Missive Intermission, or 'the past is over'
After decades of American negligence, the arrival of the pandemic means the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost, and the beginning of the end of life as we know it.
Welcome to Terminally Chill, a newsletter about American politics and other things.
Hi there,
It’s been about two months since the last post, in which I made a prediction that has… to say the least, not panned out with Bernie Sanders suspending his presidential campaign two weeks ago. I’ve thought about why the campaign went wrong as well as what it means long-term now that Sanders has dropped out, but I think it’s too soon for anyone, myself included, to claim to have a definitive answer to either question.
Beyond that, plenty has unfolded in these past couple months—a global pandemic among them. That’s also kept me from home the last six weeks as I’d traveled out of state to visit family. Not to belabor the point, but watching New York City become the epicenter from afar has been, in a word, surreal. Still, flying home at this point would be reckless, and so at least for the foreseeable future, I’ll stay where I am.
In the meantime, it felt time to get back and, in the words of Tom Hardy in Venom, ‘concentrate on the written word,’ or whatever that meant. That should mean more activity with this newsletter…, maybe. Ideally, you can expect about one-to-two of these essays per week, but again there are no guarantees to be made here.
Anyway, in recent weeks, my mind has often returned to a line of dialogue from the game Civilization V, the 4X-strategy game. Once the player completes the tech tree for their empire, upon researching the last innovation—the vaguely named ‘Future Tech’— a pop-up appears, and the narrator’s voice bellows the phrase…
“I think we agree, the past is over.”
GEORGE W. BUSH uttered those words 20 years ago, and as absurdly obvious as what he’d said was, it’s a prescient and apt descriptor of the present. Much has been made about how the coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we live and shed light on the chasmic, and often intersectional, inequities that are all too common in the United States—laying bare an inherently unjust and rigged economic system, as well as the compliant political establishment that props it up, for all to see.
Rent-burdened tenants unable to make the month’s payment; students unable to attend remote classes due to a lack of nationwide broadband infrastructure; people of color disproportionately dying due to COVID-19; unemployment figures that may rival those seen during the Depression, these are just a few vignettes from the crisis—problems not whisked away by a measly $1,200 check—and the enduring reality faced by millions of people in the richest country that the world has ever known.
And yet, all the same, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg.
Out in the backyard, there’s a small coop of four chickens. Almost everyone’s familiar with the expression ‘the chickens have come home to roost,’ the adage that essentially says what goes around comes back around. Over the years, as the project of neoliberalism has expanded its reach deeper into the American system and further into our individual lives, the U.S. has bred many ‘chickens’—unaddressed social inequalities and political negligence allowed to fester—and now, they’re coming home.
For decades, for example, the Republican Party has sought to dismantle the United States Postal Service in hopes of ultimately privatizing the entire agency, much in the same vain they’d like to do with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
In 2006, with little fanfare, disagreement, or controversy, the Republican-controlled lame-duck Congress pushed through the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. Most critically, the bill mandated that the Postal Service substantially pre-fund 75 years of its pension insurance benefits in just a decade, from 2007 to 2016, at about $5.6 billion per year.
That obligation—to which no other federal agency is held—meant the post office was paying benefits for employees who hadn’t even been born yet, and it kneecapped the entirely self-sufficient USPS, leading to years of continuing unprofitability.
“This requirement [of the PAEA] has deprived the Postal Service of the opportunity to invest in capital projects and research and development,” the agency’s inspector general reported in 2015. “Mandating 100 percent pre-funding of future liabilities that are frequently changing and highly uncertain could unnecessarily damage the Postal Service.” With the pandemic causing a drastic slowdown in mail volume, it’s been pushed to the brink, with House members warning they may run out of cash in June.
Even with the post office racing headlong into financial oblivion, however, the White House has indicated that if Congress were to appropriate relief for it, President Trump would veto the legislation. Couple that with the fact it’s increasingly likely the 2020 presidential election will be reliant on mail-in balloting, and it’s easy to envision a scenario in which voters are disenfranchised by a fledgling postal service and the government unwilling to bail it out.
In fact, we don’t even have to envision; it’s already happened.
Two weeks ago, voters in Wisconsin cast ballots in the state’s highly-controversial presidential primary and state Supreme Court election. While thousands were forced to risk infection from the coronavirus by voting in-person due to GOP lawsuits, others attempted to vote via mail, only to never receive a ballot. In Milwaukee, the city election commission’s investigating claims made by residents, who had ballots issued on March 22 and March 23, yet never received them.
Furthermore, three bins of unsent ballots destined for Oshkosh and Appleton voters were discovered in a Milwaukee postal facility. Likewise, the Village of Fox Point alleged it’d received “multiple batches of unsent absentee ballots” returned without explanation from USPS, according to Sen. Ron Johnson and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, both of Wisconsin.
If Congress continues to do what it’s always done—nothing, or if we’re incredibly lucky, the bare minimum—about this, then the fiasco in the Badger State, and the dilemma faced by voters to either risk their health or stay at home, will serve as a preamble of what’s to occur nationwide in November.
Those aren’t the only chickens though, and not all are bred by the Republicans either; Democrats do, too.
An often unspoken component of the Obama administration was its soft regulatory approach, often acceding to arguments peddled by business leaders that their tactics were actually beneficial. As Doni Bloomfield in Slate pointed out, in 2010, regulators at the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission issued guidance saying “consolidating factories is among the best ways to show that an otherwise harmful merger is actually good for consumers.”
Two years later, that laissez-faire approach enabled Irish-based ventilator-maker Covidien to swoop in and purchase California-based Newport Medical Instruments, which had been contracted by the U.S. to make 40,000 low-cost ventilators for the federal stockpile. “The Federal Trade Commission didn’t even give it a second look,” wrote American Prospect executive editor David Dayen on the subject.
Despite Newport being only a year from bringing their cheaper product to market, Covidien, who sold their own more expensive ventilators, quickly turned and claimed the arrangement “was not sufficiently profitable for the company” before shuttering the project in 2014. The federal government eventually found a new firm, Philips, to build the ventilators, but those orders aren’t scheduled to arrive until later this year—exacerbating the ventilator shortage in the U.S. and forcing states to bid against one another for essential medical supplies. Yet another chicken returning to roost, and as always, everyday working Americans are bearing the brunt of their impact. (Unironically, thanks, Obama.)
That same year, Covidien was acquired by Medtronic, a larger American-based competitor. Shortly thereafter, the latter performed the largest corporate tax inversion in U.S. history, assuming control of Covidien’s Irish headquarters and dodging taxes on more than $1 billion profit to American authorities in the process. Again, as Dayen points out, that merger led to the consolidation of much of both companies’ supply chains, thus making the entire system more fragile and at-risk to disruption as the pandemic wears on. And, as more of these chickens return home, working people will again be caught in-between, forced to endure a crisis with no safety net to support them and with no significant relief on the horizon.
Politicians, business leaders and, most certainly, the financial big-wigs on Wall Street will wax poetic about how no one could’ve ever seen this coming—hoping we’ll buy the bullshit line about this being an ‘act of God’ and not the unmitigated, preventable tragedy it’s become and will continue to be. They’ll say, ‘now’s not the time to play the blame game,’ as if their hands aren’t still at the wheel and that the institutions currently failing us aren’t of their own volition. Some may even have the gall to tell the millions of newly-unemployed that they empathize with their plight, even as they extolled the virtues of employer-based private insurance—the biggest chicken of them all coming home to roost—as panacea making policies such as Medicare for All unnecessary.
No one knows what comes next, but what’s clear is that the masses are catching on to how stacked against them the system really is, and just how profoundly full of shit its apologists on Capitol Hill, Wall Street, and in all of the other annals of power truly are. It’s a bell that can’t simply be unrung, and it shows—with wildcat strike actions taking root across the country and across industries, alike. ‘The past is over,’ the Sanders campaign included, but how much the new resembles the old is entirely in our hands, and our hands alone, now.
Are you ready?