Austerity's last stand
It’s not even a brutally pragmatic plan for keeping the economy oiled with our lifeblood
Hello and thank you for reading I genuinely appreciate it.
Today over on the paid-subscription side I sent out a few great variations on a theme. First up Miles Howard joins us to write on Biden’s response to Covid: One more defiant surge for austerity.
…This is not a public health plan. It’s not even a brutally pragmatic plan for keeping the economy oiled with our lifeblood. Letting the virus wash over the public while leaving people to buy their own masks and tests (often a necessity for workers who actually get paid sick leave) is causing massive disruption for businesses, health care providers, and schools, which effectively double as daycare for tens of millions of workers with kids. You can’t keep the economy open if workers and their families are getting sick left and right—not even if you fiddle with CDC guidelines that specify how long an infected worker should self-isolate before going back to work. Bending these rules in the interest of commerce will likely contribute to more transmission in workplaces.
So how does one make sense of this plan to let Covid have its way with American workers and hope for the best? By recognizing the plan for what it actually is—an ideological last stand. At a moment when millions of Americans are begging the federal government for help during a public health crisis, our president and his senior officials are telling us, “No. This is America. We don’t do handouts. Hell, we gave you a free vaccine. Be grateful for it. You’re on your own from here.”
Previously Howard wrote for Hell World on the ongoing predicament with the unhoused population of Boston and the abject failure of the Democrats to do anything to help renters as the eviction moratorium came to an ignominious end.
Then on a similar note Jack Crosbie of Discourse Blog writes on how we’ve basically given up in the fight against Covid.
It’s been clear from the start that everyone in power was always playing a numbers game. During the Trump administration, unconsciously or not, the GOP was generally just weighing how many deaths they could afford among their base versus new voters they could mobilize through culture war shit. My assumption for Joe Biden—given one of his major campaign promises was to end the pandemic—was that the numbers game would be a bit more weighted towards keeping the maximum number of people alive.
This was wrong. We have given up, and the priority now appears to be restoring all vestiges of economic and societal function while pushing the risks and human costs of infections under the rug.
You can see this everywhere. Biden has firmly shut the door on new stimulus packages, barring “something small for restaurants,” touting the fact that the economy—on the macro-level, anyway—is “booming” right now, as a senior administration official told CNN. Things are going so well, it seems, that we can kill the Child Tax Credit and slash unemployment benefits, and in exchange send out some meager testing kits after the press secretary makes a giant blunder on the podium and gets egg on the administration’s face.
Also today I write on the push by the privileged email job class to pressgang teachers into classrooms like it or not as the Omicron variant runs rampant. The contrast between what you hear from teachers working in schools and the people who would very much not like to have little Bowdoin and SUNY Oneonta at their feet while they’re trying to tweet all day is whiplash inducing.
All of which just builds up to this the worst fucking take I may have ever seen and it is coming from a guy who is no stranger to worst fucking takes. Try to guess if you can what it is he’s responding to here.
Read the rest here.
Please purchase a subscription to read the entirety of those pieces today or don’t and I will just go and fuck myself. As a reminder if you subscribe to a year of Hell World you’ll also get a free six months paid subscription to Foreign Exchanges by Derek Davidson and Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman as well as access to the Discontents Discord channel. Also if you buy a year at the full price today I’ll send you a copy of one of my books of your choosing. Let me know if you want to take advantage of that.
If you’re not in a position to do so at the time here’s a couple things for you to read anyway you may have missed. Yesterday the site Longform announced they are shutting down their article recommendation side (although continuing their podcast). That’s a bummer but naturally I did what any writer does in a situation like this when I heard the news and decided to make it about me. They included a number of Hell World pieces in their curation over the years including these:
All they had to do was the right thing
by Jeb Lund
The heartbreaking realization, as you gradually run across more people who are Not Taking It Seriously or are Expressing Moronic Skepticism, is that for a month there about 80 percent of America was on board with doing the right thing. We, a people who suck at doing the right thing even for the wrong reasons, stood on the side of doing the harder thing if it helped people who weren't even us.
I really can't tell if I feel more anger than sadness at the fact that those who were meant to encourage us in safety, to serve us by offering difficult guidance, wasted our sacrifice and our trust. They squandered the patience given by a beggared and exhausted people. All they had to do was the right thing, and if they weren't sure what that was, they could have erred on the side of saving people’s lives and hoping it counted, and they failed.
Waiting for the next Mr. Death
by Paul Bowers
Leuchter has said in interviews over the years that he got involved with capital punishment via his father, who was a corrections officer. After witnessing some executions and reading about botched ones, he started researching execution methods that he considered more humane.
Part of the reason Leuchter was able to corner the market in the ‘80s was that many U.S. states were ramping up executions after a short hiatus, and there was a dearth of experts. The U.S. Supreme Court had created a de facto moratorium on executions in Furman v. Georgia (1972), but allowed them to resume under new sentencing rules with Gregg v. Georgia (1976). State legislatures, including South Carolina’s, scrambled to update their death penalty laws for compliance with the Gregg standards.
The states met resistance. In 1977, every Black member of the South Carolina House of Representatives staged a 6-day filibuster to block the bill authorizing electrocutions to resume. They reasoned that then, as today, the death penalty was arbitrarily and disproportionately used to kill Black men and those convicted of murdering white victims. The bill passed anyway.
We have housed them far away from where we can see them
by Lucy Schiller
Anita lay in the hospital and the rest of us leaned forward into the group Zoom call from our five different homes. A nurse held the screen shakily, badly, switching between “speaker” mode and “grid” mode before settling on one, so that we saw both Anita there in bed, wild-haired, and a doctor next to her, who, because of the sheer volume of Covid patients at the hospital, was speaking to all of us and to Anita very rapidly, delivering the news that she was to be taken off oxygen soon if, and this was very likely he said, her lungs did not react sufficiently positively that night to the experimental medication. In the moment I had the sense that she had anomalously gotten this experimental medication. That she ordinarily wouldn’t have gotten it because of her age, her proximity to death. Something idiotic came to me then, while I was searching for the reason that she had gotten this drug: that somehow the force of our love, and my dad’s love in particular, must have been conveyed to the doctors. That the debt incurred by love and care, even at a distance, was paid off, in kind, by others who happened to be caring for her.
In reality, I think she got the drug because it was expensive and my family decided we could afford it. That was the equation.
I remembered later that she had looked at the doctor after he said she would likely die—all of us were just hearing this for the first time—and, for lack of anything else to say, saying this, I think, not to appease him exactly, but just to say something, she said “that’s fair.” But she did not believe it. I know she didn’t believe it. The situation was the same combination of unfathomable and terrifying as a plane crash. Although she’d actually survived one of those when she was younger.
Buddy listen to this shit you might need it. Makes a great soundtrack for breaking your head against a tree.
OK goodbye.