You do not need to like or agree with Hillary Clinton to recognize she would be handling this crisis a thousand times better than Donald Trump. Frankly the same can be said of Joe Biden. Competence and experience are not entertaining or validating qualifies, but they are the ones that win wars and help countries survive into the future. They are deliberately in short supply in our government today that values loyalty over competence, talking points over science, and the performance of the stock market over the literal health of the nation. I am usually a man of the left, but I’ll take a competent centrist any day of the week over the preventable chaos we are about to endure. Be well and if you have yet to make up your mind about the election, think about this crisis and the kind of commander in chief you want leading the country through it.
Did Biden call for a ban on evictions and mortgage foreclosures? Did he call for a relaxation of foreign sanctions that are endangering the health of people in nations such as Iran?
I haven’t seen his speech yet, but I know that there other Democrats who have been calling for these steps to be taken.
I think Biden will call for the former, especially since so many companies are already going in that direction. I know my electric and gas utility said no collections until the state of emergency passes.
As for the latter, I’m not sure what good that would do at this point. Iran is banning all travel into the country and pushing propaganda that America generated the virus as an act of bio terrorism. It’s doubtful they would accept our help if we offered any and we are nowhere near a position to do anything now if we cannot adequately manage the health of our own people. Maybe South Korea or China can help now that we have flattened the curve and I’d be fine with lifting sanctions to allow for that, it’s very low on the things voters are worried about right now.
The sanctions on Iran are causing real economic harm –that’s the point of sanctions, right? Relaxing them during a pandemic would save lives, not only in Iran but in Venezuela.
I’d like our government to provide real and immediate benefits to people suffering in America before we do the same for our foreign adversaries.
There was much fanfare about the first $8.3B package passed by Congress. I’ve seen absolutely NOTHING about how that’s helped anybody here (where “here” means my family and friends, my city, my state, or elsewhere in the US). There’s been similar fanfare about the second package passed by the House last Friday. Similarly, I’ve found little or no immediate benefit to anybody I know or care about.
For example, extending unemployment benefits is a great sound-bite. In practice, it does nothing to help gig workers, most workers in the hospitality industry, service workers like housekeepers and construction workers, that sort of thing. We learned today that big companies and small companies are each excluded from the provisions for paid sick leave.
We need to be doing things like sending a one-time $2-3K cash payment to every American. We need to be making test kits available by the tens of millions. We need a daily briefing with concrete data about how many tests were actually distributed each day, not vague assurances about the “millions of tests” that “will be available late next week”.
After our government finds a way to address the needs of Americans I’ll have more head-space to worry about foreign adversaries.
I agree with everything Tom wrote. I think Bob makes a great case that food and medicine should have been exempted from sanctions in the first place or exempted going forward, but the time to do that was before Iran became the third hottest red zone in the world and before the US became the fifth. I honestly think we would infect more Venezuelans than we would help if our aid workers came into contact with recipients. I think we would just be exposing anyone we sent to Iran to the virus and bringing more of it back here.
Tom is absolutely right that the focus has to be on securing the US first. I do not think we can be an effective global leader responding to this pandemic when we are frankly behind Italy in our response efforts and will likely look even worse than them in 3 weeks time. I think we will make the world sicker and not healthier if we do not secure our own nation first from mass community spread. South Korea is in a far better position to help train medical teams in other nations and possibly send aid. Frankly so is China. The US is far behind Italy.
Relaxing sanctions is not the same as sending in aid workers, so I don’t see why you keep talking about aid workers.
If there is anything this epidemic should teach us it’s that international cooperation is the only way to fight it.. “America first”, is Trump’s motto and is precisely why Trump’s reaction has been so limited and ineffective. To mimic Trump’s lack of head space won’t help us at all.
These sanctions are literally killing people. They should be rolled back.
Morally I agree with you, but if both countries have banned all travel into their country and if our country is getting more and more infected, I am not sure it could really help.
Let’s say we lift the sanctions tomorrow on food and medicine. There’s still a huge risk that we are transmitting the virus via the workers handling the shipments. There’s a very high risk considering the spread in Iran that anyone we send there will come in contact with the disease and bring it back here.
Neither of us are experts, my take is we can ease sanctions to help both nations we should do so, but let’s be realistic about it to protect sender and receiver from spreading the virus even more. I know during the Spanish flu that aid shipments between Europe and the US exacerbated the spread of the disease.
If there is such a huge risk shipping food and medicine, shouldn’t we ban all shipments to and from anywhere? Or should we only risk infecting people in countries that we are friendly with?
Haven’t we done so already? I’m not sure what your point is. What would you do by lifting these sanctions, just allow corporations to ship products to those two areas? I honestly feel that hurts Venezuela by increasing their risk of contact with the virus and risks anyone in the supply chain interacting with Iran.
We have zero sanctions on Italy, but frankly that’s a harder place for an Americans and American businesses to interact with right now for obvious reasons. I think you are overestimating the efficacy of your solution and underestimating the harms it could cause, but sure for symbolic purposes I’m fine with it. Trump won’t do it and Biden is not President anyway so this is a moot argument.
“First, do no harm”. Venezuela has been suffering from a severe shortage of medical supplies for some time. I don’t know how much of this is due to our sanctions, and I don’t claim that eliminating sanctions is some kind of magic solution, but I do know that eliminating the sanctions is certainly a step in the right direction.
As far as your notion that we are “protecting” Venezuela by crippling their economy, that is just unbelievably patronizing. Let Venezuelans make their own decisions.
I am specifically asking what sanctions you would eliminate and how it would change the situation on the ground right now?
The US does not have enough medical supplies to survive this pandemic right now. Sorry, I’d rather my wife get the protective gear and testing equipment she needs to do her job and help patients in Boston. If that makes me a right wing jingoist, so be it. You’re tilting at irrelevant windmills. Sanctions and fighting this crisis are entirely unrelated issues.
Again, we are not even exchanging people, goods, or services with our allies in Europe, why would we risk American personnel to resume trade with an American enemy? Or to possibly infect a nation where the virus is not as severe by exposing it to our products and personnel? Your proposal is a solution in search of a problem and a discussion to table until after we flatten our own curve.
https://mondoweiss.net/2020/03/u-s-sanctions-on-iran-are-making-its-coronavirus-crisis-worse-ilhan-omar-is-calling-for-them-to-be-suspended/
Three of my five adult children have lost their jobs in the last week. None of them have access to any tests.,There is no indication that any of the television talk is doing a single blessed thing for them. My mortgage is due the same as always next month and the month after, whether or not my tenants have jobs. My wife and I are already draining down our limited portfolio earlier than we wanted to because our culture will not pay a single nickle programmers or geneticists over 60. We will, of course, help our children and if our tenants can’t pay their rent, we’ll find a way to make do without for a few months.
I don’t have headspace to waste even a minute worrying about people in Venezuela.
https://www.juancole.com/2020/03/help-coronavirus-sanctions.html
A five year old with a crack pipe would be more competent than Trump, but so what? Has any Republican come forward to challenge him? No. Imagine that. They all support him 100% Does his base still adore him? Yes, and I know many of them.
Hillary ran her campaign (by my observation) focused on calling Trump a very bad man. Now that it has been proven that he is a bad man AND highly unqualified, nothing changes because Trump knows what his supporters want. Those in the house and senate want tax cuts for their wealthy friends and while they and his base want “conservative” judges. Finally, his rabid base WANTS a mad man, a kook, a guy who “speaks his mind” and “pisses off the liberals” who look down on poor working class whites.
Joe can win this not by attacking Trump. He can win this by proposing bold economic change and revolutionary changes to our antiquated health care policies. I wish him well.
Honestly there will not be an economy in 3-4 months if the inaction continues and this crisis gets as bad as it does. If the conservative estimates for deaths from this run in the hundreds of thousands (from the data I’ve seen that’s generous) than your friends will statistically have buried a love one by the time the election rolls around. I don’t think we’ll be debating wokeness, Medicare for all plans, or Trumps record on judges but his response to this crisis. Knowing everything we already know, a lot of preventable deaths will have happened because of his incompetency.
The “but my 401k looks great” guy around the grill can’t say that after Black Thursday. Trump crashed the only thing he has going for him. He may also have allowed his mother or father or sister or baby to die a preventable death.
This was always a harm reduction election (get the ship back on course and stop the human damage of this presidency) and now the white suburban middle class is going to be hit very badly by this presidency as so many communities of color have already been. As badly as victims of gun violence, immigrant communities, and Puerto Rico. All of which flew under the radar of our predominately white college educated elite media. Now decades of chickens are coming home to roost.
Underinvestment in public health, in science, in infrastructure, and closing the service gap between the wealthy and the poor. It’s going to be very hard to build a wall or gate or zone a community to keep the virus out. Lots of rich white people will die. They may regret their tax cuts then. They may even wish they had the lady with the bad emails instead.
We are collectively killing the economy with all these bans on activities that fuel it. I have a hard time imagining that level of death in a first world country. The vast majority of cases don’t even require hospitalization.
Christopher, I fear you are either not seeing or not understanding the implications of the graphics that show why these bans are needed.
In the absence of any effective vaccine or any agent that slows the course of the infection, then this pandemic will run its course — the same number of people will be infected and will have the same frequency of complications as if we did nothing. That means that some large number of people will require hospitalization (I see estimates in the scientific and medical community of 2.5M to 21M nationwide). That’s about 15-20% of those infected.
For those people who require hospitalization, nearly ALL of them will do fine if they are able to receive the right treatment at the right time. For most of them, that means that they require respirators, intubation, IV fluids, and so on. All that will require both the necessary equipment and hospital staff to use it.
We currently have 350,000 staffed hospital beds nationwide. We have about 65,000 respirators nationwide.
If all the cases come at once in one wave, then we’ll have 50-75 seriously ill people — our spouses, partners, parents, children, friends, fellow participants here at BMG — chasing each bed. We’ll have hundreds of victims, each dying from pneumonia induced by COVID-19, competing for each respirator. Those who get the treatment and the respirator live. Those who do not die.
That human calamity can be avoided by spreading the same number of infections across a longer period of time. Think about a restaurant with 25 tables. When 75 parties arrive at 7:00 because an event has just finished, then 50 will wait for a long time (or go somewhere else). If those same 75 parties are spread through the entire evening, nobody has to wait. A 25 table restaurant can serve 75 parties over the course of an evening, because each table can be “turned” several times.
The purpose of these closings and bans is to do everything we can to stretch and therefore flatten the anticipated COVID-19 peak over the next few weeks or months, rather than all at once. The experts I talk to and read say that every day that any one person waits helps.
About half of us here at BMG are going to get this infection before it’s done. If we don’t do these social-distancing measures, several of us will die in the next few weeks or months. That death toll is avoidable.
That is why these disruptions and bans are necessary.
I really hope that once this is over we think about how to prevent this from ever happening again. We haven’t had to do it before and in my view the disruptions, cancellations, bans, closures, etc. are IMO completely intolerable for a society that calls itself free and prosperous.
I wholeheartedly agree with you about this.
We don’t have to look very far to see how to prevent a recurrence — Barack Obama did that, and his administration put the mechanisms in place that would very likely have avoided this.
Donald Trump and his administration dismantled those two years ago.
I am old enough to remember Obama getting reamed for not reacting quickly or decisively enough on Ebola, when in retrospect, he did a damn good job. We could cross apply a lot of that analysis between these two presidencies. Frankly W Bush handled the aftermath of 9/11 and the start of the financial crisis far better than Trump. Frankly, he even handled Katrina far better. We forget 3500 Americans already died during a disaster under Trump’s watch, but because they can’t vote for president and are predominately Hispanic nobody gives a damn about them.
I agree with you on all points. I think the odds of Trump winning are slim to none., but I want to more than get him out. I want to make sure he and his ilk never return.
Will Biden have the nerve to make, say, Hillary Clinton our Attorney General with explicit instructions to go after, with fire and fury, Trump and all his minions?
My answer to your last question is “yes” — not only because I think Mr. Biden will to do that, but because I think that the entire nation will demand it.
My only quibble is that I suspect Kamala Harris will be more effective at that task than Ms. Clinton.
My prediction is that by March or April of next year with a Democrat as AG — if not sooner — we will be flooded with the criminal evidence that Mr. Barr and this DoJ have been suppressing for years. I think it’s MUCH more than the tip of the iceberg. I think that we’ll find criminality virtually everywhere we look in this criminal enterprise.
Maybe we can repurpose GITMO as a “temporary” facility for holding the hundreds or thousands of Trumpist criminals that will be investigated, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated by the end of 2021.
I think the obvious answer is “no,” he’ll declare it would be too damaging to the country, and will do what Obama did and give the bad guys a pass before sitting down for a bipartisan beer with Mitch McConnell.
Do we have any reason to think otherwise?
Somerville Tom’s upthread wish notwithstanding.
I sincerely hope you’re mistaken, though I share your cynicism.
@Do we have any reason to think otherwise?:
The victims of the war crimes committed by the George W. Bush administration were foreign and primarily Muslim. I think the crimes committed by Mr. Trump and his cronies far exceed anything done by the financial industry in the runup to the 2008 crash.
The victims of the Trump administration are ourselves, our neighbors, our children, our parents, everyone we love and care about.
I think that’s the reason that the anger against Mr. Trump and his Collaborators will be widespread and intense, in a way that did not happen in 2008.
Yep. Trump already let 3500 Americans in Puerto Rico die with his botched response.
I’ll add I share Trickle Up’s cynicism. Since we all have time on our hands now, I recommend Ezra Klein’s interview with Dan Pfeiffer. He really lays out why Biden was able to beat Bernie and what he needs to do to beat Trump and govern effectively. Biden would be wise to hire these Obama hands to help him govern, they are under no illusions McConnell is still a friend.
I think Biden wants to do a good job, knows this is his last shot, and is motivated by a patriotic desire to unite the country and undo the damage Trump has done. For those reasons, I think he will rely on reconciliation to overturn the filibuster if we get a senate majority or executive orders to pass stuff if we do not. It’ll look a lot more like Obama’s second term than his first (when so much time was wasted trying to get Joe Lieberman’s and Olympia Snowe’s vote).
There will be many fine choices to be made, and gray areas. But fudamentally it will come down to a choice between de-Nazification versus appeasement, with no middle ground.
Not that anyone should be surprised, but it turns out that Donald Trump’s statements about student loan interest were simply lies. The New York Times explains why.
It turns out that payments won’t change at all, because what Mr. Trump has ordered is that the payments go entirely towards principal. Some borrowers, such as those in “forebearance” programs, will benefit at least in the short-term because no interest will accrue during this waiver period. Not all loans are covered.
Meanwhile, important questions about the program remain unanswered. Most important — will the interest that accrues during the waiver period simply be added back when the waiver ends? Officials are silent. That means that it almost certainly will be. That, in turn, means that this “benefit” could actually hurt borrowers.
This administration does indeed “have an adversarial relationship to the truth”, as Mr. Biden so aptly put it.
Extended unemployment benefits don’t help gig workers and others who don’t qualify. A hiatus of evictions doesn’t help if landlords must still meet mortgage payments — at least for the millions of owner-occupied properties like ours.
I’m weary of the lies from Mr. Trump and his ilk, and I’m weary of empty happy-talk from Ms. Pelosi and the Democrats.
I want to know what tangible steps is the government taking RIGHT NOW to help those who suffering from this self-inflicted pandemic RIGHT NOW.
Honestly Andrew Yang had a good point that a temporary UBI makes sense to keep the economy rolling, especially as hundreds of thousand of workers will be furloughed and at least hundreds, if not thousands, of small businesses will go under. If this is really the
month to a month and a half shutdown I think it will be, we are talking long term damage to small businesses and some large ones too. I’ve heard rumors Encore could close.