Trump Misuse of the Pandemic

I wanted to talk about something else; the health crisis is so serious and depressing. But it’s so serious because Trump has been unwilling to be part of the solution. He tries to double down, deny the science, ignore the tragedy and let everyone who’s not a Trump supporter sink into bankruptcy or perish, while Trump and his buddies play golf, and the people he put in charge of federal agencies use the pandemic as a smokescreen behind which to destroy all the agencies and the states and the services they provide – from schools to fire, police, safety regulation and health services.

What kind of people we are is reflected in how we handle a crisis. Do we let those most in need perish while funneling everything to those least in need? Or do we protect those who need it most?

Do we protect public schools for everyone or do we make them a pay-as-you-go enterprise that only the wealthy can afford?

I’m sick of watching the Trump Administration use this crisis to double down on paying the rich and starving the public, supporting private schools and starving public ones, paying large corporations and starving mom and pop businesses.

This has been the Republican playbook – first empty public coffers with tax breaks for their friends so it looks like the federal government has to starve all the programs that serve the people – from Social Security to public health and public education.

The Trump Administration was asleep at the wheel and let the virus explode until they could claim the only way to save American workers from economic disaster is by opening up, further fanning the virus and watching workers die from the epidemic, without Trump’s loudly proclaimed but non-existent health care.

Every Senator who voted to acquit the Thief-in-Chief should be thrown out of office as traitors to America. And yes, the House should do it again, tie up this corrupt Administration on charges of:

• Lying to the American people about the seriousness of the virus
• Incompetence in stopping the pandemic while it was still manageable
• Incompetence in leaving the states to deal with it while parading around like Vladimir Putin showing off his golf game even as people died on ventilators
• Stealing from the people and letting schools, states and cities go bankrupt while profiting his rich friends

Yes, lying, stealing and incompetence are impeachable offenses, were intended to be impeachable offenses and Trump is clearly guilty.

It’s time to expose Trump and his buddies as crooks stealing the people’s money for themselves and their friends.

It’s time for Democrats to play the Tea Party’s game – no holds barred refusal to compromise until this guy is outta there. Two can play the Tea Party game and we need to do it for the people.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 26, 2020.

For those who can’t work from home

As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. The fact that Trump has handled the virus badly, stupidly, doesn’t mean that everything out of his mouth is wrong even if he says it for all the wrong reasons and without any understanding of the impact.

It should be clear that the effects of shutting down the economy are very different depending on our jobs and income. The less one’s income, the more likely that one will be out of work. The higher one’s income the more likely that one can work from home. That’s not a perfect correlation. Doctors, for example, are relatively well-paid but for much of what they do, they have to come in and see patients. And some craftsmen can build or stitch things at home, whatever their incomes. But the virus and the shutdown are having class specific consequences.

Clearly efforts are being made by many to relieve the economic impact and make sure that people have food and shelter. That too isn’t perfect. The checks coming from Washington pay little attention to who needs what, to what people’s obligations, illness or other circumstances are costing them. And with Trump’s repeated efforts to defund Obamacare, people are being blocked from the insurance they need at precisely the point in their lives when they need it most, and when the medical providers need the resources to care for people. Obama still cares. Trump medical insurance doesn’t exist and never will.

And despite the myth of the welfare queen, I represented many of the poorest in my legal career and I never met a poor person who didn’t want a job. The lack of a job affected many of them emotionally. Their self-respect was tied to doing their jobs well. And you can dispense with racial stereotypes. I spent several years running an office in a Black neighborhood and several more as Assistant General Counsel of the entire New York City legal services program. I have, as another saying goes, dealt with Black and white up close and personal.

I think we need to build some hope and self-respect into what we are trying to do for people. I’d expand the opportunities of the GI Bill that put many through educational programs that gave them the chance to improve themselves when circumstances allow.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. I think the Trump government has been wasting money on huge corporate friends that could do very well without Trump aid, and it’s wasting money on big companies, without strings attached. There’s no reason to send money to Trump’s big corporate pals without requiring that it be used to protect people’s jobs.

But government can’t do everything. Who, after all, is available to do all the things we need. It’s not just or even primarily a problem of money – the federal government has ways of expanding the money supply – it’s a problem of who’s trained to do work. We can’t have an infinite number of doctors, social workers, and on and on. There are limits. But if we Americans are good at anything, we’re supposed to be good at problem solving. And this problem needs to be addressed. Hope requires more than money – it requires a chance to crawl out of the corporate dungeons into the sunlight of jobs that pay well and can be done with decent working conditions.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 19, 2020.

Not If We Rest On Our Laurels

Americans like to say we’re no. 1, we’re the greatest, the world’s only superpower. So this is for the America greatsters. Not if we rest on our laurels, we’re not. Our genes came from all over the world. The science that’s been our glory, had many stages of development off our shores. The world doesn’t sit still waiting for the U.S. to create the next big thing. Several Asian countries have nuclear weapons. Several are challenging our digital developments, invading our privacy and platforms in ways that threaten the utility of what gets designed here.

Americans like to say we’re the richest country in the world but seldom want to do more than say it. If one examines the data, some Americans are extremely wealthy, but most of us aren’t and don’t live as well as average people in many industrialized countries. That’s in the data.

We like to say we have the world’s best health care system but it didn’t outperform everyone else in the Covid-19 crisis, and our life expectancy is not so high among westernized countries.

We developed the best education the world had known but we have largely abandoned it, abandoned the grade schools and abandoned the state colleges and universities.

We’re not the greatest if we rest on our laurels. We’re not the greatest if we treat scientific prowess as established, abandon science education from kindergarten through graduate schools and stop investing in scientific research. We’re not the greatest if we ideologically assume that government has been hamstringing our scientific prowess when in fact much American technological prowess was the result of government investment – in nuclear physics, in getting to the moon, in the initial development of the internet – programs which spawned modern broadcast and digital technology and virtually everything we use in modern life. American technological progress didn’t end with Thomas Edison; modern progress developed in tandem with government investment. Most of the important drugs we rely on depended on government investment and it’s crucial for vaccines.

We’re not the best if we assume everyone will still come to American universities while great universities develop abroad. We’re not the best if we insult everyone with our boasting and then expect them to continue coming here to study, live and work. We’re not the greatest if we continue to disparage people from eastern countries while failing to notice that they are closing the gap and even outstripping us in technological development.

We’re not the best if the method people adopt so that we are great again, let alone the best, is by dividing us against each other, blocking half the country from contributing to the extent of their abilities. Our sports teams were not at their best when we had a color line. And no field of activity will continue to rank at the top by excluding people with obvious talent. That’s just deadweight loss, using our energies to fight one another instead of building up our abilities.

No, America cannot be the best, or number 1, or great again if we rest on our laurels.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 12, 2020.

 

The System Subverts Our Values

This virus has been bringing out how much we depend on each other, rich and poor, black and white, men and women, immigrant and native. We used to talk about brotherhood and I’ve never found a good substitute for the vision of mutual concern and respect that people in my generation meant by brotherhood. Now two people who shouldn’t be named claim that Blue states don’t deserve help though we do a lot for the rest of the country, through our taxes, the business we generate and by repeatedly jumping to the aid of people all over this country when they suffer from natural disasters. What they’re really saying is that they feel no responsibility for those among us who need help, especially if they don’t have the skin color and ancestry that they honor.

I want to expand on how bad that is. When Mayor Sheehan was campaigning for her first term, I asked her about what the City could do for its poor. She pointed out that the City’s tax base was largely from property taxes. That meant that mayors inevitably had to focus on property values. She didn’t use the term but the implication was that Albany had to gentrify regardless of need and regardless of our values as human beings. Property taxes fund the schools and just about everything else the city does. So mayors have to function like developers.

It goes further. Suburbia contributes to the problems. Separately incorporated suburbs have no legal responsibility for city services. People there still work in the City, benefit from it, hire its workers, use all of the goods and services that are attracted to the area because of the City population. But they don’t share the legal responsibility.

The way this country has organized its laws is that only the federal government has responsibility for everyone in every part of the country and in communities at every level of the income scale and regardless of where its residents came from. When the federal government caters to the selfish instincts of those who are unwilling to help anyone else or who are only willing to help people who look like them and come from the same parts of the world, disaster is the result. You know the song:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run

Made it race against time

Once I built a railroad, now it’s done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Just about everyone recorded it. But apparently America still has trouble sparing a dime for the people who built it and make it run. We’ve built that into the tax system and still it isn’t good enough for people who don’t want to accept responsibility for fellow Americans. On top of all the advantages they’ve given themselves they still cry about the crumbs that might fall off their tables because they might go to Blue states.

The unnamable man in the White House, the Majority Leader of the Senate and their enablers are doubling down on all the bastions of indecency they’ve already built into American law. But though they don’t understand it – and they don’t understand much – they will be bitten by the snake they’ve let loose because when the virus is free in any of the states, the people they cherish in Red states will end up in the hospital, the morgue and the graveyard. Pandemics don’t stop at political borders. We all suffer when we refuse to take care of each other.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 5, 2020.

No Time to be Stingy

There’s no good time to be stingy about public health. It costs more, and kills our own.

The Center for Disease Control budget was stripped for years. Congress treated whatever we couldn’t enjoy tomorrow as a waste and political pariah. That’s also true of our infrastructure, needed improvements to the electrical grid and the internet system. All have the capacity to be deadly when left without repairs and upgrades.

Cuomo’s father had a Commissioner of Health on our son’s paper route. Our sons were in the same scout troop. But what I really liked about David Axelrod was that he made NY healthier. You could smell the difference when you traveled. NY had smoke free rooms, hotels, and buildings before it caught on elsewhere. I also knew the lawyer suing Cuomo over the cigarette rules. His clients apparently thought heaven should forbid anyone or any companies from having to change their behavior for the public good. But David made our lives better.

Stingy politicians who stripped public health agencies of money and authority caused many of our troubles. Public health agencies should have power to take poison out of the air and water — but no, we have to convince legislators first. Public health agencies ought to have power to protect forests that remove carbon from the air — but, no, that’s a big political issue because some people would have to change their behavior for the public good.

A big issue a few years ago was that some state coastal commissions wanted to block building on the dunes in order to minimize flood damage. But the Rehnquist Court said no. Some people might have to change their behavior for the public good.

How expensive is the new corona virus? We’re going into a major national depression because of it. All of us will pay, not by pulling green bills out of our pockets, but because green bills won’t be in our pockets, bank accounts or credit cards to pull out. This is going to be very expensive.

But pandemics will happen again because we live too close to natural habitats. They will happen again because a warming climate will nurse new pathogens. And they will happen again because manufacturers, agribusinesses, oil companies and other extractive industries don’t want to take account of nature, the environment or the implications of their behavior on our health. If what we mean by freedom is the freedom to sicken everyone because we are too busy making short term profits, then we have freedom to die – not with dignity, but freedom to die young, sick and quarantined from everyone we love.

It’s our choice – either we agree to live by healthy business and manufacturing rules or we die by unhealthy ones. And one extra step – all changes have winners and losers. We have to be willing to find or create jobs and educational opportunities like we did with the GI bill for those who are disadvantaged by the changes. Our shelter-in-place rules for dealing with the current virus has winners and losers. We are all in this together and we have to be willing to bring everyone along somehow. That’s not charity; it’s necessary and it’s just plain fair.

And let’s be clear, taking care of public health, taking care of each other, is crucial for all of us, for our economy, for our standing and our leverage in the world. Public health is part of national security. It’s not optional.

— This commentary is scheduled for broadcast by WAMC Northeast Report, on April 28, 2020.

Donald Herring, Elizabeth Warren’s brother

Mostly this blog is very political but just needed to say something. I never met Donald Herring. I’ve only met Elizabeth Warren once, years ago, but I have been a fan and admirer ever since, and I have had the pleasure of meeting her husband at professional meetings. I can only imagine how they feel. We all want the best for people we know and admire, and for our heroes. I am very saddened.

Trump’s Malfeasance Goes Viral

I read the Times’ description of the Administration’s snafus through my tears because every snafu meant a large number of unnecessary deaths.

Warnings reached America in early January from Trump’s appointees, but he didn’t trust them. Warnings came from people who dedicated their lives to protecting the rest of us, who’d become experts and never gave a fig for what they could earn in private industry, because they were dedicated to protecting us, dedicated to the God’s honest truth, not to anyone’s political fortunes. So Trump labeled them the “deep state” and ignored them too.

Public health works by moving fast to contain and avoid disasters. It took a month for him to stop some travel from China. Then he took a victory lap while the virus spread. People kept trying to alert him, but he waited because it wouldn’t make his economic messaging look good. How many people had to lay down their lives for his political messaging?

National security, medical and public health experts, people in contact with doctors in China and elsewhere, watched the virus explode and kept urging action. But still he dallied, telling everyone this would blow over. God must have decided America needed some humility, so he sent us an idiot for a president.

Delay made everything harder and costlier. Sheltering in place got harder and longer because of how far the virus had been allowed to spread. Many have already died. Many couldn’t shelter in place – doctors, nurses and everyone who makes hospitals function; and others who do critically important jobs, as aides in nursing homes, people stocking grocery shelves, making deliveries or picking up garbage – all take risks daily. The poor are not in position to survive lengthy periods of unemployment. And they’ll be the first to die when his majesty decides we should go back to our places of work and play. He’s eliminated any good choices for the great mass of Americans. Working or staying home, many will die or lose their jobs and starve. Time and delay matter. Late steps don’t erase earlier failures – they leave us chasing an ever bigger problem.

The people most at risk are the very people he doesn’t want to help. Billions for corporate welfare but pennies for the poor. He’s turning on the mass of Americans, including many who thought he’d change things in their favor. Apparently, we’re all socialists now – Trump and Republicans are socialists for the rich, doing everything government can do for them, while Biden, Sanders, Warren and the Democrats are trying to provide for the rest of us, for those who need the help.

After 9/11, I explained to a Republican congressman that his rural constituents also suffered from the attack because friends and family had found jobs in the big city. The congressman’s response to me was “I didn’t think of that.” Pandemics are different. They spread; they don’t stop at state or community lines.

The Constitution doesn’t stop us from electing fools and misanthropes. It will always be up to us. I could say “God help us,” but God, for whatever reason, leaves it to us to help ourselves. This has been hard to write. It may have been hard to hear. But the best thing Trump could do for America is to resign.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast by WAMC Northeast Report, on April 21, 2020.