Republican Leaders Couldn’t Care Less About the Unemployed
Their cruelty and ignorance are creating another gratuitous disaster.
By Paul Krugman
In case you haven’t noticed, the coronavirus is still very much with us. Around a thousand Americans are dying from Covid-19 each day, 10 times the rate in the European Union. Thanks to our failure to control the pandemic, we’re still suffering from Great Depression levels of unemployment; a brief recovery driven by premature attempts to resume business as usual appears to have petered out as states pause or reverse their opening.
Yet enhanced unemployment benefits, a crucial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, have expired. And negotiations over how — or even whether — to restore aid appear to be stalled.
You sometimes see headlines describing this crisis as a result of “congressional dysfunction.” Such headlines reveal a severe case of bothsidesism — the almost pathological aversion of some in the media to placing blame where it belongs.
For House Democrats passed a bill specifically designed to deal with this mess two and a half months ago. The Trump administration and Senate Republicans had plenty of time to propose an alternative. Instead, they didn’t even focus on the issue until days before the benefits ended. And even now they’re refusing to offer anything that might significantly alleviate workers’ plight.
This is an astonishing failure of governance, right up there with the mishandling of the pandemic itself. But what explains it?
Well, I’m of two minds. Was it ignorant malevolence, or malevolent ignorance?
Let’s talk first about the ignorance.
The Covid recession that began in February may have been the simplest, most comprehensible business downturn in history. Much of the U.S. economy was put on hold to contain a pandemic. Job losses were concentrated in services that were either inessential or could be postponed, and were highly likely to spread the coronavirus: restaurants, air travel, dentists’ visits.
The main goal of economic policy was to make this temporary lockdown tolerable, sustaining the incomes of those unable to work.
Republicans, however, have shown no sign of understanding any of this. The policy proposals being floated by White House aides and advisers are almost surreal in their disconnect from reality. Cutting payroll taxes on workers who can’t work? Letting businesspeople deduct the full cost of three-martini lunches they can’t eat?
They don’t even seem to understand the mechanics of how unemployment checks are paid out. They proposed continuing benefits for a brief period while negotiations continue — but this literally can’t be done, because the state offices that disburse unemployment aid couldn’t handle the necessary reprogramming.
Above all, Republicans seem obsessed with the idea that unemployment benefits are making workers lazy and unwilling to accept jobs.
This would be a bizarre claim even if unemployment benefits really were reducing the incentive to seek work. After all, there are more than 30 million workers receiving benefits, but only five million job openings. No matter how harshly you treat the unemployed, they can’t take jobs that don’t exist.
It’s almost a secondary concern to note that there’s almost no evidence that unemployment benefits are, in fact, discouraging workers from taking jobs. Multiple studies find no significant incentive effect.
And unemployment benefits didn’t prevent the U.S. from adding seven million jobs, most of them for low-wage workers — that is, precisely the workers often receiving more in unemployment than from their normal jobs — during the abortive spring recovery.
By the way, a great majority of economists believe that unemployment benefits have helped sustain the economy as a whole, by supporting consumer spending.
So the attack on unemployment aid is rooted in deep ignorance. But there’s also a strong element of malice.
Republicans have a long history of suggesting that the jobless are moral failures — that they’d rather sit home watching TV than work. And the Trump years have been marked by a relentless assault on programs that help the less fortunate, from Obamacare to food stamps.
One indicator of G.O.P. disingenuousness is the sudden re-emergence of “deficit hawks” claiming that helping the unemployed will add too much to the national debt. I use the scare quotes because as far as I can tell not one of the politicians claiming that we can’t afford to help the unemployed raised any objections to Donald Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.
Nor was disdain for the unlucky the only reason the G.O.P. didn’t want to help Americans in need. The recent Vanity Fair report about why we don’t have a national testing strategy fits with a lot of evidence that Republicans spent months believing that Covid-19 was a blue-state problem, not relevant to people they cared about. By the time they realized that the pandemic was exploding in the Sun Belt, it was too late to avoid disaster.
At this point, then, it’s hard to see how we avoid another gratuitous catastrophe. The fecklessness of the Trump administration and its allies means that millions of Americans will soon be in dire financial straits.
When Covid Subsided, Israel Reopened Its Schools. It Didn’t Go Well.
As countries consider back-to-school strategies for the fall, a coronavirus outbreak at a Jerusalem high school offers a cautionary tale.
By Isabel Kershner and Pam Belluck
JERUSALEM — As the United States and other countries anxiously consider how to reopen schools, Israel, one of the first countries to do so, illustrates the dangers of moving too precipitously.
Confident it had beaten the coronavirus and desperate to reboot a devastated economy, the Israeli government invited the entire student body back in late May.
Within days, infections were reported at a Jerusalem high school, which quickly mushroomed into the largest outbreak in a single school in Israel, possibly the world.
The virus rippled out to the students’ homes and then to other schools and neighborhoods, ultimately infecting hundreds of students, teachers and relatives.
Other outbreaks forced hundreds of schools to close. Across the country, tens of thousands of students and teachers were quarantined.
Israel’s advice for other countries?
“They definitely should not do what we have done,” said Eli Waxman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and chairman of the team advising Israel’s National Security Council on the pandemic. “It was a major failure.”
The lesson, experts say, is that even communities that have gotten the spread of the virus under control need to take strict precautions when reopening schools. Smaller classes, mask wearing, keeping desks six feet apart and providing adequate ventilation, they say, are likely to be crucial until a vaccine is available.
“If there is a low number of cases, there is an illusion that the disease is over,” said Dr. Hagai Levine, a professor of epidemiology and chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians. “But it’s a complete illusion.”
“The mistake in Israel,” he said, “is that you can open the education system, but you have to do it gradually, with certain limits, and you have to do it in a very careful way.” …
One-Third of New York’s Small Businesses May Be Gone Forever
Small-business owners said they have exhausted federal and local assistance and see no end in sight after months of sharp revenue drops. Now, many are closing their shops and restaurants for good.
By Matthew Haag
In early March, Glady’s, a Caribbean restaurant in Brooklyn, was bringing in about $35,000 a week in revenue. The Bank Street Bookstore, a 50-year-old children’s shop in Manhattan, was preparing for busy spring and summer shopping seasons. And Busy Bodies, a play space for children in Brooklyn, had just wrapped up months of packed classes with long waiting lists.
Five months later, those once prosperous businesses have evaporated. Glady’s and Busy Bodies are closed for good and Bank Street, one of the city’s last children’s bookstores, will shut down permanently in August.
The three are victims of the economic destruction that threatens to derail New York City’s recovery from the financial collapse triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
An expanding universe of distinctive small businesses — from coffee shops to dry cleaners to hardware stores — that give New York’s neighborhoods their unique personalities and are key to the city’s economy are starting to topple.
More than 2,800 businesses in New York City have permanently closed since March 1, according to data from Yelp, the business listing and review site, a higher number than in any other large American city.
About half the closings have been in Manhattan, where office buildings have been hollowed out, its wealthier residents have left for second homes and tourists have stayed away.
When the pandemic eventually subsides, roughly one-third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses may never reopen, according to a report by the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group. So far, those businesses have shed 520,000 jobs.
While New York is home to more Fortune 500 headquarters than any city in the country, small businesses are the city’s backbone. They represent roughly 98 percent of the employers in the city and provide jobs to more than 3 million people, which is about half of its work force, according to the city.
When New York’s economic lockdown started in March the hope was that the closing of businesses would be temporary and many could weather the financial blow.
But the devastation to small businesses has become both widespread and permanent as the economy reopens at a slow pace. Emergency federal aid has failed to provide enough of a cushion, people remain leery of resuming normal lives and the threat of a second wave of the virus looms.
The first to fall were businesses, especially retail shops, that depended on New York City’s massive flow of commuters. And months into the crisis, established businesses that once seemed invincible, including some that had ambitious expansion plans, are cratering under a sustained collapse in consumer spending….
Chinese mainland reports 36 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 36 new COVID-19 cases on Monday, 6 from overseas and 30 domestically transmitted, the National Health Commission said on Tuesday.
Of the domestic transmissions, 28 were reported in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 2 in northeastern Liaoning Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered on Monday, while 17 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Altogether, 79,030 patients had been discharged from hospitals by Monday, the report said, adding that a total of 84,464 COVID-19 cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland since the start of the epidemic, including 4,634 deaths.
Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus
The roots of the nation’s current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House embraced overly rosy projections to proclaim victory and move on.
By May, however, it was obvious that this wasn’t happening — and Democrats moved quickly to enact a new relief bill 3/
Republicans, however, turned a blind eye; Trump, it’s now clear, surrounded himself with toadies who assured their naked emperor that he was wearing the finest of clothes. And so they did nothing as catastrophe approached 4/
Seriously, these are people I wouldn’t trust to water my houseplants. And no way would I trust them to feed my cat 5/
Having nearly controlled the spread of coronavirus infections, the Israeli government under political pressure opened businesses and schools quickly and carelessly. Testing has lagged the need.
Donald Trump and his supporters routinely boast about his great success in reducing the unemployment rate. While the unemployment rate did fall to low levels under Trump, this was just a continuation of the downward trend that had been in place under Obama since 2010.
Here’s the picture with the overall unemployment rate.
[Graph]
See the sharp drop for the Trump years? Yeah, I don’t either. By the way, I am being very polite in leaving out the impact of the pandemic, which would show unemployment soaring. That has not happened in most other countries because their leaders were better able to deal with the pandemic and the economy.
Here’s the picture for the Black unemployment rate since Trump apparently thinks his administration has been great for Blacks.
[Graph]
We see the same story here as with the overall unemployment rate, the continuation of a downward trend, albeit at a slower pace, than had been going on for years. Trump can take credit for not crashing the economy, until the pandemic, but that really is not all that much to boast about.
The analysis or criticism by Dean Baker needs re-writing, because through the first 3 years of the Trump presidency general unemployment and unemployment of Blacks, Hispanics and Whites all decreased by about 25% which were indeed important decreases:
At this moment I’m thinking people who honestly want Trump out at the election but are saying Biden should not debate Trump truly want Biden removed from the Democratic ticket. Two pretty obvious circumstances. First, the politics for Democrats look great. Warren, Buttigieg and nearly all other candidates would be licking their chops to get at Trump. There is zero fear (among Democrats) that the politics would work for Trump in debates. Second, fair or not, Biden simply can’t not do these debates barring Trump refusing first. People saying Joe should stay away for this reason or that, understand he can’t, so what are they saying? Nominating Joe and skipping the debates increases the chances of losing very significantly.
New York Times Does a Little Editorializing for Private Equity Company
By Dean Baker
The New York Times had a piece * on how the private equity company, Cerberus, is unhappy with the operation of the German bank Commerzbank. Cerberus has a major stake in the bank and, according to the piece, is unhappy that it has not moved more aggressively to cut costs, meaning firing people.
According to the article, Cerberus forced the resignation of two top executives at the bank. It then tells readers that it is unhappy with plans to replace them:
“But then, on Monday, the supervisory board nominated Mr. Schmittmann’s replacement: Mr. Vetter, former chief executive of Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, which is owned by state and local governments in southwestern Germany. Cerberus did not regard him as having the experience to fix Commerzbank.”
It is not clear how the paper determined that Cerberus’ objections were based on Mr. Vetter not “having the experience to fix Commerzbank.” Given what is reported in the rest of the piece, it seems at least as plausible that Cerberus is unhappy with Mr. Vetter’s selection because he might be reluctant to engage in large-scale layoffs. That may be what Cerberus regards as “fixing” Commerzbank, but that is not the standard definition of the word.
THE CRAZY IRIS
And Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath.
Edited and with an introduction by Kenzaburo Oe.
BLACK RAIN
By Masuji Ibuse.
THE silence of the survivors was profound after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Many had witnessed too much horror and retreated into themselves. Still more were at a loss to express their emotions. Until 1952, when the Allied occupation of Japan ended, few wrote about the experience, and even fewer accounts were published.
Later, however, the victims began to publish narrative accounts of what they went through, as well as novels, short stories and poems, which were even more widely read. Together they form a special genre in the literature on war, one that delves into an experience human beings had never known.
The atomic bombings have been a touchy issue between Americans and Japanese for four decades, and the military necessity and morality of them are still debated. Both Americans and Japanese have written numerous arguments and analyses but, because of the language barrier, few Americans have been able to read what the Japanese have written. Two books -”The Crazy Iris: And Other Stories of the Atomic After-math” and ”Black Rain” – written by Japanese authors and translated into English might help to span that communications gap.
The first is a collection of short stories edited by Kenzaburo Oe. Most of them are by writers who were victims of the bombings. A striking feature of the stories is that there is far less explicit expression of the anger and hatred toward those who dropped the bombs than might be expected, and little political condemnation or moralizing.
Instead, the authors are obsessed with describing in excruciating detail what actually happened and with revealing the grotesque condition of the victims. The writers, even though they are of different ages, sex, experience and background, seem to have reached the same conclusion – the best way to express their feelings was to restrain emotions and concentrate on facts.
Among the nine short stories, two were written by Tamiki Hara, who was wounded in the bombing of Hiroshima when he was 40 years old, and who is considered by many Japanese to be among the best writers on this subject. In ”Summer Flower,” he describes what hap-pened to his home, and himself inside it, the day the bomb was dropped.
But the most compelling story in the collection, and an exception to the factual theme, is ”The Land of Heart’s Desire,” also by Hara, which was first published in 1951. It rarely touches on the events of that day. Instead, Hara concentrates on his state of mind six years after the bombing, his attitudes toward life and death and his realization that something inside him had changed drastically since the bombings. He writes with a clarity that serves to deepen the sadness.
In one passage, he says: ”I am drifting off to sleep when a sudden shock like lightning strikes my head, which unfolds in an explosion. A sharp spasm seizes my body, then all is still, as though nothing had happened. . . . Could it be, though, that the shock of that time has been constantly eyeing me and my fellow victims from a distance, awaiting its chance to drive us mad?” Shortly after writing that Hara committed suicide. Each of these stories was translated by a different person, Japanese or Westerner. The result is uneven be-cause the skill of the translators varies considerably in conveying the flavor of the original Japanese and giving readers an understanding of the context of the story.
In ”Black Rain,” Masuji Ibuse demonstrates that understatement of emotions can make powerful literature. Mr. Ibuse, a major literary figure in Japan, has won numerous literary awards and in 1966 this novel won him the Order of Cultural Merit, the nation’s highest award for artistic and scholarly achievement. John Bester’s translation of the novel is excellent. Although cast as fiction, the accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath are based on the documentary record and the author’s interviews with victims.
The story revolves around the family of a man named Shigematsu; it weaves together flashbacks, diaries of different people and eyewitness accounts of the bomb into a human drama. The description of the victims is reserved, yet hair-raising.
In the midst of the cries for help, the blood and burns and the piles of corpses, consideration for other people was all the more moving. Shigematsu’s family manages to get on a packed train to flee from Hiroshima. He tries to make more room for himself by nudging a bundle that rested on a woman’s shoulder:
”I contacted what felt like a human ear: a child seemed to be in the bundle. To carry a child in such a fashion was outrageous. It was almost certain to suffocate in such a crush.
” ‘Excuse me Ma’am,’ I said softly. ‘Is it your child in here?’
” ‘Yes,’ she said in a scarcely audible voice. ‘He’s dead.’
” ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, taken aback. ‘I didn’t know. . . . I really must apologize, to be pushing and. . . .’
” ‘Not at all,’ she said gently. ‘None of us can help it in such a crowd.’ She hitched the bundle up, bent her head, and was seized with a fit of weeping.”
This is a wrenching novel about ordinary people trying to survive the hardships of war – the scarcities of food it imposed, then constant bombing by the American B-29’s and finally a bomb beyond their comprehension. Everyone tries to cope with the catastrophe as best he can, reminding himself to be calm and to help others.
When Hiroshima was chosen as the target to demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb, it had a population of a quarter of a million people. ”Black Rain” is a detailed account of how more than 100,000 perished and a tale of those who survived. This book makes one thing clear: if ever another nuclear bomb is dropped, no one will be able to say, ”We didn’t know what would happen.”
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
The Reverend Mr. Tanimoto got up at five o’clock that morning. He was alone in the parsonage, because for some time his wife had been commuting with their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida, a suburb to the north. Of all the important cities of Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san, or Mr. B, as the Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29; and Mr. Tanimoto, like all his neighbors and friends, was almost sick with anxiety. He had heard uncomfortably detailed accounts of mass raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other nearby towns; he was sure Hiroshima’s turn would come soon. He had slept badly the night before, because there had been several air-raid warnings. Hiroshima had been getting such warnings almost every night for weeks, for at that time the B-29s were using Lake Biwa, northeast of Hiroshima, as a rendez-vous point, and no matter what city the Americans planned to hit, the Super-fortresses streamed in over the coast near Hiroshima. The frequency of the warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumor was going around that the Americans were saving something special for the city.
Mr. Tanimoto is a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry. He wears his black hair parted in the middle and rather long; the prominence of the frontal bones just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his mustache, mouth, and chin give him a strange, old-young look, boyish and yet wise, weak and yet fiery. He moves nervously and fast, but with a restraint which suggests that he is a cautious, thoughtful man. He showed, indeed, just those qualities in the uneasy days before the bomb fell. Besides having his wife spend the nights in Ushida, Mr. Tanimoto had been carrying all the portable things from his church, in the close-packed residential district called Nagaragawa, to a house that belonged to a rayon manufacturer in Koi, two miles from the center of town. The rayon man, a Mr. Matsui, had opened his then unoccupied estate to a large number of his friends and acquaintances, so that they might evacuate whatever they wished to a safe distance from the probable target area. Mr. Tanimoto had had no difficulty in moving chairs, hymnals, Bibles, altar gear, and church records by pushcart himself, but the organ console and an upright piano required some aid. A friend of his named Matsuo had, the day before, helped him get the piano out to Koi; in return, he had promised this day to assist Mr. Matsuo in hauling out a daughter’s belongings. That is why he had risen so early.
Mr. Tanimoto cooked his own breakfast. He felt awfully tired. The effort of moving the piano the day before, a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbalanced diet, the cares of his parish—all combined to make him feel hardly adequate to the new day’s work. There was another thing, too: Mr. Tanimoto had studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia; he had graduated in 1940; he spoke excellent English; he dressed in American clothes; he had corresponded with many American friends right up to the time the war began; and among a people obsessed with a fear of being spied upon—perhaps almost obsessed himself—he found himself growing increasingly uneasy. The police had questioned him several times, and just a few days before, he had heard that an influential acquaintance, a Mr. Tanaka, a retired officer of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line, an anti-Christian, a man famous in Hiroshima for his showy philanthropies and notorious for his personal tyrannies, had been telling people that Tanimoto should not be trusted. In compensation, to show himself publicly a good Japanese, Mr. Tanimoto had taken on the chairmanship of his local tonarigumi, or Neighborhood Association, and to his other duties and concerns this position had added the business of organizing air-raid defense for about twenty families.
Before six o’clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto started for Mr. Matsuo’s house. There he found that their burden was to be a tansu, a large Japanese cabinet, full of clothing and household goods. The two men set out. The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few minutes after they started, the air-raid siren went off—a minute-long blast that warned of approaching planes but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight degree of danger, since it sounded every morning at this time, when an American weather plane came over. The two men pulled and pushed the handcart through the city streets. Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city, lying mostly on the six islands formed by the seven estuarial rivers that branch out from the Ota River; its main commercial and residential districts, covering about four square miles in the center of the city, contained three-quarters of its population, which had been reduced by several evacuation programs from a wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000. Factories and other residential districts, or suburbs, lay compactly around the edges of the city. To the south were the docks, an airport, and the island-studded Inland Sea. A rim of mountains runs around the other three sides of the delta. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo took their way through the shopping center, already full of people, and across two of the rivers to the sloping streets of Koi, and up them to the outskirts and foothills. As they started up a valley away from the tight-ranked houses, the all-clear sounded. (The Japanese radar operators, detecting only three planes, supposed that they comprised a reconnaissance.) Pushing the handcart up to the rayon man’s house was tiring, and the men, after they had maneuvered their load into the driveway and to the front steps, paused to rest awhile. They stood with a wing of the house between them and the city. Like most homes in this part of Japan, the house consisted of a wooden frame and wooden walls supporting a heavy tile roof. Its front hall, packed with rolls of bedding and clothing, looked like a cool cave full of fat cushions. Opposite the house, to the right of the front door, there was a large, finicky rock garden. There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant.
Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror—and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. He bellied up very hard against one of them. As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)
When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and saw that the rayon man’s house had collapsed. He thought a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate had fallen over—toward the house rather than away from it. In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.
Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker….
The spread of coronavirus infections through South America and South Africa, below the equator, should be evident and concerning. Chinese specialists have suggested that there is a seasonal aspect to the coronavirus, and these are the winter months in the southern hemisphere.
Chinese mainland reports 37 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 37 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, 7 from overseas and 30 domestically transmitted, the National Health Commission said on Thursday.
Among the domestic transmissions, 27 were reported in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 3 in Liaoning Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered on Wednesday, while 10 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Altogether, 79,057 patients had been discharged from hospitals by Wednesday, the report said, adding that a total of 84,528 COVID-19 cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland since the start of the epidemic, including 4,634 deaths.
Virus testing in the U.S. is dropping, even as deaths mount
U.S. testing for the coronavirus is dropping even as infections remain high and the death toll rises by more than 1,000 a day, a worrisome trend that officials attribute largely to Americans getting discouraged over having to wait hours to get a test and days or weeks to learn the results.
An Associated Press analysis found that the number of tests per day slid 3.6 percent over the past two weeks to 750,000, with the count falling in 22 states. That includes places like Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Iowa where the percentage of positive tests is high and continuing to climb, an indicator that the virus is still spreading uncontrolled….
America’s Unholy Crusade Against China
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an anti-China speech that was extremist, simplistic, and dangerous. If biblical literalists like Pompeo remain in power past November, they could well bring the world to the brink of a war that they expect and perhaps even seek.
By JEFFREY D. SACHS
NEW YORK – Many white Christian evangelicals in the United States have long believed that America has a God-given mission to save the world. Under the influence of this crusading mentality, US foreign policy has often swerved from diplomacy to war. It is in danger of doing so again.
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched yet another evangelical crusade, this time against China. His speech was extremist, simplistic, and dangerous – and may well put the US on a path to conflict with China.
According to Pompeo, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CPC) harbor a “decades-long desire for global hegemony.” This is ironic. Only one country – the US – has a defense strategy calling for it to be the “preeminent military power in the world,” with “favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.” China’s defense white paper, by contrast, states that “China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and that, “As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.”
One is reminded of Jesus’s own admonition: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). US military spending totaled $732 billion in 2019, nearly three times the $261 billion China spent.
The US, moreover, has around 800 overseas military bases, while China has just one (a small naval base in Djibouti). The US has many military bases close to China, which has none anywhere near the US. The US has 5,800 nuclear warheads; China has roughly 320. The US has 11 aircraft carriers; China has one. The US has launched many overseas wars in the past 40 years; China has launched none (though it has been criticized for border skirmishes, most recently with India, that stop short of war).
The US has repeatedly rejected or withdrawn from United Nations treaties and UN organizations in recent years, including UNESCO, the Paris climate agreement, and, most recently, the World Health Organization, while China supports UN processes and agencies. US President Donald Trump recently threatened the staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions. Pompeo rails against China’s clampdown on its mainly Muslim Uighur population, but Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, claims that Trump privately gave China’s actions a pass, or even encouraged them.
The world took relatively little notice of Pompeo’s speech, which offered no evidence to back up his claims of China’s hegemonic ambition. China’s rejection of US hegemony does not mean that China itself seeks hegemony. Indeed, outside of the US, there is little belief that China aims for global dominance. China’s explicitly stated national goals are to be a “moderately prosperous society” by 2021 (the centenary of the CPC), and a “fully developed country” by 2049 (the centennial of the People’s Republic).
Moreover, at an estimated $10,098 in 2019, China’s GDP per capita was less than one-sixth that of the US ($65,112) – hardly the basis for global supremacy. China still has a lot of catching up to do to achieve even its basic economic development goals.
Assuming that Trump loses in November’s presidential election, Pompeo’s speech will likely receive no further notice. The Democrats will surely criticize China, but without Pompeo’s brazen exaggerations. Yet, if Trump wins, Pompeo’s speech could be a harbinger of chaos. Pompeo’s evangelism is real, and white evangelicals are the political base of today’s Republican Party.
Pompeo’s zealous excesses have deep roots in American history. As I recounted in my recent book A New Foreign Policy, English protestant settlers believed that they were founding a New Israel in the new promised land, with God’s providential blessings. In 1845, John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to justify and celebrate America’s violent annexation of North America. “All this will be our future history,” he wrote in 1839, “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man – the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen…”
On the basis of such exalted views of its own beneficence, the US engaged in mass enslavement until the Civil War and mass apartheid thereafter; slaughtered Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century and subjugated them thereafter; and, with the closure of the Western frontier, extended Manifest Destiny overseas. Later, with the onset of the Cold War, anti-communist fervor led the US to fight disastrous wars in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) in the 1960s and 1970s, and brutal wars in Central America in the 1980s.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the evangelical ardor was directed against “radical Islam” or “Islamic fascism,” with four US wars of choice – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya – all of which remain debacles to this day. Suddenly, the supposed existential threat of radical Islam has been forgotten, and the new crusade targets the CPC.
Pompeo himself is a biblical literalist who believes that the end time, the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, is imminent. Pompeo described his beliefs in a 2015 speech while a Congressman from Kansas: America is a Judeo-Christian nation, the greatest in history, whose task is to fight God’s battles until the Rapture, when Christ’s born-again followers, like Pompeo, will be swept to heaven at the Last Judgment.
White evangelicals represent only around 17% of the US adult population, but comprise around 26% of voters. They vote overwhelmingly Republican (an estimated 81% in 2016), making them the party’s single most important voting bloc. That gives them powerful influence on Republican policy, and in particular on foreign policy when Republicans control the White House and Senate (with its treaty-ratifying powers). Fully 99% of Republican congressmen are Christian, of whom around 70% are Protestant, including a significant though unknown proportion of evangelicals.
Of course, the Democrats also harbor some politicians who proclaim American exceptionalism and launch crusading wars (for example, President Barack Obama’s interventions in Syria and Libya). On the whole, however, the Democratic Party is less wedded to claims of US hegemony than is the Republican Party’s evangelical base.
Pompeo’s inflammatory anti-China rhetoric could become even more apocalyptic in the coming weeks, if only to fire up the Republican base ahead of the election. If Trump is defeated, as seems likely, the risk of a US confrontation with China will recede. But if he remains in power, whether by a true electoral victory, vote fraud, or even a coup (anything is possible), Pompeo’s crusade would probably proceed, and could well bring the world to the brink of a war that he expects and perhaps even seeks.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development.
The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the western hemisphere since 1971. Nonetheless, Cuba has had markedly better healthcare outcomes even though Cuba has been continually under United States sanctions. The coronavirus experience reflects a profound difference in healthcare systems, a difference reflected in other basic health characteristics of the countries.
The astonishing, sad data appears to be telling us that we have a serious institutional healthcare problem, but other than Branko Milanovic or Dean Baker such a possible problem seems seldom to have been considered.
With Republicans divided and President Trump undercutting negotiations on a pandemic relief package, the majority leader is in a difficult bind, partly of his own making.
WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell has put himself in one of the toughest spots of a political life that has seen plenty of them.
Up for re-election in the middle of an unforgiving pandemic, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader is caught in a family feud between a group of endangered incumbents in his party who are desperate for pandemic relief legislation that is tied up in slogging negotiations, and a significant portion of Senate Republicans who would rather do nothing at all.
He is also up against Democratic leaders who do not see the need to give an inch on their own sweeping coronavirus relief priorities, administration negotiators who badly want a deal that boosts President Trump — even if it ends up being one that most Senate Republicans oppose — and the president himself, who has played his usual role of undercutting the talks at every turn.
All that is at stake is the health and economic state of the nation, control of the Senate and Mr. McConnell’s own reputation and future.
“It is a big moment, an important moment for the country,” said Mr. McConnell, who has been adept at striking last-minute, bipartisan tax and fiscal bargains in dire situations — but not in circumstances quite like the present. “It does happen to be occurring in closer proximity to the election than those other big deals.”
It is also a big moment for the top Senate Republican, who may end up having to pave the legislative way for a huge federal spending package that many in his party detest.
Mr. McConnell has only himself to thank for his predicament.
While Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a sweeping, $3 trillion recovery measure in May and Democrats demanded for months that Republicans join them in mapping out a next phase of federal pandemic relief, Mr. McConnell instead hit the pause button, which he and his fellow Republicans said was necessary to assess how the nearly $3 trillion in aid already approved was working.
Visible in the background was the hope that the monthslong shutdown of the economy and stay-at-home orders would corral the spread of the coronavirus and spare Republicans from having to get behind another costly round of aid. That did not happen. Instead, the virus surged back in many parts of the country, many school systems announced they would stick with distance learning for the fall and the initial recovery started to slide.
“It allowed us to learn the coronavirus didn’t mysteriously disappear,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “It is still here.”
But the delay meant that Republicans did not even present their aid proposals until days before expanded unemployment benefits that were cushioning millions of Americans from the worst of the recession were to expire. They lapsed last week with no ready replacement, and a small-business program considered crucial to preventing a total economic collapse is set to expire on Friday, leading Democrats to accuse Mr. McConnell of acting irresponsibly.
“He’s not even sitting in the room,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on Tuesday, suggesting that Mr. McConnell was unaware of the substance of the talks.
Ms. Pelosi has taken to referring to Mr. McConnell as Moscow Mitch, a name she knows he doesn’t appreciate, and in an appearance Wednesday on MSNBC ridiculed him for failing to deliver a Republican majority for his own proposal.
“As you have seen from the majority leader, Mr. McConnell, they don’t have the votes,” she said. “They have votes for practically nothing. They haven’t passed anything. They don’t even have the votes within their own 51.”
The situation has also left Senate Republicans up for re-election — who have already seen their political chances dragged down by Mr. Trump’s poor standing — with the unappealing prospect of facing voters in less than three months without having acted to address their most pressing economic and public health needs. Their demises could cost Republicans their Senate majority and Mr. McConnell his position. And while he is currently not regarded as particularly vulnerable to defeat, the Kentuckian is facing his own challenge from a Democrat, Amy McGrath, a well-financed former Marine fighter pilot.
Mr. McConnell insisted on Wednesday that his go-slow approach had been “the reasonable thing to do.”
“Pushing the pause button meant seeing how what we have already done is working,” said Mr. McConnell, whose office said that slightly more than $1 trillion of the original $2.6 trillion allocated for the pandemic response remained unspent. “This is not play money.” …
With Old Allies Turning Against Her, Birx Presses On Against the Coronavirus
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, has found herself a woman without a country, denounced by Democrats and called “pathetic” by the president.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Six COVID-19 vaccine candidates in phase-3 trials, 3 from China: WHO
Six COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including three from China, have entered phase-3 trials, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official said on Thursday.
The three Chinese candidates are from Sinovac, Wuhan Institute of Biological Products/Sinopharm and Beijing Institute of Biological Products/Sinopharm, said Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, at a virtual briefing.
The other three are made by the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca, Moderna/NIAID and BioNTech/Fosun Pharma/Pfizer, he added.
The vaccines will be put into the general population for the first time in phase 3, after previous trials have focused on safety, immunogenicity and immune response in a small number of humans, said the WHO official. The phase-3 trial will test whether the vaccines can “protect large numbers of people over a prolonged period of time.”
However, “phase-3 doesn’t mean nearly there,” he said, as “there is no guarantee that any of these six will give us the answer.”
In total, 165 vaccine candidates have started some forms of trials, and 26 of them in clinical trials, according to WHO records.
Chinese mainland reports 37 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 37 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Thursday, with 10 cases from overseas and 27 domestically transmitted, Chinese health authority said Friday.
Of the 27 domestically-transmitted cases, 26 are in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, 1 is in Beijing.
No deaths related to the disease were reported Thursday, while 31 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
For anyone curious about the why the U.S lfpr has fallen over the last two decades but has increased elsewhere, I explain why in this article.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4361570-skill-stalagmites-technology-stalactites
The article also explains why since 2000: business investment has been weak, the fall in the labor share and many other things.
welcome to Angry Bear
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/republicans-unemployed-coronavirus.html
August 3, 2020
Republican Leaders Couldn’t Care Less About the Unemployed
Their cruelty and ignorance are creating another gratuitous disaster.
By Paul Krugman
In case you haven’t noticed, the coronavirus is still very much with us. Around a thousand Americans are dying from Covid-19 each day, 10 times the rate in the European Union. Thanks to our failure to control the pandemic, we’re still suffering from Great Depression levels of unemployment; a brief recovery driven by premature attempts to resume business as usual appears to have petered out as states pause or reverse their opening.
Yet enhanced unemployment benefits, a crucial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, have expired. And negotiations over how — or even whether — to restore aid appear to be stalled.
You sometimes see headlines describing this crisis as a result of “congressional dysfunction.” Such headlines reveal a severe case of bothsidesism — the almost pathological aversion of some in the media to placing blame where it belongs.
For House Democrats passed a bill specifically designed to deal with this mess two and a half months ago. The Trump administration and Senate Republicans had plenty of time to propose an alternative. Instead, they didn’t even focus on the issue until days before the benefits ended. And even now they’re refusing to offer anything that might significantly alleviate workers’ plight.
This is an astonishing failure of governance, right up there with the mishandling of the pandemic itself. But what explains it?
Well, I’m of two minds. Was it ignorant malevolence, or malevolent ignorance?
Let’s talk first about the ignorance.
The Covid recession that began in February may have been the simplest, most comprehensible business downturn in history. Much of the U.S. economy was put on hold to contain a pandemic. Job losses were concentrated in services that were either inessential or could be postponed, and were highly likely to spread the coronavirus: restaurants, air travel, dentists’ visits.
The main goal of economic policy was to make this temporary lockdown tolerable, sustaining the incomes of those unable to work.
Republicans, however, have shown no sign of understanding any of this. The policy proposals being floated by White House aides and advisers are almost surreal in their disconnect from reality. Cutting payroll taxes on workers who can’t work? Letting businesspeople deduct the full cost of three-martini lunches they can’t eat?
They don’t even seem to understand the mechanics of how unemployment checks are paid out. They proposed continuing benefits for a brief period while negotiations continue — but this literally can’t be done, because the state offices that disburse unemployment aid couldn’t handle the necessary reprogramming.
Above all, Republicans seem obsessed with the idea that unemployment benefits are making workers lazy and unwilling to accept jobs.
This would be a bizarre claim even if unemployment benefits really were reducing the incentive to seek work. After all, there are more than 30 million workers receiving benefits, but only five million job openings. No matter how harshly you treat the unemployed, they can’t take jobs that don’t exist.
It’s almost a secondary concern to note that there’s almost no evidence that unemployment benefits are, in fact, discouraging workers from taking jobs. Multiple studies find no significant incentive effect.
And unemployment benefits didn’t prevent the U.S. from adding seven million jobs, most of them for low-wage workers — that is, precisely the workers often receiving more in unemployment than from their normal jobs — during the abortive spring recovery.
By the way, a great majority of economists believe that unemployment benefits have helped sustain the economy as a whole, by supporting consumer spending.
So the attack on unemployment aid is rooted in deep ignorance. But there’s also a strong element of malice.
Republicans have a long history of suggesting that the jobless are moral failures — that they’d rather sit home watching TV than work. And the Trump years have been marked by a relentless assault on programs that help the less fortunate, from Obamacare to food stamps.
One indicator of G.O.P. disingenuousness is the sudden re-emergence of “deficit hawks” claiming that helping the unemployed will add too much to the national debt. I use the scare quotes because as far as I can tell not one of the politicians claiming that we can’t afford to help the unemployed raised any objections to Donald Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.
Nor was disdain for the unlucky the only reason the G.O.P. didn’t want to help Americans in need. The recent Vanity Fair report about why we don’t have a national testing strategy fits with a lot of evidence that Republicans spent months believing that Covid-19 was a blue-state problem, not relevant to people they cared about. By the time they realized that the pandemic was exploding in the Sun Belt, it was too late to avoid disaster.
At this point, then, it’s hard to see how we avoid another gratuitous catastrophe. The fecklessness of the Trump administration and its allies means that millions of Americans will soon be in dire financial straits.
Paul,
It’s about suppressing wages.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavirus-israel-schools-reopen.html
August 4, 2020
When Covid Subsided, Israel Reopened Its Schools. It Didn’t Go Well.
As countries consider back-to-school strategies for the fall, a coronavirus outbreak at a Jerusalem high school offers a cautionary tale.
By Isabel Kershner and Pam Belluck
JERUSALEM — As the United States and other countries anxiously consider how to reopen schools, Israel, one of the first countries to do so, illustrates the dangers of moving too precipitously.
Confident it had beaten the coronavirus and desperate to reboot a devastated economy, the Israeli government invited the entire student body back in late May.
Within days, infections were reported at a Jerusalem high school, which quickly mushroomed into the largest outbreak in a single school in Israel, possibly the world.
The virus rippled out to the students’ homes and then to other schools and neighborhoods, ultimately infecting hundreds of students, teachers and relatives.
Other outbreaks forced hundreds of schools to close. Across the country, tens of thousands of students and teachers were quarantined.
Israel’s advice for other countries?
“They definitely should not do what we have done,” said Eli Waxman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and chairman of the team advising Israel’s National Security Council on the pandemic. “It was a major failure.”
The lesson, experts say, is that even communities that have gotten the spread of the virus under control need to take strict precautions when reopening schools. Smaller classes, mask wearing, keeping desks six feet apart and providing adequate ventilation, they say, are likely to be crucial until a vaccine is available.
“If there is a low number of cases, there is an illusion that the disease is over,” said Dr. Hagai Levine, a professor of epidemiology and chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians. “But it’s a complete illusion.”
“The mistake in Israel,” he said, “is that you can open the education system, but you have to do it gradually, with certain limits, and you have to do it in a very careful way.” …
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/nyregion/nyc-small-businesses-closing-coronavirus.html
August 3, 2020
One-Third of New York’s Small Businesses May Be Gone Forever
Small-business owners said they have exhausted federal and local assistance and see no end in sight after months of sharp revenue drops. Now, many are closing their shops and restaurants for good.
By Matthew Haag
In early March, Glady’s, a Caribbean restaurant in Brooklyn, was bringing in about $35,000 a week in revenue. The Bank Street Bookstore, a 50-year-old children’s shop in Manhattan, was preparing for busy spring and summer shopping seasons. And Busy Bodies, a play space for children in Brooklyn, had just wrapped up months of packed classes with long waiting lists.
Five months later, those once prosperous businesses have evaporated. Glady’s and Busy Bodies are closed for good and Bank Street, one of the city’s last children’s bookstores, will shut down permanently in August.
The three are victims of the economic destruction that threatens to derail New York City’s recovery from the financial collapse triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
An expanding universe of distinctive small businesses — from coffee shops to dry cleaners to hardware stores — that give New York’s neighborhoods their unique personalities and are key to the city’s economy are starting to topple.
More than 2,800 businesses in New York City have permanently closed since March 1, according to data from Yelp, the business listing and review site, a higher number than in any other large American city.
About half the closings have been in Manhattan, where office buildings have been hollowed out, its wealthier residents have left for second homes and tourists have stayed away.
When the pandemic eventually subsides, roughly one-third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses may never reopen, according to a report by the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group. So far, those businesses have shed 520,000 jobs.
While New York is home to more Fortune 500 headquarters than any city in the country, small businesses are the city’s backbone. They represent roughly 98 percent of the employers in the city and provide jobs to more than 3 million people, which is about half of its work force, according to the city.
When New York’s economic lockdown started in March the hope was that the closing of businesses would be temporary and many could weather the financial blow.
But the devastation to small businesses has become both widespread and permanent as the economy reopens at a slow pace. Emergency federal aid has failed to provide enough of a cushion, people remain leery of resuming normal lives and the threat of a second wave of the virus looms.
The first to fall were businesses, especially retail shops, that depended on New York City’s massive flow of commuters. And months into the crisis, established businesses that once seemed invincible, including some that had ambitious expansion plans, are cratering under a sustained collapse in consumer spending….
August 3, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,862,174)
Deaths ( 158,929)
India
Cases ( 1,855,331)
Deaths ( 38,971)
Mexico
Cases ( 439,046)
Deaths ( 47,746)
UK
Cases ( 305,623)
Deaths ( 46,210)
Germany
Cases ( 212,320)
Deaths ( 9,232)
France
Cases ( 191,295)
Deaths ( 30,294)
Canada
Cases ( 117,031)
Deaths ( 8,947)
China
Cases ( 84,428)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 3, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 680)
US ( 480)
France ( 464)
Mexico ( 370)
Canada ( 237)
Germany ( 110)
India ( 28)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 15.1%, 15.8% and 10.9% for the United Kingdom, France and Mexico respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-04/Chinese-mainland-reports-36-new-COVID-19-cases-SFNyxgt440/index.html
August 4, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 36 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 36 new COVID-19 cases on Monday, 6 from overseas and 30 domestically transmitted, the National Health Commission said on Tuesday.
Of the domestic transmissions, 28 were reported in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 2 in northeastern Liaoning Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered on Monday, while 17 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Altogether, 79,030 patients had been discharged from hospitals by Monday, the report said, adding that a total of 84,464 COVID-19 cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland since the start of the epidemic, including 4,634 deaths.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-04/Chinese-mainland-reports-36-new-COVID-19-cases-SFNyxgt440/img/ea8cb9ae8a1b4515ab226e90b2354dbf/ea8cb9ae8a1b4515ab226e90b2354dbf.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-04/Chinese-mainland-reports-36-new-COVID-19-cases-SFNyxgt440/img/364ab18ebcc3423aad21e508014bb63f/364ab18ebcc3423aad21e508014bb63f.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-04/Chinese-mainland-reports-36-new-COVID-19-cases-SFNyxgt440/img/ce9d7f59656748cda788ef085309fc16/ce9d7f59656748cda788ef085309fc16.jpeg
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
More about the coronavirus relief debacle: What should Republicans have known, and when should they have known it? 1/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/republicans-unemployed-coronavirus.html
Republicans Couldn’t Care Less About the Unemployed
Their cruelty and ignorance are creating another gratuitous disaster.
10:00 AM · Aug 4, 2020
According to New York Times reporting, in April the WH was convinced that we’d follow Italy’s trajectory, with the pandemic rapidly fading away 2/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-response-failure-leadership.html
Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus
The roots of the nation’s current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House embraced overly rosy projections to proclaim victory and move on.
By May, however, it was obvious that this wasn’t happening — and Democrats moved quickly to enact a new relief bill 3/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EelOxkXWkAAk7UU?format=png&name=small
Republicans, however, turned a blind eye; Trump, it’s now clear, surrounded himself with toadies who assured their naked emperor that he was wearing the finest of clothes. And so they did nothing as catastrophe approached 4/
Seriously, these are people I wouldn’t trust to water my houseplants. And no way would I trust them to feed my cat 5/
August 4, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,873,022)
Deaths ( 159,369)
The data though reflecting negligent leadership, reflect in turn a healthcare system that is seriously flawed.
August 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 75,825)
Deaths ( 559)
Deaths per million ( 61)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Having nearly controlled the spread of coronavirus infections, the Israeli government under political pressure opened businesses and schools quickly and carelessly. Testing has lagged the need.
August 4, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,882,743)
Deaths ( 159,456)
Nathan……lfpr looks pretty much on course from 1950. You can see the boomer/female bulge in the 70’s and 80’s. Looks like that is a correction.
The economy has slowed down since 1973 THEN again post computers/peak boomer spending peak in 2000.
https://cepr.net/the-trump-record-on-unemployment/
August 3, 2020
The Trump Record on Unemployment
By Dean Baker
Donald Trump and his supporters routinely boast about his great success in reducing the unemployment rate. While the unemployment rate did fall to low levels under Trump, this was just a continuation of the downward trend that had been in place under Obama since 2010.
Here’s the picture with the overall unemployment rate.
[Graph]
See the sharp drop for the Trump years? Yeah, I don’t either. By the way, I am being very polite in leaving out the impact of the pandemic, which would show unemployment soaring. That has not happened in most other countries because their leaders were better able to deal with the pandemic and the economy.
Here’s the picture for the Black unemployment rate since Trump apparently thinks his administration has been great for Blacks.
[Graph]
We see the same story here as with the overall unemployment rate, the continuation of a downward trend, albeit at a slower pace, than had been going on for years. Trump can take credit for not crashing the economy, until the pandemic, but that really is not all that much to boast about.
The analysis or criticism by Dean Baker needs re-writing, because through the first 3 years of the Trump presidency general unemployment and unemployment of Blacks, Hispanics and Whites all decreased by about 25% which were indeed important decreases:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tFQC
January 4, 2018
Unemployment rate 16 and over, 2017-2019
(Indexed to 2019)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tFQn
January 4, 2018
Unemployment rates for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics, * 2017-2019
* Employment age 16 and over
(Indexed to 2017)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tKGe
January 4, 2018
Unemployment rates for all and men & women, * 2017-2019
* Employment age 16 and over
(Indexed to 2019)
At this moment I’m thinking people who honestly want Trump out at the election but are saying Biden should not debate Trump truly want Biden removed from the Democratic ticket. Two pretty obvious circumstances. First, the politics for Democrats look great. Warren, Buttigieg and nearly all other candidates would be licking their chops to get at Trump. There is zero fear (among Democrats) that the politics would work for Trump in debates. Second, fair or not, Biden simply can’t not do these debates barring Trump refusing first. People saying Joe should stay away for this reason or that, understand he can’t, so what are they saying? Nominating Joe and skipping the debates increases the chances of losing very significantly.
No one has cast their vote based on the debates since the Civil Rights Act.
EM:
I hope you answer Anne. It would make for an interesting conversation
No one has cast their vote based on the debates since the Civil Rights Act.
[ An important conjecture that calls for further explanation. This would take us back to 1964 or possibly 1968. ]
“No one has cast their vote based on the debates since the Civil Rights Act.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act
Civil Right Act
August 5, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,959,005)
Deaths ( 161,298)
August 5, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,959,606)
Deaths ( 161,357)
India
Cases ( 1,963,239)
Deaths ( 40,739)
Mexico
Cases ( 449,961)
Deaths ( 48,869)
UK
Cases ( 307,184)
Deaths ( 46,364)
Germany
Cases ( 214,104)
Deaths ( 9,245)
France
Cases ( 194,029)
Deaths ( 30,305)
Canada
Cases ( 118,037)
Deaths ( 8,960)
China
Cases ( 84,491)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 5, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 683)
US ( 487)
France ( 464)
Mexico ( 379)
Canada ( 237)
Germany ( 110)
India ( 29)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 15.1%, 15.6% and 10.9% for the United Kingdom, France and Mexico respectively.
https://cepr.net/nyt-does-a-little-editorializing-for-private-equity-company/
August 5, 2020
New York Times Does a Little Editorializing for Private Equity Company
By Dean Baker
The New York Times had a piece * on how the private equity company, Cerberus, is unhappy with the operation of the German bank Commerzbank. Cerberus has a major stake in the bank and, according to the piece, is unhappy that it has not moved more aggressively to cut costs, meaning firing people.
According to the article, Cerberus forced the resignation of two top executives at the bank. It then tells readers that it is unhappy with plans to replace them:
“But then, on Monday, the supervisory board nominated Mr. Schmittmann’s replacement: Mr. Vetter, former chief executive of Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, which is owned by state and local governments in southwestern Germany. Cerberus did not regard him as having the experience to fix Commerzbank.”
It is not clear how the paper determined that Cerberus’ objections were based on Mr. Vetter not “having the experience to fix Commerzbank.” Given what is reported in the rest of the piece, it seems at least as plausible that Cerberus is unhappy with Mr. Vetter’s selection because he might be reluctant to engage in large-scale layoffs. That may be what Cerberus regards as “fixing” Commerzbank, but that is not the standard definition of the word.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/business/commerzbank-cerebus-german-banks-private-equity.html
August 5, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,968,786)
Deaths ( 161,511)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E5DE123BF93BA3575AC0A963948260
September 8, 1985
After the Bombs Dropped
By FUMIKO MORI HALLORAN
THE CRAZY IRIS
And Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath.
Edited and with an introduction by Kenzaburo Oe.
BLACK RAIN
By Masuji Ibuse.
THE silence of the survivors was profound after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Many had witnessed too much horror and retreated into themselves. Still more were at a loss to express their emotions. Until 1952, when the Allied occupation of Japan ended, few wrote about the experience, and even fewer accounts were published.
Later, however, the victims began to publish narrative accounts of what they went through, as well as novels, short stories and poems, which were even more widely read. Together they form a special genre in the literature on war, one that delves into an experience human beings had never known.
The atomic bombings have been a touchy issue between Americans and Japanese for four decades, and the military necessity and morality of them are still debated. Both Americans and Japanese have written numerous arguments and analyses but, because of the language barrier, few Americans have been able to read what the Japanese have written. Two books -”The Crazy Iris: And Other Stories of the Atomic After-math” and ”Black Rain” – written by Japanese authors and translated into English might help to span that communications gap.
The first is a collection of short stories edited by Kenzaburo Oe. Most of them are by writers who were victims of the bombings. A striking feature of the stories is that there is far less explicit expression of the anger and hatred toward those who dropped the bombs than might be expected, and little political condemnation or moralizing.
Instead, the authors are obsessed with describing in excruciating detail what actually happened and with revealing the grotesque condition of the victims. The writers, even though they are of different ages, sex, experience and background, seem to have reached the same conclusion – the best way to express their feelings was to restrain emotions and concentrate on facts.
Among the nine short stories, two were written by Tamiki Hara, who was wounded in the bombing of Hiroshima when he was 40 years old, and who is considered by many Japanese to be among the best writers on this subject. In ”Summer Flower,” he describes what hap-pened to his home, and himself inside it, the day the bomb was dropped.
But the most compelling story in the collection, and an exception to the factual theme, is ”The Land of Heart’s Desire,” also by Hara, which was first published in 1951. It rarely touches on the events of that day. Instead, Hara concentrates on his state of mind six years after the bombing, his attitudes toward life and death and his realization that something inside him had changed drastically since the bombings. He writes with a clarity that serves to deepen the sadness.
In one passage, he says: ”I am drifting off to sleep when a sudden shock like lightning strikes my head, which unfolds in an explosion. A sharp spasm seizes my body, then all is still, as though nothing had happened. . . . Could it be, though, that the shock of that time has been constantly eyeing me and my fellow victims from a distance, awaiting its chance to drive us mad?” Shortly after writing that Hara committed suicide. Each of these stories was translated by a different person, Japanese or Westerner. The result is uneven be-cause the skill of the translators varies considerably in conveying the flavor of the original Japanese and giving readers an understanding of the context of the story.
In ”Black Rain,” Masuji Ibuse demonstrates that understatement of emotions can make powerful literature. Mr. Ibuse, a major literary figure in Japan, has won numerous literary awards and in 1966 this novel won him the Order of Cultural Merit, the nation’s highest award for artistic and scholarly achievement. John Bester’s translation of the novel is excellent. Although cast as fiction, the accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath are based on the documentary record and the author’s interviews with victims.
The story revolves around the family of a man named Shigematsu; it weaves together flashbacks, diaries of different people and eyewitness accounts of the bomb into a human drama. The description of the victims is reserved, yet hair-raising.
In the midst of the cries for help, the blood and burns and the piles of corpses, consideration for other people was all the more moving. Shigematsu’s family manages to get on a packed train to flee from Hiroshima. He tries to make more room for himself by nudging a bundle that rested on a woman’s shoulder:
”I contacted what felt like a human ear: a child seemed to be in the bundle. To carry a child in such a fashion was outrageous. It was almost certain to suffocate in such a crush.
” ‘Excuse me Ma’am,’ I said softly. ‘Is it your child in here?’
” ‘Yes,’ she said in a scarcely audible voice. ‘He’s dead.’
” ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, taken aback. ‘I didn’t know. . . . I really must apologize, to be pushing and. . . .’
” ‘Not at all,’ she said gently. ‘None of us can help it in such a crowd.’ She hitched the bundle up, bent her head, and was seized with a fit of weeping.”
This is a wrenching novel about ordinary people trying to survive the hardships of war – the scarcities of food it imposed, then constant bombing by the American B-29’s and finally a bomb beyond their comprehension. Everyone tries to cope with the catastrophe as best he can, reminding himself to be calm and to help others.
When Hiroshima was chosen as the target to demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb, it had a population of a quarter of a million people. ”Black Rain” is a detailed account of how more than 100,000 perished and a tale of those who survived. This book makes one thing clear: if ever another nuclear bomb is dropped, no one will be able to say, ”We didn’t know what would happen.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
August 31, 1946
Hiroshima
By JOHN HERSEY
I—A NOISELESS FLASH
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
The Reverend Mr. Tanimoto got up at five o’clock that morning. He was alone in the parsonage, because for some time his wife had been commuting with their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida, a suburb to the north. Of all the important cities of Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san, or Mr. B, as the Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29; and Mr. Tanimoto, like all his neighbors and friends, was almost sick with anxiety. He had heard uncomfortably detailed accounts of mass raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other nearby towns; he was sure Hiroshima’s turn would come soon. He had slept badly the night before, because there had been several air-raid warnings. Hiroshima had been getting such warnings almost every night for weeks, for at that time the B-29s were using Lake Biwa, northeast of Hiroshima, as a rendez-vous point, and no matter what city the Americans planned to hit, the Super-fortresses streamed in over the coast near Hiroshima. The frequency of the warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumor was going around that the Americans were saving something special for the city.
Mr. Tanimoto is a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry. He wears his black hair parted in the middle and rather long; the prominence of the frontal bones just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his mustache, mouth, and chin give him a strange, old-young look, boyish and yet wise, weak and yet fiery. He moves nervously and fast, but with a restraint which suggests that he is a cautious, thoughtful man. He showed, indeed, just those qualities in the uneasy days before the bomb fell. Besides having his wife spend the nights in Ushida, Mr. Tanimoto had been carrying all the portable things from his church, in the close-packed residential district called Nagaragawa, to a house that belonged to a rayon manufacturer in Koi, two miles from the center of town. The rayon man, a Mr. Matsui, had opened his then unoccupied estate to a large number of his friends and acquaintances, so that they might evacuate whatever they wished to a safe distance from the probable target area. Mr. Tanimoto had had no difficulty in moving chairs, hymnals, Bibles, altar gear, and church records by pushcart himself, but the organ console and an upright piano required some aid. A friend of his named Matsuo had, the day before, helped him get the piano out to Koi; in return, he had promised this day to assist Mr. Matsuo in hauling out a daughter’s belongings. That is why he had risen so early.
Mr. Tanimoto cooked his own breakfast. He felt awfully tired. The effort of moving the piano the day before, a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbalanced diet, the cares of his parish—all combined to make him feel hardly adequate to the new day’s work. There was another thing, too: Mr. Tanimoto had studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia; he had graduated in 1940; he spoke excellent English; he dressed in American clothes; he had corresponded with many American friends right up to the time the war began; and among a people obsessed with a fear of being spied upon—perhaps almost obsessed himself—he found himself growing increasingly uneasy. The police had questioned him several times, and just a few days before, he had heard that an influential acquaintance, a Mr. Tanaka, a retired officer of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line, an anti-Christian, a man famous in Hiroshima for his showy philanthropies and notorious for his personal tyrannies, had been telling people that Tanimoto should not be trusted. In compensation, to show himself publicly a good Japanese, Mr. Tanimoto had taken on the chairmanship of his local tonarigumi, or Neighborhood Association, and to his other duties and concerns this position had added the business of organizing air-raid defense for about twenty families.
Before six o’clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto started for Mr. Matsuo’s house. There he found that their burden was to be a tansu, a large Japanese cabinet, full of clothing and household goods. The two men set out. The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few minutes after they started, the air-raid siren went off—a minute-long blast that warned of approaching planes but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight degree of danger, since it sounded every morning at this time, when an American weather plane came over. The two men pulled and pushed the handcart through the city streets. Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city, lying mostly on the six islands formed by the seven estuarial rivers that branch out from the Ota River; its main commercial and residential districts, covering about four square miles in the center of the city, contained three-quarters of its population, which had been reduced by several evacuation programs from a wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000. Factories and other residential districts, or suburbs, lay compactly around the edges of the city. To the south were the docks, an airport, and the island-studded Inland Sea. A rim of mountains runs around the other three sides of the delta. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo took their way through the shopping center, already full of people, and across two of the rivers to the sloping streets of Koi, and up them to the outskirts and foothills. As they started up a valley away from the tight-ranked houses, the all-clear sounded. (The Japanese radar operators, detecting only three planes, supposed that they comprised a reconnaissance.) Pushing the handcart up to the rayon man’s house was tiring, and the men, after they had maneuvered their load into the driveway and to the front steps, paused to rest awhile. They stood with a wing of the house between them and the city. Like most homes in this part of Japan, the house consisted of a wooden frame and wooden walls supporting a heavy tile roof. Its front hall, packed with rolls of bedding and clothing, looked like a cool cave full of fat cushions. Opposite the house, to the right of the front door, there was a large, finicky rock garden. There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant.
Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror—and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. He bellied up very hard against one of them. As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)
When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and saw that the rayon man’s house had collapsed. He thought a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate had fallen over—toward the house rather than away from it. In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.
Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker….
anne:
Thank you for the detail. I have a brief post going up at 8:15 AM when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Feel free to add to the comments.
August 5, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,973,568)
Deaths ( 161,601)
India
Cases ( 1,963,239)
Deaths ( 40,739)
Mexico
Cases ( 449,961)
Deaths ( 48,869)
UK
Cases ( 307,184)
Deaths ( 46,364)
Germany
Cases ( 214,104)
Deaths ( 9,245)
France
Cases ( 194,029)
Deaths ( 30,305)
Canada
Cases ( 118,187)
Deaths ( 8,962)
China
Cases ( 84,491)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 5, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 683)
US ( 488)
France ( 464)
Mexico ( 379)
Canada ( 237)
Germany ( 110)
India ( 29)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 15.1%, 15.6% and 10.9% for the United Kingdom, France and Mexico respectively.
The spread of coronavirus infections through South America and South Africa, below the equator, should be evident and concerning. Chinese specialists have suggested that there is a seasonal aspect to the coronavirus, and these are the winter months in the southern hemisphere.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-06/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-SJ68mzIps4/index.html
August 6, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 37 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 37 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, 7 from overseas and 30 domestically transmitted, the National Health Commission said on Thursday.
Among the domestic transmissions, 27 were reported in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 3 in Liaoning Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered on Wednesday, while 10 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Altogether, 79,057 patients had been discharged from hospitals by Wednesday, the report said, adding that a total of 84,528 COVID-19 cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland since the start of the epidemic, including 4,634 deaths.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-06/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-SJ68mzIps4/img/839bcedf630742e995c3bdb5b084373b/839bcedf630742e995c3bdb5b084373b.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-06/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-SJ68mzIps4/img/8ae44a4501e64256829c4a9a73a90292/8ae44a4501e64256829c4a9a73a90292.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-06/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-SJ68mzIps4/img/30fadc60a2c14371886c89fd0d5eaf85/30fadc60a2c14371886c89fd0d5eaf85.jpeg
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-06/Virus-testing-in-the-U-S-is-dropping-even-as-deaths-mount-SJ2TyuJujS/index.html
August 6, 2020
Virus testing in the U.S. is dropping, even as deaths mount
U.S. testing for the coronavirus is dropping even as infections remain high and the death toll rises by more than 1,000 a day, a worrisome trend that officials attribute largely to Americans getting discouraged over having to wait hours to get a test and days or weeks to learn the results.
An Associated Press analysis found that the number of tests per day slid 3.6 percent over the past two weeks to 750,000, with the count falling in 22 states. That includes places like Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Iowa where the percentage of positive tests is high and continuing to climb, an indicator that the virus is still spreading uncontrolled….
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-evangelical-crusade-against-china-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2020-08?
August 5, 2020
America’s Unholy Crusade Against China
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an anti-China speech that was extremist, simplistic, and dangerous. If biblical literalists like Pompeo remain in power past November, they could well bring the world to the brink of a war that they expect and perhaps even seek.
By JEFFREY D. SACHS
NEW YORK – Many white Christian evangelicals in the United States have long believed that America has a God-given mission to save the world. Under the influence of this crusading mentality, US foreign policy has often swerved from diplomacy to war. It is in danger of doing so again.
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched yet another evangelical crusade, this time against China. His speech was extremist, simplistic, and dangerous – and may well put the US on a path to conflict with China.
According to Pompeo, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CPC) harbor a “decades-long desire for global hegemony.” This is ironic. Only one country – the US – has a defense strategy calling for it to be the “preeminent military power in the world,” with “favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.” China’s defense white paper, by contrast, states that “China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and that, “As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.”
One is reminded of Jesus’s own admonition: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). US military spending totaled $732 billion in 2019, nearly three times the $261 billion China spent.
The US, moreover, has around 800 overseas military bases, while China has just one (a small naval base in Djibouti). The US has many military bases close to China, which has none anywhere near the US. The US has 5,800 nuclear warheads; China has roughly 320. The US has 11 aircraft carriers; China has one. The US has launched many overseas wars in the past 40 years; China has launched none (though it has been criticized for border skirmishes, most recently with India, that stop short of war).
The US has repeatedly rejected or withdrawn from United Nations treaties and UN organizations in recent years, including UNESCO, the Paris climate agreement, and, most recently, the World Health Organization, while China supports UN processes and agencies. US President Donald Trump recently threatened the staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions. Pompeo rails against China’s clampdown on its mainly Muslim Uighur population, but Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, claims that Trump privately gave China’s actions a pass, or even encouraged them.
The world took relatively little notice of Pompeo’s speech, which offered no evidence to back up his claims of China’s hegemonic ambition. China’s rejection of US hegemony does not mean that China itself seeks hegemony. Indeed, outside of the US, there is little belief that China aims for global dominance. China’s explicitly stated national goals are to be a “moderately prosperous society” by 2021 (the centenary of the CPC), and a “fully developed country” by 2049 (the centennial of the People’s Republic).
Moreover, at an estimated $10,098 in 2019, China’s GDP per capita was less than one-sixth that of the US ($65,112) – hardly the basis for global supremacy. China still has a lot of catching up to do to achieve even its basic economic development goals.
Assuming that Trump loses in November’s presidential election, Pompeo’s speech will likely receive no further notice. The Democrats will surely criticize China, but without Pompeo’s brazen exaggerations. Yet, if Trump wins, Pompeo’s speech could be a harbinger of chaos. Pompeo’s evangelism is real, and white evangelicals are the political base of today’s Republican Party.
Pompeo’s zealous excesses have deep roots in American history. As I recounted in my recent book A New Foreign Policy, English protestant settlers believed that they were founding a New Israel in the new promised land, with God’s providential blessings. In 1845, John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to justify and celebrate America’s violent annexation of North America. “All this will be our future history,” he wrote in 1839, “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man – the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen…”
On the basis of such exalted views of its own beneficence, the US engaged in mass enslavement until the Civil War and mass apartheid thereafter; slaughtered Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century and subjugated them thereafter; and, with the closure of the Western frontier, extended Manifest Destiny overseas. Later, with the onset of the Cold War, anti-communist fervor led the US to fight disastrous wars in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) in the 1960s and 1970s, and brutal wars in Central America in the 1980s.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the evangelical ardor was directed against “radical Islam” or “Islamic fascism,” with four US wars of choice – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya – all of which remain debacles to this day. Suddenly, the supposed existential threat of radical Islam has been forgotten, and the new crusade targets the CPC.
Pompeo himself is a biblical literalist who believes that the end time, the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, is imminent. Pompeo described his beliefs in a 2015 speech while a Congressman from Kansas: America is a Judeo-Christian nation, the greatest in history, whose task is to fight God’s battles until the Rapture, when Christ’s born-again followers, like Pompeo, will be swept to heaven at the Last Judgment.
White evangelicals represent only around 17% of the US adult population, but comprise around 26% of voters. They vote overwhelmingly Republican (an estimated 81% in 2016), making them the party’s single most important voting bloc. That gives them powerful influence on Republican policy, and in particular on foreign policy when Republicans control the White House and Senate (with its treaty-ratifying powers). Fully 99% of Republican congressmen are Christian, of whom around 70% are Protestant, including a significant though unknown proportion of evangelicals.
Of course, the Democrats also harbor some politicians who proclaim American exceptionalism and launch crusading wars (for example, President Barack Obama’s interventions in Syria and Libya). On the whole, however, the Democratic Party is less wedded to claims of US hegemony than is the Republican Party’s evangelical base.
Pompeo’s inflammatory anti-China rhetoric could become even more apocalyptic in the coming weeks, if only to fire up the Republican base ahead of the election. If Trump is defeated, as seems likely, the risk of a US confrontation with China will recede. But if he remains in power, whether by a true electoral victory, vote fraud, or even a coup (anything is possible), Pompeo’s crusade would probably proceed, and could well bring the world to the brink of a war that he expects and perhaps even seeks.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development.
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,991,603)
Deaths ( 161,926)
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 79,275)
Deaths ( 576)
Deaths per million ( 63)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Israel opened too early and too incautiously, and lacks testing capacity.
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 76,536)
Deaths ( 1,246)
Deaths per million ( 115)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,775)
Deaths ( 88)
Deaths per million ( 8)
The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the western hemisphere since 1971. Nonetheless, Cuba has had markedly better healthcare outcomes even though Cuba has been continually under United States sanctions. The coronavirus experience reflects a profound difference in healthcare systems, a difference reflected in other basic health characteristics of the countries.
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,007,514)
Deaths ( 162,222)
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,016,016)
Deaths ( 162,397)
The astonishing, sad data appears to be telling us that we have a serious institutional healthcare problem, but other than Branko Milanovic or Dean Baker such a possible problem seems seldom to have been considered.
In Stimulus Talks, McConnell Is Outside the Room and in a Tight Spot
NY Times – August 5
With Republicans divided and President Trump undercutting negotiations on a pandemic relief package, the majority leader is in a difficult bind, partly of his own making.
WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell has put himself in one of the toughest spots of a political life that has seen plenty of them.
Up for re-election in the middle of an unforgiving pandemic, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader is caught in a family feud between a group of endangered incumbents in his party who are desperate for pandemic relief legislation that is tied up in slogging negotiations, and a significant portion of Senate Republicans who would rather do nothing at all.
He is also up against Democratic leaders who do not see the need to give an inch on their own sweeping coronavirus relief priorities, administration negotiators who badly want a deal that boosts President Trump — even if it ends up being one that most Senate Republicans oppose — and the president himself, who has played his usual role of undercutting the talks at every turn.
All that is at stake is the health and economic state of the nation, control of the Senate and Mr. McConnell’s own reputation and future.
“It is a big moment, an important moment for the country,” said Mr. McConnell, who has been adept at striking last-minute, bipartisan tax and fiscal bargains in dire situations — but not in circumstances quite like the present. “It does happen to be occurring in closer proximity to the election than those other big deals.”
It is also a big moment for the top Senate Republican, who may end up having to pave the legislative way for a huge federal spending package that many in his party detest.
Mr. McConnell has only himself to thank for his predicament.
While Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a sweeping, $3 trillion recovery measure in May and Democrats demanded for months that Republicans join them in mapping out a next phase of federal pandemic relief, Mr. McConnell instead hit the pause button, which he and his fellow Republicans said was necessary to assess how the nearly $3 trillion in aid already approved was working.
Visible in the background was the hope that the monthslong shutdown of the economy and stay-at-home orders would corral the spread of the coronavirus and spare Republicans from having to get behind another costly round of aid. That did not happen. Instead, the virus surged back in many parts of the country, many school systems announced they would stick with distance learning for the fall and the initial recovery started to slide.
“It allowed us to learn the coronavirus didn’t mysteriously disappear,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “It is still here.”
But the delay meant that Republicans did not even present their aid proposals until days before expanded unemployment benefits that were cushioning millions of Americans from the worst of the recession were to expire. They lapsed last week with no ready replacement, and a small-business program considered crucial to preventing a total economic collapse is set to expire on Friday, leading Democrats to accuse Mr. McConnell of acting irresponsibly.
“He’s not even sitting in the room,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on Tuesday, suggesting that Mr. McConnell was unaware of the substance of the talks.
Ms. Pelosi has taken to referring to Mr. McConnell as Moscow Mitch, a name she knows he doesn’t appreciate, and in an appearance Wednesday on MSNBC ridiculed him for failing to deliver a Republican majority for his own proposal.
“As you have seen from the majority leader, Mr. McConnell, they don’t have the votes,” she said. “They have votes for practically nothing. They haven’t passed anything. They don’t even have the votes within their own 51.”
The situation has also left Senate Republicans up for re-election — who have already seen their political chances dragged down by Mr. Trump’s poor standing — with the unappealing prospect of facing voters in less than three months without having acted to address their most pressing economic and public health needs. Their demises could cost Republicans their Senate majority and Mr. McConnell his position. And while he is currently not regarded as particularly vulnerable to defeat, the Kentuckian is facing his own challenge from a Democrat, Amy McGrath, a well-financed former Marine fighter pilot.
Mr. McConnell insisted on Wednesday that his go-slow approach had been “the reasonable thing to do.”
“Pushing the pause button meant seeing how what we have already done is working,” said Mr. McConnell, whose office said that slightly more than $1 trillion of the original $2.6 trillion allocated for the pandemic response remained unspent. “This is not play money.” …
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/politics/birx-coronavirus.html
August 6, 2020
With Old Allies Turning Against Her, Birx Presses On Against the Coronavirus
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, has found herself a woman without a country, denounced by Democrats and called “pathetic” by the president.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,024,691)
Deaths ( 162,629)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-07/Six-COVID-19-vaccine-candidates-in-phase-3-trials-3-from-China-WHO-SKLR0O8auQ/index.html
August 7, 2020
Six COVID-19 vaccine candidates in phase-3 trials, 3 from China: WHO
Six COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including three from China, have entered phase-3 trials, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official said on Thursday.
The three Chinese candidates are from Sinovac, Wuhan Institute of Biological Products/Sinopharm and Beijing Institute of Biological Products/Sinopharm, said Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, at a virtual briefing.
The other three are made by the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca, Moderna/NIAID and BioNTech/Fosun Pharma/Pfizer, he added.
The vaccines will be put into the general population for the first time in phase 3, after previous trials have focused on safety, immunogenicity and immune response in a small number of humans, said the WHO official. The phase-3 trial will test whether the vaccines can “protect large numbers of people over a prolonged period of time.”
However, “phase-3 doesn’t mean nearly there,” he said, as “there is no guarantee that any of these six will give us the answer.”
In total, 165 vaccine candidates have started some forms of trials, and 26 of them in clinical trials, according to WHO records.
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,032,179)
Deaths ( 162,804)
India
Cases ( 2,025,409)
Deaths ( 41,638)
Mexico
Cases ( 456,100)
Deaths ( 49,698)
UK
Cases ( 308,134)
Deaths ( 46,413)
Germany
Cases ( 215,210)
Deaths ( 9,252)
France
Cases ( 195,633)
Deaths ( 30,312)
Canada
Cases ( 118,561)
Deaths ( 8,966)
China
Cases ( 84,528)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 683)
US ( 492)
France ( 464)
Mexico ( 385)
Canada ( 237)
Germany ( 110)
India ( 30)
China ( 3)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-07/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-26-in-Xinjiang-SKMe2wLEk0/index.html
August 7, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 37 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 37 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Thursday, with 10 cases from overseas and 27 domestically transmitted, Chinese health authority said Friday.
Of the 27 domestically-transmitted cases, 26 are in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, 1 is in Beijing.
No deaths related to the disease were reported Thursday, while 31 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-07/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-26-in-Xinjiang-SKMe2wLEk0/img/324a97422e7645e2b13d0908c32cf14c/324a97422e7645e2b13d0908c32cf14c.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-07/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-26-in-Xinjiang-SKMe2wLEk0/img/fe5c1315685f4096909569803f5b2e8a/fe5c1315685f4096909569803f5b2e8a.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-07/Chinese-mainland-reports-37-new-COVID-19-cases-26-in-Xinjiang-SKMe2wLEk0/img/7f21c071f67442529ed042d6cfc6e9a3/7f21c071f67442529ed042d6cfc6e9a3.jpeg
August 6, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,032,179)
Deaths ( 162,804)