This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Wall Street Titans Finance Democratic Primary Challenger to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — Lee Fang at the Intercept: Wall Street titans are financing a direct challenge to firebrand progressive lawmaker Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the New York primary on June 23. Disclosures show that over four dozen finance industry professionals, including several prominent private equity executives and investment bankers, made early donations to Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC contributor who is challenging Ocasio-Cortez. Caruso-Cabrera was a registered Republican until a few years ago and authored a 2010 book advocating for several conservative positions, including an end to Medicare and Social Security, which she called “pyramid schemes.”
• Trump’s Lost Months Are Killing Us. Here’s How to Make Them Politically Fatal for Him. — Jonathan Alter in the Daily Beast: What might affect the outcome is a short, tight, resonant meme, a dramatic phrase that crystallizes and immortalizes the historic moment—the way John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World did after the Russian Revolution. The phrase must somehow capture all the squandered time and missed opportunities without frontally attacking Trump in ways that just push people back into their partisan corners. The headline on a superb Boston Globe editorial—“Trump Has Blood on His Hands”—is plenty true, but too blunt an instrument to win an election. Instead we must tar Trump with his lack of preparedness the way “the emails” were stuck to Hillary Clinton in 2016, “the hostages” to Jimmy Carter in 1980, “the pardon” to Gerald Ford in 1976, and “Hoovervilles” to Herbert Hoover in 1932.
• Vector in Chief — Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books: In May 1998 he discussed with the radio host Howard Stern the threat of sexually transmitted diseases to promiscuous heterosexual men. Trump implied that he did not use condoms, but gloried in the consequent risks: “They say that more people were killed by women in this act than killed in Vietnam, OK?” As he saw it, he showed reckless valor in bed, winning, he said, “the Congressional Medal of Honor, in actuality.” In this exchange, both Trump and Stern managed to avoid any mention of the real threat, the last great viral epidemic to sweep through the US—HIV/ AIDS. Neither seemed even to imagine the possibility that they themselves might be carriers of disease who could infect the women they slept with. (In this misogynistic discourse, men are “killed by women,” not vice versa.) But what makes this dialogue worth revisiting in the light of Covid-19 is Trump’s valorization of biological risk. Superior men flaunt it. They award themselves imaginary medals for doing so. Why? Because they enjoy the invulnerability bestowed by nature and heredity on life’s winners. Condoms, like social distancing and restaurant closures, are restrictions on freedom that might keep others (women, gay men) alive—but to obey such restrictions would be to accept that one is on the same level as these losers. The embrace of risk is as much the badge of heterosexual alpha maleness as it is of American free market capitalism.
• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
  
• Could Covid-19 vanquish neoliberalism? — Thomas Fazi in UnHerd: As Lord Turner, the former head of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, recently said: “I do think the time is right for monetary finance. There would be a clarity of assuring people that there is no limit on the money available.” And there you have it, the austerity lie exposed: there has never been a lack of money for education, healthcare, infrastructure, welfare and other public services. All the pain, suffering and misery imposed on millions of people as a result of austerity was entirely a political choice. All the cries of “How are you going to pay for that?” were simply a way to maintain the deeply unequal relations of power in our societies. To dramatically restrict our ability to imagine economic and political alternatives.
• The only outcome of this crisis is going to be recession – and the government has to begin talking about that fact and how it will manage it very soon — Richard Murphy: Once we have survived the initial onslaught of a crisis, which the end of lockdown will represent to many people, we then, quite rationally move to a position of trying to protect ourselves from the next attack. Economically this means that we save. Many of those who found themselves exposed to considerable financial risk as a consequence of what has happened, and have a continuing income, will not suddenly begin to spend again: instead they will build reserves to ensure that their chance of surviving another downturn is improved. I am not in any way condemning anybody who saves in this way: it is an entirely personally logical thing to do. But, as Keynes pointed out, whatever might be logical individually does not necessarily represent the best course of action for society as a whole. And savings always withdraw money from the economy. The consequence is that the money in question is not used to purchase new goods and services. This, then, exacerbates any downtown that we will suffer as a result of unemployment and the loss of capacity within the economy, and produce an increasing downward spiral potential economic difficulty. Keynes great contribution to economics was to suggest that the only way in which such a downward spiral can be broken is by government intervention. By necessity, government has to spend to stimulate demand in such a situation. Nothing else can begin to reflate the economy when this happens, excepting war.
• Lazy Cosplay Dads — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Progressives Decide: Dignity and Freedom, or Voting for Biden — Ted Rall: Given the history of the last four or five decades, it’s hard to describe the relationship between progressive voters and the corporate leadership of the Democratic Party as anything better than abusive. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, progressives have been expected to donate money and cast votes for candidates who repeatedly broke their promises to fight for the poor and working class and, as time passed, felt so confident that they could get away with acting like jerks that they didn’t even have to bother to promise anything at all beyond not being Republicans—even though often they voted along with the GOP and signed their ideas into law. 2016 marked the first time that progressives stood up for themselves and demanded a place at the table, in the form of Bernie Sanders. Like any typical abuser, the DNC got angry at their victims, blaming progressives when their decision to cheat Sanders out of the nomination in favor of Hillary Clinton caused a catastrophic defeat to Donald Trump. Now it has happened again.
• Brendan Loper: