A recent podcast Unwanted Truths about the president’s daily national security briefings revealed some disturbing details about his interactions with the national security community. More than that, the piece provided a window into the mind of the RealityTVPresident that was not altogether surprising but breathtaking in scope. Hell, just shocking.
We see that the RealityTVPresident has long been a sucker for conspiracy theories, an outgrowth of a small mind encased in paranoia, searching for easy explanations in a complex world it can’t understand. His short attention span functions as a defense against any idea incongruent with his worldview. He simply changes the subject and the speaker is cued to move on. In the end, putting words out into the air doesn’t mean that he’ll hear them; his auditory system switches on and off like a motion detector. Intelligence officials have learned to avoid any mention of Russia, just like the press can anticipate an automatic diatribe about fake news, Russian hoax, Democrat’s persecution no matter what context the word comes up in. It’s clearly Pavlovian.
Donald Trump is a walking talking national security nightmare. What’s more he has infiltrated the minds of intelligence analysts, an occupation which is more subjective interpretation than it is data gathering, such that the country’s understanding of the world outside our shores is seriously handicapped if not completely blinded. The country is increasingly endangered, blind in one eye with one arm tied behind its back.
What is even more shocking is that he has been so effective in thoroughly undermining the federal government, creating a more expansive swamp than he swore he’d get rid of. The BullyPresident’s primary weapon is his well practiced eye for the mediocre man who is inevitably subservient. Like him, they fear their inadequacy will be exposed. That mediocracy spurs their penchant to break rules, for they are easily bought. Some, like Barr, are smart and working their own political delusions. Many are masters of illusion, a further cover for their own deficiencies. But most are consumed with self-aggrandizement untethered from ethical conduct. Their loyalty is exclusively to the orange tinged hand that feeds them, sans a sense of service, civic duty or patriotism.
This mindset explains how Trump managed to bankrupt casinos, where the odds are always with the house. His penchant to cheat and congenial salesmanship led him to create multiple scams selling overpriced products to people invested in an “exclusive” brand like Trump University, Trump vitamins, etc. In truth, the Donald never had more than moderately successful businesses, expanded by bankrolling his children.
Donald J Trump has never successfully run a large business. He has never had a board of directors or stockholders. His stock was never publicly traded. In remaining outside of public scrutiny, Trump has been able to obscure how much his real life business trajectory contrasts with his small cameo role as a top executive in The Apprentice. He made a splash in a show meant to capitalize on his name. In that way, the show mirrors perhaps the most successful phase of the Donald’s business activity, licensing his name to plaster onto structures built by other companies with minimal investment of his own funds.
Part of his resistance to public disclosure of his tax returns lies in the revelation of his true wealth, a would-be billionaire exposed as less than that. His funding sources (hint, hint Russian oligarchs) may be scandalous, although scandals simply slide off 45’s back. Perhaps that’s because he has no shame. Equally disreputable are the not quite legal methods he’s used to keep his businesses afloat, often undone by his penchant for magical thinking. The New York Times has published an investigative series on the elder Trump’s role in financing his son’s career, no self-made business man is he. Most importantly, it exposes the central role of tax evasion in building Trump’s wealth.
Trump is a small person. From his casino days, we know he shortchanged contractors and hired foreign workers he refused to compensate fairly. He had the audacity to countersue Deutsche Bank after they sued him for a defaulted loan even though it was the only bank in the world that would lend him money. The essence of his business style is to cut costs by cheating others out of their agreed upon compensation. Another plus is a ready coterie of faithful lawyers made conspirators in the shady dealings.
Trump’s fragile ego is easily bruised. His forays into the court have served this purpose as well, anticipating the role of Bill Barr in deconstructing the intelligence probe into Russian intervention to elevate 45 to the White House. He’s played his vengeance out in literally thousands of lawsuits, designed to intimidate the little guy without resources for a large legal team. For larger entities, he aimed be a nuisance to their bottom line.
It is no wonder that the COVID19 pandemic snuck up on the US or that an accurate assessment of its impact is unobtainable. It is no wonder that our knowledge about countries that El Trumpe’s favorite autocrats rule seems to reflect their own propaganda. As a reality TV producer, 45 seems to honestly believe that the world he creates on TV can displace the world off screen. He can remake reality in his own image and it will be so. Or is that God? Trump/FoxNews serves as his enormously successful echo chamber that maintains a captive audience.
In the case of COVID19, where pesky data keeps getting in the way, the Wartime President has quashed the dataflow and obfuscated the analysis. Voila, the virus is not a problem; the economy is recovering; the schools can reopen; all is well. And yet when people who live in a viral outbreak hotspot look out their windows or walk down their streets they can observe that it’s rotten in Denmark. In fact, part of the rush to open businesses and schools is to maintain the facade that day-to-day life looks much the same. For people who live in low infection locations, everything is copacetic and there’s no time like the present to head to a locale watering hole. This is why COVID19 will rage on until it burns out or cripples or kills us all.
Trump’s reality remake activity is not confined to the present. His back scrubbing began with erasing the only Black US president while simultaneously wiping the 2016 election slate clean. Any suggestion of an illegitimate victory propelled by Russian interference drives El Trumpe bat shit. He has set his Senate loyalists on an investigative “witchhunt” to generate conspiracy theories that can refute what the Senate Intelligence committee has just verified in its bipartisan Russian interference report. That report is a significant hiccup in their historical cleanup operation. Consequently, Bill Barr is probably slaving over how it can be delegitimized and reinterpreted with a parallel effort to isolate and undercut intelligence agents.
“El Trumpe is slowly withering away without his rallies
These last 3 years have taken a toll on the 72 year old. The many disappointments, beginning with the inaugural crowd size and the abject failure of personal relationships with men like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un as compensation for ridicule from traditional allies. It takes a lot to be even obliquely bad mouthed by Canada. There is the scorn from Nancy Pelosi and the impeachment. All of these are deep wounds to the man who wants to be loved and respected by everyone, but particularly “liberal elites”. He needs them to acknowledge his superiority. He has bemoaned the fact that the New York Times has never written a good story about him. The sheer volume of the demands of governance has created a turbulent distraction from the things he’s most interested in doing–making a new deal to enlarge his influence and fortune. It is in service of this goal that he deconstructs and politicizes federal agencies, inserts political appointees into every nook and cranny, and politicizes diplomacy. Everything in his mind is transactional. All this without easy access to his stress relieving golf game. The effort to hide evidence of this physical toll must have extended his beauty regimen to most of his morning.
Most distressing has been the trickle of polling information that his aides have not been able to conceal– he could lose his bid to remain in the White House. Robbed of his most important rejuvenator, the instant feedback of the MAGA rally, he has become increasingly unhinged. He’s engaged in a frenetic barrage of campaign enhancing pronouncements, trying to find the shit that sticks. He’s courted Jews with the Israeli- UAE treaty. He’s signed executive orders for pandemic economic relief, eliminated regulations governing low-income housing, opened up Alaskan areas for mining, etc. He has pulled out every tool in his limited bag of tricks, recycling birtherism in a time when the country is awakening to its anti-skin color biased history. He’s had to revamp his invasion themes to an internal one pointed into the suburbs now that he’s effectively bulldozed the brown caravan into Mexico and eliminated brown and black Muslims from entry at a time when the suburbs are increasingly made up of those same groups. Still, there is always room to villainize BlackLivesMatter, the perennial favorite that keeps on giving in that way that it can be expanded from violence is coming to a suburb near you to poor people are coming to a suburb near you to lawlessness is coming to a suburb near you. Some of these themes will strike home even within groups who are nonwhite. And yet, BlackLivesMatter has expanded in rainbow fashion. Because times change, thanks to revelations of the pandemic and economic downturn and climate change and deeply embedded racial injustice, people, particularly young people, seem resistant to the PiedPiperPresident’s tactics.
Pulling out all the stops, 45 has asked his legion of loyal regional and local officials to join his team of foreign interlopers to limit the vote by any means necessary. The latest threat has been to mobilize federal forces to intimidate nonwhite voters at the poll, knowing that his paramilitary forces will fill the gap if he can’t get the real military to go along. They will use biases from visuals like age, dress and demeanor to define hostile white voters to discourage. Shifts from mail-in ballots to in person voting when insecurities about returning them mount nearing election day will create provisional ballots that can later be invalidated as needed. And if all else fails, Trump minions still have the counting process to reject unfavorable mail-in ballots, motivated by a desire to save their own skins. The majority blow out we’d like to see is still subject to hostile manipulation from El Trumpe aligned governments. We have not yet escaped becoming a banana republic.
On August 23, 1989, a white mob murdered Black teenager Yusef Hawkins for visiting a white girl.
We are witnessing the RealityTVPresident’s latest production, the post-pandemic reopening of the US economy. Like any good producer, he rolled out the teasers from the White House podium daily, dropping pearls that bubbled through the media and the late night comedy shows. When will it be? May 1st, or maybe before? How will it happen? Who will do it?
El Presidente Trumpe is very clear that only he has the power, echoing his “Only I can do it” from his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. He told reporters that the president has all the power. After that assertion met pushback from governors who rightly pointed out that they have had to wander through the wilderness with only their wits, state public health and emergency preparedness plans and phone consultations with Dr Fauci, Trump defaulted to the mushier position that he has delegated the details of reopening to the states. That interpretation leaves him as the ultimate authority with kingly magnanimity to extend his states’ rights emergency response to the return to normal economic activity. In a hastedly revised media ready statement, he proposed that governors could submit their individual plans to him for his consent. That too was revised to a scheme that would generate a national set of criteria by which each state could evaluate their own situation and progress as they determined.
And yet, 45’s initial assertions of omnipotence seemed oddly out of kilter with farming out the national emergency response to each state. More than that, behind the scenes he has actually undermined rather than supported the governors swarming like piranhas over a shrinking PPE carcass. In January and February, administration officials encouraged export of N95 masks and other protective wear to China and by February 26, the Commerce Department published a how to guide for businesses to use the Chinese state fast acquisition service. On that date, the number of cases in the US was 13; by March 6, it was 144; by March 16, it was 4226. The program was shut down on March 4.
When air force planes laden with PPE returned from China in March, their cargo was distributed to corporate middle men cronies who sold it to the highest bidder in the spirit of an administration that panders to well connected wealthy businessmen and the political leverage that comes with those contracts. Those distributors, infected with the Money First before the America First paradigm, had no difficulty sending their ill gotten bootie abroad. Governor after governor recounts how their purchases were intercepted at JFK by FEMA and rerouted to some other lucky stiffs. FEMA, however, was perfectly happy to ship expired or pediatric masks or broken down ventilators in need of repair to unsuspecting governors. Apparently the maintenance contracts on national stockpile supplies were stupidly cancelled, leaving supplies to age quietly on their own schedules. The MAWAPresident has even made a magnanimous show of belatedly sending supplies to Italy, no doubt through those same middlemen while healthcare workers in New York are sidelined with infection or worse dying for the lack of vital protective gear.
Clothed in the conservative narrative that local authorities know what’s best for their residents, the president is offloading responsibility as fast as he can so as not to sully his campaign for reelection. If voters are unhappy with the COVID-19 response in their locale, they need to look to their local officials, thus extending the Republican theme that all government is bad right down to people’s neighborhood.
He’s playing his classic Apprentice role, the fake successful businessman in judgement behind a desk, the pronouncer who ends the episode after all the detailed work is done. George Bush was the decider; Donald Trump is the pronouncer, an apt appellation for a carnival barker. What he is not, is a man who has ever taken responsibility for anything, ever. He’s betting on his customary strategy: deny his recent pronouncements, rewrite his history and blame anyone and everyone else. Typically he creates a panoply of enemies, a pick-your-poison list just to confuse and amplify his conservative media streams. He’s in a regular exchange of insults with Democratic governors and his old nemesis Nancy Pelosi.
Trump surrogates have attacked Democrats for distracting the president from heeding warnings of the upcoming pandemic coming from within his own administration, something he could never acknowledge because he professes to be unflappable. But there’s an unseemly air to the suggestion that the president doesn’t have the bandwidth to keep his finger on the pulse of his administration; that he doesn’t have an embedded alert system to quickly grab his attention. Or that his alerts are geared more toward his partisan campaign or big splash international themes than the nation’s ongoing security.
There has been no president since WWII who’s day is so lightly scheduled: down from the residence around 11ish, a few meetings or calls, lunch and “self reflection time” (time to watch Trump/FoxNews), back to the residence by 6. He leaves early most Fridays and/or returns late on Mondays to accommodate travel to one of his properties. Apparently his most productive time is 3-4 am when he unleashes his infamous tweets. It’s hard to imagine that a national leader who reads nothing, not briefings, policy statements, executive orders (unless 1 or 2 paragraphs) can effectively run the federal government. It’s more reminiscent of a figurehead business exec in a moderate sized family run business than the president of the most powerful nation in the world. For his pandemic response, he’s simply opted out of the hard work required to respond to an overwhelming national threat. It would require thinking, reading basic information about disease spread with daily updates, attending the Task Force meetings, which apparently he doesn’t, all of which impose upon his TV time and campaign strategizing.
The president’s latest target is the World Health Organization, accusing them of the exact same transgressions he himself committed, trusting the Chinese assessment of its own pandemic response. Both Trump and the WHO praised China, Trump in exalting praise of Xi Jinping. Of course, Trump was flattering the Chinese leader in hopes of achieving a trade agreement, now only wishful thinking in the wake of the pandemic. Importantly, the WHO has no enforcement power, so it’s only possible response to Chinese refusal to allow officials into the country was to use the data provided while trying to convince them to allow a team in, hopefully reinforced by diplomatic efforts from leaders of the countries involved with the organization. El Trumpe can’t publically (or privately) rebuke himself so he opted to express his anger in the form of withholding the US contribution, 15% of the WHO total budget, despite ballooning numbers of cases in Africa and South America, both continents ill equipped to flatten the curve when most have no real healthcare systems. Social distancing is impossible when housing is crowded or nonexistent. Many residents lack clean water, let alone running water for good hygiene. Many are malnourished and suffer from other infectious diseases, including a high burden of malaria and HIV in some African countries. They don’t have ICUs or more than a few ventilators in any one country. The impact of the virus will be catastrophic.
As with all the RealityTVPresident’s tactics, the brouhaha diverts attention from reporters’ blistering questions exposing his malfeasance in his daily briefings while it emphasizes his America First theme that vilifies international cooperation and characterizes global humanitarian efforts as leeches taking advantage of the country rather than examples of world leadership. And it fits comfortably within the president’s narrative against nonwhites and foreigners. His supporters don’t see images of starving children and their parents on their preferred TV outlet; but if they did, they wouldn’t see people, just brown skinned others who deserve whatever they get. But most of all, it presents El Presidente as a big tough guy, the hero of his squad.
Apparently, behind the scenes the BullyPresident is trying to blackmail the WHO into a reorientation to his own agenda. He’s asking that the organization concentrate almost exclusively on epidemics rather than the myriad of public health initiatives around clean water, road safety, maternal health, common infectious diseases, vaccinations, etc that it maintains. A more cruel way to try to seize a political advantage is unimaginable; millions of lives hang in the balance. None of these black and brown skinned people seem any more important to the president than those back home.
Like all Trump productions, The Reopening of America is all pomp with no circumstance. With grand fanfare, 45 previewed a Task Force Advisory Council, many of this much ballyhooed council members were surprised at the announcement of their names during the news conference. Eventually, he invited all Republican Senators except Romney and no Democrats. He has no interest in the input of the representatives for the majority of the country nor those most affected by COVID-19. The sheer number of participants shows that it is not intended for serious work; megastar committees are too bloated for decision-making, let alone action, a sure sign that it’s mere window dressing. Trump’s intention is clear, the BIG statement with souvenir invitations for business leaders and schmoozing with corporate heads that establish political back scratching, all to cover his own instinctual maneuvering directed toward his political survival. We didn’t hear anything else from the Council while the reopening blueprint is a fait accompli.
Imagine, a chief executive fomenting resistance to state governance, nullifying his oath to uphold the Constitution. There is no step too far to betray the country in 45’s quest for authoritarian rule.
45 wouldn’t be the BullyPresident if he wasn’t politicizing every aspect of the pandemic and his lackluster response. Americans have proven themselves to be extraordinarily gullible in these days of disinformation and attacks on the free press and scientific expertise. Many question if there is any reliable information; they don’t know where to look for it and have simply surrendered to inattentiveness. The rise in Trump’s overall popularity in the polls reflects how easily deceived the populace can be. For instance, 90% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats believe that China is responsible for the global spread of COVID-19. And then there are the demonstrators, complete with rifles, MAGA hats, Confederate flags and “Lock her up” chants in Michigan referring to Governor Whitmore. They demand to exercise their basic freedom to choose death. They haven’t thought that they will be consuming public resources, ambulances and EMTs, hospitals, nurses and doctors. It seems only reasonable that in pursuing their individual freedoms outside the societal good, they should voluntarily forgo interaction with the public sector and die at home, thereby infecting the lowest number of people. If they want out, they should stay all the way.
We are witnessing not the restoration of federalism but a further throwback to colonial days. The governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania are savvy enough to know that the amount of traffic across their borders on a daily basis would create havoc if a hodgepodge of state regulations allowed COVID-19 to cross back and forth. It is the stuff of the movie, Groundhog Day. This larger consortium may have more clout in developing broad based testing solutions and contact tracing. Gaven Newsome in California has also initiated cooperative efforts among the states on the west coast.
Under these conditions, one might anticipate the Confederacy to rise again, but that’s unlikely given their red state GOP leadership. These Trump ducklings have waddled along behind their mother duck, imprinted with his COVID-19 hoax to it’s under control to social distancing to maybe limited shelter in place to hot damn, we’re ready to reopen. Their rugged individualism and limited resources don’t support much collaboration, particularly when they don’t see a problem ahead. These governors seem satisfied with the current amount of testing because they don’t believe everyone needs to be tested. They seem to have accepted that some people are going to die from this disease because frankly, shit happens and there’s the added benefit that more colored people are dying than white, never a problem in the south.
The Task Force continues to deny that there are problems with testing. After initially emphasizing the centrality of testing, like other successful countries, the administration seems to have conceded their failure and simply taken it out of their frame. It’s just repeated reminders of their negligence. It’s in the private market, they contend and abandoned once again, the states are left holding the bag. One can only imagine the furious round of stock purchases and acquisitions among administration officials to reap the windfall from new test kits, new drugs and vaccines. Officials throw out statistics of towering numbers of testing capacity, even as the US has the lowest per capita rate of any advanced country. Statistics on capacity have not translated into the number of tests performed.
The problems with testing, which could be addressed by the Emergency Production Act, are multiple. There is the lack of supplies, swabs and reagents as well as a lack of trained personnel to both collect and process the tests, all of whom will require PPE. If this were done centrally by the federal government, they obviously have the wherewithal to manufacture and obtain supplies and ramp up personnel, for example from a military reserve.
In fact, recruited commercial labs seem to be doing fewer tests each week. The large labs have their own commercial interest in performing the routine medical labs that they always do. One marker that testing is failing is the high COVID-19 positivity rate, indicating that the bulk of testing is being done among sick people when it’s clear that the virus is more prevalent among the asymptomatic, a big factor in its spread. The positivity rate in NY is 50%, compared with 2% in South Korea, which samples its population widely and repeatedly. Until the positivity rate falls 10 fold, we won’t be testing nearly enough.
Centrally, through the CDC, has always been the way the country responded to disease outbreaks. The CDC and public health experts clearly misjudged the infectiousness of COVID-19 and its rapid spread which led to the usual strategy of CDC based testing that could be expanded to public health departments. Dr Fauci himself admitted that they had not envisioned a population wide testing scheme; it has never been done. Perhaps they optimistically thought the US would escape the brunt of this pandemic as we did with SARS-1 and MERS and that was mistake number 1, not to plan for the worst possible scenery. Mistake number 2: the CDC refusal to use the WHO test instead of insisting on developing its own which we know was subsequently flawed and took a long time to correct. But even then it was not too late to switch to the WHO test which was mistake number 3. But the fault lies with the lack of vision by the CDC for a response to a high impact national pandemic that has not occurred in this country since the flu pandemic of 1918.
At this point it seems clear that a hodgepodge of testing using numerous different assays which have not been validated independently in different locations will never add up to a broad based testing strategy nor be as expansive as South Korea or Germany. The FDA has abandoned its regulatory role by allowing almost any test to get to market without validation data, one more pork barrel for big pharma companies. As a result, it is probably time to reinvision a new approach, given that a centralized system is not in the cards. We need some innovation, not necessarily American, that can collect without back ordered swaps, perhaps saliva or serum, bypass reagents in short supply, produce rapid results and have the sensitivity and specificity to avoid high false positive and false negative results.
In the meantime, the RealityTVPresident is peddling the false narrative that states reopening in a couple of weeks will be safe without associated spikes in infections, knowing that his own guidelines call for a phase 1 where social distancing will remain in effect as businesses begin to reopen. States must first show a 2 week trajectory of declining cases or % positivity of total COVID-19 tests, adequately testing healthcare workers and maintenance of sufficient capacity in healthcare facilities. Each phase of opening must demonstrate this downward trend before advancing to the next. However, states are allowed to relax restrictions on a county by county basis, an absurdity since no county is an island without travel in and out.
Then boom, the plot twist that even veteran Trump watchers didn’t see coming. Having outsourced the blame for his failing pandemic response to the states, Agent Orange has added insult to injury by fomenting GOP opposition to Democratic governors’ shelter in place policies through support of rallies organized by conservatives to open business up, dripping with rifles and assault weapons, MAGA hats and Confederate flags. He’s encouraging his yahoos to flout phased resumption of the economy.
There is a whole individual freedom, anti-government movement being galvanized in conservative right circles. The stalwarts are standing up for guns and the right to die from COVID-19, sporting face coverings only as an aid to avoid identification by any potential authorities. Demonstrators are invoking Patrick Henry and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, an ironic contradiction given their support from the man in the White House who yearns to assume King George’s throne. Steven Moore, an administration economic advisor named to the advisory council to open up the economy, went to Trump/FoxNews to encourage people to be “the modern day Rosa Parks” [I don’t know what his thinking was here, except to backhandedly insult the Civil Rights movement that conservatives consistently vilify.] Attorney General Barr has waded in with the threat of DOJ action against state governments including supporting legal challenges from individuals or groups of citizens.
The point was to defy shelter in place orders and congregate in large crowds. (I can’t help but secretly wish for a new outbreak bump among those deniers which has apparently been reported.) 45’s contributions were tweets to “liberate” Michigan, Virginia and Minnesota, all critical to his reelection and a comment from the podium about “good people” who have cabin fever. Imagine, a chief executive fomenting resistance to state governance, pummeling the theme that we’re all in this together not to mention nullifying his oath to uphold the Constitution. There is no step too far to betray the country in his quest for authoritarian rule. This is the man who aspires to the ranks of FDR and Abraham Lincoln.
The Campaigner in Chief has hit upon an ingenious strategy. Trumpophants are not known for detailed review of documents or their consumption of nuance. Deftly using the mainstream media, desperate for some visual conflict, to create the impression that this movement represents considerable dissatisfaction with Democratic governor restrictions, he hopes to pressure them to rush to loosen stay at home orders. In fact, a survey shows that over 70% of Americans including 56% of Republicans fear that restrictions will be lifted too soon.
Demonstrations are being organized through Facebook and Twitter, financed by the usual conservative suspects including the Kochs who created and financed the Tea Party through groups like FreedomWorks, a key player in current organizing. The Mercers and Betsy DeVos have also funded this effort. The law firm Michael Best which includes Reis Priebus, another attorney for the Trump campaign and one involved in the effort to stop disclosure of Trump’s tax returns, is now representing one demonstrator. No public defender for this man on the street, these are big guns.
These backers are not people who support working people. They are the people who have suppressed wages over several decades. They want their workers to get back to work so their stock prices will stabilize, their profits can resume, their CEOs will get more bonuses and they won’t be sued for placing their workers in danger, not that they will go out of their way to make working conditions safe. They count on lax enforcement of regulation, a hallmark of Trumpian inspired regimes, to allow them to continue to take advantage of their workforce.
This then is 45’s new political squeeze. Create a plan that is too detailed to be easily understood by a public uninterested in reading long documents, avoid explaining it publically and most importantly, leave it to the governors to interpret. He seems cruelly oblivious to the prospect of sending the number of COVID-19 cases back up and the cost in American lives. And this time he’s going to lose some of his own entranced voters. Less densely populated areas in the throws of demonstrations may evolve as hotspots, costing lives in hospitals less prepared to cope. Similarly, travellers to the demonstrations may carry it back to their home locations. This will in turn force return to stricter measures which should include shelter in place orders and another economic dip.
States like Georgia headed by mini-Trumps have already moved to reopening bowling alleys, gyms, tattoo parlors and salons, in defiance of the recommendations. One wonders what interests lobbied for these, given that three involve personal hygiene and even blood which defy any concept of social distancing. Governor Kemp cited the leveling off of the number of COVID-19 cases over the weekend, plans to expand testing and adequate hospital capacity as the impetus for his orders beginning on April 22, less than 4 weeks after his general stay home orders which exempted church services and beaches. Next week, movies and dine-in restaurants. Shelter in place ends April 30. It seems he hasn’t read the details of 45’s plan or decided to ignore them. Two weeks was too long to wait. Social distancing has fallen by the wayside. How does one manicure nails, color, cut and curl hair from 6 feet away?
In another strange turn of events, 45 cited the Kemp plan as “in violation” of federal guidelines and criticized Kemp for moving too quickly, after crediting himself with getting the governor elected. Gone was that earlier assertion that the chief executive would sign off on individual state plans; oops, that probably required too much reading. Instead, he dismissed the governor with “[Kemp] must do what he thinks is right. But I disagree with him…” You have to give this Artful Dodger credit; in his mind, he stood up for his public health driven guidelines albeit limply while dropping the ball squarely in Kemp’s court. Those Georgia lives are on Kemp’s scorecard now.
The stage is set for a nightmare scenery, in which hot spots will pop up throughout the summer and we’ll limp along into a resurgence of COVID-19 disease in concert with seasonal flu in the fall. Too many people have forgotten that the objective is to “flatten the curve” which inevitably extends the duration of the epidemic. Although the RealityTVPresident has advanced the fantasy that the virus will disappear, the objective is to move into the tail of the distribution curve where there will be a few cases but not none. Unlike Ebola whose lethality leads to burning itself out, COVID-19 causes mild disease the majority of the time, much like the flu. There are fewer cases of deaths from influenza because a vaccine prevents more susceptible people from catching it. Whatever the COVID-19 fatality rate, this tragedy is not one that El Presidente believes can ostensibly be tracked back to him, even if he was the man with the plan. He “accepts no responsibility.” In doing so, he believes that will keep him in the White House.
On April 25, 1959, a white mob beat, shot and threw the chained black body of Mack Parker from a bridge into the Pearl River after he was accused of raping a white woman in Poplarville Mississippi.
45 dubbed himself a wartime president because he likes the sound of it. Thinking that it will supersize him onto a footing with FDR & Lincoln, he believes that the moniker will cement his legacy, wistfully envisioning shiny gold monuments arising in Washington and across the country. He’s forgotten or never knew about LBJ, another wartime president, who slunk out of office into a Texas sunset.
The Art-of-the-DealPresident has known a lot of failure in his life, six bankruptcies alone. Perhaps those experiences made him facile at spinning defeat into victory regardless of the ridiculousness of his claims. He’s always hopeful that rewriting his history will alter the realities in the black and white ink in his court filings and financial accounts. Put bluntly, the essential character traits required to become a great wartime leader are missing from his inventory; what they are seems to have escaped him, aside from giving less than inspiring speeches which inevitably degenerate into self pity parties. He’s no match for Lincoln. Of course ignorance has never stopped him before; he is after all, a reality TV producer who can create whatever effects he can dream up.
This new gig is a step beyond reputation rehabilitation. The RealityTVPresident suffers from the delusion that he’s turned in a sterling performance in his war against covid19. In truth, his efforts recall LBJ in Vietnam more than Lincoln except in the land of Trump/FoxNews where he triumphs, buttressed by his sycophant advisers in the executive branch. He believes his own hype, boxed in by the sand in which his head is buried. Fanciful denials and pundit fired partisan drivel replace scientific evidence and statistical analysis so critical to an effective pandemic response.
The single most important heroic wartime president characteristic missing from Trump is a sense of personal responsibility. Never in his life has The Donald accepted responsibility for his actions. For him, the buck always stops elsewhere and he begins probing for candidates early on. Since the time it became apparent that covid19 had hit our shores, he’s laid the fault on China, the Obama administration, state governors, Cuomo, Whitmer and Insley particularly, the FDA and the news media. His latest targets are frontline healthcare workers whom he’s lately accused of hoarding PPE or something more sinister. He knows no shame. Our wartime president has stated specifically that he takes no responsibility for any of it.
While Covid19 was in the US at the same time it was detected in South Korea, the virus and its consequences were never on Trump’s radar at the same time that federal bureaucrats were staging annual pandemic drills in the belly of some federal building. Lately, both he and Moscow Mitch have intimated that impeachment distracted him (so it’s the Democrats fault by inference). Presidents need to have more bandwidth than that. Bill Clinton separated governance from his legal defense, delegated to lawyers and staff.
The Trump administration could have been prepared if the intelligence had bubbled up to the attention of the Oval Office. But he was too occupied with campaigning, Muslim terrorists, bungling North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats to realize that the national security experts within and outside the administration named a global pandemic as the biggest security threat to the globe. Officials testified to that before Congress. Instead he eliminated the personnel responsible for pandemic planning when he closed the dedicated office in the NSC while he later denied knowing anything about it. A disingenuous claim made the president who claims to control everything.
All this means the administration lost precious planning time; steps that are being considered now should have been foreseen during the early stages of covid19 in China. Instead, Trump tried to wish the epidemic away, selling the narrative that rolling up our borders would keep us safe while the virus already lurked inside. Worried about the press, 45 consistently filtered information that countered his narrative, like the reports of the number of cases and the extent of testing, to make “his numbers” look like he was in control of a situation that was fast overwhelming us. Literally the CDC stopped reporting.
Emergency responses in the past have supposedly been for all those affected although, as in all things American, they reeked of the racial bias that has generally disadvantaged minorities. Characteristically the BullyPresident, ripped the subtle veneer off discrimination to make it obvious, as in the contrast between stateside Hurricane Maria disaster relief and Puerto Rico, which is facing another season of hurricanes without getting aid from the last one.
45’s America is more and more exclusive, as he makes a white polka dot tapestry of the Americans he will protect, literally house by house and congressional district by district. As of the week of March 27, 77% of covid 19 cases were in counties that voted for Clinton in 2016 and 19% in Trump voting counties, as reported by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Trump is basking in the uptick in his poll numbers reflecting approval of his emergency response. Unfortunately the virus is an equal opportunity vector. The pandemic may arrive later in Trumpophant territory but when it does, it may be even more deadly. Leaders in those places, huddling under Agent Orange’s cape, have been lax about social distancing and suspension of normal activities. They have not done the logistical work to respond effectively. These areas are often resource poor at baseline and will be late to the acquisition party. They will need supplemental medical facilities and ventilators; some rural hospitals in Georgia have less than 10. And they will drag us all down.
In my home state with a governor narrowly elected as a cruder southern imitation of Trump, counties in the Georgia mountains are banning residents from the Atlanta area, fast becoming a hotspot. Here too is evidence of racial bias, as residents of the state’s other two hot spots are not banned. Cartersville and Dougherty counties are primarily white communities where the source of infection was evangelical Sunday church services. The ministers have whispered in the governor’s ear enough to prevent him from ordering churchs to stop services. He has discouraged it but not ordered them shut down. He must protect his supporters even at the cost of their lives. These church members are particularly susceptible because the idea of “God’s will” goes a long way toward erasing responsibility from real world decision making that results in tragedies.
Conservatives who want to strip away federal regulation and bureaucracy have entered into a marriage of convenience with Trump, a would-be autocrat.
Trump’s modus operandus, governance by instinct, is no match for this novel virus, particularly when his instinct is grounded in misconceptions recycled from the 80s, partisan political concerns, narcissistic visions of grandeur, an information stream from Fox News cratered with misinformation and falsehoods and above all maximizing personal aggrandizement. But instinctual governance is a matter of style which distracts, in this everchanging fast paced news era, from the core conservative principles beneath it. El Presidente has no principles beyond concentrating power in his hands, but the conservative Republicans who’ve surrendered their power to him do.
Conservatives see the federal government as the problem, not the solution. They want to dismantle the federal stranglehold on a state’s ability to control business and regulate its residents according to their own principles regardless of what the residents want. Theirs is a marriage of convenience between a would-be autocrat who wants to strip away constraints on his power and conservatives who want to strip away federal regulation and the bureaucracy charged with enforcing it. Congressional conservatives have happily supported the deconstruction of federal agencies.
This is the first conservative experiment in national emergency response crafted to circumvent the federal apparatus. Perhaps they believe it can work, much like the Kansas experiment under Brownback. There, massive tax cuts bankrupted the state but conservatives, continuing to believe massive tax cuts are effective despite evidence to the contrary, incorporated some of those elements in their federal tax cut for the rich. This pandemic response is the perfect stage to work their magic on a national scale. Conservatives have broken the federal government. The emergency response has been outsourced to the individual states and when they didn’t act, local governments under a White House facade hell bent on plundering the treasury in service to corporate elites.
As the Covid19 Task Force emerges for its daily briefing which it’s rumored the president does not regularly attend, 45’s like a kid in a candy store, announcing the latest innovative solutions extracted from brainstorming sessions bereft of an understanding of the dynamics of disease spread and operational procedures of a public health response. No advisor in the room, except Dr Fauci, has any idea how to harness the power of the federal government to solve problems; the others have had no experience with it and they’re not interested in learning. They purposely try to avoid it except when it’s convenient to extend their powers. They know the laws, not the processes. New public private partnerships is the word of every day even as the RealityTVPresident is more often wrong than right announcing the availability of the products.
The federal government has opted out of drug safety monitoring. The FDA has completely abandoned drug, lab and device approval in favor of a fast tracking process that allows pharmaceutical products into general use without adequate testing or surveillance. The FDA has supported 45’s assertions that drugs already on the market can be used for covid 19 treatment without any way to assess their efficacy. In the wake of that announcement, individual doctors have begun using the drugs on their own, without knowing appropriate dosing or duration of treatment. And in doing so, they’ve created a shortage of the medications for current users, among them, sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis. We have entered a therapeutic wild west where doctors are free to experiment on each patient.
The public private partnership solution also provides another of Trump’s favorite vehicles, dumping tax money into corporate pockets. It promotes future back slapping, corporate campaign/PAC donations and future employment for employees leaving government service. But the case for new manufacturing in a plant that must be retooled rather than use the stockpile and excess military supplies right now is unclear.
El Presidente involved the Defense Production Act and then declined to use it, because he has never met a power he didn’t want to have. It appeals to him in a more fundamental way; 45 can think of nothing better than to command captains of industry, directing them to heel to his follies. Apparently the administration was negotiating with GM over government payment for the cost to retool a plant to manufacture ventilators until 45 lost patience and ordered them to do so under the Defense Production Act. They’ll bargain over some compromise reimbursement and GM will have income while other businesses have been shut down. What luck.
It turns out that the Trump administration has used the Defense Production Act which grants government orders priority over any others and extends loans to expand a vendor’s capacity thousands of times. Last summer, the DOD used the power to get rare earth metals to manufacture lasers and armored vehicles. FEMA has used it for disaster relief supplies and Homeland placed over 1000 orders in 2018. The Defense Department has used the act 300,000 times a year. The BullyPresident has represented the Defense Production Act as a rare last resort, a subterfuge for actions that seem to be routine for his administration. He has simply chosen not to use it in his emergency response for reasons that appear vindictive against primarily Democratic governors, bearing the current brunt of the pandemic, who have been critical of his response. This wartime president thinks exclusively in partisan political gain. Apparently, he’s steered equipment from the stockpile to states that have not even requested it yet and altered FEMA distribution after calls from his favorite supporters.
Trump has added his signature politics of division to his pandemic response. He’s attacking governors for looking for the federal leadership they deserve as they are literally struggling on the front lines. He’s playing Roman emperor, setting governors, mayors and county executives in the Coliseum ring to battle each other as well as predators, this time a virus, not the traditional maneaters. The winners will be favored with PPE, ventilators and tests, additional weapons to stagger back bloodied into the ring for another round.
Agent Orange has made clear that governors must show the proper praise and contrition to receive federal aid, like every good tyrant. He’s told Pence to ignore phone calls from Cuomo, Insley and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who have been critical, despite the fact that they are the hotspots most in need. It wouldn’t be complete without the BullyPresident’s added hate speech against them. One hates to think that his malice is underpinned by the potential loss of so many Democratic voters in hard hit urban areas, but given his general conduct, it can’t be dismissed offhand. This short sightedness is characteristic of a president who always thinks politically in the moment, not anticipating that the virus hops county lines in the travelers carrying it.
His divide and divide again strategy has set locale against locale. Several states are banning New Yorkers from entry; upstate New York is banning travellers from the city. Florida has ordered travelers from the New York area, encouraged by the covid19 task force coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx to self quarantine for 14 days while refusing to shut down beaches and restaurants statewide. 45 floated the idea of quarantining an ill defined New York area (the city or suburbs or upstate or all of the above) and possibly New Jersey. As usual, he had to walk that back to an issuance of a CDC travel advisory.
In his isolation, the RealityTVPresident has become increasingly unhinged by the restraints of social distancing as it keeps him from the golf course. His need for adulation is particularly acute in the absence of the idolatry of his MAWA rallies, leaving him adrift in a sea of dwindling numbers of reporters who are not friendly, as their job demands that they not be. He’s had to make due with daily press briefings, hijacked from the covid19 Task Force, which provide live national TV coverage for his campaign themes tailored to the current crisis. Inject a little xenophobia, adopt the foreigners bring diseases theme to castigate allies and foes alike; further torment asylum seekers marooned in Mexico by bringing all immigration to a stop. There’s no applause or cheering in Trump’s ears, but at least he gets direct feedback from his Trump/FoxNews gallery afterwards. And since TV watching is now a bigger part of his life, like all of us social distancers, he calls in frequently to Fox & Friends and other pundits. He can soak up their praise without interruption. In desperation, he went unnecessarily to Virginia to send off a Navy hospital ship just to get out of the White House and flip off pandemic precautions. At least there, he found cheers in an audience of Navy men and their families.
Now that Agent Orange has floated the idea that if everything is done right, fatalities could be kept to 100,000 -200,000, it hasn’t registered with him that that is a truly staggering number. China with a population of 1,408,526,449 reported 37,780 deaths (0.002%) while 100,000 of 328 million US residents is 0.03%, 15X higher. Even if China misreported, as the Trump Posse has recently suggested, by a factor almost 10 to 25,000, the US death rate will still be 1.5X higher than the Chinese 0.02%. Extreme isolation and extensive testing must have been critical to that differential.
These recent estimates are a far cry from the “15 cases will soon be 0” narrative that started 45’s pandemic nonresponse. Still, he’s setting expectations for his claims of a successful covid19 response come November, if he hasn’t cancelled elections under an ongoing state of emergency. His campaign is leveraging messages that say this wartime president kept the country from some larger number of fatalities and sets a fall guy among people who didn’t follow the task force’s often squishy guidelines and governors on his hit list.
That point is underscored by reports that their pandemic modeling has spurious sources. Birx has refused to release the identity of the modelers, stating that it an amalgam of several sources. Jeffrey Shaman, the leading epidemiologist cited by Birx has said his work doesn’t go as far into the future as the task force implies. In fact, he’s not sure what period their model is meant to cover.
Modeling is only as good as the assumptions on which its based. Many have speculated that it was only with this most dire model that Birx and Fauci were able to change 45’s frame of mind and jolt him into what would appear to be more active interventions. Appear is the key word here, because most of his actions are more bluster than rescue. This administration reeks of falseness at every turn; the effort to ferret out tangible truth is truly exhausting.
More importantly, modeling is only useful in constructing an overall strategy using estimates of projected needs. Both Trump and Kushner have poopoo-ed estimates from state governors using their own case statistics. And yet, 45 has only used it to coax his political allied governors into finally initiating social isolation. Even so, some like the Alabama Governor remained a holdout until April 3. He has continued to resist a national isolation order and to actively use the Defense Production Act even as the national stockpile is near empty and people will die today without a necessary ventilator. Again he intones governors to get out there on their own in the feeding frenzy. They simply can’t wait. Everything 45 lauds publicly is an illusion of reality TV editing.
What will the number of deaths from heart attacks, strokes, drug overdoses and other emergencies that go untreated as the hospital staff care for covid19 victims be?
One important mortality statistic, the other sick people that no one is talking about. Deaths from heart attacks, strokes, hypoglycemic and diabetic comas, drug overdoses and other emergencies that are occurring as hospital staff have been consumed with covid19 cases and can’t get to others in a timely manner. Luckily, the number of accidents and sports injuries are way down because people are staying indoors. But beyond that number, there are the number of people with long term consequences from non-timely or inadequate treatment of their illnesses.
Trump’s pandemic response is based on a self involved version of states’ rights where each governor jumps into the mad scramble for medical supplies with 150 other countries across the globe who all need the same items. It’s picture perfect to avoid a leader’s responsibility. The despotic touch is that supplies go to those who worship at the throne. Thus Ron Desantis, Florida’s governor, has had all his needs met as a reward for his staunch political support. He initiated that idea with the president to quarantine The Big Apple fearing New York and New Jersey snowbirds coming to their Florida roosts. Remaining in the denyer category, Desantis refused to initiate lockdown orders until April 1, leaving beach goers to seed cases at home and in other states when they returned. It’s ironic that the governor who is expanding the pandemic is first in line to get supplies that are desperately needed in states overwhelmed by the virus whose leaders Trump sees as political enemies.
The supply chain has been hampered by the fact that much of it is manufactured in China, shut down first by the virus. Italy, the second country to be devastated is also a center of manufacturing for some components. The lack of production is further exacerbated by the closing of borders, creating a logistics nightmare. The Air Force has recently airlifted covid19 testing supplies from Europe. As Governor Cuomo pointed out, FEMA’s entry into the response effort just added another hand to the bidding war. He’s also said that distributors are playing one entity against another, reneging on commitments to one state to fulfill orders for another higher bidding state.
Where then are those testing supplies from Europe destined to go, now that HHS and the CDC have outsourced testing to each locale, insisting that they are free to develop and procure their own tests? Of course, almost every place is still complaining that they can’t increase their testing. Most continue to restrict testing to inpatients and exposed healthcare workers and without information about asymptomatic and mild cases, there will be no way to determine infection rates. Isolation of exposed healthcare workers must be determined quickly to shorten unnecessary isolations and detection of asymptomatic cases is needed to isolate them appropriately. These are the methods being used successfully in Taiwan and South Korea.
Our fearless leader claims he’s heard nothing about problems with testing; he must not have caught any of the thousands of social media posts about individual experiences. While getting the test has been a bottleneck, getting the result has been even more frustrating, often taking more than a week. Maybe the task force is so focused on innovation they’ve not bothered to track how effective it is. But the exact purpose of a task force is to ferret out problems in execution of its plans. Apparently, they don’t think it’s their problem; the governors and mayors are making those decisions.
Agent Orange has made one grand gesture, sending naval ships to NYC and LA. As for the USNS Comfort sent to NYC to treat non-covid19 patients more safely, it’s majestic but not substantive. Only 20 New Yorkers have been transferred to it; similarly the USNS Mercy in LA has only 15. The ships have obstructed patient transfers through bureautic hurdles and military protocols. These include a list of 49 conditions which are excluded from treatment. Patients must be first transferred to a city hospital for screening, including a covid19 test before they can be transferred to the ship. This can require up to 5 ambulance rides, since viral test results take a week, while ambulances in the city are in constant use. Perhaps a better solution would be for the navy doctors on board to start helping out in New York hospitals.
What’s needed is a central procurer, ie the federal government which makes strategic decisions about distribution. FEMA has never played this role for the whole country. But the highest bidder approach is exactly the wrong one. Distribution of needed resources should obviously go first to the hardest hit, as infections peak in waves and resources can be shifted to those hit later as more supplies are manufactured. Every state doesn’t need to be preparing at the same moment and a central distributor will own the equipment and can move it judiciously. Is Cuomo going to want to move those 100,000 ventilators he purchased to Chicago? Probably not without a hefty transfer of funds, which neither one of them can afford. Cuomo could easily decide to sell them to the highest bidder, Norway or Sweden perhaps in the current atmosphere.
In this country where money talks louder than compassion or anything else, a central distribution authority is critical to ascertain that resources go to institutions that lack financial resources. Phoebe Putney Hospital in Albany Georgia has had 30 covid19 deaths in the midst of a Doherty County hotspot. This is a staggering figure for a city of 79,000 traceable to two funerals. The hospital was financially unstable before the pandemic and has now had to create additional ICUs with the help of the national guard.
Georgia’s governor was refusing to issue a statewide shut down, leaving the work to local governments although he finally declared a state of emergency last week allowing the mobilization of the national guard. In this scenario, who will procure the hospital’s needed supplies? The state may be lucky in this regard; Governor Kemp is also a staunch Trumpophant and his wish may become a command from Agent Orange. Claiming that he did not know that the asymptomatically infected spread the virus, he finally declared a shelter in place order on April 2, although self defeatingly exempting churches in this Bible Belt. He does have a pretty savvy Public Health Department director making his excuse simply pathetic. Kemp has become the butt of comedians everywhere. It is this type of patchwork response that endangers the whole nation, leaving specific populations vulnerable. It increases the case and death rates and diminishes the possibility that viral spread can be eliminated in the near future. Our states have different governments but they are bound together in a single land mass. We are clearly not all in this together, just as our chief executive intends.
No doubt medical practitioners are so exhausted from their patient loads, aggrieved by the high number of deaths around them, anxious and saddened by illness in their colleagues and overwhelmed by the struggle to find or create the PPE that they can’t see the forest for the trees. It’s near impossible for healthcare workers to be imaginative under these conditions. But Americans are volunteering to individually support them by making hand sanitizers, sewing masks and jerry rigging plastic shields. One enterprising young man is 3D printing face masks at home and this idea seems to have caught on in a number of institutions. UCSF has 13 3D printers pumping out face masks. This type of production could take these institutions out of the mask lottery, leaving more traditional PPE for other places. New York has a ton of universities who might try filling in their gaps as do many other states.
A recent news story featured an adapted 3D printed diving mask that is being used as an alternative to ventilators in Italy which could also lower the need for ventilators. The president is thrilled to announce corporate innovations and pay them for those, but who is in charge of developing alternative equipment innovations outside corporate giants. Why has no federal effort in innovation been launched to print 3D face masks or modified diving masks? Could it be that it might compete with GM ventilator and other corporate contracts?
This is yet another area where 45 has abdicated his wartime command in favor of allowing each battalion to equip itself with weapons and plan its own strategy. Lincoln saw the folly in letting the generals take the lead as the Union was defeated in every major battle for the first two years of the Civil War. But at least he was providing supplies and logistics and weighed in on the generals’ war plans.
Certainly, everybody is flying by the seat of their pants in the wake of this novel virus. In the UK Mercedes has modified CPAP devices, commonly used for sleep apnea, to lower the need for ventilators. However, there is evidence from the SARS epidemic that CPAP may aerosolize the virus into the room, increasing transmission. Apparently, China and Italy may have used CPAP in the wake of ventilator shortages but not enough time has elapsed for an analysis. Unfortunately, good evidence takes time.
Britain, recovering from a miscalculation that the virus would burn itself out, has made a complete u-turn after members of the Royal family, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and several Cabinet ministers tested positive. Boris thought he’d emulate his American friend, but probably had second thoughts when he saw the US top the charts in covid19 deaths. The country shut down with good popular compliance and the NHS has ramped up quickly, building multiple large field hospitals in soccer stadiums in preparation for their peak in cases. They plan to use their modified CPAP devices extensively, perhaps believing they’ve addressed the problem of aerosolization.
But they stand in sharp contrast to the delayed bungling here, the difference between a pretender and a leader. The Brits demonstrate how modelling can change government strategy. Despite a slow start, Boris Johnson took the bull by the horns even though their response is not yet well oiled and they’re having problems with ramping up testing. But at least they’re trying. In contrast, New York City is just now building large temporary hospitals in the Javits Center and Central Park with smaller units in hotels and any space they can stick sick people, the result of 45’s every-state-for-themselves approach. Only time will tell which approach will leave their country less sick and on the road to a viable economic recovery.
The danger to healthcare and ancillary hospital staff is real. Physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, EMTs and anesthesiologists are dying from the lack of appropriate protection from viral infection. Others have become ill and must be treated or self quarantine, taking them away from the jobs they are performing. This fiasco will have a far reaching impact on a healthcare system that has physician and nursing shortages at baseline. The current working conditions will result in early retirements and others who will leave hospital positions for offices or leave clinical positions all together. Some will have PTSD as a result of their experience and require mental health services. As a profession, physicians have high rates of substance abuse and suicide under normal conditions; this will certainly increase after this traumatic event. As the nation debates expanding access to medical care, significant losses of caretakers will make that access only theoretical.
As we sit in our homes in social isolation, or perhaps not if you live in much of the South and western states or you’re an essential or healthcare worker, many of us only see covid19 through our TV or social media. Most of us don’t know anyone infected or healthcare workers. But we do know people who are now laid off or unemployed; we can’t go to our favorite restaurants or movies or sports events or even watch many of our favorite TV shows. The bad certainly feels like it outweighs the good. And yet, none of us is safe from infection; even if there aren’t many confirmed cases around you, the virus could be lurking in an asymptomatically infected person, triggering an outbreak around you. That is the most likely scenario particularly in the absence of a massive testing regime. We have evidence that social distancing works in slowing viral spread which then spares healthcare facilities from being overwhelmed. And yet, there are at least a dozen states that have refused to issue stay at home orders.
45 has as yet refused to issue a nationwide stay at home order. The longer he waits, the longer we will all suffer and the more Americans will die. The problem with the path Trump has chosen is that a national response must be led nationally. It can’t be outsourced to individual states because sometimes everyone must act in tandem. Conservatives don’t believe that, nor does he. Trump believes that the minority of the populace that supports him can keep him in power, his ultimate goal. He’s not invested in states, he counts on bare to overwhelming majorities in congressional districts. His political calculation that his base, unable to see the consequences of the covid19 pandemic in their neighborhoods, will not react to the mounting death tolls on the two coasts. It’s shortsighted because the virus will get to them soon. Florida is already being ravaged and Michigan is catching up. The virus won’t stay in Detroit alone. Pennsylvania cases are creeping up as well. By that time, the RealityTVPresident is hoping to rewrite his story to appear to have taken decisive command, with the help of Trump/FoxNews allies. He just needs the right scripted media production to make his flock believe; one that doesn’t contain the reality of events as documented by his own words. This masquerading wartime commander is failing bigly.
On April 4, 1968, Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee.
The country’s national intelligence apparatus is our eyes and ears in the country and the world. It is the bulwark of protection for our citizens and institutions. When it fails, things like 9/11 happen. When it has opted out of investigating the threat from white supremacist, shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Chabad of Poway synagogue in California and the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin happen. At the same time, there are numerous examples of how it has erred in the past, harassing private citizens like Martin Luther King and legitimate organizations like Anti-Vietnam War and civil rights groups under J. Edgar Hoover. Post 9/11, the NSA has illegally violated the privacy of citizens, both domestically and abroad.
45 has set a course to return to intelligence through a partisan political scope similar to the Bush era which pushed us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least then the real intelligence was gathered; it was simply massaged into a false picture that served a political purpose but did not represent reality. In fact, that reimagining has continued throughout the war years, with the Defense Department telling the nation that we were on the threshold of winning the war. They posited that they just needed to add a little more of this or that and victory would come. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In his quest to do everything bigger and with more evil flare, Agent Orange is digging into the intelligence agencies to root out the “deep state” which in his mind is anyone who is disloyal to his conspiracy infected vision of the world. He began by relentlessly attacking the agencies’ personnel in the most personal ways, even before he was inaugurated, driving out some of the most dedicated public servants in the federal government. Once the Mueller investigation was underway, he tirelessly attacked the agency leadership as well, having unleashed his Trump/FoxNews mastiffs to chomp on them from all sides, percolating up complex conspiracy theories to make 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon like links from any one name to every other one.
His objective is to blind the intelligence agencies to the reality that lies outside his own house of cards. The movie, The Report (2019) illustrates how the interpretation of information informs the pursuit of sources as well as the questions asked. CIA/NSA agents were afraid to unearth facts about the enhanced interrogation techniques of the Bush era, even though they constituted torture, illegal under international treaties on the conduct of war.
Trump has over the years added layer upon layer to his shield, now much like the original diving suits topped by an airtight soundproof metal helmet that he frequently uses to bury his head in the sand. The ideas in his head date from the 80s, made increasingly more rigid as the world changed around him. The minute something intrudes on his radar, he quickly pops his head under the ocean floor and dials up his Trump/FoxNews oxygen supply to explain what’s really happening in a language he can understand. Post-Impeachment, everything is a Democratic Party plot, like the intelligence report of continuing Russian interference in our elections and the covid-19 virus epidemic itself.
And now, when 45 thinks that Democratic tendrils have extended beyond the intelligence agencies and federal bureaucracy into the White House, even somehow turning his own partisan political appointees into turncoats, he’s determined to cut those bits out. Beyond Bill Barr’s Justice Department investigations into past investigations, a new thing on the horizon is the creation of his own federal hiring apparatus. According to Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, for over a year, a small group of extremely conservative Republican Trumpophants, headed by Mrs. Justice Clarence Thomas, Jenny, has been meeting weekly to discuss a hitlist of those that must go and another list of new hires. Competence is optional; supreme loyalty to Donald the King is the only qualification.
Trump has hired a new US Director of Presidential Personnel whose mandate is to pick political appointees across the government. Actually, Johnny McEntee is a rebounder from earlier in the administration when he served as Trump’s bodyguard/personal assistant. He was summarily escorted out of the White House for unknown security issues, at the prompting of John Kelly. McEntee’s charge is to get rid of the traitors in the White House and the executive branch. He has added a new assistant, a 23 year old senior at George Washington University. Neither the 29 year old director or his assistant has any training or experience in human resources. Agent Orange is snugging up his cocoon ever tighter.
Now that the intelligence agencies are being equipped with partisan blinders, very real threats to our national security are blooming. Even as Pompeo is touting the ceasefire in Afghanistan as the first step to peace and American troop withdrawal, how will we know what is actually happening with partisan intelligence? While an actual end to the war in Afghanistan is a laudatory accomplishment, this is Campaign Trump Productions Inc, scripted to make it look like troop withdrawal is 45’s next accomplishment, no matter what the situation on the ground is. It’s the Bush playbook all over again, this time for exit instead of entry.
The prospect of Manchurian candidate minded intelligence gathering is frightening. Think about the fruits of Giuliani’s hanky panky in Ukraine in the absence of objective intelligence gathering; the public would know much less about the corrupt politics of the Trump administration. Giuliani continues and the new partisan intelligence agencies may stop investigating outside of their conspiracy theories, just as the Justice Department is doing. The future could bring ignoring evidence and turning a blind eye to Russian active measures across the world in an effort to chime in on the Putin narrative that Russia is a friend who deserves to return to global counsels of power.
The threat to national security from corrupted intelligence intersects with the global covid-19 epidemic. Biased intelligence gathering not only strips the country of a conduit to evaluate the extent and impact of the disease, the current administration lacks the scientific personnel to understand the implications and construct a defense here at home. For instance, Iran is a disease hot spot; Turkey’s Erdogan has unleashed a flood of new Syrian refugees on Europe to blackmail them into supporting his war against Assad’s alliance. Spread of covid-19 to this group will be deadly and potentially devastating for control of spread in Europe. Our intelligence resources in the region have already been compromised.
The epidemic has implications for military readiness, as troops and their families in South Korea, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East are at risk. And unvarnished information about these events, not the mantra “we’re doing great” is critical to prevention and preparedness.
The MAWAPresident has made it clear that he cares little about the epidemic outside our borders. His continued emphasis on his early closure of traffic from China is anti-immigrant campaign spin for Trumpophants even as it was ineffective in preventing covid-19 infections here. And his misguided America First demand to transfer Americans from the quarantined cruise ship in Japan may have hastened community spread of disease domestically.
This closed world view is also apparent in 45’s refusal to assist other national or international efforts, except interestingly enough Iran. It goes without saying that international cooperation is the best way to tackle a virus that respects no borders. But in another politically honed move, 45 demonstrated his humanitarian side in what Pompeo has termed support of the Iranian people as opposed to the authoritarian government that is oppressing them. Of course the US imposed sanctions are the major reason why the death toll in Iran is so high. They lack facilities and the needed medical equipment and supplies to treat disease victims. At the same time, Pompeo knew it was an empty gesture. Iranian hardliners would never allow US agents of any kind into their country awash as they are in the paranoia of US desired regime change. Of course they refused and the propaganda coup only cost a tweet or two.
The US response has been handicapped by the fact that this administration dismantled the Office of Global Health in the National Security Center which coordinated the emergency response infrastructure from the national security level on down. This infrastructure included offices around the world who brought American expertise to those countries to interrupt the spread of a disease before it reached the US, the most effective way to prevent an epidemic from becoming a pandemic. The center was developed under the Obama administration to respond to Ebola, so it had to go in the Trump obsession to obliterate Barack from government. It has also thinned out CDC personnel through its anti-scientific approach to public health which drove long time professionals to more friendly environments. It has tried to cut budgets at the CDC, NIH and HHS which Congress has resisted; both the CDC and NIH will be instrumental in developing a vaccine. When questioned by the press about this, Agent Orange responded with the ridiculous assertion that he could just hire these doctors back as if there is all the time in the world and they haven’t moved on to other organizations. The time is now; every day delayed is a day lost.
45 displayed all of his flaws in his covid-19 press conference. He focused on the stock market as a campaign tool rather than a concern for the health of the nation. ‘Everything is alright, trust me, because we are taking care of everything’ was his major pitch, as if this message is different from every other falsehood out of his mouth. To ask the stock market to trust him is to thrust uncertainty, the major investor destabilizer, into the forefront.
In part, his tenuous grasp on the processes involved in mounting a response to a major infectious disease epidemic has created faux facts in his mind. And then there is his belief that the wave of disease will disappear in the spring, similar to the flu. There is no real basis to believe that except that all epidemics come to an end at some point. But the Spanish Flu pandemic throws up a big red flag here; infections did wane in the spring and summer of 1917, but the virus roared back with a vengeance in the fall to continue globally for almost another two years.
As is always the RealityTVPresident’s first move, control over the messaging was quick and deadly. After Dr Anthony Fauci delivered a less optimistic picture about the coronavirus in a new conference with the president, the administration has banned any statement from any public health authority without clearance from Mike Pence, his newly appointed coronavirus czar. Pence, of course, a noted scientist, has extensive experience in public health. Oh wait, he’s a political hack whose experience, clouded by religious zealotry, resulted in the worst HIV epidemic in Indiana. He must believe he’s acquired some immunity from God since he met with a child who has covid-19. He could be spreading it among administration officials, CPAC where he spoke after being appointed czar and even Agent Orange himself.
In that regard, I have to extend kudos to the former CDC Director, Thomas Frieden, who proved himself quite the politician when he was questioned about Pence’s leadership qualifications by Christiane Amanpour. He disclosed that he advised Pence to begin clean needle exchanges to stop the HIV epidemic and Pence followed his advice. Of course, he failed to mention that the governor resisted and delayed beginning the program which cost many people their health. Frieden understands all too well how to keep his voice from censure.
45’s messaging is clear. His primary concern is optics. He needs to buoy Wall Street going into the election, his indicator of economic health. But because he’s a pathological liar unable to distinguish truth from fantasy, there’s no reason to believe anything coming out of his mouth. His faithful flock do and for that 40% of the population, we can only hope their refusal to take precautions will not end in a higher infection and casualty rate than those who heed the preventative actions recommended by the CDC. A MAGA hat is no defense against viral infection. Unfortunately covid-19 is so contagious that their inaction will put everyone at risk.
Of course, the actual economy will be impacted by both international and domestic factors. Because the US is primarily a service economy that runs on consumerism, the impact of the epidemic on consumer spending across the board can’t help but dampen the economy, even beyond the impact of the virus on Chinese production and international supply chains. The hand sanitizer and surgical mask industry are doing great; airlines and the travel industry not so much.
Trump/FoxNews and sycophants like Medal of Freedom Rush Limbaugh immediately politized the epidemic by downplaying the threat and accusing Democrats of hyping anti-Trumpism in hopes of worsening the epidemic. The junior Donald said flat out that Democrats want people to die from covid-19. The irony here is the usual conservative projection that accuses Democrats of politicizing an issue when they began with name calling and false attribution. With Pence in charge, we can look for the CDC information to be spoiled, polluted by partisan hands. This can compromise state and local efforts to combat the spread of the disease.
If we escape the potentially major catastrophic impact of this epidemic, it will be luck from the vagaries of the virus itself, not from Americans’ best nature or leadership from the White House.
This is a narrative reminiscent of the Flu pandemic of 1917, which extended to 1919. Where government and public health officials refused to cancel war bond rallies, military parades, sports events, etc the virus spread rapidly through whole cities. During the pandemic, there were bodies lying in the streets of Philadelphia, mass graves were dug as coffins ran out, whole households were wiped out. As the first case of community spread has been reported in California, the keep-Trump-in-office approach will be reluctant to enforce quarantines and eliminate public gatherings–imagine a MAWA rally being cancelled! Still, as a cowardly germaphobe, he is unlikely to put his life on the line to demonstrate he’s on top of the pandemic. It’s hard to know if he understands that he could be at risk.
The MAWAPresident’s America First focus motivates his belief that the country can escape harm by rolling up into a little ball like a pill bug. In that, he has been completely misled. In this completely integrated world today, there is no magic sphere to enclose a territory. We have our first reported case of community disease spread as a result. Despite warnings not to retrieve passengers from the quarantined cruise ship off Japan, a drastic mistake in and of itself, the BullyPresident insisted on bringing them to military installations, one of which is in California. As reported on MSNBC, a whistleblower has filed a complaint that personnel were sent to settle the passengers without instructions in proper isolation techniques or protective gear. This includes airline personnel. It is believed that the first community acquired case is someone exposed to someone exposed in this operation. The picture is further complicated by a delay in diagnosis, because the person did not fit the CDC criteria for covid-19 testing.
The CDC is struggling with a shortage of tests and labs in which to run them, another casualty of budget and personnel cuts. The initial batch was flawed but the organization announced that all states will have tests by next week. As it is, the test is only moderately accurate. This means that very few Americans have been tested, and only when they report typical symptoms or they travelled from areas with infections. Secretary Azar did his misinformation bit by lying about testing across the Sunday TV news shows. In this situation, we have no idea how prevalent infections are in this country, less than 500 people have been tested early on. Because the virus is fairly contagious, that was only the beginning. The virus is infectious before people develop symptoms, one reason for its easy spread, so there are now over 75 cases in just a few days, clearly the tip of the iceberg that will be revealed in the coming days.
More importantly, new cases require teams of epidemiologists to ferret out contacts, chase them down and effect quarantine measures. As healthcare and other workers self-quarantine, personnel shortages will crop up in a number of areas. Of course, as communities move to shut down public interaction, this may become less of a problem except at healthcare facilities. The Daily Podcast from the NYT, presents a good summary of what is known about the virus and how people can protect themselves.
The response so far may have advanced through a series of unintentional human errors which can be anticipated in any complicated multi-organizational undertaking. However, honest disclosure of mistakes and the corrective measures would go a long way to engender both trust and compliance with the steps to come.
Bogged down in his exclusive domestic focus, the RealityTVPresident appears to have forgotten a host of other global travellers. There are US soldiers stationed abroad who interact with their families and may have been transferred back to the states or some other locations. Airline personnel, businessmen, international conference attendees, NGO workers, students, commercial sea traffic workers, travel guides etc are only a few of the routine travelers who have probably not altered their travel schedules except as their destinations have cancelled gatherings. The covid-19 task force has not yet instituted travel restrictions, although it has issued some warnings. The airlines have actively taken the lead in this area by cancelling flights. The world watched China belatedly shut down and somehow thought it didn’t have to be equally aggressive in preventative moves until the infection was upon them. This is 1917 all over again, unimpeded by lessons learned from the mistakes of the SARS, MERS and Ebola epidemics in the not so distant past.
Still, it is important to retain perspective. Covid-19, a new virus with as yet little community immunity, primarily causes a mild disease, similar to a cold or flu. It’s basically a few days off work or out of school over 98% of the time. While 2% mortality is 20 times higher than with seasonal flu, it is far less than Ebola and MERS. Mortality statistics are soft because the prevalence of the virus is still unclear. There is no treatment or vaccine. Viruses mutate rapidly and the covid-19 of today may not be the one present in the future. We want to be as cautious about contracting it as we are about the flu, where even now, most people don’t get the vaccine; this is a good time to make a habit of basic hygienic procedures that prevent the spread of many common viruses. It is also crucial to observe self-quarantine measures after potential exposure. People who feel sick should stay home! Moreover, we must heed the warnings of public health experts, not politicians, when measures to increase social distancing, facility closures and quarantines in specific areas when asked. Despite the many sacrifices in daily life this may require, no cheating. It’s not whether any individual contracts the disease, but the potential to spread it to many others who could be more susceptible to severe disease.
In this divided country where the government’s approach is to dissemble and splinter, it is a big ask to put the interest of the whole above our individual groups. Americans, contrary to what they’d like to believe, are not better than they appear right now; this is who they’ve been for most of the nation’s history. A sudden detente between the entrenched right and left won’t happen in the face of a mild disease. If we escape the potentially major catastrophic impact of this epidemic, it will be luck from the vagaries of the virus itself, not from Americans’ best nature or leadership from the White House.
On March 2, 1807 Congress banned the importation of the enslaved beginning January 1, 1808. It failed to create a punishment for smugglers who continued to traffic in the enslaved.
It took a couple of weeks, but in the wake of Lt Vinman’s testimony before the House investigation committee on impeachment, Congressional Trumpophants have finally hit their stride. They’ve threaded the needle so deftly that the nuance will keep their biggest fans nestled in the nirvana of Trump-can-do-no-wrong. It is truly sad that the majority of Republican Senators are willing to betray the republic by embracing foreign intervention in sacrosanct democratic elections. So hungry are they to retain power that they will happily kiss American democracy goodbye.
That shouldn’t be surprising. They’ve shown no real love for democracy anyway. The Koch brothers and friends executed a 30 year strategic plan to mold government into a shadow of itself, leaving business unfettered by regulation or taxes. Their plan encompassed the intellectual establishment, the media, state and local governments, the judiciary, the electoral system and fake “grassroots movements”. Disinformation was standard operating procedure. One man, one vote gave way to “sure seats” where representatives selected their own electorates. From gerrymandered districts through all the mechanisms of voter suppression, conservatives understood that they were always in the minority and to win, they had to keep some of the majority from voting. High voter turnout was never their friend.
The MAWAPresident was never part of their plan. He is a fortunate fool that Steve Bannon stumbled upon. His goal to maximize Trump fame and fortune happened to coincide with Kochopulus objectives. He had the swagger to seize the government, with the help of Russian intrusion, supercharged conservative media and the “impartial” mainstream media. The strategic planners have no national allegiances; their goal is their only concern, no matter how it’s achieved. The BullyPresident doesn’t have the intellectual bandwidth to have been a plotter; he has no political or ethical philosophy; his North Star is himself. But he knows how to harness racial, ethnic and gender biases into the language of fear that woos a certain segment of the electorate. And he has bought conservatives to within spitting distance of their summit so his tenure must be preserved.
The core defense message revolves around an insistence that Agent Orange was simply asking for investigations into the 2016 elections and continuing efforts to combat Ukrainian corruption. It was simply a coincidence that the investigations involved the son of a potential Democratic candidate for president. The key word here is coincidence. Corruption is the through line in this rationale, both in 2016 and now; it is concern over Ukrainian corruption, not the specifics of Hunter Biden that is paramount. This is the duty of the president they say. After all, there could be other instances of Americans involved in corruption; in fact we know that there are, at least Paul Manafort and probably Giuliani but GOP spokesmen won’t say that. In fact, embedded in the conspiracy theory they’re pursuing is the idea that Manafort was set up to bring down DJT. But this message is hard to sell if almost every time investigation into corruption comes up in any context, Biden’s name is close behind.
For the casual listener, this message could sound plausible especially repeated on the endless loop that is the mainstream media’s interaction with Twitter, Trumpophant politicians and Trump/FoxTV aligned with the conservative media machine. Never mind that the president can’t hinder foreign aid that Congress has legally budgeted; this too transgresses the separation of powers. Mick Mulvaney has said that the BullyPresident does it all the time but that doesn’t normalize such interference. No president should be doing it, even if this one chooses to defy the rules as he has done in almost every sphere. It’s a slap in the face of elected representatives pursuing the public’s interest or at least they’re supposed to be. It’s a slap in the face of the American people.
Of course, 45 is a renowned fighter against corruption, despite the nepotism of his administration where his inexperienced daughter and son-in-law hold special advisor positions which continue to expand profits from their interests in their family businesses. They are never shy about advertising their brand throughout foreign and domestic government activity. Agent Orange has praised the work of Cabinet members whom he appointed even as they were bilking tax dollars from public coffers. Such praise preceded allowing them to resign without any executive investigation into their misdeeds. If this is vigorously attacking corruption within his administration, it probably needs a boost from Viagra. The BullyPresident has hounded out of government agencies the lobbyists comfortably ensconced in his Cabinet departments by his cabinet appointees. Does that sound like the current president or are his actions at variance with his words, as they so often? Donald J Trump has been a poster boy for corruption since his beginnings; when exactly did stamping out corruption anywhere become a chief concern for him. It seems to have conveniently emerged as a priority to rationalize his villainous misdeeds to conjure up false campaign allegations against a potential rival for the presidency in 2020 using Selensky.
Any reading of the Constitution, campaign election laws and traditional definitions of treason clearly prohibit assistance from foreign governments in US elections. The US has a vast array of its own intelligence agencies to investigate developments across the globe. As well, the state department is a huge network of diplomatic officials that affect our foreign policy. There is no reason to use people outside government employment for anything. It is has never been ok to employ nongovernmental free agents in official diplomatic business, excluding secret agent kind of stuff by the CIA or NSA. That is intelligence not diplomacy although the two are often intertwined. Nongovernmental agents should not possess the necessary security clearances to be involved, let alone be referred by the president and diplomats as the go-to guy for investigations. And for that matter, to involve the Attorney General in a sham investigation into debunked conspiracy theories generated from various conservative websites and peddled on Trump/Fox News.
But most importantly, a nongovernmental agent, not required to take an oath to uphold the Constitution, has no accountability to the public and no official records that would be subject to oversight. The government is supposed to be working on behalf of the public. Certainly there have been many historical times when this has not been the case. That is why we need Congressional oversight and the Fourth Estate, the free press.
In this particular case, the nongovernmental agent is Rudy Giuliani who has known associations with corrupt businessmen in Ukraine. I have no love for the Republican Party. Still, it is sad to watch the party so self-imbued with the trappings of patriotism trash decorated war heroes with vicious innuendo, now that they are career foreign service professionals testifying before the House. It is tragic to watch the party historically linked to the primacy of national security wallow in justifications for perhaps the largest threat to the nation in its history–the dissolution of our electoral process. For the MAGAPresident, national security threats seems only to exist at the southern border from a nonexistent enemy, Central American migrants and asylum seekers. Across the ocean, 45 sees no threat except ISIS; he seems to think the nation’s best interest lies in his personal allegiance to Vladimir Putin, a sworn enemy of the United States by Putin’s own admission. 45 has shown no evidence of allegiance to the nation except as a platform to spin transactional exchanges to enrich his family’s businesses. He is clearly more enamored with spreading Russian global interest than advancing our own.
I “see no evil, hear no evil”… but I will speak evil of witnesses and Democrats say Trumpophants
The second line of impeachment defense is even more incredible. It says if these presidential actions are malodorous, they don’t rise to the level of impeachment. Not a single GOP defender has ventured to add what they consider impeachable offenses and the media has failed to hold their feet to the fire. Not a single correspondent I’ve seen has ever asked the question, let alone drilled down for an answer. If trying to rig our elections isn’t impeachable, it’s hard to imagine what is. If obstruction of justice and of Congressional oversight isn’t impeachable, it’s difficult to imagine what is. The RealityTVPresident has perfected the I-didn’t-do-it-but-even-if-I-did-there’s-nothing-wrong-with-it defense, so he’s trotted it out again. It seems to be playing well outside the Trumpophant Kingdom, or is it? Polls seem to show an increasing number of Americans favor impeachment and removal, now almost one half.
But it’s early days yet, before the public hearings thrust the blow by blow onto TV screens daily. It all boils down to this. Is presidential solicitation of foreign interference in US elections wrong? Remember that the chief executive has publicly invited both China and Russia to jump in as well. Republicans may think its a joke, but our enemies do not. In addition, Iran was exposed for using social media to influence voter opinion; the Saudia have been similarly engaged. What’s to stop North Korea or Israel?
In the case of Russia, Trump’s encouraged it to just keep doing what it has been doing, as he continues to deny Russian involvement in 2016 and refused to support efforts to secure polling places against cyber disruption. The Russian bear is nothing if not persistent; he just keeps pushing until he meets effective pushback. 45 has bent in the opposite direction, caressing the blows by repeatedly lavishing consistent praise on the dictator and supporting Putin’s denials while attacking the US intelligence apparatus. And now he’s gone the extra mile to solicit fake news in the image of his Russian idol, subsequently landing himself squarely in this impeachment morass.
Secondly, if the solicitation is wrong, then is it impeachable behavior? Seems like it should be. In inviting interference, 45 violated his oath of office to protect the country against its enemies, threatening national security by making himself and US officials open to blackmail and other threats for his shaky dealings. In addition, he has transformed the image of the country from straight shooter to a player in the type of corruption Ukraine is so well known for.
And then there’s the obstruction of justice, which eats away at the heart of the separation of powers, the bedrock of our republic. The lesson of the Mueller Report was clear; if the chief executive could get away with obstruction there, he could do it again and so he is. He’s turbo charged his propaganda machine . . . and he’s off!
Delay and further denial of aid may be compromising Ukraine’s defense. Ukraine is the wall between NATO countries and the Russian bear which is chomping away at territory in order to prove that democracies are inferior to Putin’s dictatorial oligarchy. In the wider world, Agent Orange has exposed the US as patently dishonest in ways it has not been seen before. We had dishonest policies: WMDs, Iraq, Afghanistan and further back, Vietnam, the Cold War madness to dislodge any national self determination movement leader in the guise of combating communism. Yes, the pursuit of oil has ruled our politics.
But the world is changing; we should be locking hands with other countries to meet the challenge of climate change, globalization of the on demand economy, sustaining economic growth when business finally begins to factor in the cost of pollution, AI/automation, disparities in wealth distribution that are feeding the wave of discontent against autocratic rulers in some places and the election of more autocratic candidates in some others. And now there’s nuclear proliferation to boot. Instead the RealityTVPresident has further demonstrated that we are an unreliable ally, that we renege on our word, but we’ll consider a different course if our palms are greased with favors or cash. Take Saudi Arabia. Trump stated matter of factly that the Saudis got both weapons and our troops because they are dropping a bundle to cash for them. Now the USMC and the Army are mercenaries in 45’s eyes!
Devon Nunes, in speaking in the House against the impeachment bill, embodied another of 45’s classic maneuvers, accuse the opposition of the exact actions he’s done. Nunes talked about an intelligence committee, cloistered in a basement SCIF, led by a cult leader who has mesmerized members into doing his bidding. Would that be Adam Schiff? Sounds more like Nunes’ fearless leader, whose Trumpophants in Congress and the judiciary are legendary. Schiffants not so much; his buttoned up approach lacks the vibe of a messianic leader.
Perhaps in same way that the Emperor without clothes nakedness was suddenly appreciated when a child simply yelled it out, the veil will be lifted and the true facts will out.
Of course Agent Orange thinks that to escape removal from office, he just has to continue to pump out his rhetorical propaganda, send his minions to his own Trump/FoxTV, and convince his Senatorial entourage, in particular Grim Reaper Mitch, that their fate is inextricably tied to his, much like conjoined twins. Reports are that 45 is threatening withdrawal of campaign funding and recruiting challengers to Senators who vote to remove him from office. That sounds like jury tampering at the least. Only pressure from constituents can rock that boat enough to slash the bonds holding those votes in place. These guys and a few women clearly can’t be shamed into honoring their oath of office. They’ve been able to creatively reconfigure the puzzle pieces into a panorama that allows them to see what the PiedPiperPresident says is real, not what actually is. Only voters’ threats to eject them from their positions of power and privilege in the Senate is going to shake them loose. Many, led by pragmatists like Lindsey Graham, have demonstrated how adroitly they can adjust to the prevailing winds. Let’s hope that strong popular winds swirling with exaltation of our democratic republic will roar through the chamber, lifting the RealityTVPresident out of the White House and many of his blind supporters out of Congress come 2020.
They should blow Pence out as well since he is clearly implicated in carrying the administration’s message to Selensky that defense aid would be delayed in the absence of a public announcement of Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden. There it is, that elusive quid pro quo which is applicable only in criminal law. Trumpophants have tried to confuse the issue as part of their line of defense but nowhere did the Founding Fathers delineate it in purposely ill defined impeachment proceedings. Nor has it been involved in any of the three previous impeachments. There were several Pence interactions including the Ukrainian president’s inauguration. But that is probably political overreach for the Democrats unless there is a considerable shift in the national consciousness. Not impossible, in the way that the Emperor without clothes nakedness was suddenly appreciated when a child simply yelled it out. The veil was lifted and the true facts will out. It will happen one day, but after 2020, it will probably be too late. Welcome to the nation of El Trumpo.
November 11, 1898: 2000 Black residents of Wilmington NC were forced to flee the town at gunpoint by armed white residents in a coup that seized political control. Dozens of African Americans were killed.
Protestors hold up a sign towards the crowd at a rally for U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, January 20, 2016. REUTERS/Nick Oxford TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – RTX23AHX
Is it possible that Donald J Trump said from a White House podium “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy”? Hearing the words on his lips made them seem tarnished, as false as his bigoted rhetoric. His teleprompter reading infused the words with a disconnectedness from his persona. It’s almost as if the body was there, but the RealityTVPresident was not. That quality provides a handy device for later denials as if he needs one. What’s he up to?
Let it be noted that when Agent Orange wandered off script, he blessed Toledo, not Dayton, the actual site of the massacre. He exposed the level of concern he managed to squeeze into his weekend schedule in between viewing Trump/FoxTV and golf games. He seemed to think one more shooting wasn’t a big deal. He didn’t bother to do the basics, like contacting the mayor of Dayton, maybe because he wasn’t sure who to contact. It’s all fly over country anyway; is there really a difference between Toledo and Dayton? How can he have their backs if he doesn’t know who they are? The people in both cities should remember this in November.
Of course, 45 is notorious for saying one thing one minute and the opposite the next; the next Trump critic or MAGA rally will be the test. The RealityTVPresident cleverly avoided a declaration of his own personal commitment; he urged “the nation” to condemn but there was no “I” there or anywhere in his address. He couldn’t bring himself to own up to his role in spreading hate after asserting before his speech that “we have to end hatred…we’re going to take care of it…we are doing lots of big things to bring that about”, as if it was within his power to upend history. He has stirred the pot but he can’t change the flavor by removing his spoon.
The RealityTVPresident cleverly avoided a declaration of his own personal commitment; he urged “the nation” to condemn but there was no “I” there or anywhere in his address.
What’s he up to? My first guess is that his polls are showing his relentless racist attacks aren’t winning many supporters and could be losing some. Then, he’s probably trying to provide shade for GOP politicians who are being hammered by the press and supporters to call a spade a spade. They’ve been backed into a corner, inducing a twinge of conscious in a few. Most are unwilling to twist themselves into pretzels to defend the indefensible; they’ve struggled to find the most neutral words they can.
A new round of several Republican members of the House who will not stand for reelection may be another factor niggling at the RNC. The party, desperate to hang on to House seats, now finds them vulnerable as open seats rather than incumbent. These districts have become questionable in the face of demographic shifts but the party can’t afford to concede to an even larger Democratic majority without a fight. Agent Orange, fresh from the weekend on the golf course probably yielded to the pressure to stop the bleeding.
The BullyPresident also threw a little sand at the Democrats. “I gave the speech,” he’ll tell rally crowds, “and the Democrats just keep calling me racist”. Similarly at the press, who took what they thought was a bold stand by actually labeling his rhetoric for what it is, abandoning terms like “racialized” and “some have called it racist”. It’s one more bullet in his war against the press.
A few words cannot erase a life of racist behavior. No Policy, No Friendship Can Undo a Racist Mind Instead, 45 has spent the last couple of weeks draining the meaning out of racism, to foist yet another deception onto the susceptible. “It’s racist if you ask me if I’m racist,” he bellowed. Republican Kevin McCarthy was so confused, he couldn’t think of a single thing that he could call racist when asked by a reporter. Trumpophants have been pre-programmed to think “reverse racism” against whites when they hear the word. Some 40% of whites believe racism against whites is a more pressing problem than against African Americans. Astounding! “Reverse racism” is not a thing! On the other hand, if white people say it exists and they make the rules, does it? Powerful White Men Define Racism
The White Supremacist-in-chief has wiped the slate clean. There are no racial stereotypes that denigrate people of color to deny them access to the opportunities that whites take for granted. There is no race based discrimination in jobs or education or housing. There is no assumption of white superiority of the majority who hold the reins of power over the inferiority of people of color. Instead, there is racism blindness. So those who are Trump supporters and those who are not can hold their racial stereotypes close to their hearts, comforted that there isn’t a racist bone in their bodies. And their world will go on as it is.
Until Americans see the ugly history of hate as a cornerstone of the nation, the hatred will remain within the mainstream, sometimes full blown, sometimes festering below the surface.
“Hate has no place in America” the president said. If only that were true. For those who take the time to look, hatred IS a cornerstone of the nation from the beginning. Ask Native Americans, here before whites arrived; Mexicans native to the southwest; African Americans, here long before many whites who immigrated later; Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Italians, Germans, the Jewish, the Latinx, and Muslims who have all taken a turn. Their number have all heard that “go back where you came from”. It is difficult for Americans to see that ugly American reflection in their mirrors. But until they see that reflection and acknowledge the history, the hatred will remain within the mainstream, sometimes full blown, sometimes festering below the surface. The embers that smouldered before Obama’s election exploded after he took office, furiously fanned by the right wing media bubble to arrive with Trump in the White House fully cooked. Short of resolution, 45’s alternative may be to eliminate altogether those who have been the objects of hate with the Wall, the Muslim ban, deportation, constriction of legal immigration to a trickle, virtual elimination of asylum status, the spread of disease among malnourished occupants in unsanitary conditions without medical care in detention centers, invigorating white nationalism and allowing domestic terrorism to flourish.
August 6, 1965 The federal Voting Rights Act is enacted to enforce the 15th Amendment passed over a century before. The 15th itself was a reaffirmation of the 14th Amendment which granted the rights of citizenship that should have included voting.
Did we learn anything from the two Congressional Mueller hearings? Yes. It’s not new, Republicans and Democrats live in two different worlds. But Republicans did put the heart of their newly spiced counterattack on display. Devin Nunes laid it out nicely in his opening statement: Hillary Clinton was the only person who colluded with the Russians, through a conspiracy that fed Russian disinformation to intelligence agencies in the Steele Dossier.
Democrats refused to accept that Mueller would be a hostile witness. Lionized by progressives, he became the hero that would lock up impeachment. But he is after all a Republican. He made it clear he didn’t want to be their poster child and after maneuvering Bob Barr to limit his testimony, Mueller’s opening statement set out his major concern: the Russians have invaded our electoral process and we need to fix that. Beyond that, he wasn’t going to give the impeachment balloon any helium.
And so, their impeachment kick-off centerpiece could not present a narrative of Agent Orange’s crimes in choppy yes or no questions interspersed with GOP diatribes castigating the witness. They didn’t even get any good soundbites in Mueller’s voice. Instead, they provided a forum for conservatives to trash the investigation, the report and the special counsel while trotting out conspiracy theories drawn from their vast media paradise to reach a national audience. Interestingly, the commercial media failed to expand on them, thank goodness, and even the late night comedians stayed away.
The GOP simply outmaneuvered the Democrats. Armed with their marching orders, they fanned out to spread Trump/FoxNews created conspiracy theories to the whole country. And they excelled. Beyond the usual drivel about partisan FBI investigators and Democratic staff lawyers, they introduced newly revealed Russian actors and Trump/FoxNews “reported” ties to which Mueller could not respond, given the DOJ memorandum mandated restrictions. Mueller himself asked for the limitations on his testimony, relieving him of the hazards of wading into piranha infested waters. Barr craftily created an abyss that carved out space for GOP stormtroopers to lob conspiratorial hand grenades with impunity. In his opening statement, Mueller circumscribed the Steele dossier as untouchable. Boom! Republicans whirled with the speed of dervishes, throwing out all kinds of permutations on the treachery of the Steele dossier.
Conservatives pounced into the vacuum left by Mueller’s “I can’t get into that” with their own elaborations, as Mueller sat stoically deadpan, looking old and fatigued. They insinuated that some of the agents involved, like Constantine Kolimnic, were actually domestic intelligence operatives, knitting strands into Deep State conspiracy webs spun out in Sean Hannity’s charts; that the Clinton team met with Natalia Veselnitskaya more times than Donald Jr to link that back to the Clinton Foundation. They peppered him with questions that they knew he couldn’t answer, “just to get them into the record” and of course, to national audience eyes and ears. It had all the appearance of a coordinated effort orchestrated from the White House through the capable hands of Bill Barr. All done with an eye toward generating Trump/FoxNews sound bites for the next 18 months. Barr is the MVP of BullyPresident appointments. In his short tenure, he has consolidated chief executive control of all three branches of government, par excellence.
The reason for Mueller’s public reticence became clear. The Mueller lion had become an old cat. At times, his memory seemed clouded; he was inarticulate; he struggled to keep up; he looked as if he was in a fog; he had difficulty hearing, although that is attributable to the acoustics of a Congressional hearing room which most people don’t know. He had probably wanted to leave public life with his career image intact, unmarred by the restrictions of aging.
Conservatives will ride this investigate the investigators elephant through the 2020 campaign, throwing out the findings of the future GAO and DOJ reports, no doubt polished to a reflective shine with falsely constructed associations courtesy of Trump/FoxNewsTV.
The House hearing began with discrediting Mueller. They were rude and disrespectful, frequently cutting him off and badgering him about his partisan investigation that failed to explore multiple leads, often leading toward the Democratic campaign; his failure to indict several individuals outside the MAGA campaign, some of whom bargained for their way out of indictments. But they reserved their highest contempt for his failure to reach a conclusion about the charge of obstruction. Millions of dollars and two years and Mueller didn’t do his job!
The old elements were there, like a conclusion on collusion when the report specifically states it investigated conspiracy which is a crime and not collusion which has no legal definition. Mueller found no evidence of conspiracy, but it wasn’t for the lack of Russian efforts. Astonishingly, conservatives seem perfectly comfortable with the idea that acceptance of assistance from a foreign foe is laudable and not treasonous, having abandoned staunch patriotism for “do whatever it takes to win”. Borrowing from Jr’s idea that his meeting with Russian agents wasn’t wrong because he didn’t get anything out of it, they insisted that it can’t be obstruction if all of the chief executive’s attempts failed to shut the investigation down, buttressed by the assertion that he can fire anyone in the executive branch. Never mind that attempted obstruction is a bona fide crime. It’s the Trumpian worldview- there are no principles, only results.
Then conservatives hoisted new themes. Mueller’s investigation was inadequate and incomplete. But more importantly, he was a failure because he didn’t perform his charge: make a determination on obstruction. Mueller said there was no point if he could not indict by the DOJ criteria. In the report, he says that the evidence was unclear, that it was insufficient given the failure of witnesses to respond to subpoenas, including the Liar in Chief. Thus he would not be able to mount a case in a speedy fashion with the evidence that could be obtained and he didn’t want to shut the door to further development of a future case. And that perhaps there were other avenues, implying impeachment as perceived by Democrats.
Their most critical new assertion will resonate broadly. Exoneration is not a legal thing. All the time juries acquit criminals who committed the crime, OJ, R Kelly, Michael Jackson to name a few. On the other hand, innocent suspects are convicted all the time, like the Central Park Five or any Equal Justice Initiative death penalty rescuee. Because of the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof is on the state to convince a jury of guilt. Failing that, the suspect is innocent, or at least we’re supposed to pretend they are. In actual fact, they have not been found guilty, they are not innocent. This is patently obvious about 45; his crimes are ongoing but we are the ones in jail, some of us literally.
Similarly, when the state declines to press charges, they don’t present the details of their case to the public, the sin that Comey committed against Hillary Clinton by publicly announcing an investigation into her email server. Conservatives contend that the Mueller Report is just that, a recitation of evidence that didn’t amount to a prosecutable case of obstruction of justice and so, should have been confined to one page saying just that: there is not enough evidence to indict. Republicans seemed shocked when Mueller testified that the RealityTVPresident could be tried after he left office, an assertion that could fast track his maneuvers to emulate Xi Jiping, Chinese president for life. Republicans ignore two things: first and foremost, this is POTUS, who should be held to a higher standard than the garden variety criminal. And two, the DOJ mandate that a sitting president could not be indicted. The GOP is quick to deflect that it besmirches the reputation of upstanding rich white guys and that is the most criminal of all.
This presumption of innocence argument is enticing to the average man on the street; it’s an American hallmark. Not coincidentally, the Central Park 5 or a Black youth today don’t have a similar presumption of innocence but that is the American injustice system. If you’re brown, you are tackled and brought down, handcuffed and carried off, even if you’re never charged, you’re gonna spend time in cell or you’re just gonna be killed. If you’re white and rich, you’re gonna be treated with kid gloves, questioned and allowed to report on your own. This is how it’s always been.
While conservatives are being disingenuous in their anger about the report, Democrats should be prepared to respond as the 2020 campaign proceeds; Trump/FoxNewsTV will be hammering the theme that exoneration is not the function of the justice system relentlessly. Obviously, because it is the president, as a democracy, we need to know what is happening in our elected government, particularly as it threatens our ability to solve our pressing problems and defend against enemy attacks. But Trump/FoxNewsTV won’t be saying any of that.
The real border Wall is the one across the White House lawn, keeping Congress at bay.
The House also concentrated on advertising their alternative investigation from Bob Barr to “investigate the investigators”. Here again, the Steele Dossier is central, as the GOP continues to insist that it was critical to the initiation of the “spying” on Trump campaign hanger-ons like Carter Page while the FBI evidence documents an earlier starting date. They want to project the illusion that the intelligence agencies have been weaponized against “private citizens” and of course, the RealityTVPresident himself, in the service of a partisan witch hunt. As a veteran of the Black Power Movement and the Student Anti-Vietnam War Movement (yes, I had my own FBI file), I recall the fear of the out of control FBI against the ordinary as well as the political, like JFK, RFK and MLK. The student movement may have had more FBI agents in it than believers; we were always joking about who was an informant. White nationalists are laboring under that same fear, although unwarranted as the Trump DOJ has ignored them. Given my history, it feels strange to transition to a position supporting government intelligence agencies, no longer tied to the vagaries of J Edgar Hoover but with immensely enhanced surveillance capabilities wielded by a workforce notoriously unsympathetic to progressive opposition to government policies.
But there lurks in the average Trumpophant the feeling that they’re doing something “anti-government” which Trump/FoxTV exploited into the liberal establishment controlled Deep State that hungers to gobble up every “true conservative patriot.” Conservatives want to ride this elephant through the 2020 campaign, throwing out the findings of future GAO and DOJ reports, no doubt polished to a reflective shine with falsely constructed associations at every turn. It’s going to be 24-7 Trump/FoxTVNews fare, feeding their presidential frontman with some of his best tweets and taglines.
The question still remains, if 45 is innocent, what is he hiding while he masquerades as the “most transparent president in history” (his words, not mine). Given his sordid past and gang of crooks Why is Donald Trump Putin’s Bonbon? and Kompromat, More Complicated Than It Seems, is he fearful that any crack will lead to a torrent of unethical and criminal activity that would reveal the emperor wears no clothes? Why has he used Barr, most recently, to block every effort of Congress to carry out their constitutional oversight duties? Why has he refused to provide documents? What’s so precious about his tax returns that he has the Treasury Secretary lying to block legally mandated IRS information to Congress? His actual income? His business associations? The ongoing suits to fight release of documents; the invocation of “executive privilege” now expanded to anyone who has heard any utterance from Agent Orange’s mouth except those at a MAWA rally are all a part of his real border Wall, the one across the White House lawn.
Democrats are in a muddle. They need to let go of impeachment. They pretend its a moral issue, but impeachment is and always has been political like it was originally conceived by the Founding Fathers. Democrats are waiting for the public to demand it, rather than leading the uproar. But Democrats are just politicians interested in staying in office. And if they are going to stay in office, they should get out there and campaign to defeat the GOP at the ballot box. Given the current GOP hegemony, that is a daunting enough task. Right now, Democrats appear to be scrambling, not ready to assume leadership of what must be a formidable movement, not for impeachment but to take our country back. They can’t be counted on to do the right thing; it doesn’t look like the party how.
July 25, 1974, SCOTUS ruled in Milliken v Bradley that school district borders could not be crossed to effect integration, codifying the school segregation that today finds >60% of minority students in what are called “highly segregated” schools with > 80% minority student bodies among the >80% of Black students overall in segregated schools. So much for Brown v Board of Ed.
Since racism is, after all, a figment of the imagination of white men, Agent Orange, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham think it’s perfectly reasonable for them to continue to define it. Mitch tells us that it’s absurd to think the Chief Executive is a racist and cautioned that BOTH SIDES (there it is again) should be more civil. A Republican Congressman, in defense of his Fuhrer, earnestly told a PBS News correspondent that none of his Kentucky constituency thought 45’s latest remarks about the Squad were racist. But then he’s a Republican and probably didn’t poll any African Americans in his district since he doesn’t consider them part of his constituency. He’s certainly not doing anything to represent them in this Congress built on partisan representatives choosing their voters rather than the other way around. Too bad; African Americans as racism’s centuries old victims know exactly what it is, in all its many guises. We live with it everyday; whites do not. As John Lewis said on the House floor “I know racism when I feel it” and he’s had it literally beat into his head.
Conservatives are afraid to talk about racism; instead they hurl the word racist as an epithet at any opponent, in an effort to terminate an argument. They have adopted a definition of racism that evolved in legal strategies to beat back affirmative action initiatives in the courts in the ‘90s. Their definition centers on intent; essentially, if a speaker does not intend malice, then the speech can’t be considered racist. (45 with only malice in his heart has been granted yet another pass). Racism was now completely detached from its foundational majority oppressing a minority dynamic. In the courts, this approach set a high standard of intentional discrimination, which was almost impossible to demonstrate once officials found wording that appeared race neutral but disproportionately disadvantaged people of color. Never mind the impact on African Americans whose voices continued to be ignored.
Simultaneously the concept of colorblindness became fashionable. “I don’t see color” is supposed to convey that race is not a consideration. Although race is a social, not biological concept, color is not. Human eyes see skin color and register it in the brain where it activates implicit biases associated with racial stereotypes. This process is instantaneous and completely unconscious. Only a conscious moment of hesitation allows the brain’s intellectual centers to process more thoughtful action. And this brings us back to the meaninglessness of intent. Most racial bias is unintended by the perpetrator by the very nature of implicit bias itself. Thus to rely on intent, rather than the harm done to the victim, snatches the core from racism. The feelings are still there, but now they can be nameless. In an interview on PBS NewsHour, Lisa Desjardins said when she asked Republican John Thune if there was anything that he would call racist, after a pause, he couldn’t come up with anything. Conservatives, swimming in a racist society, can’t see what is right in front of their faces. They are racism-blind, not color blind.
This area is dangerous territory for them; many of their supporters hold racist views because the GOP was built on recruiting Dixiecrats from southern Democratic parties in the wake of civil rights legislation in the ’60s. They grew their party through the dog whistles of the Nixon and Reagan years, substituting code words like welfare queens, drug users, criminals to evoke images of Black people which the media happily provided. 45 brought the party full circle, abandoning political correctness for unadorned racist phrases, extended now to include all those who aren’t white. He energized those whose racism had become socially unacceptable in the “post racism” Obama era, extending a red carpet to white nationalists to hop off their couches and leave their computer screens to come into the streets and voting booths.
The GOP pitch is that “they’re taking your jobs and restricting your rights; they’re trying to be your equal. They’re voting for the enemy, the liberals. In this war, we’ve got to do everything to reduce their influence by disenfranchising them in any way possible.” It’s the same narrative from Reconstruction and the Jim Crow police state. History repeating itself. The GOP needs to maintain its aggressive racism to keep these troops enthusiastic, but the more upfront they are, the higher the risk of alienating those suburban women, who like their more subtle flavor of racial bias to be reticent. They form the theoretical tipping point that pushed 45 over the finish line in 2016. It’s just easier to pretend that racism doesn’t exist; that the Democrats are crazy communists talking about reparations. In fact, from their point of view, reparations are racist, the acceptable kind that white Trumpophants believe the government is practicing against them. This is not a thing!
The Democrats take the traditional view that racism is the use of false stereotypical characterizations of a minority group of people because of the color of their skin. Intent is irrelevant; the impact on the minority is the significant concern. Since minorities have little choice of party, Democrats have given lip service to responding to minority experiences to retain the participation of minorities in the political process. African Americans have often provided the balance of power. In contrast, recent polls that show that 60% of Americans have no interaction with people of another race, religion or political persuasion help explain why conservatives can’t see racism; it doesn’t happen to anyone they know.
For his part, the White Supremacist in Chief reached back into history for the narrative of the White Redeemers of Reconstruction: if the n*@gers don’t like being disenfranchised, swindled out of their land and labor, beaten and lynched here, they can go back to Africa. At the time, support for colonization in Africa reemerged as an alternative way to reduce the country’s more than 4.5 million African descendants, except that the formerly enslaved weren’t having it. They had tasted freedom and were determined not to abandon their investment of blood, sweat and tears in the US.
But “go back where you came from” says more than that. It is the trope that screams you don’t belong in the land in which you were born. It is meant to establish that this land is wholly a land that belongs to white people. You should be grateful that we tolerate your presence. You have no right to complain because it is only through our liege that you remain. Ironically, in this nation of immigrants, my ancestors were here in 1619, long before many of theirs arrived. This trope has been used for Asians from all countries, Spanish speakers, Middle Easterners, etc. In olden days before whiteness was extended beyond Anglo-Saxon, even the Irish, Slavs (think Melania), and Mediterraneans felt this sting.
They are racism-blind, not color blind.
These themes have been repeated whenever Africans Americans have tried to hold the country to account for the declared “all men are created equal” lie. Segregationists were happy to have Black people move on in the 60s when sharecropping had outlived its usefulness and Black hands were no longer needed to do the bulk of the work. But if they stayed, they had to knuckle under to dogs, fire hoses, KKK murders and bombings.
Ironically, there has been no president who has complained more than Agent Orange about almost every aspect of government; the federal courts, Congress, foreign policy and anything Obama even thought about. As the supreme exceptional, he believes it was his right to seize the government rather than abandon the country. The Squad has chosen to do what he has done; create a movement that will cement their position in government. But for 45, brown women don’t have that same right; he’s trying to create a ground swell to kick them out.
As he often does, Agent Orange evoked the racist spirit of his MAGA movement to paint 4 US Congresswomen as immigrants from other countries, absurd, given the requirements for election to Congress. But Trumpophants are not thinkers, they’re believers; the women all have foreign sounding names, like many families among Trumpophants who sprang from immigrant roots now conveniently forgotten since their skin is white and the Squad, all brown, have Afro or Muslim sounding names. But AOC is from the Bronx, Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib from Michigan. Only Ilhan Omar is a naturalized citizen from Somalia, elected from Minnesota. But a naturalized citizen is the same as a birthright citizen, just as Trump’s wife and her recently made citizen parents are, even though Melania got special skills visa status for f@#king the faux real estate tycoon in order to immigrate. Massachusettsans, New Yorkers and Michiganers should be up in arms at the insults hurled against their states, characterized as “shithole countries” in the BullyPresident’s tweets. Where’s their outrage at 45’s effrontery?
Over two days, our WhiteNationalistPresident has embellished, i.e lied, to blow as many whistles summoning his Trumpophants as possible. Two are Muslims, so “Alcaida”, as he spelled it in his notes, entered his narratives. They’re communists, they hate America, they’re anti-semitic, they’re for open borders and everything that’s wrong with the world. He literally put words in their mouths as he simultaneously misquoted what they have said. And then he brought it centerstage to his MAWA rally, engaging the crowd with a rallying cry to “Kick her out!” 2020 is all about his race baiting campaign.
The master media manipulator has pulled out all the stops. He’s pivoting his reelection campaign to center on the Squad rather than the 24 candidates vying to be his Democratic opponents. And this cycle of moral outrage has seized the airwaves, blotting out whatever the candidates have to say. But more importantly, it distances Agent Orange from running on his record of executive orders, staged diplomatic extravaganzas, and an economy that is booming for the oligarchs but leaving people working two jobs in communities devastated by plant closures or farmers on the verge of bankruptcy.
He obscuring a look beneath the impression that he’s shutting down the border, despite legal challenges that have invalidated almost all of his policies. He’s cloaked his policies that have narrowed access to the southern border to a trickle, even as more people are trying to cross. The closed ports of entry, the mandatory detentions, the inadequate number of judges that have at least a half a million cases of asylum seekers waiting for years for hearings, the virtual absence of lawyers for immigrants, the off loading of immigrants to wait in unsafe areas in Mexico and the fear of detention. Now deportation raids that have put Latinx people in ICE crosshairs. They are literally being hunted down without proper legal documents or due process.
These are the origins of the humanitarian crisis at the border, not the natural evolution of an increased flow of women and children, the first wave of climate refugees in this hemisphere. Trumpophants, fed a steady diet of Trump/FoxNews, don’t hear even the sliver of media coverage of the situation on the ground, beneath the glitz and glitter of signing ceremonies, rally speeches and tangled Homeland policies. The MAWAPresident has created a humanitarian crisis, without the campaign promised Wall or a solution to immigration. Is this a promise kept, or just a lot of bullshit about it?
His policies are designed to create a climate of fear in new immigrants and their relatives here under the spurious reasoning that it will deter new immigrants and asylum seekers, a strategy that hasn’t worked in the past. As a result, 45 has tried to dump families in Nicaragua, one of the countries from which people are fleeing and Mexico, totally unprepared for new immigrants as it struggles to maintain its native population.
The Trump agreement, made with the central government, had no input from Mexican provinces which need to depend on unforthcoming appropriations to absorb new asylum seekers. This will engender internal national conflicts destabilizing the central government and produce hostility toward immigrants. They will have problems working in an economy with high unemployment, opening them up to exploitation and further endangering their safety. And without policies in place to distribute these immigrants, their distribution across the country is likely to be random with an overabundance of families deposited near the border waiting to be called to to the US to establish a claim.
For the GOP 45’s a hero; for the rest of us, he’s an ass who’s running the country into the ground.
There’s no need for Democrats to waste time responding to the BullyPresident. We know who he is; for the GOP he’s a hero; for the rest of us, he’s an ass who’s running the country into the ground. He will say whatever he wants, particularly if it isn’t true. Ignoring his bullshit is likely to make him even more unhinged and that could be advantageous but it takes a stout constitution to withstand the unrelenting shit storm that will come their way.
The House should stop wasting time on symbolic legislature that will never become law or symbolic reprimands. Nobody even knows about most of it within the media echo chamber. Democrats should let the Mueller Report go and despite 45’s obstruction of justice, multiple conflicts of interest, corrupt behaviors and corruption in his cabinet, they should lay down the impeachment albatross. He would never be convicted in the Senate and the development of a list of charges in the House will be drowned out by the RealityTVPresident’s campaign portrayal of little Donny against the Goliath Deep State. He will win that propaganda war because he has the commercial media mesmerized and his owns state Trump/FoxTV.
The voting box is the only way to boot Agent Orange out and Democrats will have to be savvy not to fritter it away in another close electoral college loss. They should not be diverted by the media’s persistent tweet chasing and questions that focus on their reactions to them. Every press interaction should be redirected to what Agent Orange has not accomplished and Democratic alternatives to fix the nation’s problems. Democrats should be talking about Trump’s failures. They should take every opportunity to hold the RealityTVPresident accountable for the campaign promises that he has failed to deliver. Those are the economic issues that people care about; ones which he has exacerbated more than helped. Does anyone feel better off today except the top 1%? Every Democratic plan advanced in the primary campaign should be placed in the context of the failure of the Trump administration to address or worsen the problem. This strategy is not complicated and easily accomplished.
Where Trump has succeeded is in dismantling Cabinet agencies and diverting them to the service of corporate interests. He has also devastated the federal courts, so Democrats should be promoting the importance of voting for their candidates to reclaim the courts at all levels, particularly as they threaten the loss of reproductive rights and could limit any progressive change. They should emphasize the importance of taking control of state legislatures as well because reapportionment based on the 2020 Census could further cement a GOP hegemony that could spell the death knell for democracy as we know it. In their local events, candidates should lay the groundwork for supporting good local candidates in the 2020 races. If the Democrats don’t step up to the plate. . . our future is in the hands of the gods. Perhaps the gods are exacting punishment for our destruction of the planet.
July 19, 1919 A Black man accused of trying to rape a white woman was released, sparking 4 days of white mob attacks on African Americans throughout Washington, DC. 40 Blacks were murdered and 150 were injured.
45 has donned a new cape: Demonist in Chief, oops, that’s Demolitionist in Chief. His latest executive order is only one of a series of moves meant to put truth into “failing Obamacare.” Obamacare is not “imploding” as Republicans like to say, it’s being dynamited by administration efforts to blow it up. First the constant repetition of the phrase “failing Obamacare” during the failed attempts to repeal Obamacare may have left the impression among those not closely following the debate that Obamacare was on its last legs and would not be issuing new policies this year. In addition, frequent remarks by Republicans as well as administration officials about counties with none or only one insurer were intentionally meant to discourage people in those locations from even exploring the website.
During that same period, the HHS website was badmouthing the program. It’s unlikely that a history of modern government can recall any other government program trying to convince the public that it’s just no good. When Obamacare survived to live another day, HHS had to make a 180 degree about face. An enthusiastic “we’re still here” was out of the question for Price, so he opted to cut the budget for advertising the upcoming enrollment period by 90% and eliminate the navigator program that assists applicants with the enrollment process. Next up was shortening the enrollment period by 50%, from 90 days to 45 days. To further lower enrollment, the healthcare.gov website will be down for maintenance for 12 daytime hours on 5 of the 6 Sundays, one of the peak enrollment days. The enrollment process takes a considerable investment of time to compare and choose plans, so many people wait until the weekends. The HHS assertion that this maintenance schedule was similar to that in years past is the typical Trump administration falsehood; the shutdowns, for essentially half of the day during day hours rather than the traditional overnight time will reduce the enrollment period by an additional 5%. In addition, the administration also announced that it would loosely enforce the individual mandate which can only add to the number of people, including the healthy ones, who opt out of the medical insurance pool.
Behind the scenes, 45 personally intervened to deny an exemption to the state of Iowa, one that did not take advantage of expansion of insurance coverage through Medicaid, seeking a waiver under Obamacare to reduce premiums for more than 30,000 people by 30% using state funds. Likewise, state officials in Indiana requested a waiver to reduce premiums in their state, but HHS missed the deadline to respond allowing the request to simply expire. Both of these interventions fly in the face of GOP rhetoric that states are best suited to chart their own solutions, one of their sacred cows in the numerous failed Obamacare repeal bills.
More publicly, Trump announced that he would veto ACA supplements to insurance because he would no longer send payments to rich insurance companies to add to their profits. A laudable sentiment, but it’s not applicable here. The supplements help to pay out-of-pocket co-pays and deductibles for about 7 of the 10 million buyers of insurance on the exchanges. These cost sharing subsidies are mandated by law to reimburse the insurance companies. The law also mandates that the funds must be used for patient care costs. If not, companies that do not comply are required to return the money. While a court case challenging the validity of these federal supplements which rests on Congressional failure to appropriate funds is still pending, HHS has continued to pay them. Regardless, the companies will have to continue to pay plan enrollees whether they ultimately get government reimbursement or not.
The real victims will be a different set of 7 million people on the exchanges whose incomes are too high to receive the supplements because they will see rising premiums and co-pays and possibly face fewer choices as insurance companies flee the marketplaces in their area.
The obvious solution is for Congress to appropriate the money. But Trump’s objective is clear; to unsettle insurance companies, encourage them to pull out of the exchanges and discourage consumer enrollment on the exchanges during this current enrollment period.
The latest Trump edict resurrects the Ted Cruz amendment from the failed attempt to repeal the ACA. One minor provision extends the time frame for short term bridge plans from 90 days to one year which is simply a reversion to the rules in place before Obama changed them at the end of his administration. Yet another instance of erasing Obama down to the slightest detail. But the major provision is that which allows for the formation of association health plans made up of similar types of small businesses to buy less comprehensive plans. In theory, this will encourage insurance offerings across state lines, although it is up to the insurance companies themselves and any independent associations that may opt to create self insured entities. Insurance company decisions about new markets are based primarily on the profitability of policies in those locations, down to the county level, as is happening under the ACA. And theoretically, premiums would be lower because of the competition between companies across a region and because coverage could be more limited than the required ACA benefits. The problem with the theory is that it doesn’t take into account the realities of the healthcare insurance business. Premiums are based on the amount spent on the cost of the medical care, which varies widely between locations. As the prices rise by at least twice the rate of inflation, so too will the premiums.
The most important aspect of this false alternative is that it offers no additional discount on premiums over that offered through the healthcare exchanges. The strength in numbers from a small association wouldn’t exceed the advantages of the larger exchange pool and thus any savings will come solely from limitations on policy coverage. The feature that these association plans can purchase insurance across state lines comes with the disadvantage that they are exempt from state oversight. As such, in the past, many of these plans were underfunded and financially unstable, causing them to fail without adequate funds to cover customers’ medical bills. They were also less than transparent, misleading buyers about the extent of coverage. In fact, association type health insurance plans are already available but in this instance the provision of less comprehensive plans is what will make them less expensive. They are cheaper to buy but far more costly when people have to use them. In general, customers of this type of insurance are people who need to use it to cover costs of the medical care they are receiving, creating a pool with higher premiums. Even groups composed of companies with primarily young and/or healthy employees, will have to choose higher premiums and/or limited coverage. Because healthy individuals may opt for limited coverage outside the Obamacare exchanges, association plans could undermine the exchanges by drawing healthy people out of the plans offered on the exchanges, leading to even higher premiums. That’s precisely Trump’s agenda.
Administration spokesmen have said that employees in an association plan would be protected from premiums based on individual medical conditions but there are no restrictions on the health plan charging different employers different rates. A company where employees have large medical expenses could be charged higher premiums than one where employees typically get less medical care. Insurers are always in the driver’s seat where premiums are concerned; if they can’t raise premiums, they just pick up their marbles and go home!
Often not mentioned in the ongoing debate is the fact that increased premiums can only cost the government more because higher premiums by law will trigger higher supplements. Obviously, as 45 prevents larger numbers of buyers from purchasing policies on the exchange, fewer people on the exchanges do not represent budgetary cost-savings even as it means more Americans go without health insurance and needed medical care. It is hard to know how these maneuvers could impact CBO estimates of insurance coverage, since no projections have modelled them.
All of these maneuvers are designed to drive premiums even higher by ultimately culling healthy people out of the insurance pool. Large numbers of healthy individuals is the elusive gold ring for medical insurers. Young healthy people, gifted as they are with a sense of youthful immortality, are more likely to count on the low statistical probability that they are going to need medical care or even preventive care. Many preferred to pay the individual mandate penalty, much less expensive than buying insurance. So each additional barrier to enrollment only reinforces the inclination of the healthy to opt out of health insurance.
Insurance companies have already committed to premiums for this year calculated to include the possibility of the elimination of subsidies, but this move is certain to force more insurers out of specific markets and further destabilize the exchanges. But there is a remedy; Congress with its power of the purse could simply appropriate money for the supplements, and though unlikely to succeed, there is a bipartisan effort to create legislation to stabilize the marketplaces while allowing states to obtain waivers of some Obamacare requirements. Trump has strongly opposed this Alexander-Maury bill; well first he did, then he didn’t then he did, but that’s par for the course. Bipartisan efforts have had little success in Congress for several years, but at least theoretically, representatives could respond to the pleas of their constituents to continue their healthcare insurance; pleas to which legislators have so far remained deafened by Republican ideology headphones. Still Republican legislators seem to be waking up to the futility of listening to anything 45 says, and may be ready to chart a different course, even as that course will be deleterious to most Americans, except the rich ones.
The reality is that any changes, no matter what source, cannot come into effect until federal agencies write and adopt regulations implementing them, something Trump still seems unaware of. Maybe he isn’t; maybe he is simply invested in the Theater of the Moment rather than the actuality of change which he has left to cabinet members. There will most certainly be more legal challenges and court decisions. The process will take months and probably will have little impact until 2019 except for the impressions left with the public confused about what is possible in health insurance and less likely to pursue what is still both the law of the land and good medical insurance coverage for people in the individual market, Obamacare.
Tell anyone you know that’s looking for a healthcare plan that open enrollment has just opened for this year. Go to healthcare.gov and do it early.
Each morning I wake and wonder how the president, administration surrogates and Republican Congressional leaders can continue to lie every single day. By now, of course, it is a second skin that they’ve lived in for a long time. I’m not sure why I, a rational, intelligent thinker find it so difficult to accept. I get the rationale to keep the Trumpophants pumped. I understand that the GOP is racing to get their agenda done before the midnight hour when the coach turns into a pumpkin and there’s no telling if they’ll get back to another ball. But it’s so demoralizingly depressing to watch politics boiled down to “the most outrageous display wins the day” play out in front of us. In the meantime, the oligarchs are playfully bleeding the citizens dry, intent on making us poorer and sicker and poisoned by the environment for mo money, mo money, mo money.
Trump really threw in a zinger when he maintained that the GOP had the votes to pass Graham-Cassidy but couldn’t vote because one member was in the hospital. He kept repeating it like an audiotape glitch. Or more like a dotard, hardly capable of running a government. It seems incredulous that POTUS, despite easy Google invalidation, could brazenly recite his wildest fantasies. It is his sense of invincibility that allows him to do it; that and the personality disorder of pathological liar. So far, it’s working for him with minimal political resistance except for the yapping of a frustrated media, complicit in the notion that the coverage of the CelebrityPresident will grab better advertising rates than serious reporting about issues. Still my heart seizes to the verge of stopping each time. Sometimes I just want to roll over and pull the covers over my head. But then it happens the next day and here I am, typing away my anxiety and frustration. And this MoFo thinks kneeling dishonors the American flag! Yes, I’m having trouble letting go of that one too.
Trump is riding high in anticipation of tax reform that will launch his “ratings” into outer space. Likewise, the Republican Congress is bent on proving that the party can govern and they love the common man enough to put a few bucks in every pocket. One administration official felt that Americans care more about the taxes they save than what other people are paying. Or at least they’re hoping that’s the case. They’re going to spin their way into selling the corporate tax cuts as leading to higher wages and more jobs and the appearance that the wealthy will benefit more is because they pay more taxes. Trump doesn’t know what’s in the bill, but no one does except the gaggle of legislators caucusing somewhere unseen. In the run-up, he’ll be poking as many Republican bears as he can tweet. And whatever they come up with, Trump will maintain that it was all him if it passes, but if Congress falls short, it’s all Congress sabotaging the CelebrityPresident’s agenda.
To date, discussions of the new tax proposal, or rather the leaks of the as yet unrevealed legislation are following a familiar path; leak details and send out brigades of spokesmen to lie about the contents to “get the public on board.” The big lie, that it is aimed at the middle class and will not benefit the rich, is just counterintuitive to the essence of the GOP. Trump represented himself as the champion of the forgotten man, but that was never the Republican party pitch. They always smooze about the middle class when they are cutting the legs out from under it. The major party funders bought the government so they could cut their own taxes. The corporate tax cut is supported by the drivel that it will stimulate corporate creation of a windfall of jobs which will stimulate the economy to replace the federal deficit with a surplus. That’s just fake economics.
Corporate tax cuts and those for the wealthy is the premier raison d’etre for the unholy dominance of the party by the Koch brothers and their coterie of billionaire financiers. Since the 1980s, the Kochs created a playbook to make tax free status for the rich and regulation free government for corporations the central platform of the Republican Party; shifted from the John Birch Society fringe to mainstream GOP. They have been steadfastly devoted to this goal, through all its twists and turns, across conservative think tanks, invasions of Ivy League university academic towers, several iterations of increasingly anonymous trust funds funding fictional organizations and “social welfare” groups, formation and funding of the Tea Party, PACs, the Citizens United ruling and superPacs. That’s just the basics. But after the Obama detour, which they bitterly resented, they have finally seized control of the government and they’re looking for a huge return on their gigantic investment.
The administration’s recent travel scandals are indicative of who these people are. They have no problem requesting military planes and chartering private jets for personal trips, thinly disguised as government business because this the travel they’re used to. Admittedly, Tom Price isn’t in the league with Steve Mnuchin; he’s only a wealthy physician who turned the combination of Congressional privilege, campaign funds and the boondoggle that instantaneously enriches an elected official into his fortune. During his confirmation hearings, there were ethical questions about insider stock trades and shaky interactions with drug companies, but the Senate was in such a hurry to give 45 his millionaire cabinet that they didn’t want to be deterred by questionable ethics in an administration already awash with ethical breaches. Besides, the murky ethical pool in which the Congress swims leaves them ill equipped to judge.
Among other trips, Price took a private jet to Nashville to have lunch with his son and another to a medical meeting in Sea Island Georgia, a posh island retreat once the site of a G8 meeting, where he owns a home. Perhaps, he could only agree to repay the $52,000for his seat out of the over $400,000 cost for the flights because he can’t afford to shoulder the whole cost. But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be responsible for the whole cost since he chartered the planes. If the ethics agency had any muscle, it would pursue this, but it doesn’t; so it won’t. Perhaps the Congressional committee investigating the travel scandal will insist, in light of the vicious budget cutting across all government agencies. Oh yeah, Price was also reopening the executive dining room at HHS, long shuttered during the Bush administration, because, God forbid, he should leave his luxuriously appointed offices for lunch and risk mixing with regular staff.
But Price was cut loose; to believe that he resigned is just silly. And it’s unlikely that plane trips were the reason. Price failed to deliver on Obamacare repeal despite his selection for Secretary as a preeminent Congressional healthcare expert with a detailed replacement plan. For him to screw up his job and embarrass the administration was too much for 45. Besides, if he’s out, he won’t be forced to pay the full amount of your tax dollars spent on private charters.
On the other hand, Steve Mnuchin, a billionaire with a multimillionaire wife who is obviously supplementing her income with celebrity endorsement fees for tagging luxury items on Twitter, requested a military jet for his honeymoon but was denied. Still he seems big on a military planes; he did fly to Fort Knox, not visited by Treasury Secretary in decades, which coincided with the solar eclipse. Mnuchin later dismissed the naivete of Kentuckians for believing a sophisticated NY billionaire would have any interest in the stellar event. Did he really think anyone stupid enough to believe that bullshit, with Trump himself risking blindness to view the partial eclipse in DC when Kentucky afforded the full eclipse on view? He can afford to pay the full cost of flights and should, now that he pinky swore not to do it again.
Scott Pruitt, a billionaire wannabe over at the EPA is not only private jetting, he’s having a $25,000 soundproof booth built at the agency to prevent eavesdropping on his phone calls, although the identity of supposed eavesdroppers is unclear. These administration officials, so unconcerned about the reaction of the little people who brought them to power that they plan to gouge for whatever they can, clearly display their arrogance through an astounding tone deafness. To hell with the optics.
A Short History of Taxation
When the colonies united under the Articles of Confederation the federal government did not have the power to tax. Congress soon discovered that finance by going hat in hand to the states was no way to fight a war, if the authority to compel them to pay didn’t come with it. For five years, Georgia and Florida paid nothing at all.
The first national income tax in peacetime was enacted in 1894, the product of William Jennings Bryan’s populist movement. That tax applied only to the richest 85,000 Americans, the top 0.1%. The robber barons led a legal battle that eventually led to a Supreme Court decision overturning the income tax, declaring it unconstitutional. But the 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 legalized a national income tax which was initially levied only on the very rich. Rates increased during the wars, rationalized as the wealthy’s patriotic duty. During WWI, the top bracket paid 77%. During the next world war, the rate jumped to 94%.
The top earners were obviously upset, not feeling all that patriotic when it came to their lifestyles. So by 1942, they had succeeded in shifting the burden to the rest of the population so that two thirds of the population was paying income tax. The wealthy then successfully convinced the federal government in campaigns waged over 30 years to cut taxes, generally under Republicans. Although the tax structure remained progressive with the top bracket paying a 50% rate by 1981, by the end of the tax slashing festivities, the richest 0.01% had their income tax rate cut in half and the top 1% had their effective average rate pruned by one third. It should be remembered that the official rate in no way reflects actual taxes paid, given the mountains of loopholes that favor the wealthy over an average Joe or Jane.
The millionaires argue that there is no such thing as a fair share of the tax burden. They say they are no more interested in shifting the tax burden to other economic groups than in lifting it from themselves. They argue that taxes should be cut for everyone. Charles Koch has said, “Our goal is not to reallocate the burden of government; our goal is to roll back government….Morally, lowering taxes is simply defending property rights.” These libertarians have elevated their own self interest, tax avoidance, into a principled crusade about government itself. Moreover, they contend that the country benefits more if the wealthy spend more of their money on the public good, far more beneficial than government spending. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a road or bridge built by a wealthy citizen; that’s rightly to providence of our government.
Fast forward to the present
It’s no surprise that a high priority agenda of the Republican Congress is to cut taxes on the wealthy, which they claim will get the “job creators” creating jobs. That logic is difficult to square with record corporate profits in recent years, used primarily to reward stockholders and buy their own stocks, because the return in dividends is higher than the return on “job creation”. Many economists agree that wages do not usually benefit from corporate tax relief. But an alternative economic stimulus argument is that money saved on taxes will drive the consumer economy which will in term stimulate increased production. Unfortunately with the bulk of the tax breaks going to the wealthy who tend to invest rather than spend, the amount going to the rest of us isn’t enough of an economic stimulus.
The other reason for GOP enthusiasm is that they have been bought and paid for by the Kochtopus network through campaign and party contributions supplemented by political advertising from the network of PACs and superPacs, social welfare groups, and nonprofit trusts that are used to circumnavigate limitations on campaign funding of political candidates. Some legislators and many on their staffs are products of conservative institutes and business leagues. The network funded the Tea Party through the illusion of a grassroots movement in opposition to Obamacare that was primarily a collection of Koch funded PO box organizations. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, the leadership of the Senate and the House and Marco Rubio are just a few easily recognizable names. They own ‘em and they mean to run ‘em.
The essence of the bill so far
The delayed the bill this week to work out a few last minute kinks. But what we know so far is that over 80% of the changes are aimed at the top 1%. The inheritance tax, for instance, is strictly their baby. Estates taxed at 40% are levied after couples are worth over $11million or singles worth $5.49 million, the whipped cream on the economic milkshake. A whole 5428 people will benefit from changes to the so-called “death tax”, that’s got to be the top less than 0.01%. While the person impact is small, the dollar amounts are huge. When all the other tax cuts are considered, one third of the benefits accrue to the top 0.1% of taxpayers. Trump has called the inheritance tax a “tremendous burden” on the family farmer. Tax relief is said to help families trying to retain their family farms. Imagine how many family farms are worth over $11 million; it’s less than 1 in 1000. The trucking company owners who could pass their businesses onto their children that the president claimed would benefit from elimination of the estate tax number less than 100. Mnuchin has also said, “Only morons pay estate tax,” what with the myriad opportunities to create untaxed trusts.Who says 45 doesn’t care about the very few among us.
Corporate tax rates would be lowered to 25%, setting aside that multiple loopholes reduce the effective rate to considerably less than the present 40%. Trump is fixated on a 20% rate which is comparable to other developed economies but legislators seem to be settling somewhere above that. What is shocking, when considered against the backdrop of Trump’s bemoaning corporations who stash their profits overseas to avoid taxes, is that the bill proposes to leave profits earned overseas completely untaxed. Is this so that money will come flooding back to US financial institutions, because it sounds more like a tax windfall that keeps on giving enough to spur earning more profits overseas.
Hedge fund managers and private equity executives will be happy with the retention of the “carried interest” exemption which is taxed at the capital gains rate, lower than the rate for income. Mnuchin has also proposed a lower rate for “pass through” small businesses and partnerships that now pay personal income tax rates instead of corporate tax rate. The posh always-ingenious-at-avoiding-taxes could move to exploit this as a giant loophole as wealthy individuals reclassify themselves as small businesses.
Paul Ryan, in a recent interview on CBS Sunday Morning, said that businesses will also be able to write off investments they make in their businesses. This corporate honeypot is designed, says Ryan, to help their employees because “most studies show that corporate taxes are taken out of wages”, which most economists would take issue with, or at least the ones who haven’t drunk the “conservative koolaid”.
On the other hand, US corporations are pretty healthy. They are making record profits and yet, haven’t been doing due diligence as “job creators”. Buoyed by big increases in productivity in recent years, corporations have taken most of those fat profits to buy their own stocks, with a higher rate of return than adding more workers to the pay roll. They didn’t waste any of it on higher wages or expanded benefits for their workforce either. In fact over 80% of jobs created in the US in the last five years have been small businesses, including self-employed consultants and those run out of homes.
As for regular people, the standard deduction, the most commonly used method of filing taxes, will be doubled, but that may be at the cost of deductions like charitable giving, and retirement savings. Most taxpayers will be remain unaffected, since only a minority of us use the expanded form to take supplemental deductions. But one proposal, to eliminate the deduction for state taxes, seemed aimed at high tax blue northeastern states, like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Chuck Schumer has already put the kibosh on that.
Rumors about the legislation are that there will be three or perhaps four brackets with 0, 10, 25 and 35% rates. The Republican lawmakers have floated a fourth higher tax bracket for the richest as well as an increase in the child tax credit. The income levels that define the brackets have supposedly not yet been set. Ryan hinted that some people in the current lower bracket would go to zero, but others would move up a bracket.
Bearing in mind the lack of specifics, analysis by the Tax Policy Center projected an average tax bill for all income groups would decline by $1600 or 2.1% in 2018. The largest decrease would go to those with incomes above $730,000, with an after tax income rise of an average 8.5% or $129,000. For incomes averaging $66,690, the after tax income would increase by 1.2% or $660. A $2.6 trillion is projected to be cut from business taxes. Individual income tax revenue would increase by $470 billion, largely as a result of changes in personal deductions and exemptions as well as an increase in the bottom tax rate to 12% from 10%. The bottom 99% would see their taxes drop 0.4-1.7%, but the top 1% will have a 500 to 1000% rise in their tax savings. By 2027 tax cuts will shrink for every group except the top 1% and one quarter of taxpayers, many in the upper middle class, could pay more than they would without the new plan. People with incomes $150,000 to $215,000 will receive an average $1140 cut in 2018, but by 2027, they would pay $820 more than if nothing changed.
The tax plan would cost $2.4 trillion over 10 years. The single largest cost would be the reduction in the corporate tax rate and repealing the corporate alternative minimum tax which would total $2 trillion. Individual tax rates of 12, 25 and 35% would lower revenues by $1.2 trillion, while the repeal of state and local tax deduction would generate $1.3 trillion and repeal of personal exemptions $1.6 trillion in federal income over 10 years. But the amount in the Republican plan pales in comparison to what Trump intended.
It would appear that Republicans are willing to betray their allegiance to erasing the federal deficit, obscured in a haze of projected economic growth. Erasing the national debt apparently is more sacrosanct when a party is out of power. The rate of economic growth hasn’t exceeded 2% in a couple of decades, and almost no economists outside of conservative think-tanks believes that a sustained 3-5% growth rate is possible. They point to the Bush 43 tax cuts as proof, but overlook the two subsequent tax increases during his administration. Long term, the Bush tax cuts probably didn’t pay for themselves, although it’s hard to determine since federal expenditures mushroomed with the two Middle Eastern wars.
There is no way to predict whether the tax cuts will pay for themselves long term. Citing economic growth after the Reagan tax cuts is specious; the global economy has been radically transformed in the two decades since. One complicating factor is the imprecision of economic cycles. Although it doesn’t feel like it, the US is currently on a run of steady growth, but for every upturn, there is a future downturn just around the corner, sometimes deeper than the upturn was high. And just to complicate things, there is the unknown future health of the global economy.
Of course, 10 year economic projections are good statistical devices, but hardly politically applicable. 10 years is two and one half presidential administrations and the transfer of power can wreak havoc on government policy. Just look at where we are now. The Divider in Chief is either righting wrongs or committing them.
Ironically, there has been no president who has complained more than Agent Orange about almost every aspect of government; the federal courts, Congress, foreign policy and anything Obama even thought about. As the supreme exceptional, he believes it was his right to seize the government rather than abandon the country. The Squad has chosen to do what he has done; create a movement that will cement their position in government. But for 45, brown women don’t have that same right; he’s trying to create a ground swell to kick them out. 
45 has donned a new cape: Demonist in Chief, oops, that’s Demolitionist in Chief. His latest executive order is only one of a series of moves meant to put truth into “failing Obamacare.” Obamacare is not “imploding” as Republicans like to say, it’s being dynamited by administration efforts to blow it up. First the constant repetition of the phrase “failing Obamacare” during the failed attempts to repeal Obamacare may have left the impression among those not closely following the debate that Obamacare was on its last legs and would not be issuing new policies this year. In addition, frequent remarks by Republicans as well as administration officials about counties with none or only one insurer were intentionally meant to discourage people in those locations from even exploring the website. 
Each morning I wake and wonder how the president, administration surrogates and Republican Congressional leaders can continue to lie every single day. By now, of course, it is a second skin that they’ve lived in for a long time. I’m not sure why I, a rational, intelligent thinker find it so difficult to accept. I get the rationale to keep the Trumpophants pumped. I understand that the GOP is racing to get their agenda done before the midnight hour when the coach turns into a pumpkin and there’s no telling if they’ll get back to another ball. But it’s so demoralizingly depressing to watch politics boiled down to “the most outrageous display wins the day” play out in front of us. In the meantime, the oligarchs are playfully bleeding the citizens dry, intent on making us poorer and sicker and poisoned by the environment for mo money, mo money, mo money. 
oleblacklady 