25 March 20
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24 March 20
We must reject such authoritarian measures wholly, no matter who says they’re ‘necessary’
We all watched in horror as the months-long media spectacle replayed footage of the towers swallowing airplanes and crumbling into fire and dust. The moment of national solidarity and everyday heroism was brief.
The government quickly responded by attempting to achieve two things: one, expanding executive power, and two, transferring public wealth into private corporations. The Bush administration achieved the first by passing the Patriot Act, which built the foundation for what is probably the world’s most expansive surveillance state, but also by setting legal precedents that violated basic constitutional rights and by creating the Department for Homeland Security, with its aggressive constituent agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The second goal was achieved with the “war on terror”, which involved unilateral occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and subsequent military forays into many African countries. In Iraq, private security, logistics and reconstruction contractors swallowed up $138bn alone. Since 2001, $5.9tn in taxpayer dollars have gone toward wars (not to mention resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and a foreign policy blackhole that still haunts the Middle East). Neither of these goals addressed the root cause of the crisis, and arguably exacerbated the conditions that led to 9/11.
The second national emergency my generation experienced was the 2008 housing bubble collapse and subsequent recession: the most severe economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Again the federal government, this time under Barack Obama’s administration, sought to exploit the crisis to move vast wealth from the public treasury into private bank accounts. A staggering $14tn was transferred from taxpayers to private hands, including Wall Street executives who used that money to continue giving themselves seven-figure bonuses. One of the largest recipients of bailout money, Citigroup, paid out $5.3bn to employees in bonuses. While the federal government debatably halted a further stock market collapse, they certainly did not address the root cause of the crisis. A mere 11 years later and we are again standing on the edge of a major economic crisis.
Ecological devastation, meanwhile, is the quiet crisis amplifier that has persisted through both of these national emergencies and cast a shadow over the whole of my generation. Its latest iteration is the Covid-19 pandemic,
whose origins lay in habitat destruction and biodiversity loss.
Once again, the federal government appears poised to exploit this emergency to expand executive power and move wealth from the public treasury into private bank accounts. As the Nation recently reported, an internal CBP directive empowers the agency to indefinitely monitor and detain anyone suspected of carrying the virus. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has begun a bailout for the oil industry, which could exceed $2.6bn in tax dollars going to oil industry control, and is toying with the idea of an airline industry bailout, which could exceed $50bn.
The authoritarian lockdowns in China and Italy may soon arrive to the anglophone world. Seeing self-avowed leftists and liberals praising such draconian reactions is frightening. Anyone who cares about democracy and civil liberty should not welcome such responses. As we witnessed with the authoritarian reactions to 9/11, emergency violations of civil liberties are not easily rolled back, and often aggregate over time. In the wake of 9/11, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which gave sweeping powers to the executive branch. In 2012, Obama signed an expanded version into law,
which gave the president the power to “hold individuals, including US citizens, in military detention indefinitely”, which means for life. We must reject such authoritarian measures wholly, no matter who says they’re “necessary”.
The fact is, neither expanding executive power nor redistributing wealth upward will save lives or address the root cause of the crisis. In fact, both the oil and airline industries are accelerating the ecological devastation at the heart of this pandemic. As ecological collapse continues to unfold, more and more emergencies like this will occur with greater frequency and intensity. Now is the time to break out of the recurring pattern in which national responses not only fail to solve the problem, but even exacerbate the original cause, while transferring wealth from taxpayers to already-wealthy, well-connected executives. Instead, now is the time to implement a set of standards for what constitutes a response that puts the common good at the center.
In the case of this virus, there are plenty of good ideas already being discussed that would do exactly that. Instead of moving public wealth into private corporations, the government should be doing the opposite.
The first step to containing this virus is handing out cash to every American to fund their ability to self-isolate without having to go to work. A basic income of, at minimum, subsistence rate would achieve this. The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for implementing an emergency universal basic income, while presidential candidate Bernie Sanders suggested delivering a monthly $2,000 check to every household to deal with lost income.
Providing universal healthcare, both during the virus flareup and after, would also go a long way to containing its spread and reducing its seasonal intensity; the for-profit system is
probably exacerbating the spread of the virus. Subsidizing or even nationalizing essential goods and services like utilities, pharmaceuticals and distribution of basic necessities could also help contain the virus and reduce its negative long-term impacts, and ensure that those services remain available to all. The Trump administration has (surprisingly)
ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to halt evictions and foreclosures temporarily. Taking that further and reforming or eliminating them, even past the worst of the pandemic, could help soften conditions leading to virus spreading in the future.
Interim support for local services, like small businesses and charities, would also help keep local infrastructure intact beyond the most intense phases of social isolation. Dismantling the prison industrial complex and deeply reforming the justice system would help as well. The US has the highest incarceration rate and absolute prison population in the world. Abolishing the institution would go a long way toward reducing the impact of highly infectious viruses, given that prisons are “
the perfect incubators” for coronaviruses. Finally, bypassing intellectual property laws with regard to vaccine development, and preventing anyone from limiting access for private profit, would also be important, both now and beyond the pandemic.
Of course the best thing we can do is halt the twin ecological and climate crises that are now driving so many existential emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic. But, in the meantime of attending to that herculean task, the least we can be doing is agreeing on a set of responses that reject authoritarian exercises of executive power and the further enrichment of the already wealthy at the expense of the public. Instead, we should be responding to such national crises by saving lives and fortifying the common good. Through a series of compounding national emergencies, a benevolent response would be the first my generation has ever witnessed.
Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has run the firm longer than anyone since Sidney Weinberg, who died in 1969. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
Back to Work? You First.
Hamilton Nolan, In These Times
Nolan writes: "'We must reopen the economy,' you say. 'It is vital that we send people back to work,' you say. Well, it sounds important. By all means - you first."
The cure must not be worse than the problem, the president says. It is important that we not disincentive work, right-wing economists say. Keeping things closed could devastate the economy, business leaders say. These things are a tradeoff, you see. Yes, some people will die if we put everyone back to work sooner than the health experts say. But these things are inevitable. And the economic damage could be awful if we don’t.
Okay. All of you line up, to report to work.
Lloyd Blankfein, the reasonable cheerleader for restarting commerce, you can be a doorman, throwing open the doors of your Manhattan office building for all the bankers to return to their desks. The doorman, who prefers not to die, can be the CEO of Goldman Sachs. That office is sufficiently large for social distancing, I’m sure.
Art Laffer, the discredited economist, can be a waiter in a crowded restaurant. A waiter, who prefers not to die, can become an economist. No waiter could be a worse economist than Art Laffer, anyhow.
Let the lieutenant governor of Texas, raring to sacrifice himself on the altar of the free market, become a grocery store worker. Let the CNBC pundits become retail cashiers. Let the Washington corporate lobbyists beating the drum for restarting production become warehouse workers. And let the regular people who work in crowded restaurants and crowded stores and crowded warehouses and crowded factories take jobs in statehouses, and on cable TV, and at think tanks. It is only fair that the bold leaders urging us all to be brave enough to disregard scientifically sound warnings of millions of deaths in order to prop back up American business be the first ones out there, in close proximity to the infectious public, getting coughed on as they enable each and every one of the transactions that will get money flowing again. That is what leadership is all about.
Besides, there will certainly be a number of job openings in politics and cable TV punditry and think tanks once all of those free marketeers go out into the workforce and promptly catch coronavirus.
There is an unspoken and underlying assumption in all of the push to end our national shutdown before the pandemic has passed, which is: Rich people will not be the victims of this. This belief is untrue, but the rich can be forgiven for believing it—in normal circumstances, it is a very reliable rule. The rich have been sending poor people to their deaths in wars for the sake of profits for centuries. Nothing new at all about that. In violent conflicts, non-rich people are just grease in the wheels of the capitalist machine. It is not remarkable that business leaders and their allies would want to enact the same pattern of human sacrifice now, with the stock market plummeting. The difference is that the pandemic will kill the rich, too. They are currently acting as if they can buy their own safety, because they haven’t seen their peers die too much yet. But they will.
The voices pushing to send millions of people back to work at the cost of what could be
millions of lives will say that they are being hardheaded realists. They will say that the cost of our ongoing economic shutdown, with its attendant unemployment and bankruptcies, will be even worse. But the only world in which that could possibly be true is a world in which we preserve our old, suddenly absurd economic arrangements at all costs. It is only true in a world in which we refuse to consider debt forgiveness, and a massive government wage subsidy, and health care for all. It is only true if you accept the premise that, during this economic shutdown, all small businesses will go bankrupt and workers will lose their jobs permanently and we’ll all become buried in debt.
If you instead assume a world in which we recognize the obvious reality that, as a result of this unprecedented public health crisis, we must waive many debts and let government spending carry us past the dangerous period, then keeping people at home in order to save a million or two million lives is the only choice. But recognizing the necessity of what must be done means that, on the other end of this, the capitalists must take a loss. They will not take all of the loss, or even a permanent loss, but they will take a loss, because economic activity will almost cease for a period of time.
That loss—of a year or two’s profits—is what is considered unacceptable. So, of course, we must all get back to work while the pandemic is still raging. And if a couple million people must die in order to ensure that we do not forgive any loans in this country, then that is just how it is going to be. It’s just plain common sense. Okay? Fine.
You first, fuckers. See you in hell.
Sen. Richard Burr. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick leans back in his chair during a midnight session during the third day of a special legislative session on Thursday, July 20, 2017, at the Texas state capitol in Austin, Texas. (photo: Ashley Landis)
Pedestrians wearing face masks outside the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building, which carries the logo of the 2020 Olympic Games. (photo: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images)
Japan, International Olympic Committee Agree to Postpone Tokyo Games
Adam Kilgore, Rick Maese and Simon Denyer, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Facing heavy global pressure and rising athlete dissent, the International Olympic Committee and Japanese officials sharply reversed course Tuesday and agreed that the Olympics and Paralympics will not take place this summer in Tokyo in the wake of the growing novel coronavirus pandemic."
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Cuban doctors prepare to leave for Italy to provide medical aid. (photo: Twitter)
Cuba's Coronavirus Response Is Putting Other Countries to Shame
Ben Burgis, Jacobin
Burgis writes: "Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic - from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines - is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame."
ast week, the
MS Braemar, a transatlantic cruise ship carrying 682 passengers from the United Kingdom, found itself momentarily stranded. Five of the cruise’s passengers had tested positive for the coronavirus. Several dozen more passengers and crew members were in isolation after exhibiting flu-like symptoms. The ship had been rebuffed from several ports of entry throughout the Caribbean. According to sources in the British government who spoke to
CNN, the UK then reached out to both the United States and Cuba “to find a suitable port for the Braemar.”
Which country took them in? If you’ve paid attention to the Trump administration’s xenophobic rhetoric about “the Chinese virus” and its obsession with keeping foreign nationals out of the country, and you know anything about Cuba’s tradition of sending doctors to help with humanitarian crises all around the world, you should be able to guess the answer.
The
Braemar docked in the Cuban port of Mariel last Wednesday. Passengers who were healthy enough to travel to their home countries were transported to the airport in Havana. Those who were
too sick to fly were offered treatment at Cuban hospitals — even though there had only been ten confirmed cases in the whole country, and allowing patients from the cruise ship to stay threatened to increase the number.
Cuba Mobilizes Against the Virus
Despite being a poor country that often experiences shortages — a product of both the economy’s structural flaws and the effects of sixty years of economic embargo by its largest natural trading partner — Cuba was better positioned than most to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
The country combines a completely socialized medical system that guarantees health care to all with impressive biotech innovations. A Cuban antiviral drug (Interferon Alfa-2B) has been used to combat the coronavirus both inside the country and in China. Cuba also boasts 8.2 doctors per capita — well over three times the rate in the United States (2.6) or South Korea (2.4), almost five times as many as China (1.8), and nearly twice as many as Italy (4.1).
On top of its impressive medical system, Cuba has a far better track record of protecting its citizens from emergencies than other poor nations — and even some rich ones. Their “comprehensive, all-hands-on-deck” hurricane-preparedness system, for example, is a marvel, and the numbers speak for themselves. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew killed dozens of Americans and hundreds of Haitians. Not a single Cuban died. Fleeing residents were even able to bring their household pets with them — veterinarians were stationed at the evacuation centers.
The coronavirus will be a harder challenge than a hurricane, but Cuba has been applying the same “all-hands-on-deck” spirit to prepare. Tourism has been shut down (a particularly painful sacrifice, given the industry’s importance to Cuba’s beleaguered economy). And the nationalized health care industry has not only made sure that thousands of civilian hospitals are at the ready for coronavirus patients, but that several military hospitals are open for civilian use as well.
Masks: A Tale of Two Countries
In the United States, the surgeon general and other authorities tried to conserve face masks for medical professionals by telling the public that the masks “wouldn’t help.” The problem, as Dr Zeynep Tufekci
argued in a recent
New York Times op-ed, is that the idea that doctors and nurses needed the masks undermined the claim that they would be ineffective. Authorities correctly pointed out that masks would be useless (or even do more harm than good) if not used correctly, but as Tufekci notes, this messaging never really made sense. Why not launch an aggressive educational campaign to promote the dos and don’ts of proper mask usage rather than telling people they’d never be able to figure it out?
Many people also wash their hands wrong, but we don’t respond to that by telling them not to bother. Instead, we provide instructions; we post signs in bathrooms; we help people sing songs that time their hand-washing. Telling people they can’t possibly figure out how to wear a mask properly isn’t a winning message. Besides, when you tell people that something works only if done right, they think they will be the person who does it right, even if everyone else doesn’t.
The predictable result of all of this is that, after weeks of “don’t buy masks, they won’t work for you” messaging, so many have been purchased that you can’t find a mask for sale anywhere in the United States outside of a few on Amazon for absurdly gouged prices.
In Cuba, on the other hand, nationalized factories that normally churn out school uniforms and other non-medical items have been
repurposed to dramatically increase the supply of masks.
Cuban Doctors Abroad
The same humanitarian and internationalist spirit that led Cuba to allow the Braemar to dock has also led the tiny country to send doctors to assist Haiti after that nation’s devastating 2010 earthquake, fight Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and, most recently, help Italy’s overwhelmed health system amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Cuba offered to send similar assistance to the United States after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, but was predictably rebuffed by the Bush administration.)
Even outside of temporary emergencies, Cuba has long dispatched doctors to work in poor countries with shortages of medical care. In Brazil, Cuban doctors were warmly welcomed for years by the ruling Workers’ Party. That began to change with the ascendance of far-right demagogue Jair Bolsonaro. When he assumed office, Bolsonaro expelled most of the Cuban doctors from the country, insisting that they were in Brazil not to heal the sick but “to create guerrilla cells and indoctrinate people.”
As recently as two weeks ago, Bolsonaro was calling the idea that the coronavirus posed a serious threat to public health a “fantasy.” Now that reality has set in, he’s begging the Cuban doctors to come back.
Embracing Complexity About Cuba
Last month, Bernie Sanders was red-baited and slandered by both Republicans and establishment Democrats for acknowledging the real accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution. It didn’t seem to matter to these critics that Sanders started and ended his comments by calling the Cuban government “authoritarian” and condemning it for keeping political prisoners. Instead, they seemed to judge his comments by what I called the “
Narnia Standard.” Rather than frankly discussing both the positive and negative aspects of Cuban society, the island state is treated as if it lacks any redeeming features — like Narnia before Aslan, where it was “always winter and never Christmas.”
Democratic socialists value free speech, press freedom, multiparty elections, and workplace democracy. We can and should criticize Cuba’s model of social organization for its deficits. But Cuba’s admirably humane and solidaristic approach to the coronavirus should humble those who insist on talking about the island nation as if it were some unending nightmare.
Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg attends a meeting with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen as they announce a new EU climate deal, at the European Commission on March 4, 2020, in Brussels, Belgium. (photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
hough coronavirus cases continue to climb in the U.S., a number of businesspeople and commentators have begun to talk about 
