Chuck Collins: How you pay taxes and they don’t

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTO

My daughter, a librarian in Tucson, paid more taxes in 2017 than Donald Trump. So did my neighbor Rita, a teacher, and her son Tony, who stocks grocery shelves in Leland, Mich.

I also pay more in taxes than the president of the United States. And, probably, so do you.

We now understand why Trump was the first presidential candidate since the 1970s not to divulge his tax returns.

In 2016 and 2017, the billionaire paid just $750 each year in taxes to the U.S. Treasury. In 10 out of 15 years between 2001 and 2017, Trump paid zero taxes.

The average middle class household paid approximately three times as much in federal taxes as Trump did in 2017, an average of $2,200 based on an income of roughly $60,000. Any individual earning over $25,000 most likely paid more than the president.

It’s not that Trump wasn’t paying taxes at all. In 2017, Trump paid $156,824 in taxes in the Philippines and $145,500 in India. He just wasn’t paying them to support veterans, build roads, or protect seniors in this country.

The other secret Trump doesn’t want you to know is that his image as a wealthy successful business mogul is a mirage.

Over the decades, Trump personally lobbied Forbes Magazine to report that he was wealthier than he really is. Two decades of tax returns, however, reveal he is a man in deep financial doo-doo. He may even owe more than he owns.

Trump’s real estate and resort businesses are mostly money losers, contributing to hundreds of millions of tax-deductible business losses each year.

On top of these losses, Trump deducts tens of millions in lavish personal living expenses — such as $70,000 in hair styling, consulting fees to his children, and mansion retreats — to reduce his tax obligations.

Only someone with Trump’s army of tax attorneys and wealth managers could pull off these loopholes. Trump’s assets are spread over 500 different corporate shells, enabling limitless shifting and gaming of income and taxes.

Trump takes advantage of the fact that there are two tax systems in America: one set of rules for the super-rich and another set of rules for everyone else.

Most of us get our incomes from paychecks and government agencies that know exactly how much we are paid and often withhold our taxes before we even see the money.

People with incomes over $2 million and assets over $20 million get most of their income from investments, ownership of assets, and businesses. There are endless games they can play to manipulate their income. And they can afford to hire accountants and tax lawyers to maneuver their taxes downward.

If you lose money, you grow poorer. But when the super-rich create paper losses to offset their taxes, they’re still rich. And like Trump, they aren’t sacrificing anything in terms of their cushy standard of living.

These tax shenanigans are all the more unseemly in the face of a pandemic that’s destroyed the wealth, health, and livelihoods of millions. Tens of millions of families have lost jobs, savings, home equity, and any other economic security they may have had.

They will not be “carrying over” these losses into future years and virtually eliminating their taxes for a decade, as Trump did.

Instead, they’ll pay income taxes on unemployment insurance, stimulus checks, and any paycheck they’ve been able to eke out.  There will be no deductions for haircuts or consulting contracts for their children.

Trump’s taxes reveal the real truth. He’s more about the art of the deduction than the art of the deal.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Trump’s tax manipulations reveal where the weak spots are in the current system. Congress should restore fairness and integrity to a tax system that has been pillaged by the super-rich.

Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Philip K. Howard: Misdiagnosing what has led to failed state America

People want answers for what went wrong with America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic—from lack of preparedness, to delays in containing the virus, to failing to ramp up testing capacity and the production of protective gear. But almost nowhere in the current discussion can one find a coherent vision for how to avoid the same problems next time or help restore a healthy democracy.

Bad leadership has been identified as a primary culprit. The “fish rots from the head,” as conservative columnist Matthew Purple puts it. There’s plenty to blame President Trump for, but stopping there, as, say, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani does, ignores many bureaucratic failures. Cass Sunstein gets closer to the mark by focusing on how red tape impedes timely choices, but even he sees the bureaucratic structures as fundamentally sound and simply in need of some culling. Sunstein suggests that “it might be acceptable or sensible to tolerate a delay” in normal times, but not in a pandemic. Tech investor Marc Andreessen sees a lack of national willpower, an unwillingness to grab hold of problems and build anew. Prominent observers such as Francis Fukuyama, George Packer and Ezra Klein blame a broken political system and a divided culture; they offer little hope for redemption, even with new leadership.

All misdiagnose what caused government to fail here, and they confuse causes with what are more likely symptoms. Fukuyama rightly identifies a critical void in American political culture: the loss of a high “degree of trust that citizens have in their government,” which countries such as Germany and South Korea enjoy. But why have Americans lost trust in their government?

No doubt, after this is all over, a report will catalog the errors and misjudgments that let COVID-19 shut down America. The report will likely begin years back, when officials refused to heed warnings about pandemic planning. It will further expose President Trump, who for almost two months said that the coronavirus was “totally under control.” Errors of judgment like these are inevitable, to some degree—they happened before and after Pearl Harbor and 9/11, too—and with luck, they will inform future planning. The light will then shine on the operating framework of modern government, revealing not mainly errors of judgment, or cultural divisions, but a tangle of red tape that causes failure. At every step, officials and public-health professionals were prevented from making vital choices by legal obstacles.

Andreessen is correct that Americans have lost the spirit to build, but that’s because we’re not allowed to build. A governing structure that takes upward of a decade to approve an infrastructure project and ranks 55th in World Bank assessments for “ease of starting a business” does not encourage individual and institutional initiative. Of course Americans don’t trust government—it gets in the way of their daily choices, even as it fails to meet many national needs.

Our response to the COVID-19 missteps should not be to wring our hands about our miserable political system, or about the cynicism and selfishness that have infected our culture. We should focus on why government fails in making daily choices. What many Americans see clearly—but most public intellectuals cannot see—is a system that prevents people from acting on their best judgment. By re-empowering officials to do what they think is right, we may also reinvigorate American culture and democracy.

The root cause of failed government is structural paralysis. What’s surprising about the tragic mishaps in dealing with COVID-19 is how unsurprising they were to the teachers, nurses and local officials who are continually stymied by bureaucratic rules. A few years ago, a tree fell into a creek in Franklin Township, N.J., and caused flooding. A town official sent a backhoe to pull it out. But then someone, probably the town lawyer, pointed out that a permit was required to remove a natural object from a “Class C-1 Creek.” It took the town almost two weeks and $12,000 in legal fees to remove the tree.

In January, University of Washington epidemiologists were hot on the trail of COVID-19. Virologist Alex Greninger had begun developing a test soon after Chinese officials published the viral genome. But while the coronavirus was in a hurry, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was not. Greninger spent 100 hours filling out an application for an FDA “emergency-use authorization” (EUA) to deploy his test in-house. He submitted the application by e-mail. Then he was told that the application was not complete until he mailed a hard copy to the FDA Document Control Center.

After a few more days, FDA officials told Greninger that they would not approve his EUA until he verified that his test did not cross-react with other viruses in his lab, and until he agreed also to test for MERS and SARS. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) then refused to release samples of SARS to Greninger because it’s too virulent. Greninger finally got samples of other viruses that satisfied the FDA. By the time they arrived, and his tests began, in early March, the outbreak was well on its way.

Regulatory tripwires continually hampered those dealing with the spreading virus. Hospitals learned that they couldn’t cope except by tossing out the rulebooks; other institutions weren’t so lucky. For example, after schools were shut down, needy students no longer had meals. Katie Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance and a former Obama administration official, secured an agreement in principle to transfer federal meal funding to a program that provides meals during summer months. But red tape required a formal waiver from each state, which in turn required formal waivers from Washington. The bureaucratic instinct was relentless: school districts in Oregon were first required to “develop a plan as to how they are going to target the most-needy students.” Meantime, the children got no meals. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, interviewing Wilson, summarized her plea to government: “Stop getting in the way.”

What’s needed to pull the tree out of the creek is no different than what’s needed to feed school kids: responsible people with the authority to act. They can be accountable for what they do and how well they do it, but they can’t succeed if they must continually pass through the eye of the bureaucratic needle.

Reformers are looking in the wrong direction. Electing new leaders won’t liberate Americans to take initiative. Nor is “deregulation” generally the solution for inept government; the free market won’t protect us against pandemics. The only solution is to replace the current operating system with a framework that empowers people again to take responsibility. We must reregulate, not deregulate.

American government rebuilt itself after the 1960s on the premise of avoiding human error by replacing human choice. That’s when we got the innovation of thousand-page rulebooks dictating the one-correct-way to do things. We mandated legal hearings for ordinary supervisory choices, such as maintaining order in classrooms or evaluating employees. We replaced human judgment with rules and objective proof. Finally, government would be pure—almost like a software program. Just follow the rules.

For 50 years, legislative and administrative law has piled up, causing public paralysis and private frustration. Almost no one has questioned why government prevents people from using their common sense. Conservatives misdiagnose the flaw as too much government; liberals resist any critique of public programs, assuming that any reform is a pretext for deregulation. In the recent Democratic presidential debates, no one asked how to make government work better.

Experts have it backward. Polarized politics, they say, causes public paralysis. While hyper-partisanship certainly paralyzes legislative activity, the bureaucratic idiocies that delayed everything from COVID-19 testing to school meals had nothing to do with politics. Paralysis of the public sector came first, leading to polarized politics.

By the 1990s, broad public frustration with suffocating government fueled the rise of Newt Gingrich. The growth of red tape made it hard to make anything work sensibly. Schools became anarchic; health-care bureaucracy caused costs to skyrocket; getting a permit could require a decade; and Big Brother was always hovering. Is your paperwork in order? Americans kept electing people who promised to fix it—the “Contract with America,” “Change we can believe in,” and “Drain the swamp”—but government was beyond the control of those elected to lead it. What happens when politicians give up on fixing things? They compete by pointing fingers—“It’s your fault!”—and resort to Manichean theories and identity-based villains. Public disempowerment breeds extremism.

A functioning democracy requires the bureaucratic machine to return to officials and citizens the authority needed to do their jobs. That necessitates a governing framework of goals and principles that re-empowers Americans to take responsibility for results. Giving officials, judges, and others the authority to act in accord with reasonable norms is what liberates everyone else to act sensibly. Students won’t learn unless the teacher maintains order in the classroom. New ideas by a teacher or parent go nowhere if the principal lacks the authority to act on them. To get a permit in timely fashion, the permitting official must have authority to decide how much review is needed. To enforce codes of civil discourse—and not allow a small group of students to bully everyone else—university administrators must have authority to sanction students who refuse to abide by the codes. To prevent judicial claims from becoming weapons of extortion, judges must have authority to determine their reasonableness. To contain a virulent virus, public-health officials must have authority to respond quickly.

Giving officials the needed authority does not require trust of any particular person. What’s needed is to trust the overall system and its hierarchy of accountability—as, for example, most Americans trust the protections and lines of accountability provided by the Constitution. There’s no detailed rule or objective proof that determines what represents an “unreasonable search and seizure” or “freedom of speech.” Those protections are nonetheless reliably applied by judges who, looking to guiding principles and precedent, make a ruling in each disputed situation.

The post-1960s bureaucratic state is built on flawed assumptions about human accomplishment. There is no “correct” way of meeting goals that can be dictated in advance. Nor can good judgment be proved by some objective standard or metric. Judgments can readily be second-guessed, as appellate courts review lower-court decisions, but the rightness of action almost always involves perception and values. That’s the best we can do.

The failure of modern government is not merely a matter of degree—of “too much red tape.” Its failure is inherent in the premise of trying to create an automatic framework that is superior to human choice and judgment. We thought that we could input the facts and, as Czech playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel once parodied it, “a computer . . . will spit out a universal solution.” Trying to reprogram this massive, incoherent system is like putting new software onto a melted circuit board. Each new situation will layer new rules onto ones already short-circuiting.

Nothing much will work sensibly until we replace tangles of red tape with simpler, goal-oriented frameworks activated by human beings. This is a key lesson of the COVID-19 crisis. It’s time to reboot our governing system to let Americans take responsibility again.

Philip K. Howard, a New York-based lawyer, civic leader and photographer, is founder of Common Good. His latest book is Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left. This piece first ran in City Journal.

Liz Szabo/JoNel Alecia: Trump may try to rush in COVID-19 vaccine before election

From Kaiser Health News

It “seems frighteningly more plausible each day.’’

— Dr. Jerry Avorn, Harvard Medical School

President Trump, who seems intent on announcing a COVID-19 vaccine before Election Day, could legally authorize a vaccine over the objections of experts, officials at the Food and Drug Administration and even vaccine manufacturers, who have pledged not to release any vaccine unless it’s proved safe and effective.

In podcasts, public forums, social media and medical journals, a growing number of prominent health leaders say they fear that Trump — who has repeatedly signaled his desire for the swift approval of a vaccine and his displeasure with perceived delays at the FDA — will take matters into his own hands, running roughshod over the usual regulatory process.

It would reflect another attempt by a norm-breaking administration, poised to ram through a Supreme Court nominee opposed to existing abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act, to inject politics into sensitive public health decisions. Trump has repeatedly contradicted the advice of senior scientists on COVID-19 while pushing controversial treatments for the disease.

If the executive branch were to overrule the FDA’s scientific judgment, a vaccine of limited efficacy and, worse, unknown side effects could be rushed to market.

The worries intensified over the weekend, after Alex Azar, the administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services, asserted his agency’s rule-making authority over the FDA. HHS spokesperson Caitlin Oakley said Azar’s decision had no bearing on the vaccine approval process.

Vaccines are typically approved by the FDA. Alternatively, Azar — who reports directly to Trump — can issue an emergency use authorization, even before any vaccines have been shown to be safe and effective in late-stage clinical trials.

“Yes, this scenario is certainly possible legally and politically,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who outlined such an event in the New England Journal of Medicine. He said it “seems frighteningly more plausible each day.”

Vaccine experts and public health officials are particularly vexed by the possibility because it could ruin the fragile public confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine. It might put scientific authorities in the position of urging people not to be vaccinated after years of coaxing hesitant parents to ignore baseless fears.

Physicians might refuse to administer a vaccine approved with inadequate data, said Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in a recent Webinar. “You could have a safe, effective vaccine that no one wants to take.” A recent KFF poll found that 54 percent of Americans would not submit to a COVID-19 vaccine authorized before Election Day.

After this story was published, an HHS official said that Azar “will defer completely to the FDA” as the agency weighs whether to approve a vaccine produced through the government’s Operation Warp Speed effort.

“The idea the Secretary would approve or authorize a vaccine over the FDA’s objections is preposterous and betrays ignorance of the transparent process that we’re following for the development of the OWS vaccines,” HHS chief of staff Brian Harrison wrote in an email.

White House spokesperson Judd Deere dismissed the scientists’ concerns, saying Trump cared only about the public’s safety and health. “This false narrative that the media and Democrats have created that politics is influencing approvals is not only false but is a danger to the American public,” he said.

Usually, the FDA approves vaccines only after companies submit years of data proving that a vaccine is safe and effective. But a 2004 law allows the FDA to issue an emergency use authorization with much less evidence, as long as the vaccine “may be effective” and its “known and potential benefits” outweigh its “known and potential risks.”

Many scientists doubt a vaccine could meet those criteria before the election. But the terms might be legally vague enough to allow the administration to take such steps.

Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the government program aiming to more quickly develop COVID-19 vaccines, said it’s “extremely unlikely” that vaccine trial results will be ready before the end of October.

Trump, however, has insisted repeatedly that a vaccine to fight the pandemic that has claimed 200,000 American lives will be distributed starting next month. He reiterated that claim Saturday at a campaign rally in Fayetteville, N.C.

The vaccine will be ready “in a matter of weeks,” he said. “We will end the pandemic from China.”

Although pharmaceutical companies have launched three clinical trials in the United States, no one can say with certainty when those trials will have enough data to determine whether the vaccines are safe and effective.

• Officials at Moderna, whose vaccine is being tested in 30,000 volunteers, have said their studies could produce a result by the end of the year, although the final analysis could take place next spring.

• Pfizer executives, who have expanded their clinical trial to 44,000 participants, boast that they could know their vaccine works by the end of October.

• AstraZeneca’s U.S. vaccine trial, which was scheduled to enroll 30,000 volunteers, is on hold pending an investigation of a possible vaccine-related illness.

Scientists have warned for months that the Trump administration could try to win the election with an “October surprise,” authorizing a vaccine that hasn’t been fully tested. “I don’t think people are crazy to be thinking about all of this,” said William Schultz, a partner in a Washington, D.C., law firm who served as a former FDA commissioner for policy and as general counsel for HHS.

“You’ve got a president saying you’ll have an approval in October. Everybody’s wondering how that could happen.”

In an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal, conservative former FDA commissioners Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan argued that presidential intrusion was unlikely because the FDA’s “thorough and transparent process doesn’t lend itself to meddling. Any deviation would quickly be apparent.”

But the administration has demonstrated a willingness to bend the agency to its will. The FDA has been criticized for issuing emergency authorizations for two COVID-19 treatments that were boosted by the president but lacked strong evidence to support them: hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma.

Azar has sidelined the FDA in other ways, such as by blocking the agency from regulating lab-developed tests, including tests for the novel coronavirus.

Although FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told the Financial Times he would be willing to approve emergency use of a vaccine before large-scale studies conclude, agency officials also have pledged to ensure the safety of any COVID-19 vaccines.

A senior FDA official who oversees vaccine approvals, Dr. Peter Marks, has said he will quit if his agency rubber-stamps an unproven COVID-19 vaccine.

“I think there would be an outcry from the public health community second to none, which is my worst nightmare — my worst nightmare — because we will so confuse the public,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in his weekly podcast.

Still, “even if a company did not want it to be done, even if the FDA did not want it to be done, he could still do that,” said Osterholm, in his podcast. “I hope that we’d never see that happen, but we have to entertain that’s a possibility.”

In the New England Journal editorial, Avorn and co-author Dr. Aaron Kesselheim wondered whether Trump might invoke the 1950 Defense Production Act to force reluctant drug companies to manufacture their vaccines.

But Trump would have to sue a company to enforce the Defense Production Act, and the company would have a strong case in refusing, said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.

Also, he noted that Trump could not invoke the Defense Production Act unless a vaccine were “scientifically justified and approved by the FDA.”

Liz Szabo and JoNel Aleccia are Kaiser Health News reporters.

Liz Szabo: lszabo@kff.org, @LizSzabo

JoNel Aleccia: jaleccia@kff.org, @JoNel_Aleccia

Llewellyn King: Biden elicits little excitement even among Democrats

Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris

WEST WARWICK, R.I

Four years ago, Democrats slouched to the polls and voted, holding their noses figuratively. Somehow the party had come up with a presidential candidate that even many Democrats didn’t like very much: Hillary Clinton.

Pitted against a risible president, Donald Trump, who is a climate-change-doubting, class-dividing, race-baiting, immigrant-bashing, law-bending, treaty-tearing, dictator-loving, truth-challenged, dissembling incompetent, this time, it should be an easy White House win for the Democrats.

This time, there should be white-hot passion for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the candidate who would restore our moral base, our international standing, salve our wounds, and give us a sense that the nation is moving forward to a sunlit future. But there is no surge of feeling, zero passion.

Biden is the candidate who would deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding with pestilences of a biblical scale: serial hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast and wildfires from hell in the West. He is the man who should give us confidence in our systems, from health care to voting, to the rule of law at the Justice Department. But there is no surge, no passion.

Instead, the closest thing to enthusiasm I find among voters is resigned, faint praise. “He’s a decent man,” I’ve been told over and again. I’ll have a struggle in not offering the next Democrat who tells me in a woeful voice that Biden’s “a decent man” a physical rebuke.

One may discount the great man or woman view of history, but there is no great argument for the “decent man” view of history. You can have decent men who were great, Truman and Reagan, but you can’t move the needle of history with flaccid decency.

Poor old Joe Biden -- yes, he is old for the job — he’ll be 78 on Nov. 20 -- is defined mostly by having been there, like the TV-watching gardener played by Peter Sellers in the movie Being There. He was in the Senate for a long time, he was vice president to Barack Obama for two terms. He clears the being-there bar, but it is a low bar, very low.

No one is passionately against Biden. Trump’s attempts to paint him as a socialist ogre about to take us to Stalinism have fallen flat. Flat because they are unbelievable, and they are unbelievable because that isn’t Biden.

Biden has always been the quintessential man of the center of the situation. The pressure on his left wing, coming from Senators Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, and Edward Markey, of Massachusetts, and the group around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, is going to be a problem and a discomfort for Biden. He must also wonder where in that world his vice-presidential pick, California Sen. Kamala Harris, so far defined more by her ethnicity than her philosophy, will fit.

If, as still expected but not guaranteed, Biden makes it across the threshold in this election, his greatest strength will be his address book. His best strategy will be to use surrogates to fight his political wars. That means a strong Cabinet and a great White House staff.

Given Biden’s limitations, his chief of staff will be a critical player. He needs to give his Cabinet secretaries their heads. One of the many weaknesses of the Trump administration has been the pusillanimous nature of the Cabinet: Men and women who see the role only as pleasing the capricious and solipsistic president -- a chorus of lickspittle people singing hymns of praise to the chief.

Biden doesn’t need to point up Trump’s weaknesses: They are manifest. He needs to point up his own strengths beyond his affability and, yes, beyond his decency.

I’ve been watching Biden for years, nodding “hello” to him, and sometimes talking with him, the way it goes for reporters and politicians in Washington. I get the distinct feeling Biden isn’t the man he was eight years ago, when he would’ve been a more appealing candidate within his limitations. He seems diminished, his fire reduced to an ember.

As it is Democrats and renegade Republicans, needs must, will slouch to the polls to vote against Trump. Few in their hearts will be voting for Biden. There is a passion deficit.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

Mitchell Zimmerman: COVID crisis shows endless liar Trump only cares about Trump

Via OtherWords.org

“Captain,” said the first mate, “we just crashed into an iceberg — the hull’s been breached!”

“An iceberg. Deadly stuff,” said the captain. “Still, let’s play it down.”

“What are your orders? We must warn the passengers.”

“I’ll make an announcement… Attention all passengers, this is your captain speaking. We’ve encountered some ice, but we have it very well under control. We’re doing a great job. No need for you to change your routines. Over and out.”

“Should we ready the lifeboats?” asked the mate.

“Nah. Let’s just show confidence. I don’t want to create a panic.”

The deceiving and self-flattering captain of the scenario, leading his passengers into disaster, seems fictitious. But he’s all too real: except for the references to ice, everything the captain says above are things that President Trump has actually said about COVID-19.

Tragically, that’s America in the age of pandemic. Over 6.5 million cases of coronavirus. Around a thousand deaths per day. An economy in ruins.

But Captain Trump is still at the helm — and Americans are still needlessly dying — because he still prefers “playing it down” to uniting us behind the tough but necessary measures that are called for.

For months, Trump urged resistance to the precautions epidemiologists recommended, crusaded against the lockdown, and minimized the lethal threat, even claiming the coronavirus was “totally harmless” in 99 percent of cases.

He knew this was false: “This is deadly stuff,” he privately told journalist Bob Woodward in February.

Even as Trump publicly ridiculed the use of masks and encouraged followers to defy social distancing, he knew the virus was spread through the air. “It goes through air,” he told Woodward. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.”

Trump claimed publicly that coronavirus was “like the regular flu,” but he told Woodward that he knew otherwise. It’s “more deadly than even your strenuous flu,” Trump told the journalist — more than five times as deadly.

Trump and his falsehoods are responsible for most of America’s 200,000 coronavirus deaths to date. How could it be otherwise? How could anyone think thwarting the epidemic response prescribed by doctors, scientists, and public health leaders would not have deadly consequences?

Turn back to January.

A dozen presidential briefings warned Trump of the coming pandemic. The Health and Human Services Department secretary twice told Trump the contagion was looming. Trump’s trade adviser wrote a memo in January warning of a “full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

Trump claims he refused to act because he feared panic.

Avoiding panic is all very well. But if you’re telling passengers they don’t need to get in the lifeboats, you’re responsible when they start drowning. In reality, Trump cared more about not “panicking [the stock] market” — which he saw as key to his re-election — than about the lives that would be lost.

By late February a White House task force recommended aggressive steps, including stay-at-home orders. But when a Centers for Disease Control leader warned the public that a pandemic was imminent and “disruption to everyday life might be severe,” Trump threatened to fire her.

“The risk to the American people remains very low,” Trump proclaimed instead.

It was mid-March before Trump yielded to reality.

The cost of Trump’s delay? Columbia University epidemiologists concluded in May that had the lockdowns begun just two weeks earlier, “the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided.”

But they weren’t. And the 1 million people who were needlessly infected, thanks to Trump’s indifference, then went on to infect others, and those in turn still others. Meanwhile the president kept up his campaign against the steps needed to bring the pandemic under control.

No precise reckoning is possible, but there’s no doubt a majority of our cases and deaths might have been avoided but for Trump’s lies, neglect, and sabotage. 

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

Don Pesci: Self-interview of a Republican columnist in a deep Blue State

The Connecticut seal. By the way, there are some very good vineyards in what used to be called “The Land {State} of Steady Habits’’.

VERNON, Conn.

Q: Reading over your blog, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Note From A Blue State”, I don’t see many “I’s”.

A: Modesty.

Q: No really, why?

A: Political commentators fall into two categories: those who write about themselves, and those who write about others and ideas. This last group tends to dispense with “I’s”. 

Q: Well, we’ll see if we can remedy that lapse here. You have quoted Chris Powell, for many years both the managing editor and the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. on his motivation. You said to him once – correct me if I’m wrong – that he had been writing opinion pieces longer than you, and you have been working in the commentary vineyard for more than 40 years. You complimented him. His opinion pieces were perceptive, well written and necessary, a tonic for what ails the state, you said. Yet, politicians at the state Capitol who decide Connecticut’s destiny did not appear to be paying much attention. So, you asked, what keeps him going. He flashed a smile and said, “Spite.” Does spite keep you going?

A: I doubt Powell ever bought the notion that political behavior swings on the writings of political commentators. His primary motivation is plain on the face of his opinion pieces, both editorials and op-ed commentary. He wants to set hard truths before the general public, hoping that not every citizen is motivated by spite or enclosed within a Berlin Wall of invincible ignorance. Off camera, so to speak, Powell has a quiet, infectious sense of humor. And a sense of humor is a sense of right proportion. He was joking. It’s possible that joking in the 21st Century will be a capital offense punishable by exile, as were serious crimes against the state in Roman and Greek times. In modern times, burning down buildings, liberating high-toned stores of merchandise, throwing Molotov cocktails at police buildings, are all okay; but we draw the line at making jokes. The Greek tyrant Creon feared Aristophanes as much as an invading army. One day, one of Creon’s factotums met Aristophanes in the street and asked him in a fury, “Don’t you take anything seriously?” Aristophanes answered, “Yes, I take comedy seriously.” Mark Twain also took comedy seriously, and his long suffering wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, worked tirelessly to protect him from a public whipping. In "The Chronicle of Young Satan, Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts,” Twain has Satan say, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” 

Q: So, you are not spiteful then? 

A: Spite, like humor, is salt, to be used always sparingly. I acknowledge that every sealed closet has some bones concealed in it. I can only say I don’t feel spiteful, though I do think spite can flower into gorgeous commentary. I’m thinking of Alexander Pope’s long poem, “The Dunciad”. We should love lovable things and hate hateful things. The record -- and it’s a long one; “Connecticut Commentary” contains to date about 3,141 separate pieces, nearly all submitted as columns to a host of Connecticut papers – I think will show that I’m interested in the public persona of politicians, the face they present to their constituents. I’m certainly not interested in delving into the private soul of, say, U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, of this state, about whom I’ve written a great deal, much of it unpublished by Connecticut’s print media. It’s best to stay away from amateur psychology. Rummaging in private souls is very much like rummaging in attics – too many spider’s webs, hanks of hair, abandoned diaries, and moldy, old dolls.

Q: I’ve seen the Blumenthal cache. Much of it is well written, certainly publishable.  And you’ve said that nearly all of that cache had been sent out to various Connecticut newspapers. Much of it never saw print. Why not?

A: Thanks for your labor of love. It’s a good question. I suppose much of it may have rubbed editorial fur the wrong way. Part of this is business. Smaller newspapers, as you know, have been swallowed up by journalistic leviathans. The larger chains have a stable of dependable writers they may draw from. The whole of New England is a left-of-center political theater and has been for a long while. The General Assembly in the state has been dominated by left-of-center Democrats for a few decades; all the constitutional offices in the state are manned by Democrats; there are no Republicans in the state’s U.S. congressional delegation; virtually all the justices of the state’s Supreme Court have been placed on the bench by highly progressive former Gov. Dannel Malloy. Larger cities in the state – Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford – have been, some would say, mismanaged by Democrats for about a half century. And it is not news that the media do political business mostly with incumbents. So, while it is not at all excessive hyperbole to say that most of the state’s current difficulties may be laid squarely at the feet of immoderate Democrats, incumbents are, mostly for business reasons, lightly leashed.

Q: Why lightly leashed?

A: You cannot get water from a rock, and you cannot get printable news from non-incumbents. If the political state is largely progressive, the state media will follow suit.

Q: Why “immoderate” Democrats? 

A: Because Connecticut Democrats are no longer moderate, no longer centrists, no longer “liberal” in the sense that President John Kennedy or justly celebrated Gov. Ella Grasso were liberal.

Q: You knew Grasso.

A: I did. She, her family and my father and his family, while occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, were friends all their lives in the social and political petri-dish of Windsor Locks. During those times, friendship transcended politics. And politics itself was well mannered and soft spoken.

Q: Not now.

A: No longer.

Q: What changed?

A: Do you mean nationally or statewide?

Q: Both.

A: Nationally, the Huey-Long-like personality of President Trump has thrown the right-left national polarity into sharp relief, but this polarity preceded Trump by decades. When everyone, including the overarching, permanent political apparatus and a politicized media, has a dog in the fight, a permanent dog fight should surprise no one. Statewide, Connecticut has become, within a very short period of time, perhaps the most left-leaning state in the Northeast. The drift leftward here began long ago. It was “maverick” Republican Lowell Weicker who,  first as senator then governor, took the road not taken by pervious governors when he forced through the General Assembly Connecticut’s income tax, a levy that has resulted in improvident spending, outsized budgets, preening politicians and a poorer proletariat. 

Q: That was the turning point? 

A: It was a crossing of the Rubicon by a small-minded man who had contemplated for years the destruction of his own state Republican Party, which Weicker had betrayed numerous times, that finally gave him the heave-ho. Without turning over the molding psychological dolls in Weicker’s attic, I think it is proper to conclude that the man was motivated principally by unalloyed malice, what aphorist-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have called resentment, an awful curse. “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche warned, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” I never heard Weicker toss off a laugh line that was not spiked with malice. I’m referring here only to the man’s public persona, you understand. In private, he may have been Henny Youngman, for all I know. In politics, it is the characters who determine the play. And in Connecticut, neatly all the characters who advance the play are progressives motivated chiefly by a rancid lust for power, very Nietzschean. Without will, you cannot secure your ends. But when the will becomes the end, it’s doomsday. Nietzsche never quite worked that into his calculations. But the great tyrants of the 20th century – Hitler, Stalin, Mao – did. Without God, Dostoyevsky said, “anything is possible” – even Weicker, the first of many of Connecticut’s “savior politicians.” The business of these savior politicians is to create the problems from which they pretend to save us.

Q: That seems a bit cynical.

A: Critical and descriptive, not cynical. The real cynics among us are those who believe positive knowledge is impossible. A perverse inability to see what lies right under your nose, George Orwell’s formulation, is the very definition of cynicism.

Q: Can you give us an example.

A: I think it is cynical to pretend not to notice the predictable effects of Gov. Ned Lamont’s shutdown of state businesses. Even a state legislator hiding under his bed, trembling in fear of Coronavirus, cannot fail to have noticed that a prolonged business shutdown would result in a diminution of state revenue; that the fatal failure of state government to provide adequate and targeted resources to nursing homes would result in needless deaths among people exposed to Coronavirus; that tax increases always transfer power and responsibility from citizens to the unelected administrative state, a descriptive rather than a cynical term; that a one-party state necessarily results in political oligarchy, which easily dispenses with representative government; that...

Q: Alright, alright, we don’t have all day here. Without being too cynical – excuse me, too descriptive – how do you see Connecticut’s future unfolding. 

A: What was it Yogi Berra said – the future ain’t what it used to be? In a representative republic, we used to rely on the common sense of voters to turn out politicians who pursued public policies inimical to representative government and the public good, one of the reasons Grasso agitated against an income tax. One of Grasso’s biographers is Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who argues that Grasso, a great governor, was wrong about the income tax.  Well, Grasso was right about the income tax, and she was right for the right reasons. Weicker was right about the income tax when he said, during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire, and he was wrong when, as governor, he poured income tax gas on Connecticut’s recession. The progress from Grasso to Bysiewicz, from Grasso to former Gov. Dannel Malloy and Ned Lamont is a fool’s journey in the wrong direction. The false solutions and the consequent havoc lie right under our noses. And it is long past time for Connecticut’s media to realize that the whole purpose of journalism is to describe accurately, in Orwell’s words, “the thing that lies right under our noses.” So, given our recent past history, our one party state, our wall-eyed media, our seemingly indifferent citizens, our representative-shy, inoperative General Assembly, which has just decided to surrender even more of its constitutional and legislative responsibilities to an incompetent governor, I would say Connecticut’s future looks bleak. 

Q: Just one more quibble before we go. You lament the want of common sense among voters. What made common sense a casualty of modern politics?

A: Both common sense and the conscience, an inseparable pair, have been surrounded and taken prisoner by wily politicians and a cowardly media. The founders of the republic feared, almost to a man that common sense – the moral imperative, the ethical genius that lies in all of us – could not survive immoral and ambitious politicians seeking to promote their own rather than the public good. We can only pray to God for the restoration of a moral order. God, Otto von Bismarck once said, favors drunkards, the poor and the United States of America. Pray he was right, because, except on their tongues, politicians in Connecticut, mostly pretending to be progressives, favor none of the above. And, once again, I am being descriptive here, not cynical.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

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Jim Hightower: A cult doesn't need a party platform

Botticelli illustration for Dante's “Inferno,’’ the first part of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,’’ shows insincere flatterers groveling in excrement in the second pit of the Eighth Circle of Hell.

Via OtherWords.org

With our national election looming, someone should put up “lost dog” signs in every neighborhood saying, “Missing: Republican Party Platform.”

Voters won’t find one though, for this so-called major political party has decided not to produce a specific statement of what it stands for this year, nor will it offer to voters an itemized set of policies its public officials would try to enact if elected.

Indeed, the GOP hierarchy is so disdainful of the electorate that it says the party will not present a platform until 2024 — four years after the election!

They even imposed their policy silence on their own grassroots delegates, decreeing that any attempt by them to adopt new platform proposals at the Republican National Convention would “be ruled out of order.”

Instead of a political party, the GOP of 2020 has become a pathetic puppet show of weakling officials and sycophantic subordinates being jerked around by the maniacal whims of a bloated ego with despotic fantasies. The once respectable Republican National Committee has meekly ceded its authority, duty, respect, and relevance to a single unhinged authoritarian.

In essence, they’re saying that the platform — and the party itself — is one word: Trump.

Whatever poppycock the Glorious Leader utters today, whomever he attacks tomorrow, whichever fantastical conspiracy he embraces next week, the GOP will applaud, bow, and in unison reply “Amen.” Sad.

Republican senators, governors, captains of industry, elders, and others who once had power, prominence, some prestige, and maybe even a little pride now meekly wear Trump’s collar and kowtow to his conceits, leaving an entire party with a sole operating principle: “What he said” —  even when they can’t figure out what he’s actually saying, or why, or what it means for the U.S. and its people.

That’s not a party, it’s a national embarrassment.

Jim Hightower is a writer and speaker.

Jill Richardson: KKK's old rhetoric sounds like Trump's

From OtherWords.org

Rory McVeigh wrote The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, a study of the KKK in the 1920s, in 2009 —  long before Donald Trump became president. But it could almost be about Trump today.

In the 1920s, white, male, U.S.-born Protestants worried they were losing status, economic clout, and political power.

Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were settling in large numbers in industrial cities, where they took unskilled, low-paid manufacturing jobs in large plants. Simultaneously, many African-Americans were moving north for industrial jobs. More women were working, too.

Many of the anxious white Protestants were skilled laborers or small business owners. Large companies, chain stores, and the Sears catalog were out-competing them throughout the country.

Feeling squeezed out by the changing economy, the KKK framed American jobs as the rightful property of what they called “100 percent Americans.” They wrapped themselves in the flag, claimed immigrants were stealing jobs, and attempted to deny African Americans any further mobility.

You’ve heard that “stealing our jobs” line before.

It was true that the structural changes from industrialization hurt many small businesses and skilled laborers in the 1920s, just as neoliberal globalization hurt many workers and their communities more recently.

Yet instead of confronting this economic system, hardline nativists then and now sought to preserve the livelihoods of white people by depriving everyone else — playing on the fears of white Americans to gain their support.

Here’s a sample comparison of 1920s KKK and Donald Trump quotes.

KKK: “Klansmen believe that the time is at least near when American citizenship must be protected by restricting franchise to men and women who are able through birth and education to understand Americanism.”

Donald Trump: “We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby — congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen. … It’s frankly ridiculous.”

KKK: “Fifty thousand Mexicans have sneaked into the United States during the past few months and taken the jobs of Americans… All of the Mexicans are low type peons.”

Donald Trump: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

KKK: “The negro was brought to America. He came as a slave. We are in honor and duty bound to promote his health and happiness. But he cannot be assimilated… Rushing into cities, he is retrograding rather than advancing.”

Donald Trump: “Nobody has done more for black people than I have.” But also: “The Suburban Housewives of America” should “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”

McVeigh wrote, “Black men who dared to associate with white women, or who dared to challenge racial inequality in any of its dimensions, were immune from the Klan’s paternalistic protection.”

Donald Trump wrote, “Bring back the death penalty” for the Central Park 5, a group of five Black men falsely accused and imprisoned for assaulting a white jogger.

And, of course, when Black people protested police brutality, Trump threatened them with “vicious dogs” and tweeted: “LAW & ORDER!”

One hundred years apart, they are saying the same things. When I quizzed a friend on who said what, she said she could only tell them apart because the Klan’s grammar was better than Trump’s.

Job losses and other economic pains must be addressed, but we can fix these problems in a way that’s inclusive, not violent and divisive. Instead, white nationalists from the Klan to Trump glorify a past in which white men had more power than everyone else, casting themselves as protectors of white America against inferior “others.”

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

David Warsh: Trump's stain is indelible, but....

SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Watching the GOP convention last week, I had the feeling that there were two versions of the Republican Party on the program. One was a personality cult built around Donald Trump and his children,  The other professed to be an open, vibrant aggregation of all sorts of people sharing all kinds of concerns: foreign competition, immigration, religion, education, health care, military service, taxes, red tape.

The first party’s convention culminated in an extravaganza straight out of The Hunger Games, in which the coronavirus pandemic had happened long ago.  The second convention resembled a non-alcoholic version of the Democratic Party. All that was missing was inequality and climate change.

If Trump loses the election in November, will he go away?  Of course he won’t.  his tweets will continue as he seeks to retain his hold, But the acknowledgment last week of the existence of that second congregation made it possible to believe that the Republican Party might regain possession of itself sooner than expected.

Certainly, that is not the conventional wisdom, “Whether Mr. Trump wins or loses in November, he now owns the Republicans,” wrote columnist Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “They are now prisoners of the Frankenstein they helped to create.”  Ross Douthat, of The New York Times, wrote, “Even if he loses, his power will probably ebb only slowly, if at all.”  The FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo notes that some Republicans warn that, even if he loses, there is nothing to prevent him from running again in 2024.  In that case, asks an influential Trump critic, “Which Republican would be able to defeat him in a primary?”

That’s easy. For that ghost Republican a party seeking cross-over voters in a future election, the most attractive would be Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.  A point often missed about Trump’s 2016 insurgency is that many of his positions now appeal well beyond his vaunted “base.” An idiot-savant is a person who has a mental or learning disability but is extremely gifted in a particular way, such as the performing of feats of memory or calculation, Trump’s disability is characterological, but his political judgment has, in several instances, been acute, in both their popular appeal and their substance (though never their execution).

Thus tougher trade policy with China, more coherent immigration controls, prudent assessment of America’s foreign wars, realistic relations with Russia are broadly popular positions. Add a revenue-neutral carbon tax to the platform – that being a well-established Republican ambition, at least in policy circles – and the differences between the two parties would turn on their plans for social spending,  tax equity and cultural inequities.

What happens next will depend on the margin in the November election.  If Trump wins, or loses by a very narrow margin, all bets are off.   If Joe Biden wins by a substantial margin, expect the maneuvering among Republicans to begin immediately. Whatever happens to the Senate in 2020, the key to the 2024 Presidential election may be what happens in the Senate elections of 2022, when 22 Republicans seats will be at risk, compared to those of a dozen Democrats.  Would-be presidential candidates must wait to see what happens then.

Biden’s age would make him likely not to run for re-election. Vice President Kamala Harris vs. Nikki Haley would be a most interesting matchup in 2024, one that could go a long way toward restoring a degree of civility to American politics. As the 2016 primaries demonstrated, party machinery tends to swing behind whoever is thought to be capable of delivering a victory.  Under certain circumstances, it is possible to imagine a GOP rostrum in 2024 featuring George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, members of the Reagan, McCain and Cheney families — and no Trump anywhere in sight.

Can Trump be expunged from American politics? Deleted from the record? Of course the answer, again, is no. The stain is indelible. But with some luck, Donald J. Trump will be consigned to the chapter of history books in which he belongs, along with Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph P. Kennedy, Huey Long and sundry other anti-democracy people of the 20th Century.  It is a pleasant thought, at least, for the last Monday in August.

David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.

James E. Varner: Trump tool DeJoy assaults Postal Service

The U.S. Post Office in the old mill village of Whitinsville, Mass., part of the town of Northbridge. Like many attractive post offices, it was built as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Opened in 1938, it’s a Colonial Revival masonry building, built of brick and cast stone, capped by a hip roof and cupola and with pilasters flanking the central entrance.

Via OtherWords.org

President Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, recently testified before Congress about major slowdowns in mail delivery under his watch.

As a 20-year postal veteran, I had only one reaction: DeJoy needs to be Returned to Sender.

DeJoy, a Trump fundraiser who owns millions worth of stock in U.S. Postal Service competitors, has been on the job barely two months. But already, his changes have caused serious delays in delivery.

Ostensibly, these moves are cost-saving measures. But it doesn’t take a partisan cynic to understand how this kind of disruption could affect voting in November’s election. The president himself has said that he hopes as much.

Postal employees pride ourselves on a culture of never delaying the mail. Our unofficial mantra can best be summed up as, “Mail that comes in today, goes out today — no matter what.”

We are now being told to ignore that. If mail can’t get delivered or processed without overtime, it is supposed to sit and wait. That can mean big delays.

For example, letter carriers normally split up the route of a colleague who’s on vacation or out sick. These carriers each take a portion of the absent employee’s route after completing their own, often using a little bit of overtime. Now, that mail doesn’t get delivered until much later.

Then there’s the mail that arrives late in the day. Before, late arriving mail would often be processed for the next day’s delivery, even if that required the use of overtime. Today, that mail sits in the plant at least until the following evening. Mail arriving late on a Saturday or a holiday weekend could be delayed even longer.

In the plants, meanwhile, the short staffing of clerks means it takes longer to get all the mail through the sorting machines. To make matters worse, under orders from DeJoy, mail-processing equipment is also being scrapped.

Even though the processing takes longer, drivers aren’t allowed to wait on it. Postal truck drivers are being disciplined for missing their departure time even by a few minutes — even if they haven’t gotten all the mail they’re supposed to haul. In some cases, the trucks that leave are completely empty!

With package deliveries up by 50 percent during the pandemic, as the Institute for Policy Studies reports, large mail trucks operating between facilities are often already full. Imagine how much mail will get left behind when that’s combined with seasonal holiday mail, or a large number of absentee ballots.

Finally, DeJoy’s proposals to cut hours of operation at many smaller post offices — and the removal of many public mailboxes — will make it harder for the public to access postal services.

When you limit hours to 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and close on Saturdays, you eliminate access for anybody working the day shift. Throw in mandatory closure for lunch breaks in the middle of the day, and it makes matters that much worse for our customers.

Postal workers have been doing their best to keep the nation’s mail and packages moving in these difficult and hazardous times. We don’t deserve these attacks.

DeJoy now says he’ll delay more changes until after the election, but he also had the nerve to tell Congress that he wouldn’t replace the 600 sorting machines he’d already removed.

Delaying more changes isn’t enough. Instead, Congress must approve crisis relief for USPS — and reverse DeJoy’s disastrous service cuts altogether.

James E. Varner is the director of Motor Vehicle Service at American Postal Workers Union Local 443 in Youngstown, Ohio. This op-ed was adapted from a letter published in the Warren Tribune-Chronicle.

Sarah Anderson: The fox is still in the Postal Service henhouse

The John W. McCormack Post Office and Courthouse, an historic building at 5 Post Office Square, in downtown Boston. The 22-story skyscraper was built in 1931-1933 with an Art Deco and Moderne structure. The building was renamed for the late Mr. McCormack, a long-time Massachusetts congressman who was U.S. House speaker in 1962-71. Its original name was the United States Post Office, Courthouse, and Federal Building.

Via OtherWords.org

Skyleigh Heinen, a U.S. Army veteran who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and anxiety, relies on the U.S. Postal Service for timely delivery of her meds to be able to function. She was one of thousands of Americans from all walks of life who spoke out recently to demand an end to a forced slowdown in mail delivery.

The level of public outcry in defense of the public Postal Service is historic — and it’s having an impact.

Shortly after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy took the helm in June, it became clear that the fox had entered the henhouse. President Trump had gained a powerful ally in his efforts to decimate the public Postal Service.

Instead of supporting his frontline workforce, DeJoy has made it harder for them to do their job.

For example, he banned overtime, ordering employees to leave mail and packages behind if they could not deliver it during their regular schedule. Until this point, postal workers had been putting in extra hours to fill in for sick colleagues and handle a dramatic increase in package shipments.

As the mail delays worsened, more than 600 high-volume mail sorting machines disappeared from postal facilities. Blue collection boxes vanished from neighborhoods across the country. Postal managers faced a hiring freeze.

President Trump threw gas on the fire by gloating that without the emergency relief he opposes, USPS couldn’t handle the crisis-level demand for mail-in voting.

Outraged protestors converged outside DeJoy’s ornate Washington, D.C., condo building and North Carolina mansion, and they flooded congressional phone lines and social media. Political candidates held pop-up press conferences outside post offices.

At least 21 states filed lawsuits to block DeJoy’s actions, while Taylor Swift charged that Trump has “chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.”

After all this, DeJoy announced he’s suspending his “initiatives” until after the election.

This is a victory. But it’s not enough.

DeJoy’s temporary move does not address concerns about the threats to the essential, affordable delivery services that USPS provides to every U.S. home and business, or the decent postal jobs that support families in every U.S. community. These needs will continue long past November 3.

Second, DeJoy has made no commitment to undo the damage he’s already done. And he promised only to restore overtime “as needed.” Will he replace all the missing mail-sorting machines and blue boxes? Will he expand staff capacity to handle the backlog he’s created and restore delivery standards?

Third, DeJoy makes no mention of the need for pandemic-related financial relief. USPS has not received one dime of the type of emergency cash assistance that Congress has awarded the airlines, Amtrak, and thousands of other private corporations.

While the pandemic has been a temporary boon to USPS package business, the recession has caused a serious drop in first-class mail, their most profitable product. Postal economic forecasters predict that COVID-related losses could amount to $50 billion over the next decade.

DeJoy has proved he cannot be trusted to do the right thing on his own. Congress must step in and approve at least $25 billion in postal relief — and legally block actions that undercut the ability of the Postal Service to serve all Americans, both today and beyond the election.

For the American people, this is not a partisan fight. We will all be stronger if we can continue to rely on our public Postal Service for essential services, family-supporting jobs, and a fair and safe election.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. More research on the Postal Service can be found on IPS site Inequality.org.

Don Pesci: The old, tired and reclusive Joe Biden

Waiting to talk politics

— Photo by Visitor7

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin”

— Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Massachusetts politician and a U.S. Founding Father

VERNON, Conn.

I’m sitting in the Midnight Café, only half full on orders of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, having breakfast. The place names and personal names throughout have been changed to protect innocent non-politicians. The usual waitress, Sami, of indeterminate age, sporting her usual braided ponytail, greets me, a steady customer, and the order is quickly put on the table.

The next few booths are filled with electricians brought into the state by Eversource to reconnected houses and businesses with mostly repaired power lines. They are, many of them, on their way back to their home states after a grueling stretch in Connecticut dealing with the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Isaias.

Sami calls out to them, “Have a safe trip back, guys,” and they wave beefy forearms in her direction.

“Sami, look at this picture, and tell me what you think.”

The photo, top of the fold, front page, shows Sen. Kamala Harris, whom former Vice President Joe Biden has picked as his vice-presidential candidate, standing at a podium  holding forth, while Biden, stone-faced, is seated in a chair that looks alarmingly like a kiddy highchair, legs wide open, his arms tightly clutching his stomach, his face masked in pretended interest.

Sami quickly assesses the photo and, never shy of sharing her opinion, smiles wickedly.

“Wonder if he had to use a stool to mount that chair?”

“Yeah, you noticed. If he were lying on the floor, he’d be in a fetal position.”

“Right. He’s hugging his tummy tightly.”

“Harris looks presidential though, doesn’t she?’’

“Very. I’m not sure that will help whatshisname,” (Same animated smile.)

It’s one of those pictures that are worth a thousand words.

The skinny on Biden, even among some Democrats, is that he has become a recluse, and not owing to Coronavirus. His early implication that he would choose as his vice president a Black woman had limited his range, but many Democrats feel that Harris might make a tolerable president when Biden, if elected, declines to run for a second term. Biden has not been able or inclined to answer successfully barely concealed imputations that he has become an in-the-closet presidential campaigner because he fears a public, mano a mano confrontation with President Trump.

It is thought by some that Biden's possible future foreign policy with respect to an aggressive and muscular China already has been compromised by Hunter Biden, his grasping son, who had been employed and monetarily rewarded by China because his daddy was Joe Biden, the Democrat’s Great White Hope in the November 2020 elections. And there is a suspicion that Biden has problems unspooling simple English sentences, that he will not be able to carry his weight in office, that he really has forgotten more than he knows, and on and on and on. Biden is 77 years old. His best days, many agreed, lie behind him.

The skinny on Trump is that he has been fatally damaged by repeated failed attempts to remove him from office, and a painfully protracted, failed attempt, lasting as long as his presidency, to find him guilty of collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some suppose that Trump will be easy campaign prey for a weakened Democrat presidential contender and his more vigorous, Black, female running mate candidate.

Under the hammer-blows of a Democrat opposition unalterably opposed to a Trump second term, it has been supposed that Connecticut Republicans, as happened in 2018, will tremulously withdraw in horror from a toxic president, thereby giving weight to Democratic assertions that even a damaged Biden-Harris administration would be preferable to four more years of an Trump regime.

In both law and politics, silence signifies assent; therefore, silence by Connecticut Republicans on two matters of importance to them – the re-election of a Republican president and the recapture of the U.S. House, as well as a stony silence on what is broadly called progressive social issues – can only be interpreted by state groups traditionally allied against Republicans as a permission to continue unimpeded many progressive programs that conservatives, libertarians, most Republicans and many unaffiliated voters consider repugnant and dangerous to the social fabric of the Republic.

In the new age now upon us, the center has not held, and The Second Coming, born in a dry desert, is slowly slouching toward Bethlehem. The media is now capitalizing “Black” in its reportage, as if “Black” were a race; it’s a color. “White” is also a color, not a race. Distinctions are not made between tolerable and even necessary mottos such as “Black Lives Matter” and political organizations and operations. George Orwell might well sweep all the rotgut Newsspeak away, but there are no Orwells among us.

And we have assented to the anarchic rule of windy and rootless politicians, never mindful of Ben Franklin’s answer when he was asked by a woman on the street, once the Continental Congress had finished its business, “Sir, what have you given us?”

“A republic, madam – IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Looking tired? Joe Biden in Henderson, Nev., last February

—Photo by Gage Skidmore

Sophia Paslaski: Supreme Court just made the case for Medicare for All

From OtherWords.org

People of the menstruating persuasion: how dare you. The highest court in the land demands to know.

This July, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that President Trump, who does not have a uterus, was quite right to object to Obama-era rules under the Affordable Care Act that allowed Americans who do have uteri access to free birth control through their employer-provided health-insurance plans.

Specifically, NPR reports, the Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration rule that “would give broad exemptions from the birth control mandate to nonprofits and some for-profit companies that object to birth control on religious or moral grounds.”

Not just religious — “moral.”

So even if Jesus is cool with it, if you have personal “moral” quandaries with the people in your employ taking birth control, you’re free to cut your workers off from essential medications.

And I do mean absolutely essential. While some of us use ACA-covered birth control like “the pill” or an intrauterine device (IUD) as an optional measure to prevent pregnancy, many of us depend on it to treat hormonal conditions.

Birth-control medication is commonly used to help manage premenstrual syndrome and painful periods. Doctors prescribe it to control the growth of painful ovarian cysts that can lead to life-threatening complications if left untreated. It helps those with challenges like depression level out the hormonal fluctuations that can trigger cyclical mood changes around menstruation.

And for one in 10 of us, it is the best line of defense, short of surgery, against endometriosis, a debilitating condition that many struggle to manage without birth-control medication.

But perhaps that’s not the point.

Plenty of us have made this medical appeal before to no avail. Medicine doesn’t seem to matter to those employers who deem themselves religiously or morally opposed to “providing” birth control to their employees — as if employers are handing out pill packs at the reception desk like free swag at Comic Con.

Maybe, as always, this is about the medical-industrial complex.

In this country, where much health insurance is tied to employment, employers often take the position that they are “giving” their employees health care — and therefore, that they are entitled to some say over what that care entails.

That’s nonsense — but so is tying health care to employment in the first place.

Politicians who oppose Medicare for All like to cite the concerns of voters who, allegedly, love their employer-provided health insurance. But this court decision proves what most of us, I expect, already know: private health insurance isn’t all that great.

It doesn’t cover everything you need it to cover. It’s beholden to the whims of the employers who provide it. It’s expensive for the self-employed who purchase it on their own. It prioritizes profit over care, yet still never seems to get the billing done right.

As Sen. Elizabeth Warren said at a debate last year, “Let’s be clear: I’ve never actually met anybody who likes their health insurance company.”

So fine. Refuse to offer health-insurance plans that cover birth control, if you must. I’m not happy about it, especially as I write this an hour before an appointment with my OBGYN to talk about birth control and endometriosis.

But I won’t fight you either, because I think you’ve done my fighting for me — I can think of no better argument for Medicare for All than the freeing of the noble employer from the dreadful moral quandary of birth control.

Great job, team. Drinks are on Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Sophia Paslaski is on the staff of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Jill Richardson: Trump’s quasi-dictatorship is ill-suited to a pandemic

Strong leaders!

From OtherWords.org

The Trump administration is apparently undertaking its latest effort to make 2020 more of a Kafkaesque nightmare than it already is. Yes, we’ve got murder hornets and a swarm of flying ants that can be seen from space over in Ireland, but maybe the scariest plague of the year is the president.

Since the start of the pandemic, Trump’s only concern has been his poll numbers. He wants to go back to the reality we left behind in 2019: an open economy and no mass casualties from a novel virus.

We can’t do that, so he’s done his best to pretend: downplaying the pandemic, falsely claiming that his administration has it under control, urging a quick economic reopening, and inaccurately claiming the economy is strong anyway.

When he can’t pretend everything is fine, he blames the Chinese. But China is not responsible for Trump’s botched response to the pandemic.

Now the Trump administration is actively interfering with the pandemic response.

Hospitals have been instructed to send COVID data to a central database in Washington, bypassing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The information will no longer be accessible to the public, raising concern that the data is being hidden for political reasons and the lack of transparency will make it easier for the administration to mislead the public.

The administration is also blocking CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield from testifying before Congress about the safety of reopening schools. They are attempting to block GOP senators from allocating billions of dollars to the CDC, Pentagon, and State Department for pandemic response. And the administration even opposes sending billions to states for testing and contact tracing.

Trump’s message to states has largely been “you’re on your own,” declining a national leadership role and placing responsibility for handling the pandemic on the states. He’s also suggested that governors should “treat him well” to receive federal aid, using the pandemic as a bargaining chip to silence dissent from governors who disagree with him.

Earlier in the pandemic, when personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies were limited, the federal government was even seizing PPE shipments.

In normal times, I would say the president should not be abdicating his leadership responsibility on the pandemic response. Under this president, I think we’re all better off if he and his political appointees interfere as little as possible and let more capable people do their jobs.

Despite his recent conversion to mask wearing, Trump’s authoritarianism is ill-suited to a pandemic. You cannot lower mortality rates by claiming the pandemic is under control and trying to force schools and businesses to reopen, regardless of the risk to workers. You can’t prevent the economy from tanking by insisting that it’s fine.

Trump’s top concern appears to be his own approval ratings, not our national welfare. He seems to believe his denial will be enough to save the economy — a plan that will fail and cause further mass casualties along the way.

The administration has created a terrible situation. All of our choices between our health and our economy are tough, and no choices will fully protect us. More than 145,000 people have died, and our economy is a mess.

We need to govern with facts instead of fantasy. If Trump can’t handle the job, he should get out of the way.

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

David Warsh: We were warned that things would go wrong

Lancaster, Ohio, devastated by the effects of the new forms of corporate financial manipulation that took off in the 1980s.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The appearance of a new edition of America: What Went Wrong?, a 1992 best-seller by Donald Barlett and James Steele, prize-winning reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is an opportunity for those of us still in the news business to reflect. I have no problem with the subtitle they have added, The Crisis Deepens. But what was I thinking when the book was published?

What Went Wrong appeared in the spring of 1992, based on a series that had appeared in the newspaper the autumn before.  Already there was plenty of carnage to fill chapters titled “Dismantling the Middle Class,” “Shifting Taxes – from Them to You” and “The Chaos of Health Care.” H. Ross Perot was warning about the “giant sucking sound” that would accompany passage of the North American Free Trade Act, as American manufacturing jobs were shifted to Mexico.  Reagan had made the idea of NAFTA part of his 1980 presidential campaign. George H.W. Bush had signed the Canadian portion of the measure in 1988. Bill Clinton defeated Bush in November, while Perot received 19 percent of the popular vote.  The overall treaty was ratified by the Democratic-led Senate in December the following year.

The U.S. was deep in the political/cultural mood-swing I have come to think of as “the market turn” – away from the propensity to regulate, towards enthusiasm for the promise of technological and financial innovation, with a predisposition toward globalization and reliance on market processes to sort it all out.

My prior beliefs about America’s foreign trade at the time were informed mainly by a little conference volume from 1986, Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics, edited by Paul Krugman, of MIT. Twenty-two years later, Krugman would be recognized with a Nobel Prize in economics for the work he had done in those years about competition among what we had recently begun calling “high-tech” products. “Industrial policy” had been a somewhat daring taste, but now it was coming out of the closet.

The fast growth of Japan in the 1970s and ’80s had been a false alarm; you couldn’t conclude that America has “gone wrong” from Toyota’s success; only that it had received a clarion wake-up call.  By 1990 Japan’s economy was mired in recession. But things were definitely changing.

The first leveraged-buyout book I read was When the Machine Stopped (1989), by Max Holland, about a disastrous Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts buyout 10 years before of toolmaker Houdaille Corp. I reviewed American Steel: The Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt (1991), by Richard Preston, about the new scrap mill industry, then read with special care the brilliant Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (1988), by Baltimore Sun reporter Mark Reutter.  By then I was reading books about Wall Street, of which Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken (1992), by Jesse Kornbluth, seemed the most damning.

But the eyes-wide-open moment for me arrived with IBM’s decision in 1994 to sell its personal-computer business to China’s Lenovo. I had reviewed Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM (1993), by Paul Carroll, of The Wall Street Journal.  So I knew something about how Bill Gates had snookered IBM out of the far more profitable than hardware personal-computer software industry.  The question was, could a Chinese company continue to make a success of a high-gloss American manufacturing business?

Ten years later, the answer was in: They had, and then some.  By then, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik had published his heretical Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (1997). The 1999 Seattle protests as China prepared to join the World Trade Organization had made it clear there was trouble on the horizon.  William Overholt had been prescient in The Rise of China: How Economic Reform Is Creating a New Superpower  (1993), but not until James Kynge, of the Financial Times, published China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future (2006) were the dimensions clear.

By the time that David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson published “The China Shock Learning from Labor Market Adjustments to Large Changes in Trade’’ in the Annual Review of Economics, in 2016, Donald Trump has become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. “The China Shock” and the work that’s come after may warrant another Nobel Prize 20 years hence; and an avalanche of books about American job losses has roared through in recent years, including the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), by the many-faceted J.D. Vance. My favorite was Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of an American Town (2017), by Brian Alexander, about Lancaster, Ohio, his hometown.

It was when I read An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Post-war Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy (2015), by economic journalist Marc Levinson, that my sense of the overall narrative crystalized. Those first 30 years after World War II had indeed seen a period of remarkable economic growth in the United States and Europe – les trente glorieuse in France; a “golden age” in Britain; the Wirtschaftswunder in West Germany, il Miracolo in Italy.  But those first 30 years were a phenomenon of the Atlantic World. The next miracles of growth occurred around the Pacific.  It was U.S. power and America’s commitment to principles of free trade that facilitated the growth that brought down communism, and created a vastly richer and more equal world – equal, at least, among nations. Does that make it safer, too?  The world certainly has become dangerously warmer.  There is nothing “ordinary” about the global economy of today.

I didn’t vote for Ross Perot in 1992.  Nor did I believe America had “gone wrong” then, at least not in a general way, though abuses were beginning to pile up. Barlett and Steel were definitely on to something, along with other center-left journalists, in particular Thomas Edsall, then of The Washington Post, and David Cay Johnson, then of The New York Times. Only in 2016 did America’s elected government decisively break bad, at least for a time.  Thanks to Perot and Barlett and Steele and all the others, including young Paul Krugman, we can’t say we were not warned.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.

Llewellyn King: Save the Postal Service: It helps to make America great

The downtown Westerly, R.I., Post Office, designed in the Classical Revival style, in 1913, by architect James Knox Taylor. The single-story building features a broad curving facade with eight fluted Doric columns of Vermont marble, flanked by wide piers. The interior lobby space retains many original features, including terrazzo and marble flooring, and a coffered ceiling with decorative moulding.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Open Letter to the New Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

Dear Sir,

There is fear that you’ve been appointed Postmaster General (congratulations, by the way) to downsize and privatize the post office. I’m here to plead for the post office. It is a great institution and –yes, yes, yes –incredibly efficient.

How can I say that when for generations it’s been the butt of jokes, a standard applause line when denounced by politicians as an example of government run amok?

Simple: personal experience.

For 33 years, I published professional newsletters in Washington. The champion in my stable was The Energy Daily. Its success -- and it was very successful in the 33 years from its founding until I sold it -- depended on the absolute reliability of first-class letter service from the post office.

Every evening we mailed the paper in a No. 10 envelope at a post office in the Washington area. Every morning, I received one in my mailbox in The Plains, Va., 50 miles southwest of District. It was extraordinary. So, too, was its delivery across the country.

Not only did we deliver subscribers their copies by first-class mail, but we also did all the promotion the same way. Over the years we mailed hundreds of thousands of first-class sales letters, and it paid off.

Even now, in the Internet age, mail is more trusted and taken more seriously. The head of a large cancer charity told me they still rely on mail solicitations for most of their fundraising: They raise $15 million a year through it.

Years ago, the president of a large, Mid-Atlantic electric utility told me, “The post office is one of the most efficient organizations in the country. Every month we mail more than a million bills, and they all get delivered.” So, I asked, why it is cited as an example of why the government can’t do anything right? He answered, “Have you heard about the alligators in the New York sewers?”

President Trump -- to whom you, Mr. DeJoy, have made financial campaign contributions of over $2 million (a mail carrier earns just over $45,00 a year) -- wants to see the post office punished; presumably because it has a contract to deliver for Amazon whose CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the country, owns The Washington Post, which isn’t kind to Trump.

Now, I’ll agree, that the post office must stop losing so much money. Those first-class letters are few, shredding revenues. The package business is the future.

But the problem is, as much as anything, micromanagement from Congress.

When I lived in The Plains, there were a dozen nearby post offices: rural ones, close together, serving few people. Democratic and Republican congressmen get overly attached to their local post offices and fight their closure, even when it is clear there should be consolidation. Likewise, Saturday delivery; for reasons long forgotten, six-day-a-week delivery has become sacred. A private company would stop that on Day One.

Besides, you can understand the attachment to your local post office: It is part of the community. You get and send mail there, maybe buy some stamps, and catch up on the gossip -- postmasters know everything.

People don’t hang out at the FedEx office. Remember that. You damage the post office and you take away something from American life.

Also, what corporation would support rural delivery? The rural electric cooperatives were created as a part of FDR’s New Deal because there was no other way that the farms would be electrified. Even in this day and age, there is little broadband availability in rural America because it doesn’t pay to lay the cable. What will happen to the mail?

Here is a true story about the post office in The Plains. A stray village dog, one well-fed and well-known as Downtown Brown, became attached to the post office. He decided that he owned it and barred people he didn’t like from entering. Downtown Brown had to be rusticated to a farm so that the people of The Plains -- population 238 -- could once again use the post office.

It wasn’t decided then that the post office should be closed because the dog was affecting the mail. If you privatize the post office now, that is what you’ll be doing.

Do be careful. You are stepping in to take control of something very American, since 1775. It has social value as well as being an innovator, from stagecoaches to airplanes to automated sorting.

The post office helped make America great. Save the post office. About Downtown Brown: I’m told he lived a long and happy life and never went postal again.

Cordially,

Mail Customer

Llewellyn King is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

Trump’s huge and absurd lie about COVID-19 testing

Demonstrating the use of a throat swab in COVID-19 testing

From Kaiser Health News

This story was produced in partnership with PolitiFact.

“If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

— President Trump in remarks during a June 15 roundtable discussion

President Trump sought to downplay the numbers associated with COVID-19 in the United States — which have passed 2 million confirmed cases and are nearing 120,000 lives lost — by arguing that the soaring national count was simply the result of superior testing.

“If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases,” Trump said at a June 15 roundtable discussion at the White House. “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

It’s a talking point the administration is emphasizing. Vice President Mike Pence reiterated it during a phone call to Republican governors that evening, recommending they use the argument as a strategy to quiet public concern about surging case tallies in some states. It’s also a variation on a tweet the president sent earlier in the day.

With that in mind, we wanted to dig deeper. We reached out to the White House for comment or clarification, but we never heard back. Independent researchers told us, though, that the president’s remarks are not only misleading — they’re also counterproductive in terms of thinking through what’s needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

Essentially, the president is arguing that the United States is finding more cases of COVID-19 because we are testing more — and that our increased testing makes it appear the pandemic is worse in the U.S. than in other countries.

“We will show more — more cases when other countries have far more cases than we do; they just don’t talk about it,” he added.

But that isn’t true.

The numbers paint a stark picture. The United States has recorded 2.1 million cases of the novel virus so far, about a quarter of the global total and more than any other country. To Trump’s point, the country is testing more now than it did at the start of the outbreak — per capita, the U.S. is in the top 20 percent of countries when it comes to cumulative tests run.

This beefed-up testing still likely reflects an undercount in cases, though. The problem is that the U.S. outbreak is worse than that of many other countries — so we need to be testing a higher percentage of our population than do others.

To best understand this, consider the number of tests necessary to identify a positive case. If it’s easier to find a positive case, that suggests the virus has spread further and more testing is necessary to track the spread of COVID-19.

For instance, statistics from the United States and the United Kingdom are fairly similar in terms of how many coronavirus tests are done daily per million people. But those tests yield far more positive cases in the United States. That suggests the outbreak here requires more per capita testing than does the U.K.’s.

“We have a much bigger epidemic, so you have to test more proportionately,” said Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Put another way, a larger health crisis means — even after controlling for population size — that the United States will have to test more people to find out where and how the virus has spread.

And while the U.S. has ramped up its testing since March, many parts of the country still don’t have sufficient systems in place — from facilities to staff to medical supplies — for diagnosing COVID-19, researchers told us.

What If We Stopped Testing?

And what about the president’s assertion that “if we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases” or none at all?

On its literal phrasing, it’s absurd, experts said.

“The implication that not testing makes the problem go away is completely false. It could not be more false,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. That’s because testing doesn’t create instances of the virus — it is just a way of showing and tracking them. (The president made a similar point during the same White House roundtable event.)

But even if you take it figuratively — the idea that our expanded testing resources have inflated our sense of the epidemic — it’s still misleading.

“We’re seeing a lot of cases because we’re testing? It just doesn’t ring true,” Kates said. “The U.S. has made a lot of progress for sure. But that job is not finished.”

The president’s claim is part of a larger re-election strategy, argued Robert Blendon, a health-care pollster at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The idea is to suggest that the health crisis is mostly exaggerated — and that things are getting better, and Americans should feel comfortable going back to work. “If the economy takes off, the president has a chance of re-election,” Blendon said. “If it contracts as a result of expansion of cases, and the only way we know how to respond is restriction of economic activity, he’s gone.”

But the problem, Blendon added, is that COVID-19 counts are still climbing in multiple states. And people are still dying of the virus.

That gets at another point: Diagnostic testing isn’t the only data source to reveal the pandemic’s existence. Let’s not forget about hospitalization rates and death counts. The number of deaths continues to rise, and hospitalizations are higher than they would be in the virus’s absence.

Our Ruling

Trump argued that the nation’s high count of COVID-19 cases is simply a result of our expanded testing capacity. His point is entirely incorrect.

The most relevant data suggest that the U.S. isn’t testing enough to match the severity of the pandemic. Even with our higher testing ratio, we’re probably still undercounting compared with other countries.

Testing doesn’t create the virus. Even without diagnostics, COVID-19 would still pose a problem. We just would know less about it.

And, in fact, eliminating testing may alter the public’s perception of the pandemic but it wouldn’t conceal it. If anything, it would likely worsen the crisis, since the public health system wouldn’t know how to accurately track and prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The president’s claim has no merit and seriously misrepresents the severity of the public health crisis. We rate it Pants on Fire.

SOURCES:

C-SPAN, “President Trump Roundtable Discussion on Seniors,” June 15, 2020

The New York Times, “Pence Tells Governors to Repeat Misleading Claim on Outbreaks,” June 15, 2020

Email interview with Emily Gurley, an associate scientist in epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, June 16, 2020

Our World in Data, Coronavirus Pandemic Data Explorer, accessed June 16, 2020

Telephone interview with Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health & HIV policy, KFF, June 16, 2020

Telephone interview with Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, June 16, 2020

Telephone interview with Robert Blendon, Richard L. Menschel professor and senior associate dean for Policy Translation and Leadership Development, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, June 17, 2020

Llewellyn King: The sum of America’s frustrations

“The Scream’’ (1893, oil, tempera and crayon on cardboard), by Edvard Munch. The title was the popular name given to the picture, and wasn’t Munch’s.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

There is disquiet in the soul of America.

It has been expressed night after night on the streets of over 100 towns and cities. That number of urban sites, with all those tens of thousands of people, are a cry from the hurting heart of America -- yes, over the death of George Floyd, the proximate cause, but it is about more.

The demonstrations are the sum of multiple grievances that roil America: grievances over police excess; over the plight of those at the bottom with poor wages, little or no health care, and crushing debt from credit cards which they will never earn enough money to pay off in all of the years of their lives. John Butler, professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, describes this debt as “technological sharecropping.”

It is the frustration that is the underside of the American Dream; the frustration that however hard one works, one will never escape the vise of debt, the squalor and degeneration of poverty with its cramping of the spirit and breaking of the will.

It is a well-founded sense of victimhood, for there are real victims --not only the victimhood of race, but also the pervasive victim status that settles upon all on the lowest rung of the economic ladder and even many rungs above, reaching well into the struggling middle class.

It is about despair: despair over money, despair over jobs, despair over squalor. It is about agony that morphs into anger at not being heard, at being used but not respected -- being the target of economic opportunity for those who own the corporations that seem to exploit, from the usurious pay-day lender to the large corporations that hide behind technology for comfort, to avoid confrontation, and to present any dispute as an assault on their right to do as they wish. In this vein, it is the phone company that makes it onerous to report a fault on the line, the cable company that overcharges for its services, taking advantage of its natural monopoly status.

It is about the insurance company that sends you a computer- generated letter, assuring that you will not be able to deal with an individual, speak to a human being. (Bank of America will not give out phone numbers for officers.) The wretched must go in person to get near anonymous help.

It is knowing that the rich have numbers to call, specialists to see, detours around difficulties, and the glorious knowledge that they will have the more questionable of their deeds shielded from scrutiny.

It is about the rigorous greed of the few who must ensure their wellbeing through droves of lobbyists. It is about the taxes that the wealthy do not pay, and the unfortunate do pay.

It is about politicians who talk about freedom but perfect the freedom not to hear the whimpers of need from their constituents: their need for health care, employment security, affordable housing and functioning schools. It is about a whole stratum of our society, from the very bottom to the middle, that feels that society has robbed them of everything, from respect to a hearing to simple dignity.

I have covered demonstrations, from those for self-government in colonial Africa to those against nuclear armament in London to the riots on the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington and Baltimore (they also went nationwide) to the repeated protests against the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia. There is in a demonstration a kind of camaraderie, a feeling of fellowship, a sense of human warmth and kindness that is powerful and invigorating -- and, yes, intoxicating, which can trigger bad behavior. Sadly, if violence erupts, the demonstrators hand over the keys to their futures to those they are protesting.

The people in the streets are there not only because of police brutality, injustice, and economic anguish but also in protest against the president of the United States. Donald Trump has fanned the embers of differences between people, emboldened excesses in police forces and encouraged conflict over harmony, ridicule over appreciation, and introduced the vernacular of the street into the political dialogue.

It is oddly appropriate that it is in the street that Trump’s presidency is being reviled and where it may founder.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Lessons and unknowns in the COVID-19 crisis so far

— Photo by Thomas Jantzen/SPÖ

Snapshots. That’s what we have of the United States as we emerge tentative and fraught from lockdown.

We don’t have the whole picture, just snapshots of this and that.

Some of the snapshots are encouraging: The air is clearer, crime is down and a collective spirit is apparent in many places.

Others are more disturbing: The pandemic has become politicized.

Those to the right are demanding a total reopening of the economy; they’re abandoning masks and social distancing. And they’re using fragments of information to justify their cavalier attitude toward the great human catastrophe: They insist the government can’t tell them what to do, even if it endangers countless others.

The mainstream, meanwhile, reflects a cautious approach of phased-in reopening of the economy, masks, social distancing and sanitization.

Snapshot: People of middle age and older are conspicuously more cautious than the young.

Snapshot: Caution has no coherent spokesperson, unless you count New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Where, one wonders, is Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 race? He has, one reads, held dozens of election events, but his voice hasn’t been heard. (Can the liberal press be held accountable? Hardly.) Biden snapshot: a distant figure, out-of-focus.

Every time I catch a Biden speech, he’s talking about his family, his Pennsylvania roots, or the tragic loss of his son Beau to cancer. He hasn’t found the words that give strength to a distraught and suffering people.

If Biden has great ideas about the future, about how we will emerge from this terrible time, they haven’t been heard. Maybe he should hire a speechwriter; plenty of good newspaper people out of work.

Snapshot: A new federalism, as espoused by Trump: If it goes right, it’s my achievement. If it goes wrong, the governors are to blame: The buck never stops here.

More Trump snapshots: Obama is to blame; Mueller is to blame; China is to blame; inspectors general are to blame; villains at every turn.

Snapshot: Immigrants are heroes at the top and the bottom.

Every other doctor interviewed on television for their expertise about the pandemic, it seems, has an accent: That shows the power of immigrants in science. Immigrants also carry the load in the most dangerous job in the United States: meat processing and packing. It is high-risk, low-pay work.

The immigrant effect is encompassing and a source of value to all Americans.

Snapshot of health care: A system unequal to the job.

There are overworked and under-supplied healthcare workers, plus many patients who won’t be able to pay their hospital bills. Wait until the invoices start arriving across the country, spreading destitution. If the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare, the destitution will be complete: a black, financial hole swallowing millions of Americans.

Snapshot: The poor are poorly. Hispanics and African Americans are bearing the brunt of the financial pain, and a disproportionate number of infections. Because so many are on the lower rungs of the employment ladder, they’re completely out of money now, and may find they have no jobs to return to as restrictions lift. This may be the ugliest snapshot in the gallery.

Saddest snapshot: Americans lined up in the tens of thousands to get a handout from the food banks. Mostly, one sees long lines of cars waiting for bags of food. Those are the lucky ones: They have cars. The needy must walk.

Happiest snapshot: Science is back, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to hobble it.

The public wants medicines for many conditions, and the rush to find answers for COVID-19 will lead to many discoveries that will benefit other sufferers with other diseases. War spurs innovation, and that’s what we’re getting.

Hard-to-read snapshot: How many companies will survive? Will we have just one national airline? Fewer utility companies? Will retail and office space be on the market for decades? How many people will work from home full time going forward? A boom in self-employment, leading to many startups and innovations galore?

Interesting snapshot: Will the impressive governors and mayors who have emerged during the pandemic save us from the political mediocrity that characterizes the national scene? Check out Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D).

Keep snapping and wearing a mask, things will come into focus: good and bad.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

David Warsh: The FBI's 'October surprise' and Trump’s election

SOMEVILLE, Mass.

As a citizen, I feel fairly confident about leaving judgment of Donald Trump’s presidency to American people in the November election.  As a journalist, I’m professionally acutely interested in the ongoing battle over the FBI, because it seems central to American’s faith in in its government institutions.

The story received another jolt last week when Atty. Gen. William Barr said the Justice Department would move to close the government’s case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Then on May 8, the president expressed dissatisfaction with the conduct of current FBI director, Christopher Wray, in a telephone interview with Fox News, as reported by The Washington Post.

Economic Principals readers have probably read enough about what critics think Attorney General Barr did wrong. If not, here’s a well-informed take is from the well-regarded online Lawfare site.

I wanted to know more about what its critics think the FBI did wrong. So after I read the commentary on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal – more on that some other day – I turned to Barr’s interview with CBS correspondent Catherine Herridge, in which I thought that he gave a pretty good, if incomplete, account of his decision.  It was, he said, based on a review of the events of December 2016 and January 2017, undertaken at his request by Jeffrey Jensen, U.S. attorney for eastern Missouri.

Those events, between the election and Trump’s inauguration, transpired long before Barr became attorney general.  Looking back on it, Barr argued that the dominant opinion at the time had been mistaken.  He asserted that, since Flynn was a designated adviser to the president-elect at the time, his call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016 had been “perfectly appropriate and legitimate…. He was saying to the Russians, you know, ‘Don’t escalate.”’

The Obama administration earlier had imposed sanctions in retribution for Russian meddling in the U.S. election. When Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently took Flynn’s advice, the Russia controversy entered a new dimension. The rest of Barr’s reasoning for moving to vacate the charges of lying had to do with the timing of the FBI interviews that produced them.

It took pages of interview transcript to lay out Barr’s reasoning in the intricate matter. Even then, his argument was less than a convincing job. When Herridge pointedly asked, “Did senior FBI officials conspire to  throw out the national security adviser?,” Barr answered, “That’s a question that really has to wait an analysis of all the different episodes that occurred through the summer of 2016 and the first several months of President Trump’s administration.”   Presumably that would be the review that Barr asked John Durham, U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to undertake. Durham’s assignment is understood to include an examination of the circumstances and events that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

As previously noted, The Washington Post has reported that a third outside review, by John Huber, U.S. attorney for Utah, this one of the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation, has been completed, and awaits action by Barr.

One other first-person account by a participant in these events remains to appear, this one by a dispassionate newspaper reporter. Devlin Barrett was working for The Wall Street Journal when he obtained an interview, with assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe it turned out, in which the existence of the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation was confirmed for the first time.  McCabe was subsequently fired for having made the disclosure. Barrett moved a few months later to The Washington Post and has remained an energetic contributor to the story ever since.

Barrett’s October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election. (Public Affairs) is scheduled to appear in October. Its description on Amazon says this:

The 2016 Election, which altered American political history, was not decided by the Russians or in Ukraine or by Steve Bannon. The event that broke Hillary’s blue wall in the Midwest and swung Florida and North Carolina was an October Surprise, and it was wholly a product of the leadership of the FBI. This is the inside story by the reporter closest to its center….

October Surprise is a pulsating narrative of an agency seized with righteous certainty that waded into the most important political moment in the life of the nation, and has no idea how to back out with dignity. So it doggedly stands its ground, compounding its error. In a momentous display of self-preservation, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and key Justice Department officials decide to protect their own reputations rather than save the democratic process. Once they make that determination, the race is lost for Clinton, who is helpless in front of their accusation even though she has not intended to commit, let alone actually committed, any crime.
A dark true-life thriller with historic consequences set at the most crucial moment in the electoral calendar, October Surprise is a warning, a morality tale and a political and personal tragedy.

Barrett believes, to judge from the flap copy, that the FBI cost Clinton the race. And, as a proximate cause, Comey’s letter notifying Congress that he had briefly reopened the investigation of her email probably did.

EP has argued from the beginning that various field offices of the FBI, as well as headquarters units, were torn, no less than the American electorate, by deep partisan divisions. Outsiders exploited these schisms with varying degrees of success.

Leadership sought to keep lids on warring factions, with profoundly mixed results. The November election will decide possession of the White House for the next four years, but neither Barr nor Durham nor Barrett will settle the battle over the FBI. Much remains to be learned.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.