Work with IEB on 2020 Elections: Polls Close in 6 Months!  We’ve all heard that shelter-in-place is officially set to continue through May,and Indivisible East Bay’s remote activism will continue with it, as we all do our part to minimize the virus’ spread.One way you can help: join us for remote phone-banking, which is now officially live and active! Last Sunday, a small-but-mighty team gathered on Zoom and called 150 voters to turn out the mail-in vote for Tricia Zunker in Wisconsin’s upcoming special election and recruit volunteers for Mark Kelly in Arizona. One particularly fiery AZ voter told us she’s been sending a donation to Kelly every time she gets an email from the McSally campaign. Another said her yard was proudly sporting a Biden sign among a sea of signs for the bleach-proponent-in-chief. We even walked an enthusiastic long-time voter & first-time vote-by-mail-er through the absentee ballot request process. Sound like fun to you? We’ll be (virtually) here this Saturday and have phone banks planned for every Saturday in May!  2020 Voter Outreach Events Canvasses:Canvassing is on hold for now, but please fill out this form to be notified as soon as it’s back on. Remote Phone & Text Banks:Phone Bank to Wisconsin and Arizona 5/2Phone Bank to Wisconsin and Arizona 5/9Phone Bank to Arizona 5/16Text Bank to Win in 2020 5/17Phone Bank to Arizona 5/23Phone Bank to Arizona 5/30Remote Text Bank to Win in 2020 5/30 Other Voter Outreach:We’re looking to expand our outreach to Spanish-speaking voters in Arizona and beyond. Please click here to add your name to our list of people available to phone bank in Spanish.  Note: if your info is stored with EveryAction, clicking this link will automatically add you to the list. Want to write postcards from home? Email fiona.IndivisibleEastBay1@gmail.com and we’ll give you complete instructions, scripts and addresses from one of the groups we work with.

Sorry the formatting didn’t come through well.

We hear a lot about how successful Sweden’s more relaxed isolation measures are. So far in April, they have 33% excess deaths compared to 2015–19. (In fairness, after we get the US figures, which for some reason are compiled much more slowly, we may be there too. Sweden, however, seems to have rising daily deaths while we appear to have peaked.)

The best article on how we got here:

We Are Living in a Failed State by George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. …

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost [in the 2008 financial meltdown]. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist [what a phrase! —AJL].

We Are Living in a Failed State by George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020

In somewhat the same vein, Ezra Klein at Vox argues why our governments have become incompetent, well-manifested by our inability to ramp up production of medical equipment. The provocative part of the story is blaming not only the Right wanting government to do nothing, but also the Left worried the government will work to injure the relatively powerless.

The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.

Why we can’t build by Ezra Klein

California’s meandering High Speed Rail plan that purports to link San Francisco and Los Angeles gets its due mention.

The empty shelves and government lies remind Emily Gioielli and Leslie Waters at Slate of Eastern Europe 1980, and the danger, especially to our Ruling Party, is that like the faltering dinosaurs of the Warsaw Pact, they broke the social contract made by the paternalist autocrats and the passive citizensof adequate material goods. This seems a little far-fetched to me, but we can never have too much citation of Vaclav Havel.

“Human beings are compelled to live within a lie,” he explained in his treatise, “The Power of the Powerless,” and mimic the meaningless platitudes of state leaders. He explained that the average person went along with this system because they “surrender[ed] higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization.” He further suggested that Eastern Europe should serve as a “warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies.”

Is America Becoming Eastern Europe by Emily Gioielli and Leslie Waters

And for a day-by-day analysis of how Xi Jinping and Donald Trump imitated each other in using denial and muzzling the press to squander valuable time to prevent disease, The New Republic has them on the cover, with an article by Laurie Garrett, a journalist of epidemics.

Both Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping instinctively sought to repress news of the true danger of their countries’ outbreaks, and the reach of their infection zones, so as to minimize potential political damage to their regimes. Both leaders, displaying parallel if historically distinct brands of authoritarian rule in a crisis, sought to dismiss the counsel of suspect health professionals and other experts. … The larger political story of the 2020 coronavirus crisis, in other words, may well prove to be a powerful case study in the way that governments controlled by leaders prone to unilateral decision-making, and the top-down information regimes they rely on to perpetuate their rule, are all but guaranteed to create maximum conditions of public health breakdown.

Grim Reapers by Laurie Garrett, The New Republic May 2020 [possible paywalled; audioversion also available]

The full minutes will go up later, but we wanted everyone to have a chance for an Action Item today.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors meets tomorrow and the agenda again includes a continuation of the previous meetings’ request from (how-did-we-get-this-fascist?) Sheriff Ahern for more money for Santa Rita Jail as the major component of COVID–19 response.

Judy Stacey posted the full story earlier. Board Prez Richard Valle is the swing vote. His contact details are below. A sample script is at the earlier link.

District 2: Richard Valle (Board President, everyone contact) richard.valle@acgov.org ; 510- 272-6692

I haven’t pasted the Financial Times graphic for deaths recently.

Basically, no country except the USA still has accelerating (positive slope) daily death count 42 days into the epidemic. Sweden, Canada, and Brazil (which are three of the grey lines on the chart) are accelerating, but only on about day 30. They have a chance to turn the corner in the next 12 days. Whether they will, given the wretched response of Sweden and Brazil, is another question.

They may be opening up in Georgia (Georgia GOP: If you can’t beat ’em, kill ’em), but here, we are still on Zoom.

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I splurged on a signed copy of Hiding in Plain Sight, which delayed its arrival until Thursday coming. I’ll have it read by Sunday, but I won’t be able to pass it around. My previous post has links to other ways to get the book, if anyone is interested, including non-paper versions. It’s now a NY Times bestseller.

Excerpt. Excerpt of her earlier, pre-election, book, Tales from Flyover Country.

First, a poignant story that would never have gotten the same reach—it’s viral now—published in any other source.

From “A Beloved Bar Owner Was Skeptical About the Virus. Then He Took a Cruise“

“He said, ‘Don’t you think this is fishy? Do you know anyone who has it? Do you know anyone who has died from it?’ And I said, ‘Dad, I don’t know anyone now, but give me a week and I bet I will.’”

And in a week, she did.

---

The same edition also features the following, from their chief Washington correspondent: “No Fight Over Red Ink Now, but Virus Spending Will Force Tough Choices“. Remarkably, in a 30-year career, the writer has not yet figured out that deficit hawks act only against Democratic Party programs, with particular vigor if People of Color stand to benefit. On tax cuts for the rich, they are silent. On the basics of what Paul Krugman calls the Herrenvolk Welfare State, they are silent. Yet I didn’t detect any sense of sarcasm or even wonder here.

Republican concerns about deficit spending — once an animating force of the party — seemed to have evaporated when President Obama left the White House.

But, fear not, the writer is not abandoning the punditocracy consensus that the budget must be balanced. He concludes,

There is no choice now, but tough decisions are ahead.

I don’t think I have to tell you who is supposed to suffer from the tough decisions. It won’t be the billionaires.

I’d like to spend time at our April 26 meeting talking about Sarah Kendzior‘s Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. She was supposed to be doing a reading at the Hillside Club on Northside this week, and we all know what happened to that…

Two news stories today illustrate to me why Dr. Kendzior appears prescient.

Paper stimulus checks are being delayed for several days while “President Donald J. Trump” is added to the memo line. Trump wanted to sign the checks, but is not one of the officials authorized to do so. Kendzior told us years ago that autocracies are structured such that All Good Things Flow from the Autocrat. Like checks.

We also have Ivanka sitting on the President’s committee on re-opening the country. (Jared the failson-in-law sits on a separate committee mucking up the supply chain.) Kendzior: The Autocrat Trusts Only his Family. In Trump’s case, that seems to include a few mob friends like Rudy Giuliani, so it’s a “family” in the mafia sense.

Links to buy the hardcover version from major retailers are here; same link for eBook and Audiobook versions in all imaginable formats; her local (St. Louis, MO) bookstore is shipping signed copies.