Perspective
Clearly, we are living through one of the most consequential events in recorded human history.
Real perspective on what is happening and what happened, as in what will happen in the next five to ten years and how the pandemic impacted and changed human life and civilization, will need the distance of at least 50 years retrospective.
It’s a world turned upside down about which historians and others in the second half of this century and beyond will write hundreds, probably thousands of books. With that ability to look back they will see what we cannot. How it happened, how and when it ended — if it does –and how it changed us, our country, the world, and society and civilization.
It is likely the dawn of a historical epoch to rival the rise and all of the Roman Empire, the advent and spread of Christianity and later of Islam; the Crusades; the 14th Century plague estimated to have killed up to half of the people in the world in that less densely populated time, and of course in the last Century two horrific World Wars bringing the dawn of the atomic age.
Because beyond the immediate crisis, beyond its resolution, whatever that will look like in the next year or two or three, we are entering a new epoch in which the world’s economy is being stood on its head; in which strong, swift and perhaps unseen currents of profound social, political, governmental and economic limitations and change are already resulting.
As all that portends in the future, it becomes and has become clearer every day that in the immediate emergency we do not have a national response, we do not have a government, or leadership of it to understand this much less deal with it. Nor do we have a government able to imagine what comes after or to begin trying to discern such and begin to chart a course forward.
Instead but for the good conduct of most – not all – but most of its citizens and other inhabitants -and the wisdom of many governors, mayors, and other local officials, our country is in chaos.
No sensible person is surprised by this given that being thoroughly venal, purposefully ignorant, grossly incompetent and in all ways unhinged, the president personifies chaos.
Trump is Nero and Caligula congealed in a single entirely debased man,, his mind diseased, his psyche depraved.
Thus, this will go on in the United States for some time past when a competent administration led by a real president would have taken control with rational policies and sane, consistent, informed, calm and calming leadership.
A rational, competent administration would be running a parallel exercise to begin to plot whatever return to active life becomes permissible and possible and a federal role in that.
There is no evidence of this happening nor is there likely to be from this misshapen, broken, vile administration.
It is as if the planet is striking back at humankind for our abuse of it and that as part of this reaction Trump was sent as to inflict this chaos and as a harbinger of the chaos to come.
We need a new president. Whatever happens, however hard he and his party attempt to make voting, make you sure you vote if, as someone said just now, you have to crawl over broken glass to do it.
The Whole Presidential Choice
Notwithstanding so many so taken by Andrew Cuomo the choice, Nov. 3 will be Joe Biden or the incumbent, President Chaos.
Here then the question I ask always and that you should ask anyone you encounter who would consider the latter rather than the former. And with the question, the answer becomes obvious.
How many people are you voting for when you vote for president? I ask this over and over and over again.
Know what the answer is that I get from most everyone? They answer one, they say they are voting for one person.
Well, that’s not so. That’s nonsense.
When you vote for president you are voting for 4,000 people the president and/or his appointees will appoint in the senior ranks of the federal government (and whatever share of the 870 judges including justices of the SCOTUS he or she will get to name).
Of those 4,000 key federal appointees, 1,250 require Senate confirmation as do the judges.
From Merrick Garland’s nomination for the Supreme Court, across the federal circuit courts of appeal to the district court level, Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell blocked dozens and dozens and dozens of judicial nominations made by Barrack Obama.
Democrats will want not just Joe Biden in the White House but a Senate majority to make certain that does not continue and to begin to right the grotesques imbalance in the judiciary created from the hundred of extreme rightists appointed by Trump and confirmed by McConnell and his majority to federal courts across the nation. And that is especially so for the Supreme Court.
Even more, than all those people, when you vote for president you vote for an entire belief system and philosophy concerning the uses and purposes of government.
We will make a choice between a national government and it political hierarchy, thrown together crudely from red states, business and know-nothings like the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, (two of whose members have risen to be chief of staff to this president) or from the Democratic Party and its political hierarchy drawn from think tanks, academia, experienced leaders in state governments, prior administrations and from members of Congress when they can be spared from blue districts.
It is a choice between a political belief system that has as its mission tax cuts, advantages for the advantaged, racial separation and tension, the denial of voting and civil rights, or a belief system that has produced most of the progress this nation has experienced in the past 100 years.
Progress in the form of the Federal Reserve and FDA established under Woodrow Wilson; of the New Deal (Social Security, the SEC, the TVA, the NLRB) and a new international order in the U.N. the World Bank and the IMF under FDR; of the Fair Deal, the DoD and NATO under Harry Truman; of the Great Society and the Civil and Voting Rights Acts under Lyndon B. Johnson; of the CHIP under Bill Clinton, and of the economic rescue of a broken economy and the ACA under Barrack Obama.
Whose belief system do we want next Jan. 20? Who do we want to appoint those 4,000 people and judges starting Jan. 20 next year?
That’s the choice, that is what you are deciding when you vote, not a choice between two men, but between an entire system and belief in government and governance and the purposes and uses of government for the many or for the few?
A choice between rational, experienced people able to deliver rational purposeful administration and management of government, or for four more years of chaos that proceeding from the present circumstances will destroy much of what is left of the United States and any hope or ability to salvage a future from the epidemic’s societal, civic and economic conflagration.
Transition
These next thoughts do not assume or presume a Biden victory in November but are predicated on one.
In an ordinary presidential transition, itself fraught enough, a president-elect traditionally will have vetted and have in mind and announce a series of appointments in December and early January of cabinet secretaries, his National Security Advisor and key subordinates, his choice for National Intelligence Advisor.
He will also announce key White House staff – chief of staff, communications chief, press secretary to being immediately handling the flow of transition announcements, chief domestic policy and economic advisors, choices for his Economic Policy Council and other senior White House positions.
His transition apparatus will probably have in place some early necessary executive orders and in the case of this transition several of them to begin to undo the savagery, meanness, and stupidity of those issued by Trump.
Knowing full well that Ruth Bader Ginsburg must get real, something she failed to do in 2013 or 2014 when President Obama had the support of a Democratic Senate, and so must retire if there is a Democrat in the White House: Knowing too that Stephen Breyer will no doubt want to do the same next July, President-elect Biden should also have put in motion decisions about two high court nominees.
That would all be so in the course of a normal transition. But this will not be normal for several reasons.
First and foremost without known the extent of recovery (or the potential for setback) ours will be a nation coming out of and seeking a way forward after the pandemic has quieted – in a world doing the same.
Second, it will be a transition from Trump and we can certainly imagine that he will not go quietly, that he will not cooperate, that he will undermind the incoming president in any and every way he can and that until Inauguration Day he will threaten and suggest he won’t leave (don’t worry if the Army has to carry him out the back door of the White House, he will be gone if he loses).
Then too but not necessarily lastly, even without the Pandemic the damage done by Trump is so vast that it cannot be undone, reversed and overcome in several years. As much of it that can be reversed will need to be as soon as possible.
All of this suggests that the Biden transition should be in full swing now, that parallel to choosing a running mate, coordinating with the DNC if there is – or if there is not – a national convention and then running a campaign in the oddest of circumstances – the Biden transition must start now.
Usually, transition work starts in the fall, parallel to the campaign. For all the reasons and circumstances described here, it really needs to start now effective to put the new president in the position he would be in not in Inauguration Day but at least at the end of his third month in office. The first 100 days of the Biden presidency must look like the scond three months would have in ordinary time.
Those 4,000 people he will need at the top with him, especially the 1,250 needing Senate confirmation? He has to start identifying them now for the earliest possible vetting following the election by the FBI and Secret Service. He should be directing the formulation of an entire plan of executive orders and his first message to Congress asserting his legislative goals in the first year of his presidency.
Let’s trust Joe Biden, in all his experience and in all the experience of those around him, knows this today.
Peeling the Onion 