This week, I have been mostly reading:

• We need a radically different model to tackle the COVID-19 crisis — James K. Galbraith in DefendDemocracy.Press: To move forward, first of all, debts incurred before and during the pandemic will have to be written down. The energy sector and transport sectors will have to be rebuilt, based far more on renewables and sources other than oil. A large share of basic industries – especially in the health sector – will have to be repatriated so that basic sufficiency exists in this country. Millions of people will be needed to monitor and support public health; jobs for them must be organized and funded by the government. State and local governments will have to be federally-funded, in substantial part, to provide basic public services. New and sustainable housing must be built, in new community structures. High speed broadband must be provided to all. A new financing model – cooperative, with public support – will be required to re-establish small businesses. Local, decentralized cultural and sporting venues will have to replace mass-based experiences; these too will require cooperative structures and public support. In short, the only way out, remotely acceptable to the population at large, will require a comprehensive restructuring of the economy on a cooperative foundation, with the government stepping up to guaranteed funding, employment, and public investments.
• I Like My Cops Like I Like My Surgeons: Cautious, and Not Looking to Kill Me — Pardis Parker in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Just by having someone who waits outside of the home with a photograph of the suspect, for example, and who’s responsible for comparing the person in the home to the person in the photo, and who, if the two don’t match with 100% certainty, would be responsible for saying something on the order of, “The person who lives here is 7-feet tall with three arms, but the person in the photo is 2-feet tall with four legs. Weird. It’s almost as if they’re entirely different people. Perhaps we should take a beat to double-check everything before proceeding.” Or maybe they could have someone responsible for cross-referencing the address of the raid with the address of the suspect? “Is this 123 Drug Dealer Lane, where the suspect lives? It’s not? It’s 456 Paramedic Avenue, where we believe the suspect might be receiving mail? So we’re here for reasons that are… postal? In plain clothes instead of uniforms? At 1 AM? With a no-knock warrant? And, like, a ton of guns? Seems weird, doesn’t it? I mean, at the very least it doesn’t seem not weird. Maybe we should double-check everything before proceeding.”
• So Your Landlord Is Trying to Evict You — Ted Rall:
  
• Donald Trump’s Presidency Is a Saturday Night Massacre That Never Ends — Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone: David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor and historian, says SDNY prosecutor Geoffrey Berman’s removal — first announced on a Friday night, with no warning to Berman — reminded him of one of the Justice Department’s darkest days during Richard Nixon’s presidency. On the night of October 20, 1973, President Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Bill Ruckelshaus in what was dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre. To this day, Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre remains one of the most searing examples of political interference at the Justice Department. Greenberg, author of the book Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, says he traces the pattern of worrying decisions inside the Trump-era Justice Department back to the firing of former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey in early 2017. The pattern of firings and suspicious interference by the Trump-era DOJ, he says, is “clearly in line with Nixonian behavior and then some.” “In a normal political environment, a week’s worth of Saturday Night Massacres would lead to [Trump’s] impeachment and probably removal,” Greenberg says. “But we have such dysfunctional polarization, primarily the unwillingness of Republicans to step up and see Trump for what he is, that we’re not in a normal political environment anymore.”
• New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Lied” — Mickey McCauley at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: “The president once again found himself galloping ahead of reality’s leisurely pace.” “The president dabbled anew in the shallow pond of misrepresentation, filling his beak with succulent morsels hidden among the reeds.” “The president’s most recent encounter with the specter of honesty caught him wrong-footed.”
• In the interests of the health of its customers, McDonald’s has announced it will close all of its stores permanently — The Shovel: In recent weeks McDonalds has implemented a range of new processes to improve hygiene, such as the crew member placing the bag of food on the counter for the customer to pick up, rather than directly handing it over. But analysis has shown that removing the bag of food from the process altogether improved the health outcome for the customer even further.
• Ben Smith’s NYT Critique of Ronan Farrow Describes a Toxic, Corrosive, and Still-Vibrant Trump-Era Pathology: “Resistance Journalism” — Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: In March of last year, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi — writing under the headline “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD” — compared the prevailing media climate since 2016 to that which prevailed in 2002 and 2003 regarding the invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror: little to no dissent permitted, skeptics of media-endorsed orthodoxies shunned and excluded, and worst of all, the very journalists who were most wrong in peddling false conspiracy theories were exactly those who ended up most rewarded on the ground that even though they spread falsehoods, they did so for the right cause. Under that warped rubric — in which spreading falsehoods is commendable as long as it was done to harm the evildoers — the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most damaging endorsers of false conspiracy theories about Iraq, rose to become editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, while two of the most deceitful Bush-era neocons, Bush/Cheney speechwriter David Frum and supreme propagandist Bill Kristol, have reprised their role as leading propagandists and conspiracy theorists — only this time aimed against the GOP president instead of on his behalf — and thus have become beloved liberal media icons. The communications director for both the Bush/Cheney campaign and its White House, Nicole Wallace, is one of the most popular liberal cable hosts from her MSNBC perch.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller: