Fever Takes

With quarantine stretching out into the foreseeable future, it's given lots of people time to reflect on things as they did whatever ways they can to cope. For others, though, it's been a prime opportunity to show everyone the complete asses they've always been.

 We'll start with Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post arguing that pandemic makes the case weaker, not better, for socialized medicine. As you know, few things make me happier than pointing out how terrible other people's arguments are, especially when those arguments are coached in self-righteous condescending tones.

Thiessen gets the ball rolling by making rapid fire brags about the American healthcare system that range from irrelevant to clueless. He makes a really big deal out of how many more ICU beds per capita the U.S. has compared to other countries like the U.K. and touts this has some kind of brilliant innovation of the free market system. He goes on to say that we're actually much better at providing critical care than other countries and then gets what he thinks is a really harsh dig in on other countries by saying they ration ICU care to the elderly and people rated with low chances of survival.

These are all interrelated, but, to start, of course other countries ration their ICU beds to those who need it the most. That's the whole point of critical care and it's exactly why we do the same thing here. Also, pointing out that we have a higher ICU bed per capita rate or that we're so experienced in delivering critical care isn't quite the achievement Thiessen is claiming.

Thiessen presents critical care like it's a luxury upgrade that European or other socialized medicine countries deprive their citizens of in the pure, socialist pursuit of mediocrity. He glosses over that the reason we need so many beds is because we're a much sicker country than our European counterparts. Because we delay going to the doctor for so long, by the time we drag ourselves in for treatment we're in much worse shape than we otherwise would be if we could just, you know, go to doctor without worrying about walking out with a $2,000 bill hanging over your head. 

It's a neat rhetorical trick, honestly. If you make it seem like our abundance of ICU beds is an innovation of our market system while ignoring the implications of why we need a supply that large in the first place then you don't have to deal with the layers of failure required to get there. 

There's so much more here. Thiessen complains at length about how the FDA refused to use the WHO test at first, then failed to make its own and had to wait for a private alternative. Or how since Medicare pays a lower rate to hospitals and doctors we would be facing a shortage of hospitals and doctors since they wouldn't make as much. He closes with saying that we're now relying on the same pharmaceutical industry Bernie Sanders has for so long decried as greedy to find a vaccine for the virus to protect us from future outbreaks.

You have to ignore a lot to come to these conclusions. The FDA refused the test on Trump's orders because he didn't want anybody to have the capability of testing. He thinks, rightly, that the economic shutdown brought on by the coronavirus is a threat to his reelection campaign, so, if we couldn't test for the virus, there'd be no panic- no virus, no thereat, no panic. The refusal wasn't the result of the government being incompetent because that's all government can be, it was the deliberate result of a president who only cares about his public perception intentionally sabotaging our response.

And if Theissen wants to talk about hospital staffing and availability, sure, lets talk about that. All over the country, hospitals are laying off or furloughing staff and cutting the wages of whoever's left because they aren't making any money. Anyone who speaks out about these issues, gets fired. In New York alone, the state lost 20,000 hospital beds from budget cuts and other profitability issues. So that's nice. 

And the pharmaceutical industry? Any vaccine they develop for the coronavirus will be heavily subsidized by public funds, as are most of their products. After they develop this largely tax-payer funded medicine, they will then obtain a patent over it then charge people exorbitant amounts of money to get it.

 Granted, they may not do it at first for PR reasons but, sooner rather than later, they'll double or triple the price whenever they want to so that only the most well off will be able to afford it just like the companies who make insulin and inhalers do. If tying people's ability to live to their ability to pay your profit margin isn't greed, then what is?

This isn't even touching the fact that the private sector can't perform the mass testing required to track the rate of infections accurately. The can't do that because they don't have the resources to test at the level we need. So even though we're  at 987,000 confirmed cases as of this writing, we still don't know how many we're missing. We had 38,000 new cases between April 23rd and 24th, the highest one-day increase we've had yet. Do you really believe we're anywhere near our peak?

Granted, fun as it is to do all this, it is admittedly somewhat pointless. It doesn't matter if Theissen believes what he writes, all that matters is that he continues to be a vessel that champions a system that makes a lot of people money off the misery of everyone else. All he needs to do for his piece to work is reinforce someone's idea that the government just sucks at everything to accept that they, too, should be one crisis away from losing their job and insurance in the name of freedom and profit.

Sadly, there's always going to be plenty of those idiots around, so, congrats Marc, you got 'em.

Moving on, this piece about landlords and how they feel unfairly maligned over the fact that they're still demanding rent from their tenants during this crisis in The Guardian still has me wondering if it's a stealth parody or earnestly tone deaf.

Things start out as sympathetically as they can. We're introduced to Ricardo Reis, owner of sixteen properties in Michigan, a classic, salt-of-earth American heartland kind of guy we've all been trained to think of as inherently sympathetic and trustworthy. But holy shit these quotes and the attempt at context are gold:

"Everyone has an impression of us as being rich and greedy. A lot of tenants will be thinking, how can they ask [us to pay] during this time? But in reality, there are costs involved,” says Reis.

Those costs include property taxes, insurance, maintenance and mortgage payments. Although homeowners will be provided with mortgage relief during the pandemic, many renters are wondering why they should still pay rent. But plenty aren’t aware that commercial property owners – landlords, in other words – are not entitled to this benefit. Furthermore, forbearance programs only defer mortgage payments, rather than completely forgiving the cost."

The idea that renters are too stupid to realize that there are costs involved in owning or maintaining a house is hysterical to me. I'm pretty sure every renter understands that property taxes, mortgages, insurance, and maintenance costs exist- that's what they're fucking paying rent to cover, right? Reis goes on to say that most landlords in Michigan only make between $200-$300 in profit once expenses are accounted for, so it's not like they're rolling in money. Which, yeah, if you go by those rates, that nets between $38,400- $57,600 a year which, even at the top end, just barely pushes you over the median income line in Michigan.

So, you're not Uncle Pennybags, cool. Also, yeah, I do think landlords and commercial property should get relief from their mortgages just like everyone else but if they're not, it's almost like there are people who exist that make laws or something that could change the rules, if you made enough of a fuss about it. And maybe, I dunno, they should focus their energy there instead of trying to hound their unemployed tenants out of every last dollar they can squeeze from them.

But where this story goes off the rails for me is the introduction of its next subject, Greg Marguiles.

This dude is everything you could possibly want in your stereotypical landlord; I mean, look at the shit he lets come out of his mouth:

"They’ll only band together for a very short time – until the first eviction paper comes [through]. Then I think it will hit home"

"It’s unfortunate you’re not working, but that should have nothing to do with paying for what you used. "

I love this guy so, so much. His entire attitude boils down to "But think of how your problems create more important problems for meeeeeeee."

On some level, I get it. Owning property is your main if not sole source of income and if your tenants aren't working your income dries up just as much as theirs. It's the central tenet of capitalism that all spending is someone else's income so everything grinds to a halt when nobody can spend anything beyond absolute necessities. 

Now, there are plenty of people who argue that rent qualifies as an absolute necessity. Which, in one sense is true. Having a house or a safe place that shelters you from the world is an essential part of psychological development and contentment. But what makes people fucking hate landlords is that they take this literally essential aspect and hold it hostage to dole out to those they deem can make them a profit. 

When Margulies says "What could be more greedy than withholding rent that you have the ability to pay?" what he's saying is that your rent is his rightful income. Because he owns the capital in the form of a house, it is his right to demand that you sacrifice money you could use to feed yourself and your family to put food on his table so he doesn't have to sacrifice anything. Reis talks a big game about since they take the risk, they're entitled to the reward. But what Reis and Margulies are asking for is that they only be reap the benefits of their risk and not be subject to any potential failure- if that protection comes at the financial ruin of their tenants then that is a sacrifice they are willing to make. 

What's hilarious to me is that none of this registers. Reis talks about how they'll have to screen people differently once this is all over because if the government can stop evictions, then he'll need an extra layer of security on his investment. He doesn't go into specifics of course, but I imagine looking into the social media profiles of future tenants to gage their political beliefs to see if they'd engage in a rent strike will play a part, which will then determine whether the applicants get a lease or how much rent they'll pay based on this newly defined "risk" factor.

Honestly, they're free to do this if they want. Political beliefs aren't a protected class under federal law nor should they be. But thinking you should charge tenants more for what you think are dangerous political beliefs is a good idea while bemoaning how unfair it is that you can't leverage the threat of eviction over their heads during a pandemic goes a long way towards explaining why people feel the need to put landlords and property owners against the wall when revolutions break out. 

Luckily, there's a solution. As Reis says, the government "should instead bolster social housing if they believe that people should live rent-free”.

Indeed. 

Lastly, I want to talk about those stupid protests. That they're largely fake, paid for and organized by lobbyists or members of Trump's administration is no surprise. The Tea Party had the same astroturf origins and the media is failing in its coverage of these groups all over again. 

By presenting these protests has genuine outgrowths of discontent, the media obscures the real motivations behind these protests which robs of a chance to properly put them in context. It also guarantees that by treating them as legitimate, the wider they'll spread. 

This is, naturally, incredibly bad. It's nice that 80% of the country believes the lockdown measures are appropriate and should continue as they are. I don't want to dismiss how good that is or how far it'll go in keeping things from the worst case scenario. 

Still, the important part isn't necessarily the numbers of the protests- which are still comparetively small- but the fanaticism behind it. The displays will, hopefully, finally dispel the foolish notion that die-hard Trump supporters have a limit to their devotion, and thus can be pulled back from the brink when the man himself goes too far. 

Lurking underneath all of this is the question of when will we go back to normal, which is a question I doubt many people like the answer to. We might, possibly, if we're incredibly lucky, see a slowdown in the summer. Granted, if the protests keep going, we probably won't, but still.

Anyway, the second Trump has his fig leaf he'll declare the virus beaten and insist everyone go about their lives as before. He'll go back to having in-person rallies thumping his chest and crying that he gets no credit for the response, yadda yadda we've seen this movie before. 

While he's doing that, the states should continue to form cross regional alliances to better prepare their responses to the disease once flu-season kicks in. Trump and the federal government will of course be caught with their pants down, again, but there's no reason we shouldn't. 

My hope is that the majority of people, even if the green light is given, still follow as much of their quarantine routine as possible. So far, we don't have evidence of antibodies preventing getting the disease a second time, which puts serious dampners on a vaccine making this all go away. We should be prepared for this to become something we live with until we remake our society into one that can better handle the task of combating the spread of infection. 

Things have been rough, and are likely to stay that way for the rest of the year. Do what you can, keep yourself safe and sane, and, one way or another, make sure you and yours all see the other side of this.