× Expand National Archives President-elect Herbert Hoover (right) rides to his inauguration, March 4, 1929.

First Response

Here’s a little thing that hasn’t been reported about the Treasury Department’s “term sheet” for the big coronavirus economic response package. If you take a look at the metadata of that document, you’ll see that it has the title “MEMORANDUM FOR SECRETARY PAULSON.” Hank Paulson, of course, was the Republican Treasury Secretary during the last crisis, not this one. I asked but did not receive any response from Treasury about this, but it certainly gives the humorous impression that there’s a Republican bailout template in that building. “This cut and paste job is evidence that they are literally working off of the 2008 baseline that led to a bipartisan bailout of the banks and left Main Street and the broader real economy behind,” says David Segal, executive director of the Demand Progress Education Fund.

What’s interesting is how the Treasury term sheet got adopted in Mitch McConnell’s bill language released yesterday afternoon. The bailouts for the airline industry ($50 billion) and everything else ($150 billion)? Yep, although McConnell added $8 billion for cargo air carriers. There are caps on executive compensation, as Treasury asked for, but also a kind of equity stake with government participation if the value rises. Small businesses get $300 billion in “interruption loans” in both Treasury and McConnell’s imagining; Treasury wanted this to go toward eight weeks of payroll, but McConnell allows rent, mortgage, utilities, or “other debt,” though there are incentives for sustaining employee compensation until the end of June. The temporary use of the Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee money markets is also the same.

After all that (and a lot more) for businesses, the public gets—a $1,200 check. And they don’t go to everyone, phasing in at half price for those without income tax liability (as many as 75 million people, an unconscionable attack on the poor) and phasing out starting at those earning $75,000 per year, with nothing for those above $99,000.

But that threshold doesn’t reflect anyone’s current, real-world status. Indeed, it’s likely to be based on 2018 tax returns. People’s earnings from two weeks ago don’t correspond to what they’re experiencing today. If someone had a good year in 2018 and then got fired and has no income, they get nothing, because that’s the “responsible” thing to do? It’s impossibly cruel, especially given the enormous corporate bailout alongside it.

It must be said who kicked off this absurd means testing: Nancy Pelosi, whose spokesman stated that all relief “MUST be targeted.” Pelosi said in a closed-door meeting that she “didn’t want to write checks to millionaires,” and it gave McConnell an in-road to follow the lead. (Chuck Schumer said something interpreted as similar, but he was actually making a legitimate complaint: $1,000 a month doesn’t do a whole lot for an unemployed person. This is why debt moratoria could be preferable, to buy time for the unemployed through the duration of the crisis.)

But nobody in the leadership of either party has internalized that two year-old figures for determining means testing are completely obsolete. The answer is not to worry about a 1 percent overage on checks going to the 1 percent, but to radically ramp up the size of the stimulus to meet the actual need, or to pause the financial strains on those in need with debt moratoria. Pointless obsession with badly drawn means testing will destroy a lot of lives. Only the House Financial Services Committee, with a strong universal benefit, understands the depth of the need here.

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Lots of Republicans don’t want any direct payments to anyone at all, ghouls that they are. And Pelosi and Schumer generally panned the McConnell bill as too generous to corporations and not enough to individuals. But Pelosi needs to really think about her showy deficit obsession in a time of catastrophe. She’s a lame duck speaker; she has vowed to leave in 2022. Does she really want her legacy to be the second coming of Herbert Hoover?

Vital Stats

The numbers are spiraling, though that could be due to increased testing. The New York Times lists 12,326 U.S. coronavirus cases (and 194 deaths), up from 8,317 when I checked yesterday. Johns Hopkins University has it at 14,250. There are over 10,000 deaths globally from COVID-19, with Italy now showing the most casualties. The COVID-19 Tracker shows 11,723 cases (160 deaths), with 103,945 tests completed. That number has nearly doubled in the past two days. To reach South Korea’s testing level on a per capita basis, however, we need something between 75,000-100,000 per day.

COVID-19 and Campaigning

West Virginia was the last state to announce a confirmed COVID-19 case, a few hours after Donald Trump praised Governor Jim Justice (the state’s richest man) for keeping the outbreak at bay. But this was a false narrative, as testing has been almost non-existent in the Mountaineer State; even today only 143 have been tested in a state of nearly 2 million.

Senator Joe Manchin has hammered this, and so did Stephen Smith, Democratic candidate for governor, in an interview with me. “We know people who went in showing all the symptoms who were not allowed to be tested because they were not out of the country,” Smith told me. “Good old boy government hurts us in two ways: we focus on the inequality aspect, but the other way is to just not give a damn.”

Smith often uses the “good old boy” frame. I visited the state last year and profiled his remarkable campaign, which has attracted thousands of volunteers, pulled off hundreds of town halls, and convinced 93 other candidates to join him on a slate that rejects corporate money. It’s a true people-powered campaign, where supporters wrote his campaign platform, and are empowered to organize on behalf of a lasting grassroots movement that’s bigger than one candidate.

So how do you keep that going when bars and restaurants are shuttered, town hall gatherings are too dangerous, and volunteers can’t knock on doors to canvass? It lies in becoming more than a campaign. “We had a coronavirus response website up before the state government,” Smith says. “We laid out a policy plan five days ago.” The plan focuses on immediate actions within gubernatorial authority: drive-thru testing for whoever wants it; moratoria on evictions, water, gas, phone, and internet shut-offs; telework for public employees and telehealth for seniors; using school buses to deliver meals to the poor; actually counting state hospital bed capacity (there’s no current count); and much more. “It’s a preview of all the ways things could change when we win,” he says.

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The Smith campaign’s new field operation, for a May 12 election that will be conducted mostly through absentee balloting, looks more like a local care organization. The campaign plans to give 1,000 neighborhood captains 100 voters that live near them. They have the mission to contact these 100 once a week, with emails, phone calls, or letters. The message is not just to get out to vote, but to check in on the people, see what they need, help them with everything from getting a mail-in ballot to identifying resources they can access. That’s 100,000 West Virginians getting special attention.

“Crises are commonplace here, and the experience of having to get through crises on our own is also commonplace,” Smith says, citing flooding in 2016 that destroyed 1,200 homes. The nonprofit coalition he was involved with ended up rebuilding twice as many homes in its first year than the state did in four, despite the state having almost $150 million in federal grants. “The people of the state are doing brave, bold, wonderful things every single day,” Smith says. “If the state government followed the people we would have been in good shape.”

The View from Your Window

The New York Times posted a short video this week of U.S. travelers stranded in Morocco during the pandemic. I happened to get an email from a separate traveler, also in Morocco, initials SF. Here is her story:

I am here in Fez with three other American tourists, my husband and two friends, all of us over 65. We were booked to go home on 3/20, but the border was closed so we are rebooked for 4/4 on Marco Air, although who knows if we can go then. We have registered with the U.S. consulate, so they know we are here. I got through to the consulate today, but they had no news about when we can return.

The situation is changing daily. Two days ago all the restaurants were closed, yesterday the Médina was all boarded up but we were able to hire a car to go out to the countryside. Today, we could not go to the town of Meknès-Tafilalet as it has closed its perimeter. Tomorrow we hope we can get driven to Marrakesh where our travel friends know of a rhiad run by French nationals where we can stay.

There was an increased sense of hostility towards us as some Moroccans blame all foreigners for the virus. It feels as though the walls are closing in on us as the options shrink and we hear nothing from the U.S. government about what the plans are. We have no idea of how many of us there are, but according to a Canadian source, there are over 3,000 Canadians in a similar situation.

Nervy stuff, and the lack of responsiveness from the consulate, even as the State Department has called for U.S. travelers to return home, is really distressing.

I want to hear from you, wherever in the world you are. Tell me about your experiences. Email me at ddayen-at-prospect-dot-org.

Today I Learned