One of the headlines I’m seeing quite a bit this morning is former FDA director Scott Gottleib saying we’re “right back where we were.”
That’s not true. We’re far worse off. If we were back where we were, we wouldn’t still be setting new infection records. But we are. It’s not like we’re back where we were; where we were was doing something to keep this mess in check. We were staying home, we were distancing, we were masked.
Now it’s like we didn’t even do any of that, because of these selfish, obnoxious fools who can’t get it through their heads that it’s not “democratic Governors” closing things down, it’s A DEADLY PANDEMIC VIRUS. It is real, it is happening, it is killing people, and our president and his supporters are so completely off the rails they think as long as they stomp their feet and insist this isn’t all happening, it won’t be.
Yes, I said fools. The time for being polite about this has passed.
Worse Than That
We’re not “right back where we were,” because where we were was starting to do things right, and we’re not doing that anymore. Consequently we’re worse off than we were, by far. We’re seeing record numbers of new infections, the death numbers are rising in correlation. And when you take out the places that got hit hard early and clamped down much harder, it’s even worse than it looks.
The simple reality is that we need a relief package NOW. Not a “throw money at them to stop them from rioting” relief package, a comprehensive regular payment to ensure people aren’t dying and losing their homes.
Unfortunately, it is precisely these people who refuse to cooperate that will eventually cause more draconian measures to be taken to enforce masks, social distancing, and the stay-home orders that I’m quite sure are upcoming again. This isn’t going to go away because of political arguments; it’s here until a vaccine is found. I’ve been saying that since day one. It’s not going away just because we want it to. Until a vaccine is found be prepared to stay home.
But The Economy…
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I frankly don’t care much about landlords and mortgage holders at this point. The stock market doesn’t mean anything to me, nor to most of us. That’s low-speed money, it doesn’t really do anything but sit around and be shuffled back and forth between service institutions with no value add. We need money going in to the economy, that currently isn’t, to keep goods and services moving. When they stop they tend to be tough to start up again. We can let the landlords and mortgage holders wait for the moment; that money isn’t going anywhere fast anyway. Right now people need money in their hands, they need to be able to stay the hell home unless they’re essential, if they’re out they need to be covered, protected and protecting. We can work funding for maintenance technicians at rental properties and private property later, it’ll hold for a couple of weeks. Right now, people need money in their hands.
Ignoring this or pretending it’s not really as bad as it seems is killing innocent people. We have played enough games with this nonsense. Your anxiety is just one more reason you should be staying home. If you’re not capable of working in a mask, don’t work. That’s exactly why the unemployment extensions and modifications are in place.
We are at high and growing risk with this virus, and it kills. If you’re not worried about that, that’s on you. But as long as the consequences you reap from that attitude are also mine to bear, you simply don’t have the right to impose that on me and therefore you must either voluntarily stop doing so or be regulated by the government into stopping.
You WILL stop putting other people’s lives at risk. It’s not a question anymore.
The virus doesn’t care if we like it. Doesn’t care that we’re uncomfortable, doesn’t care that we blah blah blah doesn’t care. Doesn’t care about our pretense that we don’t “believe” it. What we believe is not relevant to the decision-making process anymore. Nor is what we “like” or that we’re not “comfortable” with.
Dying now.
Dying.
We don’t argue anymore. We shut up and do what we need to do to stop the dying, while we do our best to improve the science so we can understand how to properly get things rolling again long-term in the worst case scenario, that being that this simply does not go away until we achieve herd immunity. At present understanding of the numbers, this entails a minimum of a few million dead just in the US, and the only real question is how long will it take. This is the current reality.
Sidebar: How To Get Herd Immunity
The idea that speeding up infection rates will somehow provide a solution as we magically get to herd immunity without losing a substantial part of the population is nuts. The way you get to herd immunity is when some majority percentage of the population has been exposed to the virus, and it has run its course in them. In the current best case scenario that calculates to about 2 and a quarter million Americans dead in the next fairly short period – year to two years. It means permanent regulation about social distancing, masking, etc. It means nobody will ever be safe and every year a few thousand or hundred thousand people will die of this until a vaccine is developed, people who would not have died otherwise.
That is what people who keep talking about “herd immunity” and “only one percent” and so forth are saying. They are literally saying out loud that they’re willing for a few million people to die for no reason beyond their personal comfort and convenience. Over a period of decades the death rate will slow, but there’s not enough data to predict reliably by how much until, literally, everyone who is not immune to this disease has caught it and either lived or died….and at this point scientists aren’t even certain that immunity is permanent, as there have been multiple reports of reinfection but unfortunately few with any great reliability. One prominent and respected immunologist, Danny Altmann of Imperial College, London, recently characterized immunity to Covid-19 as “fragile” and “short-lived.” So it may well be that there is no vaccine, or that any vaccine would have to be administered on an ongoing basis, probably with more frequency than the flu vaccine.
Do keep in mind that for those who are effected by coronavirus-related disease, “lived” is a somewhat relative statement. This disease does some pretty horrible things to the body, the full scope of which is not yet known, but we have seen what appear to be permanent and debilitating injuries to the lungs and heart, in addition to neurological disorders that may or may not be transient.
Those relying on “herd immunity” arguments are basically saying let’s hurry up and have all those people die so we can be done with this, and we don’t even know if being “done with this” is a thing yet. The argument is sociopathic insanity and absolutely represents a callous disregard for other human lives.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled article.
Back To The Economy
Congress are going to have to find what little remains of their souls and get a relief package through that MEANS SOMETHING. Canada’s model appears to be pretty successful, and other nations are doing well under similar arrangements. Essentially a UBI will be put in place for the duration. My friend Ellis, who teaches macroeconomics, has been saying for years that we would be heading that direction soon regardless. He didn’t necessarily know it would be due to Covid, but he knew we were going to end up in a UBI situation regardless of whether we tried to or wanted to or not. The pandemic just pushes us a great deal harder in that direction and makes the solutions more clear and clearly necessary.
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The pandemic creates a special circumstance window where you can get away with UBI and no job guarantee for a period – a year or so – but that’s not a sustainable model; you have to have one for other to work. We shouldn’t do it at all but we don’t have time to wait for the job guarantee foot-draggers to catch up before we start handing UBI payments. It’s really no exception to the rules or anything, it’s just that we can agree to take on a bit of a long-term hit to keep ourselves alive in the short term.
However, that also means we need to be much more ethical and focused on what that long-term hit will look like, because it won’t be us paying for it. It’ll be our kids and theirs.
You will note that this is the end of this ridiculous “social Darwinism” / “work ethic” approach to questions of employment, compensation, and so forth; this outrageous notion that a human being must do more than simply be human before they “deserve” the benefits of their humanity. Even our best politicians continue to fall for that, if for no other reason than that they know they’re playing to the working poor, who resent the non-working poor oftentimes more than the wealthy do.
(This is a key reason that the Powers That Be, the ownership class, are dragging their feet; we’re going to realize soon that we could have been doing all of this a long time ago, and the only reason we didn’t is that someone wanted to make a dollar on it first.)
The people making the dollars from it definitely don’t want us to notice that, and you’re absolutely right to be angry about it.
But we’re so wrapped up in old-style thinking, even proto-populist Sanders plays these linguistic games, right? “No working American should have to choose between rent and food.”
Excuse me, no, that’s the old way. The new way is no HUMAN BEING should have to make that choice, who cares if they’re “working” or “American?” Why does NOT being either one or both of those things disqualify a human being from having their basic needs met? That’s just wrong, stupid, and insane.
We have the capacity to do it.
So why aren’t we?
Universal Morality Strikes Again
Well, we’re not doing it so we can feel like we’re better than someone, that’s why. So we can continue to maintain a permanent slave class in the so-called “third world” to provide us with enough cheap electronics to stay anesthetized to our own participation in the oppression of others.
Isn’t that gross?
Isn’t it time we stopped doing sick things like that to each other and started working on making sure everyone’s got a fair shot at life? Isn’t now the time to stop thinking of other human beings as expendable?
I think it is, and so do a whole bunch of other folks, and that’s the way we’re going to go whether the oligarchs and their lackeys like it or not. Any other direction violates the universal morality. So that is the direction we will go. We can get there the easy way, or the hard way. Right now the oligarchy is still trying to make it the hard way – so hard that we give up.
But we don’t give up and we won’t give up because survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality, and when we find we are violating that morality, we will, even unconsciously, act to end that violation as quickly and effectively as possible.
Solutions We Can’t Avoid
The reality that we’re being directed away from is simply this: capitalism as it is practiced in the United States and some other nations is not merely unsustainable; it is incompatible with the universal ethic. It ensures a permanent underclass just like any other top-down economic system; after all, if there is a top there must also be a bottom. As long as that “underclass,” that “bottom,” is beneath the level of not mere survival but dignity and opportunity, it is too low for the species to survive and propagate. Therefore it violates the universal ethic.
Thus, the human task before us is to ensure the bottom is high enough that any person who can be capable of it has every possible chance to be their best at whatever they choose to do with their lives.
That is the only real solution to any of this. We have to live up to our rhetoric, and we have to start right this minute, and everyone has to participate.
If we were doing that, this pandemic wouldn’t be hitting us so much harder than it is the rest of the world, we wouldn’t have these egregious abuses of power that drive people into the streets in protest, we wouldn’t be building statues to traitors, rapists, and murderers. We wouldn’t have a nation of maleducated sociopaths ready to be open fascists, walking around exerting offensive violence when there’s no reasoned or moral basis for their demands to be met.
Then those same fascists turn around and claim that those who exert defensive violence are doing the same thing, because they’re gaslighting manipulative sociopaths and they think everyone else is stupid enough to fall for that deliberate, willful, and ultimately artificial stupidity.
For far too long, they’ve been right.
This cycle has to end, and it has to end today. If it doesn’t end today then it has to end every today until it ends for tomorrow too.
None of us are free until all of us are free.
