In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston rains on Joe Biden’s “America is back” parade and underscores a point I made earlier:

President Biden set out to declare a triumphant U.S. return to the trans-Atlantic alliance. “America is back,” the president said in his speech this week to the Munich Security Conference. The leaders of France and Germany promptly made it clear that the four years of the Trump presidency had changed the relationship.

he goes on to explain:

Underlying the muted response to Mr. Biden’s speech is what the European Council on Foreign Relations calls a “massive change” in European public opinion toward the U.S. The group’s recent poll finds: “Majorities in key member states now think the US political system is broken, that China will be more powerful than the US within a decade, and that Europeans cannot rely on the US to defend them.”

These beliefs are driving fundamental changes in European policy preferences. “Large numbers think Europeans should invest in their own defense,” the poll found, “and look to Berlin rather than Washington as their most important partner. They want to be tougher with the US on economic issues. And, rather than aligning with Washington, they want their countries to stay neutral in a conflict between the US and Russia or China”—a stance endorsed by at least half the electorate in each of the 11 countries surveyed.

I believe that the Biden Administration is proceeding under incorrect assumptions. During and following World War II, European countries were our clients. Japan was our client. Israel is our client. None of them are or have ever been our allies other than on paper. They’ll follow our lead so long as where we’re leading them is where they want to go anyway.

Rather than focusing on rebuilding diplomatic bridges we should concentrate our energy and attention on building actual bridges and rebuilding the U. S. economy. The countries of Europe are operating under incorrect assumptions of their own. They’re assuming that if they maintain neutrality or throw their lot in with China they’ll be eaten last but make no mistake. They’re on the menu, too.

In his Washington Post column Henry Olsen critiques the present “COVID-19 relief” bill:

Biden has merely put a happy face on a strongly progressive agenda. Many of his executive orders — including canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and reentering the Paris climate accord — simply repeal former president Donald Trump’s actions. House Democrats have introduced the administration’s comprehensive immigration bill with no substantive GOP input, and they are also pursuing a ludicrously partisan rewrite of election law (H.R. 1). Initial talks with a group of 10 Republican senators over a compromise to Biden’s $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief bill have fizzled. Democrats are now moving to pass the massive proposal using the reconciliation procedure that allows a fiscal bill to pass the Senate with only a majority vote instead of the 60 votes needed to surmount a filibuster. Biden’s nice talk can’t wholly mask this nakedly partisan drive.

and observes:

Good negotiators follow a few simple rules. First, get leverage and use it to shape the contours of the deal. Second, have something on the table that you can give up that the other party values a lot. Third, use initial negotiating sessions to feel your adversary out and get a sense of their priorities and temper. Do this, and any deal will likely result in you getting more of what you want than if you act rashly.

Biden’s behavior so far follows these guidelines perfectly. The reconciliation process gives him leverage: Talk or you’ll lose everything. The bill itself is so filled with liberal wishes and so excessive in size that even some Democratic economists have criticized it. Biden could cut the bill in half and still end with more than enough aid to help those struggling because of the pandemic. And the initial discussions with the 10 senators provided a sense of what they want (a smaller, more targeted bill) and their temper (they really want to get to yes). All of this bodes well for a deal in early March — if Biden wants one.

which raises the question: what does Biden want? Or, more precisely, what does he want more? Does he want to unify the country or the Democratic Party? I’m betting it’s the latter and that, as he moves left, the center of the party will move left faster. I don’t believe that the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party will be satisfied with $1.9 trillion or $10.9 trillion in additional spending—they’re taking the position that numbers don’t matter, that there is no amount the federal government might spend that will have adverse consequences.

I didn’t want Mike Pompeo and Miles Yu’s Wall Street Journal op-ed go by without comment. In it, contrary to the World Health Organization task force’s findings, they take it as a given that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s labs:

The evidence that the virus came from Wuhan is enormous, though largely circumstantial, and most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In America, concern about the site is now broad and bipartisan. The Biden administration stated that it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with the investigators’ work.

The world has known for a long time that WIV poses a huge risk to global health. Two 2018 State Department cables warned of its biosafety problems. They even predicted that SARS-CoV-2’s ACE2 receptor, identified by WIV scientists, would enable human-to-human transmission. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s biosafety level 4 lab, warned, “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edge sword: It can be used for the benefit of humanity, but can also lead to a disaster.” He listed the shortfalls prevalent among China’s biology labs, including a lack of “operational technical support, professional instructions” and “feasible standards for the safety requirements of different protection zones and for the inoculation of microbiological animals and equipment.”

The Chinese public took note, with several bloggers alleging that WIV’s virus-carrying animals are sold as pets. They may even show up at local wet markets. After the Wuhan outbreak, one since-disappeared blogger asked a WIV researcher to debate the lab’s biosafety practices in public. The offer was ignored.

and

The Chinese Communist Party’s recklessness has already cost the world too much, and its obfuscation guarantees this won’t be the last such tragedy. It ordered the destruction of virus samples collected from the earliest patients. It banned the release of key data. It silenced journalists, doctors and scientists. And it impeded the WHO’s investigation. Beijing doesn’t want the world to know the true origin of the coronavirus and its serious biosafety lapses.

The Chinese government must change course. It must be open about its biosafety systems, fix its errors and curtail its dangerous ambitions. Lives and livelihoods across the world are on the line. We all have a responsibility to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party isn’t given a free pass.

I thought that the WHO task force’s dismissal of the WIV lab out of hand as a possible source on the grounds that it appeared to be well-run beggared credulity but tying the virus to the lab as Mssrs. Pompeo and Yu do, is excessive. The truth is that we don’t know where the virus came from and in all likelihood we’ll never know. The ruling Chinese regime has all but guaranteed that.

IMO China’s opacity is enough reason that we should be maintaining a much more at-arm’s-length relationship with China than we do. Do we need to add assumptions of perfidy to that?

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Republican Senator Mitt Romney characterizes the Biden Administration’s $1.9 trillion bill that has been called a “COVID relief bill” but goes well beyond, lists some of its obvious overreaches, and concludes:

Senate Republicans will support whatever is needed to expand Covid testing, accelerate vaccine delivery and support health providers. We will likewise support robust assistance for those who have been crushed financially by the pandemic, including by losing their jobs. A group of us proposed a $618 billion compromise measure that matched President Biden’s proposed health and vaccine funding, extended enhanced federal unemployment benefits, provided economic relief for those with the greatest need, and included nutrition funding, small-business assistance, and resources to get children safely back to school.

We stand ready to negotiate a plan that helps America recover, both physically and financially, from this dread disease. We are willing to compromise in an attempt to get the administration to come down from its ill-considered $1.9 trillion plan and instead provide need-based relief. We have shown a willingness to compromise—which the president and Democratic congressional leaders have yet to reciprocate.

There are those who think the Senate Republicans will reject anything the administration puts forward. There’s one sure way to find out and, coincidentally, it would be satisfying a campaign promise: unifying the country.

And I’ve got to admit that I’m puzzled by President Biden’s refusal to compromise on it. Giving aid to the rich, helping state and local governments that don’t need help, extending payments into 2022, and a $15/hour national minimum wage just aren’t essential. Why is $1.9 trillion sacrosanct?

Just in case you think that I’m the only one who doesn’t see our present system as particularly democratic (and it has nothing to do with the Electoral College), you might want to consider Ezra Klein’s latest piece in the New York Times:

And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one of those ideas. She calls it “open democracy,” and the premise is simple: What we call democracy is not very democratic.

The role of the people is confined to elections, to choosing the elites who will represent us. Landemore argues that our political thinking is stuck in “18th-century epistemologies and technologies.” It is not enough.

We’ve learned much in the last few hundred years about random sampling, about the benefits of cognitively diverse groups, about the ways elections are captured by those with the most social and financial capital. Landemore wants to take what we’ve learned and build a new vision of democracy atop it — one in which we let groups of randomly selected citizens actually deliberate and govern. One in which we trust deliberation and diversity, not elections and political parties, to shape our ideas and to restrain our worst impulses.

As I’ve said before I think that restraining our worst impulses should be effected with laws that severely circumscribe what governments can and cannot do. But our system as it presently works now basically works to create a ruling class dedicated to making the rich richer.

There have been some attempts at quantifying just how “woke” some states are, cf. the map above. At Zippia Kathy Morris explains:

It’s 2021 and every other Gen Zer is calling themselves woke. What does it mean to be woke?

Being an old Millennial, I googled to find out. Merriam-Webster defines it as, “ aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of justice).” That’s nice.

However, Urban Dictionary adds it’s a “pretentious” and “deluded” awareness. That’s less nice.

We set out to find the most woke states- and the states where it still means getting up in the morning.

Based on her analysis the most “woke” states are:

1. Oregon
2. Washington
3. Vermont
4. Colorado
5. California
6. Minnesota
7. Massachusetts
8. New York
9. Maine
10. Wisconsin

I think she’s measuring something but I’m not sure what it is. That is very nearly a list of the whitest states. Maybe the least black states?

IMO the degree of wokeness is extremely variable within states, from extremely “woke” places, e.g. Evanston just a few miles north of me, to place which aren’t very “woke” at all, e.g. say Rockport, Illinois on the west side of the state.

At the Atlantic Alexis C. Madrigal reflects on when the outbreak of COVID-19 will be over in the U. S.:

The most obvious interpretation of “beating COVID-19” would be that transmission of the coronavirus has stopped, a scenario some public-health experts have hashtagged #ZeroCOVID. But the experts I spoke with all agreed that this won’t happen in the U.S. in the foreseeable future. “This would require very high levels of vaccination coverage,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist at NYU who served on Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force during the transition. The U.S. may never reach vaccination rates of 75 to 85 percent, the experts said.

“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control. “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths.

That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza. In most recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which averages out to 55 to 140 deaths a day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was largely considered acceptable by the public,” Eisenberg said. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end to the emergency portion of the pandemic in the United States should be heralded completely by the curtailing of severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Fewer than 100 deaths a day—to mirror the typical mortality of influenza in the U.S. over a typical year—is an appropriate goal.”

Another yardstick that has been proposed is by number of newly-diagnosed cases:

Some experts were even more conservative. Crystal Watson, a health-security scholar at Johns Hopkins University, suggested a threshold of 0.5 newly diagnosed cases per 100,000 people every day, and a test-positivity rate of less than 1 percent. That would translate to fewer than 2,000 cases a day in the U.S., compared with the current 60,000 or more. We’d also want to log at least one month of normal hospital operations without staff or equipment shortages, she said.

which I find a bit facetious. As the ability to diagnose cases becomes more effective shouldn’t it shorten the duration of the outbreak? That wouldn’t necessarily be the case.

You would think that after nearly a year of a global pandemic there might be more agreement about when it was no longer a pandemic and when local outbreaks were over. Apparently not. Keep in mind that in some countries, e.g. New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore, the outbreaks are already materially over. In other, including the U. S., it will certainly be many months and might even be years before the present outbreaks are over. That in turn implies that, unless much more stringent bans on international travel are imposed than have been the case to date, the global pandemic will not be over for a very long time.

A report from researcher at University of Illinois at Chicago and former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson has found (PDF) that Chicago is the most corrupt major city in the U. S.:

Nonetheless, the DOJ statistics show that since the department began collecting the data in 1976, Chicago is the most corrupt federal judicial district in the nation, and that Illinois, on a per capita basis, is the third most corrupt state.

Table 1 shows the rankings of the nation’s top 15 judicial districts, including their major city, by the total number of public corruption convictions. Since 1976, Chicago had a total of 1,770 convictions and an average of 41 per year, Los Angeles had 1,588 and an average of 37, New York/Manhattan had 1,361 and an average of 32 per year, Miami had 1,234 and an average of 29, and Washington D.C. had 1,199 and an average of 28 per year.

I initially intended to title this post “I Demand a Recount” on the basis of its only finding Illinois the third most corrupt state. When I dug further into the report I found that on a per capita basis Illinois is by far the most corrupt state. Both of these findings should surprise no one who pays any attention to the news from Chicago or Illinois.

I have a couple of observations to add. First, the claim made in the report that corruption is spiking cannot be determined using the methodology of this report. All that one can say is that the successful prosecution of corruption in Chicago and Illinois are spiking. I sincerely believe that the successful prosecutions are merely the tip of a filthy iceberg.

Additionally, conspicuous by its absence from the report is any proposal for mending the situation or mitigating the risk of ongoing corruption. It’s blithe to propose that voters just stop voting for corrupt candidates but how? Just to take a single example, no Republican was on the ballot for mayor of Chicago and that’s been the case for some time. We had a choice between two candidates, either of whom was certain just to take her turn at the trough. Chicagoans chose the closest thing to an outsider available which judging by performance was an error. What were we to do?

I think it’s patently obvious that the Illinois Democratic Party is a criminal conspiracy but proving it is another matter. Merely getting such a case into court would probably be impossible. So prosecutors just slowly chip away at the edges while the basic corruption remains.

The solution many erstwhile Illinoisans are seizing is flight. Illinois has greater net population losses than any other state. That solves nothing for those who remain.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says that we can out-compete the Chinese by returning to the neoliberal orthodoxy on trade if our allies go along with the gag:

The U.S. and China are engaged in a strategic competition that will determine the shape of global politics this century. But when it comes to trade, a critical dimension of that competition, America is ceding the field.

In recent years, the U.S. has imposed unilateral tariffs and trade barriers on allies and adversaries alike. Controls on the trade of technology, while important for national security, have been unnecessarily broad and often unilateral. The U.S. withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). And it has, through a mixture of negligence and obstruction, hobbled the World Trade Organization. These actions undermined America’s leadership of the global trade system, to the dismay of our allies and partners and to the detriment of our firms and workers.

At the same time, China has expanded its trade footprint. Already the world’s largest exporter, China is rapidly displacing the U.S. as the largest trade partner for much of the world. Ninety countries traded twice as much with China as with America in 2018. Last year China surpassed the U.S. as the largest recipient of foreign direct investment.

and

Our work must start at home. America’s economic prosperity and the effectiveness of our political system and global leadership are rooted in domestic economic strength. We need an economic recovery program that invests in core technologies such as telecommunications and advanced computing, while also attracting the best minds from around the world to foster innovation. And as the economy recovers, we need a plan to defuse our national debt bomb over time.

China isn’t going to give America the courtesy of waiting. If the Biden administration wants to compete seriously and fulfill its promise of fashioning a “middle-class foreign policy,” it will be essential for Mr. Biden to craft a broad trade agenda that ensures U.S. workers aren’t cut off from some of the fastest-growing markets in the world.

I would submit two realities to Mr. Paulson. The first is that we cannot resume our position of economic strength unless we produce a lot more of what we consume than is presently the case and that is impeded by China’s illegal subsidization of its state-owned enterprises. Why buy an iPhone or a pair of socks made in the U. S. when you can buy those products for less money when they’re made in China?

The second is this. We have no allies. We have a few clients, e.g. Israel but not a single ally other than on paper. Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, etc. are all pursuing their own national interests and right now those national interests rely on China. And China is controlling the market for rare earths, steel, consumer electronic goods, and many, many other sectors. What does he plan to do about that?

What the U. S. needs to do is to re-industrialize. We foolishly threw that economy away twenty years ago. And neoliberalism has no solution for it.