Category: Brian Browne

Brian Browne

There comes that rare coincidence when tragedy and hope are born of the same event. We exist at such a moment. The murders of George Floyd, Armaud Arbery, Breonna Scott unleashed a torrent of anguish and indignation. Protests have spread worldwide. Everywhere is declared that racist police brutality must end. Many have described this as the fateful hour when the dam finally broke, when meaningful change flowed over the land.

This would be a relief if true. Yet, I fear this conclusion results more from wishful thinking and the hyperbole attendant to those who lack historic perspective. It appears somewhat insolent to even suggest that two weeks of relatively mild protests could topple a social system engineered and maintained by countless years of cruelty, exploitation, misery and murder. Such things do not vanish easily. It takes more than the winds of change to remove such an edifice for winds are fickle and they too change.

This is a portentous moment not because the winds and water have caused the evil dam to break. A truer depiction is that winds have blown the high waters over the top of the dam.  Nothing has broken and the system of withholding precious water from those thirsting for justice remains largely intact.

Those who protest will profit by better understanding the past. A civil war was fought which ended slavery. But equality was not had; instead, slavery was replaced by a system so harsh that, on a daily basis, it was only distinguishable from slavery in that it no longer allowed for open market auctions of black people. The misery of life and severe punishment for being black were largely the same under the Black Codes as under slavery. The black American became the “unfree unslave.” He was prisoner to a unique spatial and social confinement; the only pardon given him was death which was always readily available in a variety of gruesome manifestations.

In the 1960’s, black people struggled and died for civil rights only to have the nation shift in a manner that would render those rights mostly empty; their lack of economic power was thrust in their faces. The law now prohibits racial discrimination but allows almost any form of economic discrimination a craven mind can imagine. You are allowed to apply for a job but chances are you will not get it if a less qualified white person also applied. You can seek to rent an apartment. When the rental agent sees you, she suddenly remembers she just leased that very flat five minutes before. You are free to enter that restaurant but you never do because you cannot afford it. Of the so-called American dream, you may look at it and even call it our own but you cannot touch it or hold it as your own.

In 1968, literally thousands of protests took place. The tumult and push for change then far dwarfs today’s relatively gentle activities. Not much good came of it. The most enduring feature of that period was a conservative retrenchment that still governs the landscape today. Trump is but the inferior reincarnation of President Reagan who was the inferior reincarnation of President Nixon. Not only did politics turn more rightwing, the economy became more cutthroat and inequitable as modern-day Robber Barons unleashed an unregulated, voracious financialized capitalism on the nation and the world. Money would speak louder and mean more than ever before; but the average American would have less of it. The average black American would have less than that.

The second and perhaps equally deadly feature of that period was a fundamental dissection of black society. The small number of educated and moneyed blacks was allowed residence in the society’s leadership condominium at the basement level. Most of these blacks accepted the lowly position but the change came with a price that would be paid by the black masses. A subtle but real betrayal was set in motion. The educated and moneyed black elite remained culturally aligned with black common folk but came to increasingly meld themselves to mainstream political and economic interests.

They would use their blackness to mute black pursuit of radical reform. They became the two-bit henchman of white supremacy. They learned the trick of evoking the image of Dr. King to thwart the objectives of the slain hero. Having sated themselves with the material benefits the mainstream had promised, they were no longer interested in leading other black people to the Promised Land. They became adept at leading their people in circles. The well-worn circle now has small crack. But no one should confuse this dent for being more than the minor rupture it is.

In a fundamental way, I feel sorry for the mostly young protesters. They are good souls who want change; but, they have little idea of the depths of the evil they fight. They think the flash of dramatic action and a few strong words will suffice to defeat the leviathan. They have not been educated in the ways of reformist struggle. Those figureheads who have been presented to them as leaders are among those who do not want the protestors’ quest for change to reach its full dimensions.

The protestors would be wise to consult with Egyptians whose 2011 protests captivated the world. Those protests were much more strident and dedicated than America’s current version. The Egyptians sought a new form of government leading toward a new way of life. In their eagerness, they mistakenly focused on removing President Mubarak thinking that as the head of government he had masterminded the oppressive apparatus. Their conceptualization was incorrect. This led them to a terrible but predictable outcome. The protests were tactically successful but strategically amiss. Mubarak was not the vital element. He was but the symbolic head of a complex, dangerous conglomeration of military force and economic power. Removing him would do nothing to the conglomerate than cause it to pause momentarily in order to replace the old head with a new one. President El-Sisi replaced his mentor; almost a decade after the protests, Egypt is ruled much the same as it was before Tahrir Square momentarily shone forth as a light of freedom of liberty. As bright as that light was, how quickly was it extinguished!

American protesters now face the same dilemma as those in Egypt. They are in danger of being sidetracked to fight symbols instead of wrestling the true evil. That evil is a political economy based on the suppression of a certain segment of society so that another segment may reap a windfall. We shall call that windfall the dividends of racial capitalism since the vast majority of black people were imprisoned by wicked design in the subjugated class.

The black leaders and their masters among the moderate whites now try to turn this protest into an electoral movement against Trump. Many of the protesters will understandably swallow the bait. Trump is a racist eyesore in need of removal. He is the ultimate mountebank of racist huckstering, the high apostle of a revival of neoclassical racism. His foes in the Democratic Party are little better as they are modernistic racists. Trump’s racism is stark and glaring. The Democrats’ version is paternalistic and condescending.

Earlier this week in a demonstration of bogus allegiance with the protests, a group of mostly white Democratic Congresspersons were photographed taking a moment of silence in honor of George Floyd. Each adorned with a strip of Kente cloth about their necks, they took to their knees for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the length of time Floyd was choked by the police.

This was political kitsch of the worse degree. That they would think the simple trick of wearing Kente would endear them to black people is both insulting and laughable. Worse, what they donned was not even real Kente. It was that fake stuff made in Asia. Now that was ironically symbolic for the Democrats are as fake as the Kente they wore.

The Democrats have quickly put forth legislation against police brutality. This shows their cravenness not their concern. They have been well aware of these problems for years. Such killings and brutal acts were taking place during Obama’s tenure at a pace equal to today’s. These Democrats never rushed to present legislation to protect blacks then because they knew it would not serve them politically.

Obama’s unwritten job description was to defuse black anger; his slick, assuring words and charming demeanor were meant to keep blacks docile. If he was doing his job, legislation protecting blacks from police mayhem would be unnecessary; Obama already had blacks in tow. There was no additional black support to be had. Such legislation would only serve to threaten white support. Although it was right back then it is now, such legislation was shunned by Democrats because it was politically inconvenient. But Obama is no longer president and black people are making noise finally. Now Nancy Pelosi and her associates act like they are the long lost relatives of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Harriet Tubman, and Kunta Kinte.

Meanwhile, a great deal of energy is being expended on toppling monuments to Confederate Civil War generals and changing the names of military installations bearing the names of such men. The sentiment against these statues is appropriate but the actions taken are unproductive expenditures of finite political energy. Instead of removing the statues, it would be better to leave the statues but delegitimize them. This can easily be done my erecting, in the closest proximity to the statue, large educative plaques or murals accurately depicting the generals as racists who committed treason against their nation.

The plaques can also state that those who erected the statues were also racists. In creating these monuments during the era of the discriminatory Black Codes, the objectives of these racist town and city leaders were to glorify slavery and to intimidate their black population. In this way, the visual public history found in the nation’s parks and city squares can be rendered more accurately.

Even with this suggested approach, protesters must not expend too much energy pursing this objective for this is more symbol than substance. Dismantle every confederate statue and remove every confederate name on military installations. This will not improve the daily lives of our people. It will not create better jobs, schools, housing or health care. It will not stop the police from choking us. On these more substantive things we should devote our focus.

Yet, before we depart this subject of Civil War memorials, black people must also consume a slice of bitter truth. If we are to down these confederate monuments, we must also stop our veneration of the Buffalo Soldier. Serving in the U.S. Army after the Civil War, the Buffalo Soldier was the black man who enlisted in the Army to abet white racists in killing and subduing Native Americans as well as taking their lands. Blacks mistakenly thought by working with and for whites that their racism would subside. This proved to be both a political and morale mistake. Native Americans generally had been kind to black people, often giving them shelter from slavery. In fighting them and helping steal their land, we betrayed an oppressed ally who had done nothing against us. If we are to correct history, let us correct it all the way not just in a manner that soothes us. We cannot condemn the Confederacy’s love of slavery if we do not condemn our own contribution to the decimation of the Native American.

Protesters do well to fight lethal police brutality. If successful, their protests will save the lives of dozens of men per year. Not as many families will grieve the unjust premature loss of loved ones. Boys will have more years to grown into men. Children will keep their fathers, wives their husbands, mothers their sons. Let us not forget also the many black women such as Michelle Cusseaux killed by racist police. America will be safer less dangerous land for black people. But if the protest ends here it would have failed for black people would still continue to live in unjust poverty due to unjust bigotry. Over time, the evil violence against them would resurface because active prejudice was never extinguished in any significant amount.

Black people cannot allow themselves to be fooled into thinking that ending police lethality constitutes great progress. That would not be progress. It would simply be an act of rudimentary decency long overdue. One is relieved by the capture of a murderer but the event is rarely befitting of celebration. The same is true when the murderer is institutionalized police racism.

Real change means significant economic reform. Here, we come to the dilemma of the protests. In large degree, the protests have been well attended because they were spontaneous and without centralized leadership promoting a specific social agenda beyond ending police lethality. However, economic reform cannot be effectuated without planning and without formulating a detailed policy agenda. The very nature of decentralized protests does not lend itself to this vital task.

However, if protesters leave this task to establishment figures in the Democratic Party who claim to be their friends then nothing good will come of it. They have failed black people before the protests. They will fail black people when the protests end.

Thus, protesters must continue in the streets for two reasons. First, the protests maintain political heat on the establishment. They remind the establishment there will now be a high cost exacted for police brutality. Second, protests must not disband until the protesters develop an economic agenda of radical reform.  Ultimately, minds must unite with marchers, policy ideas must carry on from protest signs.

To keep the curtain from closing without change occurring, we must realize that Money Power and White Power are so closely related as to be identical twins. During the Great Depression, whites were given the New Deal which sustained them with jobs and other forms of government welfare. Blacks were given the old shaft. After WWII, Whites were given the G.I. Bill which further opened the door for white soldiers to education and home ownership and jobs. While government gave these opportunities to whites, it basically turned its back on blacks.  During the Great Recession of 2008-9, many blacks lost their houses to foreclosure. Big banks and big business received trillions in government subvention. During the present COVID -19 predicament, blacks died disproportionately while losing their jobs at a faster clip. Yet, relief to the millions of common men and women totaled roughly 250 billion dollars. However, a handful of banks were given access to roughly five trillion dollars. During every historic social and economic turn of the nation, inequality has worsened. White Money Power has handsomely gained. Blacks have lost the little they had. Until this changes, black lives will matter only in rhetoric but not in reality.

That most white racist politicians now oppose police lethality should not be viewed as social progress. The reality is that they have merely concluded that brusque physicality is no longer needed. Blacks have been beaten down so long and so financially weakened that they no longer seem a threat to the intelligent racists. They can afford to allow blacks to live because, to them, blacks are but the walking dead. Blacks exist without leaders or an agenda that truly threatens their elite, herrenvolk control over the nation. Let the protests continue and may the protesters mature into leaders of honest reform. Then black lives will matter because they would have defined themselves as they wish to being defined.

 

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Brian Browne

 

The American presidential election is less than six months away. For America, that second Tuesday in November will be a preordained encounter with voluntary national disaster.

On that date approximately 140 million people will vote to elect either of two lowly men, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, to the highest office in the land at a time when history casts many dark portends. This coming election will be an exercise in counterfeit democracy.

It will be akin to the torture one would experience upon being informed he must decide whether to be infected with this or that hemorrhagic plague.

The election will place the most powerful government in the world in the hands of a man patently incompetent to hold it.

It has been a full century since the candidates of both major parties were so visibly unfit for the office they crave. Neither President Trump nor former Vice President Biden can adequately govern their own words let alone aptly govern a nation.

The affairs of man are often shrouded in mystery and guided by a strange form of logic that eludes the ability of genuine rationality to decipher. Every human system is replete with flaws and lapses. Nothing perfect bears the stamp of human invention.

Yet it will forever perplex me that a nation of 300 million people would invest its future and spend several billion dollars directly on political campaigning in order elect one of two men better suited to be court jester than to be commander in chief of the world’s largest military.

The political system, most specifically the political parties and powerful interests that run it, are guilty of reckless endangerment for foisting the two political cads on the nation.

To vote for either would be the legal equivalent of assumption of an unreasonable risk; it would be a form of contributory negligence making the voter partially at fault for the wrongs their preferred candidate will surely commit if elected.

I offer you a tale from the American Deep South: It was market day in the county seat. Slaves would be placed in auction. One slaver was feeling extremely happy, thinking of the money that would come from selling his human wares.

Peering at the group of finely adorned white men waiting to partake of the auction, the slaver turned to one of the enchained men in his inventory, unexpectedly asking the enslaved man who would he want as his master.

Before the slaver’s words had fully made themselves heard by even their speaker, the enchained man solemnly replied, “Myself.”

At this moment, one word became worth a thousand pictures because that one word implied a different world. The slaver instinctively slapped the impertinent mouth.

Then he began to laugh. Punctuating his laughter, the slaver again spoke. “Either Gentleman Jenkins or Esquire Russell going to buy you. Now, Jenkins works his ni**ers to the bone and barely feeds them but he won’t beat you.

Russell loves to whip his slaves for the sport of it but he will feed you real good on Sundays because he is a church-goin’ man.

Now, which of these men would you like for your master?” At that, the enslaved man stood in silence and without motion. Not an additional word passed his lips.

The enchained man had acquired the wisdom of the oppressed. The slaver could sell him but in no way would that black man abet in selling himself.

There was no human being whom he would consent to be his owner and master. Somehow, over the years, this precious wisdom has been lost to his progeny.

They now sell themselves without realizing it albeit not into physical slavery but into a diluted yet delusional form of political servitude.

To operate with the nobility of this enslaved man would mean to turn away from Trump while at the same time turning away from Biden.

In most fundamental ways, Biden and Trump share the same elite, racist worldview. Both have repeatedly asserted that government programs important to black people should be reduced and privatized, including social security.

Both men abhor universal healthcare for all because they loathe the thought of insurance companies making less profit so that working class and poor people can get adequate healthcare. Biden and Trump want their socio-economic inferiors to live, suffer and die as inferiors in every way.

When questioned about medical care for the over 20 million workers who lost employment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden blankly declared he would expand the time the jobless had to purchase medical insurance, replacing the employer-based policy they lost upon losing their jobs.

The affluent Biden is so detached from the lives of ordinary people that he seemed not to contemplate the impossibility of how an unemployed person can afford the added costs of purchasing insurance when not earning any income.

Someone so blind should not seek to lead people whose reality he does not understand. On this issue, Trump was equally purblind and mean-hearted.

Both men would decimate public education. Neither would act to end the economic discrimination faced by blacks regarding employment, business start-ups, and residential housing.

As Biden brazenly told a group of rich donors who like what Trump was doing with the economy – don’t worry because “nothing will fundamentally change.” Biden often misspeaks. This was not one of those moments.

I am a descendant of enchained Africans. My people did not go through the unspeakable terror and torture that I could march myself to the polling station and, with a fool’s smile on my face, vote for either of these bigoted, substandard men.

Voting for either is not a sign that I am a free and equal citizen. It would be giving my consent that the wrongs done to black people should continue apace.

Like the enslaved but noble man, I would rather election day find me motionless and silent. In this instance, silence is protest.

I refuse to act like this contest between Trump and Biden holds any benefit for average Black person because it doesn’t even hold potential benefit for the average White man.

The choice given me in this election is no choice at all. I shall not endorse the unjust farce by participating in it.

America has entered a harsh period where the quality of national leadership is distinctly inferior to the challenges now faced.

The public health and economic consequences of Covid-19 compound the imbalances of an already mean and ugly political economy. Neither Biden nor Trump is sufficiently astute to douse the international hot spots largely ignited by America’s domineering, often carnassial foreign policy. These next four years will be included among the lost years for Black America.

Nothing good will intentionally be done for us. The current plans and policies of both Trump and Biden have nothing but detriment in store for most Black people.

In prior articles, I predicted the Democratic Party candidate should win the general election. With Biden now the presumptive nominee, that opinion still holds.

In 2016, Trump did not win the election more than Hillary Clinton lost it. This year, the roles are reversed. Biden will be elected not because he has the high confidence of the electorate. Trump will lose the contest more than Biden will win it.

Coming into the year, President Trump had the wind in his sails with a chance to pull off his reelection. The venture would be tough but doable.

He had emerged from the Democrats’ laggard impeachment attempt less politically scarred than the Democrats themselves. The economy was relatively good and unemployment at historic lows. Economically, Black people were no worse off under Trump than under Obama.

Perhaps, their position had marginally improved. Then came COVID-19. Trump woefully fumbled the crisis. The flaws in his character and experiences rendered him incapable of wisely handling the moment. The man is an arrogant huckster.

He has built a career by coercing and hectoring until he gets what he wants. Such a man believes his words by themselves can bend reality.  Thus, he thought there was no need to take public health precautions. All he had to do was wag his finger and speak harshly at the virus; it would surely flee.

Trump was as wrong as was imprudent. The virus cared nothing about his bully’s reputation. In due course, the virus would hunt him down coming as close as infecting his personal valet.

Trump had no answer to the virus’s impertinence. He could neither fire nor slap it. He is still reeling and incoherent. America has suffered more than other nations and much of the loss is due to Trump’s recklessness.

Due, in part to Black voter support, Former Vice President Biden should win the election. In this, Black collective wisdom is wanting. Black people have thrown themselves behind a man whose political career has mostly slanted against them.

Biden dedicated himself to tossing hundreds of thousands of young blacks in jail with the racially unfair crime bill he so proudly drafted.

If that did not work, he facilitated our debt peonage with the financial laws he proposed to benefit the large banks and predatory lending at the expense of the average man.

When it suited him, Biden openly spoke his racist disdain for Black men. In promoting his 1990’s crime bill, Biden took to the floor of the Senate, standing in the same place that racists Senators of prior generations had stood to defend slavery. Biden did not disappoint that rich racist tradition. Biden said:

“It doesn’t matter whether or not they are the victims of society… it does not mean because we created them that we somehow forgive them.. They are beyond the pale. “

Biden continued that “they” should be “put in jail and away from our families.” When he said “they” he meant Black men.

When he said “our families” he meant White people for he was speaking to a gathering of white faces belonging to fellow White senators. Biden’s remarks were Trumpian in their blatant, inexcusable racism.

Those who think Biden had been rehabilitated by serving as Obama’s understudy think too superficially on a matter of great seriousness.

Biden was selected as Obama’s deputy not because Biden was enlightened. He was selected because his racist tendencies would appeal to racist conservatives and moderates, making them less wary of the milquetoast but milk chocolate presidential candidate.

Senator Thurmond of South Carolina was among America’s most virulent racists nation for six decades. Yet, Thurmond maintained a long-term love affair with a black woman who begat him a daughter.

Biden’s much briefer dalliance with Obama does not cure his deep-seeded racism any more than Thurmond was cured of his group hatred because of his peculiar individual affection for the black mother of his black child.

Black people have a visceral disdain for Trump and this may provide Biden his margin of victory. Black people should oppose Trump. He is an evil man.

But for similar reasons, they should not endorse Biden; he is a foolish man and, like Trump, a congenital liar. I might prefer to have a foolish rather than an evil neighbor; however, when it comes to national leadership, folly and hapless judgment are just as dangerous as intentional evil.

Biden has lied about his academic record and nonexistent awards, lied about his involvement in civil rights, and lied about being arrested in South Africa.

He has lied that the NAACP endorsed him in every race he has entered. The poor man is so ignorant about this venerable organization and has no little regard for telling Black people the truth.

The NAACP could never endorse him for it would be illegal for it to do so, given its particular status as a nonprofit organization.

The major difference between Biden’s racism and Trump’s is that Biden knows how to disguise his. Trump has no filter. He is a serial liar but in this regard he is more forthcoming than Biden.

GEORGE FLOYD

My last article regarded the racist murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. This week, things got worse. A quartet of police officers, responding to a May 25 call that someone had passed a counterfeit 20 dollar bill, arrested George Floyd, a black man.

Video shows he did not resist being handcuffed and being led to the police car. The officers claim he hesitated and struggled with them about getting into the vehicle. Even assuming their claim to be true, it does not excuse what was to follow.

Three of the officers pounced on Floyd. Two held him down. The third launched his knee into the neck of the prostrate man. One minutes turned into two then into almost nine.

The cruelest one taunted Floyd telling him to get up which was impossible to do with the weight of three men riding him.

The officer contemptuously derided Floyd for not being a “tough guy” as if the officer could have withstood the torture if their roles had been reversed.

For six of minutes, the distressed man pleaded for his life, he cried he could not breathe. With half his face smashed into the pavement and as life drained from his body, Floyd gave one last, elemental cry. He called for his mother. “Momma!” he eked out.

The breath left him; he would soon give up the ghost. The man lay limp and unconscious after six minutes of torture. Yet, the knee continued to push down into his neck for nearly three more minutes as if to make sure the execution was complete.

Just like the killer’s knee compressed Floyd’s neck, compressed into that 9-minute ordeal were all the essential elements of nearly half a millennium of racial cruelty.

Videos of the extrajudicial murder made it impossible for the police to hide what they had done. The quartet was fired from the police department; yet, initially, they were not charged for any crime.

The people began to demand justice. Protests ensued. Some looting and arson followed. White conservatives and liberals alike, along with mainstream Black politicians, began to spend more time criticizing the protests and property destruction than the inexcusable murder of a Black man.

Thankfully, the younger Blacks would not be made to feel guilty. Their reasoning was sound. If the system refused to sanction its praetorians for wanton murder of your people, why should you respect the property and institutions of such an unfair system? Perhaps by destroying enough of their property, the rulers might curb their uniformed henchmen because these episodes have become too costly.

To the extent that people burned and destroyed property as a conscious strategy of self-defense to deter further police aggression by making the consequences of such aggression too costly, the people acted reasonably and well. They acted in the tradition of the slave revolt.

They acted in the tradition of 1968 when demonstrations brewed in major cities across the nation spread because of the assassination of Dr. King and the structural injustices of American society.

The protesters cannot be faulted except if you believe in forced servitude or if they stop protesting too soon.

Those who burned and looted because they simply wanted to take advantage of the moment were opportunists. Their reward shall be an opportunist’s reward. But they are not the lone opportunists.

Biden took advantage of the moment to sit before a teleprompter to read an anodyne parade of words that said nothing vital but said it relatively well.

The well-practiced statement was crafted to erase much of the damage from a revealing live interview last week where Biden arrogant superiority toward Blacks was on full display, showing the man had the undesirable aptitude for being able to lie for twenty minutes while his foot rested squarely in his mouth.

When he spoke from the screen using a prepared text, Biden almost sounded like a statesman. When he spoke from the heart during the interview, he sounded like a paternalistic buffoon. No need to guess which version was the genuine Biden.

Meanwhile, Trump took advantage of the moment by swiftly ignoring Floyd’s murder to focus on the looting and unrest. He threatened that further property damage would be met with deadly force. This will not cost him many Black votes as he had few such votes in any event.

His remarks will animate his racist support base that will see his threats as strong affirmation that he is their protector against dreaded Black insurrection. This theme has carried White politicians to electoral victory for two centuries. Trump is just the latest in that distinctly American tradition.

Establishment Black politicians and quasi-intellectuals will milk the tragedy as well. They will use it to convince their White benefactors to release more funds to their campaigns and civil rights organs that they may mollify and tame the anger of ordinary Black people. In all of this, the genuine protester is the only honest actor. The rest is theatre.

So I hope the people keep protesting. As long as you stand and put evil on the defensive, they cannot put a knee to your neck.

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Brian Browne

Notwithstanding the lethality of COVID-19 and its ungraciousness toward black people, there comes a deranged sense of normalcy to know that, despite these abnormal times, the traditional ways of killing black men are still being practiced in those locales where such ways were long-ago perfected.

On February 21, two, perhaps three, white men jumped in cars to chase down 25 year old Ahmaud Arbery. He lived in the neighborhood and jogged it almost daily as was his citizen’s right. One of the white men shot the weaponless young man dead in the middle of the street in broad daylight. Their reasoning for his demise was that he looked like a thief.

You have read about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, three black males killed because dominant society and its appointed guardians deemed them criminal based on the quantity of melanin in their skin. Long before these now deceased young men were born, black men had been chased and murdered for the same reason. The names of many will never be well known; but every sentient African American feels the crimes done unto these men much like an amputee has the phantom sensation of a missing limb.

These men were hung, shot, butchered and brutalized in the solitude of their blackness. Their obscured deaths are our living angst and agony. Because of how these men died, we remain wounded in ways that cannot be healed except by a remedy that stands unattainable as long as such bleak deaths continue. The corpses of many black men lie forgotten in the swamps and countryside of the state of Georgia. For years, a solitary black man travelling on foot along a Georgia road was a homicide in prospect. Many innocent black men were killed in these situations. Law enforcement knew their murderers but did nothing except disregard the capital crime just committed. If the police took any action, it was to instruct the killers how better to commit such murders without leaving tell-tale evidence of the evil they had done.

To take a life was prohibited by the law books parked on inanimate library shelves. But the slaughter of a black man was permitted by the informal law that actually ruled the land and defined everyday life. A black man could be murdered simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time without any possible means of escaping the lethal injustice set to descend upon him. He was killed for no reason which, in America’s strange context, is the most defensible reason of all; thus, he was not considered a victim of anything untoward. He had brought his pitiful demise upon himself simply by being himself.

It was not so much that he was killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The greater truth was that being a black man meant he was always intruding into the wrong place at the wrong time. His very existence was an infraction, his sense of freedom a serious felony and any attempt by him to act as an equal member of society was an act of high treason. Thus, his roadside execution would be but a form of natural justice, harsh, even primordial, but well deserved. The years have passed but the times have not so utterly changed. In this sense, 2020 is as it was in 1920 which was much like 1820. The morality of race remains as it has long been. A lone black man remains an endangered animal. A group of white men believe they have the license to hunt him down and extinguish his life much like a farmer or rancher protecting his livestock from a wild dog.

The racial history of America is a distorted one. Over the span of centuries, from the inception of the American nation to the present, white society has stolen much from the black population. From centuries of unpaid labor, to the slaughter of loved ones, to the kidnapping of children, there was nothing that could be taken that was not stolen. Yet the core of the American racial myth is to consider the black man the most heinous of criminals notwithstanding the unprovoked evil done to him. According to the myth, the black man does wrong because he is a wrong. Thus, any wrong done him is completely right and proper. This is one of the greatest propaganda scams and human tragedies in modern history.

This is the history which swirled about Arbery as he jogged his neighborhood. No one knows exactly what coursed through Arbery’s mind as he was harassed then shot on that residential street in southeastern Georgia. But the awful racial history of where he lived, the thought of being the latest of a long string of black victims of white hate in the Deep South, must have carved a deep channel through his thoughts as he ran toward the encounter that would become his death. The specter of “the fateful encounter” casts a shadow over the life of every black man.  Each one hopes to be sufficiently fortunate to avoid the fateful encounter because it is rare that a black man escapes such a meeting unscathed. However, it seems that white racists love killing black men more than we hate dying.

The murder of Arbery would have been officially recorded as a noncriminal incident but for modern technology and the hubris of the perpetrators. Seeing themselves as always faultless when confronting blackness, they videoed the encounter. They would have gotten away with the crime but for a local white attorney who leaked the video. Showing the racial derangement permeating that particular community, the attorney has ties to the assailants and even counseled them briefly on this case. He felt releasing the terrible video might vindicate the white men. His antics boomeranged. The video would serve to indict them, resurrecting a case that would have faded away but for his slew-footed intervention. So filled with racial prejudice, even this lawyer could not see the obvious injustice that had been done. A prejudiced eye is always a lying one.

Ironically, if not for that local attorney’s counterproductive actions, Arbery would have been just another wayward pickaninny killed in small town Georgia. His assailants would have remained free to swagger into their local bar to regale their admiring friends how they tracked down and shot the runaway black man just like their predecessors regularly did in days of yore.

The local police had already given the killers a stay-out-of-jail pass. More than 70 days had elapsed and the McMichael father and son tandem were not charged or even arrested. The police automatically believed their fictional tale of self-defense. But they were the aggressors. What they did was the opposite of self-defense. They went on attack. Twice they harassed the unarmed jogger. On the third attempt, the younger killer emerged from the car with shotgun in hand to stand in the jogger’s path.

It was evident that Arbery held no weapon; still, they confronted him with their firearms. Yet, the cursory police investigation concluded Arbery had assaulted them to the point where they fell in dire fear of their lives; this justified shooting him at point blank range. In the eyes of local law enforcement, the white armed assailant, with his finger at the quick and on the trigger, was the hapless victim who somehow manage to escape with his life. The unarmed black jogger at the wrong end of a shotgun was deemed the villain who, for no discernible reason, decided to make a deadly lunge at an armed white man. All Arbery did was apparently try to defend himself. But a black man is rarely permitted that option.

Arbery broke a cardinal tenet of the racial code. He may have thought he was simply trying to defend himself from two madmen. In doing so, he unwittingly was attacking an entire system that his two attackers and several million wicked men like them had taken centuries to build. In this world, a black man exercising self-defense is the existential danger. Thus, Arbery was killed because of this inexcusable violation.

The local police refused to criminally charge the two killers despite the obvious lies they told to squirm away from evil thing they did. They said Arbery broke into a house. This was blatantly untrue.  At some point before he knew they were pursuing him, Arbery entered the open construction site of an unfinished house. He walked about the site briefly and took nothing before resuming his jog. Technically, this might be considered trespass. However, it is common practice in the South for people to walk about such sites. No one is arrested let alone summarily executed for this any more than a city dweller is subject to capital punishment for jaywalking.

The McMichael duo further claimed Arbery resembled a suspect in a recent flurry of neighborhood residential break-ins. However, police records reveal no such spike in break-ins. The only record of any robbery in the area was of an early January call to the police from the McMicheals that a gun had been stolen from one of their vehicles. This was roughly seven weeks before they shot Arbery. As such, the missing gun seems like an isolated incident not a link in a growing chain. The neighborhood was not being terrorized or overrun by some burglar.  The McMichaels were angry because a firearm had gone missing. The weapon might have been inadvertently misplaced by one of them instead of being stolen by a stranger. This possibility did not matter to them. In the space they occupy, when something goes wrong, the nature reflex is to blame a black man. Either blame the nearest one or the one who seems to be violating the racial code. Arbery seemed to fit the bill on both counts.

Apparently, the father had a mean eye toward Arbery. The elder McMichael was a retired police officer. While still in active service, McMichael was involved in arresting Arbery in 2014. Arbery, then a high schooler, was charged with bringing a weapon to school. He was placed on five year probation. In 2018, Arbery had a minor shoplifting charge. He had made mistakes, but Arbery was not a serious or habitual criminal. Filled with the animus that prejudice triggers, McMichael apparently could not tolerate the notion of this same young black man being allowed to run at liberty through the streets of the neighborhood.

McMichael appointed himself guardian of the neighborhood against the perceived black menace. That Arbery resided in the same area probably fueled McMicheal’s resentment. As they pursued the black jogger and the situation escalated, McMichael and son would promote themselves from merely being neighborhood guardians to become judges and executioners of another human being.

The last refuge sought by the McMichael team was to claim they were effectuating a citizen’s arrest. However, as a former law enforcement officer, the elder man well knew that citizen’s arrest can only be made upon witnessing the commission of a crime and should never involve deadly force. McMichael did not see Arbery steal even a blade of grass. At most, he witnessed a technical trespass on at residential construction site which belonged to another person. Under no interpretation of the law was McMichael empowered to make an arrest much less resort to deadly force under these facts.

In the end, this was but the latest in a string of tragedies that stretch far back into the past and that will likely extend well into the future. American society is built on a seemingly inexhaustible deposit of racial injustice and hatred. This is what killed the young man. Because black people protested, legal authorities in Georgia reluctantly were forced to act differently than they would have. I guess this is a sign of incremental progress.

Had a black man shot a white man in similar circumstances, the black man would have been immediately jailed if not killed on the spot for his effrontery. The deeper truth is that no sane black man would even contemplate doing to a white man what the McMichaels did to Arbery.

If in his own home, a black man witnesses a white burglar that black man must still wisely consider his options. If he calls the police and they arrive, they will reflexively assume he is the criminal and arrest, if not shoot, the innocent homeowner. If he takes the situation into his own hands, he will be arrested no matter how aggressive or strongly armed the criminal might have been. He has no right to kill a white man no matter the provocation. For a black man to defend himself against interracial violence is to put himself at greater risk of official violence against him. This is the American paradox of self-defense and the black man.

That the McMichaels have been charged with murder is a positive step. Hopefully, justice will be allowed its fullest definition. But even this rarity will not bring the young Arbery back. Yet, it may deter other such tragedies. However, do not be surprised if these men get off with a much lighter sentence than what is due. The law enforcement system and the white people who run will largely sympathize with the shooters. Racism permeates every American institution from the public health system to the court system. Black men will continue to die more than they should either by the scourge of mindless virus or by the intentions a hateful society. And so history replays itself — racists love seeing us die more than we love seeing ourselves live.

 

08060340825 sms only

 

 

 

 

Brian Browne

In part 1, we asserted that African nations acted prudently when they acted decisively to restrict social activity to the point of lock-downing the continent’s major cities. Our health care systems are weak. They cannot treat high numbers of sick people. If the coronavirus were to make a prolific and prolonged visit to the continent, the consequences would be dire. Our health care systems would collapse under the weight of it all; as would the sick and dying.

Some people contend the public health measures imposed are too overbroad given the currently low infection rates Africa is experiencing. Those making this claim believe they are being judicious and balanced in their approach. In fact, they are gamblers of the worst type for they know not the nature of the momentous bet they would have us wage. They do not even realize they are making a gamble at all and that their wager could be a variety of dead man’s bluff.

The world’s knowledge of the coronavirus is scant. No one can predict with certainty either the path it might hew or the depths of that path. All we know is that we face a highly unpredictable, infectious and lethal menace against which there exists no present cure. To claim that public health measures now taken are too onerous is to claim that we should simply hope larger numbers of people do not fall ill if society is allowed to operate more normally. This is not being judicious; instead, it is a form of myopia that tells someone to believe only what is front of you. In normal times, this mode of thought might suffice. In times of emergent danger, this perspective can so thoroughly blind a person that he does not see danger until the hour becomes too late to avoid it.

To do take only meager precautions yet pray for the best in this situation is not policy. It is the fruit of unsubstantiated hope. Advocates of this minimalist approach have no way of knowing that the numbers of infected will not rise. No one knows the odds for or against a lethal escalation. Proponents of this passive way merely play an intuitive hunch.

They feel that things will not go too badly; but, if things turn for the worst, then our nations can quickly take measures that arrest the viral assault. Their beliefs may be true. Then again, they may be false and fatally so. They base their great gamble on no scientific fact. As far as we know, the less painful outcome they envision carries no greater likelihood than a more harmful result. In such a situation, it borders on the irresponsible to take the lenient approach. No prudent statesman dares risk national catastrophe on a hunch.

The United States, the UK, and others tarried just a bit before instituting public health measures such as social distancing and lockdowns. They are now paying the costs of thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of infected. But for the relative strength of their health care systems, fatalities would be higher. We have not the health care systems that can tend to high numbers of patients if the virus takes strong hold on the continent.

As the virus took hold in these western countries, we saw that poor people living in densely populated confines and who lack access to the best health care were its most numerous prey. When infected, poor people are also more susceptible to dying. If I am not mistaken, the vast majority of our urban dwellers basically fit the demographic description of the most vulnerable in the West.  As such, acting quickly in hopes that swift action would blunt widespread publication of the virus was to act wisely given the terrible unknowns associated with this deadly sickness. When we cannot distinguish the probability of a minor irritant from that of sheer disaster costing the lives of tens of thousands, there is no option but to protect the worst case for that worst case is as likely as any other.

Thus, the public health measures were appropriate and timely. But we would be cruel to ignore their resultant economic costs. National economies have shut down. The measures have pushed millions out of employment, separating them from their daily wage. All businesses have been impaired. Many have closed. Millions are without money to purchase the stuff of their next meal. The unscrupulous take advantage of the weakened condition of their neighbors; crime rises. Unrest lurks just below the surface.

Again, this is where government must step in because only national governments have the ability to counterbalance the negative economic consequences of the public health measures they authored. It makes little sense for governments to work so avidly to keep people from the grip of contagion yet barely lift a finger to protect those same people from the throes of hunger and destitution. There is no compelling reason to save a man from disease only to impoverish him that he might suffer a more lingering demise through starvation and abject poverty. Such a state of affairs is illogical; it constitutes a most distorted species of humanitarianism.

Through its public health measures, government can help protect you from the virus but government is presently unable to cure you of the disease. Thus, implementing the preventative measures became the required action of the wise and the prudent. Yet, government is not helpless against the economic consequences of its own public health actions. Government can do much to cure the negative fallout. Thus government must do what it can to prevent a situation where its tools and capacities become inutile.

Let us carry these ideas through to their logical conclusion. If government cares enough about protecting us by suppressing the virus, government likewise should care enough to snuff out hunger caused by its public health measures. A caring government would not prevent one form of premature death just to favor another form. Compassionate government would do all it can so that most citizens pass away from natural causes in their advanced years.

In their economic effect, the public health measures amount to a self-induced depression comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Especially in areas under comprehensive lockdown, employment has reduced by over a half. Financial sector activity has dwindled to a fraction of its normal amount.  The falling away of jobs and money has come in vast dimensions. Government action brought this decline into being. Fortunately, government action can substantially dilute the economic pain thus induced.

Here is where we must discuss the nature and use of money. Many people believing themselves to proponents of sound money have railed against government issuing currency or creating wage-paying jobs to help people during this crisis. They conclude with an assurance based on little more than a religious belief in the flotsam of orthodox economic thinking that such actions will cause dreaded galloping inflation. At best, their position is unduly alarmist much like the old marm screaming fire merely upon spying a book of matches on the coffee table. Not only does this position border on the inhumane, it constitutes economic malpractice.

Shouting about galloping inflation perhaps makes people feel restrained and morally superior when compared to the libertine inclinations of those who would have government provide monetary assistance to innocent people that they may not starve. What meager steps the orthodox claim as all that can reasonably be done is but a fraction of what must be done with both reason and compassion. Their claims of rampant inflation are uttered to make them appear to be custodians of a superior knowledge; in reality their viewpoint is but a spittoon filled with unfounded bias.

Incidents of galloping inflation have occurred but are not common fare. Rarely are such outcomes the result of fiscal actions dedicated to aiding a nation’s poor. No government gives enough money to the poor for inflation to gallop. If we were to objectively view most nations’ expenditures on the poor, they would be found so erratic and inadequate as almost never cause inflation by themselves. Most modern instances of galloping inflation, from the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s through to present-day Venezuela, are due to a complex of factors.

Chief among them is usually a large amount of foreign denominated debt that has come due, political trouble with stronger creditor nations and, until the dam finally breaks on the exchange rate, a stubborn adherence to inappropriate monetary policies such as an overvalued currency. Most of these factors are clearly absent in the present case. Thus, the assertion of galloping inflation is a term orthodox followers use to scare or ridicule others and cloud rational thought that might lead to policy prescriptions beyond that reside outside the orthodox school.

Look at the 2008-9 global financial crisis. So many governments ran large deficits to bail out their financial sectors and selected industries. As an example, the United States government dedicated several trillion dollars – some analysts say over 10 trillion – in loans, grants and other forms of assistance to the private sector to escape that crisis. Despite the expenditures, inflation did not rise above 2 percent. Most other nations that embarked on similar relief also had similarly modest experiences with inflation. This showed that high inflation is not inherent even in a steep increase in government deficit spending. Inflation is not inherent in government spending; more pertinent to the matter of inflation is the subject matter of the government expenditure. Regarding inflation, what the money is spent on is more germane than who spent the money.

Inflation fear-mongers seem not to understand the nature of money. Public money creation is not intrinsically more inflationary than private money creation.  When a person obtains a bank loan, the financial institution is not lending money held in some vault; nor is it lending from other customers’ savings deposits. When it makes a loan, a bank creates new money based on the bank’s confidence the borrower will repay both principal and interest at a defined future date. The inflation mongers cherish this private money creation because of their inherent bias. They believe the private sector is without sin but that government economic intervention is evil incarnate.

However, the mechanics of private sector money creation and public sector money creation are similar. Both sectors can create new money. The real difference between the two is not the mechanics of money creation but the objectives of two acts of creation. The private sector creates money out of the desire to gain more profits for the borrower and lender. Whether their endeavor benefits society is of no great consequence to them. Government created money, public money, should be created to advance a social good for that money is in effect the equivalent of a public utility. Bank money is thus first given to those who claim they can make a sufficient profit from loan proceeds. Sometimes they do. Many times they do not. However, the incidents of failure of private sector loan transactions do not give rise to cries that private sector loans should cease.

However, orthodox believers rail against government or public money when the matter turns to helping the poor and struggling. This hatred is inconsistent with their blind affection for private sector money creation. If there is idle labor capacity, government funds can and should be used to bring about added employment. If there is an idle supply of food and yet multitudes hunger, government should provide funds that the hungry may purchase food. Such measures never cause galloping inflation. They do stop galloping starvation.

The inflationary impact with be modest because such actions merely bring aggregate supply and demand into a more beneficial equilibrium that serves the public welfare. Of course, if government uses money on wastrel enterprises such as buying marigolds and tulips for every household, those expenditures will be useless; they may add to inflation because they enhance neither meaningful supply nor demand. Again, the issue is not that government deficit expenditure is always bad, but that such expenditures must be guided toward the appropriate purposes.

Hence, African governments must join the rest of the world by removing the blinders of orthodox theory and practice. America thus far has expended 6 trillion dollars in stimulus to fight the economic decline caused by the virus. A fraction of that money is earmarked for the working class at a rate of 1,200 dollars per person. America worries not about inflation at this time because the imperative is to stop recession or deflation. The same is true for the UK and the entire Eurozone. The same is true for China, India and most of Asia.

One must ask those African adherents of economic orthodoxy if our economies are so different that they do not obey the same general principles operative everywhere else. If they answer that our economies follow the same rules, then these people must admit we should adopt economic stimulus befitting our conditions. If they answer “no” then you must further ask why then did they previously follow the economic orthodoxy of these other nations. The dilemma posed is inescapable by logic alone. It is only escapable by suspending logic and believing in a set of ideas simply because you want to belief because of any soundness or efficacy found in them.

Clearly, a national government can issue additional money for beneficial social purposes that enhance gaps in aggregate demand, supply or both.  This is done by deficit spending. During times of private sector weakness, government should engage in prudent deficit spending. Deficit spending simply means a national government spends more than it takes in as revenue. The differential results in a net benefit or enrichment to the private sector. In this manner, aggregate demand grows, as will employment. The growth in demand and employment spurs investment. This, in turn, increases output and supply. All of this pushes the national economy toward fuller employment and away from recession’s pull.

African governments must embrace such a perspective if they are to reduce the economic decline caused by the coronavirus.

Chiefly, governments must:

• Forego Austerity/Increase Deficit Spending: Budget cutting is the worst possible fiscal reaction to the current situation. Normal government revenues will fall steeply during this period. This decline is evidence of private sector contraction and suffering. Government should not compound the shortages by engaging in voluntary contraction to exacerbate the private sector’s involuntary one.

Instead, government must increase deficit spending in order to prevent economic recession or depression.

• Target the Poor and Recently Unemployed: Government should give quick relief to those rendered unemployed because of the crisis. Most effective would be to provide these people with government-funded jobs if public health restrictions allow. For instance, many people can be hired as part of the effort to sanitize and cleanse areas thus limiting the viral spread. Others can be employed in manufacturing items such as soaps, masks, hand sanitizers, etc. that will help in this regard.

If jobs cannot be had, then the next best alternative is to provide jobless households with funds that people may afford food and other basics.

Backlogs in pensions for the elderly and others should be paid.

• Debt Suspension: There should be a moratorium on loan repayments for small and medium-sized businesses. This will allow some of these firms to operate and perhaps retain a portion of their labor force. Such firms should also be given tax credits.

Utility payments should also be suspended by government for 2-3 months. Privately-owned utility companies should be given tax relief or credits over a period of years to partially absorb the loss of revenue.  Government can also help the companies by providing government guarantees for infrastructural and other capital investments these companies should make to boost supply and productivity.

• Assure Affordable Food Supply: Government must ensure adequate food supply at affordable prices. Government can distribute food where it must. But the better policy is to ensure affordable supply through the marketplace wherever it can take place. Establishing minimum prices through mechanisms like commodity boards is commendable.

In addition to providing fertilizer, government should purchase farm equipment and implements that can be used and maintained by local farmer cooperatives to improve productivity and lessen toil.

• Environmental Projects: Desertification and deforestation are growing problems on the continent. Now is a good time to hire available labor to undertake massive restoration projects.
• Monetary Policy: Central Banks must lower interest rates. This will encourage investment and employment heading into the medium and longer-terms.

Lower rates will place downward pressure on the exchange rate which will make imports more expensive.

• Restrain Imports: Nations should limit nonessential imports. Import payments drain needed foreign exchange and, in some instances, constitute a drag on domestic production.

For those essentials not locally produced, government can waive taxes on such vital imports such as medical supplies at this time.

In conclusion, by instituting the public health measures, African governments have answered half of the call. Governments have a further obligation not only to protect people from disease but to safeguard them from acute deprivation. Should they act in this humane way, our leaders would have taken a historic step in realizing government for and of the people. Even in crisis, the light of compassion and goodness just might shine forth.

 

+2348060340825 sms only

 

 

 

 

Brian Browne

In part 1, we asserted that African nations acted prudently when they acted decisively to restrict social activity to the point of lock-downing the continent’s major cities. Our health care systems are weak. They cannot treat high numbers of sick people. If the coronavirus were to make a prolific and prolonged visit to the continent, the consequences would be dire. Our health care systems would collapse under the weight of it all; as would the sick and dying.

Some people contend the public health measures imposed are too overbroad given the currently low infection rates Africa is experiencing. Those making this claim believe they are being judicious and balanced in their approach. In fact, they are gamblers of the worst type for they know not the nature of the momentous bet they would have us wage. They do not even realize they are making a gamble at all and that their wager could be a variety of dead man’s bluff.

The world’s knowledge of the coronavirus is scant. No one can predict with certainty either the path it might hew or the depths of that path. All we know is that we face a highly unpredictable, infectious and lethal menace against which there exists no present cure. To claim that public health measures now taken are too onerous is to claim that we should simply hope larger numbers of people do not fall ill if society is allowed to operate more normally. This is not being judicious; instead, it is a form of myopia that tells someone to believe only what is front of you. In normal times, this mode of thought might suffice. In times of emergent danger, this perspective can so thoroughly blind a person that he does not see danger until the hour becomes too late to avoid it.

To do take only meager precautions yet pray for the best in this situation is not policy. It is the fruit of unsubstantiated hope. Advocates of this minimalist approach have no way of knowing that the numbers of infected will not rise. No one knows the odds for or against a lethal escalation. Proponents of this passive way merely play an intuitive hunch.

They feel that things will not go too badly; but, if things turn for the worst, then our nations can quickly take measures that arrest the viral assault. Their beliefs may be true. Then again, they may be false and fatally so. They base their great gamble on no scientific fact. As far as we know, the less painful outcome they envision carries no greater likelihood than a more harmful result. In such a situation, it borders on the irresponsible to take the lenient approach. No prudent statesman dares risk national catastrophe on a hunch.

The United States, the UK, and others tarried just a bit before instituting public health measures such as social distancing and lockdowns. They are now paying the costs of thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of infected. But for the relative strength of their health care systems, fatalities would be higher. We have not the health care systems that can tend to high numbers of patients if the virus takes strong hold on the continent.

As the virus took hold in these western countries, we saw that poor people living in densely populated confines and who lack access to the best health care were its most numerous prey. When infected, poor people are also more susceptible to dying. If I am not mistaken, the vast majority of our urban dwellers basically fit the demographic description of the most vulnerable in the West.  As such, acting quickly in hopes that swift action would blunt widespread publication of the virus was to act wisely given the terrible unknowns associated with this deadly sickness. When we cannot distinguish the probability of a minor irritant from that of sheer disaster costing the lives of tens of thousands, there is no option but to protect the worst case for that worst case is as likely as any other.

Thus, the public health measures were appropriate and timely. But we would be cruel to ignore their resultant economic costs. National economies have shut down. The measures have pushed millions out of employment, separating them from their daily wage. All businesses have been impaired. Many have closed. Millions are without money to purchase the stuff of their next meal. The unscrupulous take advantage of the weakened condition of their neighbors; crime rises. Unrest lurks just below the surface.

Again, this is where government must step in because only national governments have the ability to counterbalance the negative economic consequences of the public health measures they authored. It makes little sense for governments to work so avidly to keep people from the grip of contagion yet barely lift a finger to protect those same people from the throes of hunger and destitution. There is no compelling reason to save a man from disease only to impoverish him that he might suffer a more lingering demise through starvation and abject poverty. Such a state of affairs is illogical; it constitutes a most distorted species of humanitarianism.

Through its public health measures, government can help protect you from the virus but government is presently unable to cure you of the disease. Thus, implementing the preventative measures became the required action of the wise and the prudent. Yet, government is not helpless against the economic consequences of its own public health actions. Government can do much to cure the negative fallout. Thus government must do what it can to prevent a situation where its tools and capacities become inutile.

Let us carry these ideas through to their logical conclusion. If government cares enough about protecting us by suppressing the virus, government likewise should care enough to snuff out hunger caused by its public health measures. A caring government would not prevent one form of premature death just to favor another form. Compassionate government would do all it can so that most citizens pass away from natural causes in their advanced years.

In their economic effect, the public health measures amount to a self-induced depression comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Especially in areas under comprehensive lockdown, employment has reduced by over a half. Financial sector activity has dwindled to a fraction of its normal amount.  The falling away of jobs and money has come in vast dimensions. Government action brought this decline into being. Fortunately, government action can substantially dilute the economic pain thus induced.

Here is where we must discuss the nature and use of money. Many people believing themselves to proponents of sound money have railed against government issuing currency or creating wage-paying jobs to help people during this crisis. They conclude with an assurance based on little more than a religious belief in the flotsam of orthodox economic thinking that such actions will cause dreaded galloping inflation. At best, their position is unduly alarmist much like the old marm screaming fire merely upon spying a book of matches on the coffee table. Not only does this position border on the inhumane, it constitutes economic malpractice.

Shouting about galloping inflation perhaps makes people feel restrained and morally superior when compared to the libertine inclinations of those who would have government provide monetary assistance to innocent people that they may not starve. What meager steps the orthodox claim as all that can reasonably be done is but a fraction of what must be done with both reason and compassion. Their claims of rampant inflation are uttered to make them appear to be custodians of a superior knowledge; in reality their viewpoint is but a spittoon filled with unfounded bias.

Incidents of galloping inflation have occurred but are not common fare. Rarely are such outcomes the result of fiscal actions dedicated to aiding a nation’s poor. No government gives enough money to the poor for inflation to gallop. If we were to objectively view most nations’ expenditures on the poor, they would be found so erratic and inadequate as almost never cause inflation by themselves. Most modern instances of galloping inflation, from the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s through to present-day Venezuela, are due to a complex of factors.

Chief among them is usually a large amount of foreign denominated debt that has come due, political trouble with stronger creditor nations and, until the dam finally breaks on the exchange rate, a stubborn adherence to inappropriate monetary policies such as an overvalued currency. Most of these factors are clearly absent in the present case. Thus, the assertion of galloping inflation is a term orthodox followers use to scare or ridicule others and cloud rational thought that might lead to policy prescriptions beyond that reside outside the orthodox school.

Look at the 2008-9 global financial crisis. So many governments ran large deficits to bail out their financial sectors and selected industries. As an example, the United States government dedicated several trillion dollars – some analysts say over 10 trillion – in loans, grants and other forms of assistance to the private sector to escape that crisis. Despite the expenditures, inflation did not rise above 2 percent. Most other nations that embarked on similar relief also had similarly modest experiences with inflation. This showed that high inflation is not inherent even in a steep increase in government deficit spending. Inflation is not inherent in government spending; more pertinent to the matter of inflation is the subject matter of the government expenditure. Regarding inflation, what the money is spent on is more germane than who spent the money.

Inflation fear-mongers seem not to understand the nature of money. Public money creation is not intrinsically more inflationary than private money creation.  When a person obtains a bank loan, the financial institution is not lending money held in some vault; nor is it lending from other customers’ savings deposits. When it makes a loan, a bank creates new money based on the bank’s confidence the borrower will repay both principal and interest at a defined future date. The inflation mongers cherish this private money creation because of their inherent bias. They believe the private sector is without sin but that government economic intervention is evil incarnate.

However, the mechanics of private sector money creation and public sector money creation are similar. Both sectors can create new money. The real difference between the two is not the mechanics of money creation but the objectives of two acts of creation. The private sector creates money out of the desire to gain more profits for the borrower and lender. Whether their endeavor benefits society is of no great consequence to them. Government created money, public money, should be created to advance a social good for that money is in effect the equivalent of a public utility. Bank money is thus first given to those who claim they can make a sufficient profit from loan proceeds. Sometimes they do. Many times they do not. However, the incidents of failure of private sector loan transactions do not give rise to cries that private sector loans should cease.

However, orthodox believers rail against government or public money when the matter turns to helping the poor and struggling. This hatred is inconsistent with their blind affection for private sector money creation. If there is idle labor capacity, government funds can and should be used to bring about added employment. If there is an idle supply of food and yet multitudes hunger, government should provide funds that the hungry may purchase food. Such measures never cause galloping inflation. They do stop galloping starvation.

The inflationary impact with be modest because such actions merely bring aggregate supply and demand into a more beneficial equilibrium that serves the public welfare. Of course, if government uses money on wastrel enterprises such as buying marigolds and tulips for every household, those expenditures will be useless; they may add to inflation because they enhance neither meaningful supply nor demand. Again, the issue is not that government deficit expenditure is always bad, but that such expenditures must be guided toward the appropriate purposes.

Hence, African governments must join the rest of the world by removing the blinders of orthodox theory and practice. America thus far has expended 6 trillion dollars in stimulus to fight the economic decline caused by the virus. A fraction of that money is earmarked for the working class at a rate of 1,200 dollars per person. America worries not about inflation at this time because the imperative is to stop recession or deflation. The same is true for the UK and the entire Eurozone. The same is true for China, India and most of Asia.

One must ask those African adherents of economic orthodoxy if our economies are so different that they do not obey the same general principles operative everywhere else. If they answer that our economies follow the same rules, then these people must admit we should adopt economic stimulus befitting our conditions. If they answer “no” then you must further ask why then did they previously follow the economic orthodoxy of these other nations. The dilemma posed is inescapable by logic alone. It is only escapable by suspending logic and believing in a set of ideas simply because you want to belief because of any soundness or efficacy found in them.

Clearly, a national government can issue additional money for beneficial social purposes that enhance gaps in aggregate demand, supply or both.  This is done by deficit spending. During times of private sector weakness, government should engage in prudent deficit spending.

Deficit spending simply means a national government spends more than it takes in as revenue. The differential results in a net benefit or enrichment to the private sector. In this manner, aggregate demand grows, as will employment. The growth in demand and employment spurs investment. This, in turn, increases output and supply. All of this pushes the national economy toward fuller employment and away from recession’s pull.

African governments must embrace such a perspective if they are to reduce the economic decline caused by the coronavirus.

 

Chiefly, governments must:

• Forego Austerity/Increase Deficit Spending: Budget cutting is the worst possible fiscal reaction to the current situation. Normal government revenues will fall steeply during this period. This decline is evidence of private sector contraction and suffering. Government should not compound the shortages by engaging in voluntary contraction to exacerbate the private sector’s involuntary one.

Instead, government must increase deficit spending in order to prevent economic recession or depression.

• Target the Poor and Recently Unemployed: Government should give quick relief to those rendered unemployed because of the crisis. Most effective would be to provide these people with government-funded jobs if public health restrictions allow. For instance, many people can be hired as part of the effort to sanitize and cleanse areas thus limiting the viral spread. Others can be employed in manufacturing items such as soaps, masks, hand sanitizers, etc. that will help in this regard.

If jobs cannot be had, then the next best alternative is to provide jobless households with funds that people may afford food and other basics.

Backlogs in pensions for the elderly and others should be paid.

• Debt Suspension: There should be a moratorium on loan repayments for small and medium-sized businesses. This will allow some of these firms to operate and perhaps retain a portion of their labor force. Such firms should also be given tax credits.

Utility payments should also be suspended by government for 2-3 months. Privately-owned utility companies should be given tax relief or credits over a period of years to partially absorb the loss of revenue.  Government can also help the companies by providing government guarantees for infrastructural and other capital investments these companies should make to boost supply and productivity.

• Assure Affordable Food Supply: Government must ensure adequate food supply at affordable prices. Government can distribute food where it must. But the better policy is to ensure affordable supply through the marketplace wherever it can take place. Establishing minimum prices through mechanisms like commodity boards is commendable.

In addition to providing fertilizer, government should purchase farm equipment and implements that can be used and maintained by local farmer cooperatives to improve productivity and lessen toil.

• Environmental Projects: Desertification and deforestation are growing problems on the continent. Now is a good time to hire available labor to undertake massive restoration projects.

 

• Monetary Policy: Central Banks must lower interest rates. This will encourage investment and employment heading into the medium and longer-terms.

Lower rates will place downward pressure on the exchange rate which will make imports more expensive.

• Restrain Imports: Nations should limit nonessential imports. Import payments drain needed foreign exchange and, in some instances, constitute a drag on domestic production.

For those essentials not locally produced, government can waive taxes on such vital imports such as medical supplies at this time.

In conclusion, by instituting the public health measures, African governments have answered half of the call. Governments have a further obligation not only to protect people from disease but to safeguard them from acute deprivation. Should they act in this humane way, our leaders would have taken a historic step in realizing government for and of the people. Even in crisis, the light of compassion and goodness just might shine forth.

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Brian Browne

AFRICA braces in dreadful hope that it will not have to brace for the full brunt of the coronavirus. The virus has thus far not cast its full gaze upon the African continent. We wait in anxious hope for nothing because nothing seems to be the best thing we can hope for at the moment. We belatedly prepare for that which cannot be prepared for.

The most powerful men in the world now hide. They can blow up the planet several times over but are now put to fright by a microscopic bit of unruly protein. These men can invade nations and lay waste to everything that other men have ever built; but they cannot prevent this little speck from entering their lungs and falling them to their knees. Their power may not save them this time.

Yet humans are stubborn and cling tightly to our beliefs. Our societies are constructed in part of truth, in part of collective fictions. We weave myth and reality together to fashion a nation just as we do to shape an individual. Here, I do not use the word myth in its most pejorative sense. I speak not of outlandish fairy tales composed of flying horses or talking pumpkins. What I refer are those beliefs society holds dear not because they are true; but that they are taken as truth because they help society to  smoothly function along the lines the powerful want society to be ordered.

I speak of the social conventions and customs by which we identify and operate as if they are immutable and essential to human life; in reality, these things we hold so precious are of a lesser nature. They simply are subjective choices a society makes about how it wants to perceive itself. They are neither inexorable nor vital to our existence. The only thing inexorable is that the choice to create social fictions will be made; however, the choices thusly made are not the only ones that could have been made. For instance, had a prior generation decided to engage in armed rebellion to gain independence, Nigerians today would view society and their place in it much differently than they now do. The national myths that would have arisen from such a struggle would differ materially from the myths that hold today.

To white America, George Washington is the great unifier, the father of the nation. To Native Americans, he is a reviled figure bearing the terrible epithet, “Destroyer of Towns.”  Mainstream America has elevated the destroyer to the status of a hero although he spent the majority of his adult life stealing land belonging to others or using as slaves those unfortunates stolen from their African motherland. The Native American depiction of Washington was accurate but was crushed because of its accuracy. It was essential to America’s self-perception as “the best hope of mankind” that Washington be seen as heroic. Thus, a positive myth has been used to obscure his reality. The violent extinction of almost a whole people became justified as the progress of world civilization.

To those who control the African mind, mythmaking has been an especially profitable venture. It has been important to cast those who most vigorously sought African liberation as reckless, irresponsible and crazed. Nkrumah, Lumumba, Qaddafi, Sankara and Malcolm X all were tainted.  Mandela only stopped being a criminal once he forswore violence and promised to allow white economic power its free and expansive reserve.

Notice the difference. Washington, a man of great violence and offensive disregard for other races, is elevated to the status of world hero. A black leader merely seeking a modicum of self-defense is called rabid, then put down like a mad dog. This is the import of national and international myth in operation.  The saddest things is that we tend to believe these fictions although we know them to be fashioned from chards of reality stitched together by a false theme the story teller wants us to accept. The teller spins this tale not to advance the portion of truth within his particular concoction; he uses the portion of truth to advance the untruth he has spun into his yarn because it profits him.

I have used these extreme examples to clearly describe the concept of social fiction. Most useful myths are much subtler. For instance, we have the myth that the wealth of a person or nation means the nation or person is divinely favored. This myth persists even though our eyes show us many scoundrels who enjoy wealthy, carefree lives.

There is also the myth that the wealthy are by virtue of their belongings more intelligent than the non-wealthy and their views are to carry great weight on all societal matters even those of which they know little. An affluent predatory businessman is asked to head a government commission on ending poverty and we think nothing of it. In fact, most applaud the selection.  One would be wiser placing an unreformed addict in control of a hospital’s opium supply.

A close relative to the foregoing myth is that complete deference must be accorded those in power although technically they are public servants. In other societies, this myth does not hold. Politicians are publicly criticized and given small deference in many societies. In Africa, along with religious leaders, they are deified. The common man has been told that obedience to the rich and powerful is his finest virtue, his best possible lot in life.  To the extent this holds him captive, he has forfeited any chance at improving his station.

Being poor and weak, African nations likewise defer to wealthy and powerful countries. The once proud and militant continent is no longer. We have become bowed and obsequious on important matters. We accept every social and economic fiction the West has tossed at us. Search for a resolute independent thinker among our elites. You will look for countless hours yet still be able to count your findings on one hand with digits left to spare.

Africa has not been the author of the myths that control it. In other words, the lies you believe are not even your own. Africa has thus suffered by believing myths that profit and belong to another. Herein lies what maybe the most important opportunity presented by the current crisis. The pandemic has unbalanced the rich and powerful nations. It has also frightened the elite within any given nation. They face an emergency that further impoverishment of the average citizen cannot resolve. Thus, they have suspended their free market beliefs at least for the time being because strict adherence to these unique fictions would engulf them in volcanic disaster.

Thus, in the US, the powerful concocted on the fly a plan to spend 6 trillion dollars to keep their economy afloat and maintain their global standing. If the need arises, they will spend 6 trillion more. This vast sum was not parked in some vault. Nor did they melt down gold to produce this sum amounting to roughly 7 percent of global GDP and 30 percent of American GDP. They were able to create this enormous sum of money simply because there was a social and political agreement among the powerful to do so. The will to maintain one’s profitable station makes one agile enough to cast aside even the most fundamental of social fictions. If the wealthy can discard their cherished myths how much more should the poor discard these same ideas which never did anything but make them poorer than they should have been?

You have been taught that money was in finite supply and could only be found for a few key purposes. Now, trillions of dollars are pouring forth to be used for everything and anything related to the economy. Out of necessity, America abandoned the social fiction that money is a finite commodity. They decided to operate closer to the truth. Money is but a social convention, a public utility that enables us to transport economic value over space and time. The quantity of money in use is not due to some preordained objective economic formula. The quantity of money created by government is based on subjective political considerations; the eternal economic truth is that there is no such truth. All is but a mad dash for the finish line.

The United Kingdom and most EU nations also have embarked on historic stimulus packages. India, the world’s largest democracy and developing nation, too has launched a large scale stimulus package. Most governments are creating money out nothing but the political commitment to respond to the emergency at hand in ways that mirror a nation’s social priorities. Thus, America gives over 90 percent of its stimulus to Money Power, i.e., big business and bigger banks. On the other hand, Denmark dedicated its package to provide every laborer 90 percent of their normal income. In conservative New Zealand, mortgage payments have been suspended for 6 months.

The lesson is there for us to learn. African nations must too engage in fiscal stimulus to keep their economies afloat and to prevent already widespread poverty from metastasizing into something so abysmal as to offend description. American and other developed nations feared a loss of GDP of 15-30 if they don’t enact stimulus. If the larger nations fear imminent depression, we would be reckless to behave with less concern. Should African economies suffering but half the percentage losses feared in the West, our people will undergo a grave suffering.

There is no reason to think we shall be immune to economic contraction. Global trade has reduced. The price of oil and other natural resources have nosedived. Industrial and food supply chains have been disrupted. There will be fewer goods; they will attract high costs. Joblessness will increase. Compounding the economic consequences are the preventative actions our governments must take to halt dissemination of the virus. African governments have locked down major cities and towns. Borders are closed. Factories must shutter.

To save our physical existence, we must first jeopardize our economic one. But to truly maintain our physical wellbeing over a longer period, we must take steps to quickly protect our economic health. This is the essence of the dilemma the virus has imposed on us. We artificially have suspended much of our economic activity. Yet people still need to eat and live although work and regular wages cannot be had. This is where government must step in to supply people with sufficient financial liquidity to keep from starving and thus keep the economy and the supply of vital goods and services operating at a decent pace.

My great fear is that Africa will not do what is necessary because of our collective financial ignorance. We fail to grasp the true nature of money. Last week, one of Nigeria’s most prominent political figures published an instructive message calling for expansionary fiscal policy.  Given the reply of most nations to this crisis, one would think this general proposition unassailable. Yet, his recommendation was widely denigrated in conservative political circles, as “printing naira.”

Surely some of the criticism had nothing to do with the meat of his suggestion. It was merely political opposition. However, much of the opposition shows a dangerous ignorance of the nature of money and a national government’s ability to use its own currency to stimulate its economy in times of trouble.

There are those who cry Africa has not the material or financial resources to do anything but let itself be battered. Their cry is false. Resource and financial limitations will, in fact, restrain us to a degree. But every nation is restrained to some extent even the most powerful. That does not prevent them doing what is within their power to do. In the end, the strength of our political will, love of the people, and courage to ignore economic orthodoxy will determine the quality and efficacy of our reply more than our resource levels will make the fateful determination.

If this crisis persists longer than a month or two longer, Africa may well face the political and economic question of a generation. To do nothing but rely on the markets and the economy to revive themselves is insensitivity and recklessness of the most disastrous order. Nothing of any consequential good will come of it. African nations must then enter unexplored territory. They must engage in the broad based fiscal stimulus being everywhere else enacted.

If we don’t plan for this curative step, we will be consigning ourselves to the gales of fate at a time of evil contagion. Next week we will explore what such a plan should look like.

 

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Brian Browne

Ignorance and running in the dark have something in common: they both tend to make you run to the very thing from which you are trying to escape.

When war pounds at the door, the time has long past for you to question why. At that moment, the only questions to ask are what weapon is to be used and if one’s army and allies are ready for the fight. The Coronavirus has been on the attack since last December, perhaps before then. Governments have responded belatedly to the menace. This is of no surprise. The human mind loses rationality when confronted by plague or pestilence. Fright plays a great part in the drama. We all are moved when called to grapple with an invisible lethality. We are disoriented by the impending sense of loss of control. Nature has found us out and found us vulnerable.

More fundamentally, no one embraces bad news. We are even more squeamish to publicly disclose such tidings. Even if the unwelcome news is beyond our control to prevent, we feel telling others about the bad news is akin to telling on ourselves. It reveals some element of incompetence or blame. Perhaps others will sense we are accursed or ill-fated. Thus, we delay in acting to combat the intrusion because our very actions admit its presence. Instead, we keep silent in futile hope the evil thing will vanish without another pair of eyes ever noticing its entrance into our tranquil domain. Only when the thing looms as close as our next breath do we say what should have been said before. If there had been the chance to quell the monster, that chanced was extinguished by our silent inaction.

Governments consist of people; thus governments act likewise. The Chinese government equivocated and maundered about the virus. It was only a few months ago that Chinese authorities hectored the now deceased physician who tried to bring the curious ailment to public light. It is a flaw in the human composition that we must first contest an uneasy truth. We seek to berate it, somehow thinking we can defeat it by refusing to acknowledge its existence. These tactics sometimes work when applied to an alternative political idea or policy. However, the tactics lose their efficacy when deployed against a physical reality no matter how small or microscopic. No amount of hectoring or propaganda can alter the composition of a stone or change the lethality of a contagion.

If we are to be truthful, we must allow government some amount of delay between when it learns of a communicable ailment and when it makes a substantial disclosure to the public. To ask for immediate disclosure is to ask for too much; it goes against human nature. Whether we like it or not, there will be a gap – an amount of time where government officials must dispel their initial fears and irrational refusal to believe adverse news.

However, there is a big difference between this inevitable gap in disclosure and a prolonged cover-up through wilful nondisclosure. One is permissible because it is human nature. The other is indefensible because it is the worst of human nature.  How long it takes a government to respond after that unavoidable lapse of time is a function of leadership ability, compassion, and commitment to social order.

The Chinese dawdled for several weeks, leaving the task to ineffectual regional leadership who possessed not the tools, expertise and full mandate to treat the problem effectively. Once the severity of the virus dawned on Beijing, the national leadership moved into action. Drastic measures became the order of the day. Businesses and factories were shuttered. Cities locked down. The Chinese imposed wholesale quarantine of a few hundred million people. The virus took its grim toll but began to subside in the tightly structured, regulated nation.

South Korea would not tarry. Its government jumped fast and energetically to stave contagion. Its innovative response which included drive-in testing locations proved efficacious. The virus subsided quickly. North Korea was also visited. However, we have no clear idea if the virus has been contained. What we do know is that this nation’s leadership is capable of abject brutality in accomplishing a social goals. To be afflicted with the virus in such a place would be tantamount to entering Hell’s worse ghetto.

In Europe, the disease hit Italy with a vengeance as if collecting on an old debt left too long unpaid. Despite the vast difference in population, Italy’s number of stricken people rivals China’s and its death rate is vastly higher, approaching 10 percent. The global rate is below 4 percent.

With Europe and North America affected, this would be more than just a public health issue. It becomes a contest between statist China and the Western democracies as to which political economic system was better able to curtail and recover from the virus. Within Western democracies, a sub-battle would ensue between the social democratic nations of continental Europe and the Anglophonic apostles of the free market in the UK and US.

Both American and European leaders procrastinated much too long. The mark this casts on their leadership will prove indelible. So full of themselves, each selfish leader thought he or she could will the viral intruder into submission. Each thought himself so exalted that the virus would not hit their nations simply because they did not wish it to. This inaction, though different lengths of time for each leader and nation, amounts to gross dereliction of duty caused by inordinate personal vanity. Precious weeks were lost during which advanced preparation could have been made that might have blunted the severity of what was to come.

Western nations took a piecemeal approach.  Proud of the mythical superiority of their way of life, they sought to curb the virus in a liberal, free market manner. It was as if the microbe had read their beloved treatises on capitalism and was somehow bound to respect their secular religion of profits over people. The Western response would first advocate voluntary measures. As these incremental, tentative steps proved futile, Western governments would enact meatier restrictions. Now whole cities are being quarantined. The great cities of New York, London and Paris are ghost towns. Borders have been closed. Armies are being deployed to enforce these measures. Having derided Chinese policy as draconian, the West now follows suit step by slow agonizing step. To save itself, the West must refute itself. Contradiction abounds.

The lock-down measures reveal a grave dilemma. The very steps taken to slow the virus will impair the economy faster than they stop the virus. As always man and anything he constructs are more fragile than the microbe. The Covid-19 pandemic now batters the global economy. Stock markets have shed 25 trillion dollars in value in the past three months. China has recorded its first monthly GDP contraction in 40 years. The Eurozone dashes toward depression. The US Treasury Secretary warns of 20 percent unemployment unless drastic remedial action is taken. Analysts fear American GDP will be stripped by 10-15 percent in the second quarter of 2020.

Financial markets have seized up. Liquidity is at a premium. Due to the multilayered edifice of global debt caused by the securitization of financial assets all financial houses are, at the same time, highly exposed debtors and creditors. Everyone owes and is owed. No one wants to pay in fear of not getting paid. Each player clutches hard to the dollars in hand.  Estimates are that global financial markets are short as much as 12 trillion dollars. A like sum must be injected into the system just to return financial markets to minimal functionality during this time of jagged crisis.

Meanwhile, the virus has devastated the productive sector of the economy where the average person works and where tangible, non-financial goods and services are provided. This makes Corona a rare and highly dangerous dual economic threat. Brent oil has dropped to less than 30 dollars. Oil inventories are so high that Texas may order a first-time freeze on oil production. The expansion of oil inventories implies that economic activity has slowed to a crawl. Air travel has largely been grounded. Tourism has collapsed. The manufacturing sector is rapidly crumbling. Worldwide, tens of millions of workers have already been fired, laid-off or their hours reduced. Production of goods have already declined. International and domestic transportation have been significantly impaired. Supply of consumer goods, including food, is uncertain. Imports will be fewer and dearer in costs. Left too long unattended, Corona threaten to impair the real economy in ways unseen in nearly a century.

The last time the world economy faced a serious dual threat to both the financial and real sectors simultaneously was the late 1920s. The outcome was not very good. It became known as the Great Depression.

The democratic nature of Corona has alarmed Western elites. Ebola was a frightening hemorrhage but was basically localized. It affected the poorest people in the poorest nations on the poorest continent. The elite did not contract that disease. Ebola hit hard but was relatively immobile. It isolated itself to a degree.  Conversely, this pandemic takes to the air as an avid traveler. Corona has followed global trade and transportation routes. As such, it disproportionately has visited those with sufficient income to travel internationally. Outside of China, the virus is thus far more a high-end disease. Because the virus impacts all aspects of the economy and does not discriminate by class, Western elites realized they must act to save themselves and their system. To save the system, they have to break every important tenet of that system.

Germany is the temple of balanced or surplus government budgets. Tomorrow, Germany will likely suspend its constitutional provision against deficit spending so that it may enact a vast stimulus program. The Tory government in the UK has abandoned conservative dogma in the face of emergency. The Bank of England has pledged to pump as much money into financial markets as is needed. On the fiscal side, the Johnson government has rolled out a 500 billion pound program. This will be but the first tranche. All European nations will introduce some form of tax abeyance and debt moratoria.

The US probably is the most curious tale. That a presidential election is set later this year makes the dynamics more intriguing. President Trump was arrogant and slow reacting to the crisis. Sensing it could impact his electoral chances, he downplayed the trouble and foot-dragged on preventative medical preparations.  His negligence in this early phase was acute and disconcerting. His Democratic opponents justifiably denigrated his abysmal performance.

Belatedly, he came to action upon realizing he could not will the disease away. The medical response started to fit the circumstance albeit still with gaping holes in supply of vital equipment.

But what is most curious is Trump and his fellow Republicans’ approach to economic stimulus. The Democrats consider themselves the party of the people and the Republicans as that of the elite. However, the Democrats’ economic proposals lag in comparison to Trump’s remedies. It is as if Trump is being true to FDR and the spirit of the New Deal which is the inheritance and should be the political territory of the Democrats. Meanwhile, establishment Democrats talk in the squeamish incrementalism that ruined President Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party during the Great Depression.

A grand role reversal is at hand. For whatever reason, the Democrats have relinquished to trump the economic policy ground they should occupy if they had remained true to the spirit of Roosevelt. As such, they seem intent on giving Trump every opportunity to snatch reelection from the very jowls of defeat.

Trump has proposed to give every American adult 2000 dollars. Hedge Fund predator, Republican Senator Mitt Romney, has joined the chorus although a vocal Trump opponent. In comparison, the so-called progressive and former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris tabled threadbare proposal to give every adult a paltry 250 dollars a month. This is but ¼ of Trump’s plan yet Harris falsely claims that her plan is the best that can be done! Worse, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi openly opposes Trump’s plan as too generous to the poor and working class. She touts a very conservative plan focused mainly on paid sick leave. She seems not to care that sick leave is very short term. It covers few expenses. Moreover, it is not applicable to the millions who have been fired or had their work hours reduced. It also will not cover the many small business owners and contractors whom Democrats claim to be the very backbone of the economy. Evidently, the Democrats don’t care if the virus serves to break the back of the national economy.

Trump also has called for various forms of relief from tax credits to debt moratoria prohibiting evictions, foreclosure and cutting off utilities for nonpayment. Mainstream Democrats run behind Trump on these proposals. The only Democrat advancing more progressive ideas than Trump’s is Senator Sanders. Sanders will lose the Democratic nomination even though the policies he has long espoused fit the times. He will not be the nation’s president but he is the closest thing it has to an oracle. Meanwhile, Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden is shamefully devoid of ideas. His proposals are so inadequate as to laughable. Like Pelosi, he only advocates government payment of emergency leave for workers. However, this will leave most people unattended at a time when all but the very affluent need dire assistance.

Why have Republicans acted with more alacrity in responding to the economic plight of average Americans?  The Republicans understand better the nature of money and the economy. Shuffling trillions of dollars to big business, they have engaged in corporate welfare for decades. They are used to large price tags. Sensing the demise of the economy, most Republicans have no compunction in rendering a relatively small, temporary welfare package to the average person. Once the economy stabilizes, they know things can quickly be returned to normal where the big corporations receive government largesse and the worker is once again left to fend for himself.

Democrats are loathe to embrace Trump’s fiscal expansion because they know it will reveal their true identity. For years, mainstream Democrats have been lying to the people. They have been telling people that there is insufficient funds to initiate policies that would materially improve life in America. However, the government will now somehow find several trillion dollars in a few months to spend during the crisis. Government can and will manufacture anywhere from 3-10 trillion extra dollars during this episode. This expenditure will salvage the nation not bankrupt it.

If this is the case, is not homelessness an emergency for some. Is not hunger? Is not poverty? Is not joblessness? What of the dilapidated national infrastructure? Even after this emergency passes, can’t tens of billions of extra dollars be devoted to these problems? Spending an extra 100-200 billion yearly would be a drop in the bucket compared to the plan now on the board. Yet, such expenditures can change the very face of the nation. For decades, establishment Democrats have deceived their supporters that such programs are fiscally out of reach. The crisis and the expenditures Trump proposes put the Democratic establishment to lie. Thus, they must block his spending plans. If they do not block him, they will either have to transform into genuine progressives or reveal themselves to be conservative Republicans in liberal clothing. They detest the average person, feeling themselves vastly superior. They much rather continue with the façade. Ironically, because of Trump, the charade the Democrats have played on the people may soon expire. This is a good thing if it comes to pass.

However, the strongest lessons the elite will take from this will not be humane. The elite will see their chief vulnerability as an economy still too dependent on the common worker. Much more emphasis and investment will go toward automaton. They will plan such that when the next contagion comes machines will command more of the economy and people will matter less. At that point, the elite will feel no compunction to help those beneath them. Then contagion will truly assume biblical proportions. The world truly will not be the same after this. Already, it is not as you think it to be.

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