‘Wartime President’? Trump Rewrites History in an Election Year
The New York Times – March 26, 2020 – Annie Karni, Maggie Haberman and Reid J. Epstein
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-wartime-president.html
The option, which he has brazenly pushed in recent days, is to cast himself as a “wartime president” who looks in charge of a nation under siege… This gambit, however, requires a rewriting of history — Mr. Trump’s muted approach to the virus early on — and it’s far from clear if many voters will accept the idea of him as a wartime leader… The great unknown, of course — and the tremendous risk to Mr. Trump’s political fate, no matter what he says or does — is that the human cost, the economic toll, and the longevity and course of the pandemic are all X factors that will most likely play out for months and could be strongly salient if not severe by the time of the November general election.
Intelligence Agencies Repeatedly Warned Trump of a Likely Pandemic. He Ignored Them.
Slate – March 23, 2020 – Daniel Politi
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/intelligence-agencies-warned-trump-likely-pandemic.html
The reports never predicted when the virus might hit the United States nor did they recommend things the administration should do to prepare but when looked at as a whole, they made it clear that the virus was possibly heading to become a global pandemic. Despite these warnings though, Trump continually played down the severity of the virus and officials struggled to get him to focus on the issue. “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” an official said. “The system was blinking red.” Case in point, when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was finally able to get Trump to speak to him about the virus, the president interrupted him to ask about vaping.
Coronavirus and the ‘Shock Doctrine’: Does Even this Disaster have to Make Rich Richer and Poor Poorer?
Informed Comment – March 23, 2020 – Sam Pizzigati
https://www.juancole.com/2020/03/coronavirus-doctrine-disaster.html
Klein sees those same dynamics now resurfacing in the coronavirus crisis. “We are seeing,” she told Democracy Now recently, “this very predictable process that we see in the midst of every economic crisis, which is extreme corporate opportunism.” In response to the pandemic, she said, Trump is “dusting off” the Wall Street wishlist on everything from cutting and privatizing Social Security — by undermining its payroll tax revenue stream — to enriching the fossil fuel industry with huge bailouts. So how can we prevent a “shock doctrine” repeat?… The coronavirus crisis also gives us an opportunity to use the public purse to shift our economy towards greater equity and sustainability. The core of a reverse shock doctrine ought to be a massive public investment program designed to create good jobs, with a premium on projects that better position our economy to address climate change.
It’s Morally Repulsive How Corporations Are Exploiting This Crisis. Workers Will Suffer
The Guardian – March 22, 2020 – Robert Reich
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/22/large-corporations-exploiting-coronavirus-crisis
Using power and privilege to exploit the weak and vulnerable in the face of a common threat is morally repugnant. Call it ‘Burring’ after Richard Burr’s stock sell-off.
How to stop the virus, according to scientists and health experts
The New York Times – March 22, 2020 – Donald G. McNeil Jr.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-restrictions-us.html
No one is certain why the virus travels in this way, but experts see an opening nonetheless. “You can contain clusters,” Dr. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.” But doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace. Containment becomes realistic only when Americans realize that working together is the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones. In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately… Dr. Tedros [the W.H.O.’s director general] called for countries to learn from one another’s successes, act with unity and help protect one another against a threat to people of every nationality. “Let’s all look out for each other,” he said.
Power in a Time of Coronavirus
Reader Supported News – March 23, 2020 – Norman Solomon
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/62013-rsn-power-in-a-time-of-coronavirus
Under the weight of the coronavirus emergency, the crucial political challenges involve fighting the bastions of dominant political malfeasance, lies, and plunder at the top of the U.S. government… With this pandemic, fueled by the intentional neglect and greedy stupidity of Trump and Company, we have profuse reasons to heed words from legendary labor organizer Mary Harris, “Mother” Jones: “Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.” To fight like hell for the living — to protect people from the ravages of the coronavirus and a harsh economic system — will require unrelenting work from progressive movements willing and able to organize effectively in every political arena.
A Planet of Missing Beauties
Tom Dispatch – March 24, 2020 – Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176679/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_%22the_skies_are_emptying_out%22/#more
When Donald Trump finally turned his mind to the coming pandemic (rather than denying it) as the economy he had been bragging about for the previous three years began to crash, one of the first groups he genuinely worried about didn’t include you or me or even his base. It was America’s fossil-fuel industry. As global transportation ground down amid coronavirus panic and a wild oil price war between the Saudis and the Russians, those companies were being clobbered. And so he quickly reached out to them with both empathy and money — promising to buy tons of extra crude oil for the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve (“We’re going to fill it right to the top”) — unavailable to so many other endangered Americans. At that moment he made it perfectly clear that, in an unfolding crisis of the first order, all of us remain in a world run by arsonists led by the president of the United States.
Trump Won’t Order Vital Coronavirus Supplies Because Corporate CEOs Asked Him Not To
Vanity Fair – March 24, 2020 – Bess Levin
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/donald-trump-defense-production-act
They’re worried it could be bad for business.
Give Me Capitalism or Give Me Death
The New Republic – March 25, 2020 – Nick Martin
https://newrepublic.com/article/157047/give-capitalism-give-death
The truth is the same as it has always been. Capitalism has not consumed America; it is America. Insofar as the concept of this nation is constantly evolving, the past century, and specifically the latter half, has been a study in what happens when governments —federal, state, city, local—reorganize themselves around the notion that profit is the ultimate achievement. In the long run, what happens in the next few weeks and months will not matter to those at the top. People will continue to get sick, people will continue to die. Young and old. The people in power, in Washington and in boardrooms across the country, will pay lip service to the tragedy. But what matters to them deep down is that life returns to normal, because normal was working so ridiculously well for them.
Cuba’s Coronavirus Response Is Putting Other Countries to Shame
Jacobin – March 24, 2020 – Ben Burgis
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/cuba-coronavirus-braemar-doctors-health-care
Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic — from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines — is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame… The country combines a completely socialized medical system that guarantees health care to all with impressive biotech innovations. A Cuban antiviral drug (Interferon Alfa-2B) has been used to combat the coronavirus both inside the country and in China. Cuba also boasts 8.2 doctors per 1,000 people — well over three times the rate in the United States (2.6) or South Korea (2.4), almost five times as many as China (1.8), and nearly twice as many as Italy (4.1). On top of its impressive medical system, Cuba has a far better track record of protecting its citizens from emergencies than other poor nations — and even some rich ones.
Covid-19 Is Nature’s Wake-Up Call to Complacent Civilization
The Guardian – March 25, 2020 – George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/25/covid-19-is-natures-wake-up-call-to-complacent-civilisation
Sunk costs within the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, private healthcare and other sectors prevent the rapid transformations we need. Money becomes more important than life. There are two ways this could go. We could, as some people have done, double down on denial. Some of those who have dismissed other threats, such as climate breakdown, also seek to downplay the threat of Covid-19. Witness the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, who claims that the coronavirus is nothing more than “a little flu”. The media and opposition politicians who have called for lockdown are, apparently, part of a conspiracy against him. Or this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated by those who put money ahead of life. This coronavirus reminds us that we belong to the material world.
COVID-19 Relief Package Has Important Aid, But More Is Needed Urgently
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – March 26, 2020 – Robert Greenstein
https://www.cbpp.org/press/statements/greenstein-relief-package-includes-important-aid-but-more-needed-to-meet-urgent
Meeting this crisis will demand a sustained response by all of us — and Congress is no exception. Lawmakers will need to do substantially more in subsequent bills to address urgent needs in areas like health coverage and food assistance for struggling families… The Trump Administration will need to implement the new law faithfully, effectively, and swiftly. Very close scrutiny of the Administration’s implementation actions will be essential.
COVID-19 is spawning a global press-freedom crackdown
Columbia Journalism Review – March 25, 2020 – By Joel Simon
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/coronavirus-press-freedom-crackdown.php
Amid efforts to beat back a global pandemic of a kind unseen in more than a century, and to prop up a global economy on the brink of depression, it’s hard to focus on long-term consequences. But we must be mindful that when we get to the other side of the pandemic, we may be left with a narrative, being written by China, that government control over information was essential to combating the crisis. That would be a devastating blow to the global information system, one that could endure even as the memories of the terrible pandemic we are currently facing slowly fade.
The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
Robert Reich’s Blog – March 26, 2020
https://robertreich.org/post/613497899639291904
The coronavirus has starkly revealed what most of us already knew: The concentration of wealth in America has created a a health care system in which the wealthy can buy care others can’t… Forget politics as you’ve come to see it – as contests between Democrats and Republicans. The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy. The market has been organized to serve the wealthy. Since 1980, the percentage of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest four hundred Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent… history shows that oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever. They are inherently unstable. When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing, oligarchies become vulnerable. As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We have before. We will again. In order for real change to occur – in order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves – the locus of power in the system will have to change.
Rightwing thinktanks use fear of Covid-19 to fight bans on plastic bags
The Guardian – March 27, 2020 – Karen McVeigh
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/27/rightwing-thinktanks-use-fear-of-covid-19-to-fight-bans-on-plastic-bags
Articles warning that reusable cloth bags are worse than plastic ones for spreading coronavirus have been linked to major rightwing nonprofits such as the Manhattan Institute, and contain misinformation aimed at defeating or repealing plastic bag bans, said Greenpeace USA. The effort “risks further confusion” amid a global public health crisis, it said.
The Nature of Crisis
The New Yorker – March 26, 2020 – Bill McKibben
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/the-nature-of-crisis-coronavirus-climate-change
Physical problems—climate change and the coronavirus being the pertinent examples—are all about time. And what’s striking to me is how similar these two examples are… We wasted many weeks, during which time the virus gathered momentum. Now we face an incredibly costly (and far more disruptive) effort to keep it from taking down our entire society… Similarly, with climate change, we had effective warning in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties. At that time, we could have made somewhat disruptive efforts to cut carbon emissions by a per cent or two a year—call it the South Korean approach. But we didn’t, and nor did any other country, for the same reason: the oil companies didn’t want “the numbers” (in this case, the profits) to change. So they promoted a farrago of lies intended to quiet people’s fears, and the climate crisis gathered momentum.
No Mercy even in a Pandemic: Israeli Occupation Authorities Demolish Makeshift Field Hospital in Palestinian Hamlet
Informed Comment – March 28, 2020 – Juan Cole
https://www.juancole.com/2020/03/occupation-authorities-palestinian.html
It is a tenet of the Israeli Occupation that the 5 million Palestinians under their jackboot are not allowed to build new structures without permission from the Israeli overlords. The hope is apparently to drive Palestinians out of Palestine over time by denying them essential shelter. That this principle of “no new unauthorized buildings” should be applied to hastily erected clinics for vulnerable Palestinians in their hamlets during a global pandemic outbreak is the ultimate in cruelty. It certainly qualifies as a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of occupied populations.
What a Plague Reveals
New York Magazine – March 28, 2020 – Frank Rich
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/frank-rich-what-a-plague-reveals.html
A society reveals a lot about itself, heroic and not, when confronting a plague. But we didn’t need a plague to tell us that Trump places zero value on any life except his own, and it’s no surprise that many of his zealots are willing to blindly follow his example. Witness that so-called man of God, Jerry Falwell Jr., who decided to end social distancing and summon the previously dispersed student body back to Liberty University in Virginia, at whatever cost to themselves…. The anger and despair that have fueled populism in America, even to the point of inducing voters to hand power to a charlatan like Trump, may metastasize at least as fast as the plague.
It’s wrong to blame bats for the coronavirus epidemic
The Conversation – March 24, 2020 – Peter Alagona
http://theconversation.com/its-wrong-to-blame-bats-for-the-coronavirus-epidemic-134300
As an environmental historian focusing on endangered species and biological diversity, I know that bats provide valuable services to humans and need protection. Instead of blaming bats for the coronavirus epidemic, I believe it’s important to know more about them. Here’s some background explaining why they carry so many viruses, and why these viruses only jump infrequently to humans – typically, when people hunt bats or intrude into places where bats live.
People Are Dying: Why Are We Waiting for Medicare for All?
The Gainesville Sun [Florida]- March 23, 2020 – F. Douglas Stephenson
https://www.gainesville.com/opinion/20200323/f-douglas-stephenson-why-are-we-waiting-for-medicare-for-all
An old social justice chant, “Why are We Waiting,” is sung to the tune of the beautiful and inspiring Christmas carol, “O Come All Ye Faithful.” The lyrics apply to the situation today: Even with the dangerous coronavirus pandemic, big insurance and big pharma continue opposing legislation for the new Medicare for All. We still wait because these resistant, self-serving industries have the most to lose if their huge profits are redirected to direct patient care for all. Individual and corporate predators regard democracy, government and community as obstacles to their greed and avarice, always placing profits over individual patients, families and public health. It’s no wonder so many beholden members of Congress want to protect the interests of big insurance and big pharma, industries that spent $371 million on lobbying in 2017 alone… American history is filled with examples of fundamental, democratic change brought about by successful mass action and public pressure against the counseling of the go slow, vested interest crowd. No more waiting! Ask your legislators to fully support Medicare For All now: HR-1384/S-1129.
Why Coronavirus Is Humanity’s Wake-Up Call
Yes! Magazine – March 18, 2020 – David Korten
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/03/18/coronavirus-wake-up-call/
It is a demonstration of our ability, when the imperative is clear, for deep and rapid global cooperation and change at a previously unimaginable speed and scale. There is an obvious desire to protect ourselves and our loved ones. But we are also seeing something more as communities mobilize to address the crisis—a sense of mutual responsibility, born of a recognition that we are ultimately bound to a common fate. The speed of the resulting global shift is beyond any prior human experience… I sense that as our eyes open to this reality, we are seeing a simultaneous awakening to the imperative to deal with a host of other system failures that imperil our common future… This is humanity’s wake-up call. As we awaken to the truth of the profound failure of our existing institutions, we also awaken to the truth of our possibilities and interconnections with one another and with Earth. With that awakening comes a recognition that we must now learn to live lightly on the Earth, to war no more, and to dedicate ourselves to the well-being of all in an interdependent world.
Why Coronavirus Relief Needs to be Permanent
Yes! Magazine – March 20, 2020 – Megan Wildhood
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/03/20/coronavirus-relief-permanent/
We all have to recognize that this pandemic is offering us an opportunity to see where our weaknesses as a society are and to come up with effective sustainable solutions… As the world of biology has taught us, diversity is the key to resilience… It’s time to push our leaders to replace their short-term view of maintaining until things can go back to normal (as in, the conditions that make pandemics possible) with the bigger vision of a sustainable society that always cares for what its members need.
Lessons from the Coronavirus Can Help Us Overcome the Climate Crisis
Yes! Magazine – March 27, 2020 – Jessica Corbett
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/03/27/coronavirus-green-new-deal/
Ambitious action by the government and private sector on a scale often reserved for wartime is “part of the vision behind” the Green New Deal, which aims to dramatically curb climate-heating emissions. “The second part,” he said, “is doing it in a way that is just and equitable.”… Author and historian Jeremy Brecher, who co-founded the Labor Network for Sustainability, wrote for Common Dreams on Wednesday that workers and communities can lead the way with a “do-it-yourself Green New Deal” that puts people to work meeting the most urgent needs of this moment… Some Green New Deal advocates see the COVID-19 outbreak as a signal to the international community that it is necessary to reform humanity’s relationship with nature, pointing to concerns that “as habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics.”
Remembering Rev. Joseph Lowery
Justice Initiative – March 28, 2020 – Heather Gray
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Remembering-Rev–Joseph-Lowery.html?soid=1109359583686&aid=Mzh8p9Wzf4Y
“Rev. Joseph Lowery was a fighter for civil rights,” said Congressman John Lewis. “He spoke up spoke out he never gave up. He marched and he protested all across America. We mourn his passing this evening. He made a lasting contribution and he will always be remembered for his role to help change and make our country and our world a better place. I had the great honor of serving on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference board with him. His presence and leadership will be deeply missed.”