Super Bowl LV Prediction

Going into this National Football League season I assumed that television ratings would be excellent due to the pandemic disruption of all sports leagues and subsequent fan demand for regular programming. That's why I was surprised a few weeks back to hear that television ratings were down significantly this year, meaning that the NFL's hold on U.S. consciousness appears to be waning again.

I've tracked this issue over the years because the National Football League, with the rise of the Internet giants and the diminishment of both broadcast television and Hollywood, is really the last cultural commons in the United States, and if the last cultural commons is trending towards spoliation we need to accept this as evidence that big change is underway.

There are plenty of reasons why the NFL is tanking, but I am interested in what it augurs. I think it's pretty clear the direction we're headed because we've already arrived: political stasis and constant civil conflict. The two major political parties are imploding, and to my mind this is something long overdue.

In any event, I've appreciated games played to empty stadiums this year. The absence of cheerleaders and obscene fans is a relief. The excellence of the athletes is on even greater display.

Week 17 approaches, the last week of the regular season. Green Bay travels to Chicago to lock down homefield throughout the playoffs. I have to say that of late I have been greatly impressed by the Packers. How they humbled the Titans in the snow of Lambeau was an incontrovertible display of strength.

So heading into the playoffs I have to pick the Packers to go to the Super Bowl. 

In the AFC can anyone beat the Chiefs? 

Yes, if Mahomes has a bad day. 

Las Vegas still favors Kansas City to repeat. I think that's right, though I wouldn't be surprised if a team like the Ravens or the Steelers pull off an upset.

The Super Bowl in February, Super Bowl LV, will be a repeat of the first Super Bowl, but this time the Chiefs will win.

A Pandemic of Homelessness

It's that time of year. The big dark has descended upon the Pacific Northwest. Sunrise is after 7:00 AM. Sunset is 4:30 PM. 

Each year around mid-November, due to the dark mornings and dropping temperatures, I'll start replacing my weekend road runs with laps on the community center soccer pitch. 

Due to a lengthy recovery from COVID, I've been leery about recommitting to running. Last December I posted my best 5K time in years. It seemed as if I were on my way back. I followed that performance with close to a personal worst a couple months later at a leap year 5K; a performance that augured my falling ill with the coronavirus.

Slowly but surely my strength is returning. Demands at work are off the charts. So all restored vitality is being sucked up by the job. Nonetheless, with the chores of grocery shopping and laundry already expedited, and with Thanksgiving approaching, my holiday ritual for which is a long early morning run, I decided to head out to the playfield at 5 AM this morning.

I walked the steep hill up to the community center rather than run it, as I usually do. When I got to the artificial turf soccer field it was pitch black. No moonlight nor any streetlamp glow. I noticed big tarped piles dotting the perimeter. I figured it was machinery for turf maintenance. 

When I started running my square laps I could see that tarped piles were actually homeless bivouacs. Underneath the blue tarps were igloo-style camping tents. They lined the four sides of the pitch.

I've been coming to this community center soccer field for two decades, and I've never seen anything like this before. Clearly it is something that the city's parks department must have signed off on. I know from being on that field early in the morning that city workers service it regularly.

Homelessness was a huge problem prior to the pandemic, a glaring indictment of "as good as it gets" American neoliberalism and Trumpian "the greatest economy of all time" hokum. Now that problem is being mainlined. Cities are transferring homeless from barracks-style shelters to hotels in order to reduce the number of coronavirus infections. Seattle is considering buying a hotel for the homeless. 

Hopefully some sort of socialized housing safety net comes out of this pandemic, a basic right to something like a home in a tiny house village. 

After I finished jogging I walked to a nearby Safeway for some Emergen-C. On the south side of an east-west street opposite the Safeway is a little pocket city park, a patch of green grass and shade trees. It too was filled with tents of the homeless. On the sidewalk leading to the Safeway entrance homeless slept.

The longer the pandemic persists the more homelessness is going to be forced from the margins of our neoliberal society to its center.

It's Morning in America: BlueAnon vs. QAnon

It's Friday morning and Trump's hope for claiming a second term appear to be dashed by Biden pulling ahead in the Peach State. Surveying opinion, Scotsman Craig Murray seems most sensible to me:

I hope that those who consider themselves of the left enjoy their relief when the electoral process finally puts to bed the extraordinary populism of Trumpism, and returns the USA to the smoother control of the regular media and political classes and their billionaire controllers. Because anybody who believes any more than that is happening is a fool. I said that I did not blog about the US elections because of the appalling partisan nature of debate. The truth is the system threw up, again, two truly obnoxious candidates entirely antithetical to the real interests of ordinary people in the USA. Biden will do nothing to tackle the appalling wealth and resource inequality which is the most startling problem the country faces. He will hopefully resolve social tensions in the short term. But the cause of those social tensions is a system of gross exploitation of the middle and working classes which is not sustainable in the long term, and which was the root of the Trump political eruption.

Kamala Harris was of course the most right wing possible Vice-Presidential pick. Her advance into power, despite being entirely rejected in the Democratic primaries, is in itself a huge condemnation of the system. I believe I am right in saying that Harris’s Primary campaign was so disastrous she managed to obtain zero delegates at all to the Democratic National Convention. Zero, None. Absolute bottom of the pile. Rejected by Democratic voters as the candidate in toto. Attempting to confirm this zero delegate fact, I just looked up the Wikipedia page on her primary campaign, which turns out to be the most entirely false, hagiographic and manicured Wikipedia page I have ever seen, on any subject, which is saying a lot. Apparently her Presidential Primary bid was in fact a tour de force of brilliant debating and political strategy, recounted in enormous detail, not an abject failure resulting in no delegates. The extraordinarily dishonest Wikipedia page is not perhaps in itself hugely important, but it is emblematic of the sinister manipulation behind the scenes of Kamala Harris’s rise to power.

Let us put a note in our collective diaries to look again in two years and see whether the USA has entered a period of renewed social progress, or just reinvigorated its position as a violent threat to the world. I am looking forward to the period when Biden’s mainstream cheerleaders have to find something positive to say rather than just respond “But Trump is evil”. I predict most of the responses below will say nothing much more on analysis than “But Trump is evil.” Knock yourselves out.

I think World Socialist Web Site's Patrick Martin makes an important point when he says:

While Trump at present lacks the political support to overturn the results of the election, he is laying the basis for a campaign to present himself as the victim of a “stab in the back.” This narrative will be used by himself and members of his family to perpetuate the development of a fascistic movement, which will become a permanent and significant presence in American politics.

Trumpism isn't going to evaporate after Pennsylvania and Nevada are declared for Biden. The Republican Party is headed for a bloody bestial internal struggle. 

Will the Lincoln Project neocons return to the GOP to knife fight with faux working class hero Josh Hawley or will they continue to hole up in the Democratic Party with the likes of Abigail Spanberger? Either way both national parties have houses built on melting ice.

Last night ABC News' George Stephanopoulos had to remind his viewers that Russia seeks to divide us. It was the BlueAnon mantra recited right before a commercial break, a bang of the gong for the Democratic faithful, as Trump flag-wavers rallied in Phoenix and Las Vegas, a patriot here and there with an AR-15 slung over the shoulder.

It's morning in America: Russiagate vs. Pizzagate.

Wrong Again: No Blue Wave

UPDATE: It looks like Biden is going to hold on in a squeaker, 270-264. Give Biden Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. That's 270. Give Trump Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. That's 264.

****

At this point, the early morning after election day, the presidential race is too close to call. Biden needs the vote yet to be counted in Michigan and Pennsylvania to come in overwhelmingly Democratic, something that is distinctly possible since many of the outstanding ballots are from urban counties.

One thing though appears obvious: There was no blue wave. Texas didn't flip and Trump won Florida again. Republicans will likely maintain control in the Senate and even pick up seats in the House. The energized electorate was composed of more than just alarmed soccer moms; it included Trump loyalists as well.

The bottom line here is that the United States is a nation on its way down. How else to explain the inability of a well-funded opposition party to shellac an incumbent saddled with 13 million unemployed and over 200,000 dead from a pandemic?

It's difficult to rationalize. If Trump wins, the state polls in Pennsylvania will turn out to be even more inaccurate than they were four years ago -- a big blow to the mainstream media and the polling profession.

I'm not convinced that Biden has lost this. Trump's premature declaration of victory and call for a stop to the vote count is telling. As Republicans go to court it is unclear what arguments could justify halting the normal tabulation of election results.

On the other hand, maybe "the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary."

Which Side are You On?

Glenn Greenwald's resignation from The Intercept is one of those rare "which side are you on" moments of brilliant illumination. Yves Smith has a helpful synopsis this morning with links to all the key pieces.

The story in a nutshell is that editors at The Intercept refused to publish co-founder Greenwald's story about evidence of influence peddling found on Hunter Biden's laptop. In response, Greenwald announced his resignation and set up shop on Substack.

I subscribed to Greenwald's substack, as well as Matt Taibbi's. Taibbi's take on Greenwald's resignation is definitive. I hope you read it. 

Taibbi plots the rise of Russophobia starting in 2016 as the key organizing principle of the Democratic Party. Russia went from being dismissed by Obama as barely a regional power to an omniscient many-headed hydra controlling U.S. democracy.

To me it has always seemed obvious that the the target of this new McCarthyism is the voting population of the United States. How to maintain fealty to a neoliberal order that produces more than anything else foreign wars and inequality? Gin up terror over foreign subversion by an official enemy.

As for The Intercept, its support for the war on Syria (Robert Mackey, Mehdi Hasan) and Russiagate (James Risen) shows it's squarely aligned with the U.S. national security state. On the other hand, I think Ryan Grim's reporting on progressive electoral politics is indispensable, and Ryan Devereaux has done great work on the Thin Blue Line.

In the end, does anyone doubt that Hunter Biden, a fucked up young guy, was peddling his father's name for personal advantage? I don't. At the same time, since I have never believed that Joe Biden is some kind of moral exemplar, I had no trouble voting the Democratic ticket. The battles yet to be fought are against the Democratic Party once it attains control of the federal government.

The 2020 General Election: It's Another Blue Wave

As I emerge from the chrysalis of my COVID illness I am confronted with increased demands at work. I am now working a ten-hour day Monday to Thursday and a five-hour day on Friday. Where I used to wake up and spend 90 minutes on this page I am now heading to the office first thing so I can be at my desk by 7 AM. I work through lunch -- pre-lockdown I would walk ten minutes to a coffee shop and read the paper for 40 minutes -- then I scurry home at 4 PM where I work remotely until 5 PM.

It's going to be this way for the foreseeable future. Social distancing at work means I am the principal person in the office most days -- a one-man band answering the phones, processing the daily mail, receiving deliveries, etc. Also, the building where the office is located has been sold, and we have a vacate date sometime at the end of winter. Herculean chores must be performed the next few months.

With the general election a little more than a week away I wanted to get my prediction down, for what it is worth.

I was wrong, as were most others, about 2016. I thought the gender gap was real and that Trump would lose the suburbs as a result. It didn't end up that way, but it is coming to pass in 2020. Trump is losing the suburbs. For instance, Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix metropolitan area, is polling strongly for Biden.

A recent national poll shows Biden up by 9 points. Biden is up in the industrial swing states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; plus, Biden is also up in Arizona and Florida. For all intents and purposes Trump has no path to victory without Pennsylvania and Florida.

The diehard Republican has a couple responses when confronted by the slew of polls and other markers of Democratic strength like record-breaking Dem early voting and ActBlue fundraising totals. 

The first GOP argument, which cannot be discounted, is a significant voter registration advantage in big swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. Republicans apparently earned this advantage by door-knocking during the pandemic. Good for them. You can't fault the party for working hard. Whether increased registration translates into a significant increase in votes is another question. It is of course better than nothing, but just because someone comes to your door and registers you to vote doesn't mean that you will actually fill out a ballot, let alone vote for Trump.

The second Republican argument is that all the polls in 2020 are even more off than they were in 2016 because of a "social desirability bias." The American Conservative summarizes this argument as follows:

Two pollsters who got 2016 right think that the mainstream polls are wrong again, and although they grant that the election is very close, at this point they predict a Trump electoral college victory. Patrick Basham of the Democracy Institute predicted a Trump win in ’16 and also got the Brexit referendum right as well. Basham, in his latest poll for 2020 predicts an easy electoral college victory for Trump with all battleground states ending up in Trump’s column. Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group in his 2016 polls predicted the exact number of electors awarded to Trump. Now Cahaly predicts that most battleground states will go for Trump with an electoral college victory in the mid-270s.

What both these pollsters are aiming to tackle is what is called social desirability bias in the polls. Social desirability bias is when a poll interviewee gives an answer to a question based on what he considers socially acceptable, rather than his true opinion on the subject. It has been observed that voters were more likely to choose Trump in a poll that felt more anonymous, such as a poll that used an automated, interactive voice response system instead of a live caller.

For me, this doesn't pass the smell test. It would mean that the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary. It just doesn't add up. Trump has completely fucked up the federal response to the pandemic, and he fomented a race war over the summer, not to mention his overt messaging to the militia movement. Do you think a Grosse Pointe Park soccer mom is cheering for the Wolverine Watchmen?

So Trump loses. He holds the Confederate States of America minus North Carolina and Virginia. Trump's performance in Georgia and Florida will tell us whether the election will be a rout. If Trump holds on in Florida and Georgia he'll limit the size of Biden's margin in the electoral college.

In Florida Trump is doing much worse this go-round with senior citizens due to his handling of COVID. I think Biden wins there. In Georgia Biden has a real shot. Remember, Stacey Abrams lost in the 2018 gubernatorial race by just 50,000 votes despite a massive voter purge by the GOP.

All in all it's another Blue Wave.

COVID Long-Haulers + My Pitch for Astragalus

The New York Times published a story earlier in the month about COVID "long-haulers," people, such as myself, who continue to struggle months after being infected. The NYT story emphasizes the psychological struggles of long-haulers. 

The story re-posted today by Naked Capitalism, "Thousands of New York ‘Long Haulers’ Struggle with COVID-19 Months After Diagnosis," is much more sympathetic to the plight of the long-haulers, situating them in a larger health crisis that has to date been under-reported rather than shading the story as an example of pandemic mass psychosis.

I can bear witness to the brutal reality of the long haul. For the most part I've stopped walking home from work, choosing the bus instead, because the two-mile uphill climb is too much for me now. My heart isn't right.

After a ridiculously unproductive couple of visits to my primary care physician (and ridiculously expensive, even though I have good employer-based health insurance) I decided to forego further rabbit-holing in the corporate health industrial complex and take charge of my own recovery.

One positive that I can report is the Chinese herb Astragalus. I read online that it helped with myocarditis.  German studies published this summer revealed a connection between COVID-19 and cardiac problems. Astragalus has made a difference. Three capsules taken daily -- one morning, noon and night -- have reduced my nasty and incapacitating arrhythmia. 

Daily COVID Deaths Predicted to Climb Next Month

 From this morning's Slog:

The key question: Just how much did we fuck things up this weekend? Experts worried Labor Day weekend could cause a new surge in the virus. "The warnings came as a widely cited model by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington projected a worsening outbreak in the U.S. that will peak in early December at about 2,900 deaths per day, up from about 860 a day now, unless government officials take action," according to the AP. As county health officer Dr. Jeff Duchin told Slog: If we all made the same decisions on Labor Day weekend as on Memorial Day weekend and the Fourth of July weekend, we will have trouble sending children back into school this fall. “You have to think, are these social activities and going out to eat more important right now than educating our children?”

Also, from today's WSWS:

Daily deaths are projected to start climbing after October 1 and then rise sharply after November 1. By December 1, current projections for the daily number of deaths stand at 26,870. Hospital resources expected in use in December include 1.87 million hospital beds, 399,463 intensive care unit (ICU) beds and 340,307 ventilators. These projections are driven by dropping temperatures in the fall and winter season that drive people indoors, compounded by declining mask usage, which stands at around 60 percent, and declining social distancing measures.

COVID is already back on the rise in Europe. Spain and France have experienced a resurgence this summer. In the midst of this resurgence children are being sent back to school. The result is going to be an infection spike prior to the anticipated seasonal spike in October. Not a pretty picture.

Western governments have basically given up on the idea of developing a comprehensive diagnostic system of the sort you see practiced, for instance, by NFL teams: regular testing, quarantine and contact tracing. It's not even mentioned anymore, replaced by bullshit happy talk about a vaccine. 

Western governments have adopted a de facto policy of herd immunity, something that could prove to be illusory given that reinfections have now been documented.

New York City should give us a good idea. After the city's truly horrific spring, infections were reduced to such an extent that there has been speculation that it has achieved herd immunity. If this is true, there should be no spike when schools reopen on September 21.

As COVID deaths begin to tick back up markets are on their way down. The Fed's "QE forever" was able to buy all-time market highs for a spell, but the reality of long-term unemployment has finally appeared to have crashed the party.

Minnesota on My Mind

In his afternoon Water Cooler Lambert Strether devotes three paragraphs, the first of which can be found below, to liberal Minnesota's perplexing status as a tossup battleground state:

UPDATE Trump (R)(2): “An unlikely state tightens up” [Politico]. “Minnesota, which once looked like a vanity project for Donald Trump, is suddenly emerging as a critical test of his effort to turn his campaign around. Interviews with more than a dozen officials and strategists from both parties in recent days depict a state in which Joe Biden is leading, but where the president is making inroads in rural Minnesota. … In the run-up to the 2016 election, Minnesota seemed like a stretch for Trump. No Republican had carried the state since Richard Nixon in 1972, and Trump made minimal effort there. Even so, Trump came close to victory, carrying 78 of Minnesota’s 87 counties and losing the state by fewer than 45,000 votes. Following the election, Trump said he regretted not doing more. The state’s 10 electoral votes — the same number as neighboring Wisconsin — became an enduring source of infatuation for him. He’s still preoccupied with his near-miss four years later. ‘One more speech, I would have won,’ Trump told a crowd recently in Mankato, a small college town in southern Minnesota. ‘It was so close.'” • A Trump crowd in a college town? Can any Minnesotans comment on this?

It's hard to believe that the cradle of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is going to swing to Trump in 2020, a year of social upheaval not unlike 1968, the year the Democratic Party standard bearer was vice president Hubert Humphrey, stalwart champion of civil rights and a former mayor of Minneapolis.

Humphrey carried his home state that year of course, but he also carried Michigan, a state which was a key to Trump's victory in 2016.

Sagaar Enjeti thinks Trump wins reelection if he carries Michigan, Arizona and Florida. The problem for Trump is winning all these battleground states in 2020 is going to be a lot different than how he won in 2016. In 2016 he won as a stealth candidate who very few analysts took seriously. That's not the case this year.

I prefer to look at 1988. If Michael Dukakis won Minnesota so will Joe Biden. On the other hand, Dukakis also won in Wisconsin and Iowa, states Trump won in 2016 and will likely win again.

Dukakis was the last losing Democratic Party presidential candidate for whom I voted. Shamefully, I voted for Clinton twice; voted Green until Obama; then voted Green again in 2016. After much internal wrestling I have decided to vote for Biden.

It's not a naive vote, nor a hesitant one. I am confident in the decision, and I can justify it based on several different arguments.

Let's take one that impacts me personally. Labor rights. The Mitch McConnell GOP castrated Obama after Scalia died in early 2016 and Obama's pick to replace him on the Supreme Court never came to a vote. Subsequently, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, who was approved and assumed office in April of 2017. Next year, in June, Gorsuch, voted with the majority in Janus v. AFSCME.

Janus vs. AFSCME allows public-sector workers, say, state department of transportation employees, to opt out of union membership. The initial fear among unions was that the Supreme Court decision would lead to a loss of upwards of 30% of their membership. Nothing like that ended up happening. As I believe I mentioned before, the overwhelming majority of union members realize that having a union and a collective bargaining agreement is a significant advantage.

Nonetheless, the low single-digit percentage of workers who do opt out creates an overabundance of administrative chores. And I am the person on staff for whom it falls to expedite those chores. It's a lot of correspondence and database work. I figure that each worker who opts out consumes about 20-30 minutes of my time. Since June of 2018  many hours of my worklife have been chewed up thanks to Janus.

Even if Trump loses in November, the GOP will hold a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. Nationwide right-to-work is rumored to be in the offing. I think a second term for Trump basically guarantees some form of private sector right-to-work. Trump is a bomb thrower. Though many in his base are rank'n'file trade unionists, I don't have to tell you that he would revel in diminishing their ability to make a living.

So there's one reason to vote for Biden. Labor rights. I'll include some more as we slouch toward election day.

Also, in the pipeline I have the second installment of The Republican Party Must Be Destroyed. It's a look at that hatemonger from yesteryear, the father of the Christ of the Ozarks, Gerald L.K. Smith.

Militias as Police Proxies

Looking at some of the video from the Jacob Blake protests in Kenosha, it seems like this is going to be the new normal going forward. Armed pro-Trump Blue Lives Matter militia will act as proxies for police and national guard. Teenage gunman Kyle Rittenhouse passed through police lines unmolested after shooting three people, murdering two of them.

Even if citizens are successful in de-funding the police, these militias are going to pop up to terrorize the enlightened. It's not a stretch to imagine militias mustered to put down protests of Trump's refusal to leave office after a contested election in November.

The Decades Delayed Remote Work Revolution

I first took note of the promise of remote work when I was a lower-division undergraduate. This was probably 1984 or 1985. I saw a television news story that said in the next few years companies would be allowing, thanks to modems and personal computers, more employees to work from home. I was pleased because this meant by the time I exited the university and entered the workforce I'd likely have more freedom than those who had come before.

Needless to say the remote work revolution never arrived. Every so often another story would appear heralding a workplace paradigm shift thanks to the breathtaking speed of our digital transformation, but eventually even those petered out.

To be sure there was an elite class of workers who always enjoyed on-the-job flexibility, as well as a precariat of freelancers for whom remote work was not necessarily an enhancement, but it took the pandemic crisis of 2020 to deliver the fruits of stay-at-home work for the great mass of office workers.

This morning Yves Smith, "New York City Faces Another 'Drop Dead': How Many Other Cities Will Wind Up in Distress?," takes a look at the what the long-delayed but now here-to-stay remote work revolution means for the great urban centers of the United Stated, and the news is not good for real estate.

Smith mentions that large employers are trying to bring their workers back onsite and they're facing a rebellion. I can testify when that moment arrives for my office the same thing will happen.

So cities are facing an enormous drop off in tax revenue. That's really the issue that's impeding another bailout plan passing congress. The Republicans won't backstop states, counties and cities; they want a repeat of the post-2008 layoffs of government workers that helped to created a slow-motion recovery and stoked political division that they were able to take advantage of.

I for one am enjoying the empty streets. But I realize there is going to be huge price to pay.

Ben Norton of The Grayzone

Caitlin Johnstone's post this morning is a defense of The Grayzone. The Grayzone pretty much anchors online U.S.-based anti-imperialist journalism -- journalism, not merely commentary.

Consider Ben Norton. The guy is a colossus of productivity. Last night I watched his interview with Anya Parampril, another Grayzone contributor, about ongoing U.S. coup efforts targeting Nicaragua. The interview contains  eye-opening information about the 2018 coup attempt.

Johnstone notes that, 

Grayzone‘s Ben Norton wrote this past June that “in its more than four years of existence, including its first two years hosted at the website AlterNet… The Grayzone has never had to issue a major correction or retract a story.”

I am not citing Norton because I think taking the outlet’s word for it is a valid argument, I’m citing him because I’ve never seen a shred of evidence that what he said is false, and neither have you. There is so much spin going into discrediting The Grayzone at this point that we may rest assured that if it had ever been caught reporting something untrue, establishment narrative managers would have made damn sure we all knew about it.

But they haven’t, because they can’t. All they’ve been able to do is argue that The Grayzone reports things that other media outlets do not report, which are not in alignment with the approved viewpoint of the United States government. Which is to say, all they can argue is that The Grayzone is doing journalism.

In fact, if you believe as I do that journalism’s first and foremost function is to hold your government to account with the light of truth, you can easily make the argument that The Grayzone has published more real journalism just this year than all corporate media like Axios have put out this millennium. The outlet’s original reporting on the OPCW scandal and coverage of the US regime change operations in Nicaragua along with critical journalism on the persecution of Julian Assange, Venezuela, Bolivia, Syria, Russia, China and other unabsorbed governments, all just in the last few months, leave other publications far behind.

The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #3

In my lifetime the Democratic Party -- I'm speaking here of the rank'n'file -- has always shown a concern for peace. I think it's non-controversial to say that Obama won the presidency because he was the only mainstream candidate of either major party to have a public record opposing the Iraq War. Who can deny that Trump's margin of victory in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania was due to his running as the anti-war candidate in 2016?

Rank'n'file Democratic Party opposition to war tracks back to Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy was blocked at the convention in Chicago by the old bull party bosses congregated around Hubert Humphrey. George McGovern became the placeholder for Kennedy delegates after Senator Teddy Kennedy declined to pick up the mantle of his assassinated brother. 

McGovern would go on to lead the McGovern-Fraser Commission which would rewrite the rules on how Democrats nominate their presidential candidate. The work McGovern did on the commission would pave the way for his nomination in 1972. In the general election McGovern would lose every state to Nixon except for the Kennedys' Massachusetts and the Black-majority District of Columbia. Nixon's '72 landslide victory would come to naught as his administration imploded over Watergate. 

Which brings us to Seymour Hersh. I recently finished reading his memoir, Reporter. In it Hersh explains how his reporting on Watergate gave way to the revelation of the "Family Jewels," a compendium of CIA crimes commissioned by agency head James Schlesinger as a response to Nixon's  attempt to deflect White House responsibility for the Watergate burglary by asserting it was a CIA operation.

What struck me about Hersh's account was that after the initial splash the Family Jewels created, along with related followups, there wasn't the interest or support from his editors at The New York Times to pursue more of these national security state bombshells. Hersh mentions that congressional committees, e.g., Church and Pike, would continue the work with subpoena power; so off he goes on vacation and then relocates to New York City where he starts reporting on corporate corruption for The Times.

That's 1975. You have to get all way to the mid-1990s in Hersh's memoir to understand what happened (really, what didn't happen) with the Church and Pike investigations of national security state crimes. Hersh explains that senate leaders were reticent to give Frank Church chairmanship of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities because they knew that he coveted a presidential run as leader of the Democratic Party and they didn't want to muddy the investigation with presidential politics. Church promised that he would not run for president in 1976. He lied.

The result of this lie, according to Hersh, is that the committee's work was compromised and the crimes of the Kennedy administration were obscured or soft-pedaled because Church believed to win the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1976 the victorious candidate had to be perceived by primary voters as the true representative of the Kennedy legacy; to tarnish that legacy was to guarantee defeat.

To correct the record and debunk the myth of Camelot Hersh writes The Dark Side of Camelot (1997).

I purchased a copy of the book as soon as it appeared. In the 1990s I worked nights and spent my free time studying Kennedy assassination literature. I was drawn to the topic because, from college days, I was a Derridean, someone who believed that perception is textual. When it comes to textuality you would be challenged to find a field larger than that provided by the Kennedy assassination. My thinking was -- at the time I was still south of 35 years of age -- that if one could master that mass of literature, one could claim to have mastered perception itself.

But I never finished The Dark Side of Camelot. I think I made it halfway through, and then, because none of the material was what I considered at the time to be of a bombshell nature, since I was so thoroughly immersed in the literature, I set it aside. Hersh was pilloried at the time in the mainstream press for material, forged documents, that never even made it into the book. He was also criticized for getting marginal stuff wrong.

After I finished Hersh's memoir, I picked up the copy of The Dark Side of Camelot I set aside more than 20 years ago.

It's a tremendous book. I truly savored it. Hersh systematically demolishes the Kennedy legacy:

• JFK worked with the mob to win the presidency
• Bay of Pigs is laid at JFK's feet
• JFK/RFK fulsomely supported "Executive Action," a.k.a., assassination
• Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear holocaust (then Kennedy lied about swapping the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba)
• Kennedy supported the assassination of Diem because Diem was negotiating with the North to end the war

There's much more. Overall the picture -- both of Jack and Bobby -- is of an unhinged presidency. Jack Kennedy was addicted to sex, in poor health, committed to ruthless skulduggery, seemingly always in crisis, and Bobby was his loyal little brother enabler.

If I would've finished the book back in 1990s I could've seen that Hersh basically affirms the hypothesis -- that Kennedy's assassination tracks back to LBJ -- that I was working on. Hersh doesn't make this argument explicitly because he, improbably, accepts the conclusion of the Warren Commission, that there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but Hersh does say that in final months of Kennedy's life the decision was finalized to boot Johnson off the ticket in 1964. The Bobby Baker Quorum Club scandal taken up by the Senate Rules Committee tainted both Jack (because of his affair with German party girl Ellen Rometsch) and Lyndon (because of petty kickbacks, the details of which RFK was surreptitiously feeding to Republicans on the committee). Then Kennedy's brains are blown out in Texas.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that RFK's rebirth as an anti-war politician post-Tet might have been sincere but it was most likely mere crass opportunism. Bobby was no peacenik.

Nonetheless, as decades plodded on after '68, there remained and remains a significant constituency within the Democratic Party which is opposed to the national security state and perpetual warfare. This constituency elected Obama and probably defeated Hillary. 

Russiagate was designed and continues to be used to neuter and bleach this constituency, and in this regard it has been largely successful. The Democratic Party is now just as bellicose as the Republican Party, and for that reason it needs to be destroyed. Because even if the George Floyd Rebellion and the Black Lives Matter renaissance are fundamentally anti-imperialist and pro-peace, a lot of the white liberals who have supported the movement are card-carrying Russiagaters and defenders of the CIA , NSA and FBI.

The Republican Party Must Be Destroyed #1

It might already be happening. Trump, whose plummeting poll numbers seem inversely linked to the the spread of the coronavirus, is getting plastered in swing states, tomahawking any chance of Republicans maintaining control of the U.S. Senate. Dire indeed this is for the GOP because it has allowed itself to become a cult of personality. If Trump can't brake his descent, he's going to take the Republican Party with him.

You wouldn't think that the removal of John C. Calhoun's statue yesterday in Charleston has more to do with today's Republican Party than it does with the rival Democrats, with whom Calhoun, as Andrew Jackson's first vice president, was affiliated. Read Joseph Lowndes' From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (2008) and you understand why this is the case.

Segregationists after World War Two started their migration out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party because the national Democratic Party favored integration and civil rights.

It took several decades to complete this migration but the die was essentially cast with the Brown decision in 1954. 

Before their was #Resistance to Trump there was the Resistance to federally mandated integration. A key doctrine of the segregationist Resistance was interposition, basically a reboot of nullification, the idea that a state can void a federal law it finds objectionable. The greatest champion of nullification was John C. Calhoun.

From the battles over integration in the South, Lowndes tracks the movement of white supremacists into the mainstream Republican Party via the '64 Goldwater campaign, George Wallace's '68 presidential run culminating in Nixon's "Southern strategy" landslide victory of 1972, and finally the Sweet Beulah Land of the Reagan 1980s.

Make no mistake the GOP is a White Man's Party through and through and has been for 40 years. The fact that statues of great white slave owners are coming down not exclusively at the instigation of the mob but at the behest of local grandees and with almost no sign of push back is a very bad sign for the Republican Party and a very good sign for the rest of us.

COVID Efflorescence

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases yesterday rocketed past 9 million as the pandemic accelerates in every corner of the world, an increase of one million cases in seven days. The number of known deaths now stands at more than 469,000. Both these figures are on track to surpass the ghastly milestones of 10 million cases and 500,000 deaths later this week.

The sharpest uptick in new cases continues to be in Eastern Europe, South Asia, North America and South America. The United States has the most new cases of any country, closely followed by and sometimes exceeded by Brazil. And while India has a lower count of new cases, that number is increasing sharply, and the official figures are undoubtedly a gross underestimate in a country of 1.3 billion people with only rudimentary health care infrastructure.

These countries similarly lead the world in number of new deaths, along with Chile, Peru, Russia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Iran. Globally, the seven-day moving average of daily deaths has never gone below 4,000 since the beginning of April and is again trending upwards. The seven-day moving average of daily cases has not gone below 100,000 since March 27 and will soon surpass 150,000.

The dangers of the pandemic were sharply expressed on yesterday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press” program by Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “I don’t think this is going to slow down. I’m not sure the influenza analogy applies anymore,” he said, developing his position from his earlier work which attempted to model the spread of the coronavirus based on how the flu spreads. “I don’t think we’re going to see one, two and three waves—I think we’re just going to see one very, very difficult forest fire of cases.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, noted on CBS’s Face the Nation: “We’re seeing the positivity rates go up. That’s a clear indication there is now community spread underway, and this isn’t just a function of testing more.”

Bryan Dyne, "World coronavirus cases rocket past 9 million as pandemic accelerates"

Big Police Defeat in Seattle Last Night

If statues of Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson are being toppled with nary a complaint,  the United States is in dire need of a rebranding. Surely you would think that this is obvious to the ruling elite, but apparently it isn't, judging from the Republican policing proposal introduced yesterday.

Cities are sprinting ahead of the national government. A good example is here in Seattle where last night the Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council (MLKCLC), my former employer, ousted the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). I recall a lot of council work went into SPOG, backing the guild in its contract negotiations with the city, etc, with little to show for the effort.

Now it's coming to light (see longtime city councilman Nick Licata's "Inside CHAZ: An 'Autonomous' Three Block-Long Seattle Street Threatens America, What?") that the decision to abandon the East Precinct police station was something of a wildcat strike by the guild, a petulant reaction to criticism over excessive use of force:

A resident of one of the nearby apartment buildings, whom I know very well, told me of her interactions with a police officer. She was standing in front of her building on Monday, June 8 at noon asking people what was going on. A police officer came by and announced, “We are all pulling out, and you’re all going to be on your own. We are not coming back in and you are not going to get help and bad elements will come in.” Then he added, “And who would want to work in Seattle [as police]?”

On the same day, June 12, that I visited CHAZ, Michael Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, told Fox News “This is the closest I’ve ever seen our country, let alone the city here, to becoming a lawless state.” It would lead one to believe that the police union had lost faith in receiving political cover for their use of excessive force, if the city council and mayor were to allow protesters so close to their precinct station.

Police officers in Seattle are not allowed to strike, but they may have actually adopted an old fashion factory “walk-out” by letting the police chief know that they could no longer execute their usual police practices if they remained there.

The corrupt, feckless nature of large urban police forces is being exposed. Let's hope the "lawlessness" continues.

Our Dystopian Present

Nations are ending lockdowns despite the persistence of COVID-19. The original talking points of comprehensive testing and contact tracing have been abandoned. Now the unspoken policy is herd immunity. Workers will be forced back into the job market. Auto manufacturers are increasing production despite a spike in COVID cases in their factories.

The problem with herd immunity is that we don't know what level of protection COVID antibodies provide. As Benjamin Mateus explains in "Studies on COVID-19 antibody response undermine US 'herd immunity' policy":

The immunity to the virus is not as robust as had been hoped by investigators, and no one yet knows what level of neutralizing antibodies are required to offer protection. This has considerable implications for vaccine productions, as vaccine efficacy seems to hinge on the ability to demonstrate consistently high levels of neutralizing antibodies.

As the virus expands its reach in Africa and India, it appears that after six months of COVID we are just at the beginning.

States are writing austerity budgets. There will be no let up in joblessness and apparently no further lockdowns. The only way for the state to prevent a revolution is by means of massive violence.

Is This Time Different?

Last night at dusk, around 9 PM, protesters marched on the side street beneath my apartment chanting "Out of your home and into the streets!"

Even though I have lived in this neighborhood, sort of  radical Seattle's Ground Zero, for decades, that has not happened before. Usually protesters march down Broadway, a block to the West.

Certainly the size of recent marches has been robust.

Maybe what we have here is indeed a rebellion. Caitlin Johnstone thinks a shift in consciousness is underway (see "I Reckon We Can Win This Thing").

Having recently read Charles Reich's The Greening of America in honor of its 50th anniversary I am aware of the shortcomings of heralding the arrival of a new consciousness. Reich cherry-picked and oversold the transformations the Hippies were bringing about. For some reason in 1970 Reich could not foresee that there would be a huge reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, one that would usher in our current, now zombie, neoliberal paradigm.

I do think things might be different this time. Because of the persistence of COVID-19, because of the economic calamity hurtling our way, the pre-pandemic status quo is not going to be rehabilitated.

The temptation of the ruling class will be to bat away calls for change with military force. But the ruling class is split, and one half wants Trump out. So a violent crackdown isn't an obvious, ready-made solution here.

Is it different this time? Yes. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily headed for someplace better.

The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #2

In the first installment of "The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed" I mentioned reading recently Robert Remini's Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959).

For me the book was a revelation because I was unaware what a stalwart Jeffersonian Republican Martin Van Buren was and how strongly he conceived of his mission to elect Jackson as the standard bearer of the new Democratic Party as a way to salvage Jefferson's legacy.

What is Jefferson's legacy?

To answer that question I next turned to Roger G. Kennedy's Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (2003), a eye-opening formidable piece of scholarship.

In a nutshell Jefferson's legacy is a massive expansion of slavery and the re-colonization of the American South by the British Empire a few decades after the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War.

Jefferson accomplished this by appropriating Indian lands under a cloak of expanding yeoman farmer homesteads but in reality the lands were raped with mono-culture cash crops (cotton, tobacco) destined for the English export market and harvested by brutalized African slave labor. 

At the very root of our party system in United States is the left of tribal lands, the expansion of African slavery and the British Empire.

As the statues are torn down, let's hope Jefferson's is one of them.

Planet of the Humans

Jeff Gibbs' Planet of the Humans documentary -- the one that was removed from YouTube for a spell; the one produced by Michael Moore; the one that has mainstream enviros quaking with rage -- is quite good and very cogent.

The central thesis is that renewable energy is not going to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. Solar and wind energy are not really renewable in that photovoltaic cells require plenty of toxic industrial fossil fuel inputs and have a limited life cycle. The same can be said of the turbines that generate electricity from the wind.

The biggest target of Planet of the Humans is biomass. Gibbs convincingly documents that a green giant like Germany, a country lauded for producing a high percentage of its energy from renewable sources, owes its stature to burning biomass and biofuels. Biomass is just a fancy name for cutting down trees and burning them in a furnace; garbage, too.

Gibbs illuminates the extent to which high finance has prostituted 350 and the Sierra Club. Most are aware that Al Gore is an untrustworthy, venal character, but who would have expected the same from Bill McKibben?

Our only way out of this mess -- COVID-19 is just a hint of the pain and suffering coming our way -- is a significant reduction in population combined with a massive reduction in consumption. 

Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

About ten blocks south of my apartment building the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) has been created.  The East Precinct building, which the Seattle Police Department (SPD) abandoned earlier in the week after repeatedly saturating protesters with tear gas despite an announced tear gas ban by Mayor Jenny Durkan and Police Chief Carmen Best, is at the center of the newly created autonomous zone.

After a few days of celebration things are starting to heat up with Trump making threats, The New York Times posting a story on its homepage, and the SPD making noises that it wants its station back. (If you want to keep up with the latest CHAZ news from local sources, let me suggest that you follow Rich Smith on Twitter and you bookmark Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. Both are excellent sources.)

Even if Trump doesn't invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and dispatch troops from Fort Lewis, it's likely, once things die down a little, that the odious Mayor Durkan will send in riot police a la Mike Bloomberg and Zuccotti Park nearly a decade ago.

I have yet to visit CHAZ despite living nearby. I am trapped in this cycle of going to the office and then recovering at home. My lungs have still not healed. If I am improving, it's in tiny barely perceptible increments. I did work four days in the office last week, and the one day worked last week from home was a full day, 7 AM to 5 PM. So that's good news. I couldn't have done it in May. Nonetheless I'm growing concerned that my lungs might be permanently damaged.

What's particularly worrisome is that countries are ending lockdowns despite rising rates of infection. The state of Arizona might run out of hospital beds in July. The principal rationale for locking down back in March was that COVID-19 could overwhelm and collapse the health care system. I don't see how that has changed. Furthermore, what about a testing regimen as we emerge from lockdown? Nothing of the sort. It's a tacit admission, at least in the United States, that government is unable to manage the pandemic.

The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #1

After reading the latest from Caitlin Johnstone, the unassailable "The Democratic Party Exists To Co-Opt And Kill Authentic Change Movements," I am introducing the first of what I hope to be a series of posts arguing that the Democratic Party ought to be destroyed posthaste.

Soon after Super Tuesday and in the run-up to the nationwide pandemic lockdowns I devoured a copy that I had lying around the apartment of Robert Remini's first book, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959).

What was a revelation to me was that the Democratic Party, the supposedly transformative, egalitarian "Party of Jackson," was actually a salvage operation for the listing "Era of Good Feelings" Republican Party of Jefferson, the primary political vehicle of Southern slavocracy.

The Democratic Party was a creation of Martin Van Buren, Bucktails party boss of New York. He used the Tariff of Abominations and Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign to rejuvenate the old planter Republican Party coalition.

In other words, the origin of the Democratic Party is synonymous with  the rejuvenation of the political power of slavocracy, not to mention the genocide of indigenous peoples.

Bear that in mind when you consider legislation proposed by congressional Democrats to address the policing crisis in the United States. If we can create a new federal department post-9/11, why can't we re-imagine how we police ourselves? Let's defund and abolish police departments as presently constituted.

When Does the George Floyd Rebellion Get Co-Opted?

After reading JEFFREY ST. CLAIR's "Roaming Charges: Mad Bull, Lost Its Way" I believe we're at a tipping point. If fence-sitting city councilmembers are joining the barricades and demanding the mayor pull back her troops, something has shifted.

What comes next is an attempt to co-opt and muffle the rebellion. The New York Times, for instance, has been very supportive of the uprising. Read the editorial by Jamelle Bouie, "The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It." It's excellent. But let's not forget what happened to the Women's March, splintered by turf wars and the obligatory charges of anti-Semitism, or the #Resistance, smothered in years of mainstream Russiagating. 

For the time being the mainstream mind managers are unwilling to take their foot off the accelerator. They've got Trump right where they want him. He's looking increasingly vulnerable, as vulnerable as he looked in the torchlight of Charlottesville the summer of 2017.

But a reaction will come, probably at the same time that legislation starts coursing through city councils to defund the police and replace them with social workers. Shaky Nancy Pelosi, who has gone to ground during the rebellion, will reappear to declare systemic change impossible during an economic crisis.

People must stay mobilized and continue to take to the streets. Don't be fooled by those who try to brake this movement by saying it's all a Putin plot or tainted by anti-Semitic bias. So far criticisms of violent outside agitators and Antifa anarchy have fallen flat, and so too has the Russia bogeyman. But that doesn't mean that the "Mighty Wurlitzer" won't be switched back on.

Thin Blue Line Flag: U.S. Police State's "Old Glory"

The “thin blue line” flag is the known symbol of a social, cultural, and political movement that is inextricably linked to the country’s current unrest. The flag is the centerpiece in a world of merchandise and policing philosophy, all built around the idea that the police are an embattled tribe of warriors, maligned and reviled by a nation that fails to appreciate their unique importance. The blue line is a reminder that much of the policing community sees itself as separate from the rest of society — and as the nation has witnessed in recent days, in video after shocking video, this well-armed population, imbued with the power to deprive citizens of life and liberty, does not take kindly to those who challenge its authority.

“What we’re talking about here is a worldview that says that police are the only force capable of holding society together,” Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of “The End of Policing,” told me. The view turns on the notion that “without the constant threat of violent coercive intervention, society will unravel into a war of all against all,” he explained. Seen through this lens, “authoritarian solutions are not just necessary, they’re almost preferable.”

In the wake of Floyd’s killing, with protests in every state in the union and U.S. security forces at every level called to respond, the country is now witnessing what years of militarized conditioning, training, and culture have wrought: a nationwide protest movement running up against a nationwide police riot. 

Ryan Devereaux, "POLICE ATTACKS ON PROTESTERS ARE ROOTED IN A VIOLENT IDEOLOGY OF REACTIONARY GRIEVANCE"

Master-Slave Dialectic

Scrolling through the morning news what jumps out at a reader are all the smartphone videos of police brutality, an issue that Caitlin Johnstone addresses in "Smartphone Cameras Are The Windows Into Society’s Soul."

If you have had a conflict on the street with an officer of the peace, you know that this is how things usually go. The police are trained to use overwhelming force if their authority is challenged.

Recalling my university days and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, this is the dynamic that guides lordship and bondage, a.k.a., the master-slave dialectic. And, FYI, it doesn't work out for the master. Overwhelming force as a solution freezes the master's consciousness, while the overwhelmed slave has to use her noggin to figure a way out of her dominated state. Off she goes to a higher stage in the dialectic.

That's where we are at now. The neoliberal state -- absent all its bells and whistles -- is reduced to gross displays of brute force to maintain fealty.

It's hard to see how it survives, even if somehow jobs were added in May.

UPDATE: The latest from Caitlin Johnstone:

A police force which cannot respond to protests about police brutality without the internet being flooded with a steady stream of police brutality footage is a police force in sore need of drastic overhaul. It has already been proven that that is in fact the case. There’s no taking it back. There’s no fixing it. It’s done. The debate is officially over. Huge, sweeping changes must immediately be made, and there’s no valid reason for the protests to stop until that has occurred.

U.S. Military Reticent to Wage War on Domestic Population

According to The New York Times in "Esper Breaks With Trump on Using Troops Against Protesters":

Senior Pentagon leaders are now so concerned about losing public support — and that of their active-duty and reserve personnel, 40 percent of whom are people of color — that Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, released a message to top military commanders on Wednesday affirming that every member of the armed forces swears an oath to defend the Constitution, which he said “gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.”

American exceptionalism anyone? Or, as Peter Schwarz reports in "European media outlets fear bitter class struggles in the US":

“The image of the United States as the centre of Western civilisation is collapsing before our eyes. Will it be possible to rebuild the old image again?,” commented the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Tuesday with reference to the recent events in the US.

The only way to rescue U.S.-led global neoliberalism is at the point of a bayonet. Trump sees this. It won't work. But at this stage, it is the only thing that can keep the zombie ambulatory. I'm surprised it took us this long -- and a lethal global pandemic -- to arrive here.

Militarizing a Response to the George Floyd Rebellion Won't Work

Protests continue in Seattle. I can hear the helicopters from my apartment. 

In the nation's capital there is what appears to be a complete military occupation:

Less than two hours before Washington’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect on Tuesday, military vehicles assumed positions across the city.

A crowd of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House appeared to be at least twice that of a day earlier, and swelling.

With the imminent arrival of military units and the use of helicopters to suppress protesters on Monday night — a tactic used for battles with insurgents abroad, now applied on U.S. soil — some in the crowd whispered that more soldiers were on the way.

Alec, a 32-year-old protester who spent two deployments in Afghanistan, said he had seen things over the past two days that he never expected to see in his own country.

“There are real problems here,” he said, declining to give his last name because he works for the government, “and no amount of uniforms or soldiers are going to fix them.”

While the evening ended with only flashes of confrontations, the city’s downtown is being flooded with agents from the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, Customs and Border Protection, and several other agencies, along with the military. Transportation Security Administration officers have also been called out of airports to help protect federal property.

The militarization of the response to the protest has stirred deep concerns and drawn widespread criticism, including from retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that “our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.”

“I am deeply worried that as they execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The Atlantic published on Tuesday, adding that America’s cities and towns “are not ‘battle spaces’ to be dominated, and must never become so.”

Trump's Wallacite/Nixonian "law & order" response is not going to solve the problem. There are not enough troops to extinguish a nationwide rebellion. Remember Eric Shinseki? He was the Army Chief of Staff during the run-up to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq who rocked the boat by saying that the occupation would require several hundred thousand ground troops. The United States has a population ten times greater than the size of Iraq's 2003 population; its entire active-duty and reserve force adds up to about 2.1 million troops. Is Trump going to abandon overseas bases to occupy the homeland?

In "The George Floyd Election," Thomas Edsall susses out the ongoing rebellion's impact on the presidential election, whether it will break for the right or for the left. Edsall starts off by looking at 2020 through the prism of 1968 and the riots in wake of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. It is argued that Humphrey lost because of the protest and riots of 1968 and Nixon and Wallace won.

Edsall goes on to reject parallels between '68 and 2020. For starters, the percentage of the electorate that is white has shrunk by 23% since 1968. More importantly, Trump is completely boxed by an economic collapse that will only grow worse in the near term:

What makes the moment unique is that the combination of widespread racial discontent, the pandemic and the economic implosion is taking place at a time when the scope of deprivation and need is extraordinary.

The number of people who are out of work without income now tops 40 million. There is the prospect of an “avalanche of evictions” forcing millions of renters into homelessness as legal protections and government assistance come to an end. The University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute estimates that “42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.”

Families will increasingly begin to experience the incalculable depth of loss as the election approaches, and traditional political maneuvering will be subordinated to the less familiar and highly volatile politics of scarcity.

Scarcity can being out the best and the worst in us, but with Trump in the White House for the next seven months the likelihood of a beneficial outcome is slim to none.

This is a presidential election that pits George Wallace (Trump) against George H.W. Bush (Biden) during a Great Depression.

It's Not All Looting

Protesters sat in the street outside the Minnesota governor’s residence in Minneapolis on Monday.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Silver Lining to George Floyd Rebellion

As COVID-19 spikes and the White House goes dark, consider this: This is just the beginning.

Civil unrest is our new normal. What happens when enhanced unemployment expires in July? What happens is a wave of evictions.

There is no indication that the federal government is able to provide leadership. States and municipalities will soon have to cut services and layoff workers. As we saw in post-Katrina New Orleans, police will simple vanish from their posts.

One silver lining to the George Floyd rebellion is that it has chased China-bashing from the front-pages of U.S. newspapers. It's hard to act as if you are a bulwark of civil liberties when the national guard is mustered and firing upon reporters:

In China, the state-run news media heavily featured reports about Mr. Floyd’s death and portrayed the protests as another sign of America’s decline. When a U.S. official on Saturday attacked the ruling Communist Party on Twitter for moving to impose national security legislation to quash dissent in Hong Kong, a spokeswoman for the Chinese government fired back with a popular refrain among protesters in the United States.

“‘I can’t breathe,’ ” the spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, wrote on Twitter.

George Floyd Rebellion

“The police never stand up for us,” Mr. Green said, sipping on a beer. “With the Covid pandemic people are hungry and homeless. With no job, what do you expect? I think that’s going to happen to masses of people across this country. We could reach the point that it’s civil war.”

"Appeals for Calm as Sprawling Protests Threaten to Spiral Out of Control," John Eligon, Matt Furber and Campbell Robertson

Sinophobia

White House trade advisor and prominent Sinophobe Peter Navarro was interviewed yesterday by ABC's George Stephanopoulos. The interview provides a convenient encapsulation of Trump's reelection strategy of scapegoating China for the coronavirus pandemic.

The United States might be a faltering hyper-power, but it remains unrivaled when it comes to capitalizing on crises. By blaming China, the Trump administration hopes to dodge voter retribution in November at the same time braking the Dragon's global economic growth.

It is unclear to me how much blame can be ascribed to China. If patient zero was diagnosed on November 17 of last year in Wuhan, what do we make of the patient in France who was diagnosed on November 16?

Much too much is unknown about COVID-19. For instance, what are we to make of the spike in multi-system inflammatory disease among children?

At this point I don't think that we can rule out a man-made origin of the coronavirus. The mainstream press dismisses man-made origin, as Mike Baker did recently in "When Did the Coronavirus Arrive in the U.S.? Here’s a Review of the Evidence":

Dr. Bedford [of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle] said there was no evidence of genetic engineering in the virus, noting that it appeared to be a genetic outgrowth of a virus circulating among bats. It probably reached humans through an intermediate animal, such as a pangolin, he said.

“There’s no hallmarks of it having been manipulated in a lab,” Dr. Bedford said. “I think that’s definitive.”

He did not, however, rule out the possibility that some version of the virus being studied by scientists in Wuhan could have somehow escaped and spread from there. But he doubts that is the case. He said that the most prevalent theory about the virus’s origins — that it spread naturally among animals at a live animal market in Wuhan, then jumped to humans — was the most likely explanation.

But Kate Charlet's point in "The New Killer Pathogens" is that no such definitive statement is possible when it comes to genetic modification in a lab:

Ultimately, the power of these disincentives hinges on the ability to determine that an attack has occurred and to identify its source. For now, investigators looking at a pathogen in the aftermath of an attack would not necessarily be able to tell if gene-editing techniques had been used.