07 May 20
RSN is a "Lousy Business Model"
We hear it all the time: RSN is a "Lousy Business Model". It's true and what's more, we are proud of it!
What we do is not, "a business model" it is a community service model, and an organizing model. That's the key: We need money, but we're not in it for the money. We did not start this as a business, we started this because we are angry about what is happening to our country, and other countries as well, and we want to do something about it.
Believe this: RSN is a thorn in the side of the corporate media, not in spite of our Reader Supported non-business model, but precisely because of it. Think about that.
Again our thanks,
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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06 May 20
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Amanda Marcotte | Trump Gives Us the Worst of Both Worlds: A Ruined Economy and a Soaring Death Rate
Amanda Marcotte, Salon
Marcotte writes: "Reopening the country so hastily will lead to mass death - and do massive, lasting damage to the economy too."
epublican governors, bending under Donald Trump's unsubtle pressure, have started to end the restrictions on businesses and other public places that were put in place to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. In reaction, public health officials have been adjusting their models to reflect what is likely to be a rapid spread of new infections. The New York Times obtained a leaked document from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that projects a massive increase in the daily death toll, from 1,750 to 3,000 a day, and suggests we may see as many as 200,000 deaths by June 1.
The reason that the Trump administration and the GOP governors in his thrall are going forward, despite these numbers, is simple: They believe that it's worth the sacrifice of lives to reopen the economy. Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick famously explained the logic to Tucker Carlson on Fox News: "There are more important things than living, and that's saving this country for my children and grandchildren and saving this country for all of us."
Trump has not hidden that he believes that American voters won't care about widespread sickness and death, so long as the economy is doing well. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — who is basically the White House chief of staff now, no matter who officially holds the position — also seem to believe that the only thing stopping the economy from roaring back to life is the lockdowns, not the virus itself.
Indeed, Kushner made headlines last week by claiming that the crisis was basically over already. By July, he predicted, the country would be "really rocking again."
It appears far more likely, however, that Trump's strategy will result in the worst of both worlds: One where the economy is in the tank and the virus itself is devastating the country.
Trump's path on this couldn't have been worse, even if he was actively trying to destroy America. (Which is certainly one way to interpret his actions.) First, he delayed the shutdown recommendations and ignored the coronavirus for months, allowing infections to spread unchecked. Then, once the horse was already out of the barn, he reluctantly allowed shutdown orders to go forward. But being shortsighted and impatient, he and many Republican governors are now shutting down the shutdown well before the pandemic has been contained. The result is obvious: There will be a ton of serious economic pain, and most of that sacrifice will be for naught as the virus starts to spread again.
Trump's optimistic assumptions about the economy roaring back to life have no apparent connection to reality. For one thing, the economic damage is already so widespread and severe that it's magical thinking to imagine that everything will rebound quickly. The last time the country had an unemployment rate this high was during the Great Depression, which lasted a full decade. The grim reality is that economies don't bounce back after taking such a massive hit.
True, this is a unique circumstance in that the economic crash was not fundamentally due to market problems, but to the government shutting down public places. Some economists hope the recovery will be swifter than usual once the crisis is over, and of course we should all hope they're right.
But even if that is true, there's reason to believe the damage is too widespread to simply heal overnight. Too many businesses have already gone under, and rehiring all the people out of work isn't going to happen overnight. J.Crew has already filed bankruptcy and numerous other major retailers and large corporations are likely right behind them. As Annie Lowrey at the Atlantic reports, small businesses across the country are collapsing. Like it or not, a lot of the jobs aren't coming back just because states decide it's time to reopen. We are likely in this for the long haul.
There's good reason to fear that by reopening prematurely, the economic damage will be even worse than if we pursued a more rational course. Beyond the sobering death rate, the FEMA projection predicts an eightfold growth of infections, from 25,000 a day to 200,000. That would be 6 million people newly infected within a single month. That kind of widespread sickness — even if the vast majority of those people will recover, and some never become noticeably ill — is simply not compatible with the "rocking" economy of Trump and Kushner's dreams. Sick people can't work. Even those who have extremely mild symptoms will likely be under quarantine (as they certainly should be) to stop further spread.
People who see these rising rates of sickness and death will not be overly eager to return to "normal" life. New polling from the Washington Post shows that this is not a situation of "if we reopen, they will come." On the contrary, 67% of Americans said they would be uncomfortable going to a retail store and 78% said the same about going to a restaurant.
Prematurely ending the lockdowns could also force even more small businesses to close their doors. As Emily Stewart at Vox reports, being "allowed" to reopen could be devastating for some small businesses like hair salons. When the lockdown was mandatory, employees at such businesses qualified for unemployment. Now they no longer will, in most cases — but they can't exactly go back to work as usual if no customers are coming in. So all those workers and small-business proprietors will be much worse off than when they were being forcibly shut down. Business will be "open" and people will be employed or employable, technically speaking. But whether there's actually work or any revenue coming in just because the doors are open is quite a different matter.
"You can't reopen your hair salon if there's no one there to do hair," Stewart writes.
Restaurants, retail shops and so on will largely face the same problem. Dramatically reduced foot traffic, plus the reluctance of many employees to return to work, will mean waiters losing out on tips and store clerks seeing their hours dramatically reduced, if they're not laid off entirely.
Forcing millions of people off unemployment into "jobs" that provide no real income will be devastating for the economy, arguably much worse than the situation of the last several weeks. People can't spend money they don't have, full stop. And the economic slowdown that will result will reverberate throughout the country.
Furthermore, states who see their hospitals get overcrowded and death rates soar are likely to panic and reinstate lockdowns, causing more rounds of unemployment and more businesses to shut down. As painful as extending the current lockdowns would have been, adding more chaos and sickness will just make the whole situation worse. (The governor of Mississippi, as red as a state as one could imagine, seems to have tentatively come to this understanding,)
Donald Trump doesn't care about any of this, of course. Being a sociopathic narcissist, he has undue confidence that he can just bullshit his way out of this situation (or any other). Instead of focusing energy and resources towards fighting the virus, as media critic Jay Rosen writes, Trump will instead focus his energies on "one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history."
Trump's focus, as usual, will be on how to pin the blame for all the deaths and all the economic devastation on someone else: the governors, the Democrats, the scientists, Barack Obama, whoever. In that sense, he clearly believes he's got a win-win situation. If the public is outraged over the rising death toll, he can blame governors for ending the lockdowns prematurely. If the public is outraged over the economy, he can blame the governors for having lockdowns in the first place.
We've already seen Trump's having-it-both-ways strategy, in his treatment of Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Under pressure from Trump (and out of a desire not to keep paying unemployment benefits to hairdressers, tattoo artists and other employees in shut-down businesses), Kemp moved to reopen Georgia's economy too early and too rapidly. As soon as he did so, however, Trump castigated him for it. Now, whatever happens — whether the coronavirus devastates Georgia or not — Trump can claim that he wasn't responsible for any mistakes that were made.
The silver lining in all this: It's not likely to work. Trump's gamble that he can be the first president in history whom people don't blame for tough times is a product of his extreme narcissism, and not based on any evidence outside the fantasy world in his head. It's particularly hard to imagine how he'll pull that off when there's such a wealth of video footage of Trump claiming to have "total" authority, announcing that a miracle is in sight, hogging credit for things he didn't do and declaring premature victory. For Democrats, creating campaign ads that contrast endless, fatuous Trump's self-congratulation with his total unwillingness to accept responsibility should be a breeze.
Ahmaud Arbery. (photo: News4Jax)
ALSO SEE: Georgia Family Seeks Justice for Vigilante Murder
of 25-Year-Old Ahmaud Arbery
Georgia to Consider Charges in Killing of Unarmed Black Jogger as Video Emerges
Joanna Walters, Guardian UK
Walters writes: "A prosecutor in Georgia said he would ask a grand jury to decide if charges should be filed against a white former law enforcement officer and his son over the fatal shooting of an unarmed young black man as he ran through a small town."
EXCERPT:
Prosecutors were reluctant to charge former police officer and son in shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery
prosecutor in Georgia said he would ask a grand jury to decide if charges should be filed against a white former law enforcement officer and his son over the fatal shooting of an unarmed young black man as he ran through a small town.
The shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery outside Brunswick, Georgia, in February was captured on videotape and posted on social media on Tuesday, stirring outrage over the reluctance of prosecutors to file charges against Gregory McMichael and his son, Travis.
The video footage, which was taken by an unidentified witness in another car, shows Arbery jogging down a narrow two-lane road and around a white pickup truck stopped in the right lane, its driver’s door open.
As Arbery crosses back in front of the truck a gunshot is fired. Arbery is then seen struggling with a man holding a long gun as a second man stands in the bed of the truck brandishing a revolver. Two more shots are heard before Arbery stumbles and falls face-down on to the asphalt.
The graphic footage has prompted an outcry and demands for justice; the activist Shaun King posted the video on Twitter, describing it as “one of the worst things I’ve seen in my entire life”.
Tom Durden, the acting district attorney for a neighboring district, said in a letter posted on Facebook that he believed “the case should be presented to the grand jury of Glynn county for consideration of criminal charges against those involved in the death of Mr Arbery”.
Durden, who was assigned to investigate the fatal shooting after prosecutors in Brunswick and a neighboring district recused themselves due to potential conflicts of interest, said he would present the case to the next available grand jury in Glynn county. That grand jury might not meet until mid-June or later because courts were under restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
According to a police report obtained by the New York Times, Gregory McMichael, a former police officer and district attorney’s investigator, told investigators the incident began when he spotted Arbery from his front yard “hauling ass” down the street.
McMichael told police that, because he suspected Arbery in a string of recent neighborhood break-ins, he summoned his son and the two men gave chase in the truck, Gregory McMichael carrying a .357 Magnum revolver and Travis armed with a shotgun.
Gregory McMichael said Arbery began to “violently attack” his son and fought over the shotgun, prompting Travis to open fire. It is not clear from the police report or the videotape if Gregory McMichael also fired on Arbery.
But it appears from the video footage that by the time the clearly unarmed Arbery is tussling with Travis McMichael, who is holding the long gun, a shot has already been fired.
The Democratic presidential candidate and presumptive nominee Joe Biden tweeted that it was clear Arbery was killed “in cold blood” and called for a full murder investigation.
A Palestinian man walks past a coronavirus-themed mural in Gaza City on April 28. (photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty)
Rashida Tlaib and Alan Lowenthal | The Trump Administration Must Release All Approved Funds to Help Palestinians Fight the Coronavirus
Rashida Tlaib and Alan Lowenthal, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "As members of Congress who come from different backgrounds - a Jewish American from Queens and a Palestinian American from Detroit - and who hold different views on how to achieve peace and justice in the Middle East, we share a fundamental belief that the humanity, dignity, safety and rights of all people should be protected."
READ MORE
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: David Zalubowski/AP)
Bernie Sanders Gets Chance to Pick Up New York Delegates, After Judge Orders Democratic Primary Restored
Grace Panetta, Business Insider
Panetta writes: "A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the New York State Board of Elections must hold a presidential primary election and restore Sen. Bernie Sanders and all other presidential candidates who qualified to the ballot."
READ MORE
Nuns rally outside the Supreme Court in 2016 following oral arguments in seven cases dealing with religious organizations that want to ban contraceptives from their health insurance policies. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
Supreme Court Hears Case on Birth Control Access and Obamacare
Nina Totenberg, NPR
Totenberg writes: "A closely divided Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in a case involving Trump administration rules that would allow employers who claim a religious or moral objection to opt out of providing free birth control in their health care plans."
READ MORE
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presents onstage at a reception before an event at the Temple Emanu-El Skirball Center on Sept. 21, 2016 in New York City. (photo: Michael Kovac/Getty)
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Joins Oral Argument by Telephone From Hospital
Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
Wolf writes: "Chalk up another 'first' for Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: participating in oral argument from her hospital bed."
READ MORE
These turbines, featured in the film, have since been removed. (photo: 'Planet of the Humans')
The Important Debate Planet of the Humans Misses
Kate Aronoff, The New Republic
Aronoff writes: "Instead of lambasting yesteryear's renewable energy, the movie could have taken up current, more relevant questions."
lanet of the Humans—the Michael Moore–backed documentary about the alleged folly of green energy—is a mess. Since its April 21 release, numerous expert critics have detailed the film’s use of outdated and cherry-picked information. The climate movement and clean energy sector that director Jeff Gibbs and producer-protagonist Ozzie Zehner criticize in the film, outraged environmentalists have pointed out, doesn’t remotely resemble today’s reality.
Author Bill McKibben, whom Gibbs bizarrely fixates on as an exemplar of corporate environmentalism, has repeatedly rebutted the film’s ad hominem attacks and pessimistic take on environmental activism: Several of the decaying wind turbines and abandoned solar panels criticized in the film no longer exist, in some cases long since replaced by new and higher-functioning renewables. Problems of intermittency and efficiency with solar power, which the film cites as proof of solar technology’s failure, have been vastly improved through years of dedicated research, political scientist Leah Stokes noted for Vox, while the film, she added, says almost nothing about fossil fuel companies’ malfeasance. “Renewable energy is still so new, so fast-changing that the facts about renewable energy are not universally known,” filmmaker Josh Fox wrote aptly in The Nation. “We still have far to go in teaching people the basics of renewable energy. And the film trades on this widespread ignorance in appalling and deceitful ways.”
These criticisms are all, of course, correct. But much as a broken clock is right twice a day, there’s a tiny kernel of truth buried deep under the mountains of outdated disinformation in Planet of the Humans. There are real, thorny questions about our low-carbon future that deserve to be debated in public: questions about public land use, the supply chains that the renewable energy industry depends on, climate crisis profiteering, and more. Gibbs offers no guide to addressing any of these. Instead, parroting climate deniers’ insistence that renewables are as bad as fossil fuels, the film poisons the well for any kind of constructive debate.
Gibbs spends most of his film crafting a series of straw men out of long-spoiled bales. He spends a great deal of time on biomass energy, for example, to argue that renewables are wasteful and counterproductive. But biomass today supplies less than 2 percent of power in the United States and hasn’t been a favored solution of the environmental groups Gibbs skewers for years; both McKibben and the Sierra Club (another one of the film’s targets) have criticized it—a fact McKibben raised with Gibbs months before the film’s release to no avail. In its attack on solar energy, the film tours a type of large-scale, last-generation solar facility in Southern California that will never be built again and focuses on a set of panels that are orders of magnitude less efficient than today’s panels. It cites details on electric cars’ alleged emissions footprint that are no longer true. And the movements that have shaped the climate conversation in the last decade—indigenous-led fights against Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines, Climate Strikes, the Green New Deal—go mostly unmentioned.
One legitimate concern the film could have focused on is how utility companies and private developers deploy large-scale renewables on federal land. That’s an issue environmental groups—like those the film attacks as being too credulous on renewable energy—have in fact repeatedly raised. While renewable energy development is stymied by dark-money spending at least as much as—if not more than—local resistance, renewables do need to attend to issues of public participation in what gets built, how renewable infrastructure is designed, and who benefits from that development. Such concerns over democratic input and environmental impact assessments shouldn’t be laughed off as wingnuttery from either a moral or a practical standpoint—especially given that renewables need to expand rapidly if we’re to meet urgent emissions targets. Yet by gathering all his gripes about low-carbon energy into a single, shoddily researched product, Gibbs makes it easier for green energy advocates to dismiss any and all concerns as the work of propaganda artists or crackpots.
Similarly, human rights campaigners and eco-socialists have long worried about the conditions under which minerals used in solar panels and electric vehicles are extracted. Procuring lithium and other metals ethically and sustainably will be vital in coming years as the solar industry expands. Gibbs’s film sloppily insists renewables are bad and will always be bad, making it harder to have a good-faith conversation about how the components of the energy transition are procured.
In the end, many of the film’s problems stem from its inability to perceive a crucial distinction—one environmentalists can miss, too—between renewables advocates and the renewables industry. Gibbs targets a so-called “green energy movement” that doesn’t exist. A number of people and movements currently favor expanding green energy, whether through measures like renewable portfolio standards and campaigns to shutter coal-fired power plants, or as part of more comprehensive approaches like the Green New Deal, to move away from fossil fuels entirely. Separate from those favoring green energy is the renewables sector itself—now a $1.5 trillion industry that operates a lot like any other industry. Its goal is to make a profit, with competing firms looking to sell their products to as many people as possible and return value to investors and shareholders. It cuts corners, bust unions, and violates labor law. In that, the people making money from clean energy and ugly, continent-spanning supply chains are not wholly unlike those who produce cell phones and laptops. They lobby lawmakers. Many of them struck a bargain with Congress to support lifting the crude oil export ban in 2015 in exchange for a temporary tax-credit extension. While the levels of regulatory capture and political spending they engage in pale in comparison to the fossil fuel industry, these are first and foremost for-profit firms, not tree-hugging do-gooders. Climate advocates should pay more attention to how this industry works and stop giving it a free pass for bad behavior: Too often, discussions of 100 percent renewable energy neglect questions of power and ownership, all but assuming that a new class of green entrepreneurs will step in to take the place of today’s fossil fuel magnates. Alas, this is not the kind of nuanced lesson viewers will glean watching Gibbs’s ham-fisted explanation of how energy and electric cars worked a decade ago.
Given executive producer Moore’s longtime interest in automakers’ malpractice, the snippet on electric vehicles in Planet of the Humans might have been a chance to skewer the auto industry for using EV production as an excuse to outsource jobs, one of the grievances presented by workers in a recent United Auto Workers strike. Gibbs, as director, might have included interviews with union autoworkers who are pushing to retool their factories to participate in the energy transition. Who benefits from clean energy, and on whose terms will it scale up? Where do workers fit in? How will they be treated and protected? Instead of asking these questions, Gibbs meditates on his cherry-picked, out-of-date factoids, reporting with glee that GM salespeople presenting the Chevrolet Volt in 2010 plugged their car into a grid that still ran on fossil fuels. “Is it possible,” he asks, “for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?” It’s an approach more at home in a freshman dorm room than a film with the backing of one of America’s most prominent documentarians.
Since Moore’s 1989 debut with Roger & Me, his films have punched up with humor at automakers, gun manufacturers, health care companies, and the Bush administration. Lacking both Moore’s charisma and his grasp of political economy, Gibbs replaces Moore’s concern for the lives and well-being of working people with his own concern for a planet he believes would be better off with far fewer of those people. Humanity, in Planet of the Humans, is the enemy, and any attempts to salvage its future are fair game for ridicule as the work of either profiteering liars or misdirected rubes. The film’s turn toward population control isn’t just nihilistic but nasty and has an ugly history in environmentalism. Protecting the trees has almost always come with a judgment about which kind and color of humans they need protection from. Early conservationists sought to preserve white bloodlines and the California redwoods alike, evicting indigenous Americans from land they had stewarded for centuries to make room for white settlers’ romanticism. For people like the late John Tanton—a Sierra Club activist and founder of influential xenophobic groups like NumbersUSA—immigrants were an invasive species to be eradicated so that earth’s natural beauty could thrive. That Gibbs interviews almost no people of color or people from the global south and talks mostly to men, in his 90-plus minutes of screen time, makes these similarities particularly tough to ignore. Gibbs does not appear to be a white nationalist himself, but his film echoes their approach.
Planet of the Humans paints the green energy future in black and white. Reality, of course, will fall somewhere between Gibbs’s Malthusian nihilism and the shiny private tech utopias imagined by profit-seeking clean energy developers. A feature-length documentary about renewables made by an avowed environmentalist in 2020 could arm the public with information to work toward a better place along that spectrum, helping movements and policymakers alike ensure that the benefits of the energy transition are shared broadly. Gibbs doesn’t have such critical democratic engagement in mind. He mainly seems to want his audience to be as hopelessly gloomy as he is.
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