Gone out to play today

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Lovely season; lovely day to walk with the E.P. The world's troubles will still be around tomorrow ...

This is what normalization looks like in our economy

California's unemployment rate was down to 8.3 percent this March from a high of 16 percent in April 2020. It sure would be great to cut that figure in half -- and we're on our way. There's enough renewed commerce that signs like this are showing up all around. 

But employers are whining; they aren't finding the workers they want.

Economist Paul Krugman explains the labor market phase we're now living through as the pandemic recedes.

As it happens, I’ve been poring over a report titled “U.S. Small Businesses Struggle to Find Qualified Employees.” The report summarized a survey conducted by Gallup and Wells Fargo, which found a majority of businesses saying that it was hard to hire workers. 

Oh, did I mention the date on the report? Feb. 15, 2013 — a time when there were three unemployed workers for every job opening. There was, in fact, no shortage of qualified labor, and the unemployment rate kept falling for another seven years. 

So what was that about? Employers in a depressed economy get used to being able to fill vacancies easily. When the economy improves hiring gets a bit harder; sometimes you have to attract workers by offering higher wages. And employers experience that as a labor shortage. 

But that’s how the economy is supposed to work! Employers competing for workers by raising wages isn’t a problem, it’s what we want to see.

I feel sure Big Box corporation doesn't agree. That's capitalism for you.

Friday cat blogging

 

Janeway can appear so demure when peeking out of her castle.

Moments later, she'll be chewing on a metal knitting needle. Ah youth!

Boasting of torture

Warning: this story is stomach turning.

Former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher is Donald Trump's kind of guy. He was tried in a military court for stabbing a severely injured ISIS prisoner in the neck and got off on that particular charge. But he was convicted, among other misdeeds, of posing with the corpse. [See below] The former president was easily convinced this was just the sort of behavior he wanted in the nation's fighting forces. He supported Gallagher and eventually gave him a broad pardon.

The Navy didn't want its guys running around without discipline, so it tried various measures within its jurisdiction to mark that Gallagher had crossed a line. Trump didn't like that either. The affair bounced around the chain of command, eventually leading to Trump's own chosen Navy Secretary getting booted.

At Task and Purpose, Jeff Schogol reports on Gallagher's current boasts, now that he's off the legal hook. 

... Gallagher has told “The Line” [a podcast] that the SEALs were not tending to the fighter’s injuries; rather, they decided to conduct “medical treatment on him until he’s gone.” 

“I mean, he was going to die, regardless,” Gallagher said. “We weren’t taking any prisoners." 

He also claimed that every member of his platoon, including one SEAL who later reportedly described Gallagher as “evil” to investigators, all agreed to torture the ISIS fighter to death. 

“Everybody knew what was going on,” Gallagher said. “It’s the only truthful thing to this whole process; and then the rest of it just is like a bunch of contorted lies to, like, pin that whole scenario on me.” 

“I didn’t stab him,” Gallagher continued. “I didn’t stab that dude. That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done – and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him.”

We can only hope that Gallagher is boasting about torturing the prisoner to amp up his right-wing notoriety. He's found a sweet grift, being the right's favorite war criminal. Though the whole platoon is pictured here, we know some of them turned Gallagher in and called him "freaking evil."

These stories from the forever wars keep sending me back to the story of the U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Seeing the terrible stacks of prisoner bodies everywhere, their first impulse was simply to shoot every German in sight. But officers made them stop, insisted the German commanders get a trial with explicit evidence and defense lawyers -- and then quickly hanged the men convicted. This proceeding set the model for the better known Nuremberg trials. 

Warriors aren't angels but they need not be allowed to become devils either.

Some states did better than others; all could do more

Click to enlarge.

Matt Yglesias posted this map to show that most states contribute hardly any assistance to families with children living in dire poverty. And it does do that. But it shows something else as well: how political differences between states meant different effects on poor people.

TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) is the Clinton-era successor program to what used to be called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, more commonly known as welfare. In the 1990s, legislators of both parties decided they could force those lazy ladies raising kids on a pittance of government assistance to work for their benefits. And also that they should limit families' eligibility to collect any help at all after a period as short as two years. Bureaucratic hoop was intertwined with bureaucratic hoop; many women and families just fell out of the system altogether and got nothing. In good economic times, some of these parents caught on in the most precarious of bad jobs; in bad times, they fell out of the labor force. We see some of them living on the streets today.

The sum the federal government gave the states to pay for TANF was set in the 1990s, and as far as I know never increased. It never was generous and is worth far less today. In any case, the welfare "reform" law was written so that, if states wanted to, they could divert TANF cash to their general funds. So what the map really shows is that most states (yes, the usual suspects) did just that, effectively pocketing a federal windfall nominally meant to help poor people.

How much poor women and their kids were hurt by "reform" came to depend on the political balance of forces in each state. The few dark blue states on the map above reacted to welfare "reform" with policies that were more generous to recipients. To some extent, this came about because poor women fought back. In California, for example, organized welfare recipients won the right to count education at community colleges and in technical programs as "work" for the purpose of keeping eligibility. This seems merely sane, but the 1996 law was so punitive toward those needing assistance that it took battles to win.

No wonder, after 25 years of these sorts of policies, we are ready for President Biden's American Families Plan in some form. It's time for this country to give parents and children a hand. 

• • •

It took a few years for a clear picture of the effects of the 1996 welfare law to play out. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by social scientists Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer offers a lively description of the subsequent extreme poverty into which many families fell.

The peculiar problems of peeing during a pandemic

Maybe it's really almost over. A couple of weeks ago, I was able to do something that told me this city is making progress on re-opening from the coronavirus: I found a public toilet in an out-of-the-way park and it was open for use! Yippee! Most such facilities had been closed since March 2020 or a little later.

I can testify to this because I whiled away the pandemic by completing huge chunks of my Walking San Francisco project. Even at the very beginning when we didn't know much about how COVID is spread, it seemed as if longish walks with a camera were permissible. In those traffic free days, the city was quiet and sometimes very lovely in a clean-air spring.

Eureka! It's unlocked.

But walking about the city posed a problem: where should I pee? In the previous eight years of the project, I'd gotten very good at scouting out opportunities. But not in 2020. Coffee shops were not open; public libraries were closed; some big retail, grocery stores and mini-malls might be open, but not the bathrooms; public park facilities were mostly locked.

My best bet for relief became residential construction sites equipped with a porta-potty. But in the early days, the workers were off the jobs and sheltering in place too. Most of their facilities were locked. I became eagle-eyed, looking for unlocked enclosures.

Pretty soon I had quite a few points of "anecdata": there were socio-economic patterns to the availability of urban porta-potties. In poor and working class neighborhoods, they were always locked. Ditto in the truly wealthy areas. Not so in upper middle class residential neighborhoods.  There I could usually find a porta-potty to duck into. As job sites reopened, I could sometimes find workers to ask to use their facilities.

And, of course, I've been an urban runner for decades. That means I am not ashamed to use of what I call "circular bushes," conveniently placed shrubbery. A city presents a surprising quantity of possibilities, often on median strips or around public buildings, in just about every neighborhood. You just want to look out for surveillance cameras. Wouldn't want to upset the security ...

A few months ago, Nicholas Kristof, an observant Times columnist who I often find too saccharine, made a great suggestion:

America’s most disgraceful infrastructure failing is its lack of public toilets. ... the United States is simply not made for people who pee. ... Americans have painstakingly built new norms about dog owners picking up after their pets, but we’ve gone backward with human waste. ... How is it that we can afford aircraft carriers but not toilets? 

... it’s not just the homeless who suffer. Taxi drivers, delivery people, tourists and others are out and about all day, navigating a landscape that seems oblivious to the most basic of needs. The same is true of parents out with kids. 

So come on, President Biden! Let’s see an infrastructure plan that addresses not only bridges and electrical grids, but also bladders and bowels.

Now there's an infrastructure plan I could love. And so would a lot of people on the streets, voluntarily or involuntarily.

Averting the War to End War

According to Georgetown historian Michael Kazin, World War I was a "bad" war. That is, that monstrous bloodletting was, for the United States, a war of choice rather than for the safety and security of the nation. In that sense, the first worldwide conflict of the 20th century was like so many U.S. military excursions that came later: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the catalogue goes on. U.S. entry into the European conflict, which had nearly exhausted the original participants by the time we got "over there," looks inevitable in hindsight -- and certainly set the pattern for U.S. world power.

But intervention wasn't inevitable.

War against War: the American fight for peace 1914-1918 is about the vigorous, broad-based peace movement which opposed U.S. participation.

There's little doubt that, in 1914 when the carnage began on European battlefields, most people in the U.S. didn't give a whit and didn't think this was their nation's business. The belief was common that wars were only ploys by capitalist munitions sellers to increase their profits. Many citizens distrusted and feared militarism and glorification of armed conflict, though former President Teddy Roosevelt yearned for heroics. Large immigrant pockets, still incompletely melted into Americanism, identified with combatants of their former nations. Quite a few of those were of Germans-origin. People from English-speaking backgrounds identified with the Allies, with Britain and France -- but hardly anyone much cared for the tyrannical czarist Russian empire.

Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, in office 1912-1920, was a wily bird, managing his unwieldy coalition political party. He gave ear-room to its many pacifist, isolationist, and internationalist socialist elements, while gradually moving the country toward coming in on the side of the Allies in accord with the party's mercantile and industrial factions. He ran for re-election in 1916 on the message "he kept us out of war" and then asked for a declaration of war in April 1917.  Meanwhile he was still uttering idealistic promises about peace without victory, a war to end war, and the promise of a more just international order that the United States would midwife when the guns stopped. (We didn't do any such thing, but that's not Kazin's story here.)

Kazin recounts the efforts of a parade of anti-war leaders who were both celebrities and true opinion leaders in their day, though our memory of them has dimmed: the religious pacifist politician Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the Wisconsin Republican progressive Robert LaFollette, the capitalist isolationist Henry Ford (yes, the car magnate and later Hitler-sympathizer), the socialist humanitarian Jane Addams. He also records the persecution Wilson's Justice Department unleashed against anyone who might have challenged conscription for the army or "patriotism" in general.

Kazin concludes with a thoughtful observation that succinctly captures something I've had to learn in a lifetime of opposition to our "bad" wars. Our forebears who opposed World War I set us a significant example of ingenuity but also of compromises in an inherently complex political endeavor.

Anti-war movements are not like other collective attempts to change society. In contrast to those who seek to win rights and a measure of power for women or workers or people of color or gays and lesbians, peace organizations have no natural constituency. Neither can their movements grow slowly, taking decades to convince ordinary people and elites to think differently and enact laws to embody that new perspective. A massive effort to stop one's country from going to war -- or to stop a war that it is already waging -- has to grow quickly or it will have little or no influence.  

What's more, it has to lure talented activists away from other, more enduring political commitments. Every new war also requires peace activists to create a new movement and then find partners for a coalition that might be capable of pressuring the government to end it. There have always been pacifists in the United States. But during periods of peace or brief conflicts, they endure on the margins, unknown to most of their fellow citizens. 

The Americans who fought a war against war from the summer of 1914 until the Armistice fifty-one months later managed to surmount all these obstacles ... [Their challenge to their war remains relevant:] Can one preserve a peaceful and democratic society at home while venturing into the world to kill those whom our leaders designate, rationally or not, as our enemies?

Kazin thinks, and I concur, that the late 20th and early 21st century United States lost its way in part because, in the aftermath of the inconclusive 1914-18 European war, we ended up fighting a "good" war in 1941-1945 in which real challenges to national and civilizational survival were at issue. (This analytic framework elides the concurrent race war in the Pacific between U.S. and Japanese empires -- we routinely erase that experience mentally, though we may learn to do so less these days as China "rises.")

Because of the horrendous -- life or death -- experience of that one "good" war against Nazi barbarism, we have ever since been confused in a way in which early 20th century citizens were not when our leaders call us to "bad" -- unnecessary -- wars. We, broadly, have become more easily roused to believe a present call to war is another "good" war.  There are very few "good" wars -- and all wars are still wrong, cruel, and terrible.

Students call for a #RestorativeRestart

You can't just open the buildings, call back as many teachers, staff and students as you can find, and expect education to resume as if 2020 never happened. The past year has been disorienting, frightening, and grief-filled. Students want help to move beyond the trauma. 

Fortunately, there's some funding for re-opening and a lot of good ideas, many of which are in described a research brief, “Reimagine and Rebuild: Restarting school with equity at the center,” issued by a broad coalition of teachers, academics, funders, and youth organizations. 

In an article in EdSource, Taryn Ishida, executive director of Californians for Justice, described what the young people who worked on the brief brought to the project.

“In education, we talk a lot about students, but rarely do we talk with them. The brief was developed by working with Black, brown, Asian Pacific Islander and low-income students to lay out their blueprint for an education system that is built to support every student to thrive.”

These students know that they want to learn, but after the interruption of the pandemic, they need help and support from teachers and the education system at large.

Imagine being a first-year high school student. On campus with 3,000, maybe even 4,000 students. You’ve never met your teachers, let alone seen your fellow classmates in more than a year. You’re in a brand new school, the hallways are crowded, and you feel overwhelmed. What are you going to do?

Nobody thinks it is going to be easy to make up for the loss of a year of in-person instruction. But the young people are at work on a vision for a #RestorativeRestart.

For May Day: let's remember who has been dying

This story by Nadia Lopez from the Fresno Bee brought me up short:

87% of additional California deaths in 2020 pandemic were workers

The state’s essential laborers continued showing up to work throughout the pandemic. But for many, those low-wage jobs on the frontlines came at a high cost.

Deaths among Californians between ages 18 and 65 increased by 25% during the first ten months of the pandemic, with the state’s workers making up 12,500 of 14,370 additional deaths compared to the previous year — or 87% of additional deaths in 2020, according to an analysis of state public health data by the UC Merced Community and Labor Center.

... “The Central Valley has always had high rates of worker injuries, illnesses and deaths because of the many high-risk industries like meat processing, agriculture, manufacturing and warehousing that have been core to our economy,” [Mai] Thao [of the Fresno-Madera-Tulare-Kings Central Labor Council] said. “But within the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply and disproportionately impacted these high-risk industries, with many worksites initiating outbreaks and leading to deaths.

Living in a city and in the Mission neighborhood, it's not a stretch to catch the general idea that the pandemic is hitting communities of color hardest. That's evident all around.

But here's deadly evidence of our urban dependence on Central Valley workers -- from diverse communities, many undocumented migrants -- who keep the food coming for all of us.

We need Biden's "American Jobs Plan" and probably much more

I can't get over the picture of our current employment situation described in recently compiled economic statistics. It's becoming all too clear who is being left behind in our effervescent post-pandemic recovery.

In March, for example, the overall economy added back 916,000 jobs. Only 7,000 went to workers with high school diplomas but no college degree. [My emphasis.]

... Horrigan’s research has shown that both minority females without college degrees and white males without college degrees are having the hardest time finding work again.

... The problem for policymakers, Madowitz says, is there’s been a lot of thinking in the past decade about how to help men in blue-collar industries, but there’s been little thinking about how to help women in the service sector who suddenly might need to change careers.

This isn't the most intuitive graph, but it highlights what's amiss:

People with college degrees, and even with 2 year college experience, are getting back to work.

People without college are not yet getting call backs. Many such people were "essential workers" during pandemic lock downs, doing work that kept society going. But similar workers who were forced out during shut downs are not yet finding new and renewed employment.

Friday cat blogging

Erudite Partner was just adjusting controls on the TV box. Janeway saw her chance for a higher perch. She's a hazard, whenever we bend over and sometimes even leaping from a standing start. Ah, youth!

Are we going to do anything about it?

"White supremacy is terrorism." 

Joe Biden said that from the podium in the House of Representatives last night.

I think we can say the Biden administration is trying. The old, white, Irish-American guy has come to power at a moment when our contradictions of race and power are murderously visible. There's no way around 'em -- we're going through ...

Definitions of terms

My friend Scot Nakagawa writes a new Substack, We Fight the Right, which I find wise. For years, he has dropped mini-essays, which I think of as dives into understanding the context of ongoing progressive struggle, on Facebook. This seems a better medium for his particular insights.

Here are some tidbits in which he's shares how he thinks about and distinguishes between "white supremacy," "structural racism," and "white nationalism."

• As an ideology, white supremacy is the belief that white people are, by dint of race, culturally and/or biologically superior to all other people and should, therefore be the dominant group in a multiracial society. White supremacy as ideology was invented to justify the establishment of explicitly racist codes and institutions that protect white dominance and rationalize race-slavery, Native American dispossession, the subjugation of women, and immigration limitation and control in the context of a liberal democratic state. ...

• The contemporary legacy of legal white supremacy today is structural racism. Structural racism refers to the contemporary system of racially inequitable social and political relations resulting from historic practices of legally sanctioned racial exploitation and exclusion. ... Importantly, because structural racism is a historic construct, it can be reproduced without explicit racist intent. It keeps on when we just go along, making its seeming permanence a further rational for its perpetuation. But while just going along with it, even unconsciously may be enough to perpetuate it, none of us were the original architects of structural racism, making blame a dry well when it comes to achieving justice. ...

• White nationalism is a radical ideology with revolutionary implications as it proposes not to just subjugate people of color within a white supremacist state, but to exclude people of color altogether, with some factions aiming to achieve this end through taking over government and mounting genocidal campaigns of racial cleansing. ... White supremacy is still relevant to the white nationalists as an ideological system. In other words, their belief in white supremacy is what justifies their white nationalist political agenda.

Go read it all. Scot can help us know what we're talking about and struggling to defang.

Why art?

Signs of post-pandemic life: After more than a year of silence, the students are back, playing in the schoolyard across the street.

 

Someone -- a teacher I presume -- has pasted signs along the wall where children line up to check in.

I warm easily to the joyful call to live life to the fullest. Go kids! 

But I can imagine that the more instrumental Spanish language message might have its place in this school too. Stick with it kids!

In India, the coronavirus is thriving ... but this ...

Every day, it feels more vicious, and realistically, it is more suicidal, for the United States to continue protecting pharmaceutical company "intellectual property" in coronavirus vaccines. 

Nobel economics prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach from Public Citizen make the case for breaking patents.

Waiving intellectual property rights so developing countries could produce more vaccines would make a big difference in reaching global herd immunity. Otherwise, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population, resulting in increased deaths and a greater risk that a vaccine-resistant variant puts the world back on lockdown.

... Firms in the Global South are already making covid-19 vaccines. For example, South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare has produced hundreds of millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, even though only a fraction of those went to South Africans. Other drug corporations simply refuse to work with qualified manufacturers in developing countries, effectively blocking more production.

Not one vaccine originator has shared technologies with poor countries through the World Health Organization’s voluntary Covid-19 Technology Access Pool. The global Covax program, which aims to vaccinate 20 percent of developing countries’ most vulnerable populations, has delivered about 38 million doses to 100 countries; meanwhile, the United States administers 3 million doses daily.

There is no way to beat covid-19 without increasing vaccine production capacity. And some production must be in the Global South for a host of reasons, including that prompt suppression of new variants is how we avoid more deaths and quarantines.

India suffers many ills, including rising sectarianism and illiberalism, but it has a large, competent medical supply industry.  Given the chance, it could make vaccines for its own people and much of the world. The United States should stop playing a huge part in preventing this natural development in a situation of global threat.

The U.S. is shipping medical supplies to India, but how about assisting Indians to help themselves?

Send out a fighter jet against protesters?

If this Los Angeles Times story is true -- and it seems responsibly reported by journalists in a real newspaper -- it would seem to me it should be getting more attention:

In March of last year, California National Guard members awaited orders from Sacramento headquarters to make preparations for any civil unrest that might arise from the outbreak of the coronavirus.

 ... The air branch of the Guard was told to place an F-15C fighter jet on an alert status for a possible domestic mission, according to four Guard sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

Those sources said the order didn’t spell out the mission but, given the aircraft’s limitations, they understood it to mean the plane could be deployed to terrify and disperse protesters by flying low over them at window-rattling speeds, with its afterburners streaming columns of flames. Fighter jets have been used occasionally in that manner in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, they said.

... They said the jet was also placed on an alert status — fueled and ready for takeoff — for possible responses to protests over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer and to any unrest sparked by the Nov. 3 presidential election.

The Times' sources, implicitly members of the Guard who were aware of the alert orders, say the directives came orally or in text messages, rather than through the usual chain of command. They thought even contemplating using an F-15C fighter jet in this way would be "illegal."

“That jet has one mission and one mission alone — to go up and shoot down other airplanes,” said retired Gen. David Bakos.

I should think so. I hope competent journalists are doing some digging into what seems an important and somewhat tangled story. Gov. Gavin is supposed to be in charge of the California Guard -- where was he in this?

H/t Atrios. He didn't know any more either ...

Come on Biden: let's get the vaccines out to the world

This morning I was on the phone with a friend in a Central American country. We were trying to make plans for future in-person connections. 

"You know there's no way I'll be vaccinated before next year?" he asked. The only people from his area who have gotten a coronavirus vaccine have been very rich and powerful or people who have U.S. passports who can travel to get jabbed in Miami. Those are often overlapping categories. Most Central Americans are simply shit out of luck.

In the U.S., we've come to a turning point. Most people who want their shots can get them. For months the lament was vaccine scarcity. Now it's the prevalence of hesitancy.

So it seems time (and probably over time) to begin asking what is the U.S. doing to get the rest of the world vaccinated? How are we using our riches?

STAT has a rundown:

More than two million petitions were sent to the White House in hopes of convincing the Biden administration to support a proposal that would temporarily waive trade agreement provisions in a bid to widen access to Covid-19 vaccines in low and middle-income countries.

The effort was promoted by several U.S. lawmakers and dozens of advocacy groups amid ongoing controversy over the proposal, which was introduced last fall at the World Trade Organization. Since then, however, the effort has stalled amid push back by the pharmaceutical industry and some wealthy nations, including the U.S., over concerns that intellectual property rights will be compromised.

The clash, which remained deadlocked yesterday at yet another WTO council meeting, emerges as Covid-19 has claimed more than 3 million lives worldwide and new variants threaten to make it harder to contain the coronavirus. Meanwhile, low-income countries have received just 0.3% of the nearly 900 million doses that have been administered globally, according to the World Health Organization. ...

“This is an all-hands-on-deck global emergency and it doesn’t make sense to grant pharmaceutical companies monopolies, especially since taxpayers have provided funding” to develop some of the vaccines, said Abby Maxman, who heads the Oxfam America advocacy group that supports free global access to Covid-19 vaccination. “We need to use every tool at our disposal.”

The necessary international arrangements are complicated as all things are in a world of many cultures, much need, and competing power centers.  

But the whole world needs vaccines as soon as possible for the sake of us all. The virus doesn't respect borders. And this country should be able to make the pharma compainies give a little -- after all, the U.S. taxpayer paid for much of the research that led to vaccine patents. There are some countries, including hard-pressed India, that could be making vaccines if pharma were forced to loose its death grip. 

In the context of a worldwide pandemic, profit from hording "intellectual property" looks like theft from humanity.

True words cause a ruckus ...

Rep. Mondaire Jones, a House Democrat who represents a district just north of New York City, was speaking in favor of D.C. statehood.

What comes across as a silence in this video is the moment when Republicans, without microphones, started yelling at him for calling their anti-statehood speeches "racist trash." Way to go, Mr. Congressman!

Though he agrees to have this phrase erased from the record in the interest of legislative comity, the whole short speech is worth watching. Congress is changing.

Friday cat blogging

I'm in bed to sleep. It's hard to tell whether Janeway is preparing to nod off or to pounce.

The House votes ...

... on to the Senate. 

[D.C. non-voting delegate Eleanor Holmes] Norton said this year’s vote felt even more significant than last year’s, because awareness of the District’s plight seems to be growing.“It’s now begun to excite the country,” she said in an interview earlier this week.

Erudite Partner grew up in D.C. sixty plus years ago, always aware that Congress was disenfranchising the people of her very Black city. 

The District is no longer so preponderantly Black. That's a complex development, neither all good or all bad. 

But it has always been wrong that 690,000 people don't enjoy full citizenship.

And the rest of us have begun to understand that.