Have you learned nothing from us?

The COVID data for Michigan shows a big spike in the number of new cases per day, peaking at 5721. The peaks in the last five weeks are now 4382, 4466, 4274, 3894, 5721. The earlier values have been revised. I’m sure this last one will be too. Even so, at the moment it looks scary. It also looks like it continues the rising September trend, if one ignores the plateau in October. Deaths per day hit 57 one day last week and one day the week before was revised to 54. Today I was also able to draw my map of Michigan county hotspots. The counties with the highest case rates are in the center of the lower peninsula and a few counties in the upper. The counties with the lowest percentage of cases include Wayne (including Detroit), Oakland, and Washtenaw (where Ann Arbor is). Also low is Leland County, which has the highest vaccination rate in the state. I spent a couple hours today on the edges of the Farmington Farmers Market talking to voters, alerting them there is a “Secure MI Vote” petition being circulated. In spite of its name it has nothing to do with election security and everything with voter suppression. This is now the third time I’ve done that and I had a good cool sunny day for it. I saw one of the members of the team talking to a woman for quite a long time. As we closed out our work this member told the rest of us the woman was from Germany, whose main message was: Have you learned nothing from us? She was astonished that Americans were now doing the same things Germans had done just before the rise of the Nazis and those in power are letting it happen. Alexander Kaufman, climate reporter for HuffPost, tweeted a chart of the differences in carbon emissions between the rich and poor of the G20 countries (well, the 17 for which there is data). The US is, not surprisingly, at the top of the list. The bottom 50% of Americans emit about 8 (metric) tonnes of CO2 per person. The top 10% emit 50 tonnes per person. The group that emits the second highest amount are the rich of Canada at about 28 tonnes per person, just over half. Ben Phillips tweeted a photo of the virtual address by the Tuvalu delegate to the COP26 climate summit. He’s wearing a suit and speaking from a podium – and he’s standing in the ocean with the water about mid-thigh. Many thousands of youth marched outside the climate summit. They’re marching outside because they’re not allowed inside. Leah McElrath tweeted a ten second video from Stuart Gibson looking down on the crowd from above to capture its size. I’ve seen a few other videos of the march. It was big. Greta Thunberg is also one stuck on the outside. She talked to the crowd for nine minutes. She tweeted this quote from her talk:

Many are asking what it’ll take for people in power to wake up. But let’s be clear - they’re already awake. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know exactly what priceless values they’re sacrificing to maintain business as usual.

Cleaning out browser tabs... A week ago, just after the House briefly entertained the idea of including a wealth tax in the big Build Back Better bill, Michel Martin of NPR spoke about it with Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University. Some of what they talked about: Billionaires would rather pay tax lawyers to figure out how not to pay income taxes. That they pushed back against a billionaire tax is no surprise. The rich don’t sell their assets to cover their living expenses. They get loans with the assets collateral. So there is no tax on the increase in value of the asset when sold and no tax on the loan because it is to be repaid. There is a bias in our tax laws in favor of income from capital and not in favor of income from labor. That bias has been there since the 1920s because wealthy white men wanted to pay less in taxes. The argument is businesses generate jobs and thus wealth. But billionaires create problems for the federal government to solve, then don’t pay their fair share having created the problems. Race is in there. Those who don’t pay taxes are mostly wealthy white men. They are the ones behind the scenes getting lower tax bills. Because white men don’t pay their share, black Americans have to pay more. This gets left out of the conversation. Marcus Johnson tweeted:

The funny thing is people think the CRT discourse is something new. No, this is the same cultural-political fight going back 200+ years. Over the level of political power Black people can have in society. Black people gain something politically, there’s a conservative backlash. Abolitionist movement — secession. Reconstruction — jim crow and state sanctioned vigilante violence. lost cause propaganda. Civil rights/Voting/Immigration — southern strategy, modern gop realignment. tough on crime, conf monuments Obama — Trump BLM/Floyd Protests — anti CRT

It is two steps forward, one step back. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted John Stoehr and his Editorial Board. Stoehr wrote that CRT is the most destructive political boogeyman since Joseph McCarthy. State legislatures are using it to create a new category of “un-American activities.” By censoring information and policing thought, the Republicans can replace knowledge and understanding with lies and propaganda advancing a preferred way of seeing America, to wit: In America, everyone gets a fair shake in life. Social ills like poverty and racism are individual failings, not societal ones. Everything is fine. Nothing to worry about. Except “those people” making trouble. Brandon Bradford tweeted:

All politics are identity politics, so when people talk about getting rid of "identity politics" they don't mean their identity, just yours.

Some talking heads say that Glenn Youngkin won to be governor of Virginia because of the way he hammered at education. Howard Fineman of NBCNews tweeted:

The “schools” issue actually is a ganglia of strategies to anger the #GOP base about: 1. Feds, in this case for keeping schools closed due to Covid. 2. The power of science experts. 3. Teachers unions. 4. Teaching societal responsibility for racism. 5. Teaching gender fluidity.

In another roundup Dworkin quoted Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, who tweeted a link to a story about what young people think about how the pandemic was handled on CNN and included a quote:

"Our adults and leaders were unwilling to find a common ground, unable to compromise, and our education suffered, not because of covid but because of incompetence and lack of innovation." This whole piece is a tough read.

I think Dworkin then quoted a bit from that article. It’s by Madeline Holcome of CNN:

“This pandemic has brought me self-reflection and analysis, but it also was a test on the world and this country, and I fear we are failing,” said Ella Stromberg, a 17-year-old from Vancouver, Washington. Young Americans may not have autonomy over how they attend school, if their families get vaccinated or the policies elected officials implement, but they are observing the victories and pitfalls of those who do.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted some late night commentary. Here are a couple:

The reproductive health of millions of women currently rests in the hands of the Supreme Court. Three-fourths of people seeking abortions are low-income, many of whom are people of color. They will face barriers making it almost impossible to get to another state. Think of it as the Oregon Trail, where all the pioneers are pregnant, and instead of dysentery you die of Amy Coney Barrett. —Samantha Bee President Biden was in Scotland for the climate change conference. The U.N. Secretary General got things off to a fun start. He told the delegates: 'We are digging our own graves.' And Senator Joe Manchin was like, 'Yeah, but if we stop, we're gonna put a lot of gravediggers out of business. What about them?' —Jimmy Kimmel