What The Pandemic Lays Bare: We Have Become, In Saagar Enjeti's Words, "A Sclerotic, Rotten Society"

After midnight. congressional negotiators and the White House reached an agreement on the $2 trillion relief/stimulus package. There will be a vote on it later today. What did the Democrats achieve by stopping the Trump-McConnell first iteration of the bill? It now includes more funding for hospitals and health care workers; expanded and enhanced unemployment benefits (by 13 weeks) covering individuals who are not currently covered by traditional unemployment assistance and with full salaries for workers; and some semblance of oversight-- I'll believe it when someone catches Trump trying to steal some of it-- over the $400 billion slush fund for corporate America. Under the terms of the deal an "independent" inspector general and a congressional oversight board would be in charge of scrutinizing the lending decisions out of that pot of money. There is also a proviso that companies accepting aid from taxpayers cannot reward shareholders and top executives through stock buybacks.

Earlier that day, the Washington Post reported that Trump has finally "agreed to allow enhanced scrutiny over a massive loan program that is a centerpiece of the Senate’s $2 trillion coronavirus economic package, taking steps to address a major Democratic concern and potentially pave the way for a vote." They had hope it would have been yesterday, but are happy enough that it will come today both in the Senate and the House.

Señor Trumpanzee had "already said where he wants some of the money to go, promising assistance to cruise ship companies, for example, that have operations in Miami. And when he was asked Monday evening who would perform oversight of the program, Trump responded, 'I’ll be the oversight.' But during closed-door negotiations on Capitol Hill, White House officials have agreed to allow an independent inspector general and an oversight board to scrutinize the lending decisions."

McConnell's package was stuffed full of Republican Party agenda items-- bailouts for corporations primarily-- and Pelosi's wasn't nearly as terrible but was still bullshit. Who can resist including their own priorities when a must-pass-package around 2 trillion dollars is on the line? An honest broker, perhaps? That leaves out McConnell, Schumer, Pelosi, Hoyer, McCarthy and, obviously Trump and Mnuchin. The Democrats accuse McConnell of putting together a corporate slush fund. The Republicans accuse Pelosi of trying to pass the Green New Deal (part of a "Democratic wish list"). If only!

McConnell's bill was 247 pages long. Pelosi's is 1,432 pages. Let's compare:

McConnell wanted to give direct payments of $1,200 to individual Americans making less than $75,000 annually, and $2,400 for eligible married couples making less than $150,000 combined, with an additional $500 for every child. The amount of money is reduced by $5 for every $100 that a person earns over $75,000, so Americans earning more than $99,000 will get nothing. Pelosi's bill is pretty much the same in that way except that it increases the figure per individual to $1,500. Her bill also waives $10,000 in federal student loan payments. McConnell addresses education by allowing Betsy DeVos to defer student loan payments and by allowing students who were forced to drop out of school due to coronavirus to keep their Pell grants.

After that the two bills go off in different directions. McConnell is unreasonably generous to corporate America, no strings attached:

• $50 billion in loan guarantees for passenger air carriers.
• $8 billion for cargo air carriers.
• $150 billion for other large businesses.
• $300 billion for small businesses. (Pelosi wants $500 billion here.)

Pelosi's plan is far more ambitious, dedicating $4 billion in grant funding to help states with upcoming elections and nationally mandates 15 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail, including mailing a ballot to all registered voters in an emergency, something violently opposed by Republicans, who always oppose expanding the franchise. Things that will never stay in the final bill include canceling several of Trump's executive orders that labor complains have weakened public sector unions' ability to engage in collective bargaining; requiring companies receiving federal assistance during the pandemic to institute a $15 minimum wage; and creating new carbon offset guidelines for airlines, with a long-term goal of reducing jet fuel emissions by 50% by 2050.

Pelosi's bill also allocates $150 billion to support hospitals, local health centers and government-funded medical programs, with an additional $80 billion in low-interest loans to hospitals; provides child care assistance to health care workers and emergency personnel; temporarily provides $600 per week to unemployed workers affected by the pandemic. Self-employed workers, Americans whose contracts were canceled, and new entrants to the job market would also be eligible; expands paid sick leave and family medical leave, as well as gives more money to food-safety benefits; dedicates $20 billion to reimbursing the U.S. Postal Service for lost revenue, and forgives USPS debt; and one that McConnell is likely to approve of: creating a $200 billion stabilization fund for states and $15 billion for local governments through the Community Development Block Grant program. The legislation also authorizes the Federal Reserve to purchase state and local government bonds.

In an OpEd for Newsweek yesterday, Robert Reich wrote that Republicans are helping corporations to exploit the crisis. "Airlines," he wrote, "are big enough to get their own loans from banks at rock-bottom interest rates. Their planes and landing slots are more than adequate collateral. Why do airlines deserve to be bailed out? Over the last decade, they spent 96 percent of their free cash flow, including billions in tax savings from the Trump tax cut, to buy back shares of their own stock. This boosted executive bonuses and pleased wealthy investors but did nothing to strengthen the airlines for the long term. Meanwhile, the four biggest carriers gained so much market power they jacked up prices on popular routes and slashed services (remember legroom and free bag checks?)." He continued, echoing what many frequent fliers feel about the airline companies that McConnell is so eager to bail out at taxpayer expense:

United CEO Oscar Munoz warned that if Congress doesn't bailout the airline by the end of March, United will start firing its employees. But even if bailed out, what are the odds United would keep paying all its workers if the pandemic forced it to stop flying? The bailout would be for shareholders and executives, not employees.

While generous toward airlines and other industries, the Republican bill is absurdly stingy toward people, stipulating a one-time payment of up to $1,200 for every adult and $500 per child. Some 64 million households with incomes below $50,000 would get as little as $600. This will do almost nothing to help job-losers pay their mortgages, rents and other bills for the duration of the crisis, expected to be at least the next three months.

The Republican coronavirus bill is about as Burring as legislation can be-- exposing the underlying structure of power in America as clearly as Burr's stock trades. In this national crisis, it's just as morally repulsive.

Take a look at how big corporations are treating their hourly workers in this pandemic and you see more Burring.

Walmart, the largest employer in America, doesn't give its employees paid sick leave, and limits its 500,000 part-time workers to 48 hours paid time off per year. This Burring policy is now threatening countless lives. (On one survey, 88 percent of Walmart employees report sometimes coming to work when sick.)

None of the giants of the fast-food industry-- McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Duncan Donuts, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Subway-- gives their workers paid sick leave, either.

Amazon, one of the richest corporations in the world, which paid almost no taxes last year, is offering unpaid time off for workers who are sick and just 2 weeks paid leave for workers who test positive for the virus. Meanwhile, it demands that its employees put in mandatory overtime.

And here's the most Burring thing of all: These corporations have made sure they and other companies with more than 500 employees are exempt from the requirement in the House coronavirus bill that employers provide paid sick leave.

At a time when almost everyone feels burdened and fearful, the use of power and privilege to exploit the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of others is morally intolerable.

We are all in this together, or should be. Whatever form it takes, Burring must be stopped.

Paul Krugman's Powerful Indictment Of The Republican Party's War Against Working Families

The Republicans love it when feeble-minded or low-info independents and moderates blame "both sides" for governmental dysfunction instead of focusing, for example, on the conservative ideology and GOP mania to shrink government so that they can drown it in a bathtub... in the poetic words of Republican crooked lobbyist and power monger Grover Norquist. Sunday, Paul Krugamn, sitting in for Charles Blow, devoted a column to blasting that pathetic Beltway concept so cherished by former Washington Post political columnist David Broder and other evangelists of a conservative consensus in Washington. Ostensibly, he was talking about Republican obstructionism to effective economic stimulus for an economy they wrecked.

America used to be a country that built for the future. Sometimes the government built directly: Public projects, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, provided the backbone for economic growth. Sometimes it provided incentives to the private sector, like land grants to spur railroad construction. Either way, there was broad support for spending that would make us richer.

But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.

Some background: More than seven years have passed since the housing bubble burst, and ever since, America has been awash in savings-- or more accurately, desired savings-- with nowhere to go. Borrowing to buy homes has recovered a bit, but remains low. Corporations are earning huge profits, but are reluctant to invest in the face of weak consumer demand, so they’re accumulating cash or buying back their own stock. Banks are holding almost $2.7 trillion in excess reserves-- funds they could lend out, but choose instead to leave idle.

And the mismatch between desired saving and the willingness to invest has kept the economy depressed. Remember, your spending is my income and my spending is your income, so if everyone tries to spend less at the same time, everyone’s income falls.

There’s an obvious policy response to this situation: public investment. We have huge infrastructure needs, especially in water and transportation, and the federal government can borrow incredibly cheaply-- in fact, interest rates on inflation-protected bonds have been negative much of the time (they’re currently just 0.4 percent). So borrowing to build roads, repair sewers and more seems like a no-brainer. But what has actually happened is the reverse. After briefly rising after the Obama stimulus went into effect, public construction spending has plunged. Why?

In a direct sense, much of the fall in public investment reflects the fiscal troubles of state and local governments, which account for the great bulk of public investment.

These governments generally must, by law, balance their budgets, but they saw revenues plunge and some expenses rise in a depressed economy. So they delayed or canceled a lot of construction to save cash.

Yet this didn’t have to happen. The federal government could easily have provided aid to the states to help them spend-- in fact, the stimulus bill included such aid, which was one main reason public investment briefly increased. But once the G.O.P. took control of the House, any chance of more money for infrastructure vanished. Once in a while Republicans would talk about wanting to spend more, but they blocked every Obama administration initiative.

And it’s all about ideology, an overwhelming hostility to government spending of any kind. This hostility began as an attack on social programs, especially those that aid the poor, but over time it has broadened into opposition to any kind of spending, no matter how necessary and no matter what the state of the economy.

You can get a sense of this ideology at work in some of the documents produced by House Republicans under the leadership of Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee. For example, a 2011 manifesto titled Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy called for sharp spending cuts even in the face of high unemployment, and dismissed as “Keynesian” the notion that “decreasing government outlays for infrastructure lessens government investment.” (I thought that was just arithmetic, but what do I know?) Or take a Wall Street Journal editorial from the same year titled “The Great Misallocators,” asserting that any money the government spends diverts resources away from the private sector, which would always make better use of those resources.

Never mind that the economic models underlying such assertions have failed dramatically in practice, that the people who say such things have been predicting runaway inflation and soaring interest rates year after year and keep being wrong; these aren’t the kind of people who reconsider their views in the light of evidence. Never mind the obvious point that the private sector doesn’t and won’t supply most kinds of infrastructure, from local roads to sewer systems; such distinctions have been lost amid the chants of private sector good, government bad.

And the result, as I said, is that America has turned its back on its own history. We need public investment; at a time of very low interest rates, we could easily afford it. But build we won’t.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is doing all it can to discourage and suppress voters and to make sure important decisions are left in the hands of their own base. We have a new song for that:

Instead Of Talking About Deficit Reduction During An Economic Crisis, Why Isn't The Focus On Stimulus And Job Creation?

With Democrats like Baucus & Landrieu, who needs Republicans?

Despite the announcement yesterday that unemployment had ticked down to 7.7%, as Krugman pointed out in his Times column, the crisis that this country is facing now is not a ginned up "Fiscal Cliff" but a real live jobs crisis that is gnawing away at our economy from the inside.

[W]e may be about to slash spending and raise taxes not because markets demand it, but because Republicans have been using blackmail as a bargaining strategy, and the president seems ready to call their bluff. ... [T]here is a whole industry built around the promotion of deficit panic. Lavishly funded corporate groups keep hyping the danger of government debt and the urgency of deficit reduction now now now-- except that these same groups are suddenly warning against too much deficit reduction. No wonder the public is confused.

Meanwhile, there is almost no organized pressure to deal with the terrible thing that is actually happening right now-- namely, mass unemployment. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past year. But long-term unemployment remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression: as of October, 4.9 million Americans had been unemployed for more than six months, and 3.6 million had been out of work for more than a year.

When you see numbers like those, bear in mind that we’re looking at millions of human tragedies: at individuals and families whose lives are falling apart because they can’t find work, at savings consumed, homes lost and dreams destroyed. And the longer this goes on, the bigger the tragedy.

There are also huge dollars-and-cents costs to our unmet jobs crisis. When willing workers endure forced idleness society as a whole suffers from the waste of their efforts and talents. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that what we are actually producing falls short of what we could and should be producing by around 6 percent of G.D.P., or $900 billion a year.

Worse yet, there are good reasons to believe that high unemployment is undermining our future growth as well, as the long-term unemployed come to be considered unemployable, as investment falters in the face of inadequate sales.

Just as The Times published Krugman's piece, Jobs Not Cuts, a coalition of progressive activist groups and some labor unions released their first ad that does put some pressure on mass unemployment. Here's the one they're running in Virginia against conservative Democrat Mark Warner, who is up for reelection in 2014 and who is a steadfast advocate of the Fiscal Cliff Mentality and a Grand Bargain meant to balance the Budget on the backs of working families.



Warner is a perfect target. However, the other two corporate whores who have the ads running for their constituents, Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Denny Rehberg (R-MT), are a waste of money. Rehberg was defeated last month and his time in Congress can be measured in hours. McCaskill next has to worry about what voters think in 2018. Better targets would be Republicans who could be vulnerable in 2014-- Susan Collins, Miss McConnell, Saxby Chambliss and Lindsey Graham in the Senate and dozens of GOP House members (like Paul Ryan, Fred Upton, Buck McKeon, John Mica)-- and the Democrats facing reelection battles who are working behind the scenes to toss working families overboard like Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor in the Senate and the three Blue Dogs who have refused to sign the discharge petition, John Barrow, Jim Matheson and Mike McIntyre, in the House.

Yesterday is was barely sunrise when we looked out how badly the Democratic strategists had picked the battlefield terrain for the Grand Bargain-- bad for working families, wonderful for the wealthy families who finance our political elite's cushy careers. Democrats are fighting the wrong battles and preparing the "win" hollow victories while "compromising" with ravenous Republican predators by cutting right to the bone when it comes to the American social contract itself. As Chris Hayes points out in Twilight of the Elites, "[T]he political system seems more or less completely deaf to any cries for more stimulus and direct job creation. As soon as stocks had recovered [from the Bush crash of 2008] and a modicum of growth was restored, the dominant conversation in Washington among both Republicans and Democrats was about how and how much to cut the deficit. The White House spoke of its 'pivot' to deficit concerns, while Wall Street, conservative think tanks, and the Republican Party all devoted themselves to sounding increasingly dire alarms about the size of the U.S. government's debt and advocating a radical deconstruction of the country's basic framework for providing social insurance." With the campaign finance system the way it is now-- especially after Citizens United, the distance between our political elites and normal people is too great for effective representative government. Hayes:

[T]he core lesson of the financial crisis: the increasing inequality, compartmentalization, and stratification of America in the post-meritocratic age served to seduce those at the top into an extremely dangerous, even pathological, kind of complacency. The ship sprung a leak down in the lower decks, flooding the servants' quarters, and no one up top realized it would bring down the whole thing. The cocktails continued to flow, the band continued to play, and the party rollicked on Wall Street throughout the housing bubble, even as subprime borrowers drowned, as their lives and wealth and homes were destroyed. But the water kept coming in, and it climbed deck by deck, until, eventually, the music stopped and the party ended, and it looked like the entire thing might go down.

Given what a close call it was for those on the top deck, for the Jamie Dimons and the bankers and the titans of industry and all the members of the 1 percent, you would think that the single most important lesson they would take away from the near miss would be this: You ignore the fate of those on the bottom deck at your peril. An economy divided into "subprime" and "prime" is dangerously precarious; the predations tolerated in the former will, sooner or later, come to feast on those who make up the latter.

And yet, astonishingly, this lesson has gone almost entirely unheeded. We once again have a bifurcated economy, a prime economy and a subprime economy. Our government institutions responded with nearly unprecedented swiftness and force to save, and then revive, the prime economy. Yet they are letting the subprime economy fend for itself, to suffer through a period of drought and privation as bad as anything in eighty years. "If your personal wealth is predominantly in capital markets," says Damon Linker, a lawyer at the AFL-CIO, who served on the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, "well then you had a hell of a scare, but you're 70 percent on the way back to where you were in 2007. If your personal wealth is predominantly in your home, you're fucked. And approximately 80 percent of people in the U.S., their only asset is their home."

"So why," asked Krugman yesterday, "aren’t we helping the unemployed? It’s not because we can’t afford it. Given those ultralow borrowing costs, plus the damage unemployment is doing to our economy and hence to the tax base, you can make a pretty good case that spending more to create jobs now would actually improve our long-run fiscal position. Nor, I think, is it really ideology. Even Republicans, when opposing cuts in defense spending, immediately start talking about how such cuts would destroy jobs-- and I’m sorry, but weaponized Keynesianism, the assertion that government spending creates jobs, but only if it goes to the military, doesn’t make sense. No, in the end it’s hard to avoid concluding that it’s about class. Influential people in Washington aren’t worried about losing their jobs; by and large they don’t even know anyone who’s unemployed. The plight of the unemployed simply doesn’t loom large in their minds-- and, of course, the unemployed don’t hire lobbyists or make big campaign contributions. So the unemployment crisis goes on and on, even though we have both the knowledge and the means to solve it. It’s a vast tragedy-- and it’s also an outrage."

Which brings up the uncomfortable question no one ever wants to ask: what the hell is the purpose of the Democratic Party if it's controlled at the top by corrupt corporate shills like Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Crowley and Steve Israel... and corporate senatorial bottom-feeders like Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill, Max Baucus, Tom Carper and Mark Warner? And, as if to answer, Krugman rushed out a blog post in the evening warning Obama that he's about to make an awful mistake by bowing the right-wing demands and raising the Medicare eligibility age.

[R]aising the Medicare age is terrible policy. It would be terrible policy even if the Affordable Care Act were going to be there in full force for 65 and 66 year olds, because it would cost the public $2 for every dollar in federal funds saved. And in case you haven’t noticed, Republican governors are still fighting the ACA tooth and nail; if they block the Medicaid expansion, as some will, lower-income seniors will just be pitched into the abyss.

Second, why on earth would Obama be selling Medicare away to raise top tax rates when he gets a big rate rise on January 1 just by doing nothing? And no, vague promises about closing loopholes won’t do it: a rate rise is the real deal, no questions, and should not be traded away for who knows what.

So this looks crazy to me; it looks like a deal that makes no sense either substantively or in terms of the actual bargaining strength of the parties. And if it does happen, the disillusionment on the Democratic side would be huge. All that effort to reelect Obama, and the first thing he does is give away two years of Medicare? How’s that going to play in future attempts to get out the vote?

If anyone in the White House is seriously thinking along these lines, please stop it right now.

As I've been warning all year, Obama is going to utterly destroy whatever value is left in the Democratic Party brand. It's why, in part, I didn't vote for him last month. Nor did I vote for the two corporate shills up for reelection for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives where I live, Dianne Feinstein and Blue Dog Adam Schiff.

THE GRIM REALITY OF JAMES INHOFE vs THE BRIGHT PROMISE OF ANDREW RICE-- TODAY'S STIMULUS BILL

Sometimes one vote means an awful lot. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe cast a deciding vote in the U.S. Senate today, a vote that puts into stark contrast for Oklahomans being represented by a practitioner of a Greed and Selfishness philosophy of government like Inhofe or being represented by a we're all in the boat together kind of problem solver like Andrew Rice, the young populist running for Inhofe's seat. The issue was the crucial bipartisan economic stimulus bill meant to send put between $500 and $600 directly into the pockets of American taxpayers, particularly seniors and disabled veterans who are being especially hit hard by the Bush Recession.

The legislation Inhofe managed to kill today would have extended unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed, provide tax breaks to businesses to spur investments and prevent layoffs, and add $1 billion for heating assistance to help families meet high energy bills. Inhofe is working with a small cabal of extremist legislators to substitute a stingy bill that would do little to stimulate the economy and would exclude 20 million seniors and disabled veterans from receiving rebates; it does not include the extended unemployment insurance, heating assistance funds, or extension of tax incentives to increase clean energy and energy efficiency. 

This is exactly the kind of legislation Oklahomans should be thinking about when they go to the polls next November and pick between Inhofe and Andrew Rice, who would have voted for the economic stimulus bill, like all Democrats and more than a few Republicans. It needed 60 votes to get through the obstructionist tactics Inhofe and Mitch McConnell had engineered but it came up one vote short-- 59 to 40. Andrew has been endorsed by Blue America and you can donate to his campaign here. (As usual, McCain couldn't be bothered coming back to the Senate to vote; he's too busy collecting money from special interests for his presidential bid. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama made sure they were on the Senate floor to vote for the bill.)

Andrew, out meeting with Oklahomans and talking with them about the issues that are important to them, sent DWT this statement:

There is growing evidence that Oklahomans are starting to feel the effects of a stumbling economy. I believe the Senate's stimulus package would have given our hard working families, seniors and disabled veterans a much-needed lifeline to navigate these difficult times. I am sensitive to their vulnerability at this time and would like to have provided the 60th vote yesterday that could have made it possible.

Here's a video of McCain repeatedly promising to work in the Senate on passing this bill. Unlike Inhofe he didn't even bother to cast a vote or offer a substitute, not even a bad substitute like Inhofe's plan.



Dr. Ivan Holmes, Chairman of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, pointed out that "Inhofe once again turned his back on fellow Oklahomans today when he had an opportunity to help them cope with the nation's growing economic crisis." Holmes said the measure would have:

*  provided income tax rebates to 98 percent of Oklahoma taxpayers, including  440,000 Social Security beneficiaries and 56,000 disabled veterans;

            * extended unemployment benefits by an additional 13 weeks to the state's idled  workers (4.5 percent in December);

            * added $1 Billion to the nations' low income energy assistance program to help low income workers cope with rising energy costs;

            * extend by one year several alternative energy tax initiatives to help America  achieve energy independence sooner rather than later;

            * allow businesses to add 25 percent depreciation of assets in '08 and '09 and to  use current losses to offset their previous five years of taxes rather than the two  years allowed by current law.

"This is one more example showing that Senator Inhofe is insensitive to the hardships faced by average Oklahomans," Holmes said.  "The Senate stimulus package offered numerous ways to boost our economy by giving low and middle income workers critical financial relief. His only answer seems to be 'let them eat cake'... With Senator Inhofe's vote, the Senate could have overcome minority objections to this important economic stimulus and given thousands of hard working Oklahoma families an opportunity to ride out this rough patch we're in."