Eating, and not eating, in the time of the coronavirus

This column seems to me an excessively happy assessment of life sheltering-in-place -- as well as very much concerned with a first world problem.

Dietitians report that clients are less interested in dieting, and more interested in sustainable eating patterns that enrich their long-term health. The search term “weight loss diets” fell sharply in March and April, according to Google Trends.

“I have definitely seen less talk and fewer questions about fad diets” says Melissa Nieves, a dietitian with Fad Free Nutrition based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “I think people have rightfully put their attention on their protection, survival and well-being during this pandemic. That also includes eating habits becoming more practical and less centered on what diet culture says we should or shouldn’t eat to reach a socially constructed body ideal.”

Cara Rosenbloom, Washington Post

Well, maybe. Most people in my circles keep groaning about the pounds they have put on, but some probably are acquiring improved food habits. This author reports that 45 percent of us said we were cooking more at home, not surprisingly. And many people report eating better, consuming less salt and sugar while adding fruit and vegetables.

But this picture doesn't catch the other stark reality of this time: with 40 million and counting workers out of jobs, many people simply can't afford to buy food. The Highland Country Press of Hillsboro, Ohio, offered a picture of that reality.

“COVID-19 has created the perfect storm, releasing a downpour of difficulties on Ohio families,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. “High unemployment rates and loss of income from jobs has led to a massive surge in demand at our foodbanks at a time when we’re facing significant operational challenges, including declines in volunteers, fundraising revenue and donated foods.”

Foodbanks across the country rapidly shifted operating models to meet skyrocketing demand while mitigating the spread of COVID-19, and they haven’t seen demand ease off for three months. Meanwhile, disruptions to the supply chain have meant fewer retail donations and a surge in food prices putting additional pressure on family food budgets.

“Congress attempted to put an umbrella over families’ heads by means of expanding SNAP aid and increasing unemployment benefits, but it hasn’t been enough,” Hamler-Fugitt said. “The increase in food prices makes the current SNAP benefit amounts even more inadequate to meet basic food needs. Our foodbanks simply cannot keep up with this level of demand – congressional action is needed now.”

Yes, Congressional action is needed -- and Republicans refuse to move on this. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives has sent a proposed relief and stimulus bill to the Senate, but the GOPers there are just sitting on it.

Congress should keep it simple, just give people who are hurting more money. Their well-being was sacrificed to try (largely ineptly) to control the virus for the sake of everyone. The food distribution and supply chains would sort themselves out if people could afford to buy.

The police lack all accountability; it's the money

Emily Galvin-Almanza, a public defender and co-director of Partners for Justice thought she should explain her support for #DefundThePolice to her mom. What follows is an adapted Twitter thread in which she made the case.

[Unless bracketed, all text is by Garza-Almanza.]
... And she asked me a question: how could what happened to Rayshard Brooks [killed last Friday by an Atlanta cop] happen, at this moment, in this uprising? How could police keep...doing this?

So this is what I said.

My mom is not steeped in these issues (I mean, she is more now, because, like, she has to be mother to yrs truly). So this thread isn't intended for folks who are already right there with us. I'm hoping this will be useful for folks who are wondering, and who share her questions.

Killings--murders--have continued, and will continue, because the police lack all accountability. It's not just qualified immunity, which protects them from being found liable for things that would bankrupt/jail the rest of us. It's the money.

Follow the money.

Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd, could *still get his million dollar pension* even if he is getting those checks while serving a sentence for homicide.

Police pensions are...generous. Many are raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, even if they've been dismissed for the kind of misconduct that would throw you or me into a cell. ...

So you can't get sued, you won't lose your $ no matter what you do, and, what's more, you're living in a culture where morality is upside down, bullies rule, and everyone is trained to be both extremely violent and extremely terrified all the time. ...

... Let's talk about overtime.

As a public defender, whenever I got a case that was just especially, stupidly made-up (think someone arrested for dealing drugs who was at home with no drugs, money, scales, paraphernalia, or baggies on them) the first thing I checked was the cop's schedule.

Inevitably--seriously, ask, like, any defense attorney about this--when you got a really stupid arrest, it would be within an hour or so of the end of the cop's scheduled shift.

Shift ends at 6pm? This really bad arrest would be at, like, 5:30.

Why? Well, because processing an arrest takes time, but it's also really easy. So you can make time-and-a-half for sitting in the precinct typing up some papers and waiting to talk to a DA.

This REALLY adds up. Examples...
Defund the Baltimore Police
Detroit Police overtime up 136 percent over 5 years
Police Overtime Running 2x over budget
We Need To Talk About Boston's Police Budget

Let's not forget that the end-of-shift arrest isn't just an inconvenience--arrests cost people jobs, homes, family unity, sometimes unraveling entire lives.

Some of these cops are making close to half a million dollars a year on the backs of the poor and innocent.

So when we look at police budgets that are bloated like this...it's not just military equipment and chemical weapons.

It's public officials lining their pockets with taxpayer money by doing terrible things to the people they're supposed to protect.

And uhhh it's a lot--A LOT--of the taxpayers' money.

So when you hear "defund the police" and you get worried about a world where there's no one protecting the public, please remember that EVERY MODEL for doing this envisions a world where someone is on the other end of the phone when you call 911. ...

Now I know for sure we're living in a failed state

The Ford Foundation, the occupant of this glowing New York City headquarters, has chosen to issue bonds, payable in the far future, in order to increase its grants in this moment of pandemic, economic collapse, and necessary uprisings. According to the Times:

In 2019, the Ford Foundation handed out $520 million in grants. [Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation,] quickly realized that was not going to be anywhere near enough in this crisis-engulfed year.

His solution: Borrow money, spend it quickly and inspire others to follow Ford’s lead. The Ford Foundation plans to announce on Thursday that it will borrow $1 billion so that it can substantially increase the amount of money it distributes.

Walker has lined up four other old-line, extremely affluent, charitable foundations to follow his lead. This is old money stepping up.

Walker at Ford is doing exactly what every progressive and even conventional economist has urged governments to do since 2008: when interest rates are near zero, borrow and push out that cash to build up social capital as well as needed infrastructure. This is what a functional government would do. Unhappily, Republicans have only been willing to allow the government to borrow to give a $1.4 billion dollar tax cut to their rich buddies -- and to their plutocrat in the White House.

So here we find private wealth doing what government ought to be doing. I guess we're lucky there's a Ford Foundation. (This was something I was less sure about back in the day when I was a supplicant. These institutions are awfully satisfied with their own virtue.) They could be doing far worse things with their $13.7 billion dollar endowment. Hitler-loving Henry Ford must be rolling in his grave. Give some of that money to the people who are setting the agenda in the streets!

Unwelcome letter from the IRS

This ugly item turned up in the mail today. That man sure has a messy mind -- and wields a messy Sharpie.

As happened for most(?) of us, the stimulus money turned up weeks ago and went right out again. We were fortunate enough to be able to do some passing on. Democrats darn well better play hard ball and pry more stimulus from the GOPers; eventually we're all going to notice that all of us suffer when nearly one quarter of us are out of work.

This was preventable.

Never forget: this was preventable

Back in the day when I worked for a research outfit, I was dazzled by the brilliance of Edward Tufte's volume, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I still am. Erudite Partner even was enabled by a sympathetic boss to attend the great man's course. Tufte had a rule:

... the fundamental principle of good statistical data: Above all else show the data.

Andrew Van Dam's The unluckiest generation in U.S. history in the today's Washington Post follows Tufte's rule brilliantly and sadly convincingly, illustrated by nine mostly simple charts.

People aged 20 to 40 have been hammered by the coronavirus shutdown. And they bring along far less buffer which might help them to weather the storm. Many have lost jobs and essentially will have to start adult life over -- for the second time, having endured the 2008 recession.

He explains:

After accounting for the present crisis, the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history.

Millennials will bear these economic scars over the rest of their lives, in the form of lower earnings, lower wealth and delayed milestones, such as homeownership.

... Millennials had much less of a financial cushion than previous generations did at their age, Kent said, even though they had been doing many things right. The deck has been stacked against them. They just don’t have as many assets as previous generations did at their age.

The horror of this moment for the largest, most diverse, to my mind most interesting, generation in the country's history is all laid out here. Must reading....Another Washington Post article, A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic, tells more of the story, with charts not quite elegant.

Some groups have been hit harder than others. Rates of anxiety and depression were far higher among younger adults, women and the poor. The worse scores in young adults were especially notable, given that the virus has been more likely to kill the elderly or leave them critically ill.

No kidding. What would you expect? My generation has full lives behind us, however fraught our pasts may have been; young people coming up face a very hard future. And they know it. We need to listen to them and learn.

Grocery delivery: both less and more than just a job

Last week we ordered groceries from Costco, delivered by an Instacart "shopper." (I guess that label is better, more accurate, than calling a worker an "associate," but cloying euphemisms about people doing work under arrangements with lousy or no benefits still annoy me.) We've ordered several times since the lockdown. I figured out that I was suspicious of Instacart a couple of years ago, so I feel uneasy about this. I was lucky enough to have been raised in a moment in U.S. history -- the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II -- when even middle class white people thought you did your dirty and dreary work for yourselves. But here we are and ordering groceries if we can afford to has become a public health practice.

So what kind of business is Instacart and the many analogous services? According to the Washington Post, these gig jobs are a booming business.

Instacart, founded in 2012, more than doubled its workforce in two months, thanks in part to Facebook ads with the coronavirus-sensitive slogan “Make money without passengers.” ... In interviews with 20 people who signed up for these jobs since the coronavirus crisis hit two months ago, workers said the barrier to entry was low, requiring little more than a background check, driver’s license and car insurance. But many found a steep learning curve in navigating company policies that shape pay and hours. Nearly all recruits said the availability of work and pay dropped off after a few weeks. ...

... Instacart’s algorithm organizes grocery orders into “batches,” which can include up to three different customers. Workers then select gigs from a Twitter-like feed, which shows earnings per batch in one lump sum, including tips.

So workers are essentially competing with each other, online, for what look like the best "batches." And then what is actually paid can change if some items turn out to be out-of-stock or if the customer changes the percentage of tip after the worker takes on their project. The default tip in the Instacart app is 5 percent of the cost of the groceries. Decent people bump it up; no tip is required from cheapskates. It's not clear what compensation "shoppers" receive beyond the tips -- varies by locality and their costs of doing the work such as gas. Maybe $10 to 15 an hour according to forums. There seems to be no promise of any particular wage from Instacart.

And then workers carry the inherent risk of encountering the coronavirus while in the stores or (less likely) at doors.

Some of Instacart's many new hires during the pandemic are happy with their role. Fox Business found an Instacart enthusiast to interview.

Sarah Hlad has been an Instacart shopper since early April, and already she’s earned almost $3,000.

“The first week I did it, I paid off my whole credit card,” she told FOX Business.

... On an average day, Hlad said she makes between $100 and $120, doing about three to four batches a day.

Ms. Hlad seems to be single, without dependents -- and seems to be doing the gig as a temporary fill-in until the pandemic threat wanes. This might not look so good to workers driven by greater needs.

For some "shoppers," the promise of delivering groceries has turned sour. According to CNET, part of how Instacart has been attracting hundreds of thousands of new workers is by promising sick pay if they catch COVID. But it seems the company seldom -- or maybe never -- honors that promise.

Like hundreds of thousands of other people across the country, Rachel worried she'd contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Her doctor recommended a test for the respiratory illness and told her to quarantine as she waited for the results, which could take a couple of weeks. Unable to work, Rachel sent Instacart a letter from her doctor. She asked for the sick pay that the company said it was offering workers during the pandemic.

"We carefully reviewed the documentation and, unfortunately, we were unable to confirm this claim at this time," Instacart responded 14 days later in an email seen by CNET.  To get approved, the company said Rachel would have to provide either a positive COVID-19 test or get a "mandatory quarantine order by [a] public health agency." A doctor's letter wasn't enough.

Dozens of other Instacart shoppers say they've also had doctor's notes turned down and were told to get a letter from a public health agency, according to advocacy group Gig Workers Collective. They say Instacart's sick leave policy creates a catch-22 because it's nearly impossible to get that documentation. Of the group's 17,000 members who are Instacart shoppers, only one is known to have gotten paid leave.

"Apart from that particular shopper, I don't know of a single other person," said Vanessa Bain, an organizer for Gig Workers Collective. "It's literally designed to keep people from being able to access it."

Some benefit.

And yet -- and yet -- the explosion of gig work delivering groceries during the pandemic also has evoked for some who've taken it on that wonderful experience we all wish existed more often in whatever we do to bring in our necessary sustenance. They are proud and fulfilled to be doing something that seems needed and worthwhile. This lovely video (not about Instacart but one of its analogues) reminds us what "work" might be and can be. Take the time to view. This guy cares.
If only this proud emotion were not so often exploited to turn a profit for others whose motives are entirely to make money for themselves.

For the record: Trump is a quitter ...

and we, the people, are screwed. Because the administration has not used the two month shelter-in-place period to get a tough testing, tracing, and quarantining program in place, we have both wider spread of deadly COVID-19 infections and a trashed economy. And we are going to live with this until there's a vaccine or perhaps until 70% or so of us catch the murderous virus, resulting in an estimated million-plus deaths. That's what achieving "herd immunity" means. Meanwhile our feckless president burbles on:

... the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.

Echoing his breezy language in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump has in recent days returned to a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own accord, without a major government response.

“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests: This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Trump said Friday. “It’s going to go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”

David Graham, The Atlantic

This catastrophe was preventable.

We will live with -- and too many will die on account of -- this lazy, ignorant man in the White House. He can't do the job and he won't get out of the way for people who could because the only thing he values is being the center of attention. He's just a lazy, egotistical quitter.

Image by David Lawrence Hawkins.

Laid off workers support a longer shut down

It was particularly striking in the story of the Chinese American neighborhood which largely escaped infection by coronavirus that workers in the Chinese groceries both pushed to close their stores as COVID spread and understood when it might be safe(r) to reopen.

Maybe our governing authorities should pay attention to what many people who have lost their jobs want from their governments. Seventy-nine percent believe their well-being would be best served by staying locked down.

That’s a remarkable number — and it’s one that suggests these people are taking a longer-term approach to getting back to work than Trump does. It seems they believe the best way to actually get back to work and stay there is to no longer have to deal with the outbreak, which makes complete logical sense. Perhaps they also fear that going back to work could mean their own exposure to the virus, given that many of them come from service industries.

Washington Post poll

What happens when the jobs just go away?

For about six weeks, I've been very gradually reading Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse. Greenhouse was the labor reporter for the New York Times for 31 years. He knows what he is talking about.

What you get is an extremely well-reported journalistic tour of U.S. labor history including the epic struggles of needle workers, autoworkers, miners and thousands more industrial workers who won a framework of positive union labor law during the Great Depression; capital's successful clawback of hard won worker rights and victories beginning in the Reagan era; the rapid loss of union legitimacy when too much of labor became more a somnolent bureaucratic institution rather than a justice movement in the mid-20th century; and workers' inventive initiatives to find new organizational forms for fairness and empowerment in the last 20 years. Greenhouse has interviewed the people whose lives tell the story and they are all here.

I enjoyed this book and would heartily recommend it as an introductory history of the apparently endless struggle between owners who exploit and their workers who resist, often tenaciously, imaginatively, and bravely.

But as I finished the book I realized -- the economy within which Greenhouse wrote this book is gone.

In the time it took me to read his story, the pandemic and the public health response had obliterated the context in which he wrote. Twenty-five percent or so of people who used to have jobs don't. And even if some of them were called back to their jobs soon, many will be terrified to return, while employers may not be able to operate in the reduced circumstances.

Many of the drivers of an economy based in consumption may not come back for years: mass entertainment, travel, transportation, restaurants, bars, services, much retail ... what-all we don't know, but will find out.

The medical/industrial complex is being turned upside down and throwing off some workers -- nurses, the staffs of small rural hospitals, doctors in private practices -- while major medical centers are reorganized for massive surges of infectious disease.

Corporate management is getting a good look at whether it needs all that office space. Can "knowledge workers" be kept on call online 24/7 in their own residences without being brought physically together?

Can higher education survive without collecting students on campus -- and do students need to interact in person at all? How much can schools charge for online instruction?

States and cities are about to be broke, unable to pay the employees needed deliver what passes for local governance and a safety net.

Garrett Graff carefully explicates all this:

At every turn, the scale of the disaster is almost unfathomable. Forget the Great Recession or the Crash of ’87. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which, if we escape a crisis “only” on the scale of the Great Depression, we might be lucky.

Where's labor in all this? Delivery workers and grocery clerks -- currently in great demand in hazardous jobs -- have already tried to push back against exploitation and for health protections. They don't consider themselves disposable. Such rebellions aren't going away; can organized labor rise to helping make something more durable out of this kind of desperation?

Trump's attempt to pretend all's well without doing anything via the federal government to mitigate the pandemic looks to be extended to re-animating the economy. That is, he wants to bet re-election on ceasing to make even feeble efforts to shore up workers and small proprietors who are being wiped out. For the GOPers, the play seems to be to force desperate people to risk their lives to prop up corporate profits. Can organized labor find a role protesting such forced work in unsafe workplaces?

Is the pandemic going to lead to Hunger Marches on Washington to be dispersed by troops and tear gas? That's what happened last time things got this bad.

Professor Betsey Stevenson projects a rocky ride even if the economy does regain some kind of footing. She projects that Trump will get some of what Trump wants, an impression that the job statistics are getting better. But the reality will be less sound or happy.

The first few months in which the data show job growth, we’ll simply be learning which jobs were never really lost in the first place. It’s then that we’ll be able to see which industries have shrunk, which businesses reduced their output or shuttered entirely, and which workers need to find new employers or a different kind of work.

... If businesses that open see only a handful of customers return then they will likely conclude that they need fewer employees, ultimately leading to more permanent job destruction.

If, instead, states wait to reopen until they have built better public health plans that inspire more confidence, businesses will likely see a sharper increase in demand when they ultimately reopen.

This is the economic reality we've entered over the last two months. It's not much like any of the contexts in which Steven Greenhouse tells the story of labor. But what runs across his book is that however ignored and suppressed people may be, they will search out new ways to fight for themselves, their families, their communities. They will in this time too.

Close to home ... I try to grasp what the data means

Parts of the Mission neighborhood, my home, have just become one of the more thoroughly coronavirus-tested spots in the country. The full results aren't published yet, but UC San Francisco has summarized initial results from two days work to test a little over 4000 residents. The Chron has the story here. Mission Local has what I find the clearest account.

Of the people tested, 1.8 percent (73 individuals) showed the markers of a current infection with the virus; over half of those, 53 percent, had no symptoms of disease -- and very likely didn't know they had it and might be spreading it. Ninety-five percent of those with the infection were Latinx, though Latinx people were only 44 percent of the tested population. No whites or Blacks tested positive though these groups together amounted to 40 percent of the sample. The remaining 5 percent of positive cases are called "Asian" -- perhaps Filipinos?

Starkly, seventy-five percent of those currently infected were male.

It seems pretty clear: at present in San Francisco, those getting COVID-19 are men going out of necessity every day to earn a living. The Mission has many old multi-flat buildings within which rooms are rented out to single laborers, sometimes several guys jammed together. These rooms come with padlocks for each door and shared bathrooms, minimal kitchen facilities. These facilities are just a small step above living on the street; they house people who do the dirtiest work of the city. And these folks are getting infected.

What about families? Are less women currently infected because they've been needed to stop work outside the home to care for children no longer in school, leaving the bread-winning to the men? I don't know.

At the moment, San Francisco seems a largely safe harbor from the virus if you don't have to go out to encounter significant numbers of other residents every day.

There's so much we don't know yet about the patterns of life that underlie the infection data. We may learn more later this month when the information derived from blood taken in the testing has been analyzed. Maybe even more significant numbers of Mission residents will show antibodies that reveal they were infected six weeks ago and have passed through and out of the infection storm. Not terribly likely, but possible. That's what shelter-in-place is all about.

And someday, soon-ish, more people will start going out again. We aren't going to stay away from each other forever. We just won't. Trump's protesting goons are fools tempting Darwinian retribution, but a broader community life will resume. And then there will be more opportunities for everyone who emerges from sheltering to encounter the virus. In history, societies have restored themselves after plagues when most people had developed some immunity the hard way. I sure hope we get a vaccine, and soon. But it is sinking in that this is just one phase and we have a long way, and very likely a lot more sickness, to go.

Economic casualties

Erudite Partner is still teaching during this strange season of "sheltering in place." She's all too aware that the class she holds twice a week on Zoom consists of some of the people who are likely to be badly injured by the pandemic. That's not because they are at particular danger of getting ill; they are young and all securely housed. But they are college seniors, graduating into this horribly disrupted economy.

According to a study described in the Seattle Times, young people in that state, which is a bit ahead of the national curve, are already in big trouble.

The data show that a staggering 51% of young adults say they expect to need help paying the rent or mortgage in the next few months, compared with just 8% of seniors. And 53% of those 18 to 29 say they’ll need help paying for basic needs like food, medicine and utilities. Among those 65 and older, 16% say they will need help with this.

The survey also shows that those with a household income of less than $50,000 — a group which, naturally, includes a lot of young adults — are the most likely to need assistance.

And a greater share of people of color expect to need help compared with white Washingtonians, although the difference is not as dramatic as between young adults and seniors. Among white people, 29% said they would need help with rent or mortgage payments, compared with 37% of people of color. And 34% of white people said they would need assistance paying for basic needs compared with 39% of people of color.

There's no reason to expect the national picture of who is most immediately being hurt to be very different -- except that West Coast carnage in Black and Latinx communities seems generally a little less severe than what is happening around New York, and other older cities in the North like Chicago and Milwaukee. And there is also a terrible COVID cluster on Navajo lands. The COVID epidemic in the South is still under-reported, but if Louisiana offers any clue, as many as 70 percent of the victims may be Black.

We have recently seen what happens to an age cohort which comes of working age in times of economic trauma. People who graduated into the 2008 recession were slow to get good jobs, slow to be able to afford homes, slow to marry, and slow to become parents. They were still hurting when COVID knocked down their prospects again.

(I'm realizing that I'm a product an earlier round of this: my parents entered adulthood just as the Great Depression was taking hold and didn't see fit to have a child -- me -- until they had been married 15 years.)

But the new group are graduating into something much worse. And, because that's how the U.S. population shakes out, more of them will be coming from those disproportionately affected communities of color. Losing your mom to a virus doesn't help you launch.

Trump can bloviate all he likes about "opening up" the economy, but a nation terrified of gasping out its last breaths in an over-crowded ICU isn't going to throng to sports events and restaurants any time soon -- even if people could afford it. We've all got a world of hurt here.

Oil: "the excrement of the devil" and some of its works

It's gotten a little lost now that we are living in a world turned upside down by coronovirus, but we're also in the backwash of some kind of global oil price war. No wonder the great casino on Wall Street has gone bonkers.

Just what's going on with the oil business seems murky. That psychopathic Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia has been locking up his relatives, perhaps to seize the throne prematurely, and somehow his antics turned into a bidding war with Russia over who could pump and sell the most oil at lower rates. Global prices took a nose dive, which might seem like a good thing when you have to fill up the car, but it's not so simple.

Lower gasoline prices will benefit consumers and lower transportation costs for businesses. However, they are very bad for U.S. oil producers. Highly indebted fracking firms may not be able to obtain further bank loans or perhaps even stay in business. States such as Texas and North Dakota, where fossil fuel extraction is a big part of the economy, would face hard times.

"The excrement of the devil" wags the dog that is the world economy; our current apparent collapse into recession may have as much to do with a couple of dictators' fossil fuel fixations as financial barons fearing the flu.

We're fortunate that someone does know a great deal about the history and machinations of the oil economy -- and where Trump and Russia fit in it all. MSNBC's news host Rachel Maddow has a story to tell.

Her new book Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth consists of 29 chapters of good yarns, episodes in fossil fuel villainy. In this vivid denunciation of the cruelty, corruption, and crackpot lunacy of the oil extraction industry, she spells out the horrors in a well-crafted romp about lone wolf drillers, corporate kleptocrats, and vicious dictators, all the way from Pennsylvania fields, to fracking quakes shaking Oklahoma, through Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, and Venezuela, to Vladimir Putin, Rex Tillerson and Donald Trump. She writes:

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we're now living through.

I don't mean to be rude, but I also want to be clear: the oil and gas industry is essentially a big casino that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit. That equation invites gangsterism, extortion, thuggery, and the sorts of folks who enjoy these hobbies. It's practitioners have been lumbering across the globe of late, causing mindless damage and laying the groundwork for the global catastrophe that is the climate crisis, but also reordering short-term geopolitics in a strong-but-dumb survival contest that renders everything we think of as politics as just theater. ...

And so she goes on to lay out in a series of related vignettes what she concludes: Russia's kleptocrats, finding themselves rulers of a collapsed country with no productive economic assets but a backward oil industry, have been "driven to distraction" and have worked to ensnare the world in the international chaos we suffer from -- "the new world disorder."

This is a provocative, thoroughly researched, book, well worth reading. ...I read this as an audiobook while driving across the country last fall. As it happens, one of the few semi-hopeful eruptions of outraged citizens taking back power from the oil barons that Maddow recounts took place in a state we drove through. For decades, Oklahoma's schools were starved of resources because of the refusal of oil barons, fracking cowboys, and corporations to pay taxes on their wealth. The plutocrats even won a provision in the state constitution to require a three-quarters vote to raise their taxes. But Oklahomans have been fighting back.

What happened was democracy. "In politics, money most often trumps merit," says Mike Cantrell, the independent Oklahoma oilman who finally got fed up with the lousy funding and bucked Big Oil in his state. "But constituency trumps everything." After years of killing cuts, the constituency finally started to kick up enough of a fuss that pols started to worry about the damage to their elective selves if they stuck to the status quo. Starting in early 2018, months of walkouts, strikes, and rallies by students, teachers, and parents across the state finally gave Oklahomans in elective office enough courage to punch the bully in the nose. Or at least be seen trying to throw that punch if they wanted to keep their seats.

In the spring of 2018, the legislature approved a series of tax raises (with the needed three-quarters majority in both houses) to increase funding in public education, including a teacher pay raise of close to 15 percent, across the board. Key was a hike in the energy production tax from 2 percent to 5 percent ...

Reading Blowout, I knew what these signs along the Oklahoma highway meant: democracy in action.

Let's think differently ... ?

One of the oddest things about the current political moment is that Billionaire Mike's bullion is resuscitating a dying medium as a political tool.

Broadcast TV is on its way to extinction. Younger people don't watch TV though they certainly consume plenty of product through screens. Only time sensitive events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars draw significant live audiences.

But TV still outpaces all other information sources -- social media, radio, print -- when it comes to "news." Those of us immersed in other media may wonder at that, but survey data says it is true.

The political campaign serves as a "made for TV" event and ongoing spectacle. Because national terrors are real, it's quite a draw. Wednesday's delightful debate was the most watched primary debate ever. Kick billionaire butt, Liz!

In the big states, particularly the Super Tuesday anchors California and Texas, TV really remains the most likely point of contact with the whole kerfuffle for most potential votes. Only Bloomberg can afford to rule there. Justin Powers has reported on watching 185 Bloomberg ads, immersed in what he quotes Elizabeth Spiers describing as "mediocre messaging at massive scale." He concludes that Bloomberg has made himself "inescapable," but we still don't know if that equals "electable." You can replicate Powers's disturbing media diet by following this link.

Many political professionals had come to doubt the efficacy of TV advertising; they had measured the effect of any ad as small and fleeting, gone in about a week at best. We're getting to see whether flooding the zone can overcome that -- or whether real world events such as the Nevada debate and caucuses (and Trump rallies) can interrupt the flow.

I think I would not bet on TV even at Bloomberg volume. But, to my horror, I might be proved wrong.

From my clutter to your consideration: found thoughts

I have so many topics I would want to write about but never will have time to research properly. So some Saturdays I've decided I'll post some annotated links.

CalMatters has created a simple checklist evaluating measures that California might take to respond to the fact that our economy is throwing people out of their homes and onto the streets. I wasn't inclined to be sympathetic to such a listicle, but find this thought-provoking and instructive. Take a look.

I often repeat a recurring rant about how we aren't going to combat climate chaos through individual behavioral tweaks. Carbon pollution is society-wide and needs society-wide solutions. Here's an article which documents how individual action --a crackpot, but emotionally comforting, idea -- came to infest late-20th century U.S. environmental consciousness.

And if you want to feel better, read this pitch from an articulate trail running coach about why his athletes and community should be working to save our environmental laws from the Trump administration's giveaways to the polluters.

No wonder we're an unhappy polity

The young people are decidedly NOT alright when it comes to their economic security.

This chart, from a Washington Post analysis, shows how bleak prospects must feel to all too many. It's not about how much income folks are making in their jobs, if they have jobs, which at present they probably do of some sort.

It's about wealth:

Wealth is a measure of what people own: their assets (which typically include homes, cash savings and stocks) minus their debts (like mortgages, student loans, consumer debt). Its importance to an individual, a nation or an entire generation cannot be overstated; it gives families a safety net during hard economic times, such as a layoff, and is intertwined with such milestones of adult life as buying a home, starting a business or retiring comfortably.

The article doesn't emphasize this as much as I might: these days, ambitious young people who might otherwise be buying houses or other assets are trapped under a burden of education and other debt which gets in their way. This means their "wealth" nets out to not much of anything at all, even if they are making a decent income.

There's nothing novel in this, but the article is succinct and worth reading.

It's not density that city people hate; it's housing injustice

The national media is full of stories about how coastal California needs more houses, but -- for reasons pundits treat as either cupidity or stupidity -- we resist efforts to build what we obviously need. The collapse last week of this year's attempt to pass state Senator Scott Wiener's bill set off another predictable round. SB 50's essence was to allow more building near public transit lines, though there were plenty of devilish details. This, from the NY Times, is a representative specimen, irrefutable on big picture analysis, uninformed on the nitty-gritty level where politics plays out:

Over the past eight years, the San Francisco Bay Area has added about 676,000 jobs and 176,000 housing units. The entirely predictable result has been a surge in rents and home prices along with a rising homeless problem that has jetloads of tourists convinced that one of the richest places on earth is actually a dystopia of misery and destitution. Despite its reputation for all things liberal, California has the highest poverty rate in the country — about one in five people — once the cost of shelter is figured in. This is not for lack of jobs or money, but because its cities are so exclusive that they are essentially turning working-class residents into poor people.

... S.B. 50, an ambitious but divisive bill, was shelved until next year. The bill would expand the state’s housing supply by forcing cities to allow apartment buildings in the low-slung bungalow neighborhoods on which the state was built. ...

Each year state legislators go through a Groundhog Day routine in which they introduce dozens of new housing bills that are full of technicalities and minutiae but fall into two basic categories. The first are bills that make it easier to build housing so that the long-term shortage can be rectified. The second are bills that provide more money for subsidized affordable housing and expand tenant protections so that people who already have affordable homes don’t lose them. ...Where does it go? All we can count on for now is that next year will feature a renewed fight over S.B. 50. And dozens of other housing bills. And the housing problem getting worse.

Like a lot of San Franciscans, I'm thoroughly convinced that we need more housing and that means more density. I'd go to bat for a believable plan. Yet I am not at all on board for Wiener's bill; in fact it looks like a con job to me.

• The bill's assumptions about developer behavior are nonsense in the San Francisco context. Roll back local controls and you will merely allow more condos for rich people . Even the Times has figured that out.

  As land costs rise, developers can make more money building at the top end of the market and ignoring the middle.

• Housing developers have to be required to build affordable units, probably at something close to a 50/50 ratio of rich to middle class housing to keep new buildings from just making the situation worse.

• If the state legislature is going to weigh in on urban housing and density, they need to get their feet off city's necks and repeal pre-emption measures that effectively outlaw effective rent control (Costa-Hawkins) and incentivize clearing existing apartment buildings of renters to sell them off as condos (Ellis). They also need to offer more money for public transit if they are going to dump more people into existing systems.

• It's hard to take seriously a commitment to equity when suburbs are incentivized not to develop public transit because to do so would mean they had to house more people.

• It's hard to take seriously a law that's been written to let Marin County off the hook for its density provisions. Look, I love all the green spaces over there, but Marin is the 13th richest county in the country according to the American Community Survey. It could do more to house more people.

• If some sort of grand bargain between localities and the state is going to happen, it probably needs a more trusted broker than Senator Wiener. He's my rep; he's been kicking around San Francisco politics for over a decade -- and he's never seemed to meet a private builder development project that he didn't like.

Tim Redmond who has been observing these housing fights for decades laid out at 48 Hills what it might take to break the logjam on increasing density in the San Francisco Bay Area.

... Imagine the billions of dollars that will pour into the state coffers with the next round of [tech] IPOs. Why isn’t Wiener asking that all of that money go to stabilize and protect existing vulnerable communities – including the construction of a vast amount of (sure, dense) affordable housing, served by new, state-funded transit?

The [San Francisco Board of Supervisors] are asking the right questions. I doubt Wiener would accept the type of amendments that would make his bill acceptable – and if he did, I doubt the Legislature, which is under the thumb of the real-estate industry, would accept them.

For anyone who has read this far: why am I writing this? Housing policy is not one of my regular topics. But irritation with the smug superiority with which national media approach our devastating housing situation has me thoroughly pissed off. If you want to hear from people who work in this arena everyday, let me suggest San Francisco's Housing Rights Committee.

We elected some good ones in 2018

Here Congresswoman Katie Porter schools JPMorganChase billionaire Jamie Dimon on life in the low-wage world his corporation has built.

Porter flipped California's District 45 around Irvine last fall. Erudite Partner reports she uses the same home economics lesson Porter uses here with Dimon with her University of San Francisco undergrads.

On beyond the RESIST moment

As I walk around middling neighborhoods in San Francisco, the bumper stickers are still prominent; many, many, of us responded to the shock of seeing Donald Trump elevated to the White House by engaging, protesting, and eventually electing a Democratic House of Representatives. Locally, we can enjoy the spectacle of our Congresscritter putting President Blunderbuss in his place.

But after two years, though we still need to protest and impede Trump's racist authoritarianism, we can't allow ourselves to become exhausted spectators to a faraway Washington drama. People are being hurt and terrible policy choices are being locked in by a GOP coterie of con-men masquerading as a cabinet. We need to be envisioning what we do want from government more than what we don't want.

And it turns out, such re-envisioning is just what majorities of us have been doing with results that surprise the cautious establishments of both political parties.

For starters, we don't want Donald Trump in 2020. According to a Washington Post/ABC news poll:

A 56 percent majority of all Americans say they would “definitely not vote for him” should Trump become the Republican nominee, while 14 percent say they would consider voting for him and 28 percent would definitely vote for him. Majorities of independents (59 percent), women (64 percent) and suburbanites (56 percent) rule out supporting Trump for a second term.

Even with our absurdly unrepresentative Electoral College, you can't elect a president with those numbers.

But even more to the point, somehow the stresses of the last two years have moved public opinion in some clear new directions:

A strong majority of Americans support sharply raising taxes on the wealthy. A plurality disapproves of the large corporate tax cut passed by the Republican Congress in 2017. A whopping 70 percent of the country — and even 52 percent of Republicans — support Medicare for all. More than half of the country wants to see abortion remain legally available (with that number dropping below a majority only late in pregnancy.) Fifty-seven percent of Americans (and 69 percent of military veterans) would support removing all troops from Afghanistan after 17 years of stalemate.

Damon Linker, The Week

And there's plenty more: no amount of presidential bluster moved more than 60 percent of us to think it worth shutting down the government for a Wall. Trump's Wall, Trump's push to Make America White Again, simply doesn't cut it for most of us.

And Linker missed a couple of vital items. We don't know quite what we mean yet, but bipartisan support for something called a "Green New Deal" hit 81 percent in December.

And for all the saber rattling from Washington, the powers-that-be act as if they know that getting directly militarily engaged in Venezuela would be wildly unpopular. (Sure hope I'm right on that one, but I think that's the lesson they've taken from nearly two decades of lingering wars of choice.)

And so -- we've moved on from the simplicity and unity of the RESIST moment. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to flesh out where we want to go; inevitably different people will work on different parts of this. And that work will generate different priorities

But the catalogue of items laid out above are no longer fringe ideas -- I would expect that all the aspiring Dem presidents will at least give them lip service.

Resistance gave us that. Now we have to fumble through all available means, including the political thickets, to make our newly clarified majority wishes into realities.

The power of a good idea whose time has come

Still neutral on the Dem presidential hopefuls -- I need a shorthand nickname for this gaggle. Any suggestions?

But if Elizabeth Warren can spread the idea that it is the responsibility of government to ensure that the country's wealth is better distributed, she'll have served us well. She wants to tax, moderately, not just "earnings" but the stored horde of accumulated wealth that gives the One Percent their permanent sway among us.

Note that this is not just a throwaway line political line from Warren: she's assembled the economic experts to design a tax that would do the job. Read all about it here.

This passes for ethical analysis?

Reihan Salam, the executive editor of the old line conservative magazine National Review, writing at the Atlantic, is distressed about remarks Hillary Clinton (remember her?) made in Mumbai this week:

“I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his [Trump's] whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards.”

Salam is not the only one; the rightwing echo chamber (Fox News, Breitbart, etc.) seems to agree with him that Clinton has somehow in these words made a "moral" critique" of those who didn't vote for her.

Dude -- she's just stating facts. The only adjective here that might be construed as having a "moral" content is "optimistic". If you think optimism (or pessimism) constitutes innate character, just maybe there's some sense in this. I don't think that way nor I expect do most people. I think of either quality as mostly a responses to real surrounding conditions, usually a fairly accurate reading.

I asked E.P., my resident local ethicist, what she thinks is going on in this sentence. She suspects that Clinton's rightwing hearers believe that somehow she's accused them of being racists. I guess they may be hearing Clinton that way, though it seems absent from these words, only present in their prickly (guilty?) psyches.

Salam goes on to draw a picture of a country with two parallel societies, Clinton's "Trickle Down America" and Trump's "Stagnant America." He indicts prosperous cities with being run for the benefit of ripoff capitalists (true), while exploiting low wage workers, often people of color and/or undocumented immigrants (true). He then has the decency to point out that the policies Clinton campaigned on would have moderated these ills.

He doesn't describe how he thinks "Stagnant America" is doing. Not so well, judging by his own label. Hopelessness and poverty aren't usually good for people. Clinton's policies might have done some good there too, though he neglects to mention this.

I grew up in "Stagnant America" even before the label "Rust Belt" had begun to be applied to aging industrial centers. The downward trajectory could be felt even when steel and auto were still huge. Salam is right; when economies pass their peak and contract, the folks who live amidst the dislocation and pain get hurt. How about we try to help them, rather than exploit their pain to mobilize resentment?

In case you are wondering, the photo is of Chicago from Evanston.