Bad Morning
April 23, 2020
I should, but no, I have decided not to preface this with an acknowledgment of all I am grateful for, my comfortable situation here at home, reliable WIFI, and a husband who only comes downstairs from our son’s former bedroom and B’s current office for lunch. Yesterday morning was not a good one.
Without offering anything in the way of a trigger warning, the April 20, 2020 issue of The New Yorker contained two articles which upended my day and pitched me into more fevered perseverating about the collapse of our world as we know it. Stop right here if power mongering, greed and profiteering during times of misery raises your blood pressure.
The first article: “The Price of a Pandemic: pain and profit on Wall Street” by Nick Paumgarten
Excerpt:
“He [an investor who calls himself the Australian] quickly put some money to work. He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share. He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
“You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have, “ he said over the phone.”
I know, I know, there is a long history of seizing opportunities when they present themselves, and this guy called the Australian hadn’t received special NSA briefings about the encroaching pandemic like some of our members of congress who have since gone on to make killings of their own. I know it’s a rigged game. But still. For the first time, it has hit me that my dream of the future, having a little room in a moderately priced assisted living facility, where they make a point of freshly brewing coffee each morning and inviting the local high school kids in for jazz band concerts, has always been tenuous at best.
worth a fortune
The second article: “Enabler-in-Chief: Mitch McConnell’s refusal to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever” by Jane Mayer
Excerpts:
“Many have regarded McConnell’s support for Trump as a stroke of cynical political genius.”
“Yet, as COVID-19 decimates the economy and kills Americans across the nation, McConnell’s alliance with Trump is looking riskier. Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him. He even went so far as to prohibit witnesses at the impeachment trial, thus guaranteeing that the President would remain in office.”
“In a forthcoming book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stuart Stevens [a longtime Republican political consultant] writes that, in accommodating Trump and his base, McConnell and other Republicans went along as Party leaders dismantled the country’s safety net and ignored experts of all kinds, including scientists. “Mitch is kidding himself if he thinks he’ll be remembered for anything other than Trump,” he said. “He will be remembered as the Trump facilitator.”
I am not a leader, but I try to be a good follower of good leaders. I worked as a high school teacher in a building that had the shining benefit of being led by a man decidedly equipped to lead. He brought out the best in his teachers and students. He led by personal example. He never blamed others and was quick to praise the good work and ideas of others. When he retired, the name of the street leading into the school was named for him, Dave Paddock Way. We are hungry for leaders who bring out our better angels. We need them now. I refuse to believe it’s too late.
besties