The Terrifying Next Phase of the Coronavirus Recession

In relative terms, Virginia continues to do well in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, although numbers of cases have risen in the Hampton Roads area, likely due to people ignoring mask wearing and social distancing mandates over the 4th of July weekend.  I say relative terms, since Virginia's new cases are a small fraction of what is happening in other states, especially Florida and Texas.  Yet compared to western European countries Virginia's numbers are terrible. Why?  Several causes, the most significant being the lack of any rational, science based federal response to the pandemic. The Trump/Pence regime first punted and left the heavy lifting to individual states and now is undermining medical experts  Further exacerbating the situation,  a number of GOP lead states rushed to reopen prematurely.  Then there are those who refuse to abide by mask requirements and eschew social distancing, caring nothing about those they may be infecting and putting their self-centered  sense of "liberty" over the lives of others.  The current result?  An economy that may be facing a second shutdown, especially in sunbelt states - the governor of Georgia incredibly ban cities and localities from implementing mask mandates.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at America's failure and what may be in store economically if the failed response to the pandemic continues.  Here are highlights:

Failed businesses and lost loved ones, empty theme parks and socially distanced funerals, a struggling economy and an unmitigated public-health disaster: This is the worst-of-both-worlds equilibrium the United States finds itself in.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has railed against shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, tweeting in all caps that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” and pushing for employees to get back to work and businesses to get back to business. But the country has failed to get the virus under control, through masks, contact tracing, mass testing, or any of the other strategies other countries have tried and found successful. That has kneecapped the nascent recovery, and raised the possibility that the unemployment rate, which eased in May and June after nearly reaching 15 percent in April, could spike again later this year.

The economy seized in unprecedented terms this spring as states and cities mandated lockdowns. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed, and millions of workers were furloughed or laid off. But instead of setting up a national viral-control strategy during this time, as other rich countries did, the United States did close to nothing. . . .  The Trump administration punted responsibility for public-health management to the states, each tipping into a budgetary crisis. After a springtime peak, caseloads declined only modestly. Outbreaks seeded across the country. States reopened, and counts exploded again.

Now the economy is traveling sideways, as business failures mount and the virus continues to maim and kill. New applications for unemployment insurance, for instance, are leveling off at more than 1 million a week—more than double the highest rate reached during the Great Recession, a sign that more job losses are becoming permanent.

The next, terrifying phase of the coronavirus recession is here: a damaged economy, a virus spreading faster than it was in March. The disease itself continues to take a bloody, direct toll on workers, with more than 60,000 Americans testing positive a day and tens of thousands suffering from extended illness. The statistical value of American lives already lost to the disease is something like $675 billion. The current phase of the pandemic is also taking an enormous secondary toll. States with unmitigated outbreaks have been forced to go back into lockdown, or to pause their reopening, killing weakened businesses and roiling the labor market. Where the virus spreads, the economy stops.

That is not just due to government edicts, either. Some consumers have rushed back to bars and restaurants, and resumed shopping and traveling. Young people, who tend to get less sick from the coronavirus than the elderly, appear to be driving today’s pandemic. But millions more are making it clear that they will not risk their life or the life of others in their community to go out. Avoidance of the virus, more so than shutdown orders, seems to be affecting consumer behavior. Places without official lockdowns have seen similar financial collapses to those with them, and a study by University of Chicago economists showed that decreases in economic activity are closely tied to “fears of infection” and are “highly influenced by the number of COVID deaths reported” in a given county.  

The perception of public transit as unsafe, for example, makes it expensive and tough for commuters to get to their jobs. Schools and day-care centers are struggling to figure out how to reopen safely, meaning millions of parents are facing a fall juggling work and child care. This is a disaster. “The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance,” the former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem has argued in The Atlantic.

International comparisons are enlightening. Countries that successfully countered the virus seem to have enjoyed better financial recoveries; countries that did not shut down saw major hits to their economy anyway. In Sweden, authorities declined to enact strict public-health measures as the virus took hold. It has seen significantly higher case counts and more deaths than its neighbors, such as Norway, and its economy tanked. Or consider South Korea. With aggressive contact tracing and mass testing, it kept many of its commercial and educational facilities open as it quashed the pandemic. (The country has tallied just 288 deaths from COVID-19, compared with roughly 135,000 in the United States.) The unemployment rate there is 4.2 percent. . . .

In France, one of the hardest-hit countries in Europe, families are back to going on vacation, eating in cafés, and visiting loved ones in hospitals. In the United States, outbreaks are shutting everything down yet again.

The country can still flatten the curve and lower the death toll. Simple, low-cost measures like requiring masks in public would preserve as much as 5 percent of GDP, economists have estimated, as well as preventing thousands from getting sick. The supposed trade-off between public health and the economy doesn’t exist. And right now, the country is choosing not to save either.

Notre Dame: A Cathedral for a Fragile Age

Like many across the globe I was shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific fire at Notre Dame de Paris which has sat on the  Île de la Cité  - the historic heart of Paris in the middle of the River Seine - for 850 years.  Paris is perhaps my favorite city in the world. Part of my attachment to Paris and France may stem from the part of me that descends from French immigrants who ultimately settled in New Orleans.  Part may stem from my frequent visits to Paris years ago on business trips and more recently on pleasure trips, the last taking place last September.  Another part my come from the realization that without France, Yorktown might have been lost.  Visit the Yorktown Revolutionary War Museum and you are reminded that it was a joint American-French army that defeated the British after the French fleet had driven away British reinforcements.

Whatever the allure, on every trip to Paris, I'd visit Notre Dame or walk by it.  It seemed immortal and a forever constant. With luck, the French will restore Notre Dame and also restore that nation's national unity which has been frayed by far right forces and Russian meddling akin to what America suffered.  A piece in the New York Times also suggests that the cathedral and French culture and French Enlightenment - a strong source for the Founding Fathers - may remind Americans of what has been lost but is capable of being restored in its own society.   Here are column excerpts:

Kilometer Zero: Notre-Dame de Paris, the place from which distance in France is measured, the reference of a people, the starting point and endpoint, the “epicenter,” as President Emmanuel Macron put it. That is why so many people, religious or not, were in tears as the great cathedral burned. A part of themselves, their bearings, was aflame.

Ransacked during the revolution in an anticlerical frenzy, restored and rebuilt during the 19th century after tempers cooled, site of imperial coronation, national liberation and presidential funerals, Notre-Dame became the nation’s soul, the place where France could reconcile its turbulent history, the monarchical and the republican, the religious and the secular.

What is Paris after all? Beauty. The horror of it lay in watching beauty burn, the delicate spire toppling into an inferno of 800-year-old beams. Here was the best of humankind, as powerful an expression as exists of the sacred, going up in black smoke.

In a time of anxiety, of ugliness and hatred and lies, the blaze felt ominous. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” John Keats wrote, and that is “all ye need to know.”

A friend in Paris, Sarah Cleveland, wrote to me: “It was strangely quiet and still, as if people were in a trance, watching the fire boil inside the shell of the cathedral walls, like a caldron. The scene was solemn, reverent. Hopeless. It seemed impossible that something so monumental could be so fragile.”

Civilization is fragile. Democracy is fragile, like that spire. It is impossible today, it is dangerous, to ignore that. When a universal reference goes up in smoke, an abyss opens up.

Notre-Dame is a sanctuary, in a time when the American president spits on sanctuaries and has considered, as punishment, dumping poor migrants in those cities that dare to call themselves by that name.

Our Lady of Paris is still there after the blaze, with her towers, roofless now. President Macron vowed to rebuild the cathedral. Money is pouring in. The French president was dignified, a reminder of the unifying power of dignity at a time when it has vanished from the White House.

Notre-Dame, Macron said, is “our history” and “our imaginary”: a means, in other words, to remember and an inspiration to all who aspire for something transcendent, beyond self. The contribution of President Trump, for whom self is all, was to suggest sending “flying water tankers” to douse the cathedral. His advice was ignored.

Perhaps, for an American, the closest thing to Notre-Dame, in its power to represent the nation, is the Statue of Liberty, work of a French sculptor. A mist hung over the water the other day, with the magical result that the torch of liberty hovered in the air, apparently detached. Seeing it, I imagined Emma Lazarus’s poem rewritten for the age of Trump:

Give me your despots, your rich,Your vulgar tax evaders yearning to flee,The depraved and debauched that itchTo steal, I will make them free.Send these, the dishonorable, to watchHow easy it is to corrupt like me.

I don’t recall French civilization feeling so important in my lifetime. It’s what we have. There will be ugly polemics over the coming weeks, once the first shock passes, over who was responsible, how this disaster happened, what negligence was involved.

But in those silent, reverent, hymn-singing crowds on the streets of Paris, I also saw the possibility of a French coming-together in the determination to rebuild — not only the cathedral, but also a nation shaken by the violence of the Yellow Vest movement and the social divisions it reflects. The story of Notre-Dame is a story of endurance and rebirth.

It is also a story of European civilization. Notre-Dame survived Hitler, just. Its fragility, now demonstrated, demands Europe’s unity, too.

Here at home, Trump and many in the GOP have been destroying America's institutions just as thoroughly as yesterday's fire destroyed the roof of Notre Dame cathedral.  All of us must vow to rebuild those endangered institutions and protect them from Trump and those who would destroy them.  Just as the French will set about restoring Notre Dame.

Germany Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

Germany's Parliament voted somewhat belatedly yesterday to doing the rest of modern Western Europe by legalizing same sex marriage.  As in America, same sex marriage has been used as a political football by politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel who moved to allow the vote even though she voted "no" on the measure.  Why?  Political expedience and the realization that blocking a vote could hurt her reelection prospects.  In Germany, religious groups, including child the rapist protecting Catholic Church, have opposed LGBT equality, clinging to a 12th century understanding of sexuality and sexual orientation.  Of course, it must be remembered that with notable exceptions, Germany's churches climbed aboard the Nazi train, seeking to retain power and wealth (the Vatican did the same thing in Italy with Mussolini).  The the parallel with America is that it is Germany's rural regions that have opposed marriage equality while modern urban areas, the economic dynamo of the economy, have favored it. The Washington Post reports on the development.  Here are excerpts:

Germany on Friday recognized the right of same-sex couples to wed, a major step for gay women and men living in a country split between conservative, Christian customs and modernizing forces.

The German Parliament voted 393-226 to modify the country’s civil code, reshaping the institution of marriage with little fanfare but enormous significance as Germany prepares to join much of the Western world in codifying marriage equality. After clearing a path for lawmakers to approve the measure, Chancellor Angela Merkel ultimately opposed it herself.

“It’s a joyous turning-point,” said Volker Beck, who has campaigned for gay rights for decades, as a spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany before he entered Parliament as a member of the Green Party. “Equality and civil rights have been achieved.” 

For some, the surprise was only how long it took, in a country often seen as a progressive model for the region. Notable, also, was how quickly the matter moved forward once it was brought up this week. 

At issue was a web of dynamics, from Nazi-era repression to the way in which political parties have derived their power from religious groups. Over time, however, church attendance has waned, and polling suggests that a comfortable majority of the public supports same-sex marriage. 

Since 2001, Germany has allowed civil partnerships, which afford many of the same benefits accruing to married couples, with the notable exception of the right to joint adoption. 

Electoral pressures facing Merkel also appeared central, leading some gay Germans to wonder whether they were political instruments for the German leader running for a fourth term in September.

Marriage was becoming a wedge issue, and by easing her resistance, Merkel swept it away from her opponents. The Social Democrats, a center-left group forming part of the chancellor's governing coalition, had declared future cooperation contingent on same-sex marriage. Smaller parties on whom Merkel might depend should she be reelected in the fall, such as the Greens, said the same. 

The chancellor has often made leftist causes, from wages to nuclear power, her own. In this case, however, she kept the issue at arm’s length. After enabling its consideration, which all but guaranteed passage, she ultimately voted no.

Her personal reservations could ease backlash from the conservative wing of her party, and from its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union, which is staunchly Catholic. The German Bishops’ Conference opposed the vote in a statement condemning the “hasty procedure” for overriding the “Christian concept of marriage.” 

The uneasy advancement of gay people in the E.U.’s largest country reflects vast social differences within Germany, as well as its tortured past.   

“Berlin and some of the conservative villages in the south of Germany — they exist on different planets,” said Andreas Kraß of the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humbold University in Berlin.

It was in Berlin that the gay rights movement began at the turn of the 20th century, with the founding of the first gay rights organization, said Robert Beachy, author of “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity.” 

But the capital wasn’t “back in its glory,” he said, until reunification in 1990, as homosexuality was as dangerous in the postwar period as it had been under the reign of the Third Reich. Just last week, Parliament voided convictions under an anti-sodomy law sharpened by the Nazis and then preserved by West Germany.  

The much welcomed vote represents another much deserved defeat for the Catholic Church and other denominations that continue to base their beliefs on hatred of others and the embrace of ignorance.  I continue to believe that religion, especially  conservative Christianity and fundamentalist Islam, are net evils in the world.  The world and humankind would be better off if they both ceased to exist.

America's Allies Conduct Intelligence Operations Against Trump

While many Trump voters continue to make apologies and grasp at anything to avoid admitting that they made a grievous mistake in voting for Der Trumpenführer, many of America's allies recognize that not only is the man unfit for office but a danger to world stability.  Trump apologists are whining about "leaks" rather than what the leaks are revealing about possible illegal actions at least and treason in the worse case.  And then there are the Congressional Republicans who for the most part are trying to stifle any independent investigation of potential law breaking and/or treason.  As a result, America's allies meanwhile are running their own intelligence operations and as Newsweek reports are corroborating the illicit communications.  So, no, this is not a plot by Obama hold overs in USA intelligence offices.  Here are highlights from the Newsweek piece:

As part of intelligence operations being conducted against the United States for the last seven months, at least one Western European ally intercepted a series of communications before the inauguration between advisers associated with President Donald Trump and Russian government officials, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The sources said the intercepted communications are not just limited to telephone calls: The foreign agency is also gathering electronic and human source information on Trump’s overseas business partners, at least some of whom the intelligence services now consider to be agents of their respective governments. These operations are being conducted out of concerns that Russia is seeking to manipulate its relationships with Trump administration officials as part of a long-term plan to destabilize the NATO alliance.

Moreover, a Baltic nation is gathering intelligence on officials in the Trump White House and executives with the president’s company, the Trump Organization, out of concern that an American policy shift toward Russia could endanger its sovereignty, according to a third person with direct ties to that nation’s government.

These sources spoke on condition that they not be identified because they were not formally authorized to disclose the information. While Newsweek was told which allied nations intercepted the communications and are gathering intelligence on Trump associates, the sources did so on condition that the countries not be identified out of concern those governments would incur the president’s wrath.

The Western European intelligence operations began in August, after the British government obtained information that people acting on behalf of Russia were in contact with members of the Trump campaign. Those details from the British were widely shared among the NATO allies in Europe. The Baltic nation has been gathering intelligence for at least that long, and has conducted surveillance of executives from the Trump Organization who were traveling in Europe.

These operations reflect a serious breakdown in the long-standing faith in the direction of American policy by some of the country’s most important allies. Worse, the United States is now in a situation that may be unprecedented—where European governments know more about what is going on in the executive branch than any elected American official. To date, the Republican-controlled Congress has declined to conduct hearings to investigate the links between Trump’s overseas business partners and foreign governments, or the activities between Russia and officials in the Trump campaign and administration—the very areas being examined by the intelligence services of at least two American allies.

Some details about Trump’s business partners were passed to the American government months ago. For example, long before the president’s inauguration, German electronic surveillance determined that the father of Trump’s Azerbaijani business partner is a government official who laundered money for the Iranian military; that information was shared with the CIA, according to a European source with direct knowledge of the situation.

Of equal concern to our allies is Trump’s business partner in the Philippines, who is also the special representative to Washington of that country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte. This government official, Jose E.B. Antonio, is the head of Century Properties, which in turn is a partner with the president’s business in the construction of Trump Tower at Century City in Makati, Philippines. According to people with direct knowledge of the situation, a European intelligence service has obtained the contracts and other legal documents in the deal between the Trump Organization and Antonio. That deal has already resulted in large payments to Trump’s business, with millions of dollars more on the way—all coming from an agent of the Philippine president.

These intelligence operations against the United States come as a result of allied concern about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s designs to damage NATO and whether Trump intends to follow a policy path that would embolden Russia. In addition, they are apprehensive about whether a newly strengthened Moscow would use its energy weapon—Western Europe obtains almost 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia—to push aggressive policies with little objection from the Trump White House.

[T]he Baltic nation also launched an investigation by its intelligence service into the relationship between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his longtime personal friend, Igor Sechin, the head of the Kremlin-controlled oil company Rosneft. Sechin and Rosneft are on the blacklist of people and entities designated for sanctions following Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. He was Tillerson’s main business partner when he worked as the chief executive of Exxon Mobil and is a powerful figure in Russia who is both a former member of the FSB (the federal security service that is the primary successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB) and the former head of presidential administration in charge of the security services. 

It is beyond disturbing that our allies are doing what Congressional Republicans are refusing to do: determine if we have traitors in the White House.   

Italy's Senate Approves Same-Sex Civil Unions

In another major defeat for the Roman Catholic Church, the Italian Senate passed a a bill that would put in place civil unions for same sex couples.  While gay adoption provisions were stripped out of the final bill, much to the dissatisfaction of LGBT advocate, the bill does bring Italy finally in line with other developed western nations.  True, it is not marriage equality, but it is progress and a huge defeat for the Catholic Church.  Here are highlights from The Advocate:

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's political gamble paid off today, with his nation's senate voting overwhelmingly to approve a bill to legalize non-religious civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. After being held up for weeks in the country's upper house of parliament due to heated controversy over a provision that would allow for one partner to adopt the biological child of the other, the bill will now head to the lower house—stripped of the adoption clause—where its passage is expected to be easy.

Renzi has made it a personal mission to bring his country into alignment with the rest of Western Europe—Italy is the only major country without any legal recognition or protections for same-sex couples, let alone marriage equality. In an attempt to force the bill's passage, he called a confidence vote in his leadership and his legislative agenda today. Had the motion failed, he would have been forced to resign. The vote was successful, passing by a margin of 173:71, an outcome that Renzi has hailed as "historic." 

Gay rights activists, however, have described the bill as a betrayal, according to the BBC. Renzi had long insisted that the provision for gay adoption remain included. His unwillingness to back down on the issue is why the bill stalled in the senate for so long. However, after Italy's highest court refused yesterday to recognize a gay partner adoption performed in the United States, Renzi decided to move ahead with a version of the motion stripped of the controversial adoption provision. 

Flavio Romani, president of the LGBT rights group Arcigay, told Reuters:

"This text once again does not take into consideration children who need definite laws and protection. The law that has come out of all this is lacking its heart."