I do not listen to the press conferences with Trump. I hear about the fallout afterwards. Perhaps it’s best to ignore him, save our outrage, and give a signal boost only to correct misinformation. (Rachel Maddow had a good segment on this.) His is a long history of ignorance, stubbornness and destructive stupidity:
He has lied continually, absurdly downplaying the risk of the virus. He took apart the pandemic response team two years ago; he ignored national security advisors and ignored the spread of the current virus; and even as medical personnel around the country take their own lives in their hands, he refuses to use the powers available to him under the Defense Production Act (pushed by our own Senator Markey) to produce personal protective equipment (masks, gloves, glasses, gowns) at maximum speed. (Local hospitals are resorting to community-based crafting operations to make PPE.)
Major manufacturers WILL NOT DRAMATICALLY CHANGE priorities of production until US promises them a market. We can’t do this on mere charity. Without #DefenseProductionAct , companies risk creating unused inventory. That’s the genius of DPA. US is the guaranteed market. @cnn
— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) March 21, 2020
We actually do depend on responsible leadership at the very top. At great length, Trump has royally —-ed this up, and continues to make things worse, at grave human cost. People will die, unnecessarily; certainly people we know. At the prompting of a few prominent conservatives and plutocrats, he is now publicly risking as many deaths as is necessary in a doomed attempt to prop up the economy. There is no economy if you’re dead; this is based on fantasy, desperation, and greed.
It was nearly 3 1/2 years between the stock market crash of 1929 and the first New Deal programs. That was nearly an entire presidential term where the government acted helpless, and in fact acted counter-productively. We’ve got 10 months until January 20th, 2021; a President Biden had better be prepared to work fast — passing transformative, revivifying legislation in the first 100 days of his Presidency. He has done well to adopt Elizabeth Warren’s ideas on student loan forgiveness and bankruptcy. The rest of the agenda had better look a lot like a Sanders or Warren presidency; either we go for Big Structural Change, or disaster capitalism and authoritarianism will thoroughly destroy what’s left of us.
Of course, a Biden Presidency will only happen if he can make a better showing than yesterday’s late, tepid, and discombobulated video. Who among his staff thinks this is good enough? (Massachusetts Governor “Charlie Parker”, well, that’s a new one.)
Now is the time for a tough, bold — yea Churchillian tone from Democratic leaders — to show what the alternative would be like, and to continually make Trump feel the heat.
Yep. Co-sign to the above and to this excellent Op-Ed from Zeke Emmanuel (the good Emmanuel).
All this needs to happen in next two weeks:
-DPA authorization now. One central person in charge of production.
-National shelter in place order
-National school closure
-Road closures and limits to interstate travel
-Deploy national guardsmen and military to enforce shelter in place order and do drive thru tests
-Anyone jobless who wants to get paid to help America can be trained to test temperatures and build/use equipment
-Army Corps of Engineers to constrict field hospitals all over to remove Covid from ordinary hospital operations
-MA is already waiving licensure requirements for out of state nurses and doctors, the country should do the same and deploy them to high need areas.
-Every med student waiting for match day should be matched to high need areas and put to work right away
Next 6-18 months:
–Nationalize health insurance to cover costs
-Massive Public works programs to revive economy and employment once it’s safe to work again
-Massive grants time state governments to shore up budgets and interest free small business grants to keep payroll going
Any Democrat talking about means testing needs to STFU right now. Give every individual money and every company bailouts. No exceptions. No hoops to jump through. Get it done.
We need to accelerate the development, production, and volume distribution of a cheap and reliable antibody test for CoV-2 so that we can identify those who have survived it (most often unknowingly) and are therefore both immune and not contagious.
As night follows day, there will be waves of these people, arriving 4-6 weeks after the upwards spikes in infection rates. We already know that death rates spike 2-3 weeks after an infection rate spike, because it takes about that long for the viral infection to reach its peak. Each victim is either dead or recovered about 2 weeks after that. For each death, there are about 98-99 immune survivors.
About two weeks after each wave of tragic deaths, there will be wave — ONE HUNDRED TIMES LARGER — of immune survivors.
These immune survivors, once identified, can staff our hospitals, teach our children, cook our meals, serve our drinks, and style our hair.
I disagree with the premise that we should, for example, close our roads and state borders.
I am reminded of an apocryphal joke about corporate IT departments — “The corporate IT department is happy to announce that availability of EVERY corporate system is now ONE HUNDRED PERCENT — as a result of our decision to block access from all users.”