What’s going on in China?

Is the new virus under control and soon to fade? Or are we on the brink of a gigantic pandemic?

The business press reports a number of disturbing, if not alarming, trends in industrial companies dependent on the Chinese supply chain that has been severely disrupted by COVID-19. The examples are multiplying rapidly—the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said 48% of their member companies are “impacted” by the rolling shutdowns, and 78% are short-staffed.

U.S. manufacturing, what’s left of it anyway, is highly dependent on inputs farmed out to companies in China, so the deep disruption of economic activity through mandatory quarantines and factory suspensions can paralyze entire industries if they continue for too long. Surprise, surprise, turns out the wholesale shipping of U.S. industrial capacity to low-wage venues in pursuit of a quick buck turns out to have a downside despite its success in crushing labor domestically.

Apple has had to revise profit forecasts, and HSBC is taking a huge hit from its giant Asian operations. Volkswagen can’t get key parts for its cars, and the list goes on and on.

This deep drag on economic activity is not only threatening to crush China’s growth rate or even throw it into reverse, but it also could bring the ruling Communist Party and Chairman Xi specifically into disrepute given his ham-handed approach to the viral outbreak and years-long L’etat, c’est moi determination to identify the state with his divine person. It is significant that Xi, who normally makes sure that his image is plastered all over the news media daily, virtually disappeared from view for nearly two weeks just as the coronavirus disaster was unfolding.

In fact, some analysts are suggesting that a coronavirus pandemic, if it materializes, could be the “black swan” event that triggers the next worldwide recession. With some estimates of total infected persons reaching into the hundreds of millions in China alone, the consequences of ongoing quarantines, factory shutdowns, etc., are incalculable and must be making party officials mighty nervous. The big firms can bounce back and make up for lost production, but smaller enterprises will go under, and not just in China.

On the other hand, if people are sent back to work whether the illness is under control or not, the economic damage will be minimized, at least for a while, even if the result is a rejuvenated epidemic with the disease spreading to neighboring countries and eventually the entire world.

Therefore, all numbers coming out of China that purport to show a slowing of the infection rate and an early peak to the epidemic’s spread should be taken, in my view, with a boulder of salt. If the Chinese leadership is calculating a course of action between two unwelcome bad choices—an uncontrolled epidemic or economic disaster—it’s pretty easy to see where their short-term self-interest lies. And U.S. businesses reliant on Chinese supplies are unlikely to cast doubt on what would be highly reassuring news, even if the actions taken as a result put their own workers in danger.

Incidentally, my suggestion here Feb. 15 that high rates of cigarette smoking in China might be contributing to the toll of disease is supported by an academic article published last week in an online magazine. A study of lung tissue looking for a receptor named ACE2 that increases the likelihood of COVID-19 infection found no differences in rates among patients from different racial, age, or gender categories. But one factor was statistically significant: smokers had greater ACE2 gene expression than non-smokers (p=.008) The datasets are small, and the article isn’t peer-reviewed. Nonetheless, it’s not a stretch to assume that a respiratory illness will hit hard in a population in which 60% of adult males smoke.

Three points on COVID-19, a.k.a. Coronavirus

Corona means “crown” in Spanish, giving new meaning to the Shakespearean line, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” from Henry IV, part 2. Also kinda wrecks the "Queen for a Day" concept.

The virus kills you by entering the lungs and destroying cells there, triggering an immune response that can do further damage. Shortness of breath is an early symptom.

Something like 60% of adult males in China smoke tobacco, and the Chinese government receives as much as 10% of all revenue from its tobacco monopoly, which may explain why the regime is so lax on tobacco control measures. The lag in action on this front may well be contributing to the high morbidity and mortality rates of the new virus. By the same logic, other countries with lower smoking rates may be less susceptible.

The recent spike in new cases results from a revised yardstick for measurement by which the government now includes anyone with a preliminary pneumonia screen, whether or not they can get the more complex test to confirm COVID-19. This is because China does NOT have a single-payer healthcare system, and most citizens must cover around half of all hospital costs. The change is meant to encourage people to present for treatment and not be held back by fear of bankruptcy.

Conclusion: China does some things pretty well. Public health is not one of them.

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If Troy Price were Bolivian, he’d be holed up in a foreign embassy

Troy Price fell on his sickle as Iowa Democratic Party chair after the caucus-night debacle in which results of that supposed exercise of popular sovereignty collapsed ignominiously. By the way, we still don’t know who won most of the absurd SDEs (State Delegate Equivalents), that measure that enabled lab-grown Pete to declare premature victory.

Troy’s the guy who decided that a partial vote count favoring Pete B should be announced, followed by the suspension of all further returns due to the sudden failure of the magic app designed by a team headed by three former Clinton campaign operatives, all of whom love Bernie to death. I guess no one thought cellphones could be used to call in vote totals to a central clearinghouse. And math is so hard.

Some of Bernie’s strongest areas in the state weren’t yet recorded when everything stopped, and some of the arithmetic in the official vote reports are plainly wrong. (Maybe they could hand out calculators to precinct officials next time.) But the early headlines are what counts in Iowa, not one delegate more or less six weeks from now.

This strange incapacity to add up numbers and calculate percentages calls to mind another recent election-night drama that took place just last October in Bolivia. There, three-term president Evo Morales was holding a substantial lead in early returns though short of the 10% margin he needed to win a first-round victory and another four years in office. Then the rapid vote count stopped, sparking suspicion of vote fraud, and the U.S.-dominated Organisation of American States promptly weighed in to denounce exactly that.

We know the rest: the right-wing opposition mobilized, called in the police and army, and ousted Morales. This is called a coup d’état, notwithstanding the ensuing semantic parsing, and it was followed by mass arrests of Morales’ followers, persecution of former officials of the prior government, and by all indications a holy mess. The Trump Administration applauded the armed takeover, and the Democrat response has been muted at best.

But when such Third World antics played out in the U.S., the only outside intervention was from the Democratic National Committee itself, whose operatives were at least as responsible for the ruined election as the local underlings. Troy apologized before being led offstage forever, reinforcing the aw-shucks, gee-whiz impression of mere incompetence rather than nefarious manipulation. As usual, we’ll never know how much of each was at work because making sure elections aren’t well organized in the first place is key to messing with unwelcome outcomes at various key moments downstream. (Watch out for more funny business in famously chaotic and confusing California.)

Price should be glad he presided over a vote count interruption in the U.S. because if the Bolivian rules had applied, his family would be scurrying through the back woods into Minnesota for asylum, his bank account would be blocked, and his entire staff on trial for corruption or perhaps terrorism. That’s how the new Bolivian authorities are taking their revenge on the erstwhile legally constituted government officials there who may or may not have put a finger on the scales. Here, we are more forgiving when the establishment favorite "wins."

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And then there were . . .

I confess to utter puzzlement over the appeal of lab-generated Mayor Pete whose policy statements are as thin and fluffy as cotton candy and equally nutritive. That said, it is undeniable that he has energized a certain demographic who must see the gay candidate as some sort of Obama redux, an innovation in the political landscape who is cool by the fact of existing and who trots out comfy platitudes at the speed of light. (Caitlin Johnstone called him “the Mozart of bloviation.”) In any case, the Indiana boy wonder should enjoy his moment in the sun given that pulling neck and neck with Bernie in the first two contests was a remarkable feat for a young squirt mayor with a weird name.

However, I believe the more important story of this inaugural primary season is the version of Ten Little Indians playing out before us. We started out with 20 or 21 candidates, a dozen of them faded before we even noticed they were there, and now two heavy hitters who were expected to dominate are sinking fast. Biden is a painfully lousy politician and was always likely to implode; even so, the speed and magnitude of his collapse is epic. Short of convincing Barack Obama to stump South Carolina with him for the next three weeks, it’s not clear how Biden can salvage his dignity, much less his presidential pretensions.

Elizabeth Warren was a front-runner in New Hampshire for a spell and comes from the state next door, so she cannot paint her fourth-place finish as anything less than a disaster. The new flavor of the month is Amy Klobuchar who was the beneficiary of rave chatter on the cable shows all night and, I predict, will become the replacement female darling as Warren is escorted to the wings. Let’s see if Klobuchar decides to slam the B boys (including Bloomberg) as icky males, or perhaps she’ll decide that that ploy didn’t work so well for EW.

In short, we have a phenomenon seen repeatedly in these mass candidacies at the start of a presidential season: steady attrition in which top-rated pols with all the “right” characteristics are pumped up by Beltway chatterers and then are relentlessly felled by the march of those little columns of numbers parading across the screen. Some flashy and expensive contenders flop in the batter’s box.

Once again, Bernie’s first-place finish in total votes was roundly ignored by the corporate yappers, which should serve him perfectly as he grinds on to Nevada and South Carolina and watches the runners-up sink their teeth into each other’s throats. Warren’s eventual departure will leave the field starkly divided into two camps: Bernie and Other. No one can even pretend to echo his insistence on reversing direction 180 degrees in economics, foreign policy, and the role of government, and no one adheres to his theory of social change nor has built the volunteer army to back it up. He’s unique.

Bernie’s critique of runaway cowboy capitalism will be the same in November as it is now. His main adversary in Nevada and beyond isn’t any of the candidates—it’s the undecideds who aren’t convinced that he can win despite his, um, winning. The voters may go nostalgic and choose mushy centrism for November, or they may be seduced by Bloomberg’s billions. But win or lose, Bernie won’t change either his message or his way of doing politics. He’ll just be around, doing what he’s always done.

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Totally serious predictions of what will happen in 2020

[credit: Andreas Schwarzkopf, Graffito am Freiburger Dreisamufer]

February 8: Bernie Sanders notches solid victory in the New Hampshire primary; Biden is fifth behind Amy Klobuchar and applies to Citibank for a campaign “bridge loan.” “I will certainly pay you back with two hamburgers tomorrow,” quips the flailing candidate while tousling the hair of two female loan officers.

February 9: Tesla stock recovers from sudden plunge to post a new record of $1200 a share. Elon Musk promises that the company will turn a profit early in President Biden’s second term.

February 14: Buttigieg campaign storms South Carolina where hundreds of Bubbas gather to greet the homosexual Rhodes scholar at a mass kegger before the classic Clemson-USC basketball game. Shouts of “Peter! Peter!” ring out at the tailgate party. Mayor Pete charms the crowd with a Norwegian folk tale in the original language.

February 14: Dow Jones cracks the magical 30,000-point barrier after Trump threatens to lock Fed chief Jerome Powell in a White House basement if he doesn’t lower interest rates. “We’ll show Jerry a Foggy Bottom over here,” says Trump, later mocks reporters for taking him seriously.

February 20: Michael Bloomberg buys another $1 billion worth of TV and radio ads in the Super Tuesday states, hires 1000 unemployed teens to distribute primary day swag bags in African-American neighborhoods. Despite the expenditure, his personal fortune rises to $65 billion on booming stock market values.

February 22: Nevada caucuses interrupted by freak sandstorm, hundreds of caucus cards are blown into the desert. Nevada Democratic Committee mobilizes schoolchildren to chase them down @ 50 cents each. Partial results expected after Super Tuesday. Bernie supporters denounce fraud; Hillary Clinton condemns Bernie supporters for their “typical male attitudes towards Mother Nature.”

February 26: Amy Klobuchar fails to show up for a South Carolina rally, is later discovered getting hammered with the New York Times editorial board. Denies knocking her chief of staff unconscious with an electric pencil sharpener.

February 29: Bernie Sanders surges to overcome Biden’s 40-point lead in the polls and win the South Carolina primary. DNC declares emergency and mobilizes to “avert disaster,” asks Bloomberg for leftover swag.

March 1: Elizabeth Warren surrogates suggest forging a Buttigieg-Warren “gender emancipation” alliance to counteract the meanie bro culture dominating the primary season. Joy Reid of The View says the gesture “shows how the power of pronouns can rebalance income redistribution.” Klobuchar chief of staff regains consciousness.

March 4: Super Tuesday. Sanders notches victories in, California, Colorado, Maine, Utah, and Vermont. CNN explodes with wall-to-wall coverage of “massive Bloomberg surge” with firsts in Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, calls race “wide open.” Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar alternate for third. Results from Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Texas are delayed due to computer glitches; DNC appoints special emergency panel to oversee the disrupted primaries comprised of Caroline Kennedy, Chelsea Clinton, and Ghislaine Maxwell at a news conference headlined “Believe Women.” Warren takes first in Massachusetts, says Bloomberg was “a daring, innovative mayor.”

March 10: Sanders and Bloomberg split a second set of delegate-rich primaries, Sanders winning Michigan and Washington, Bloomberg victorious in Missouri, North Dakota, and Mississippi. Idaho ballot marking devices investigated after showing a late surge for Deval Patrick, who was not on the ballot. DNC announces full investigation of the anomaly.

March 14: Biden wins Northern Mariana Islands caucus, decides to stay.

April 4: Early Wyoming caucus totals favor Bernie but are later recalculated to award all 14 delegates to Amy Klobuchar. Trump attributes Klobuchar victory to the “advantage of coming from a neighboring state.” Meanwhile, all Alaska primary results arrive via dogsled within twelve hours of polls closing. DNC announces launch of a three-year study of the successful Alaskan procedure “to inform our 2024 primary season.”

April 4: Bloomberg nails huge Louisiana primary victory after sponsoring a week-long riverboat cruise with the entire state legislature and the New Orleans Saints cheerleading squad.

April 7: Wisconsin primary voting continues past 4:00 a.m. as all voters must present voter registration cards, driver licenses, birth certificates, a utility bill, first and last month’s rent, and three witnesses to their good character.

April 28: Bloomberg buys up all scheduled programming on broadcast media in the eastern seaboard in advance of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island primaries; wins the votes, but GDP takes massive hit as voters flock to movie theatres during working hours.

May 2: Biden wins Guam caucus, decides to leaves Northern Marianas. Kansas primary results knocked offline by a tornado hitting computer server. DNC announces investigation.

May 12: Bernie again takes 52 of 55 West Virginia counties; arcane DNC rules lead to majority of delegates awarded to Tom Steyer.

June 6: Virgin Islands caucuses disrupted by crazed infiltrator wearing Bernie gear, later identified as David Frum in disguise.

June 7: Sanders wins Puerto Rico primary; Trump attempts to revoke Puerto Ricans’ citizenship.

July 13 – 16: Sanders enters Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee with 48% of delegates needed to win the nomination; 8% are disqualified because their middle initials are not listed on their voter registrations. Another 4% fall ill from food poisoning. Bloomberg elected on second ballot with support from also-rans and superdelegates. Amy Klobuchar named running mate. Bloomberg heard calling her “Abby” by mistake. Joy Reid praises Bloomberg’s choice and “long history of support for women.”

August 24 – 27: Trump nominated by acclamation at the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, delivers acceptance speech while simultaneously marrying fourth wife. Christian Coalition announces the introduction of sainthood among Protestant denominations.

November 3, 2020: Michael Bloomberg elected president, appoints Bernie Sanders Secretary of Health and Human Welfare in preparation for universal, government-funded healthcare “because I said so.” Calls congressional leaders to his office and threatens to drop $100 million each on their primary opponents if anyone votes no. “Aetna can suck me,” says the president-elect.

November 4: President Trump declares the election fraudulent, refuses to leave office. Joint Chiefs of Staff arrive at White House meeting with National Security Council in M1 Abrams tanks. DNC cheers defense of democracy, asks them to station vehicles permanently in Lafayette Park.

January 20, 2021: Bloomberg sworn in. Personal fortune reaches $85 billion.

On the Doorsteps of the Iowans, part 4

Now that the Iowa caucuses are just hours away and opposition camps can’t take advantage, I will describe a surprise we discovered and exploited while trudging the snow-covered byways of that state: the vote-rich African immigrant communities.

Africans are not a population you immediately associate with Iowa, but the state has large cohorts of Sudanese, Congolese, and Ethiopians, among others. Many were settled as refugees but are now doing that American thing of merging with their new homeland and raising children who are as Iowan as the white kids next door whose families immigrated a few generations earlier. (The Iowa, the Missouri, and other nomadic tribes inhabited the area pre-European settlement—all others are newcomers.)

We volunteer canvassers were given lists via a cellphone app that directed us to the doors of prospective voters in Iowa City, and by chance my team, comprised of Grandma Jan (profiled in the New Yorker recently) and a South African academic who holds a U.S. passport, were given a neighborhood almost entirely populated by Sudanese. It is a sign of how weak all the campaigns are (including Bernie’s) in terms of organizing their own potential base that so little had been done to educate and mobilize these highly motivated recent citizens.

Iowa City is a liberal-ish university town with a gay mayor, so you’d think the hundreds of Sudanese suddenly facing the Trump travel ban preventing their relatives from visiting would have been targeted for a major effort months ago. But we found that these very welcoming people who, like Arabs everywhere were only too delighted to have visitors sit down for tea and meet their families, had only the vaguest notions about what is happening later today, where to go to participate, or who the candidates are. While the half-dozen well-funded campaigns scramble to pull traditional caucus-goers this way or that, they all left this mountain of potential votes on the table. We did our best to remedy that.

As a lone male, I did not get the entrée that our female canvassers received though I was always treated more politely than in white neighborhoods. This was not entirely a disadvantage because the ladies were so often delayed with lengthy visits. (When I went with a female partner, the women home alone could invite us in.) Imagine the work that could have taken place among these families whose children now face hostility and threats for the mere fact of being Sudanese-American.

I did get extra points for actually knowing something about the Sudan, having spent two months there in 1979. One prosperous head of household getting local teenagers to shovel his suburban driveway insisted that we come back for a formal visit, shaking his head at how the promise of America had suddenly soured under “the monster.” Where we normally would get only one or two “commitment to caucus cards” signed during a shift, among the Sudanese I came back with no less than six.

Our team concentrated its efforts among the Africans in the lead-up to today’s crucial vote, and the Bernie campaign has waked up to the potential, albeit tardily. If the Sanders phenomenon fulfills its promise to be a movement rather than a mere election, someone will take up where we left off.

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On the Doorsteps of the Iowans, part 3

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” –Soren Kirkegaard

On New Year’s Eve 1979-80 on the cusp of our one of our endless presidential election cycles, my friend Jerry got out his microphone and recorded everyone at the party answering three questions: (1) Who will be the Democratic nominee? (2) Who will be the Republican nominee? and (3) Who will win the presidency? When we listened to it a year later, we were surprised at the answers.

Not one person said: Ronald Reagan.

It was such an illuminating experiment that I’ve repeated it over the years when in the U.S. or with American ex-pats. Here are the results:

In 1992 not one person said: Bill Clinton.

In 2000 not one person said: George W. Bush.

In 2008 not one person said: Barack Obama.

In 2016 not one person said: Donald J. Trump.

So, predictions anyone?

With the benefit of hindsight, we see the logic of what occurred, that Clinton would triangulate his Third Way into a minority presidency, that W would slip into the White House on a hanging chad, that Obama would benefit from running smack into a financial crash, that Trump would exploit billions in free advertising and a premature coronation to challenge our sense of reality. We forget that all this came as a series of middling-to-huge surprises at the time. I conclude that those announcing what WILL or WILL NOT happen in 10 months are pompous boobies.

What I do dare to predict with modest confidence is that things are not going back to normal, whatever that was, any time soon. Now that we have a Third World pattern of income distribution, we should expect to experience Third World politics to go with it. Trump marching his slash-and-burn entourage through our constitutional framework accompanied by the feckless, Democrat non-opposition clutching its collective pearls is just the beginning.

That said, it was refreshing to spend a week soliciting reflection on the political questions of the day from dozens of Iowan households, a moment in which it was possible to reimagine a civil, civic space that did not rely on 12-second sound bites or WWF-style shouting matches. It’s hard work trudging up and down the snowy (and for a New Yorker distressingly spread-out) sidewalks of Davenport and suburban Iowa City, but one gets used to the brush-offs while seeking that sweet spot on the porch with the storm door ajar when someone offers you two minutes of issue-based conversation. Mine tended to drift toward single-payer health care as that’s my core issue.

Some endorsed the idea with enthusiasm while the more interesting conversations were with those hesitating to back Bernie. Their doubts included these: that union health plans are hard-fought gains that a member didn’t want to give up; that Bernie’s heart attack might mean he doesn’t have the energy for the job; that incrementalism makes more sense given the ferocious opposition; that other candidates had interesting alternative plans.

We were strictly instructed never to discuss other candidates, so on that one I pivoted. The union guy’s mind was made up, so I didn’t linger. The others were at least open to persuasion as I opined that incremental changes, which leave insurance companies as gatekeepers between us and our doctors, are ineffective and reversible. When the woman questioning Bernie’s age turned out to have had a heart transplant, no less, I said he looks like he’s in better health than ever, and she agreed.

One thing that did not come up, perhaps surprisingly, was socialism. No doubt I was given canvass lists of households less likely to have a problem with that, but nonetheless I was struck by the absence of that old bugaboo.

It’s hard to believe that these tiny nudges amount to anything, but multiply my miniscule efforts times 130,000 doors knocked by over 10,000 volunteers in a single weekend Jan 25-26, and you might have enough pro-Bernie tilts to push him up a point or two while consolidating those already leaning in his direction. Once the electoral excitement dies down, I hope these eager and hardy youths realize that the same efforts have to continue throughout the entire calendar if we’re to have any chance of pushing through these urgently needed changes. Campaigns are exciting and have an end date; organizing and mobilizing for political influence do not.

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