Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

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Robert Reich: CEOs, not the unemployed, are America’s real ‘moral hazard’

Many Republicans believe economic relief for those without jobs encourages slacking off. But it is corporations that are bailed out again and again

The coronavirus relief enacted by Congress is barely reaching Americans in need.

This week, checks of up to $1,200 are being delivered through direct-deposit filings with the Internal Revenue Service. But low-income people who have not directly deposited their taxes won’t get them for weeks or months. Worse yet, the US treasury is allowing banks to seize payments to satisfy outstanding debts.

Meanwhile, most of the promised $600 weekly extra unemployment benefits remain stuck in offices now overwhelmed with claims.

None of this seems to bother conservative Republicans, who believe all such relief creates what’s called “moral hazard” – the risk that government benefits will allow people to slack off.

The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, for example, says state unemployment offices are overwhelmed because the extra $600 is “incentivizing people to leave the workforce”. Hello?

When it comes to big corporations and their CEOs, however, conservatives don’t worry about moral hazard. They should.

Charles M. Blow: Stop Airing Trump’s Briefings!

The media is allowing disinformation to appear as news.

Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as “earned media” coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media.

The firm computed that Donald Trump had “earned” a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising.

As The New York Times reported at the time, the company’s chief analytics officer, Paul Senatori, explained: “The mediaQuant model collects positive, neutral and negative media mentions alike. Mr. Senatori said negative media mentions are given somewhat less weight.”

This wasn’t the first analysis that found that something was askew.

In December 2015 CNN quoted the publisher of The Tyndall Report, which also tracks media coverage, saying Trump was “by far the most newsworthy story line of campaign 2016, accounting alone for more than a quarter of all coverage’ on NBC, CBS and ABC’s evening newscasts.”

Simply put, the media was complicit in Trump’s rise. Trump was macabre theater, a man self-immolating in real time, one who was destined to lose, but who could provide entertainment, content and yes, profits while he lasted. [..]

Trump has completely politicized this pandemic and the briefings have become a tool of that politicization. He is standing on top of nearly 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.

In 2016, Trump stormed the castle by outwitting the media gatekeepers, exploiting their need for content and access, their intense hunger for ratings and clicks, their economic hardships and overconfidence.

It’s all happening again. The media has learned nothing.

José Andrés: Our people are hungry. We need a leader who will feed them.

They say you cannot see hunger.

But what do you see in thousands of cars outside a food bank in San Antonio? Or cars lined up for hours outside supermarkets in Puerto Rico when people heard about food and water deliveries after Hurricane Maria?

I am a cook. Over the past few years, I have learned a lot by feeding the many, not the few, after disasters across the world.

The good news is that communities grow stronger in disaster: New leaders emerge in unlikely places, and neighbors look after one another.

The bad news is that until reliable supplies of food and medicine are guaranteed, people cannot return to normal. The search for food will be their top priority, taking up precious hours every day.

Recovery starts with admitting that we have a food crisis — in addition to the health crisis of the pandemic and economic crisis of the recession.

Some see this pandemic as a war. If this is a war, it is one we are waging with no generals and a volunteer army funded by philanthropy.

Our food supply should be a national security priority. This pandemic shows that food has been an afterthought, handled by charities and volunteers who cannot cope with the scale of today’s challenge. Under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “mass care” — including feeding — is a joint exercise among traditional charities, faith groups and the private sector. This is called a whole community response.

Charles Warzel: Protesting for the Freedom to Catch the Coronavirus

The reopen America protests are the logical conclusion of a twisted liberty movement.

At a string of small “reopen America” protests across the country this week, mask-less citizens proudly flouted social distancing guidance while openly carrying semiautomatic rifles and waving American flags and signs with “ironic” swastikas. They organized chants to lock up female Democrat governors and to fire the country’s top infectious disease experts. At one point during protests at the Michigan Capitol, the group’s orchestrated gridlock blocked an ambulance en route to a nearby hospital.

For those who’ve chosen to put their trust in science during the pandemic it’s hard to fathom the decision to gather to protest while a deadly viral pathogen — transmitted easily by close contact and spread by symptomatic and asymptomatic people alike — ravages the country. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise. This week’s public displays of defiance — a march for the freedom to be infected — are the logical conclusion of the modern far-right’s donor-funded, shock jock-led liberty movement. It was always headed here. [..]

It’s important to note that the reopen protests have been generally small (at most, hundreds of people in states of millions of citizens responsibly staying at home) and don’t even reflect the polled opinions of many conservatives. But they fit neatly into a larger campaign playbook and take on outsize importance. They take place frequently in swing states or states with Democratic governors and are plastered across social media, reported in mainstream organizations, openly cheered on by Fox News and right-wing media, and ultimately end up amplified (tacitly or explicitly) by the president. The strategy has worked well in recent years, consolidating support among the Trump base.

Paul Waldman: The war against the states

President Trump and congressional Republicans are going to war with the states.

It’s bizarre, it’s self-defeating, it will do enormous harm to Americans in every corner of the country, and it can be fully explained only by understanding the president’s pettiest and most narcissistic motives. In other words, it’s the kind of thing we’ve come to expect in the Trump era.

Last week, the $349 billion allotted for small businesses in the CARES Act rescue package ran out, with only a portion of the American businesses that have suffered in this pandemic-driven recession getting the help they need. While everyone seemed ready to provide more money, we found ourselves in a familiar situation, with Democrats saying we need to be swift and aggressive in saving Americans suffering from this economic catastrophe, and Republicans saying that we shouldn’t spend too much or help too many people.

When negotiations began, Republicans wanted to add about $250 billion to the small business fund — and do nothing else. Now it appears that Democrats have pressured them into accepting a package that sends $370 billion to small businesses, gives $75 billion to hospitals, and spends $25 billion to beef up coronavirus testing.

What isn’t included in the package, however, is the desperately needed aid to states and cities Democrats sought. Republicans absolutely refused to even consider it. [..]

Like everything else, this likely comes back to Trump himself. In his desperation to blame anyone and everyone else for his own failures, he has decided that states and governors are the problem: They aren’t being nice enough to him; they are dismissive when he says he “calls the shots”; they aren’t doing enough testing.

So he and congressional Republicans have decided that states are just like undeserving poor people who must be punished to do the right thing. In this case, the right thing is lifting lockdown orders as soon as possible. Just as Republicans worried that the tens of millions of newly unemployed people might grow lazy and slothful if the government helped them pay their bills for a few months, now they worry that the same will happen to states.

So Republicans have decided on a strategy of extortion: You don’t get help unless you lift your stay-at-home orders; then maybe we’ll talk. That’s not what’s best for public health and your economic situation? It’ll lead to more infections, more deaths, and a longer recession? Too bad. It’s what Trump wants, and that’s all that matters.