WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Wednesday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes.
- So much for a Wednesday. Noise perhaps. Confusion. Ominous sometimes, repetitious often and sadly, no longer surprising. Hardly news but too important to be ignored. Beginning with President Trump, in his evening news conference, flatly refusing to say he’ll accept a “peaceful” transition after the election, more definitively than ever. “We’re going to have to see what happens.” The rest of the quotes are otherwise enshrined, like so much else, in the day’s headline tweets on the @macenewsmacro account, easily dialed back. Trump said the announcement by his health experts that vaccine candidates will be thoroughly reviewed perhaps for weeks before being ultimately approved, he said, may or may not be approved by the White House. “I think that was a political move more than anything else.”
- Or how about, at the same briefing, Trump’s newly adopted virus expert Scott Atlas, saying CDC chief Robert Redfield “misstated something there,” in other words was wrong when he testified earlier in the day that 90% of Americans are still vulnerable to the virus. “No, it is not 90%,” Atlas said. This is only a few days after Trump himself rebutted Redfield. Who to believe? Atlas was asked. “I’m giving you the best information.” Again answer by answer, the twitter headlines captured the stridently declared contradictions. If the aim is to muddy the waters and raise questions about who to believe, the White House messaging is succeeding. Atlas also said Deborah Birx, who has become largely invisible to the public, has denied the story about how she’s considering leaving the Corona Virus Task Force.
- After President Trump cut the questions short, saying he had to take a telephone call, not only Atlas but White House economic policy coordinator Larry Kudlow came to the podium, armed with charts backing up his main message, that it’s wrong to say only the wealthy benefited from the pre-pandemic economy. One reporter responded he didn’t need a history lesson. What’s the situation now? Kudlow said he didn’t know. The Census Bureau has not come up with the data yet.As frequently reported, income inequality has soared, much exacerbated by the pandemic.
- On Capitol Hill, where Redfield was accompanied by the expert’s expert Tony Fauci, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and the Public Health Service’s Adm. Brett Giroir, questions from the House Select Subcommittee overseeing the virus response. The usual questions and answers except suddenly fireworks, dramatic enough to be replayed through the rest of the day. Captured in a @macenewsmacro tweet as it played out, Fauci struck back at Sen. Rand Paul’s questioning of the value of government directed lockdowns and mask directives. “I challenge that,” Fauci said as Paul questioned the science yet again. Still, the net aftertaste of the entire day was a conflicted bitterness reflecting great forces at odds – the White House publicly humiliating Redfield yet again, the president repeating how we’re “turning the bend” in defeating the virus, Prof. Atlas saying cases (up more than 53,000 Tuesday) and fatalities are not the important metrics to watch as the mortality clock ticked higher, more than 201,000 dead, as always, the worst in the world. The Data Safety Monitoring Board will determine the launch of the vaccine, maybe as soon as late next month, Atlas said. Johnson & Johnson became the fourth pharma firm to enter a virus candidate Phase 3 trial.
- Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell had his second turn before a congressional committee this week, breaking no new ground but slightly more forceful in insisting the virus determines the pace of reopening of the economy, that school reopenings have to be done safely, and resisting the attempts by some Republicans to force from him a quote that supports the president’s virus narratives. Powell and Treasury’s Stephen Mnuchin go before Senate Banking Thursday. On what many hope to be a next virus aid legislative package, again no real urgency.
- The fates threw something else in the American cauldron, the Breonna Taylor decision from Kentucky’s black attorney general who spoke at the Republican National Convention. President Trump said the “really brilliant” AG’s decision was excellent, as was the governor’s decision to take the precaution of calling in the National Guard. Louisville’s nighttime curfew began a tense overnight, with heightened tensions also in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and some other places across the country. The six bullets that hit Taylor were justified and legal, the AG said. One of the three officers executing a no-knock warrant should not have fired into adjacent apartments, the grand jury found. The FBI is still investigating.
- PBS’s “Hacking Your Mind” special Wednesday night illustrated how the “torrent of outrage” from social media sources has persuaded so many they are right, and those other people are not only wrong but evil. Learning how to push the divisiveness has become this era’s cottage industry, exploiting how easy it is to rub raw the wedge-issue conflicts, triggering the “autopilot bias,” often synthetic and artificial, often composed on purpose by the legion of mind hackers, the commercial perpetrators of cognitive illusion. Rip apart the social fabric for fun and profit. Who knew hyper moralism was a product?
- Upcoming economic statistics include the Labor Department’s weekly assemblage of state reports on fresh unemployment benefit claims at 8:30a ET. The Senate Banking Committee hearing of Fed Chair Powell’s testimony begins at 10a.
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