This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Michael de Adder (via Digby):
  
• The government is going to beat coronavirus using modern monetary theory — Richard Murphy: Last night Gary Gibbon of Channel 4 News reported that the Coronavirus Emergency Bill included an increase in the UK government contingency fund for unexpected expenditure from just over £10 billion a year to more than £260 billion in the coming year. This morning I admit that I can find no reference to this in the media, or in the draft Bill itself, but I have a very strong suspicion that the figure was reported with good reason. Whether precisely correct or not, what this additional provision demonstrates is three things. The first is that additional government expenditure happens because the government decrees that it should. Second, the government can decree this without first having raised tax revenue to ensure that the expenditure is funded. And, third, the government can also do this without the prior consent of bond markets: there was no guarantee or underwriting from them for this action.
• What Trump's coronavirus briefings are really about — Windsor Mann in the Week: He prefers to discuss things that have nothing to do with the pandemic, such as his "very popular" wife and "Sleepy Joe Biden." While he has not called for the coronavirus to be locked up, he said, "We're building a wall." His logorrhea occasionally takes him into the unchartered territories of pseudo-empathy and complete sentences, as when he said, "Life is fragile" and "The whole concept of death is terrible." Also terrible is the credit Trump isn't getting. More than anything, he wants to be commended. On Sunday, he complained that "nobody said thank you" after he donated part of his presidential salary to fighting the coronavirus. He donated $100,000, which is $30,000 less than what he spent on silencing a porn star.
• As Bad As the COVID-19 Crisis Is Now, Life Will Eventually Go Back to Being Normal-Bad Again — Matthew Brian Cohen at McSweeny's Internet Tendency: While we might make coronavirus testing, and possibly even treatment, free of charge, rest assured, once this blows over, you will continue to go into debt for any other health issue. Nothing can stop the American way of life, not even a pandemic. We will not let this virus prevent our insurance companies from gouging us for basic services the way our Founding Fathers intended. We will not let COVID-19 change who we are — cruel, capitalist, and dog eat dog. Look, Americans are some of the toughest people in the world. We’ve been through a hell of a lot as a country – slavery, civil and world wars, recession after recession after recession, and we courageously ignored the lessons of all of them. I’m confident we can get through this epidemic without losing sight of the systemic problems that got us into this mess in the first place.
• Matt Wuerker:
  
• Supply chains: a neoliberal crisis — Alistair Cartwright in Counterfire: The Atlantic magazine has highlighted how today’s ‘just-in-time’ distribution methods, which only keep 15-30 days worth of products in stock, have exacerbated the problem. The supplies manager at The Medical University of South Carolina put it like this: “I guess we’ve done a good enough job within the health-care supply chain of getting pricing down to the point that the vendors don’t have a lot of extra margin or slack to play with.” […] The more health is treated as a commodity, the more the production and distribution of essential medical equipment become keyed to the fluctuations of the market. One of neoliberalism’s favourite catchphrases even finds its way into an official NHS emergency response framework: ‘just in time’ contracts with suppliers will be activated in the event of a pandemic.
• Anti-Corbyn Labour officials worked to lose general election to oust leader, leaked dossier finds — Jon Stone at the Independent: Tactics by anti-Corbyn staff evidenced in the report include channelling resources to candidates associated with the right wing of the party, refusing to share information with the leader’s office, and “coming into the office and doing nothing for a few months” during the election campaign. The report says hostile staff created a chat so they could pretend to work while actually speaking to each other, with one participant stating that “tap tap tapping away will make us look v busy”. An election night chat log shows that 45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that Labour had overturned the Conservative majority, one senior official said the result was the “opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years”, describing themselves and their allies as “silent and grey-faced” and in need of counselling.
• Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic and U.S. Response — Ryan Goodman and Danielle Schulkin at Just Security: In our view, the timeline is clear: Like previous administrations, the Trump administration knew for years that a pandemic of this gravity was possible and imminently plausible. Several Trump administration officials raised strong concerns prior to the emergence of COVID-19 and raised alarms once the virus appeared within the United States. While some measures were put in place to prepare the United States for pandemic readiness, many more were dismantled since 2017. In response to COVID-19, the United States was slow to act at a time when each day of inaction mattered most–in terms of both the eventual public health harms as well as the severe economic costs. The President and some of his closest senior officials also disseminated misinformation that left the public less safe and more vulnerable to discounting the severity of the pandemic.
• Joe Biden says he ‘doesn’t have enough information’ on Iran to have a view. How odd – he negotiated the nuclear deal — Robert Fisk in the Independent: A few days ago, Bernie Sanders announced that US sanctions should not be contributing to Iran’s “humanitarian disaster” and that its economic war against Tehran should, at least temporarily, during the coronavirus crisis, be lifted. So what did Joe think about that? Well, the wordsmith frontrunner responded with this imperishable statement: “I don’t have enough information about the situation in Iran right now.” Now this was very odd. Was not Biden the vice president under the Obama administration that actually negotiated the Iran nuclear accord – and which Donald Trump tore up in 2018? Even weirder was Biden’s continuing blather on the subject. “There’s a lot of speculation from my foreign policy team that they’re [sic] in real trouble and they’re [sic] lying. But I would need more information to make that judgement. I don’t have the national security [sic] information available.” Well, he could have fooled me. Clearly Biden isn’t planning to help the Iranians, although – like a lot of voters – I’m not quite clear whom he’s accusing of lying. Does he think the Iranians are telling fibs? Or the Trump administration? Since the Iranians initially kept quiet about shooting down a Ukrainian airliner and may well have dissembled about the start of the coronavirus – and then Trump originally denied that the coronavirus even existed – we can safely conclude that both Iran and Trump lie through their teeth. So I guess it doesn’t matter what Biden meant. Which is one of his problems.
• Provenance unknown, via Bruce Sterling:
  
• The coronavirus response calls into question the future of super — Warwick Smith in the Conversation: The trouble with money is most people are so busy looking at it they are blind to what’s going on in the real economy - by which I mean the production and distribution of goods and services. […] If Australia as a whole consumes fewer goods and services in one year, it is likely to reduce rather than increase its future wealth because it is fully utilised labour and capital that drives investment and productivity. That’s what lies at the core of misunderstandings about the superannuation system. Foreign investment aside, it can’t allow an entire society to save for the future to support itself in retirement.
• What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage — Will Oremus in Medium: In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports. […] If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused. […] Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.