Bits ‘n’ Pieces: December 3, 2020

By Lorraine H. Marie
Reader Columnist

East, west or beyond, sooner or later events elsewhere may have a local impact. A recent sampling:

Last year’s four-day work week experiment in Japan found that worker productivity was boosted 40%. In the U.S. the Mom Project is urging U.S. corporations to follow Japan’s lead.

Nasty stuff: President Donald Trump campaign attorney, Joseph DiGenova, has said Chris Krebs should be “drawn and quartered” and “shot” for disagreeing with the president. Krebs was the director of cybersecurity until Trump dismissed him for saying the recent election was “the most secure in history.” Krebs was responding to Trump’s allegations of rampant voter fraud; he has indicated he is ready to take legal action against DiGenova.

The Atlantic commented on President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet and senior staff picks, and played with Trump’s accusation that Biden was “the most boring human being I’ve ever seen.” They noted that while Biden’s choices may be “boring,” “if you shook them awake and appointed them in the middle of the night at any time in the last decade, [they] could have reported to their new jobs and started work competently by dawn.”

Biden has announced plans to have Janet Yellen, a labor economist and monetary policy expert, head the Treasury Department. She chaired the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018 and was head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton. She wins praise from left and right: former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn tweeted that she is “an excellent choice … a steady hand.”

A recent Rand Study showed that if income distribution were the same as it was in the three decades after WWII, today’s “bottom” 90% would be far better off: those earning $35,000 would instead be earning $61,000, and a college-educated person earning $72,000 today would instead earn $120,000. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich commented that the downward trend is not from “natural causes,” but rather, stems from slackened antitrust laws, corporate union busting, bailouts of Wall Street and widened tax loopholes.

The daily death toll from COVID-19 is now equal to 9/11 every three days, but Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell sent his colleagues home for a break without passing any COVID-19 relief bill. The House passed such a bill in May, but McConnell has ignored it. Inequality Media says that when the bill passed March 27 there were 18,093 new cases that day; now there are more than 150,000 new cases daily. Last week 125 economists wrote an open letter urging a COVID-19 relief package that would serve until a vaccine is ready to have an impact, Newsweek reported.

The havoc caused by COVID-19 could change before Christmas, if we followed the lead of Slovakia: That country is utilizing a massive antigen-testing program, with notably successful results, TIME reported. The paper strip test is similar to a pregnancy test but uses a nasal swab sample. It’s inexpensive, easy to manufacture, shows results within minutes, and can be done at home. If half of all U.S. citizens partook, then knowledge that they are either safe that day, or need to quarantine, would buy valuable time and save untold lives before a vaccine is ready for widespread use. If the government footed the bill, the cost would be $5 billion (as compared to the $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal from the House). 

Blast from the past: It’s called “American democracy’s design flaw,” and it’s just fine if it works for your party, points out David Daley, author of Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. In the past eight elections Democrats won seven of eight of the popular presidential votes (including Biden), but that did not always put them into the White House. It was the Electoral College that blocked the people’s will, with Republicans gaining the White House twice, even with fewer votes, since 2000.The explanation: rural areas skew the vote. For example, Wyoming’s electoral vote counts for four times the weight of a California electoral vote. A more recent “design flaw” was the Supreme Court’s declaration that the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed to protect minority voters (not all Supreme Court justices agreed), which opened the doors for voter suppression efforts in 25 states, such as in Texas, where the governor limited ballot drop boxes to one per county. Daley writes that more than 50 million Americans live where one or both chambers of their state legislature are controlled by Republicans, despite Democrats winning more votes in 2018.