Weekend Update: Getting Through It

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

R.I.P John Lewis, activist and member of Congress (1940-2020)


Amidst strangely hopeful news for the future, another week of the ominous present.  But we got through it.

Another week of the same headline repeated every day: record number of Covid 19 infections, hospitalizations, deaths, in this state and that, and in the United States as a whole, doleful country.

"The painful economic lockdowns imposed in March gave the country time to flatten the epidemiological curve and contain the virus. But that window of opportunity, which came at great economic cost, is quickly slamming shut. Health experts say all signs point to a deadly summer and fall unless government leaders implement a much more robust national strategy." wrote Reid Wilson way back on July 12.

Obviously there is not going to be any robust national strategy out of Washington, and so the suffering and death and economic and psycho-social suffering will continue.  The best that can be hoped for is that the worst attempts to further damage constructive response will be blocked, and the people will deal with it, with leadership from wherever they find it--governors, mayors, community public health, Dr. Fauci newly freed to go back on national television to at least suggest guidelines for a common response.  But with hospitals stressed, and certain cities lining up refrigerated trucks, the potential for a firestorm of societal chaos by fall is still alive.

This week Paul Krugman among others warned of the upcoming end of the covid crisis rescue package's support for expanded unemployment benefits, which has effectively supported the US economy.  Congress has yet to act to extend it because Republicans have been balking. The national economy for the next years hangs in the balance, as do the lives of millions.  This is only one of the areas where Congress--meaning the Republican majority in the Senate-- needs to act if a deep and stubborn recession is to be avoided.  Some suspect that the most consciously evil man in America, Senate majority leader McConnell, wants that economic damage if it will hurt a Biden administration.   But I'm confident that if anyone can maneuver a deal, it's Nancy Pelosi, still the most impressive Democrat of them all.

The administration is trying to force schools to reopen, including in-person college classes, but their threat to withdraw funding from public schools turns out to be empty, and their policy to force colleges to offer classes or see their foreign students returned to their home countries has been ruled illegal by courts.  Still, it a heartbreaking mess, with no harmless choices.

Late in the week the news emerged of the administration's attempt to stir up trouble in Portland, Oregon with Homegrown Hitler's secret police kidnapping people off the street in what someone described as "stop and frisk meets Guantanamo." It seems to be a strategy of fomenting the violence that Trump claims is happening as Black Lives Matter demonstrations continue.  Apparently Homeland Security has joined ICE as Trump's Gestapo, although their outfits have been described as available on E-Bay.

Mary Trump sold a million books (literally) and made the media rounds this week, notably on Rachel Maddow.  For those who don't see the point of learning even more of what we already know about the madman, Dahlia Lithwick in Slate offers this:

  At bottom, Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”

Later Lithwick summarizes Mary Trump's point: "Trump’s superpower isn’t great vision or great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach."

Those needing to escape from the relentless bad news should not look to shelter on the deceptively innocuous Weather Channel, let alone Weather Underground, which predicts a very hot summer for most of the US, followed by a warmer than usual fall.

Weather depends on climate, longterm and shortlived phenomena.  But this past week scientists concluded that this summer's Arctic heat (temperature passed 100F at the Arctic Circle) was "essentially impossible" without the climate crisis.

Another round of polls show further deterioration for the Re-Elect the Apprentice Dictator campaign, while that campaign itself is in turmoil.  The recently fired campaign manager is reportedly being investigated by the campaign for skimming a little too much off the top of campaign money that by rights should be going to Trump hotels and businesses, massive corruption in plain sight, the hallmark of this administration.

It is in this context of very possible if not probable Democratic victories in winning the White House and both houses of Congress in the upcoming 2020 elections that Joe Biden's climate crisis plan announced this past week achieves significance.

In an article entitled Joe Biden Is Campaigning On The Green New Deal, Minus the Crazy, Slate's Jordan Weissmann writes that Biden has adopted the key differences of the Green New Deal from previous Democratic policy proposals on the climate crisis:

"In the past, Democrats have wanted to reduce emissions through market-oriented mechanisms like a carbon tax or cap and trade... Green New Dealers have taken a different, less market-focused approach, combining clean power mandates that would force a shift away from carbon, massive government spending and industrial policy designed to create jobs, and a strong emphasis on environmental justice for communities hardest hit by pollution. Instead of putting a price on CO2 and letting capitalism do its magic, the new generation of climate hawks want to force power companies and other emitters to abandon fossil fuels while using the federal purse to put people to work and reinvent the American economy."

Biden proposes a program aimed at a clean energy grid by 2035, and zero carbon emissions overall by 2050.  He proposes spending $2 trillion over four years, and to previous proposals he adds "a “made-in-America” economic plan that would use gobs of government procurement and R&D funding to build up domestic sectors like renewable batteries and electric vehicles (there’s your industrial policy). And the campaign has outlined an extensive proposal to “secure environmental justice” by directing 40 percent of its climate spending to disadvantaged communities."  

Which is something like political genius on several levels.  It has the potential to give the nation a common purpose and commitment, beginning with another feature of the proposal (adapted, as several of these are, from Washington Governor Jay Inslee's platform during his brief but now very influential presidential candidacy): a "Civilian Climate Corps that would work on restoration and resilience projects, a direct nod to Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps."  Besides mobilizing young idealists to do this increasingly necessary work, it means this program is addressing both the causes and effects of the climate crisis.

So I allowed myself to feel a little hope--that is, a focus for enacting hope through action.  I may live long enough to see a Civilian Climate Corps do effective work.  But even if the rest of the program is enacted, it won't pay off for long after I'm gone (except for health effects, especially in poor and minority communities, which is not nothing.)  But even if it turns out to be too late, knowing that we finally gave it our best try is worth something.

Finally, it's two weeks before the date Joe Biden gave for announcing his vice-presidential choice.  A lot of names, including new names, have puffed up in the media, with little credibility, and even less understanding than me of the political liabilities of certain otherwise worthy choices.   Right now however I'd guess that the top two possibilities are Sen. Kamala Harris and former Obama aide Susan Rice, with Sen. Warren falling back a notch.  Again, though, it's Kamala.