The right-wingers who comprise the majority of the pro-life movement are only consistent in one respect. On issue after issue, they have no respect for life. Their hypocrisy leads one to suspect that they are more interested in controlling women than saving lives.
Shutting down businesses and schools felt to many people like a natural response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the extended coronavirus lockdown of 2020 did not follow any widely-accepted standard strategy; lockdowns were sporadic and short-lived during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the most recent historical parallel. Encouraging and coercing tens of millions of people to shelter in place in 2020 was one of the most radical social engineering experiments in modern history, as novel as the coronavirus itself.
The political impulse to cancel events and close nonessential services we experienced during the spring and summer of 2020 is reemerging as the highly contagious, albeit anecdotally less severe, omicron variant sweeps through New York City and other hotspots. Broadway theaters, rock and hip-hop performers have canceled performances, the Rockettes closed their season a week early and Mayor Bill de Blasio is considering curtailing attendance at the city’s annual ball drop at Times Square. Rumors that New York City is considering another public-school system lockdown are sparking panic among parents.
Harvard has moved back to remote learning. The World Economic Forum in Davos has been canceled. Quebec is under lockdown, joining the Netherlands. The United Kingdom is considering one.
So, clearly, is the Biden Administration. The feds can’t order lockdowns. But they can pressure states and cities to enact them.
White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci says he doesn’t “foresee” another national lockdown in the United States—yet. Students of political messaging will take note of the careful if-then conditional sentence structure in Fauci’s statement on ABC’s “This Week”: “I don’t see that in the future if we do the things that we’re talking about,” Fauci said. “The thing that continues to be very troublesome to me and my public health colleagues is the fact that we still have 50 million people in the country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not vaccinated.” What are the odds that vaccine resisters will change their minds in the next week or two?
Americans should consider, as we stare down the barrel of a second wave of “slow the spread”-motivated societal freezes, the pros and cons of the first one last year. Spoiler alert: this is not a movie that deserves a sequel.
Co-conceived in 2005 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security and the World Health Organization, the Pandemic Influenza Plan developed to “prevent, control, and respond to…novel influenza A viruses of animal (e.g. from birds or pigs) with pandemic potential,” according to the Centers for Disease Control, was the blueprint for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza deployed by the Trump and Biden administrations 15 years later to coordinate “all levels of government on the range of options for infection-control and containment, including those circumstances where social distancing measures, limitations on gatherings, or quarantine authority may be an appropriate public health intervention.” Federal officials turned to this Bush-era guidebook when COVID-19 came to America.
It pains this leftist to admit it, but conservatives who warned of the economic and psychological costs of the 2020 lockdown turned out to have been correct. “Lockdowns do not prevent infection in the future. They just don’t. It comes back many times, it comes back,” President Donald Trump said in April 2020, shortly before much of the country succumbed to lockdown fever. He looks prescient.
With the delta and omicron variants still raging, cost-benefit analysis of the COVID lockdown requires hard data that won’t be available for years. But one thing is clear: the lockdown experiment was far short of an unqualified success.
The economic cost has been staggering. “COVID-19–related job losses wiped out 113 straight months of job growth, with total nonfarm employment falling by 20.5 million jobs in April [2020],” according to a study by the Brookings Institute. 200,000 businesses more than average failed. Harvard economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers have estimated the total cost of the crisis, much of which is attributable to the lockdown, at $16 trillion if the pandemic were to end this fall—i.e., now.
2020-21 was the Great Lost Year of American public education. With Black students five months behind where they would have been otherwise and whites two months back, virtual instruction was virtually educational.
But what about the benefit? Some studies claimed that lockdowns prevented nearly 5 million cases in the United States; at a mortality rate of 1.6% that works out to 80,000 fewer coronavirus fatalities thanks to the lockdown. But analyses of “excess deaths” indicate that at least 300,000 Americans more than usual died last year due to causes other than the virus itself. Increased alcohol consumption, reduced physical activity and depression culminating in suicide (not last year, when fewer people killed themselves, but in future years) will claim lives years into the future. If the lives-saved column of the ledger comes out a net positive, it probably won’t be by much.
As for ordinary Americans, we are voting with our feet: 72% of respondents to a December 14th Ipsos poll said they plan to see family or friends outside of their household over the holidays.
This country can’t handle more lockdowns.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Your opinion doesn’t matter—not by itself. No matter how heartfelt or important to you personally, your thoughts about Gaza or legal weed or the war on skinny jeans don’t mean anything merely because they reside inside your brain.
Your opinion matters only if you express it. Expression of an opinion doesn’t change anything unless it’s done effectively. Opinions expressed en masse, alongside others who share your views, are more likely to effect change—but that’s not enough to move the needle. What changes policy, what improves lives for the foreseeable future, what makes history on a radical scale, is a sustained mass movement that expresses an opinion so aggressively that the ruling classes are forced to change course or risk losing their power and privilege to revolutionary overthrow.
American liberals and leftists have strong opinions on a variety of issues. But they express them on the couch or online rather than in the streets, where it matters. On the rare occasion when we venture into the public sphere, our protests are usually sporadic and unsustained, like the annual anti-Trump women’s marches with the pink pussy hats or militantly nonviolent, like the antiwar protests leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Neither had any effect. Leftie demonstrations rarely assume the dangerous character required to scare the powers that be: violent, or nonviolent while brandishing a credible threat of violence.
Last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were an exception, continuing every day for well over 100 consecutive days in over 500 cities, involving between 7 and 22 million people. Though mostly nonviolent, BLM demonstrations featured sufficient property damage and violence to lend the peaceful events a menacing swagger. Which is why BLM was effective.
Racist and brutal police are still a big problem. But BLM moved the ball down the field more than anyone would have expected previously. Defunding the police went from fringe to mainstream with cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco actually moving millions of dollars in their budgets. Chokeholds have been banned in dozens of cities. Confederate statues, the Stars and Bars at NASCAR, the names of sports teams and products whose names invoke the legacy of racism are biting the dust. Equity has become a policy priority for public educators.
Liberals, progressives and leftists should take note of BLM’s successes and emulate their tactics for other causes. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the 1960s. Street activism works when it’s sustained—and a little dangerous.
For the first time in memory a majority of Democratic voters tell pollsters they support the Palestinians in their struggle against apartheid in Israel and the brutal occupation and theft of land in the Palestinian Territories. Nice to see. But your disgust at the Israeli bombing of Gaza can’t be enough to help the Palestinians or pressure Congress to cut off the $4 billion in aid Israel receives each year from U.S. taxpayers. You have to fight for it.
68% of voters want to add a public option to Obamacare. (And 55% want Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All.) The public option was one of Biden’s campaign promises but now he’s reneging. Two out of three voters is a big number, but Democrats won’t have to make good on their promises as long as we sit on our asses at home.
63% of Americans say they want the minimum wage to go up to $15-an-hour immediately. Yet Democrats haven’t even announced a bill for their watered-down, half-hearted proposal to scale up to $15 by 2025. Biden and the Democrats talk to big-business donors and lobbyists, not you and me. Public opinion doesn’t matter by itself.
Want the U.S. to use its enormous military and financial influence over Israel to force movement toward a two-state solution that emancipates the people of Palestine? Get out into the streets. Stay there. Be militant. Don’t stop until you get results.
Want Congress to finally get serious about America’s insane for-profit healthcare system so that anyone who’s sick can see a doctor? Fill the streets of hundreds of cities for months at a time and refuse to leave until the corrupt fools in Washington see reason and let us join the numerous other nations who provide for their people’s basic needs.
Want a living wage for anyone who puts in a full day’s work? Don’t just think it—do it. Go out there, confront the cops, refuse to be cowed, make everything stop until employers are forced to do the right thing.
Last year’s BLM protests were fueled in size and intensity by the COVID-19 lockdown and high unemployment. Now that workplaces, schools and entertainment venues are reopening, it’s tempting to return to the ad-hoc passive activism of the pre-pandemic era. But wimpy succumbing to “free speech” zones to express grievances on the occasional Saturday or Sunday didn’t work then and it won’t work now. We need to rock the streets every day, hard, like it’s 2020 or 1968.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
The Centers for Disease Control made big news by announcing that people who are fully vaccinated for COVID-19 no longer have to socially distance or wear masks, even indoors.
Beginning in March 2016 I repeatedly and almost famously warned overconfident Democrats—who ridiculed me for saying so—that Donald Trump would probably win the 2016 election. Days after Trump’s “softly sensuous” inauguration I accurately predicted the next four years: “Three scenarios show us what everyday life in Trumpian America will probably feel like: Third World dictatorships, prison and having an alcoholic parent.”
“In a dictatorship,” I noted, “particularly where the despot is a megalomaniac in the vein of a Saddam Hussein or a Muammar Gaddafi, citizens obsess over the Great Leader’s every move.” Never have the American people obsessed for four exhausting years over a president as we did over Trump and his autocratic style.
“People who have done time will tell you that it’s important to study the guards, particularly the sadistic ones.” Like prison inmates, we studied Trump and his tweets and his strange corrupt family incessantly in a vain attempt to isolate the methods to his multiple madnesses.
As I concluded in January 2017: “It’s never fun to be Cassandra.”
Now it’s time to weigh in on what Joe Biden’s first — and despite his recent statement to the contrary, almost certainly only — term will probably look like.
Spoiler alert: it probably won’t last four years.
There’s a reason candidate Biden barely campaigned and almost never spoke extemporaneously, and that President Biden has only given one highly cringy press conference so far, a record low in the modern era. Biden, 78, is the oldest man to have taken the oath of office. And while a lot of 78-year-olds are physically vigorous and mentally sharp, Biden isn’t one of them.
Biden’s cabal of Obama-era handlers are doing their best to hide their fading commander-in-chief and his obvious-to-all-non-Democrats infirmities, running the country from behind the scenes. His media allies have sacrificed their last vestige of dignity in their heroic support for the Dems’ ridiculous “nothing to see here” narrative.
As professional gamblers evaluate the president’s health and political performance, posted odds that he’ll remain in office through January 19, 2025—when he’ll be 82—have already plunged from 75% to 60%. My guess is that no one is more aware of Biden’s condition than DNC bosses. They would like Biden to hang on until after the November 2022 midterm elections, then step aside in order to allow Vice President Kamala Harris a year of incumbency, which could bolster her case for 2024.
Biden can still read a speech. But he is a husk, a placeholder leader like Pope Benedict XVI, who like Biden became pope at age 78. Benedict resigned at age 85, citing old age.
Following Trump’s bipolar rule and violent departure from office, Biden’s courtly elder-statesman style and successful passage of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill has him enjoying high approval ratings. But failures of commission and omission lie ahead. It’s mostly downhill from here.
The next major item on the Biden Administration’s legislative agenda is a $2.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Until recently building stuff seemed like one of the few areas in which a bipartisan grand bargain might be possible. Now, however, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has united the GOP in opposition. With DINOs like Joe Manchin of West Virginia going wobbly, it seems destined for outright defeat or, worse because it only pretends to fix the issue, severe dilution.
Voters judge presidential success and failure on two metrics. First, did the president correctly identify the problems people care about most? Second, did they fix those problems or at least do their best to try?
In part because they listened to progressives, Biden’s people wisely put money into people’s pockets to help them recover from the economic pain of the COVID-19 lockdown. As checks arrive this month, voters will feel warm fuzzies for the Democrats. But it wasn’t nearly enough. What happens in two or three months? Those single $1400 payments, a tiny fraction of a whole year of fiscal pain, will be spent and gone. The eviction and foreclosure moratorium ends June 30th. There is no indication that the White House plans another relief package.
Look for a long hot summer as complacency deteriorates into despair.
Biden’s presidency will likely crash on the shoals of the country’s numerous long-neglected problems. Legislation to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour will be tepid to nonexistent. The same goes for student loan debt relief. Biden promised to add a public option to the Affordable Care Act but there’s no sign of life there either. He talks a good game on racial justice yet offers nothing by way of forced federal reform of local policing.
If I’m right, the second two years of the Administration will belong to Kamala Harris as of 2023.
She is young, charismatic and relatively energetic. She will make the most of her historical moment as the first woman of color to hold the nation’s highest political office; the media will be on her side. But if history repeats itself by punishing the party in power Democrats will likely lose seats in the House and control of the Senate in the midterms, leaving her in an even worse position to get anything done in Congress. Nevertheless, she’ll be a formidable candidate in 2024.
As befitted him, Trump went out with a bang.
Biden will end with a whimper.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the upcoming graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available for pre-order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Biden’s response to the insanely low minimum wage, the ongoing healthcare crisis and the millions of people and businesses destroyed by the COVID-19 recession has been anemic; his defenders insist Trump was worse. But we can’t say “Trump was worse” when the rent is due.
It’s too early to celebrate, back-to-brunch Democrats.
Liberal voters are counting Biden’s corporatist cabinet picks. But we still don’t know for sure that Trump will let them hatch. There’s still a significant chance — I would put it at 50-50 — that the “outgoing” president will engineer a coup d’état in order to remain in power.
Democratic-aligned media outlets are promulgating wishful thinking. They’re crowing about a routine, peaceful transfer of power. They’re making fun of the Trump campaign’s losses in court challenges to the election results and making light of the president’s hope that faithless electors will trigger the 12th Amendment scenario by causing Biden to fall short of 270. The mainstream pundit class points to the bureaucracy’s granting of access to Biden’s transition team and to excerpts from a recent Trump interview as evidence that he has accepted defeat. (In fact, Trump said that if the electoral college votes for Biden, they will have “made a mistake, ’cause this election was a fraud.”)
But they are ignoring human motivation.
Trump has every reason to use radical means to remain president, democracy and constitution be damned. If he leaves the White House on January 20, the former president loses executive immunity and becomes exposed to an array of fraud and corruption charges related to his businesses. The New York State charges are the most hazardous. He could well be convicted and sent to prison on those. Even if Biden were to issue a presidential pardon, a law specifically directed at Trump ensures that a federal pardon would not apply to New York’s state convictions. Trump is an old man, hardly in good health. He could spend the rest of his life in prison — unless he declares martial law and becomes America’s first dictator.
Cynics, a group I usually identify with, believe that wealthy and powerful white guys like Donald Trump are never held accountable for their crimes, much less go to prison. For Trump, that has been the case so far. But there have been exceptions. As happened to Martin Shkreli, Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein, everything indicates that Trump’s white privilege card has been revoked. The ruling classes are dying to see Trump humiliated, perp-walked, and mug-shot in a jumpsuit that matches his skin tone. The neoliberals never considered the master of crass to be one of their own. Now he is a full-fledged class traitor, our Huey Long. Populist and verbally skeptical of the militarism and job-exporting free trade agreements that line the capitalists’ Cayman accounts, Trump has proven that a sizable portion of the American public—on the right, no less!—agrees with him. The elites despise him for this. They will not save him.
Trump’s lawsuits will fail. (He knows.) The electoral college will elect Biden.
Trump will then have five weeks to decide what to do. Await his fate at Mar-a-Lago? Trump isn’t passive, especially when he fears he’s going to lose. Fly to exile in Israel or Saudi Arabia? Netanyahu is too beholden to the U.S. to risk offending an incoming Biden Administration; Saudi Arabia is one of the most unpleasant places on earth.
Trump’s coup calculus is simple: what’s the worst-case scenario if he fails? Arrest and prison? He’ll be no worse off than if he didn’t try.
Trump has two major advantages that the usual coup plotter doesn’t. First is incumbency: he currently has his hands on the levers of power. He’s not looking to change anything; he’s trying to keep things the way they are. Second, he doesn’t have the support of the military—but he doesn’t need it. His would be a “police coup” carried out by the numerous local police departments whose unions endorsed him for reelection, alongside federalized state police and deputized paramilitary MAGA goons.
Leaders of the armed forces, the only institution that could stop Trump, would face an awful choice. If they remove the civilian head of government, even a rogue, they are carrying out a military coup. They would have to shoot at local police, many of whom are veterans. If the army were to stand down, they would be tacitly endorsing Trump’s police coup. My experience is, when people face two bad choices, they do nothing—which is why I don’t think Trump has to worry about the military.
History tells us how such a coup would go down. Newspapers will disappear, radio will go silent, television will go dark, the Internet will be turned off. Police checkpoints will spring up on city streets and along highways. After a short time, perhaps a few days, the president will inform us that it’s all for our own good, that he’s trying to protect America and democracy and everything beautiful, but that a state of emergency is necessary to preserve law and order. There will be curfews, martial law, a ban on political protests and gatherings. Communications will resume in a limited fashion. Even news media outlets that used to be critical of Trump will sing his praises.
In most other countries, a coup leader like Trump would face dogged resistance. But that usually requires socialists and communists; only a disciplined Marxist movement stands a chance at destabilizing an authoritarian regime. Fortunately for Trump, a century of ruthless oppression and right-wing propaganda has eliminated the actual left.
Trump set the stage for a coup by moving loyalists into key positions. After the election he fired the Secretary of Defense, a man notable because he refused to send the military to fight protesters on American streets, and replaced him with a toady. The Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence also got the axe. He did the same to the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at Homeland Security. The directors of the CIA and FBI reportedly have targets on their backs as well. Wishful-thinking Democrats speculate that the firings are mere retribution by a spiteful Trump. If so, it’s interesting that Trump’s revenge is limited to key national security figures. Didn’t anyone in the Department of Agriculture ever piss him off?
“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free,” counsels Sun Tzu. “Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” The powers that be are ignoring this advice. If they were wise, they would approach Trump with a deal: go quietly, return to your real estate business, and you won’t be prosecuted. No more rallies. No more political campaigns.
Instead they have turned him into a cornered rat. Because the authorities are hell-bent on humiliating and destroying a sitting president, the American republic is about to go through one of its most dangerous months in history.
Trump might resign himself to months and years of court hearings, trials, prison for him and his family. But I wouldn’t count on it.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Why, Democrats have been asking, do so many poor white people vote for a Republican Party that doesn’t care about or do anything for them? The most common reply is: Democrats are snobby coastal elites who talk down to them. Classic example, courtesy of Obama: “They [voters in the Rust Belt] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Democrats know their arrogance pisses off the working-class whites they need to win national elections. Yet they persist.
Every day sees some op-ed Ivy-educated columnist opining that voting for Trump means you’re a Klansman and another DNC-fed talking head pontificating about the masklessness at the president’s rallies with the bloated tone of a Roman tribune announcing stunning news that no one had ever heard before.
Now the Democrats are at it again, setting the stage for yet another surprise loss. Because, yes, they just lost again. When you expect a “blue wave,” when you’re running against a president who lost hundreds of thousands of citizens and tens of millions of jobs the year of the election, when you expected to pick up tons of seats in the House and take back the Senate, and none of that happens and you just barely win the presidency in a squeaker, you basically got your ass kicked.
Humility is in order. But it’s not on the menu.
“You chose hope and unity, decency, science and, yes, truth … you ushered in a new day for America,” Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris told attendees at her victory party. And the 73 million Americans who voted for Trump? By inference they must have voted for hopelessness and division, indecency, superstition and, yes, lies.
Biden had a similar message in his last pre-election closer. “This is our opportunity to leave the dark, angry politics of the last four years behind us,” Biden said. “To choose hope over fear, unity over division, science over fiction. I believe it’s time to unite the country, to come together as a nation.” Biden won. But 73 million people voted for those “dark, angry politics of the last four years.” Those voters thought Trump offered them more hope than Biden. They didn’t want to unify under the Democrats.
We all have to live together in one country until there’s a second Civil War. We don’t have to think the same or look the same. But in order to function as a society we do have to understand one another. Liberals do not get Republicans or understand where they’re coming from. They don’t even care. Until that attitude changes, Democrats will keep losing elections they ought to have won and will find it impossible to achieve tolerance from half the populace, much less consensus.
I’m a leftist. But I called the 2016 election for Trump early that year, not because I’m smart but because I’m from Dayton, Ohio. I watched my hometown devolve from an industrial powerhouse into a Rust Belt hellscape that eventually became Ground Zero for hopelessness and urban decay in the national opioid epidemic. International competition was inevitable. But deindustrialization powered by job-killing free trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO was federal policy dreamed up by Republicans and enacted into legislation by Democrats like Bill Clinton—and that’s how American politicians killed places like Dayton in the industrial Midwest and across the country.
My blood boiled when Democrats admitted that NAFTA would kill American jobs but, hey, new jobs in Mexico would open new markets for American goods. Such an idiotic argument. After the factories closed in America, who would sell stuff to Mexico? China. But my rage paled next to those of men and women who lost six-figure salaries and wound up working as Walmart greeters—all because Democrats like Clinton were funded by contributions from corporations that wanted to sell to American consumers without hiring American workers in order to fatten their profits.
Years passed. More factories shut down. The long-term unemployed went on disability. Those who could find jobs worked for tiny fractions of their previous pay. Tax revenues shrunk. Infrastructure crumbled. Cities entered their death spirals.
No one cared except the people who lived there.
Deindustrialization never became a political issue. Republicans and Democrats agreed that free trade was a good thing. The New York-based press ignored the rot and the misery in the country’s heartland. Only two politicians on the national scene acknowledged it: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. After the Democrats kneecapped Sanders, that left Trump as the only candidate who understood that the part of America that let working people send their kids to college had been pretty great but no longer was. He didn’t offer a credible reindustrialization policy. As president, he didn’t do much beyond provoke a trade war with China to address the issue. But he acknowledged the Rust Belt and for the people who lived there so long, ignored and dismissed and derided, that was enough.
Democrats still don’t get it.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
If nothing else, the political and economic collapse of the United States means it no longer has much stomach for lecturing other countries.
