"Never let a crisis go to waste"

Rahm Emanuel, whom This Week Has brought in as a counter to Chris Christie,  now that the Pandemic requires broadcasting from home, quoted this old bromide last week on the show.

On Emmanuel, he looks pathetic next to Christie. Christie had started off on the show as a Trump apologist but he no longer really serves in that role and for some reason, warriness perhaps, he takes a really measured tone in his debates with Emmanuel.  Emmanuel, in contrast, is bucking for this network's Chuck Todd, so while This Week is infinitely better than Todd's declined Meet The Press, Emmanuel is a detraction as he feels he has to counter Christie no matter what Christie says.  If Christie declared kittens to be cute, Emmanuel would declare them to be hideous. Todd, for his part, would declare them to be hideous visages of evil if Trump thought they were cute, and would go on to berate his guests for 40 minutes on the dangers posed by kittens to society and  the degree to which Trump is personally responsible for that.

But I digress.

Last week Emmanuel repeated the famous quote "Never let a crisis go to waste" and it is one that is inevitable in the Pandemic, so I don't fault him for noting that.

There are two ways that has in fact come up, although one may not really be an application of that so much as something will claim to be an application of that.

Starting with the first example, I heard, although I haven't read the bill, that the relief bill passed by Congress which provides for relief for individuals and industry omits, at to some extent, the oil and gas industry.

Now, what I don't know is how far down this goes.  That Exxon Mobile can't get anything is obvious, but what about local oil and gas service industries, many of which are quite small?  I have no idea.

This was done as the Democrats intentionally wanted the bill to have a "green" feature.  At least at one time the retaliatory position by the GOP took out all energy producers, so wind fell out as well.  I'm not sure where that is at.

Anyhow, the concept basically is sort of a "let 'em fail" approach.  The thought was if they fail, well it was their time.

Of course nobody anticipated the catastrophic drop in oil prices that have happened since that time.  That unprecedented event was in part Coronavirus Pandemic caused, there being a massive drop in oil demand due to quarantines, and in part caused by the bizarre Saudi/Russian price war spat which they got rolling.  This involves the maxim, of course, that people who start wars can't control how they end, even price wars.  They both got the darned thing rolling, and now they're not able to bring it to an end.

As noted, the US could really take advantage of this by buying up the surplus at the absurdly low rates oil is at.  If we wanted to be super cynical we could close the doors to importation of oil to the U.S. except for government purchases and have the government really  ramp up purchase of hte surplus.  Indeed, were we to do that, the impact would be to depress the price of foreign oil more, which would allow us to buy more.  In the meantime we could be throwing up storage tanks like so many tents and put ourselves in really good strategic shape for eon.  Double, triple, quadruple, ro whatever it takes our strategic reserve.

We should do that.  That would indeed be an application of the titled maxim.

I doubt we'll do that, but the Democrats did take advantage of the crisis in the relief bill, and here's an example of how they did that.  My prediction is that as we roll along there will be more of that.  Let's look for all sorts of "debt forgiveness" (which is in reality debt reallocation" and the like.

On to example two, maybe.

The President halted immigration into the US.

It's not a permanent halt, but it predictably brought the same liberal storm of criticism that anything which seeks to restrict immigration in any way does.

American immigration policies have been out of whack for decades.  We've addressed it here before, so we'll forgo doing it in this thread, but it's a fact well known to the informed that the immigration rate is higher than is economically and environmentally sustainable.  Depending upon the view of people who are really familiar with it, the rate needs to come down and the question is whether it needs to come just down or way down.  Added to that, the fact that really high rates has damaged the employability of native blue collar workers and the employability of the urban, often black, poor was a factor in the electoral rage that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016.

Trump has taken action on immigration but at every turn he's been countered by the left, which basically believes in open doors and whose elites are insulated from the economic, if not environmental, impact that would have. Those on the right have often been frustrated, however, that Trump has not gone as far as they feel warranted, with some of his early backers really upset about that.  The whole debate, moreover, tends to bring up citations to simplistic citations to American history such as "we're a nation of immigrants", which is true if you aren't Sioux or Ojibwe, and which isn't really an argument that that policy can't be updated for the era in which we live. Indeed, it obviously needs to from time to time, as we were a nation of slave holders too and nobody regards that as a viable modern argument for anything.

Now he's temporarily halting immigration, which is only temporary and which is further prudent under the circumstances.  He ironically received criticism for closing the country to the Chinese earlier in the pandemic and then received criticism for not doing it quickly enough.  What will come of this temporary hiatus isn't clear, but probably not much.  It might provide a little room to reconsider the present high rates, however, or it might be teeing this issue up for the 2020 election.

Irrespective of its purpose, it's a good idea in this context for obvious reasons.  Trying to more or less quarantine the country means more or less quarantining the country.

None of which means that everything that's done from here until November isn't going to be filtered through a political lense.  It will be.  If Trump adopts a kitten right now Rahm Emmanuel will accuse cats of being evil, and if Biden adopts a puppy, some right wing commentator will claim dogs are socialists.  

That's the era we live in, although we might hope something about the Pandemic may lessen such extremism somehow.