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Top 20 States:
May 10, 2020
COVID-19 Update
May 9, 2020
Today's Daddy State Fuckery
Money quote:
Bill Maher:
Democrats are "the party of choice" - we can choose not to completely fuck ourselves over this.
Bill Maher:
COVID-19 Update
WaPo has s small(ish) roundup of the pandemic news:
President Trump on Friday continued to eschew key public health guidelines from his own administration even as a second White House staffer tested positive this week.
Confirmed cases neared 4 million worldwide, with more than 275,000 deaths.
Here are some significant developments:
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for a new coronavirus screening.
- The commissioner of the FDA began to self-quarantine for two weeks after being exposed to an individual who tested positive.
- Jacaré Souza will no longer fight in Saturday’s UFC 249 middleweight matchup in Jacksonville, Fla., after testing positive.
- Leaders of a Sioux tribe in South Dakota on Friday refused a request by the governor to remove checkpoints on state and U.S. highways.
- Trump is increasingly dismissing the consensus of experts that widespread testing is necessary before the country can safely phase out restrictions.
- The unemployment rate jumped to its highest level since the Great Depression.
- Seoul shut down more than 2,100 nightclubs, discos and bars after new coronavirus cases were linked to partygoers.
Top 20 States:
They keep telling us to expect 135,000 American dead this year, and that we'll get to that number by about August 1st.
So - nobody dies from this shit in the last four months of 2020?
No. That's not what they're saying.
They're happy-talking us (IMO).
There are people who know about this stuff - and they're saying we ain't seen nuthin' yet - but they're not part of the federal government, so their estimations don't carry the weight.
Meanwhile, people who know about this stuff, and who're still working for the feds, aren't being allowed to tell us what's going on.
We ain't done yet - there's plenty of kick left in us - but it's time to acknowledge that this country is a Failing State now.
May 8, 2020
Fallout
It's not all 45*'s fault. He didn't personally bring COVID-19 to us, and he didn't spread this contagion across the country all by himself. Don't be daft.
But he failed to recognize the emergency, and it's possible that part of the failure was deliberate - because he wanted desperately not to have it reflect badly on him.
And then he fucked up the response by trying to monetize the thing, and let his radical Shock Doctrine devotees take a crack at demonstrating how much more efficient and effective "the private sector" is when compared with dumb ol' gubmint.
(Remember, dear - Karma's only a bitch when you are)
So, it's not unreasonable to say that the worst of the pandemic - and the worst of the fallout resulting from the pandemic - are, in fact, his fucking fault.
WaPo:
The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent in April, the highest level since the Great Depression, as most businesses shut down or severely curtailed operations to try and limit the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
The jobless rate was pushed higher because 20.5 million people lost their jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday, wiping out a decade of job gains in a single month. The staggering losses are roughly double what the nation experienced during the 2007-09 crisis, which used to be described as the harshest economic contraction most people ever endured. Now that has been quickly dwarfed by the fallout from the global pandemic.
“This is pretty scary,” said Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel. “I’m fearful many of these jobs are not going to come back and we are going to have an unemployment rate well into 2021 of near 10 percent.”
The sudden economic contraction has forced millions of Americans to turn to food banks and seek government aid for the first time or stop paying rent and other bills. As they go without paychecks for weeks, some have also lost health insurance and even put their homes up for sale.
Louise Lara apologized for crying as she told her story. The 54-year-old single mom had just listed her home in the Florida Panhandle as “for sale by owner,” the latest sign that her middle-class life is slipping away amid the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Lara’s saga, like that of so many other Americans, began March 20 when she was furloughed from her longtime job at a spa. The furlough was supposed to be temporary, but it doesn’t look that way now. The resort she worked for just notified her that her health insurance will terminate at the end of the month. She has spent hours on Florida’s deeply flawed unemployment website. She hasn’t received any money despite six weeks of calls and daily log-ins. She even mailed in a paper application. With money running short, she’s putting her home on the market and applying for food stamps.
“It’s a terrifying, terrifying situation,” said Lara, who tried to get a grocery store job but was told there’s a hiring freeze. “I am at the end of my finances.”
Millions of us have been sliding down the ladder into "the lower classes" for a very long time.
Up until now, that descent for most folks has been slow enough that they've been able to adapt fairly well.
This is the big drop - sudden and precipitous.
Maybe now we get an idea of how bad we've been getting fucked - and for how long.
But maybe now is not the time to start feeling the burdens of it all. Because that's what the Daddy State wants. They slam us in the head until we're dazed and confused, and then they "lead" us into the worst fucking aspects of plutocracy and dictatorship anyone can imagine.
Maybe now we get up on our hind legs and really start fighting back.
Today's Tweet
A big box of nuthin'.
Mike Pence caught on hot mic delivering empty boxes of PPE for a PR stunt. pic.twitter.com/IduvGhiPwj— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) May 8, 2020
Krugman Speaks
Paul Krugman, NYT: (pay wall)
Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on workers. The economy has plunged so quickly that official statistics can’t keep up, but the available data suggest that tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, with more job losses to come and full recovery probably years away.
But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits — such an extension, says Senator Lindsey Graham, will take place “over our dead bodies.” (Actually, over other people’s dead bodies.)
They apparently want to return to a situation in which most unemployed workers get no benefits at all, and even those collecting unemployment insurance get only a small fraction of their previous income.
Because most working-age Americans receive health insurance through their employers, job losses will cause a huge rise in the number of uninsured. The only mitigating factor is the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which will allow many though by no means all of the newly uninsured to find alternative coverage.
But the Trump administration is still trying to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional; “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” declared Donald Trump, even though the administration has never offered a serious alternative.ign Up
Bear in mind that ending Obamacare would end protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions — and that insurers would probably refuse to cover anyone who had Covid-19.
Finally, the devastation caused by the coronavirus has left many in the world’s wealthiest major nation unable to put sufficient food on the table. Families with children under 12 are especially hard hit: According to one recent survey, 41 percent of these families are already unable to afford enough to eat. Food banks are overwhelmed, with lines sometimes a mile long.
But Republicans are still trying to make food stamps harder to get, and fiercely oppose proposals to temporarily make food aid more generous.
But we’re only now starting to get a sense of the Republican Party’s cruelty toward the economic victims of the coronavirus. In the face of what amounts to a vast natural disaster, you might have expected conservatives to break, at least temporarily, with their traditional opposition to helping fellow citizens in need. But no; they’re as determined as ever to punish the poor and unlucky.
As many pundits have said over the years, even when it's plain that their philosophies aren't working, "conservatives' will double down.
We've gone along with a "tough love" approach to poverty (eg) - "weaning the poor from the government teat" (which has turned out to be a very PC way of saying "kick 'em when they're down") - and when it becomes clear that it's not working, Republicans decide it's because we haven't been kicking them hard enough.
Democracy is supposed to be a Free Market kind of thing. You bring your ideas to the marketplace, and voters decide if those ideas are worth something.
Republicans insist that their ideas - the ones the voters keep rejecting - are perfectly sound, so if there's a problem, then it must be that we've got the wrong voters, and so we'll fix it by gerrymandering and caging, and when that's not enough, we'll go with flat-out voter suppression.
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