Last Call For Tales From The Trump Depression, Con't

Here's how bad unemployment got at the state level in April.

Minnesota and Connecticut weighed in at 8%, merely "the worst of the Great Recession years". The US as a whole was at 14.7%, nearly 50% worse than the height of the 2007-2008 meltdown's 9.9%.

Michigan is at 22.7%, and Nevada is at 28.2%.  These are catastrophic numbers.

We've seen another 10 million plus unemployment claims since May 1 nationwide, and will almost certainly see another 2 million plus on Thursday.

We will be above 20% when May's numbers hit in less than two weeks.

This could have been prevented.  Here in Kentucky, because the GOP refuses to help, the state now faces a $600 million shortfall and massive austerity cuts will be coming by the end of next month unless the Senate GOP gets off their asses.

Gov. Andy Beshear must slash $457 million from Kentucky’s General Fund and $161 million from its Road Fund for the current fiscal year that ends June 30, a panel of economists said Friday.

The Consensus Forecasting Group said the state’s economy has been wrecked by the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of most businesses. With income, corporate, sales and gas tax collection falling, state government faces lean times in the immediate future.

The roughly $11 billion General Fund pays for most state services, including education, health care, environmental protection and public safety. The Consensus Forecasting Group initially considered a plan calling for $377 million in General Fund losses but rejected that because it wasn’t pessimistic enough given current economic conditions.

The General Assembly will need to return to Frankfort for “a short, targeted special session” to help write a budget reduction plan for the Road Fund, Beshear told reporters Friday evening. He did not give a specific time frame.

Any state revenue shortfall greater than 5 percent in the General Fund or Road Fund “shall require action by the General Assembly,” according to state law. Under the numbers released Friday, the Road Fund would shrink by 10.4 percent, while the General Fund would shrink by 4 percent.

“We’ve had initial conversations with (legislative) leadership,” Beshear said. “We’ll want to talk with them again, make sure we have it all hammered out. Make sure we do it in as short of a time as possible.”

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article242938091.html#storylink=c

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article242938091.html#storylink=c

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article242938091.html#storylink=cpy

Oh, and from now on, everything is going through the State Department, and not Health and Human Services.  Because pandemics are apparently now diplomatic and political problems, not health ones.

Aides to President Donald Trump are considering a plan to shift the government’s global response to future infectious disease outbreaks to a new unit inside the State Department, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

The proposal, discussed during a National Security Council deputies committee meeting on Thursday, already has set off a turf battle between the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID officials were surprised and perplexed by the idea, which could lead them to lose control of significant funds and authorities.

People familiar with the issue say Dr. Deborah Birx, a top official handling the administration’s response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is likely to wind up in charge of the new unit if it becomes a reality. The proposal also could, to some degree, establish an alternative mechanism to some of the work done by the World Health Organization, whose U.S. funding Trump has threatened to permanently end.

The overall effort, first reported by the media platform Devex, is described as the President’s Response to Outbreaks, or PRO.

Donald Trump chose this.

And this is only the beginning, folks.

Mitch Heads Home

The House passed a $3 trillion COVID-19 package this month. As the NY Times Editorial Board lays out, the Senate GOP response was "absolutely nothing" and they've adjourned for Memorial Day recess for the week.

After three weeks in session, the United States Senate emptied out again on Friday, as lawmakers fled Washington for the Memorial Day recess. They left without even pretending to tackle the next round of coronavirus relief.

This is how the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, wants it. Many Republicans, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are reluctant to embrace more government spending, so Mr. McConnell is taking a wait-and-see approach.

The Democratic-led House passed a $3 trillion relief package on May 15. That bill was imperfect but it was something. Mr. McConnell, on the other hand, has repeatedly said he’s in no hurry for the Senate to offer its own proposal. He has put talks on an indefinite pause, saying he wants to see how the economy responds to previous relief measures. The Senate may get around to putting together a plan when it reconvenes next month. Or perhaps it will in July.

This course of inaction is unsustainable. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, warned this week that the economic damage from the pandemic could stretch through the end of next year. Over the past nine weeks, new jobless claims have hit nearly 39 million, and the official unemployment rate is expected to approach 20 percent this month. Behind these numbers are real people suffering significant hardship. The Senate’s sluggish response in addressing this suffering has begun to discomfit even some of Mr. McConnell’s fellow Republicans.

“I think June doesn’t need to come and go without a phase four,” said Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi on Wednesday, referring to the next round of aid.

Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine — both facing tough re-election races — have been especially eager to assure constituents that they take their pain seriously. “Congress has a tremendous responsibility to help mitigate the impact of this crisis on our states and our local communities and on the families they serve,” Ms. Collins said in a floor speech on Wednesday. “We must not wait. We should act now.”

Republicans should keep the pressure on Mr. McConnell and prepare to intensify their push for action when the Senate reconvenes.

When the Senate reconvenes in June, the only thing on the agenda is Sen. Lindsey Graham's mass subpoenas of former Obama administration officials and FBI agents to spend the summer rehashing the "Obamagate" show.

There's no phase 4 coming. Graham made that clear at the beginning of the month.  "Over our dead bodies" would unemployment extensions pass, remember?

Mitch McConnell doesn't want to lose the Senate or the White House.  But he's willing to risk both to make sure Biden gets stuck with trying to recover from the worst depression in US history.

Sunday Long Read: Backlash To The Future

At The Atlantic, Cornell history professor Lawrence Glickman details that the major driving force in American politics as far as gatekeeping social progress is now and has always been the inevitable backlash of white moderates against too much government helping black and brown America.

The word backlash gained popularity in the summer of 1963, when, after dallying on the issue for the first two years of his presidency, President John F. Kennedy proposed significant civil-rights legislation. In response, the word, which had primarily denoted the recoil of a fishing line, was repurposed, usually as “white backlash,” to refer to opposition to the increased pace of African American civil-rights activism or the Kennedy (and, after his assassination in November 1963, the Lyndon B. Johnson) administration’s legislative proposals and executive actions, or both.

In 1966, a commentator, speaking of “the grand new word, backlash,” claimed without much exaggeration that “just about everything that happened could be (and was) attributed to some form of backlash.” The word came to stand for a topsy-turvy rebellion in which white people with relative societal power perceived themselves as victimized by what they described as overly aggressive African Americans demanding equal rights. Backlash, as the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, “is nothing more nor less than white resentment of Negroes.”

Moving beyond an opposition to civil rights, the word backlash—less frequently qualified as “white”—quickly became a synonym for a new and growing conservative force, signifying a virulent counterreaction to all manner of social movements and cultural transformations that became central to American politics. Over time, observers noted manifestations of this reaction in a “Southern backlash,” a “male backlash,” a “heterosexual backlash,” a “property tax backlash” and a “backlash against environmentalists.” Just a month after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a journalist described the United States as being in the midst of “a multitude of backlashes.” But as one commentator pointed out, “The word which gave rise to all sorts of other ‘lashes’ was coined in reference to white opposition to Negro gains.”

Backlash may have burst onto the scene as “the word of the year in American politics” in 1964, but it described one of the oldest and deepest patterns in American politics, one that is once again playing out today in the right-wing campaign against social distancing. Backlashes appear as seemingly serial and discrete events—against the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, or the women’s movement in the ’70s, or the gay-rights movement in the ’90s. But this obscures an underlying continuity: These individual backlashes are all instances of a reactionary tradition, one that is deeply woven into American political culture and that extends back to the era of Reconstruction, at least. And the backlashes are powerful not only for the fury they represent, but in the fear they instill in political leaders, even progressives, who hesitate to push things “too far.”

During Reconstruction, opponents of the black-freedom struggle deployed preemptive, apocalyptic, slippery-slope arguments that have remained enduring features of backlash politics up to the present. They treated federal support for African American civil rights, economic and social equality—however delayed, reluctant, underfunded, and incomplete it may have been—as a cataclysmic overreaction and framed it as a far more dangerous threat to liberty than the injustice it was designed to address. In 1867, not even two years after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle decried the placement of political power “in the hands of a property-less and ignorant class of the population,” and pronounced that “the pending Reconstruction scheme must be abandoned.”

Since then, such framing has done more than merely shape the politics of reaction in the United States; it has also constrained putatively supportive political leaders, who live in fear of setting off backlashes. Responding to a moderate plan to enfranchise only free blacks in Louisiana in 1864, the Union general Nathaniel P. Banks, worrying about a negative response from the state’s whites, who were being defeated in the Civil War, said, “Revolutions which are not controlled and held within reasonable limits produce counter-revolution.” That obeisance to a defeated group in 1864 was an extreme version of a general pattern that has remained a hallmark of backlashes ever since: solicitousness to white fears.

For many white backlashers in the 1960s, the era of what the historian C. Vann Woodward called the “second Reconstruction,” the first Reconstruction remained a negative model. They viewed its reform as overly fast-paced, and felt that it foregrounded black civil rights at the cost of white people’s peace of mind. They associated civil-rights activism with what popular historians and commentators of the day called the “excesses” of Reconstruction, by which they meant a combination of “militant” African American demands for basic equality with overweening, aggressive, and hasty federal action in support of interracial democracy. Thurman Sensing of the Southern States Industrial Council, a conservative business group, described the civil-rights movement in 1966 as an effort to force “the Reconstruction of American customs,” showing the degree to which the post–Civil War campaign for racial equality remained a central metaphor for white backlashers. The journalist in December 1963 who noted the political power of those opposed to “Negro pressure for equal opportunity and the Federal Government’s pace on the Civil Rights front,” could just as easily have been describing the origins of the counterrevolution of the 1870s.

There was, then, nothing particularly novel about the constituent elements of white backlash to the civil-rights movement: its smoldering resentment, its belief that the movement was proceeding “too fast,” its demands for emotional and psychological sympathy, and its displacement of African Americans’ struggles with its own claims of grievance.

What is particularly noteworthy is that the white backlash in this case was in place before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. The pattern is this: American reactionary politics is nearly always preemptive, predicting catastrophe and highlighting potential slippery slopes. “White backlash,” after all, got its name in 1963, just months after African Americans in Birmingham risked attacks from police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses in order to demand justice, and immediately after Kennedy mooted the idea of substantive legislation—both events taking place well before the Civil Rights Act became law. What one reporter called “white panic” was driven by fears of “favoritism” and “special privileges” for African Americans—that white “workers would be forced out of their jobs to make way for Negroes,” as one article put it that year, when Jim Crow still prevailed. “Many of my people think the Negroes want to take over the country,” a midwestern Republican politician said in a Wall Street Journal article published on April 10 of the following year, still months before the Act’s passage. “They think there are things in the bill that just aren’t there, like forced sales of housing to Negroes and stuff like that.” White backlashers imagined coercion where it did not exist. They embraced a lexicon and posture of victimization that hearkened back to the era of Reconstruction and anticipated the deceiving, self-pitying MAGA discourse that drives reactionary politics in Donald Trump’s America.

As Glickman notes, the very virulent campaign against social distancing (almost certainly getting a major assist from social media bots) is reactionary in nature.  Once the COVID-19 pandemic caused people to question why black and brown Americans had a higher fatality rate from the virus, and that front-line "essential" workers in the food service and health care sectors (also disproportionally black and brown) were the most at-risk, social distancing became "unnecessary" for white America.

Instead of tackling the racial disparities in America's health care system as a result of COVID-19, the virus became a "Democrat hoax" and the direct aid for those who needed it the most (also disproportionally black and brown) became "handouts" and "bribes". It was criminally easy to weaponize the response to the virus in the Trump era, and that's exactly what's happened.

The States Go Viral, Con't

The second COVID-19 wave is coming, right now, in almost half the US states.

The coronavirus may still be spreading at epidemic rates in 24 states, particularly in the South and Midwest, according to new research that highlights the risk of a second wave of infections in places that reopen too quickly or without sufficient precautions.

Researchers at Imperial College London created a model that incorporates cellphone data showing that people sharply reduced their movements after stay-at-home orders were broadly imposed in March. With restrictions now easing and mobility increasing with the approach of Memorial Day and the unofficial start of summer, the researchers developed an estimate of viral spread as of May 17.

It is a snapshot of a transitional moment in the pandemic and captures the patchwork nature across the country of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Some states have had little viral spread or “crushed the curve” to a great degree and have some wiggle room to reopen their economies without generating a new epidemic-level surge in cases. Others are nowhere near containing the virus.

The model, which has not been peer reviewed, shows that in the majority of states, a second wave looms if people abandon efforts to mitigate the viral spread.

“There’s evidence that the U.S. is not under control, as an entire country,” said Samir Bhatt, a senior lecturer in geostatistics at Imperial College.

The model shows potentially ominous scenarios if people move around as they did previously and do so without taking precautions. In California and Florida, the death rate could spike to roughly 1,000 a day by July without efforts to mitigate the spread, according to the report.

Other models released in recent days captured a similarly mixed picture. The PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia used county-level forecasts that found much of the country was in decent shape for reopening, but worrisome areas remain, including Houston, Dallas, South Florida and Alabama.

On this Memorial Day weekend, some people will visit areas that may not have had much exposure to the virus, said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab.

“This is the first test of the system,” Rubin said. “Those areas that succeed this weekend are going to succeed because they’ve developed strong regulations on how they’re going to do this.”

The Imperial College researchers estimated the virus’s reproduction number, known as R0, or R naught. This is the average number of infections generated by each infected person in a vulnerable population. The researchers found the reproduction number has dropped below 1 in the District and 26 states. In those places, as of May 17, the epidemic was waning.

In 24 states, however, the model shows a reproduction number over 1. Texas tops the list, followed by Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Alabama, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, Missouri, Delaware, South Carolina, Massachusetts, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Maryland.

With the notable exceptions of New York, New Jersey and Michigan, the other seven of the ten most populous states are still all in epidemic status: CA, IL, MA, FL, OH, NC and PA.  It's going to be a lethal Memorial Day weekend, and by mid-June it's going to be clear that reopening is going to come at a bloody cost.

America is bored of social distancing?

We're about to be bored to death of it.