The Death of Electoral Politics in the United States of America - Part I

 

THE SICK JOKE of BIDEN VS. TRUMP

Well, it's gonna be Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. How utterly ridiculous. Back in 2016 I'd said that if I was a US-American citizen and my choice was between Trump or Hillary Clinton, my answer would have been "Neither." To this day I maintain that H. R. Clinton's threat to shoot Russia planes out of the skies over Syria was batshit lunacy. Trump was/is awful. Hillary was awful.

The Left should fight back against whomever of these monsters win. But the Left can't fight. But at least the Left shouldn't vote for their own oppression.

Many US-Americans agreed with me. Hillary won the popular vote. But enough Democratic voters stayed home, joining the roughly 50% who don't bother to vote ever, that Trump squeaked-out an Electoral College victory with his rat-shit supporters, Republican gerrymandering and electoral fraud.

And Trump, being Trump (which is to say a grifting, bloated, combed-over, sprayed-orange, rapist, racist travesty of a human being) has gone on to be remarkably stupid, incompetent, vile and destructive as anyone's worst fears. At the same time though, US-Americans' material living standards haven't altered in appreciable ways from the Obama years. (Thanks to Trump's budget-busting tax-cuts, things were going to get worse eventually, as the oligarchy would demand spending cuts on social services to make up for the revenue lost with.)

The Hillary Clinton/DLC-wing of the Democratic Party responded to her humiliating loss by blaming it on Bernie Sanders (which reveals that Hillary can add "ingrate" to her list of character flaws), progressive voters (who she had deliberately shat upon) and, most laughably, the Russia of Vladimir Putin. Providing yet more evidence for why she was a terrible candidate, Hillary managed to miss or ignore the real reasons for her loss (her terrible record and policies and Republican cheating) for imaginary ones.

There were encouraging signs that the most energetic, hopeful segments of the party's base were mobilizing and coming up with candidates and policies that spoke to the people left behind by the Democratic leadership. This leadership was in thrall to the billionaire donor class and pursued policies that only advanced the interests of the oligarchs first and foremost. Only as an afterthought did the Democratic leadership speak of policies to address the needs of the increasingly put-upon majority. And then the pursued only such remedial policies as would not negatively impact the oligarchs.

Canada's Half-Assed Response to COVID-19

Compared to the clusterfuck going on south of our border, Canadians are once again getting smug about our superiority to those "stupid Americans." I wish that we wouldn't do that. Certainly the US political system produces more than its fair share of arrogant stupidity than most other countries, but Canadians are fast learners. So many people thought Rob Ford was harmless fun. He wasn't. He was an international disgrace and a terrible administrator. stephen harper is still thought of by a frighteningly large segment of our population (include our "elite" commentators) as some sort of "elder statesman" rather than the anti-democratic, racist, crooked, cowardly bully, human train wreak that he was. Enough of us in Ontario voted for Doug Ford to give that blustering imbecile a majority. And Jason Kenney's United Cretin Party of Alberta was also given a majority and just look at the insanity. (I'll say now that Kenney's response to COVID-19 hasn't been half-assed. It's been full-on psychopathic.)

It's high time that we in Canada took a long, hard look in the mirror at ALL of the political parties (Conservative, Liberal, NDP) that we have all allowed to run-down our healthcare system at both the provincial and federal levels. We have allowed hospital beds per capita to decline. Linda McQuaig reminds us that Canada once had a world renowned, publicly owned and operated laboratory that developed cutting-edge vaccines which we privatized for a song. Shit-head Doug Ford is having to reconcile his continued cuts to public healthcare ($1 billion over 10 years to Toronto alone) with his current acknowledgement of that same system's vital importance for preventing thousands of excess deaths due to this pandemic.

Listen folks, it's like this: Stuff costs money! Sure, for a country of 37-million people, the price-tag for top-of-the-line healthcare is going to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. (Thankfully, our annual GDP is around $1.5 TRILLION.) That's just reality. And privatizing it isn't going to make it cheaper. Thanks to those corrupt psychopaths in the USA we have an actually existing private comparison which shows that private healthcare is more expensive. It's long past time for us to stop being polite to these right-wing scum who are constantly slashing our healthcare system so that their oligarchic paymasters can have more money to hoard in illegal offshore accounts, or (worse) to profit from privatization, price-gouging us our deaths.

Either these people are astonishingly ignorant and incapable of grasping the consequences of their actions or they simply don't care. Regardless, it's unacceptable.

So, we have to spend money. And to that we have to tax. We have to restore taxation levels on the wealthy to 1970s levels and ignore their self-interested whining. We have cut their taxes for forty goddamned years and we have gotten less than nothing for it.

But even before we start taxing these assholes, we must cease and desist from wasting scarce public revenues on propping up corporate parasites in fossil fuels and finance. It's time to let the private owners of Canada's oil patch (both foreign and domestic) go bust. Nobody put a fucking gun to their heads and made them invest in a boom-and-bust resource industry. They already want billions in subsidies to develop and move their money-losing sludge. They already intend to leave us with the trillion-dollar clean-up bill for their industry. Why in the sweet name of Christ do our politicians think there is anything to be gained by ensuring that these petulant dip-shits need are kept whole during this crisis?

Speaking of rich assholes who expect to keep making money while everyone else suffers losses, as I said previously, Canada's banks, which have collectively had profits of over $40 billion annually since 2017 (at least). At the moment, these precious darlings are planning on letting mortgage payers defer payments for the next few months while charging interest the whole time and expecting everything to be paid-up in full at the end of that time. And that's when they can't dick around and nickel and dime their customers to try to get as much as they can right now. NO. A thousand times NO. Certainly a country doesn't want its banking sector to suffer loss after loss, whether through bad loans or bad investments. But that is why we have deposit insurance. We also don't want thousands, tens of thousands, of people to lose their homes. We also don't want thousands of small businesses to go under. Canada should take steps now to FORCE our banks to accept a moratorium on all debt obligations at a time when people can't pay because they can't work. At the same time, it should not be beyond our capabilities to protect our banks from speculators who would take such a policy of debt forgiveness as an opportunity to attack. I'm well aware that the default mode for all our politicians is to grovel and placate our titans of finance. But the damage that will be the inevitable result of that sycophancy will be so enormous that the time to stop throwing good billions after bad is NOW.

As for the financial markets themselves? The speculating and gambling in secondary financial markets? Let them crash. It will have negligible impact on the real economy. Secondary trading on the TSE and elsewhere is just like a bunch of boys swapping trading cards back and forth. There is very little leakage from this sector to the rest of the economy, and what leakage there is can often be damaging (such as real-estate speculation). These people buy luxury homes and cars, sometimes pricey artworks, other luxury goods, ... that's about it. What they give away in charity is less than what they'd have to pay in taxes. For the most part, they're parasites killing the host economy. Let them fail.

Once they're gone, Canada's government could implement a form of "Quantitative Easing" or "QE" for ordinary Canadians. Especially with regards to student loans. And this would be an ideal time to do it since the lack of spending opportunities will act as a drag on any (minuscule) inflationary pressures.

But that's enough macro-policy. Time to deal with the nitty-gritty of the Covid-19 crisis itself. I wrote about how to deal with the crisis already in my last post. Here's the quick and dirty:

1. Suspend all rental and mortgage payments, effective immediately, for the next two months (at least.) 
2. Provide $2,000 to every adult for food and basic necessities.  
3. Implement war-time level taxation on the wealthy to pay for everything during this crisis
4. Let the private-sector oil industry collapse and buy it up afterwards.
5. Order the production of thousands of new ventilators and subsidize the re-tooling necessary for every manufacturer with the capability of doing so.
6. Do the same thing with testing capacity. Implement total lock-downs in sections of the country where teams can test everyone within a 24-hour period.
7. Prevent unnecessary travel between cities and towns.
8. Devote all available resources to the production of masks, gloves, surgical gowns, etc., for hospitals and clinics dealing with the virus.
9. Train people to perform the simpler tasks required to deal with the virus. (This includes administering tests/conducting the tests/scrubbing down hospitals/emergency clinics/etc.)

I've already repeated some of these things here today. I'll add to that that we should have the provinces take over all care for the elderly. Any provinces legitimately without the resources to do this should enter into contracts with a federal agency in the same way that some provinces employ the RCMP for policing. It's criminal the way we treat our elderly and the people who care for them. All workers in retirement homes and nursing homes should immediately become full-time, unionized employees. Their spouses doing non-essential work should be subsidized to stay at home so as not to expose these workers and their clients to this deadly virus.

Here's a good summary of how Canada botched its initial response to the crisis. Was this laziness or stupidity? No. This was just part of our elite culture of wishful thinking and decades of zero-consequences for appalling mistakes. They hoped that somehow you could have continued repatriation of Canadians and travel of foreigners into Canada from virus hot spots and that magically, none of these individuals would have breathed in a microscopic airborne virus, and that they wouldn't be breathing out said virus after they got here.  Such magical thinking was predicated on the need to prevent injury to the economy and a denial of the need to mobilize the country's resources (include taxation of the wealthy) that acknowledging reality would make inevitable.

Chowdhury said the government took too long to realize how significant the issue was and took too long to call out the severity of the problem.

"I always feel like we're behind the curve," he said in an interview.

Chowdhury concedes that hindsight is 20-20 and it's easier to see mistakes in retrospect, but he points to a list of other countries — South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand — that have fared relatively well to show that other governments, with the same evidence in hand, were quicker to react and did so more decisively.

And they did so on a number of fronts: tighter borders, early and prolific testing and mandatory quarantines. Jurisdictions like Taiwan also immediately put the production of medical supplies, such as masks, into overdrive.

"Like everything when it comes to this pandemic, it's the people and leaders who moved early that made the difference," Chowdhury said.

In January, Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said there would be cases of COVID-19, but "it's going to be rare."

All through January and well into February, Health Minister Patty Hajdu and other federal ministers reassured Canadians that the risk of getting the coronavirus in Canada was low, even after the first few cases popped up in the country.

With regards to testing, Canada is still treating it as something that is only done for people showing up in emergency rooms with respiratory problems, or people from China with same, and there has been very little coordination of the development of resources needed to test everybody. The only was for society to return to some semblance of normalcy is to test EVERYONE. Ontario managed to ramp-up testing capability but then kept the criteria for testing high. We're only belatedly rectifying that error.

I'm reading some encouraging things about Canada's (belated) response to shortages of medical equipment and protective garb. It's not at that link, but earlier in the week I read [somewhere] about how these companies were already negotiating with subcontractors to dramatically expand productive capabilities to produce ventilators. But Linda McQuaig argues that things could be going much faster and on a larger scale if our politicians get out of the mindset that the public sector is inherently useless and incompetent. We were capable of great feats of development and productivity in World War Two and we're capable of doing so again:

Of course, ventilators are suddenly in short supply due to the pandemic and ensuring an adequate supply for Canadian needs seems like an almost impossible feat.

In fact, it pales in comparison with the amazing production feats performed by Canadian industry during the Second World War—feats that we're still capable of today, if our leaders would overcome their reluctance to take charge of needed industrial production.

In 1940, when British forces had to make an emergency evacuation by sea from Dunkirk, they left behind virtually the entire British fleet of military vehicles. Almost defenceless, Britain turned to Canada to help it replace the 75,000 military vehicles it had abandoned in France.
Canada immediately stepped up to the plate—and then some.

In a highly co-ordinated effort, Ottawa created—almost from scratch—a vast industrial base that produced 800,000 military transport vehicles and 50,000 tanks, not to mention tons of other military supplies throughout the war.

This enormous industrial mobilization, overseen by wartime government production czar C.D. Howe, was enabled through legislation that gave Ottawa wide-ranging powers to compel manufacturers to produce war material.

Also central to Canada's massive mobilization was the creation of 28 Crown corporations, with a workforce of 229,000, dedicated to manufacturing war products, according to University of Toronto's Sandford Borins.

Again, from my readings on the economies of World War Two, I'm aware that none of this was instantaneous. Read reviews of the best work on the USA's defense industry/industrial capacity in WW2, Maury Klein's A Call To Arms.

How To Respond to the Coronavirus

I've kept it a pretty good secret as a blogger up til now, but it's time to throw off the mask and reveal that I'm actually an expert in public health and disease control.* That's how I make my living in meat-space. As such, I think it imperative that I share my knowledge and wisdom with my readers so that they can effectively demand the proper response from their elected officials.

1. Suspend all rental and mortgage payments, effective immediately, for the next two months (at least.) This includes interest payments on mortgages. The banks have had annual profits in excess of $40 BILLION for YEARS now. Why should they expect to profit from this crisis while everyone else is expected to take a loss?

2. Provide $2,000 to every adult for food and basic necessities. (Stop talking about "keeping the economy moving or getting the economy moving." People aren't out there buying shit because they're supposed to be staying at home!)

3. Implement war-time level taxation on the wealthy to pay for everything during this crisis. The wealthy have, for years, had more money than they knew what to productively do with. Don't place the burden for paying for this crisis on the backs of ordinary Canadians.

4. Let the private-sector oil industry collapse and buy it up afterwards. We already know that they're leaving us the bill for the BILLIONS in cleaning up after them. Why shovel billions into their bank accounts just to allow them to continue to fleece us?

5. Order the production of thousands of new ventilators and subsidize the re-tooling necessary for every manufacturer with the capability of doing so.

6. Do the same thing with testing capacity. Implement total lock-downs in sections of the country where teams can test everyone within a 24-hour period. Create the capacity to deliver the results of these tests as quickly as possible. Everyone who tests negative can return to voluntary social distancing.

7. Prevent unnecessary travel between cities and towns.

8. Devote all available resources to the production of masks, gloves, surgical gowns, etc., for hospitals and clinics dealing with the virus.

9. Train people to perform the simpler tasks required to deal with the virus. (This includes administering tests/conducting the tests/scrubbing down hospitals/emergency clinics/etc.)

That's all I can think of for now.

*(Of course I'm not.)

Musings on "Horseshoe Theory"

 "Horseshoe Theory" - "also known as the horseshoe effect, in political science is a claim that the far-left and far-right are more similar to each other in essentials than either is to the political center.^{[note 1]}
It was formulated by the French post-postmodernist philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye in 1996,^[2] but similar ideas existed previously.^[3] Faye believed that the extremes of the political spectrum both represented totalitarianism of different kinds; this meant that the political spectrum should not be described as a linear bar with the two ends representing the far-left and right being ideologically the furthest apart from each other, but as a horseshoe in which the two ends are closer to each other than to the center."

You can read the rest of that lengthy quote from rationalwiki.org, to find about the many variations and critiques of the concept. But right now I just want to talk about how centrist US Democrats have been using the theory and how it applies to them.

Centrist Democrats have been saying that "alt.right" (read: "fascists") and "leftist extremists" (read: "purity ponies") have essentially united in a "Red-Brown Alliance" that only reveals both groups' overall intellectual barrenness and uselessness.

This is, for the most part, stupid. The current Democratic Party elites are vermin. They're brazen shills for a thoroughly corrupt capitalist oligarchy who betray their supporters and the US-American people over and over again. Who willingly sacrifice the well-being of ordinary people for the continued super-profits of billionaire criminals. Of course they're going to be criticized!!

They are criticized on the right by common, mainstream Republicans, who vote the way they do out of a lazy adherence to tradition and devotion to a vague set of values about "hard work" and "freedom" and "family values." Some of their criticisms come from more hardcore Republicans. The mess of delusion and hypocrisy known as the "Tea Party." These folks are represented by the character of "Crazy Uncle Liberty" who spouts off their obnoxious, ignorant, hypocritical ravings online, via email, and at the dinner table. And, finally, there is the "alt.right." This is a tribe of openly racist, violently anti-democratic, pseudo-intellectual shitheads that has grown in numbers as neo-liberalism (pushed by both mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians) continues to wreak havoc among the population.

Harsh economic times created by elite corruption inevitably turns segments of the population towards extremist theories. "The center cannot hold." In the case of the "alt.right" their twisted, malformed minds cause them to disregard the facts and instead concoct crackpot theories which create scapegoats to blame for their problems and subsequently attack. Some of these dangerous idiots supported Donald Trump against the Republican establishment due to his being openly racist and for his stated opposition to the Washington Consensus of "free trade" ("globalism") and imperialist wars.

What to say? Do supporters of the current Democratic Party leadership deny the reality of oligarchic corruption? Do they pretend that Obama did not form his Cabinet from a list of names provided by Goldman Sachs? Do they deny that Hillary Clinton accepted $3 million dollars to give a series of speeches to Wall Street titans (or that her and her husband's combined haul from "speaking fees" from the time of his leaving the presidency to the announcement of her 2016 presidential campaign) was $153 million?

There's a lot to criticize the Democratic leadership for. Therefore it's not surprising that their critics on the right and the far-right might occasionally have legitimate things to say when they criticize them, however distorted by partisan blindness and hypocrisy, or delusion, or racist insanity.

So, because there's a lot to criticize, the right-wing occasionally shares some of them with people to the left of the Democratic leadership. And, on the left, moderates who supported Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will share the odd critique of the Democratic leadership with authoritarian, racist (usually anti-Semitic) denizens of the far-left. (I'd get a link to explain far-left anti-Semitism, but I'd have to wade through page after page of cynical right-wing drivel about how Hitler was a socialist, or cynical Zionist drivel about how criticizing Israeli barbarism is anti-Semitic.) Essentially, the left-wing anti-Semitism arises out of the fact that there was a Jewish presence in international finance (due to European Christendom's once held belief that loaning money at interest was prohibited) and using that to spew nonsense about how the entire world is run by the Rothschild family.

And here we go: Supporters of the current Democratic Party leadership (that is, supporters of people like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the Clintons, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Neera Tanden, the Cuomos, Joe Biden) actually believe that (in their version of the "horseshoe theory") alt.right fascists are the right-wing equivalent of Bernie Sanders supporters! That's right! Supporters of a long-time Vermont Senator who self-describes ad "Independent" but generally caucuses with the Democrats, and who is trying to campaign openly for the party's presidential nomination on a platform of FDR-LBJ social welfare programs, are the equivalent with far-right Nazis!

And why is that? Why! Because they both criticize the Democratic Party leadership! (Who are supposedly above criticism.) Do progressives say that the Democratic Party is corrupt? Well, so do Trump supporters! You see? They're exactly the same!

Obviously this is a false equivalence. And I don't like to engage in false equivalencies. So, I'm not going to say that radical-centrist Democrats are the equivalent of Donald Trump supporters or alt.right nazis. I do, however, notice that mainstream Democrats share Donald Trump's antipathy to Venezuela's Bolivarian government. And they both share the asinine belief that Bolivia's Morales and his Indigeneous supporters are to blame for the racist coup that overthrew Morales' government because they got too uppity. And they both like to use election fraud to defeat their opponents. Don't they both support the unjust spying and civil liberties-busting powers of the surveillance state? And they both are slavish devotees of their respective bullshit propaganda outlets. And they both are devoted to regime change in Syria in favour of Jihaadist nutbars taking over the country and plunging it into chaos.

And both centrist Dems who support Joe Biden and Trump supporters appear unembarrassed about their devotion to disgusting travesties of human beings. Trump supporters swoon over their lazy, stupid, fat, yellow-haired combed over, spray-tanned, incoherent, racist, mushroom penis, rapist creep who openly lusts after his own daughter, serial fraudster, lying dipshit. And Biden supporters see nothing to question about their own excitement over a senile, rapist, racist who fabricates his Civil Rights activism, war-monger, authoritarian, corrupt, lazy, and stupid, ignorant, plagiarizing, scumbag.

And, finally, from my recent dealings with a shit-headed commenter, ... both right-wing trolls and Democratic trolls share an inability to construct an argument and so revert to puerile attempts at goading and insults.

The Poison of Capitalism

The point of this post is that our forty-year infatuation with neo-liberalism and financialization has made us a weaker, sicker society, with a hollowed-out economy and an inability to respond to predictable and inevitable crises. Also, it seems as if the capitalist ruling class has become so used to being pampered, and being held unaccountable for their crimes, their lies, and their hypocrisy, that they are responding to this current pandemic with such brazen selfishness and inhumanity that [even I] think they are going to provoke a reckoning when all this is over.

Around about 1980, neo-liberalism was promoted as the answer to the "failure" of the pseudo-Keynesianism that western governments had adopted following the policy lessons of the Great Depression and World War Two. Neo-liberalism includes "Free Trade" (re: "investors' rights") policies that allow for the exporting of jobs to countries with cheaper labour and less worker rights. It allows for the movement of capital but NOT for the movement of labour.

It allows for the lowering of taxes on the wealthy and corporations. who were wrongly believed would invest this returned income into job creation. Despite there being little evidence for this, western governments (including Canadian federal and provincial ones) offer up new revenue-busting tax cuts to the wealthy year after year. All that has been achieved is revenue shortfalls that have led to to cuts in public services, including healthcare and education, and increased income and wealth inequality as the rich hoard their money in the financial markets and illegal offshore accounts, and the vast majority are forced to pay more (for, say, healthcare and education) from lower incomes due to de-unionization and the loss of jobs in manufacturing and the public sector.

De-unionization is one aspect of another facet of neo-liberalism, which is de-regulation. Regulations that force businesses to protect workers' physical and mental health cost money. Removing them would (again) give business more money to invest in glorious job-creating growth. Regulations protecting the environment cost money. Get rid of them. Laws preventing monopolies and price-gouging and fraud limit corporate incomes. Eliminate them. De-regulation will allow "job-creators" to have more money to "create jobs" and we will all have wonderful income-creating opportunities. Not, mind you, steady jobs: Because a steady job is anathema to neo-liberalism. We'll all have "gigs" and "side hustles" in the "knowledge economy." It will be an exciting life of flitting from one exciting, well-paying challenge to the next. (Of course this is all garbage.)

Alberta's fundamentalist dullard/tormented closet-case premier, Jason Kenney, has made the remarkable achievement of being the epitome of this bankrupt ideology. And the real-world outcomes of these policies reveals its bankruptcies.

Let's state it plainly; if these policies of neo-liberalism really worked, then forty years of pursuing them should have brought us to a wonderland of wealth and productivity. But, as we see now, the opposite is what we see before us.

And one of the things we see before us is our governments' inept responses to the COVID-19 crisis. In Canada we see billions going to bail-out the owners of oil companies while we simultaneously realize that our healthcare system has been starved to the point of inadequacy to deal with this pandemic. We also see millions of Canadians incapable of being able to afford losing a single pay-period. Canadians have been unable to save. NOT because we're such spendthrifts, but because living expenses (education, housing, transportation, etc.) have soared year after year.

Don't take my word for it. Here's Taylor Scollon from "The Passage" to tell us all about it in "The Coronairus Is About To Expose Just How Broken Our Welfare State Really Is."

At the end of a dark week, let’s begin with that most Canadian refrain of positivity: it could be worse, at least we aren’t the Americans. There are more confirmed cases of COVID-19 south of the border (at least for now), and if you do get sick there you can expect to spend thousands of dollars just to get tested. And don’t even contemplate the cost of care if you’re one of the millions of Americans without adequate health insurance. We can find some solace in the fact that, for us, testing and treatment will be free. 

Aside from that there is not much good news. After all, we share a border with the Americans, and disease doesn’t respect borders. But more importantly, after decades of erosion and cuts, our own welfare state can barely get us through normal times, let alone a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic is finally forcing all of us to confront that harsh truth.

Scallon points out the inability of many workers to afford quarantine or to qualify for the benefits that might allow them to survive:

we can expect 11 million people to enter self-quarantine for at least two weeks, many of them in the next few months. I fear people have not fully grasped the implications of this.

Immediately, most of those 11 million people will be unable to work. ... most of those quarantined will face enormous challenges hanging on to their income.
The majority will not have employer-sponsored paid sick leave. Only 42 per cent of workers in Canada enjoy this benefit. The remaining 58 per cent will be mostly left to fend for themselves. Sick leave rules vary by province, but only Quebec and PEI guarantee any paid sick leave to workers (two days in Quebec, and one day in PEI after you have been with the employer for five years). Premier Doug Ford’s Ontario government scrapped paid sick leave in 2018. ...

...Those who are eligible can receive a maximum of $573 per week for up to 15 weeks. If you live in any urban region of the country, you know this is barely enough to cover rent on a studio apartment let alone groceries.

Scallon continues with the state of our healthcare system:

Distressingly, those with mild infections contending with financial strain may be the lucky ones.  After decades of cuts and neglect, the public healthcare system we are so proud of does not appear equipped to handle the pressure that will soon be placed upon it. While we have yet to see how the stresses of COVID-19 impact us, we can look at what other countries have experienced and extrapolate based on their readiness.

Our caseload now is low: only 152 cases (as of publication on March 13). But a number of epidemiological studies focused on the Chinese experience found that cases doubled every six days. If this holds true for Canada, we would expect to reach around 39,000 cases by the end of April and 300,000 by mid-May.
...

Unfortunately, decades of cuts have left our healthcare system less prepared to handle an outbreak like this. While China has 4.3 hospital beds per 1000 people and Italy has 3.7 beds per 1000 people, Canada has only 2.5 beds per 1000 people — or 92,462 beds in total. This represents a decrease of 32 per cent from our 2000 level of 3.7 beds per 1000 people. We also have one of the highest hospital bed occupancy rates in the world at 91.6 per cent, behind only Israel and Ireland. This means that under normal circumstances, our healthcare system has around 7,776 hospital beds available.
...

Finally, what about the unknown numbers of homeless in Canada? Poor people gravitate to larger cities in search of work and/or government services. But skyrocketing housing costs and the increasing uncertainty of jobs and the persistent stagnation of wages, have all contributed to a rising homelessness. And at the same time, neo-liberal austerity has made being homeless more dangerous and unhealthy:

Without tenant protections and a shelter system already well beyond capacity, people who fall behind on their rent can be evicted and tossed to the street with nowhere to go. Self-quarantine will not be an option for them, or for the 35,000 Canadians who are homeless on any given night.

Everything I've been saying at this blog for years, and which analysis is based upon what many more rigorous and original thinkers have been saying for decades:

It’s important to remember that all of these problems caused by our totally inadequate welfare state are experienced every day by millions of Canadians. It didn’t take COVID-19 to deny people the medication they need to survive, or push more and more people into gig jobs that pay next to nothing, or erode healthcare funding to the point people are regularly treated in the hallway.
For decades our political class told us we need to “cutback”, “trim the fat”, “find efficiencies”, and “sell-off underperforming assets”. They turned our welfare state into a sad joke. Now the bill is coming due, and I fear we are all about to pay for it dearly.

Which now brings us to the sociopathic responses of the US-American and Canadian governments. Justin Trudeau plans on spending $25 billion to shore-up a cratering economy. The 2008 Recession ended up costing Canada around $100 billion just so the economy wouldn't fall into recession. (At least we don't have the total-idiot Conservatives in power. Jason Kenney has responded to Alberta's economic collapse by soiling his diaper and shrieking. In 2008 we had the simpleton Jim Flaherty proposing austerity in the face of calamity. Months previously the imbecile had been forecasting surpluses as far as the eye could see.) Liberals have always been the more reality-based managers of capitalism when compared to their more extremist brethren in the "conservative" parties. "Conservative" politicians can say any fool thing that comes into their heads, fanatically adhere to ruinous tax-cuts and severe austerity for the poor, and so long as they abuse the right scapegoats for their low-information voting base they can continue to be officially respectable.

But, Jason Kirby in Maclean's points out that, once again, Canada's oligarchs and political servants are expecting ordinary Canadian households to shoulder the burden of keeping the Canadian economy afloat. In the 2008 Financial Crisis, Canada's banks got the Canada Mortgage & Housing Corporation (CMHC) to purchase $69 billion in assets and the Bank of Canada to provide billions more in loans to keep them afloat. Canada wasn't hit as hard as Wall Street was because we did not have the same insanely corrupt derivatives market that they did.

But during 2008-2009 (and in housing, up to this very day) Canadians continued to spend, despite generally high unemployment during the crisis and despite a higher average household debt than US households. Something I've remarked upon several times over the years at this blog; The same economic geniuses who warn us about our high debt levels and bemoan our "economic illiteracy" simultaneously exhort us to keep spending to keep the economy moving.

And now, Kirby says:

Instead, with Canada’s economy already more dependent on indebted households than at any time since at least the 1960s, and with the economy facing headwinds from the recent rail blockades and uncertainty over the spread of coronavirus, the hope is that cheap money will keep consumers spending and that households can bail out the economy yet again.
That’s not exactly how Poloz has framed the bank’s rate cut, of course. In his speech the day after the rate announcement Poloz said the goal of the cut was to preserve confidence on the part of consumers and businesses in the wake of steep stock market declines, even if a decade of low rates has done little to spur businesses to invest. But he did warn that the plunge in oil prices to their lowest level since 2016 could spread throughout the rest of the economy as those directly affected “spend less money on everything.”
“The downside risks to the economy today are more than sufficient to outweigh our continuing concern about financial vulnerabilities,” he said, using central banker speak for the state of Canada’s overextended households and the risk they pose to the financial system. He also brushed away concerns that Canadians in some real estate markets will do what they have done every other time rates have been cut — drive expectations of home prices higher and stretch their finances dangerously thin to avoid missing out on the gains. “Declining consumer confidence would naturally lead to reduced activity in the housing market,” he said in his speech. “In this context, lower interest rates will actually help to stabilize the housing market, rather than contribute to froth.”

There are real-world consequences to such blindness and stupidity. This is really happening folks! It really is the case that our leaders expect us to prop-up the economy with money that we don't have. It's as simple (and insane) as that.

But not only are we expected to ignore the ways that they've impoverished us while still expecting us to be happy consumers; we're also supposed to bail them out with scarce public resources while our hospitals go begging during an international pandemic! The goddamned fucking fossil fuels industry, despite having had decades of high profits (in the past) and having paid absurdly low royalties to Alberta and Saskatchewan, and despite having been subsidized with billions of public dollars ever year, and despite their reneging on their obligations to clean up after themselves, ... these corporate titans stand their with their hands out, pathetically mewling that they'll go under if we don't give them billions more, right now. And of course the Liberals are more than happy to accommodate them. (And we're supposed to be grateful that they're not as enormously happy that the detestable Conservatives would have been.)

And jeeziz-fucking-christ! Canada's fucking banks! Our giant, super-profitable, coddled, barely regulated banks! Listen you stupid assholes; the business shut-downs and self-isolation that are the inevitable consequences of this pandemic mean that MILLIONS of Canadians CANNOT WORK and therefore CANNOT GET PAID! To date, the stupid Liberals, led ostensibly by the airhead Justin Trudeau have not implemented a moratorium on mortgages or rents during this time when people CANNOT WORK and therefore CANNOT GET PAID. Instead:

As part of the government's pledge to help Canadians suffering financially due to COVID-19, Finance Minister Bill Morneau asked the heads of Canada's big banks to allow people to defer mortgage payments for up to six months.

In other words, Morneau is asking the banks to voluntarily do the decent and sane thing. Morneau is possibly not stupid enough to think that Canada's bankers can be decent, sane human beings. He probably knows damn well that Canada's bankers will behave just as abominably as they always have. From the same article:

The banks responded by issuing a statement saying they "have made a commitment to work with personal and small business banking customers on a case-by-case basis to provide flexible solutions to help them manage through challenges such as pay disruption due to COVID-19; child-care disruption due to school closures; or those facing illness from COVID-19."

This is public relations talk which means: "We have no intention of doing the sane and decent thing. We want the money! Give us the money! I don't care what you have to do to get it! Give us the money! Can't work? Fuck you! Pay me! Sick in the hospital? Fuck you! Pay me!"

Why the fuck go through all the work of going through mortgage relief on a "case-by-case" basis when you already know that across the board, PEOPLE CAN'T PAY BECAUSE PEOPLE CAN'T WORK BECAUSE OF THE PANDEMIC???????!!!!!!?????

It would be incredibly time-consuming and expensive to review tens of thousands of cases of people needing temporary relief from impending mortgages due to the pandemic. To argue something as stupid as what the banks are arguing is just their being unembarrassed with their lame-ass excuse for their psychopathic behaviour. And these people are psychopaths.

Read that entire article for the various instances of how these monsters are playing ridiculous games with their CUSTOMERS, dicking them around with bullshit demands for information or giving them the runaround. There's too much for me to quote here without simply copying the whole article. I'll just add the following:

CBC News asked each of the big five banks for more information on the criteria for the case-by-case-based decisions on mortgage and credit deferrals.
We asked:

• Who would qualify?
• Is there an application process?
• Does the entire household have to be off work?
• Will they require documentation?

None of the banks answered any of those questions.

TD, CIBC and Scotiabank all responded by repeating their commitment to work with personal and small-business banking customers on a case-by-case basis. Each encouraged customers to contact their call centres directly or visit their websites.

BMO and RBC did not respond to emails from CBC News.

And this:

The government is purchasing up to $50 billion of insured mortgage pools through the CMHC, which says that stable funding for the banks and mortgage lenders is meant to ensure continued lending to Canadian consumers.

This is the same delusional, contradictory horseshit that they sold us in the 2008 crisis. Throwing taxpayers' money at the banks so that they could continue to provide "credit" to people who didn't want to borrow because their lives had been turned upside down by job losses or (in the USA) the devaluation of their homes.

I mean, it's entirely possible that Bill Morneau, who was born wealthy and worked for his daddy's company before taking it over, is a complete moron who owes it all to nepotism, and that he's so fucking stupid that he believes that the banks need an injection of $50 billion so that they can LOAN money to desperate people who are calling up their banks pleading for help because they can't work. But I honestly don't think Morneau is that stupid. I think the CMHC has given the banks that $50 billion so that they can prop-up their own stock prices. Because he's evil.

Well, this is a blog post that hardly anybody reads and I've got other things I want to do. This post has sat in my "Drafts" folder for almost a week and I want to just publish it and move on. So, for posterity's sake, I'll mention a few of the other links that I wanted to speak about and then conclude.

From The Disaffected Lib, there's the possibility that Trump's sustained denialism about the Coronavirus wasn't just due to delusion and selfish politics. He might have been preaching business-as-usual so that he'd have time to dump his own stock portfolio before the market crashed.

We already know how Republican Senator Richard Burr, while publicly advising calm, was telling a small group of wealthy sugar-daddies to head for the hills while he did likewise. A number of other Repugnicans did the same along with Democrat Dianne "Warbucks" Feinstein.

Meanwhile, a group of investment bankers were found to have been inquiring of executives in health care profiting companies that they had invested in if it was possible that they could, you know, maybe engage in a bit of price-gouging during the pandemic, so as to further enrich themselves.

Over the past few weeks, investment bankers have been candid on investor calls and during health care conferences about the opportunity to raise drug prices. In some cases, bankers received sharp rebukes from health care executives; in others, executives joked about using the attention on Covid-19 to dodge public pressure on the opioid crisis.

...

Steven Valiquette, a managing director at Barclays Investment Bank, last week peppered executives from Cardinal Health, a health care distributor of N95 masks, ventilators and pharmaceuticals, on whether the company would raise prices on a range of supplies.

Valiquette asked repeatedly about potential price increases on a variety of products. Could the company, he asked, “offset some of the risk of volume shortages” on the “pricing side”?

Michael Kaufmann, the chief executive of Cardinal Health, said that “so far, we’ve not seen any material price increases that I would say are related to the coronavirus yet.” Cardinal Health, Kaufman said, would weigh a variety of factors when making these decisions, and added that the company is “always going to fight aggressively to make sure that we’re getting after the lowest cost.”

“Are you able to raise the price on some of this to offset what could be some volume shortages such that it all kind of nets out to be fairly consistent as far as your overall profit matrix?” asked Valiquette.
Kaufman responded that price decisions would depend on contracts with providers, though the firm has greater flexibility over some drug sales. “As you have changes on the cost side, you’re able to make some adjustments,” he noted.

The discussion, over conference call, occurred during the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference on March 10. At one point, Valiquette joked that “one positive” about the coronavirus would be a “silver lining” that Cardinal Health may receive “less questions” about opioid-related lawsuits.
Cardinal Health is one of several firms accused of ignoring warnings and flooding pharmacies known as so-called pill mills with shipments of millions of highly addictive painkillers. Kaufmann noted that negotiations for a settlement are ongoing.

And, since I started this post, the US Senate (that home of vermin) has passed a bail-out bill that is an even more brazen theft of public resources to reward criminality and incompetence than was the 2008 bail-out package.

It seems to me that this crisis might be a game-changer. Since 2011 I've become increasingly pessimistic about the collective intelligence of the human race to reverse the calamitous trajectory towards ecocide and dictatorship that we're presently on. But it's just possible that the soon to be revealed total failure of the USA's for-profit healthcare system; the murderous impact of decades of shit-head neo-liberal austerity on other OECD countries' social safety-nets (including healthcare); the absolutely disgusting and shameless nature of oligarchs and politicians using this crisis for personal profit; the obvious failure of the delusions of religion, the assurances of imbeciles and grifters, to protect people from a virus; the bungling of Trump; the insanely idiotic elevation of a dementia case to the Democratic nominee for the office of President; ... all that and other instances of madness, just MIGHT inspire people to think about what's necessary for a genuine, revolutionary transformation of a doomed system.

"Driftglass" - Evil AND Stupid

Foreward: I know that an insignificant number of people read this blog. But just so that the number reading this post won't be even more insignificant, please understand that the topic isn't just me ragging on one individual blogger. As I'll explain in the piece, there are larger ramifications arising out of the behaviour of the individual being critiqued.

The Post Itself: 

Once upon a time I was legitimately confused as to whether hopeless Democratic Party hack-blogger "Driftglass" was evil or stupid:

You see, to hear Driftglass speak it, the Democrats can simply do no wrong. (Except, that is, fail to stand up to Repugnican hatred and bullying.) Is he a chump or a paid stooge? If he's the former, then he really should cut it out with the photoshopping and the blogging, because they don't appear to be paying for themselves and he's just cheer-leading for his own exploitation. But if he's a paid shill? Then that's evil. Doing stupid shit like posting White House press releases to fight against reality. Pushing that ridiculous "Putin stole the election" meme on gullible liberal fools. Perpetuating the Democratic policies of corruption, imperialism and betrayal, as if they're a genuine alternative to Repugnican atrocities.

Well, after reading this post I can now confidently assert that the old boy is both very evil and quite stupid. It's clear that Driftglass has consciously developed a semi-coherent, semi-clever narrative of pretending to engage in constructive criticism of the Bernie Sanders campaign (with no criticism or at least almost no criticisms of any other candidates) while at the same time insisting that after the primaries that he will support the party's candidate wholeheartedly (even if it's Sanders) and that he expects Sanders supporters to do the same (even if it isn't Sanders).

Yet Another Uncontrollable Foray Into US-American Politics

You have to give the US-Americans credit. They're still able to make their abomination of a political culture eminently entertaining. Bernie Sanders is clearly the front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination for their presidential candidate to meet Trump in the 2020 US Presidential Election. Sanders is a much needed push back against the plutocratic power that has been enriching itself since 1980. Sanders has built a viable, activist coalition of working class, middle-class, multi-racial, young, old, ... it's inspiring.

Obviously, the Democratic Party leadership sees this as a threat. These vermin are addicted to sucking the rat-penises of Wall Street filth such as Michael Bloomberg. They make their bread-and-butter by ensuring the continued hyper-profitability of the parasitical private health insurance industry. They're wedded to child-murdering Zionist psychopaths. They support endless bloody wars for the continued blood-money of the Military-Industrial-Complex.

At one point, the Democratic Party leadership offered up the ludicrous Joseph Biden as their favourite son. But when this clueless whore failed to ignite the masses the plan switched to running a whole squadron of spoilers (including Elizabeth Warren) to defeat Sanders.

Unfortunately, even with their thumbs on the scales in Iowa and New Hampshire, these anti-democratic scum failed to stop Sanders' grassroots coalition. When he crushed them in Nevada they went into panic mode. The Clown Car strategy wasn't working because none of these corporate stooges were getting enough of the pro or anti-Sanders vote to win 15% and, thereby, any state delegates. This is because these clueless, out-of-touch, sold-out, elitist pricks don't understand what's going on outside their bubble worlds.

Biden's train-wreck of a campaign was do or die in South Carolina. Older Black voters (who remember Biden happily playing second-fiddle to the First Black President [Barack Obama]) planned on voting for Biden (as opposed to the white people in Iowa and New Hampshire) and this was what he was counting on. Some Sanders supporters saw their man inching up in the polls and thought they might hold Biden to a narrow victory or even defeat him. Alas, alack! Biden got a crushing 48%, with Sanders a distant second at 19%.

That was enough for the Democratic leadership. Willfully forgetting that Biden is a joke, these deluded dipshits have decided that the Clown Car strategy wasn't working. Biden was Obama's VP. Biden has name recognition. Pete Buttigieg is loathed by people of colour and white people who have a brain, and not a huge loaf of shit inside their skulls. Very few people like Amy Klobuchar (aside from hopelessly out-of-touch elitists like the New York Times and millionaire comedian Bill Maher and liberal feminists). So these two have dropped-out and endorsed Biden.

The only problem is that Biden is still a hugely unpopular, demented, incompetent, racist, elitist, corporate asshole.

Back in January, well before the Democratic primary race had taken on its current composition, independent journalist Ruth Ann Oskolkoff reported that a source had heard from high-level Democratic Party insiders that they were planning to install Joe Biden as the party’s nominee, and to smear Bernie Sanders as a Russian asset.

“On January 20, 2020 at 8:20 p.m. PDT I received a communication from a reliable source,” Oskolkoff wrote. “This person had interactions earlier that evening with high level party members and associates of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who said that they have now selected Biden as the Democratic Party nominee, with Warren as the VP. They also said the plan is to smear Bernie as a Russian asset.”
Now, immediately before Super Tuesday, we are seeing establishment candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar drop out of the race, both of whom, along with former candidate Beto O’Rourke, are now suddenly endorsing Biden. Elizabeth Warren, the only top-level candidate besides Sanders who could be labeled vaguely “left” by any stretch of the imagination, has meanwhile outraged progressives by remaining in the race, to the Vermont senator’s detriment.
...
The only problem? Biden’s brain is turning into sauerkraut.
There are two new clips of video footage making the rounds today, one featuring Biden at a rally telling his supporters that tomorrow is “Super Thursday”, and another featuring the former VP saying (and this is a direct quote), “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created– by the– you know, you know the thing.”
I’ve written about Biden’s recent struggles to form coherent sentences before, and it seems to be getting worse. There’s simply no comparing the befuddled, fuzz-brained man we see before us today with the sharp, lucid speaker we were seeing even a few years ago. The man’s brain does not work.

So, this shambling, senile corporate tool is what one of the two parties of the most powerful country in the world is offering up as Democracy's saviour. To say it is to expose the insanity.

At some point in their desperation, the Democrat elites thought that "Alpha-male" billionaire Bloomberg could sweep in [after subsidizing the party and all their mercenary hangers-on] and blast his way to the top and knock-out Bernie with his charisma. But Bloomberg's debate performances showed him to be an uninspiring septuagenarian unable to deflect condemnations of his sexist, racist behaviour from people not beholden to him for a paycheque. He might stay in the race, but he certainly won't be taking any of Sanders' voters.

Elizabeth Warren is staying in to steal votes from the progressive bloc. Because she's poisoned by personal ambition. I believe her conversion to semi-progressivism was real and that she has genuine convictions. But she has discovered (to her chagrin) that her calculating efforts to ingratiate herself with party power-brokers has destroyed her appeal to the voters who at first admired her. And she's shown herself to be willing to utilize every sleazy trick in the book (exploiting "#Believe Her" in her attacks on Bernie Sanders, outright lying about his past statements on super-delegates) to try to regain her viability, and it's all just lowered her in the eyes of her former admirers. So now she remains in the race partly to serve the Democratic leadership and mainly out of spite.

Which, semi-finally, brings me to this specimen of liberal feminism. Now, obviously, I hate women. Caitlyn Johnstone is one of my favourite writers. (Along with Linda McQuaig and Susan George.) But I loathed Hillary Clinton. And I didn't like Amy Klobuchar. And while I used to think it almost a toss-up between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (favouring Warren FWIW), the fact that I'm now all-in for Bernie just makes me a paid-up, card-carrying sexist "Bernie-Bro" now and forever. I'll let this liberal feminist blogger embarrass himself explain it:

I think it’s fair to say that a year ago at this time a substantial percentage of Democrats, or at least Democratic activists, would have subscribed to something like this axiom: “All other things being anywhere close to equal, the party should nominate a woman in 2020 (perhaps with the addition, “or, if not, a non-white man.”).
The reasons for holding this position should be too obvious to belabor. The Republican party is the party of hierarchy and reaction, which is to say it’s the default party of white men. The Democratic party is the party, at least in aspirational terms, of egalitarianism and demographic diversity. Its last two presidential candidates reflected that.
Yet the harsh truth is that, going into the 2024 presidential election, the list of women in American political history who will have drawn any kind of substantial support in a major party presidential primary campaign will still consist of one name: Hillary Clinton. And Clinton, while a very accomplished candidate in her own right, does fit the extremely narrow model of a woman political leader who can sometimes be acceptable in a traditionally patriarchal culture, which is to say the heir, by blood or marriage, to a political dynasty of some sort.
In my view, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand were all in their own ways vastly superior Democratic presidential candidates to either Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or Pete Buttigieg, let alone Mike Bloomberg. I was no fan at all of Amy Klobuchar, but even she would have been preferable to yet another ancient white guy.
That none of these candidates ended up getting any serious traction in the race, when the men who did were so obviously flawed in different but profound ways, is in very large part attributable to bad old fashioned misogyny, full stop.
Obviously none of the women candidates were perfect either, because such a candidate doesn’t exist. I realize I’m not an unbiased observer — another thing that doesn’t exist — but for the life of me I can’t understand how a progressive voter could prefer Sanders to Warren, or a more moderate voter could prefer Biden or Buttigieg, let alone Bloomberg, to Harris.
In my view, the women candidates in all these comparisons were clearly superior to the men, without even taking into account that they were women — which, again, should be taken into account!
That their campaigns all went nowhere, so that we are left with a choice between two deeply flawed candidates, who also happen to be nearly 80 years old,* is a profoundly depressing comment on how Hillary Clinton’s nomination may have been an aberrational product of her own autobiography.
We still have, as a country and a party, an enormous way to go on this issue.
*Can any knowledgable commenter remark on the following matter: I’ve been told that there’s a particularly significant health marker for someone who has recently had a heart attack — the left ventricle ejection fraction? — that would be extremely valuable to know in regard to Sanders’s current health, with the point being that Sanders has not released this data point, and it would be good to have it. (ETA: This covers it. Thanks to a couple of commenters for flagging it).

And to that stew of mewling bullshit I have to say: "Sorry. No."

Because my opposition to Hillary Clinton was based on her being a war-monger and a stooge for the capitalist class.

Kamala Harris was a woman of colour who decided to play the game of being a race-traitor and who has managed to take that grift all the way to the US Senate.

Amy Klobuchar is a right-wing Democrat (Re: "Scumbag") who abuses her office staff the way any penis-haver would. (Albeit non-sexually.)

I've already spoken about Elizabeth Warren's unelectability.

Notice that this fuckwad duzzint mention Tulsi Gabbard. Perhaps he's "SEXIST"??? (I could go into details about his nitwit fuck-head-erry about his animus to Gabbard but it's so much easier to ascribe it to sexism and have done with it.)

And, REALLY finally, stupid Democratic partisan hack "Driftglass" occasionally makes noises about how he'd even support a whack-doodle like Sanders against Trump. All the while though, this turd has taken at least two blog posts to whine and bitch about Sanders supporters pushing back against the nauseating drivel spewed by Hillary Clinton or some other piece-of-shit, but seems completely uninterested in the debacle his party elites made of Iowa, or of Buttigieg's claiming victory before any results came in (or of the media that gave Buttigieg his victory laps while "disappearing" Sanders' polling leads with Orwellian efficiency). Because hacks gonna hack.