Where We Are, America, With this Pandemic

The latest New York Times Magazine's cover story today got me, more than anything, from the description of it.

Why We’re Losing the Battle With Covid-19

And that description.

The escalating crisis in Texas shows how the chronic underfunding of public health has put America on track for the worst coronavirus response in the developed world.

The most cases and the most deaths from this pandemic than any other nation in the world.

We're number one.

And now this.



Thanks, Mr. President.

Thanks, Republicans.

A Timely Must-Read

Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a magnificent, even important article I think it's safe to say all adult Americans should read.

America’s Enduring Caste System

Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. 

Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries.

We heard the man on the ground pleading with the man above him, saw the terror in his face, heard his gasps for air, heard the anguished cries of an unseen chorus, begging the lighter man to stop. But the lighter man, the dominant man, looked straight at the bystanders, into the camera, and thus at all of us around the world who would later bear witness and, instead of heeding the cries of the chorus, pressed his knee deeper into the darker man’s neck as was the perceived right granted him in the hierarchy. The man on the ground went silent, drained of breath. A clear liquid crept down the pavement. We saw a man die before our very eyes.

What we did not see, not immediately anyway, was the invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip...

Even Glenn Beck Agrees About Trump

Yes, even Right Wing, ugliness- and ignorance spewing Glenn Beck agrees and admits that none other than Donald J. Trump, president-elect (I still shudder), is potentially scary and even dangerous.

Glenn Beck Is Sorry About All That

Quoting:

"I think he could be one of the most dangerous presidents to ever come into the Oval Office."

It's a good, if brief interview and article and it's certainly nice to see and hear some contrition and thought, introspection and even regret from anywhere, let alone a Right Winger like Mr. Beck. It's just that it's too late. Donald Trump is, God help us, President-elect.

Republican's Kansas in the New York Times Tomorrow

The Republican's Kansas hits the Sunday New York Times in a pretty big way tomorrow with an article on the state in the rather prestigious front cover article of the New York Times Magazine.

The Kansas Experiment

Needless to say, given what that Right Wing political party, led by their governor, Sam Brownback, has done to the state and their finances and gun laws, etc., it isn't pretty. It's honest and truthful but certainly not pretty.

It's online now. You can read it at the link above.

Not to be done there, Kansas also gets fair and honest but critical treatment at the Atlantic, too, from last April, in case you missed it.

Kansas's Failed Experiment

And then there's the Washington Post's evaluation a year ago in July.

In Kansas, Brownback tried a red-state 

'experiment.'

Finally, at least for now, there is coverage from The Week, last April.

Kansas' experiment in concentrated 

conservatism keeps getting grimmer

The one reason I think it's so very important to note the mistakes and failures of Governor Brownback's and the Republican's efforts in Kansas just now is no way to gloat over their being wrong, no. The reason it's important to point out these huge, ugly mistakes is because virtually every candidate for president in 2016 from the Republican Party are espousing the same, so-wrong, even ignorant policies that have gotten Kansas into the fiscal and financial mess they're in now. 

That is, the Republican candidates are still pushing "trickle down economics." They're emphasizing tax cuts for the wealthy. 

It's not just wrong but it's been proven wrong nationally as well as more locally in states. Kansas is certainly one of the biggest and worst---best?---examples. And Americans need to stand up, say as much and vote accordingly.

The NYT article, after reading it and after watching the Republican debates this last Thursday evening, make it clear---very clear--what a destructive, negative mess the entire political party is.

The Republican's and Right Wing's economics for the wealthy and corporations have not only been proven wrong by states like Kansas and Wisconsin and others where debt has been wrung up but it's also been disproven by states like California that did the opposite. That is, California raised taxes on the wealthy, grew their economy and paid off their debt. This from 3 days ago.

California Pays off $14 Billion in Costly Debt From 2004

At long last, can we kill the "trickle down", "supply-side" economics nonsense?

Please?

Notes on our debt limit--and what some Republicans are thinking of doing to us all

 

There is a terrific, simply factual article in yesterday's NY Times Magazine about the nation's debt limit and how several Republicans are considering trashing the nation's debt--and so, economy--just so they can make some points and get their way.
 

Our Debt to Society

 

The most poignant, brief quotes from it:

 

Congress has imposed a strict limit on how much debt the federal government can accumulate, but for nearly 90 years, it has raised the ceiling well before it was reached. But since a large number of Tea Party-aligned Republicans entered the House of Representatives, in 2011, raising that debt ceiling has become a matter of fierce debate. This summer, House Republicans have promised, in Speaker John Boehner’s words, “a whale of a fight” before they raise the debt ceiling — if they even raise it at all.

If the debt ceiling isn’t lifted again this fall, some serious financial decisions will have to be made. Perhaps the government can skimp on its foreign aid or furlough all of NASA, but eventually the big-ticket items, like Social Security and Medicare, will have to be cut. At some point, the government won’t be able to pay interest on its bonds and will enter what’s known as sovereign default, the ultimate national financial disaster achieved by countries like Zimbabwe, Ecuador and Argentina (and now Greece). In the case of the United States, though, it won’t be an isolated national crisis. If the American government can’t stand behind the dollar, the world’s benchmark currency, then the global financial system will very likely enter a new era in which there is much less trade and much less economic growth. It would be, by most accounts, the largest self-imposed financial disaster in history....

...No wealthy country has ever voluntarily decided — in the middle of an economic recovery, no less — to default. And there’s certainly no record of that happening to the country that controls the global reserve currency.

 If the debt ceiling isn’t raised by X-Day, I figured, the world’s investors would begin to see America as an unstable investment and rush to sell their Treasury bonds. The U.S. government, desperate to hold on to investment, would then raise interest rates far higher, hurtling up rates on credit cards, student loans, mortgages and corporate borrowing — which would effectively put a clamp on all trade and spending. The U.S. economy would collapse far worse than anything we’ve seen in the past several years.
 

While this possibility might not sound so bad, it’s really far more damaging than the apocalyptic one I imagined. Rather than resulting in a sudden crisis, failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to a slow bleed. Scott Mather, head of the global portfolio at Pimco, the world’s largest private bond fund, explained that while governments and institutions might go on a U.S.-bond buying frenzy in the wake of a debt-ceiling panic, they would eventually recognize that the U.S. government was not going through an odd, temporary bit of insanity. They would eventually conclude that it had become permanently less reliable. Mather imagines institutional investors and governments turning to a basket of currencies, putting their savings in a mix of U.S., European, Canadian, Australian and Japanese bonds. Over the course of decades, the U.S. would lose its unique role in the global economy.

      

The U.S. benefits enormously from its status as global reserve currency and safe haven. Our interest and mortgage rates are lower; companies are able to borrow money to finance their new products more cheaply. As a result, there is much more economic activity and more wealth in America than there would be otherwise. If that status erodes, the U.S. economy’s peaks will be lower and recessions deeper; future generations will have fewer job opportunities and suffer more when the economy falters. And, Mather points out, no other country would benefit from America’s diminished status. When you make the base risk-free asset more risky, the entire global economy becomes riskier and costlier.

 

And one final word of caution. Even if the Republicans don't "pull this trigger", so to speak, come October and have us default on our debt, there are still other concerns, thanks to their selfish, self-centered ways, for the rest of us:

 

...if the debate becomes an annual affair, the world’s largest investors probably will one day move toward a mix of other financial reserves. Decades from now, the world would probably be poorer on account of about only 20 people.

--Adam Davidson , co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money,” a podcast and blog.

 

 

Memorial Day, 2013

Metal Memorials

“Hey, man, just so you know, I’m going to set this thing off.” I don’t have a metal plate in my head or shrapnel in my legs, but I carry with me something that might as well be lodged deep under my skin. After Vietnam, soldiers and civilians alike would wear bracelets etched with the names of prisoners of war so their memory would live on even if they never came home. Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued the practice, but with a twist.

The same bracelets are adorned with the names of friends killed in action. The date and place are also included as a testament to where they took their last steps. One of the first things my platoon did after coming home was order memorial bracelets from the Web sites that specialize in military memorabilia. You don’t even have to type in the name or the date; their system uses the D.O.D. casualty list. All you have to do is filter by name and a software-aided laser will burn the selection onto an aluminum or steel bracelet. What emerges out of this casual and disinterested practice is jewelry teeming with the amount of love and commitment found in 10 wedding rings.

Every trip to the airport has the same outcome: additional security checks and a pat down from a TSA agent. I tell them it’s the bracelet that the metal detector shrieks at. “Can you take it off?” is always the question. “I don’t want to take it off” is always the answer. To some screeners my answer is a poke in the eye of their authority. Others recognize the bracelet and give me a gentle nod and a quick pat down. I suspect they have encountered other veterans like me and realize the futility of asking to have it removed. In a glass booth at the security gate is where I most often get the question, “Who’s on the bracelet?” Those who realize the significance of it usually want to know the name. I stare down and rub my fingers over the lettering. “Brian Chevalier, but we called him Chevy.”

At times the memorial bracelets seem almost redundant. The names of the fallen are written on steel and skin, but are they not also carved into the hearts of men? Are the faces of the valiant not emblazoned in the memories of those who called them brothers? No amount of ink or steel can be used to represent what those days signify.

My bracelet says “14 March 2007,” but it does not describe the blazing heat that day, or the smell of open sewers trampled underfoot or the sight of a Stryker, overturned and smoke-filled as the school adjacent exploded under tremendous fire. It was as if God chose to end the world within one city block. When Chevy was lovingly placed into a body bag under exploding grenades and machine gun tracers, worlds ended. Others began. The concept of Memorial Day nearly approaches superfluous ritual to some veterans. It's absurd to ask a combat veteran to take out a single day to remember those fell in battle, as if the other 364 days were not marked by their memories in one way or another.

I try to look at pictures of my friends, both alive and dead, at least once a day to remember their smiles or the way they wore their kits. I talk to them online and send emails and texts and on rare occasions, visit them in person. We drink and laugh and recall the old days and tell the same war stories everyone has heard a thousand times but still manage to produce streams of furious laughter. I get the same feeling with them; Memorial Day does not begin or end on a single day. It ebbs and flows in torrents of memory, sometimes to a crippling degree. Most of us have become talented at hiding our service, and safeguard the moments when we become awash in memories like March 14. The bracelet is the only physical reminder of the tide we find ourselves in.

Not just soldiers are touched by war. Chevy was a father and a son, and his loss not only rippled through the platoon and company but a small town in Georgia. The day serves as a reminder that there are men and women who have only come back as memories. Maybe the reflection on those who did not return is a key to helping civilians bridge the gap with veterans. Occasionally my bracelet spurs conversations with friends and coworkers who did not know I was in the Army or deployed to Iraq. I still don't feel completely comfortable answering their questions but I'm always happy to talk about the name on my wrist. His name was Brian Chevalier, but we called him Chevy.

--Alex Horton, a Georgetown University junior, started a blog called Army of Dude while serving in Iraq in 2006. In this post he remembers a fallen friend.

From  Warrior voices - The New York Times, this past February.

John Le Carre', on George W. Bush, Part II

Because it's just that good.

And true.

And right.

A decade after “shock and awe,” he (le Carre') still rubs his forehead while speaking of it, as if discussing a death in the family.

On a shelf in his bathroom, le Carré keeps a rubber cartoon figurine of Bush, so he can stare at it while urinating.

God, I love that.

Link to original story: John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age - The New York Times

The brilliant John Le Carre', on the nightmare that was President George W. Bush

From The New York Times Magazine  article from a week ago, John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age

(John) Le Carré has the distinction of being among Bush 43’s earliest antagonists. In January 2003, when many of the world’s prominent journalists and writers were falling in line behind the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, le Carré published a jeremiad in The Times of London with the headline “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.”
      

“How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein,” he wrote, “is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history.”

In their own words, American Soldiers

From an article in Sunday's New York Times, Warrior Voices, poetry and other writing by American Soldiers in the Middle East:

The Writing on the Wall

Nervous sweat sanctifies
The temples of the born-again
As Kevlar-fitted troops ascend
In C-130s to rapturous
Jet streams that cradle
And wash over the innocence
Of a civilization.

The tarmac softens their disciplined boots
And Iraq welcomes God’s children —
Prisoners of war —
To the great temptation.

Children stalk men
As it was written
Under the bright-black night
Where tracer rounds race to meet shooting stars.

Somewhere, a hand that shakes
From the sight of a sacrificial lamb
Hung from the bridge
Of an overpass outside of Fallujah
Reproduces a shot group
That blots out the eye of the needle.

Whizzing sniper rounds speak
To the righteous
And unprophesized I.E.D. blasts
Pass them over.
Isaiah’s marred Assyrian road
Imprints itself upon their souls.

Boots hardened through baptism
In the sands of Ur.
Stilt shaky legs and dilated pupils
Called upon to witness.
Confused tongues fail to articulate
Shattered minds, leaving them,
Instead, as burnt offerings
At the spiraling staircase of Babel.

Revelation comes in the transubstantiation
Of anti-psychotics —
Self-medicated migraines escalate with communion wine —
Passed around
As false manna at V.A. hospitals.
Concussed remembrances of innocence
Create a nervous sweat
For those who look back to Babylon
And fail to read the writing on the wall.

More here:   Warrior Voices - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

Quote of the day

"Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them." --Dave Eggers, American writer, editor, and publisher.

Links: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/a-critic-makes-the-case-for-critics.html?pagewanted=all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Eggers

A refresher course on the Republican Party

Lest you or anyone think the Republican Party of today only recently got this way, please read the following recounting of that grand old now-deceased leader of the Conservatives in general but Republicans, specifically as one writer to the editor did in the May 10, 2009 issue of The New York Times Magazine: "William F. Buckley began his career vehemently defending the worst excesses of McCarthyism; throughout the civil rights movement, opposed integration and black suffrage; during the Vietnam War, advocated using nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese; supported unconditionally the racist apartheid government of South Africa; cheerled for the genocidal CIA-backed coup against Allende in Chile; and, in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, recommended that HIV-diagnosed patients be forcibly tattooed on their buttocks. Despite the virtues of his intellect and charisma, William F Buckley's only legacy to us is that mixture of homophobia, greed, racism, hypocrisy and military recklessness that is 21st-century conservatism." --David A. Murphy, Providence, RI. I hope that clears things up.

A new weekly entry

Thoughts after reading The Sunday New York Times:

--There is a serious article in The New York Times today with a challenge to President Obama. The title tells it all: "You Try to Live on 500K in This Town".

The smaller description of the article declares that: "The preident's Wall Street salary cap threatens live as we know it in Manhattan."

How laughable.

The rest of us will say good for New York.

Any forced deflation for the island of Manhattan could be a good thing, ultimately.

Painful, but good.

This will could bring some sanity and livabilty back to New York.

--There is an article about Michelle Obama going around Washington, talking about her husband's administration's goals and work ahead of them, all the while thanking the different people for that work.

So far, it seems, she's doing a great job of it and it's well received.

It will be fascinating to see how far Mrs. Obama takes her role in this--will she work on policy?--and how this will be received, especially compared to how the Clinton's got into a bit of trouble when Hillary worked on health care.

--It was reported that KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, just got a new $35 million contract with the Department of Defense even though they've been accused of having electrified an American soldier in Iraq, due to unprofessional electric work. The soldier was electrified in the shower.

Why would they get a new contract?

--There's yet another article about the results of the scumbag Bernard Madoff and his handiwork.

Tragic. Truly tragic.

Reading these things makes me hurt for these people.

--One of the things that really struck me was a full-page ad in the first section by Wells Fargo Bank.

It really upset me. (Read: p*ssed me off).

The whole thing was to explain why they should have been able to take their staff to Las Vegas.

They claim they should be able to "recognice" their excellent staff this way.

Well, hogwash.

They can "recognize" their excellent employees by giving the lowest and lower-level associates with $100.00 or $500.00 bonuses and/or recognition meetings with the rest of their staff, for starters.

But let's make it clear--you don't take millions or billions of dollars of government tax money in order to survive in a tough economy because, frankly, YOU--THE PRESIDENT OR OTHER EXECUTIVES--SCREWED UP.

No way.

Talk all you want. Trips to Las Vegas are out, boys.

Don't even try to explain it away.

--There are a few terrific articles in The New York Times Magazine, within the paper (of course), telling of new, current trends.

The first is a newly coined phrase, "fat tail" by William Safire.

The 2nd is on VH1's new reality show on addiction, "Celebrity Rehab". Formerly famous actors and performers check into a home to dry out, publicly and on camera. Ugh.

A third one deals with the fact that upper-end, pricier chocolates seem to be holding their own in sales, all the while becoming almost ubiquitous.

--There is a fantastic article on David Sanger's new book about the new President's and country's challenges. It suggests President Obama will likely not be able to break away from now-former President Bush's direction, as Presidents, one to the next, can't break from the previous one, or our history.

--The last one I might have mentioned might have been about what to do for this financial crisis but it was written by Ben Stein.

I refuse to comment further on Ben Stein as I have no idea why The New York Tiems, CBS Sunday Morning News and who knows who else, give this clown any airtime.

Ben Stein.

A 2nd-rate, B movie actor.

Why do people listen to this guy?