Tag Archives: COVID

Political Rants

With friends like us, who needs enemies?

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Anyone who thinks what we’re doing to Afghanistan is uniquely cruel has not been paying attention over the last few decades. We did something very similar to Vietnam after that endless war ended. We sanctioned the government, denied them aid, blocked others from trading with them, and so on. That lasted decades, and I have no doubt that, given the prevailing political mood, the Afghan strangulation might last years, at least.

What the hell is the point of this policy? We bled rural Afghanistan for twenty years. Every family lost someone to our bombing runs, drone strikes, or night raids. Sniveling hacks like Lindsey Graham seem satisfied that all this killing has accomplished something, but he’s wrong, as usual, unless the point was to make some people a lot of money. As we sit around grousing incoherently about retail terrorism, a million people are on the brink of starvation, and we won’t even let them have their own damn money.

Keeping the creep-asses happy

I don’t imagine that our leaders actually care that much about people in other countries. They often pretend to care one way or the other to please some domestic constituency. For instance, it’s hard to find a politician willing to say something good about Cuba, or Venezuela, or some other official enemy. It’s not because they’re official enemies – on the contrary, they’re official enemies because our politicians don’t want to say anything good about them.

If I were to assume the best about Biden, I would guess that he won’t agree to free up Afghan reserves held in this country because he doesn’t want to be criticized for appearing to support the Taliban. I’m sure he can hear the attack ads in the back of his mind – Biden gave money to the Taliban! He supports terrorists! Not unlikely, though the right wing is going to say that anyway, regardless of what he does. So maybe a million kids need to die so that he can avoid some amount of criticism. That’s the best case.

For reasons of state

What’s the worst case? That they’re cravenly putting people’s lives at risk for some perceived gain. It’s kind of the same thing, except maybe more actively evil. Our leaders are well-practiced at standing by and folding their arms while thousands die. Look at the global COVID pandemic – we could have taken steps to tamp down the virus all around the world, thereby saving maybe hundreds of thousands of lives. But we didn’t because, well, we value free markets and private property over all other things. Even people.

The Lindsey Grahams of the world affect to be afraid that, if we don’t kill them over there, they’ll find some way to kill us over here. From what I’ve heard of the rural experience in Afghanistan over the last twenty years, I would guess that we are now in more danger from angry Afghans than we ever would have been had we decided not to invade. So, either the Senator is an imbecile or maybe he just doesn’t care that we’re making people bitter enough that they’ll want to get back at us one day. (My guess is that, by then, Graham will be long gone.)

Self-licking ice cream bomb

There is, of course, a financial incentive. The Pentagon budget is a tremendous bonanza for defense contractors. Untold fortunes have been made off of these massive, multi trillion-dollar budgets. Because institutions have a tendency to perpetuate themselves, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our global war on terror is likely to keep rolling and rolling, regardless of success or failure.

The machine is doing exactly what it’s built to do. No, it’s not keeping us safe – that’s not what it’s built for. It is making people rich, though, and so by that standard, our foreign policy is a screaming success.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Get back onto that plague ship, you lazy prole!

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The chattering classes are having a hair-on-fire moment about labor. We’ve seen this coming for a while now. I commented on it back in July when retired ad man and political commentator Don Deutsch fired off a petulant little tweet about working people, then yakked about it with Joe Scarborough.

Well, they’re back, and it’s because the service is just not what it should be. Hell, do you realize Joe and Mika had to wait two hours for a flight because there weren’t enough baggage handlers? It’s like workers don’t want to work anymore. Unprecedented … or IS it?

An ill wind, indeed

When the Black Plague ripped through Europe in the 14th Century, it created a massive labor shortage. This was due to the fact that the disease may have killed as much as 1/3 of the population. The peasants who survived were reluctant to return to their rich masters’ fields. This compelled the gentry to sweeten the pot a bit – compensate the workers more, give them money, cut their rent, etc.

That was kind of a great leap forward for labor. Then the gentry passed a law that established a kind of maximum wage. This was to protect the essential feudal relationship between lord and peasant. (They had their own Donnie Deutcshes back then, of course.) It kind of backfired, though – there was a peasant rising, and they won some concessions. By 1500 the feudal system was giving way to another system of worker exploitation.

Here’s a tip for you

What television pundits are complaining about is simple: workers are saying “fuck this lousy job.” The wealthy underwriters of cable television don’t like this. This is the part of supply and demand that drives them nuts. Their pundits roll out the claim that lazy workers are all at home, eating grapes and collecting their federal unemployment enhancement checks.

The fact is, many workers who left their jobs were in tipped industries. Wait staff make sub-minimum wage plus tips, and it’s hard for them to demonstrate that they earned enough income to receive full unemployment. Worse, they get harassed and abused at work, and have to worry about catching COVID. Patrons will tell them to take off their mask if they want a tip. Who needs that bullshit?

Same old same old

Employers, large and small, are conveniently forgetting something: COVID is still killing people. The rolling three-day average is running over 1,100 deaths a day – that’s a 9/11 every third day. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to work remotely. The more poorly-paid, low-benefit occupations tend to be in-person only, and that’s why people are not returning to those jobs.

Also, if this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that withholding labor is an effective tool. If enough people do it, rich people start squawking. When you hear that sound, you know you’re doing something right.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

To the rescue.

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Congress approved the 1.9 trillion-dollar COVID rescue package this week, and while the final version didn’t include everything I would liked to have seen in the bill, there’s some decent stuff in there. What’s more, it is generally on a scale that approaches that of the problems we face. This is a departure, and one would hope a trend, away from the post-Reagan neoliberal consensus and towards a broader notion of what government may be called upon to accomplish on behalf of ordinary people. We have often heard pundits spin a false dichotomy between “big government liberalism” and “small government conservatism” – the fact is, conservatives and the right more generally are all in favor of big government, so long as it serves the interests of the powerful. The fact that the rescue package turns this on its head is an indication of how far we’ve come in recent years, despite all the resistance.

We’re overdue for that sort of turn, frankly. We’ve been living in the Reagan economic universe for forty years – essentially my entire adult life – with labor under siege, bloated military budgets, corporate-friendly multilateral investor rights agreements (popularly known as “free trade agreements”), and imperial swagger on the world stage. Obviously one bill is not going to change all of that, but it’s a step in the right direction, and a relatively bold one at that, compared to what we’re used to. Sure, the COBRA subsidies are kind of stupid and a massively inefficient way to extend health insurance to unemployed people. Sure, the checks should have been $2000 because that’s what everyone – including Trump – was calling for just after the election. Sure, they should have kept the $15 minimum wage because it was a solid provision that would have pegged the rate to inflation instead of giving employers a gradually increasing discount on the cost of labor. But what’s there is mostly good.

Biden and others have said that provisions in this bill will cut child poverty in half. I think that’s great, but it’s kind of like dividing the baby. If we can cut it in half, how about spending more and eliminating it entirely? So much of what’s in the legislation addresses inequality in a substantive way, but the solutions are almost all temporary ones. It’s incumbent on progressives to push the administration and Congress to build these initiatives out into more permanent benefits. We will see what kind of an effect this bill will have on families and individuals. If it’s dramatic enough, that could create the kind of popular momentum needed to push a broader agenda forward. We know what some of that will look like – the minimum wage, labor reforms, etc. We need a wealth tax, not so much to generate revenue (it will do that) but to reduce inequality and lessen the power and influence of the ultra wealthy. I’m talking about an upper limit on assets – something well south of a billion dollars. That’s the kind of tax system we need.

This could have come out much worse, and I think a lot of credit is due progressives like Bernie Sanders and some of the great people in the House. Their fingerprints are all over the more progressive pieces of this, and that’s cause for celebration.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Same old.

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It’s late February, nearly a year after the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States, and I and millions of people like me are still standing in the middle of a street, waiting for a truck to strike us down. For those of you who thought everything would change after we got rid of Trump and saw Biden take office, this is not an encouraging time. I know we’re little more than a month into the new administration, but for chrissake, the house is on fire … pull the damn alarm. They’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than this, because this is pathetic. I’m hearing voices within the administration telling us that they’re ramping up production of everything COVID-related via executive order. That’s nice, but where’s the evidence of this? I live in a fairly rural community (a small city), and I notice no change whatsoever, aside from the rhetoric.

Yes, like many Americans, I have not had a COVID vaccine, as I am not yet eligible. I am not over 65 nor do I work in what’s considered a high-risk capacity. But the eligibility barrier is just another way of saying that they just don’t have enough shots. At this point, they should be flooding the zone with vaccines, trying to get as many shots as possible into people. I have heard whispers that they will be expanding eligibility to people in their mid fifties, but there’s no official statement regarding that on the CDC site, New York’s COVID page, nor my local Health Department’s site. And so we wait in this Kafkaesque way until someone tells us its our turn, but that day still seems pretty far off. And it’s not like I can shelter in place into perpetuity – I have to work, and that involves leaving my house on a daily basis (albeit not for the entire day); I have to go to the market from time to time, of course; I have medical appointments that can’t be done virtually. In short, I need the goddamn shot.

I hate to say it, but this is the same pathetic small-bore type of response to enormous problems that we saw in the Obama administration. We need a national mobilization on the scale of the Second World War, quite frankly, as we have lost many more Americans than died on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s, but I have zero confidence that Biden and his administration have the bottle to follow through with anything of the sort. After forty years of right-wing assault against the very notion of government actively intervening on behalf of ordinary people, we are left with this dysfunctional husk of a federal bureaucracy, straining like a 100-year-old geezer as it attempts to squeeze out a COVID response package that’s months late and about 600 dollars short, per capita.

Let’s prove me wrong on this. Call your senators, your rep, your new President and Vice-President. Tell them to push harder to get this vaccination program moving – July is not nearly soon enough to get shots in everyone’s arms. Let’s do it like our lives depend on it, because they just might.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.