StrangeSox

The federal courts are increasingly packed with judges who want to return to Lochner-era jurisprudence. We have a SCOTUS justice who's most famous prior ruling was that it was perfectly acceptable for a trucking company to fire an employee who chose to abandon his broken-down truck rather than freeze to death. I wouldn't be so sure about any pro-labor legal outcomes.

Leadership across the country is pretty much just shrugging their shoulders at this point. We're going into an "NBA hell" response where we do basically nothing to contain the health damage, which will just lead to further economic damage. We won't make people feel safe and secure by staying home, instead forcing them back to work if they want food and shelter, further exacerbating the health crisis. Which will then only deepen the economic damage, which will be accelerated by massive state and local layoffs. I know this is a deeply pessimistic outlook, but from what we're seeing from the Federal government (Congress and WH) and from many states across the country, I don't see much to indicate we're on any other path. And this lack of vision or leadership is only going to drive people to drop their support of mitigation efforts and instead turn to more conspiratorial viewpoints.

Something my wife pointed out and that we're already seeing in other states like Ohio--in the phased reopening approaches, schools and daycares are still closed until we reach Phase 4, which has pretty high hurdles. But businesses are opening back up in Phase 3. How are all of these people supposed to go back to work with no childcare options available? I'm not sure about Illinois, but in Ohio and other states not being able to go to work because you don't have anyone to watch your kids would count as quitting your job, meaning you'd be ineligible for UI. You'd go to $0 income. We still seem to be making the absolute worst policy decisions that punish the working class.

The social cohesion aspect is important! There was an interesting On The Media segment on this back in March: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/masks-symbols-on-the-media

There's a very powerful and well funded political media enterprise that has conditioned a lot of people over the years that experts are not to be trusted, and now they see it politically advantageous to claim this is all still "just the flu" Death cult.

Cover-up begins https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/06/coronavirus-update-us/

OTOH they've packed the courts top-to-bottom with judges who would love to go back to Lochner.

Good news! Jared's in charge of finding a vaccine! https://www.thedailybeast.com/kushner-botched-the-covid-response-now-trumps-tapped-him-to-get-a-vaccine-by-the-end-of-2020

JB's plan seems reasonable. Trib has a thorough breakdown of it. https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-cb-pritzker-plan-reopen-illinois-20200506-erfvitdovffmzd7ativx4hj57q-htmlstory.html

They don't care if you die, Balta. We're finding out what they're doing with the ppe they're stealing from states:

This actually highlights the false choice pretty well, accidentally. The biggest hotspots in the country right now are prisons and...meat processing/packing facilities. Forcing low-wage workers back to work in these conditions (while simulatneously giving their megacorp employers lots of money + legal immunity!) is causing these outbreaks to worsen, which means the plants have to throttle back or shut down because a huge percentage of their workforce is now sick, some probably dead. The kicker of course is that these workers almost definitely don't have health insurance, either, or still face 5-figure bills if they get hospitalized. And this process will repeat itself over and over and over again as we "open up the economy!" Because it's not a choice we can actually make right now. We can't just decide, "eh, a few hundred thousand dead people is worth it" because we won't be getting a functional economy out of that trade-off.

It's the path we're heading down at an accelerating pace. The conservatives on the WI Supreme Court just made very clear that they don't value the life of the working class in the least, and they compared Evers' SAH order to Japanese internment and tyranny. They will be striking down Wisconsin's order, which means that state will be completely "open" soon. People will be forced to choose either their health (as well as the health of their family) or economic destitution as they'll be ineligible for UI. Small Businesses are still going to be in rough shape as they won't be back to the same revenue levels they were at before. State and local payrolls and services are going to be devestated in next year's budgets. Our federal leadership is largely choosing to just wash their hands of any responsibility for responding to this. We can't come together as a society when one portion doesn't place any value on the lives of the other, but that's where we are. edit: and there's more at stake in the WI than just this single order: https://www.vox.com/2020/5/5/21246697/republican-lawsuit-wisconsin-stay-at-home-legislature-palm Meanwhile the House of Representatives can't be bothered to meet or figure out remote/proxy voting and the Senate is only interested in confirming more FedSoc judges like the ones on the WI Supreme Court.

GOP is a literal death cult at this point. People working at meat-packing plants aren't even real people according to Wisconsin Supreme Court judges, and this: They want to march the working class back to work at significant risk of illness or death.

Things are looking better in NYC but worse in the rest of the US: Meanwhile, the White House is explicitly saying that "blue states" shouldn't get any federal money and are relying on 'models' like this: If your government is completely incapable of responding to internal or external challenges, how functional is the state? edit: and at the state level:

Hey by your estimates we must be at 500m-1000m Americans already infected

I think support will drop among the non-GOP crowd as well. I hope you're right.

It's not a terrible result, at least right now, but we do have Fox News pushing not just "reopen the economy!" right now but also actively agitating against social distancing and mask-wearing. I fear the support will only get weaker across the board as this drags on with no real plan or leadership and active opposition to doing anything about it from one side.

How would the US react if we had a 9/11 happening every day for a month straight?

Of course this is becoming a culture war issue like everything else these days. I wonder if other countries see similar political splits on pandemic response measures?

What is that base don?

Add in that the official death totals are almost definitely an undercount when you compare to excess deaths, and we're looking at a very grim summer.

Lots of other states are taking different paths than Kansas, greg. edit: forgot to include the NYT link above, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-updates.html This is largely hitting poorer and non-white communities along with the elderly in nursing homes, all groups that are already regularly marginalized.

I saw Indiana is planning on allowing 4th of July parades/festivals and gatherings of 250 people starting in mid June. Meanwhile, the New York Times got details of an internal Administration report The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June. As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750. The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now. The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.

Hopefully I'm wrong but it seems like the US is largely giving up on the idea of containing this. We're nowhere near the testing levels we need, and states are either just opening up right now as their numbers go up up up, or they're announcing plans to open up more and more within a month or so. Even states like Illinois are relaxing restrictions weeks before the predicted peak let alone a ways down the slow decline.