PANIC vs. PANDEMIC: DOING THE HARD MATH

We all know that hard decisions require hard trade-offs. Believe it or not, I take Trump at his word that he chose to downplay the deadly danger of the coronavirus to the American people because he didn't want to create "a panic" as he told Bob Woodward in taped interviews for Woodward's new book "Rage." So, what were those trade-offs?

As a philosopher, I might frame the question along these lines: What was the utilitarian calculation that led him to call the virus a Democratic hoax, to claim it was no worse than the flu, to encourage his followers to flout and then protest mask ordinances and business closures, to claim over and over again that the virus would simply disappear on its own as if by magic, to blame the states's governors (who did not have the same information he bragged to Woodward he had) for their failure to handle the pandemic?

Or to put it another way: What countervailing value compelled this administration to try to wait out the ravages of this pandemic in anticipation of a vaccine (and gaslight the American public about when it will be widely available)?

Again: Why, to this day, is there still no national policy to deal with the inevitable second wave that will strike here before a vaccine is widely available?

These are the sorts of hard questions a competent leader and administration is required to make in deciding policy questions. I get it.

So, what was the trade-off that fueled Trump and his administration's decision to downplay the deadly seriousness of the virus to the American public? What was the specific panic they wanted to avoid?

Trump's economic advisors Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow and Steven Mnuchin, among others, made it abundantly clear that the administration's main concern was stock market values. The Trump administration's principal measure of its economic success has been the rising stock market. Trump himself boasted the other day about the record highs in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as evidence of what a good job he is doing. Understandably, they did not want to see a stock market panic a la 2008.

So, let's look at the numbers on both sides of the trade-off equation. Currently, the U.S. has roughly a quarter of the world's deaths (~195,000) even though we only make up about 4% of the world's population. Worldwide deaths stand at ~905,000. So, doing back-of-the-envelope math, if Trump had acted responsibly and truthfully, not downplayed the severity of the threat, and the U.S. had performed on par with the averages of other countries in the world (not better, just average), we should be at ~36,000 deaths (4% of 905,000). That's ~160,000 additional deaths due to Trump's neglect and public lies about the deadly severity and spread of the virus.

So the question we need to ask is how many points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were salvaged by this policy? And how many lives were sacrificed in trade-off for each point on the Dow?

Unfortunately, I can't do the second part of the calculation because I don't have access to the numbers Navarro, Kudlow, Mnuchin, Trump, Pence, et al., had. I don't know what their projections of a market "panic" looked like. How many points did they believe it would fall if Trump did not downplay the threat of the pandemic? So, as I write this, I cannot tell you how many American lives per Dow point they gamed out in their scenarios. But I do believe this is the question that needs to be asked. FOIA, e.g., anyone?

One last point. If they did not make the good faith effort to do these utilitarian calculations in determining their policy response to the deadly spread of the virus, then frankly they did not do their job. They are incompetent, and their response has been in bad faith. The total good from the number of Dow points saved should outweigh the total suffering caused by the stack of dead American bodies and shuttered businesses or Trump's policy is an abject failure.

Difficult policy decisions demand tough, realistic calculations. We hired Trump to do the hard work of governing, and we need to be assured he didn't slough off this decision in the false hope the pandemic would simply peter out because he was afraid it would upset his re-election campaign strategy.

More Plague Thoughts — More Political This Time

I posted the following thread on Twitter a couple of days ago.

Ok. Hold onto your collective hats. It’s time for some (conspiracy) game theory. In a very memorable phrase, Trump’s campaign manager Parscale recently declared that his ‘Death Star’ campaign was about to launch on all platforms. 1/10

The next day, a massive disinformation conspiracy theory video appears on Facebook filled with a mixture of misinformation, disinformation, and partial or slanted truth-or truthiness. Pl@ndemic. Millions of instantaneous views & shares. 2/10

This is a rather obvious piece of propaganda intended to confuse people, poison the dialogue, and create and play on people’s fear and doubt about the authority of using a scientific approach to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. 3/10

It was shocking how fast it “went viral.” And of course there was further PR complaining about how the media is attempting to squelch the truth. Which only propagated it more. But that’s not all. 4/10

Today it was announced that Trump’s valet tested positive for coronavirus, and in a memorable phrase Trump was lava level angry. It was this phrasing that jumped out at me. It sounds contrived. What does it matter what Trump is feeling? 5/10

Shouldn’t we be concerned about what he’s NOT been doing to protect the country? This feels like another distraction tactic to take the heat off of him for his negligence and reckless indifference and utter incompetence in dealing with this problem. 6/10

Now the speculation: Let’s say it’s not true, or only partially true—the valet has a common cold. But what if the campaign sequesters Trump for a couple weeks or so (a la Kim Jong-Un)? 7/10

Rumors spread that Trump has the virus. Everybody wants to know. Does he have it? Is he going to die? Nobody says anything. Then all of a sudden, he reappears (again like Kim). And the whisper campaign begins about how he beat the invisible enemy. 8/10

He’s a superman. He’s a God. It’s a miracle. God wants him to rule four more years, otherwise a lesser man would have succumbed. It’s campaign gold, I tell ya. 9/10

So, is this another move in the Death Star campaign. I wouldn’t put it past them. Watch this space! 10/10

PS. Yes, I’ m cynical, but not half as cyncical as this Trump campaign. Also a reminder: I craft narratives (create fiction) daily.

The Personal Is the Political

Not one given to overly personal revelations here, nor to magical thinking—after all, I'm a lawyer, a rationalist philosopher—yet I find myself compelled to write this post. Please indulge or ignore, as you will.

On November 9, 2016, I made a private vow: The day the current occupant of the White House was "elected" I shaved my head and stopped trimming my beard. I promised not to let my hair grow back or to shave until Drumpf was out of office whether through electoral defeat or impeachment or coup or assassination. It was my own personal performative, prophetic (you know: mourning, sackcloth and ashes kind of thing—I'm also an erstwhile theologian) form of protest.

I had many reasons for this. I lived in New York during the '80s and '90s and knew what a damaged, mobbed-up con man this person was. I'd seen first hand his assaults on truth and decency, his greed, his amorality, his lust for acclaim and adulation, his narcissism. His evil. I also recognized how charismatic and what a genius at PR (i.e., propaganda) he was (see my pre-2016 election analyses here). I actually knew lawyers who'd represented him—in smaller, peripheral matters. The things they said...

Over the gentle protestations of wife Wisdoc, I kept my vow until Tuesday of last week. Because, you see, my only, my Dearest Darling Daughter (known in these parts as Wisdaughter) got married this weekend, and she wanted me to look presentable (and less like a bald Unabomber) for the photographs. I protested, saying that fifty years from now—long after I'm dead and forgotten—she can boast to her own kids and grandkids about her father's principles and integrity when she shows them the pictures. But she and her mother prevailed—to an extent.

I compromised my personal principles—out of love, mind you. I went to the family's long-time barber and hair dresser and had him trim my beard, shape it up. I did not have time to grow my (less than full) head of hair back.

And here's where we get to the magical thinking part. No sooner did I trim up my protest beard than the Speaker of the House of Representatives decided to submit a formal vote of impeachment to Congress. So, you tell me, which way did the causality run? Post hoc propter hoc? Mere prediction? Serendipity? Or, did my jumping the gun jeopardize any chance of humiliating and shaming this monster by running him out of office and forever blocking his spawn from public office? None of the above?

That being said, the question inevitably rises: should I take off the whole beard and start growing my sparse head of hair forthwith?

What Is All This Racket? R.I.C.O.

It's time to learn a new thing. I suspect this thing is going to loom large in the public arena in the near future. What is this thing, you ask? It's called RICO.

RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It is a federal law—meaning that it governs the whole country and not just one state—and can be found in the U.S. Code at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-1968.

Essentially, what RICO does is criminalize organized crime. It gives federal prosecutors—U.S. Attorneys in the various federal districts and the Dept. of Justice—a tool to use against criminal organizations such as the mafia and gangs and cartels.

What is 'Racketeering'? you might ask. Racketeering includes a broad array of criminal activities including, but not limited to: murder, rape, kidnapping, gambling, prostitution, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, blackmail, fraud, obstruction of law enforcement or justice, abuses of the legal system (for example, to retaliate against whistleblowers), abuse of political office, witness tampering, forgery, and human or drug trafficking.

But if someone gets caught, say, extorting protection payments from a local bakery, why not simply prosecute them for that crime in the local court system? That's a good question. RICO provides at least two additional measures to deal with this sort of crime. First, the low-level hoods who are threatening the baker's livelihood might not be acting on their own. They might be reporting and funneling money up the chain to lieutenants who report to their captains who report to their bosses and so on as part of a larger organization or enterprise. RICO allows prosecutors to go after the upper level bosses who may, in the immortal words of Godfather 2, have "a lot of buffers" to protect them. It also allows them to break up these organizations.

Second, RICO makes this enterprise a FEDERAL crime. Many times, local police and prosecutors may not have either the resources or the political will to challenge a criminal organization. For example, to continue the Godfather analogy, the bosses may have local judges and police and politicians "in their pockets," making state or local prosecutions difficult, if not impossible.

RICO goes after the criminal organization or enterprise. To bring a criminal RICO case, a prosecutor must allege that defendants conducted or participated in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. This has been held to include four distinct elements: 1) The existence of an enterprise or an organization whose actions impact interstate commerce; 2) The defendants were employed by or otherwise associated with this enterprise; 3) The defendants participated, either directly or indirectly, in the conduct of the affairs of the enterprise; and 4) The defendants engaged in a "pattern" of racketeering activity (see above), that is to say at least two enumerated racketeering acts.

Remember: we're talking about criminal RICO here. There is also what's called civil RICO, a case that can be brought by victims of the racketeer. Donald J. Trump settled charges of civil RICO for $25 million dollars in the case of Trump University in 2016.

One of the big advantages of criminal RICO is its severe, some would say draconian, penalties. If found guilty of racketeering, a defendant faces fines up to $25,000 and incarceration of up to 20 years for EACH count. Not only that, a convicted racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through this pattern of racketeering activity. Victims of racketeering activity are entitled to treble damages—that is to say, damages three times the actual amount of proven actual damage.

To give you an idea of what sort of enterprises have been charged under RICO, Wikipedia lists a number of famous cases: Hells Angels, Catholic dioceses, the Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry, Key West Police Dept., Michael Milken, Major League Baseball, Pro-Life activists, LAPD, Al Qaeda, Mohawk Industries, the Latin Kings, Gambino crime family, Lucchese crime family, the Chicago Outfit, Pennsylvania state judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella, lawyer Scott W. Rothstein, AccessHealthSource, FIFA, and Connecticut Senator Len Fasano. There are many others.

As I say, expect to hear a lot more about RICO in the coming weeks and months. Watch for it.

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