Time will tell which name will go down in history books. But April 7, 2025 will be up there with Black Monday (October 19, 1987) and Black Thursday (October 18, 1929).
Trump wants everyone to just calm down, already, in his own ever-weirdly worded way. But he said this just before millions of Americans died of Covid, too.
All this tariff talk is provoking a recession, which seems to be a feature, not a bug. As the economy falls, companies go bankrupt and are cheap to take over by the wealthy. The very rich will be able to take advantage of desperate times to buy businesses and property, and then are even further ahead when (or if) the economy rebounds. More power. More control. More stuff. The suffering of the citizens is not a concern. At all.
This entire scheme was kick-started back in 1971 by the Powell Memorandum. Chomsky and Chris Hedges have been talking about this forever. And, of course, Ralph Nader. It's the precursor to disaster capitalism. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo attacking "extremists" like Nader who was doing things like trying to get cars to add seatbelts to improve traffic safety. The Memorandum is a push to allow unfettered capitalism without any regulations because, as far as Powell was concerned, businessmen really own the country. They pushed for more business involvement in colleges and universities way back then.
A couple days ago, Senator Chris Murphy clearly outlined the corruption in the White House. It's all out in the open BECAUSE THEY CAN. Like in Russia, few in positions of power dare call them on it.
"Trump and Elon Muck and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves, and their strategy is to do it all out in the open. ...
Charlie Angus is on a role. The NDP MP has a book excerpt in The Walrus explaining the rise of neoliberalism starting from Reaganomics.
The rules of the neoliberal game advise to take advantage of or create a crisis in order to shrink governmental oversight, bust any strikes, lower marginal tax rates so the wealthiest pay very little, reduce or obliterate corporate regulation or allow dubious self-regulation, and privatize the shit out of public services. Naomi Klein did a great job explaining it all in The Shock Doctrine, which he mentions.
Mr. Angus says,
"The crisis of the 2020s is something different than a lingering cultural stasis. The reality is that the political, environmental, and economic forces unleashed in the 1980s have finally caught up to us. . . . Operation Break the Working Class has created a generation of billionaire oligarchs form the stolen wages of the American working class. . . . To find our way out of this mess, it is necessary to confront the false history of the 1980s. Historical amnesia is not accidental--it is a political construct. If you scratch the sheen of '80s nostalgia, the underlying socio-economic fractures are readily apparent. These contradictions in the popularized narrative constitute a dangerous memory."
This is the first September that I'm not going to school as a teacher OR a student since I was 4 years old (not counting maternity leaves for all my spring babies), and all I can think about is the giant Covid wave engulfing all the little ones without any mitigations even suggested.
"New" research says that kids actually DO get harmed by Covid, which is something most should have known years ago. For a while there, the story was that kids carry it, making schools the number one vector of transmission, but somehow aren't actually affected by it, which is clearly malarky! Even without an eye to long term damage, just being sick for a few weeks several times a year takes a told. As a trustee in 2022, my phone rang off the hook with parents frantic that their kids were getting sick again. I talked to parents with kids in the hospital, so I can imagine in what universe people ever believed it's harmless.
Salon reports,
"For years, public health experts have said that Covid-19 infections in children are 'mild.' . . . While some children with the coronavirus are admitted to the ICU and there are pediatric deaths, studies have found that underlying medical conditions including obesity, diabetes, cardiac and lung disorders, increase the risk of severe outcomes."
Without testing or wastewater data warning us of rising cases of viruses in our regions ahead of time, we can only look to excess deaths after the fact. Bleak times.
This is a graph of Finland's excess deaths relative to pre-pandemic levels. Pay attention to that blue line. It's the excess deaths of children aged 5-9. The dip in 2021 is when kids all wore masks and fewer died of RSV and the flu. The current excess death rate for kids is 2.4 times pre-pandemic levels. More than twice as many kids are dying, and we're still not acting on this.
Schools are the number one vector of infection. If we can halt transmission there, it will make a huge difference. We could have CO2 monitors in every room that beep at 500 ppm to alert the teacher to open doors and windows. And we could have super quiet and super cool CR boxes that run on computer fans. The CO2 monitor is a one-time buy at about $200 - likely far less in bulk, and the CR boxes are under $300 fully assembled or under $200 if you make them yourself - again, far less if in bulk. Those changes would be cheap and doable today, except opening windows and having CR boxes in class will get you in trouble in my neck of the woods. If we actually wanted to spend money protecting kids - and the rest of us by extension - we could add upper room UV!!
Alex Walker, Climate Finance Program Manager at Environmental Defence, wrote about spotlighting and mythbusting this week's government studies on climate change and finance:
"The Senate Banking commmittee had a study on Thursday of Senator Rosa Galvaz's amazing Climate-Aligned Finance Act. I wouldn't call all the witnesses experts on climate finance. Let's bust some of the less-than-expert myths that were said.
Gina Pappano, CEO of an anti-divestment organization, who is so unaware of climate change that she asked Suncor to scrap their net-zero plan - which they rejected. If Suncor believe in climate change more than you, it's an issue.
Some great quotes include “energy is our economy…our economy is energy”. Seems to have missed the stat that Canada’s largest economic sector is real estate.
* “Investment [in oil and gas] leads to emissions reductions because investment leads to innovations”. Lie. Reports found $10 billion+ loans made to O+G companies to reduce emissions, but every single one increased production. Investment = more oil and gas.
* “This bill would undermine the Canadian economy itself”. Also false. Not sure she actually read the bill. CAFA is designed to protect the Canadian economy against the systemic physical and transition risks of climate change.
* Finally “Nobody is doing any costing on what net-zero means to our economy”. False! Extensive modeling exists on the cost-savings of reaching net-zero over letting climate change run rampant. Climate change will cost Canada $5.5 trillion by 2100. Net-zero looking a lot cheaper now, huh?
Have we ever lived outside of a system of pseudo-feudalism with peasantry, slavery, or the working poor labouring for the benefit of Kings, land barons, or factory owners?
One perspective of the past thousand years or so might go something like this: Peasants lived on the King's land, first for free, then later in exchange for a portion of the food they grew or products they crafted. A tax on land started when the Lords realized they could profit more from keeping sheep than people, and peasants had to commodify their labour for the privilege of continuing to live where they had been born. Then we had some revolutions to usher in a whole new way of living, to be able to have individual property rights and to choose our leaders. The wealthy expanded their land into plantations and dragged over people from the colonies to work them in exchange for some food and shelter. It was different in tone the King/peasant dynamic but not result: lords allowing food and shelter on their land to people who already lived there in exchange for their labour compared to landowners providing food and shelter to people they kidnapped in exchange for their labour. That type of labour was never abolished; it was merely outsourced to poorer countries and American prisons. More acknowledged today, we have the working poor who make just enough to barely pay for rent and food. Leaving a horrible job at Amazon isn't a realistic choice without any possibility of saving money. They're free in title but not in practice. They might very well still live on land belonging to their overlord!
So, when did we have a democracy in which each person's unmanipulated and unfettered vote counts as much as any other, or human rights in which we are all have the right to food and shelter and certain freedoms. Did I blink and miss it? I wrote about this five years ago as well.
My mom was right after all: We really should do everything we can to keep babies from getting sick.
When I was close to the due date of my first child, my mom warned me not to pass around the baby to people or let lots of people into the house no matter how much they beg to see the baby. Everyone's going to want to see the baby, but the baby shouldn't be in contact with anyone who could be sick. And you can't always tell if someone's sick.
Then suddenly, for just the past four years or so, the general populace seemed (seems?) to think that children should get as many infections as possible when they're young - and many think they also shouldn't get the inert version of infections offered by vaccines. Funny that.
But now the old ways - the pre-2020 ways - have even further evidence.
A Lancet study found that there's little Covid transmission in schools WHEN infection control measures were in place.
"The review found that masking, vaccinations and test-to-stay policies were the best methods to reduce Covid-19's spread in schools and daycares. The effectiveness of strategies like mandatory quarantining, cohorting, and hybrid learning is uncertain and may have made 'little to no difference in transmission.'"
Dr. Mike Moffatt explained the six economic problems Canadians should worry about.
He starts with red tape stopping things that would benefit us, a lack of state capacity, overlapping jurisdictions that allow things to slip through or remain undone, use of temporary foreign workers, risk aversion, and demographics. Below is all from Moffatt, saved for later reference:
"Canada overall is in great shape. Most countries would trade our problems for theirs in a heartbeat. This list of six isn't about any order of government or party. They're larger. More structural. this isn't meant to be exhaustive. Here we go:
"Many describe living in a sort of waking, powerless nightmare where an obvious catastrophe is unfolding but society just blithely ignores it."
That's from this Guardian article from May 2022 that could have been written today, and possibly needs to be written every day to wake us up:
"People have described it as like they are at a funeral but everyone else is treating it as a party. People are still going to college, planning for retirement, doing all theh things as if the future will look just like the past when we know that's not true. There's a delusion of normalcy. . . . Carbon emissions leapt globally last year . . . Wildfires are now a year-round menace to the US west. On Friday, it hit 51C in Pakistan, while India has baked in such extreme, record heat that dozens of people have died and birds are falling from the sky"
You'd think climate change and Covid happening right in front of our eyes would affect our behaviour more, wouldn't you! Denial is a powerful drug.
So, remember when I said the Special Advisory Committee on Covid-19 was “the force behind our Canadian pro-infection train?" Well, now I think the "Industry Strategy Council" established by @ISED_CA in May, 2020 was the force that drove them all. Here's the who, what & why…
On May 8, 2020, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science & Economic Development announced that this new council will serve as “advisory board to assess the scope and depth of Covid-19’s impact on industries and inform government about specific sectoral pressures.” Industry Strategy Council Meetings were held June 8-Sept 15, 2020 where members shared experiences and heard from ministers/industry about hard hit sectors including transportation, air travel, tourism/hospitality, retail and oil and gas, and worked on positioning Canada for "economic recovery."
And @GovCanHealth only attended two meetings, the 1st to provide "an epidemiological overview of the pandemic and public health approach for restarting the economy" and the 2nd to "present health indicators to guide PHOs in monitoring & preparing for Covid-19 resurgence scenarios as the Canadian economy reopens." Whereas McKinsey & Co attended exactly three Industry Strategy Council meetings. The 1st to provide "supporting materials highlighting economic responses to Covid-19 across the globe," the 2nd to show "health measures other countries have taken as they re-open their economies." At the 3rd meeting, McKinsey & Co "presented economic recovery scenario modelling for the advanced manufacturing, agri-food, health and biosciences sectors" and "international approaches to understand sectoral pressures and cross-sector strategic directions." All meetings are here.
Nearing the end of my two-week long prep period at the END of a year that slayed me with back-to-back senior courses, and I'm finally getting caught up on my reading!
WORDS MATTER
He starts each chapter with definitions to help us see the more useful perception of these problems. Here are two key sets of terms:
non-racist / neutral / colourblind
"The claim of 'not racist' neutrality is a mask for racism" (7). "The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans towards equity is 'reverse discrimination'" (20). "White people have their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist [separate people who don't accept the dominant culture] and the assimilationist [adopt the dominant culture's way of life]: the slave trader and the missionary" (31).
The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history. To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rate to be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80 percent. . . . A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want.In 1953 in the US, the marginal tax rate was 92% on income over $400,000 (it was 84% in Canada), but $400,000 would be about $3.5 million in today’s money. So, if we want our economy to be very strong, anything people made over a few million dollars, should go almost entirely to the government. That would lower the incentive to make huge amounts of money, and CEOs might pay their employees more rather than take such high paycheques. When the highest tax bracket is raised, then the government has more money for education, health care, infrastructure, job creation, and climate change mitigation.
"After a thorough security review, the University has concluded that Ryerson is not equipped to provide the necessary level of public safety for the event to go forward. In light of recent events, Ryerson University is prioritizing campus safety."I don't blame them. I wouldn't give her the platform to speak in the first place. I think free speech is important, but it's particularly important because we need the right to criticize people in positions of power and to question legislation. It's not important that everyone can say everything they think to as many people as possible. Her right to free speech isn't eroded since she's still free to talk on the internet and in her own media venues. [ETA - Even Rebel Media doesn't want her anymore.] She just wasn't given the right to speak at that one location.
What is new, and dramatically new, is the U.S. withdrawal from the rest of the world on the issue of greatest significance for the prospect of human survival: climate change. The Washington Post had images of receding glaciers that will raise sea levels by many feet and pretty much drive tens of millions off land. A good part of organized life in coastal cities will be devastated. Every country in the world with the exception of the United States is committed to at least some actions on this issue. The US alone is not only refusing to participate, but is actually moving in a dedicated fashion in the opposite direction: trying to maximize the damage. |
| Further explanation here. |
