Capitalism!
“@VP: The CDC tomorrow is going to issue new guidance which will make it possible for people who have exposed to the coronavirus to return to work more quickly by wearing a mask for a certain period of time.” Bonus track: The Invisible Hand Wants You Dead.
Look on his works, ye mighty.
I mean, if we’re looking for a scapegoat.
Capitalism!
“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’?”
And on the pedestal these words appear:
Caring responsibly.
The obsession of the Democrats—the ostensible left-wing! who are on our side! aren’t they?—with nickling and diming and means-testing the shit out of what should be a simple and immediate act of handing every person in the country a wad of money in this time when we’ve been asked to stop working for our own collective good—it’s explained, somewhat, by David Graeber’s notion of a war between administrators and care-givers, which did get stark real fast, didn’t it. (We can take some solace in the administrative bullshit that’s been so quickly swept away, that some small care might be given; we might well quail before the new heights of administrative bullshit to be scaled, even as those who supposedly can’t be helped set out to help themselves. —As for the Republicans, well, they in their cunning at least know enough to look like they’re in favor of what everyone wants, even as they bitterly oppose it.)
Everybody is paying attention.
“Who died on 9/11? It was front-line people and our passengers. Who suffered in the bankruptcies that followed? It was me and my friends. They took our pensions, they slashed our pay by more than 40 percent, diminished our health care, cut our jobs. They put it on our backs. For a lot of people, that meant real personal loss of our homes and cars and stressed marriages and divorces and the pain of telling our kids that they had to do without. We’ve seen this before, and we know exactly what didn’t work. We won’t stand for it again. We won’t let that happen to the rest of the country.” —Sara Nelson For President Now.
Capitalism!
“Business Insider Italia explains that even though the original manufacturer was unable to supply the part, it refused to share the relevant 3D file with Fracassi to help him print the valve. It even went so far as to threaten him for patent infringement if he tried to do so on his own. Since lives were at stake, he went ahead anyway, creating the 3D file from scratch. According to the Metro article, he produced an initial batch of ten, and then 100 more, all for free. Fracassi admits that his 3D-printed versions might not be very durable or re-usable. But when it’s possible to make replacements so cheaply—each 3D-printed part costs just one euro, or roughly a dollar—that isn’t a problem. At least it wouldn’t be, except for that threat of legal action, which is also why Fracassi doesn’t dare share his 3D file with other hospitals, despite their desperate need for these valves.”
Capitalism!
“So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, ‘Labrador Diagnostics,’ which decided that right in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making COVID-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those COVID-19 tests.”
A paradise paved in a parking lot.
Further anent the preceding: here’s a start at listing mutual aid initiatives around the country; here’s a form for Portland-area folks to request support, including food deliveries and prescription pickups; here’s another Portland-area form for folks to offer that support. In conclusion, America is a sham: long live US
Bitter truths are bitter.
“The modern state was one that could no longer be run by a gang of friends.” —Tom Cutterham
Sufficient unto the day.
Closing the libraries is wildly grim. “The library branches’ WiFi signals will remain turned on for anyone who wants to sit outside a building or in the parking lots,” but, and yet, I mean, well. And still. —One might well note that ebooks are still available; one might well note that the 2019 Library Writers Project selections have just been announced; one might well—but still.
To the right, ever to the right!
Never to the left, forever to the right!
I have been thinking about this a lot. One of the things I am really struggling with right now is that we don’t have a progressive or a Left shock doctrine, as Naomi Klein calls it. The Right has a program in place for how to take advantage of moments like this. When you look at what the junta has done and everything else, this is an opportunity for the wealthy 1 percent of the United States and world to make Puerto Rico into a playground the way Cuba was in the 1940s and 1950s for the U.S. rich. I am terrified we will have an island of Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans.
To me, the question is: What do we do in the short and medium term that offers some semblance of a shock doctrine for our side? If we are going to rebuild Puerto Rico, how do we do it in a way that is right for the people of Puerto Rico? I have to weigh that with the very immediate concern of needing to get cargo containers with food and necessities that people have. Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good answer for how we meet the short-term need a way that sets up for the future.
If the Left and the unions don’t show any leadership during the Coronavirus crisis, the most acute social crisis we’ve faced for a long time, then objectively they’re deferring to the government.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
The President would like to share the attached image with you, and passes along the following message: “From opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!”
Who said the working folks were scum?
That we were tramps and on the bum?
And that he had us on the run?
Der Chief!
“Today, we are living in the world Jack Welch made, one in which a racist, proto-fascist, self-proclaimed billionaire whose businesses have worked with organized crime figures is president, governing by the New Gilded Age principles of letting business rule itself and eviscerating labor, consumer, and environmental regulations. In fact, while Welch criticized Donald Trump’s chaotic management skills, he also loved how Trump had governed in favor of business and warned that impeaching the president would ‘blow the markets away.’ Impeachment had no impact on the market, but Jack Welch being wrong about America was the cornerstone of his career. His life immeasurably hurt this nation and should not be mourned. Instead, his methods and beliefs should stand for the decline of America in the twenty-first century.” —Erik Loomis
Cancel your subscription.
After 1985, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize political life and the economy through new policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). These policies caused political instability arising from nationalist and separatist movements. In 1989, Soviet-allied states in Eastern Europe were overthrown in a wave of revolutions which ended communist rule.
As part of an attempt to prevent the country’s collapse, a referendum was held in March 1991, boycotted by three republics, that resulted in a majority favoring the preservation of the union as a renewed federation. Gorbachev’s power was greatly diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin‘s high-profile role in facing down a coup d’état by party hardliners. In late 1991, Gorbachev resigned, and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the union. The remaining 12 constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states.
The only thing more gobsmacking than the brazenly open who-gives-a-fuck incompetence of it all is how well it’s going to already have been working.
And just to prove I’m not some Russian trollfarm bot, here’s a photo of me doing my bit to thwart the Soviets’ years-long 1988 plan to exploit Sanders’ antiwar agenda by helping to TEAR DOWN THIS WALL in December of 1989:
In conclusion, fuck the Times.
Gods are made, not born.
“The Market is at once wide and unthinking; it has a superhuman capacity to order the world, and yet it is essentially human in its behavior; it is a force of nature beyond human power and reckoning, yet it can be appeased, argued with, altered, bribed, influenced, redirected, appealed to, etc.; it is amorphous and yet incarnate—though immaterial, it takes on many forms. Our markets are like a cute classical pantheon, a gaggle of mercurial superhuman principalities of the heavens who sprung out of the self-created ancient orders of the universe and then sorta took shit over, although they seem a bit out of their depth actually running things; in their foibles they are more human than human; their appetites are ours, exaggerated; their greater wisdom smells faintly of folly and stupidity; they are more poetical than actual; they are not, in any case, real. Markets are always doing this because of that, responding to injury with injustice, bickering, dithering, making backroom deals—all in all like a bunch of line-graph Greek Gods. I will spare you the image of Paul Krugman at the Bacchanal. The proper way to read this sort of thing is as an installation in a rather dull epic, full of epithets. Volatility remained high, everyone.” —Jacob Bacharach
The (eventual) persistence of memory.
When I was writing this thing about Moore’s and Gibbons’ (and Higgins’) Watchmen—specifically, the bit about Rorshcach’s origin story in the margins of Kitty Genovese’s story, or at least Harlan Ellison’s hothouse revision of the urban legend of Kitty Genovese—I was trying to remember the piece I’d read some time before that didn’t so much tell me the urban legend was wrong, I mean, that’s what everyone knows at this point, the lesson it’s always already taught, but was the first piece to show me just how wrong it was, how much it bulldozed on its way to making its ugly little point, the glimpses of her life and all those others that couldn’t be reclaimed merely by unlearning it. —I didn’t find this half-remembered piece then, so went with something else, ah well, but I can tell you now it was “Don’t Look Now,” by Angus “studentactivism” Johnson, and I’m glad I can now tuck it into the commonplace book.
