Pointlessly meaner and more violent

NBC News tweeted coronavirus cases per month and deaths per month. November’s 4.3 million cases is more than double October’s 1.9 million cases. These are the highest two months. In deaths, November (36K) is higher than October (24K), but not doubled. Both are lower than April’s 59K deaths. In yesterday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Amanda Mull of The Atlantic. Mull told the story of Josh, who was carefully following COVID guidelines as he selected safe restaurants for indoor dining. He got sick anyway. He found out that indoor dining cannot be made safe and temperature checks weren’t useful. Amanda Mull wrote:

Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it. Often, safety protocols, of all things, are what’s misleading them. In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,” the science journalist Roxanne Khamsi recently wrote in Wired. “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.

I’m sticking to takeout. And long days by myself at home. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported on Saturday Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, went to Georgia to boost turnout for the Senate runoff elections. She got a lot of questions similar to: If it’s rigged, why vote? She couldn’t explain it because there hasn’t been a coherent explanation. A bit of schadenfreude as their lies come back to bite them. Einenkel also reported Senator Marco Rubio pretended to be a good Christian and tweeted a Bible verse:

Why do you make us wander, LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we do not fear you? Isaiah 63:17

Twitter pounced. My favorite comeback is from Jessica Gerna:

2 Thess 2:9-10 This man (antichrist) will come to do the work of Satan with counterfeit power and signs and miracles. He will use every kind of evil deception to fool those on their way to destruction, because they refuse to love and accept the truth that would save them. 2 Thess 2:11-12 So God will cause them to be greatly deceived, and they will believe these lies. Then they will be condemned for enjoying evil rather than believing the truth. Here is your answer @marcorubio.

Almost a week ago I mentioned the nasty guy was asking his minions to reclassify federal workers in the Office of Management and Budget so he could fire them if they weren’t sufficiently loyal. The head of OMB said 88% of his workers could be reclassified. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Virginia, tweeted a thread to explain the background. In 1883 the Pendleton Act “created a permanent, professional civil service that works for the American people, not the benefit of one person.” That’s what the nasty guy is trying to undo. That executive order was signed before the election. Now that the nasty guy has lost that election this order is turning into a way to sabotage the OMB, either by replacing them with his minions are leaving the office an empty shell. Beyer described a bill to reverse the nasty guy’s order and, yep, there will be a big fight over it, as Beyer said. That’s not the only effort to sabotage Joe Biden’s presidency. Joan McCarter of Kos reported Health and Human Services – the department that’s supposed to be protecting us from the virus and isn’t – has proposed a new rule. Every HHS regulation is to be assessed to determine if it should be continued, amended, or rescinded. If the assessment doesn’t happen the regulation expires at ten years. This rule could be hugely damaging. The Affordable Care Act (fondly known as Obamacare) is supported by a network of regulations. And the ACA is ten years old. All of those supporting regulations could be made to expire. To prevent that the HHS would need 90 full time staff and millions of dollars. That’s staff that should be running regular HHS functions and doing things like handling the pandemic. They’re determined to kill the ACA. This is their tactic now that the Supreme Court likely won’t kill it for them. And by killing the ACA they are determined to kill us. Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, quoted a few more articles on sabotage. I’ll mention a couple. Dana Milbank at the Washington Post listed a few: sowing doubts over the integrity of the election, shutting down the lending programs as part of the virus relief CARES Act, and Moscow Mitch blocking another virus relief deal which would expose millions to eviction and hunger. Paul Krugman a The New York Times talked GOP party sabotage. There have been several cases where states elect a Democratic governor and the GOP legislature strips the governor of power. Wisconsin is one example. So, of course, the GOP will try to do the same to Biden. Wrote Krugman:

Although Biden is still talking in a comforting way about unity and reaching across the aisle, at some point he’ll need to stop reassuring us that he’s nothing like Trump and start making Republicans pay a political price for their attempts to prevent him from governing.

Gabe Ortiz of Kos listed a few ways in which the nasty guy is sabotaging vulnerable populations. One would freeze wages for seasonal farm workers for two years. Another would discriminate against homeless transgender people. There are many more. William Barr, the head of the Department of Injustice, is finalizing a few rules and regulations of his own. Hunter of Kos reported that some of them have to do with federal executions. These rules bring back the electric chair and firing squads, at least in states that permit them. Wrote Hunter:

The death penalty has been proven to be both ineffective as a deterrent and more costly than imposing life imprisonment to begin with; it should be abolished on those grounds alone, irrespective of moral arguments. Trump and his gang of arch-conservative Republicans (that is, fascists) have instead hastened those executions, and are on track to oversee the most federal executions in over 200 years. At some point, conservative priorities are conservative priorities, and as we have seen a great many conservative priorities boil down, in the end, to performative cruelty for the sake of performative cruelty. From Sen. Mitch McConnell's continued insistence on blocking food aid to Americans even during a once-in-a-century-pandemic to Trump's spittle-flecked attacks on enemies to tented desert refugee camps to tear gassing Washington, D.C. protesters standing between Donald Trump and a church he never once gave a damn about to a new out-of-nowhere attempt to reintroduce firing squads, of all things, the core theme is of making the nation pointlessly meaner and more violent. This is thought to be a good thing, in the Party. It is celebrated. It is considered making the nation “great.”

Are these rules likely to stand? Probably not. He’s doing it anyway. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed capitalism, first by noting capitalism does splendidly well under monarchies, fascist rulers, and single party dictatorships. For the last, see China over the last three decades.

Capitalism can grow at an enormous rate when enabled by a government where civil rights, worker safety, and pollution are considered issues barely worthy of notice. So what happens when capitalism decides that democracy … is holding it back?

Democracy and capitalism aren’t the best of roommates. Even Adam Smith in his classic work The Wealth of Nations recognized that taxation and regulation were required to meet the higher cause of public good. There would always be forces to resist, pushing a nation towards the capitalist goals. A war between democracy and capitalism has been going on every day.

What might be unique to this time is the directness with which democracy’s opponents have taken to going directly after the most basic institutions required to operate even a barely adequate republic. They’re against democracy, and they genuinely don’t care who knows it. … But the new note that seems to be emerging is that it’s not just acceptable to undermine democracy, it’s a good thing. It’s not just a rollback of the civil rights era and a gleeful re-embrace of Jim Crow politics, it’s an open argument that democracy is bad. A claim that even when millions more Americans vote for one candidate than the other, to the extent that they overcome racial and structural barriers already built into the system, that it’s perfectly fine to just ignore their votes. That isn’t the normal stuff of partisan divide. It’s the substance of national dissolution. At the heart of it aren’t just fist-waving fascists like Trump, but a vast swath of the communication industry that has discovered a simple truth: It is more profitable to attack democracy than to support it. Capitalism isn’t just bumping elbows with democracy at the moment, it’s at war. Because it thinks that other system—the one where things like safety, pollution, and rights are all off the table—sounds like a pretty good deal. This isn’t just a consequence of the ability of corporations to generate more revenue through the old, old system of privatizing profit and socializing losses. It’s also massively affected by the unprecedented concentration of wealth. That consolidation makes it more and more tempting for the few to simply cross out the rights of the many … for dollars. … If democracy survives this assault … it had better find a new partner. One that is not so abusive.

From my understanding of supremacy (which I’ve been developing over at least a decade) capitalists – those in control of a corporation – are supremacists, believing their lives are supposed to be better than the lives of those under them. And one way to make their lives better in comparison is to make their worker’s lives worse. Their goal isn’t just dollars. It is to have power over those under them. And one way to do that is to keep those under them from having dollars. Might highly regulated capitalism work? Probably not. They would be forever working to undermine the regulations. Perhaps a law that demands all workers, down to the lowest janitor, are equal owners of the company. Bringing democracy to the boardroom would help, but someone would try to undermine that too. Thom Hartmann, a progressive talk show host, tweeted a thread. I’ll summarize more than quote, though I’ll start with his opening:

Fascists and oligarchs within the Republican Party are already beginning preparations to steal the 2024 presidential election. Trump, it turns out, was just a dry run for them.

They’ve put forward (or let the nasty guy put forward) the idea, long since left behind, that the state legislature can select the members of the Electoral College. Several states (Michigan being one of them) have refused to do that this year. And many of those who refused will face primary challenges from people willing to appoint EC members favorable to the GOP candidate no matter what the popular vote is. If that gets before the Supreme Court, they’ll go with the legislature, because that’s what the Constitution says. At the time the Electoral College was put in the Constitution Alexander Hamilton though it was a good idea because the EC could see the candidates (which, in 1788, average citizens couldn’t) and verify he wasn’t incompetent or a traitor. (Yeah, the EC was also created to make sure the South could maintain slavery.) We may soon be faced with the EC being used to install a traitor. It is time – as in before 2024 – to push to abolish the EC (which, alas, will take a Constitutional Amendment), or at least weaken it with the National Popular Vote interstate compact.