April 2020 Archives

Dear America,

Our "stable genius" of a president continues to preach to his choir every evening on television and all day long on twitter.  But as if that weren't enough--and God forbid that it is--he's affixing his name to everything involving the COVID-19 cataclysm.  It started with a post card that everyone got about two weeks ago with no address on it, but rather with "PRESIDENT TRUMP'S CORONAVIRUS GUIDELINES FOR AMERICA" emblazoned across the face of it as if he conceived of social distancing and wearing facemasks as a means of stanching the virus' spread.  Never mind that he called the pandemic "the latest Democratic hoax: number seven" just about two weeks earlier.  At the time of receipt of the card I wrote that I thought it was a breach of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from campaigning, which I feel certain Robert Redfield, Trump's appointed Director of the CDC did to curry favor with "the boss," and I don't mean Bruce Springstein.  It seems to me that either Redfield is guilty of the breach, or Trump has violated our code of election laws, but one of them should be prosecuted.  I wrote not just to you, but to the New York Times as well, but they apparently were indifferent to the act...either that or I was wrong about the ambit of the law, but in any event, The Times wasn't concerned about it.  In fact, I never even heard of anyone asking official sources about it, so that's a dead issue apparently.

But now, Trump's name is emblazoned on every one of the checks that are going to just about every household in the United States as if he were writing the checks out of his own checking account.  In reality, if anyone's names should be on those checks it should be Nancy Pelosi's or Mitch McConnell's.  They got the law passed; all Trump did was sign it after insisting for critical weeks that we were all overreacting to the "Chinese virus."  But the distastefulness of it all aside, he has arrogated to his campaign for reelection the providence of our country as created by our government...our congress in particular.  Of course, his minion, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, either on the orders of the boss or on his own in the hope of getting a pat on the head, has insisted that it was his idea.  But Mnuchin's fealty to his boss is far greater than his fealty to either to the truth or to probity.  He is an opportunistic, unscrupulous and devious former "financier" and businessman who conveniently left about $100 million worth of assets out of his financial disclosure when he was being considered for the position of Treasury Secretary, which he still occupies today.  And just as would be the case if his boss were selling one, I wouldn't buy a used car from him.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump is trying to buy votes with money that's being borrowed from the world--even from the Chinese, who hold more of our treasury bonds than any other entity or person anywhere--with the consequence of increasing the national debt by more than $2 trillion, with another half trillion to come if he signs the small business loans bill going through congress as I write.  What puzzles me is that other than the reports that this is happening in the media, no one is even talking about it.  This is like in old Chicago politics when the incumbent Democrats would go out on the street and give ten dollar bills to anyone they could find who could vote if they would do so for the Democrats, with a promise of more largess if they won.  So I'm not saying that only Republicans are corrupt.  I'm saying that politics is corrupt, and Donald Trump is the current godfather of that corruption...and apparently Steve Mnuchin is one of his soldiers.  So much for stability and genius.

Again, what I don't understand is that no one seems to be complaining about all this.  Plastering Trump's name all over everything "corona virus" is vile in several respects: (1) Trump, rather than deal with the virus and its consequences,  left us vulnerable to the virus's spread for a month, which probably cost twenty or thirty thousand lives in an effort to make the same kind of political hay out of it that he did the impeachment; (2) His rationale was that the virus was a hoax of political origins when the rest of the world was already rushing to deal with it; (3) we have had more cases and more deaths from the virus than other nation on earth; (4) we still can't get tested if we want to because the tests and the testing centers aren't available; and (5) the whole effort to deal with the virus, both medically and in terms of its impact on our economy has been a botched job, largely because he'd rather give farmers money to buy their votes than buy the crops they are plowing under and feeding them to those in need, and now in the form of rushing the abandonment of the social distancing and other restrictions that have so far saved countless lives before we have even seen a significant downturn in morbidity and mortality from the disease.

He ought to be impeached again, not elected again.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A couple of days ago, I heard an interview with Michael Bowen, a vice-president and equity holder at a company called Prestige Ameritech.  Prestige Ameritech is the nation's largest manufacturer of surgical face masks and respirators, and he was interviewed about the shortage of those health care supplies and why his company didn't ramp up production to accommodate the national need...why didn't they have enough manufacturing capacity as it was.  His response was nothing less than a critique of American economic policy relative to international trade.

Bowen told of his company previously buying a new factory and fitting it with new machines in response to the SARS virus epidemic of 2003.  After the epidemic, when the need was no so dire, those who bought from Prestige during the crisis because of the increased capacity they had developed began buying their masks in Mexico, and Prestige was left with excess capacity, which had cost them so much that they nearly went bankrupt when that excess had to be idled for want of demand.  Then he was asked about the market for their products and he answered as expected except for one thing.  He said that hospitals and other entities that use face masks constituted their market, but when he was asked how much of the market the U.S. government comprised, he said, "zero," and when the interviewer asked him to repeat what he had said, he said it with more emphasis.  That's when he recounted the SARS build up of the past and the financial debacle it was for his company.  The interviewer noted that he sounded angry, to which he replied that he wasn't anymore.  At this point, he noted, he was just puzzled by the fact that wasn't explicitly mentioned.  Even our government doesn't buy American anymore, and that is really the problem.

Donald Trump has made note of the fact that in a crisis situation, we, as a nation, cannot afford to be without vital industries, like steel manufacturing for example.  He made his usual flamboyant effort to promote the interests of the steel industry, but in the end, it all came to a grandiose next-to nothing.  Then came his shot at bringing the automobile industry back to this country from Mexico--which, by the way, manufactures the surgical masks and respirators that our government buys for our military and veterans' hospitals--in the form of the "USMCA" that he touts so highly as one of his "great" achievements.  But all that treaty does is increase slightly the percentage of American parts that our auto companies have to use when they build their cars in Mexico.  The auto assembly jobs stay there, and American workers who built the cars in the sixties and seventies are still without those jobs, and for that matter, the jobs making those medical supplies that we now complain we can't make fast enough stayed in Mexico too.

All of this and much more demonstrates the real nature of a problem that we should have addressed decades ago, but that we can't address without structural change in our form of capitalism now.  If we had imposed tariffs on goods that we made better than anyone else back then, our export markets might well have remained sound because there were no close alternatives to, for example, American cars.  But we didn't impose such tariffs, at least not to the extent that our domestic and foreign markets were protected, and as a result, foreign products improved to the point of being equal to what we produced, and often superior.  Foreign management practices became more efficient than ours as did foreign manufacturing technology, and then, there was no advantage to buying American so we no longer had any leverage in foreign markets.  When the Chinese got rich, they bought from Mercedes and Infinity, not Cadillac and Lincoln.  And for the run-of-the-mill goods we use every day, Chinese products got cheaper as American ones got priced out of the market.  So the jobs making those products went to China too.  Even the more high-toned goods, like I-phones, are not made in America anymore.  The Chinese make them in factories where workers are forced to live in dormitories.  In fact, when President Obama once asked Steve Jobs what it would take to bring those jobs home, Jobs arrogantly replied, "Those jobs are never coming back."  We don't even buy American labor anymore.

So, instead of new trade agreements that do less than enough to restore American jobs for American workers, we are going to have to find another way to keep the nation's essential industries from atrophying and becoming insufficient for our crisis needs, like the needs we have relative to the COVID-19 pandemic.  We will have to find a way to induce Americans to buy American, and those in other countries to do so too.  The Chinese use governmental subsidies to help their workers compete internationally.  In that vein, we could at least require our government to buy American.  Are you listening, Donald?

Your friend,

Mike