven them to such a point?

Perhaps it was the murder of Ingrid Escamilla, 25, a Mexico City resident, who, according to the New York Times, “was stabbed, skinned and disemboweled” this February. Maybe it was that the shooting of the artist and activist Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre in Ciudad Juarez, a barely noted reminder to an uninterested world that women have been disappearing for decades along the U.S.-Mexico border. Or maybe it was just the fact that official figures for 2019 revealed more than 1,000 femicides in Mexico, a 10% increase from the previous year, while many more such murders go unrecorded.

Is the pandemic patriarchal? If it weren’t for the pandemic, maybe the Wall Street Journal would have been right. Maybe the Day Without Women would have been only the first of many major victories. Maybe the international feminist anthem, “El violador eres tú” (You [the patriarchy, the police, the president] are the rapist), would have gone on inspiring flash-mobs of dancing, chanting women everywhere. Perhaps the world’s attention might not have been so quickly diverted from the spectacle of women’s uprisings globally. Now, however, in the United States and around the world, it’s all-pandemic-all-the-time, and with reason. The coronavirus has done what A Day Without Women could not: it’s brought the world’s economy to a shuddering halt. It’s infected hundreds of thousands of people and killed tens of thousands. And it continues to spread like a global wildfire.

Like every major event and institution, the pandemic affects women and men differently. Although men who fall sick seem more likely than women to die, in other respects, the pandemic and its predictable aftermath are going to be harder on women. How can that be? The writer Helen Lewis provides some answers in the Atlantic.

First of all, the virus, combined with mass quarantine measures, ensures that more people will need to be cared for. This includes older people who are especially at risk of dying and children who are no longer in school or childcare. In developed countries like the United States, people fortunate enough to be able to keep their jobs by working from home are discovering that the presence of bored children does not make this any easier.

Indeed, last night, my little household was treated to a song-and-dance performance by two little girls who live a couple of houses down the street. Their parents had spent the day helping them plan it and then invited us to watch from our backyard. What they’ll do tomorrow, a workday, I have no idea. A friend without children has offered to provide daily 15-minute Zoom lessons on anything she can Google, as a form of respite for her friends who are mothers.

As recently as a week ago, it looked as if shuttered schools might open again before the academic year ends, allowing one New York Times commentator to write an article headlined “I Refuse to Run a Coronavirus Home School.” An associate professor of educational leadership, the author says she’s letting her two children watch TV and eat cookies, knowing that no amount of quick-study is going to turn her into an elementary school teacher. I applaud her stance, but also suspect that the children of professionals will probably be better placed than those of low-wage workers to resume the life-and-death struggle for survival in the competitive jungle that is kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade education in this country.

In locked-down heterosexual households, Helen Lewis writes, the major responsibility for childcare will fall on women. She’s exasperated with pundits who point out that people like Isaac Newton and Shakespeare did their best work during a seventeenth-century plague in England. “Neither of them,” she points out, “had child-care responsibilities.” Try writing King Lear while your own little Cordelias, Regans, and Gonerils are pulling at your shirt and complaining loudly that they’re booored.

In places like the United Kingdom and the United States, where the majority of mothers have jobs, women will experience new pressures to give up their paid employment. In most two-earner heterosexual households with children, historic pay inequalities mean that a woman’s job usually pays less. So if someone has to devote the day to full-time childcare, it will make economic sense that it’s her. In the U.S., 11% of women are already involuntarily working only part-time, many in jobs with irregular schedules. Even women who have chosen to balance their household work with part-time employment may find themselves under pressure to relinquish those jobs.

As Lewis says, this all makes “perfect economic sense”:

“At an individual level, the choices of many couples over the next few months will make perfect economic sense. What do pandemic patients need? Looking after. What do self-isolating older people need? Looking after. What do children kept home from school need? Looking after. All this looking after — this unpaid caring labor — will fall more heavily on women, because of the existing structure of the workforce.”

Furthermore, as women who choose to leave the workforce for a few years to care for very young children know, it’s almost impossible to return to paid work at a position of similar pay and status as the one you gave up. And enforced withdrawal won’t make that any easier.

Social reproduction? What’s that? And why does it matter? This semester I’m teaching a capstone course for urban studies majors at my college, the University of San Francisco. We’ve been focusing our attention on something that shapes all our lives: work — what it is, who has it and doesn’t, who’s paid for it and isn’t, and myriad other questions about the activity that occupies so much of our time on this planet. We’ve borrowed a useful concept from Marxist feminists: “social reproduction.” It refers to all the work, paid and unpaid, that someone has to do just so that workers can even show up at their jobs and perform the tasks that earn them a paycheck, while making a profit for their employers.

It’s called reproduction, because it reproduces workers, both in the biological sense and in terms of the daily effort to make them whole enough to do it all over again tomorrow. It’s social reproduction, because no one can do it alone and different societies find different ways of doing it.

What’s included in social reproduction? There are the obvious things any worker needs: food, clothing, sleep (and a safe place to doze off), not to speak of a certain level of hygiene. But there’s more. Recreation is part of it, because it “recreates” a person capable of working effectively. Education, healthcare, childcare, cooking, cleaning, procuring or making food and clothing — all of these are crucial to sustaining workers and their work. If you’d like to know more about it, Tithi Bhattacharya’s Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression is a good place to start.

What does any of this have to do with our pandemic moment? How social reproduction is organized in the United States leaves some people more vulnerable than others in a time of economic crisis. To take one example, over many decades, restaurants have assumed and collectivized (for profit) significant parts of the work of food preparation, service, and clean up, acts once largely performed in individual homes. For working women, the availability of cheap takeout has, in some cases, replaced the need to plan, shop for, and prepare meals seven days a week. Food service is a stratified sector, ranging from high-end to fast-food establishments, but it includes many low-wage workers who have now lost their jobs, while those still working at places providing takeout or drive-through meals are risking their health so that others can eat.

One way professional class two-earner couples in the United States have dealt with the tasks of social reproduction is to outsource significant parts of their work to poorer women. Fighting over who does the vacuuming and laundry at home? Don’t make the woman do it all. Hire a different woman to do it for you. Want to have children and a career? Hire a nanny.

Of course, odds are that your house cleaner and nanny will still have to do their own social reproduction work when they get home. And now that their children aren’t going to school, somehow they’ll have to take care of them as well. In many cases, this will be possible, however, because their work is not considered an “essential service” under the shelter-in-place orders of some states. So they will lose their incomes.

At least here in California, many of the women who do these jobs are undocumented immigrants. When the Trump administration and Congress manage to pass a relief bill, they, like many undocumented restaurant workers, won’t be receiving any desperately needed funds to help them pay rent or buy food. Immigrant-rights organizations are stepping in to try to make up some of the shortfall, but what they’re capable of is likely to prove just a few drops in a very large bucket. Fortunately, immigrant workers are among the most resourceful people in this country or they wouldn’t have made it this far.

There’s one more kind of social reproduction work performed mostly by women, and, by its nature, the very opposite of “social distancing”: sex work. You can be sure that no bailout bill will include some of the nation’s poorest women, those who work as prostitutes.

Women at home and at risk It’s a painful coincidence that women are being confined to their homes just as an international movement against femicide is taking off. One effect of shelter-in-place is to make it much harder for women to find shelter from domestic violence. Are you safer outside risking coronavirus or inside with a bored, angry male partner? I write this in full knowledge that one economic sector that has not suffered from the pandemic is the gun business. Ammo.com, for example, which sells ammunition online in all but four states, has http://ammo.com/experienced more than a three-fold increase in revenue over the last month. Maybe all that ammo is being bought to fight off zombies (or the immigrant invasion the president keeps reminding us about), but research shows that gun ownership has a lot to do with whether or not domestic violence turns into murder.

Each week, Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax hosts a chat line offering suggestions for help of various sorts. For the last two weeks, her readers (myself included) have been horrified by messages from one participant stuck in quarantine in a small apartment with a dangerous partner who has just bought a gun. Standard advice to women in her position is not just to run, but to make an exit plan, quietly gather the supplies and money you’ll need and secure a place to go. Mandatory shelter-in-place orders, however necessary to flattening the curve of this pandemic, may well indirectly cause an increase in domestic femicides.

As if women weren’t already disproportionately affected by the coronavirus epidemic, Senate Republicans have been trying to sneak a little extra misogyny into their version of a relief bill. In the same month that Pakistani women risked their lives in demonstrations under the slogan “Mera jism, meri marzi” (“My body, my choice”), Republicans want to use the pandemic in another attempt to — that’s right — shut down Planned Parenthood clinics.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently revealed that the $350 billion being proposed to shore up small businesses that don’t lay off workers would exclude nonprofits that receive funds from Medicaid. Planned Parenthood, which provides healthcare for millions of uninsured and underinsured women, is exactly that kind of nonprofit. Democratic congressional aides who alerted Sargent to this suggest that Planned Parenthood wouldn’t be the only organization affected. They also believe that

“…this language would exclude from eligibility for this financial assistance a big range of other nonprofits that get Medicaid funding, such as home and community-based disability providers; community-based nursing homes, mental health providers, and health centers; group homes for the disabled; and even rape crisis centers.”

Meanwhile, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas are trying to use the coronavirus as an excuse to prevent women’s access to abortion. On the grounds that such procedures are not medically necessary, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has ordered abortion providers to stop terminating pregnancies. Earlier, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sent letters to abortion providers in that state forbidding all “nonessential” surgical abortions.

A return to normalcy? When Warren Harding (who oversaw a notoriously corrupt administration) ran for president in 1920, his campaign slogan was “a return to normalcy” — the way things were, that is, before World War I. What he meant was a return to economic dynamism. As we know, the “Roaring Twenties” provided it in spades — until that little crash known as the Great Depression. Today, like Harding, another corrupt president is promising a prompt return to normalcy. He’s already chafing at the 15-day period of social distancing he announced in mid-March. At his March 23rd press conference, he hinted that the United States would be “open for business” sooner rather than later. The next day, he suggested that the country reopen for business on Easter (a “very special day for me”), saying he wants to see “packed churches all over our country.” He can’t wait until everything, including our deeply unequal healthcare and economic systems, gets back to normal — the way they were before the spread of the coronavirus; until, that is, we can go back to being unprepared for the next, inevitable crisis.

Unlike the president, I hope we don’t go back to normal. I hope the people of Venice come to appreciate their sparkling canals and their returning dolphins. I hope that the rest of us become attached to less polluted air and lower carbon emissions. I hope that we learn to value the lives of women.

I hope, instead of returning to normalcy, we recognize that our survival as a species depends on changing almost everything, including how we produce what we need and how we reproduce ourselves as fully human beings. I hope that, when we have survived this pandemic, the world’s peoples take what we have learned about collective global action during this crisis and apply it to that other predictable crisis, the one that threatens all human life on a distinctly warming planet.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 31 March 2020

Word Count: 2,672

—————-

So much for “reopening” the country.

The president spent all of last week talking up the need to rescind the administration’s “social distancing” guidelines so the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic would not be worse than the disease itself. He said restrictions would end by Easter.

Donald Trump’s decision to move ahead despite the outbreak’s mounting death toll came on a single day, according to Bloomberg News, after “he watched a sermon delivered by a prominent evangelical preacher to an empty megachurch. It gained momentum as Trump listened to advice from conservative economists who warned of near-apocalyptic financial damage, a view reinforced by a free-fall in markets.”

Then, late last night, the administration announced the guidelines would be in effect through April. That suggested that “the adults in the rooms” won an internal debate. It suggested that public health officials, who know what they are talking about, were able to convince the president, who does not know what he’s talking about, of the error of his ways. It suggested that in the end, science and pragmatism prevailed over politics.

They didn’t.

By spending the week talking about possibly lifting restrictions, the president accomplished a slew of things — all of them cynical, nihilistic and baldly political.

He continued his war against the press. The more reporters asked how he could even think of lifting restrictions before the pandemics peak, the less time they had to ask why his administration dilly-dallied for a month, the less time they had to ask why he didn’t heed warnings of a coming contagion, the less time they had to ask why the president turned down Congressional funding, all making its spread far deadlier.

He signaled to white evangelical Christians that not even an act of God would stop him from representing their interests. Son-in-law Jared Kushner, who does not know what he’s talking about, apparently told his father-in-law, “four days after the stay-at-home advice,” that “reopening” by Easter Sunday would be meaningful to his base.

The president also succeeded in persuading some Americans he has more authority than he actually has. No president can “reopen” a country amid a national pandemic. The US is federalist system of government, not a unitary system, like France. Governors are free to follow, or not follow, Center for Disease Control’s public health guidelines. Guidelines are not federal regulations or federal law. They cannot be enforced legally.

So “reopening” the country was always a farce.

Trump did the same thing over the weekend when he said he was “considering” quarantining New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the pandemic’s regional epicenter. A US president can do no such thing unless he’s prepared to send military troops to establish checkpoints. He wasn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop him from claiming that he “changed his mind,” as if he ever had that option to begin with.

By claiming powers he does not have, Trump created rhetorical conditions in which governors can appear at odds with his constitutional authority, even as they work to protect their constituents. In such conditions, Trump can blame individual governors, Republican or Democrat, for the coming recession. He can use this inter-governmental conflict to hide his administration’s efforts to undermine state-level containment.

States need ventilators. The administration isn’t helping; it is in fact outbidding them, according to the governors of Massachusetts and Michigan, a Republican and a Democrat, respectively. One gets the feeling they are not entitled to aid. One gets the feeling they must first kiss Trump’s ring. “I want them to be appreciative,” he said.

If that sounds like quid pro quo, that’s because it is. If that sounds like the same thing Trump did to Ukraine’s president, that’s because it is. And you’re not alone. CNN’s Ronald Brownstein asked Friday: “Trump says the quiet part out loud: after signaling he’d only help governors who praise him, he says so explicitly. Isn’t this essentially what he said to Ukraine: play ball politically or you won’t get your aid?” Yes, it is.

My senator, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, echoed that on Twitter:

“Mr. President, Michigan needs masks and tests. People are going to die if we don’t get them.”

“I would like you to do me a favor, though.”

Americans are notorious for their short memories. For this reason, we have been looking at the coronavirus pandemic as a matter of public health or economics or both. It’s more than that, though. It’s a continuation of our ongoing constitutional crisis.

A president who has been acquitted of betraying his country after extorting a foreign leader into sabotaging our national elections is just the kind of president who would betray his fellow Americans when the mood strikes him. Who’s going to stop him?

That said, the comparison isn’t quite fair. After all, no one died from Trump’s betrayal. The COVID-19 death toll now stands at nearly 2,500. The CDC expects 200,000 dead and more. We have not been thinking of constitutional crises in terms of body count.

We should, though. Treason kills, too.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 835

—————-

TUNIS — In the face of the mounting toll of the coronavirus pandemic, most of the Arab region, as many other parts of the world, has been catapulted into full lockdown mode, with airline travel suspended, schools shuttered, human movement reduced to strict essentials and economic activity screeching to a halt.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases passed 5,000 in Turkey and 3,000 in Israel and was more than 1,000 in Saudi Arabia. Most other countries in the Middle East and North Africa reported hundreds of cases.

Iran remains the worst-hit country in the region, with an official death toll of more than 2,500 and more than 35,000 people infected. About 21,000 people were hospitalised and more than 3,000 were listed in serious or critical condition.

Restrictive measures gradually escalated to daytime and night-time curfews in many places, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Algeria.

Convincing citizens of abiding by curfews and confinement orders has not been easy. Authorities have made arrests, confiscated cars and imposed steeper penalties against violators.

In Jordan, no fewer than 2,000 people were arrested and arrests were made in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. In Saudi Arabia, social media posts showing violations of the curfew can draw sentences of up to 5 years in prison and fines of $800,000.

Sometimes, ordering curfews was easier said than done. Chaotic distribution of goods forced Jordanian officials to relax restrictions.

To dissuade violators of confinement rules, Tunisian police used robots. Zipping through Tunis and handing out infractions to those violating quarantine measures, the security devices made a splash with the public after some people had been reluctant to follow government directives.

“With thermal anomaly detection, real-time video and audio capabilities and a laser telemetry system, the vehicles are an effective tool for ministry officials to communicate government messages and interact with the public while limiting person-to-person contact,” said Radhouane Ben Farhat, commercial director of Enova Robotics, which manufactured the robots.

In most of the Arab world, wariness about the disease and respect for the restrictions prevailed. Social workers and retired doctors volunteered to help. A group of 150 people, mostly women, also volunteered in Tunisia to confine themselves in a factory for a month to manufacture much-needed surgical masks.

Some Salafist advocates tried to exploit the situation by billing mosques closures and bans on group prayers as an assault on the faith but they seemed to have little sway with the public.

Most mainstream Muslims scholars have been supportive of government decisions closing all places of worship as a precautionary measure to stem the spread of the virus.

“After carefully considering the nature of this contagious and rapidly spreading virus and its impact on lives, together with the societal, religious and political implications, scholars agreed… all Muslims and citizens of the United Kingdom should adopt social distancing,” read a statement signed by Islamic figures in the United Kingdom.

Moroccan Salafist preacher Abou Naim called the closures “a scandal” and issued threats that led to authorities arresting him on anti-terrorism laws.

“Whether in Algeria, Morocco or Egypt, Salafists seem to have agreed on using the epidemic to serve their political ambitions,” noted Egyptian writer Ahmad Hafez.

Unauthorised but mostly tolerated nightly marches continued by small crowds in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and other places, uttering religious chants and praying for divine help in “defeating the epidemic.”

In their calls for prayers, muezzins asked the faithful to pray at home while Quranic recitations continued to be broadcast from mosque minarets.

In Baghdad, the anniversary of the death, in the eighth century, of Imam Musa al-Kadhim drew tens of thousands of pilgrims, encouraged to attend by influential Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr.

As they sit home and ponder the public health crisis, many spend time watching television and surfing the internet. Sober discussions are often punctuated with conspiracy theories.

Nowhere was the appeal of conspiracy theories more evident than in an opinion survey conducted March 25-26 in Tunisia that stated that 46% of respondents said they shared the conspiratorial view that the coronavirus was man-made by “US labs seeking to weaken China.”

About 30% of those asked said the contagion was the result of a “natural phenomenon” and 16% blamed hygiene lapses in China.

Lamine Ghanmi is a veteran Reuters journalist. He has covered North Africa for decades and is based in Tunis.

Samar Kadi is the Arab Weekly society and travel section editor.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 704

—————-

My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.

The year 1929 brought the Great Depression and lean times. My father’s father had left the family, so my dad, then 12, had to pitch in. He got a newspaper route, which he kept for four years, quitting high school after tenth grade so he could earn money for the family. In 1935, like millions of other young men of that era, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a creation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that offered work on environmental projects of many kinds. He battled forest fires in Oregon for two years before returning to his family and factory work. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army, going back to a factory job when World War II ended. Times grew a little less lean in 1951 when he became a firefighter, after which he felt he could afford to buy a house and start a family.

I’m offering all this personal history as the context for a prediction of my dad’s that, for obvious reasons, came to my mind again recently. When I was a teenager, he liked to tell me: “I had it tough in the beginning and easy in the end. You, Willy, have had it easy in the beginning, but will likely have it tough in the end.” His prophecy stayed with me, perhaps because even then, somewhere deep down, I already suspected that my dad was right.

The COVID-19 pandemic is now grabbing the headlines, all of them, and a global recession, if not a depression, seems like a near-certainty. The stock market has been tanking and people’s lives are being disrupted in fundamental and scary ways. My dad knew the experience of losing a loved one to disease, of working hard to make ends meet during times of great scarcity, of sacrificing for the good of one’s family. Compared to him, it’s true that, so far, I’ve had an easier life as an officer in the Air Force and then a college teacher and historian. But at age 57, am I finally ready for the hard times to come? Are any of us?

And keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Climate change (recall Australia’s recent and massive wildfires) promises yet more upheavals, more chaos, more diseases. America’s wanton militarism and lying politicians promise more wars. What’s to be done to avert or at least attenuate the tough times to come, assuming my dad’s prediction is indeed now coming true? What can we do?

It’s time to reimagine America Here’s the one thing about major disruptions to normalcy: they can create opportunities for dramatic change. (Disaster capitalists know this, too, unfortunately.) President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this in the 1930s and orchestrated his New Deal to revive the economy and put Americans like my dad back to work.

In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney capitalized on the shock-and-awe disruption of the 9/11 attacks to inflict on the world their vision of a Pax Americana, effectively a militarized imperium justified (falsely) as enabling greater freedom for all. The inherent contradiction in such a dreamscape was so absurd as to make future calamity inevitable. Recall what an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scribbled down, only hours after the attack on the Pentagon and the collapse of the Twin Towers, as his boss’s instructions (especially when it came to looking for evidence of Iraqi involvement): “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” And indeed they would do just that, with an emphasis on the “not,” including, of course, the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

To progressive-minded people thinking about this moment of crisis, what kind of opportunities might open to us when (or rather if) Donald Trump is gone from the White House? Perhaps this coronaviral moment is the perfect time to consider what it would mean for us to go truly big, but without the usual hubris or those disastrous invasions of foreign countries. To respond to COVID-19, climate change, and the staggering wealth inequities in this country that, when combined, will cause unbelievable levels of needless suffering, what’s needed is a drastic reordering of our national priorities.

Remember, the Fed’s first move was to inject $1.5 trillion into the stock market. (That would have been enough to forgive all current student debt.) The Trump administration has also promised to help airlines, hotels, and above all oil companies and the fracking industry, a perfect storm when it comes to trying to sustain and enrich those upholding a kleptocratic and amoral status quo.

This should be a time for a genuinely new approach, one fit for a world of rising disruption and disaster, one that would define a new, more democratic, less bellicose America. To that end, here are seven suggestions, focusing — since I’m a retired military officer — mainly on the U.S. military, a subject that continues to preoccupy me, especially since, at present, that military and the rest of the national security state swallow up roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending:

1. If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. There was never, for example, any sense in investing up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal. (Why are new weapons needed to exterminate humanity when the “old” ones still work just fine?) Hundreds of stealth fighters and bombers — it’s estimated that Lockheed Martin’s disappointing F-35 jet fighter alone will cost $1.5 trillion over its life span — do nothing to secure us from pandemics, the devastating effects of climate change, or other all-too-pressing threats. Such weaponry only emboldens a militaristic and chauvinistic foreign policy that will facilitate yet more wars and blowback problems of every sort. And speaking of wars, isn’t it finally time to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? More than $6 trillion has already been wasted on those wars and, in this time of global peril, even more is being wasted on this country’s forever conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (Roughly $4 billion a month continues to be spent on Afghanistan alone, despite all the talk about “peace” there.)

2. Along with ending profligate weapons programs and quagmire wars, isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? Roughly 800 U.S. military bases circle the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion at a yearly cost somewhere north of $100 billion. Cutting such numbers in half over the next decade would be a more than achievable goal. Permanently cutting provocative “war games” in South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere would be no less sensible. Are North Korea and Russia truly deterred by such dramatic displays of destructive military might?

3. Come to think of it, why does the U.S. need the immediate military capacity to fight two major foreign wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon continues to insist we do and plan for, in the name of “defending” our country? Here’s a radical proposal: if you add 70,000 Special Operations forces to 186,000 Marine Corps personnel, the U.S. already possesses a potent quick-strike force of roughly 250,000 troops. Now, add in the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. What you have is more than enough military power to provide for America’s actual national security. All other Army divisions could be reduced to cadres, expandable only if our borders are directly threatened by war. Similarly, restructure the Air Force and Navy to de-emphasize the present “global strike” vision of those services, while getting rid of Donald Trump’s newest service, the Space Force, and the absurdist idea of taking war into low earth orbit. Doesn’t America already have enough war here on this small planet of ours?

4. Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. It’s time for a new Civilian Conservation Corps focused on fostering a Green New Deal. It’s time for a new Works Progress Administration to rebuild America’s infrastructure and reinvigorate our culture, as that organization did in the Great Depression years. It’s time to engage young people in service to this country. Tackling COVID-19 or future pandemics would be far easier if there were quickly trained medical aides who could help free doctors and nurses to focus on the more difficult cases. Tackling climate change will likely require more young men and women fighting forest fires on the west coast, as my dad did while in the CCC — and in a climate-changing world there will be no shortage of other necessary projects to save our planet. Isn’t it time America’s youth answered a call to service? Better yet, isn’t it time we offered them the opportunity to truly put America, rather than themselves, first?

5. And speaking of “America First,” that eternal Trumpian catch-phrase, isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism, not to speak of politics that divide, distract, and keep so many down? President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that only Americans can truly hurt America, but there’s a corollary to that: only Americans can truly save America — by uniting, focusing on our common problems, and uplifting one another. To do so, it’s vitally necessary to put an end to fear-mongering (and warmongering). As President Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear inhibits our ability to think clearly, to cooperate fully, to change things radically as a community.

6. To cite Yoda, the Jedi master, we must unlearn what we have learned. For example, America’s real heroes shouldn’t be “warriors” who kill or sports stars who throw footballs and dunk basketballs. We’re witnessing our true heroes in action right now: our doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, together with our first responders, and those workers who stay in grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like and continue to serve us all despite the danger of contracting the coronavirus from customers. They are all selflessly resisting a threat too many of us either didn’t foresee or refused to treat seriously, most notably, of course, President Donald Trump: a pandemic that transcends borders and boundaries. But can Americans transcend the increasingly harsh and divisive borders and boundaries of our own minds? Can we come to work selflessly to save and improve the lives of others? Can we become, in a sense, lovers of humanity?

7. Finally, we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet. For if we keep treating our lands, our waters, and our skies like a set of trash cans and garbage bins, our children and their children will inherit far harder times than the present moment, hard as it may be.

What these seven suggestions really amount to is rejecting a militarized mindset of aggression and a corporate mindset of exploitation for one that sees humanity and this planet more holistically. Isn’t it time to regain that vision of the earth we shared collectively during the Apollo moon missions: a fragile blue sanctuary floating in the velvety darkness of space, an irreplaceable home to be cared for and respected since there’s no other place for us to go? Otherwise, I fear that my father’s prediction will come true not just for me, but for generations to come and in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined.

A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, William Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2020 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 2,038

—————-

One might have thought the coronavirus pandemic would have been an instant and massive boost to xenophobia in Europe and this would be particularly true of Italy.

For it is in Italy that the pandemic has taken its greatest toll and Italy’s far-right League, which has taken its inflammatory viewpoint mainstream in the country and further afield in Europe, enjoys the greatest domestic popularity of any party.

By rights, the conditions should be perfect for the League’s anti-immigrant politics. It should be blooming virulently, in the gritty soil fertilised by fear, fake news, grief and uncertainty.

However, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Termometro Politico (TP), the well-regarded Italian political website, reported that its poll indicated continuing decline in support for the League. The party still has the most support among voters, it said, 31.6%, compared with 21% for the Democratic Party, which is part of the coalition government, but the League’s star appears to be waning rather than shining brighter in the age of coronavirus.

It is significant that the TP poll was conducted March 11-12, 48 hours after the crisis forced the Italian government to announce a stringent national lockdown to halt the spread of the virus. That should have been the very moment when the League, led by Matteo Salvini, tapped into Italy’s sense of panic and dread and wrested the narrative from Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and his administration. He hasn’t managed it — yet.

That’s not for want of trying. In late February, Salvini, a former interior minister, demanded Conte’s resignation for his failure to “defend Italy and Italians.” To refocus the coronavirus-afflicted country’s attention on immigrants and Muslims — his main targets for the past six years as the face and voice of the League — Salvini said: “The infection is spreading. I want to know from the government who has come in and gone out. We have to seal our borders now.”

He returned to his trademark rhetoric about African asylum-seekers arriving in Italy from Libya. “Allowing migrants to land from Africa, where the presence of the virus was confirmed, is irresponsible,” Salvini said. He was wrong on the facts when he said it. At the time, Egypt was the only African country to have reported one confirmed coronavirus case. Libya confirmed its first case March 25.

Salvini also seems to have been wrong in his assumption that Italians would be eager to embrace the League’s customary explanation for their woes. Despite obvious efforts to remind voters that their true enemies are the usual visible ones — immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa — Salvini and the League are drawing tepid interest.

There are two possible reasons. There is the mood of the moment that recognises the unprecedented peril posed by coronavirus, an invisible enemy that knows no borders, in Italy or anywhere. The League’s siren song has less purchase at a time Italians are cleaving together in support of their embattled government as it struggles to fight the pandemic.

Indeed, Italian pollster Ixe recorded that Italy’s confidence in its government increased 6 percentage points to 49% the week of March 23 with Conte’s approval rating rising 6 points to 51%. And, if social media memes are any indication, there are many new and affectionate ones about Conte.

Could Italy’s sudden and apparent deafness to the League’s hateful rhetoric signal a deeper change in Europe generally and more particularly in Italy? Is it possible that the fever has broken and the xenophobic phase is over?

There is little evidence of that. In step with Salvini, the leaders of far-right parties in France, Germany and Spain asked for border closures early in the unfolding coronavirus crisis. The call seemed less to do with public health than the far-right’s trademark, the clamour for walls to keep out refugees and illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, the Hungarian government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, justified its March 1 abolition of the right to asylum by discerning “a certain link between coronavirus and illegal migrants.”

Even so, it’s possible the pandemic will eventually blunt some of the sharpest arguments employed by Europe’s xenophobes.

Post-coronavirus, both the left and the right may be increasingly in sync, albeit for different reasons. Even before the virus outbreak, Europe’s left-leaning environmental movement had been stigmatising air travel and demanding that localisation roll back globalisation. The right had consistently called for strong borders and a reversal of globalisation.

After the pandemic, both wish lists might mesh in a way that leaves little space for xenophobes.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 750

—————-

I consider myself a leftist. That may come as a surprise. I have written a lot here at the Editorial Board in support of a revival of small-r republican liberalism. I’ve also been quite critical of leftism in general and of Bernie Sanders in particular. Fact is, though, I’d love to see virtually all of the Vermont senator’s proposals become law. My beef with Sanders is more a matter of style and principle than of policy and programming.

My other beef is with a particular kind of leftist, the very loud ones who put all politics in huge boxes — good and bad. Little about politics, especially legislative outcomes, can be put into boxes clearly labeled and clearly understood. Good people vote for bad things for good reasons. Bad people vote good things for bad reasons. Not only do some leftists project their views loudly; they project silly visions of magical thinking.

When word came that the president would support legislation that would send every American a check for a thousand dollars and more, the Loud Leftists jumped at the chance to accuse the Democratic Party, which has spurned their candidate, of being “outflanked” by the Republican Party. Here was proof, they said, that the Democrats really are the party of the rich. The Republicans were moving in a socialist direction.

Or something like that. I suppose someone somewhere has probably articulated this view in full voice. I’m not inclined to search for it, though. It’s too ridiculous. The George W. Bush administration cut stimulus checks to blunt the impact of a Great Recession about to steamroll the country. Are Loud Leftists prepared to declare the man who lied to America to launch endless war a Sanders forerunner? I hope not.

What the Trump administration is set to do is obviously much larger in scale, but the objective is the same — to stabilize an economy reeling from a global crisis. But “government intervention” in the economy is not the same thing as socialism. (It’s also not, for the love of God, the same as Universal Basic Income. Checks from the latest round of stimulus funding will last a few months. UBI is about long-term stability.)

Indeed, seeing them as equal is accepting as true propaganda conservatives have used since the Cold War. “Government intervention” was reserved for liberals who favored a social safety net. Any “government intervention,” to Cold War conservatives, was equal to totalitarianism. The question, as we face a plague none has ever faced, shouldn’t be whether to “intervene,” but whether it leads to republican outcomes.

The Loud Leftists were at it again after the Senate passed this week a stimulus package worth $2 trillion. They focused on the corporate giveaways (or “welfare”) that really do stink to high heaven. Here was proof, once again, that the Democrats were rolling over for Trump, thus being complicit in turning the reins of government over to the rich.

Yet they ignore, or seem to ignore, what the Democrats got in return. More money for unemployment insurance. More money for health care. More money for hospitals. More money for cities and states. More in direct cash payments to individuals. In short, billions and billions of dollars for their priorities during a national crisis.

You could say, as the Loud Leftists say, that the Democrats are guilty of bailing out corporations who already don’t pay much, or any, federal income tax. But you could say that that’s what they were willing to accept to get what they wanted. The same, of course, could be said of the Republicans. To get “government handouts” for the rich, the Republicans were eager to eat “government handouts” for workaday Americans.

The truth of the matter is clear in the sheer size of the legislation. It started at $850 billion when the White House was negotiating with Senate Republican only. Trump had to get through Nancy Pelosi, however, and that’s when the price tag more than doubled. The president could have enforced a cap on spending, but he didn’t, and neither did anyone else. The mode of bargaining wasn’t either/or. It was and/also.

Again, none of this is socialist, per se, but we keep talking about it as if it were, because we keep thinking about 21st-century politics in 20th-century terms. We continue using old conservative rhetoric from the Cold War to describe our current reality. I don’t think we are moving in the direction of socialism as much as we are in the direction of corporatism, which, when you think about it, makes a kind of sense.

All things being equal, you can imagine a long-term future in which the monopolistic corporations have become so dependent on the federal government for shareholder-value maximization that they lose control of it, so much so that they grow weak and vulnerable to the whims and whimsies of a fascist president much like the current one.

All things being equal, you can imagine a long-term future, as Mihail Manoilescu did in 1938, with The Century of Corporatism, in which the state is total, and capital’s influence has been squeezed out and its influence diminished, as the country moves down a path toward an inevitable historical endpoint in which “the Social left” rises in triumph.

All things being equal, you can imagine America becoming China.

This leftist is too American for that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 27 March 2020

Word Count: 890

—————-

It’s still unclear to me what Lindsey Graham was complaining about last night. He and three other GOP senators made a stink over a provision in the $2 trillion stimulus bill regarding jobless insurance. It’s unclear because their complaint was incoherent.

They claimed that workers would lose incentive to work if they received too much in unemployment benefits. They’d quit — and go on the dole. But unemployment benefits don’t apply to people who resign. They apply to people furloughed or laid off. Since “incentive” is about choice, and since choice is moot, their mewling was meaningless.

Unless they were trying to save face. Conservatism under Donald Trump is not the conservatism of my youth (think Ronald Reagan), but these people have reputations to protect even if their reputations are political fictions. They understand well what it looks like for “conservatives” who for years sabotaged the economy to wound a black president to, then, all of a sudden support the biggest economic relief package in US history.

The Senate passed the bill last night, but at least Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott, Tom Scott and Ben Sasse had a chance to make-believe they are dutiful limited-government conservatives forced into compromising their principles by circumstance beyond their control. Never mind that they voted yes. Never mind that they could have voted no without jeopardizing the bill’s passage. Never mind, because the play’s the thing.

Still, if we understand their complaint as one of incentives, it’s worth dwelling on. Incentives are central to the economic ideology that has animated the Republicans since forever. That ideology holds that markets are efficient and know better than government how to allocate labor and resources for the benefit of the greater good. “Government interference,” even in its blandest form, is akin to Communism or sacrilege, depending on how much heavenly import you imbue markets with.

It’s always been debatable whether the Republicans really believe what they say they really believe about the markets. (Leftists call it “neoliberalism” and blame both parties equally for its global economic dominance.) What’s not debatable is that the Republicans find ways around their “principles” when a Republican sits in the White House, while rediscovering the zeal of the freshly converted when it’s a Democrat.

Deficits were no big deal during Reagan’s time. Deficits were the end of the world during Bill Clinton’s time. Deficits were nothing to worry about when George W. Bush was president. Deficits were so dangerous the Republicans could not in good conscience help Barack Obama lead the country out of the Great Recession. Now, deficits are trivial again. They’ll be apocalyptic with the next Democratic president.

Whether in good faith or bad, however, markets were still more credible than an activist government. Most people most of the time still thought equal opportunity for businesses was the same as equal opportunity for their fellow Americans. Belief in market ideology was so strong it shaped how people engaged the debate over welfare.

Some said the rich were greedy and held workaday Americans in contempt. That’s why they hated social insurance programs like food stamps, Medicaid and jobless benefits. That couldn’t be right, said the market faithful, who have made up a majority of Americans for half a century. The welfare debate wasn’t about the bigotry of the aristocracy against the plebes. It was about efficiency. It was about incentives. To think otherwise was to think the unthinkable: class war in a classless society.

Like I said, Graham and his cohort were plainly incoherent last night. I still don’t know what they were talking about. But there is one interpretation that makes sense to me as Americans enter into a period of mass death and astronomic unemployment.

That interpretation is this: The rich can be trusted with public money, but not so everyone else. It’s OK to give Boeing tens of billions of dollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going back to work even at the risk of death.

When most people most of the time had ample faith in markets, and when the ideology of markets was credible, it was difficult to see the rank bigotry the very rich often express toward the not very rich. (Not being very rich means you obviously don’t deserving being very rich, which means you are richly deserving of your suffering.)

But I think that faith is waning. Unemployment rose to more than 3.3 million in a week. Deaths from the coronavirus pandemic hit 1,000 today. Markets are not going to save us. Indeed, the billionaires who control markets could make things so much worse. (They could literally kill people.) In a way, it’s fitting that Graham and others were incoherent. Their incoherence reflects a once-powerful ideology in deep decay.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 26 March 2020

Word Count: 823

—————-