California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

How to Prevent More Deaths From COVID

by John Lawrence

When people show mild symptoms like coughing or headache, even though they test positive, hospitals won't admit them. Then they go home where the virus can gain ground, and they become really sick. Then they are admitted but in many cases it's too late. Look at what happened in the most famous case: Donald Trump. As soon as he showed symptoms, he went to the hospital where he was treated with mononclonal antibodies among other treatments. This knocked out the COVID before it had a chance to take hold on his body. Hardly anyone else is getting this kind of treatment . If they were, there would be a lot less serious sickness and a lot less death. The point is that the disease is treated early before it has had a chance to gain a hold. That is the treatment the President got, but nobody else is getting that kind of treatment. Hospitals should be admitting and treating mild cases as soon as they show any symptoms at all and then treating them with monoclonal antibodies.

Off the Top of My Head

Why is the Stock Market Surging in the Midst of Huge Unemployment

by John Lawrence

Simple answer is that the stock market has nothing to do any more with the Main Street economy. There are two economies: Main Street and Wall Street. There's the economy of rich investors, and the economy of the 90% who aren't investors. The stock market is dominated by large multinational corporations like Apple and Google, and is invested in by rich people from all over the world. As COVID has shown, we have a bifurcated economy. Secondly, interest rates for Treasury bonds are zero so why would an investor buy them when investing in stocks amounts to a self fulfilling prophecy? The more money going in, the greater the rate of return, and rich people are continuing to make huge amounts of money. Business Insider reported that billionaires saw their net worth increase by half a trillion dollars during the pandemic. All that money has to go somewhere. Meanwhile, middle class people with 401(k)s are draining them to meet expenses. Thirdly, the Federal Reserve has all but gifted rich investors trillions of dollars.

More than 1 in 4 Americans are raiding their retirement accounts after a coronavirus-related job loss. The unexpected loss in income is causing many Americans to tap their retirement savings just to make ends meet. And many people who lost a job — or have a spouse or partner whose income has declined — didn’t have much money saved in the first place. Half of Americans who were recently furloughed or let go have saved less than $500 for retirement in the past year — and 70% have saved less than $1,000, according to a report by fintech firm SimplyWise. Of those who have an individual retirement account, 401(k) plan or retirement savings account, 1 in 5 now plan to tap those funds. Of course rich investors don't suffer job losses because they don't have jobs other than managing their money. That they can do from home.

Some has been written about a K-shaped recovery from the pandemic. In a K-shaped recovery, the economic bounce-back is bifurcated like a "K": The wealthiest Americans are quickly rebounding, even thriving, while the middle- and lower-income set are not. As of the first quarter of 2020, the wealthiest 10% of American households owned 87% of all stocks and mutual funds, according to the Federal Reserve. So where does that leave the other 90%? Struggling. Waiting in line at food banks. Getting evicted and foreclosed on. Losing their small businesses in droves. The fact that a second relief package has not been implemented and in all probability won't be for another 2 months till after Biden takes office will hinder those people in the lower part of the K even more.

So what does this say about essential workers? Are rich investors essential workers? I don't think so. Are doctors and nurses? You bet. But they are being shafted by the American people who won't obey simple guidelines in the midst of a surge upon a surge in COVID. Many of them are committing suicide. Others will soon throw up their hands and quit their jobs rationalizing that their own families are more important than taking care of sick patients which puts them at risk. Multitudes of Americans traveled during the Thanksgiving holidays ignoring pleas to stay home. Now doctors and nurses will pay the price for those who exercised their "freedom" as Americans to ignore the pleas of others and only think of themselves. Even family members of these will pay the ultimate price. Another ghastly statistic: the US with 4% of the world's population has 19% of the world's COVID cases. An in November there were an average of a million new cases per week.

Having a President for the past four years who has dumbed down the American people has not been a big help in contributing to a better society for Americans or those in the rest of the world who had looked up to America. Now the question is to what degree the Biden administration can recover some semblance of American democracy and respectability among other world leaders and also economic equity for all Americans. A lot of it will hinge on whether or not Democrats will control the Senate after the two runoff elections in Georgia. If Republicans continue to control the Senate, we can expect four more years of gridlock and straitjacketing of Biden's ambitious agenda. This will be devastating for America and the world. The US will continue to diminish in importance in the world community. Economic inequality will be exacerbated, and global warming will get even worse as hurricane and fire seasons become normal year round events.

'Hunger Like They've Never Seen It Before': US Food Banks Struggle as 1 in 6 Families With Children Don't Have Enough to Eat

Published on Friday, November 27, 2020

by Common Dreams

"We're now seeing families who had an emergency fund but it's gone and they're at the end of their rope," said one Texas food bank director. 

by Brett Wilkins, staff writer

 

74 Comments

People queue on November 21, 2020 at a food distribution site at Lake-Sumter State College in Clermont, Florida sponsored by the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. (Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Light Rocket/Getty Images)

One in six U.S. families with children don't have enough to eat this holiday season, a national emergency exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and the unemployment crisis it has generated. Over the past several days, remarkable reporting in the Washington Post and National Geographic, among other outlets, has explored this alarming trend. 

"It's been hard to survive. Money is low. No jobs. Hard to find work."
—Randy Young, Houston 

According to Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the U.S., more than 50 million people will experience food insecurity by the end of the year. Among U.S. children, the figure rises to one in four. The group, which runs a network of some 200 food banks across the nation, says it distributed over half a billion meals last month alone, a 52% increase from an average pre-pandemic month. 

The latest U.S. Census Bureau pandemic survey, published earlier this month, found that fewer than half of U.S. households with children were "very confident" they could afford to provide enough food for their families in the next month. 

As is so often the case when it comes to matters of economic inequality, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the hunger crisis. Among the 25 U.S. counties experiencing the worst food insecurity, only four have majority white populations, all of them in rural Kentucky. Census Bureau data reveals that fully 27% of Black and 23% of Latinx households with children reported not having enough to eat over the past week—compared with just 12% of white families. 

"This is a story about racial and ethnic disparities—both food insecurity and the story of coronavirus," Emily Engelhard, managing director of Feeding America's research unit, told National Geographic. "The populations and geographies that started in the most disadvantageous state of food insecurity are the ones that are getting hit the hardest" during the pandemic. 

"People are seeing hunger like they've never seen it before," Trisha Cunningham, president of the North Texas Food Bank—where cars lined up for miles and people slept in their vehicles waiting for Thanksgiving food boxes—told National Geographic. On November 14, its busiest day on record, North Texas Food Bank provided groceries—including 7,000 whole turkeys—to more than 25,000 people.

In northeastern Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank planned to distribute 12,000 meals, a 5,000-meal increase from a year ago. 

"We're now seeing families who had an emergency fund but it's gone and they're at the end of their rope," Kristin Warzocha, president of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, told the Guardian. "We're going to be doing this for a really long time, and that's frankly terrifying given the impact hunger has on physical health, learning and development for children, and parents' stress."

In Texas' second-largest city, the San Antonio Food Bank distributes eight semi-trucks full of food every day, but still was forced to resort to rationing due to soaring need. 

"Covid-19 has taken so much, people's jobs, their loved ones, and now we're just trying to stop it from taking Thanksgiving," San Antonio Food Bank CEO Eric Cooper told CNBC. "Pre-pandemic we were feeding around 60,000 people a week, and now we're seeing around 120,000... and most of those are new to the food bank. They've never had to ask for help before." 

 

Indeed, among the thousands of cars that lined up starting in the pre-dawn hours for free Thanksgiving meals at Houston's NRG Stadium last weekend, there were more than a few luxury makes. 

"I was just telling my mom, 'You look at people pulling up in Mercedes and stuff, come on,'" Randy Young, a recently laid-off cook at the stadium who was waiting in line with his elderly mother, told the Post. "If a person driving a Mercedes is in need of food, you know it's bad."

"It's been hard to survive," Young said. "Money is low. No jobs. Hard to find work." 

Loudoun County, Virginia is per capita the wealthiest county in the nation, with a median household income of just under $140,000. Yet the Post reports Loudoun Hunger Relief recently handed out meals to 887 households in one recent week, a 300% increase from pre-pandemic activity.  

"We are continuing to see people who have never used our services before," Jennifer Montgomery, Loudoun Hunger Relief's executive director, told the Post. 

In the nation's largest city, Food Bank for NYC president Leslie Gordon told France 24 that "even before the pandemic, there were 1.5 million residents here across the five boroughs who didn't always know where their next meal was coming from or what it would be, and that's escalated considerably to nearly two million of our neighbors." 

"Across the country demand has not let up, and food banks do everything they can to make sure families have food on the table for Thanksgiving," Zuani Villareal, a spokesperson for Feeding America told the Guardian. "There's no end in sight, but we can't be the only solution." 

Celia Call, CEO of Feeding Texas, stressed to the Post that "without sustained aid at the federal level, we'll be hard-pressed to keep up" with demand. "We're just bracing for the worst," she added. 

Several progressive lawmakers tweeted the Post article over the past two days. One of them, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), said that "Congress has the power to address this crisis," and asked, "Why aren't we doing it?" 

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How Mitch McConnell’s Do Nothing Republicans are Killing You

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

The Senate adjourned and left town without even trying to pass a COVID disaster relief bill. By the time they return on November 30, based on current trends, an additional estimated 16,000 Americans will have died from COVID-19.

We pay these elected officials to keep us safe, and they’ve failed us. To them I ask: How much death and suffering must the American people endure before you act?

Remember: House Democrats passed a comprehensive relief bill all the way back in May. 

You, Mitch McConnell, have refused to lift a finger for months, and Senate Republicans have been happy to follow your lead.

Countless Americans are now paying the price for your malicious inaction.
You should have learned lessons about COVID during its first horrific wave last spring.

First, there’s no tradeoff between COVID and the economy, and no way to get the economy back until COVID is under control. As the virus surges and more shutdowns loom, the millions of jobs we’ve added since April are about to disappear again. I’ve said this since March and I’ll say it again: The only way to get our economy back to full strength is to control the virus.

Second, more shutdowns are necessary. Businesses like Tesla in Alameda County, California, and Tyson meat packing plants in Iowa remained open during previous shutdowns, and both companies suffered COVID outbreaks. No exceptions this time around.

Third, and most importantly, shutdowns are only viable if accompanied by disaster relief so Americans can survive financially.  So pass disaster relief.

Re-up expanded unemployment benefits. The extra $600/week provisioned in the CARES Act expired on July 31st, and all federal relief will expire on December 31st. Expanded unemployment benefits were a financial lifeline for millions during the first and second waves, and must be instituted again to keep millions out of poverty this winter. Don’t listen to people who claim that we have to get people back to work, or keep them working. The best way to stop the spread is to pay people to stay home.

Stop evictions and foreclosures. It would be the height of cruelty to force even more people out onto the streets in the middle of winter as the virus surges. And with more job losses around the corner, we must ensure that a missed rent or mortgage payment isn’t a death sentence.

Distribute another round of Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses, with strict oversight to ensure the funds actually go to businesses that need them, not massive, publicly-traded companies that have plenty of other options. 

Shore up state and local budgets. State and local governments are facing huge budget shortfalls. Without federal aid, vital public services are on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – when the public needs them more than ever. And local governments need funds to shelter unhoused residents, especially as temperatures drop and COVID intensifies.

Protect essential workers. Tens of thousands of workers on the frontlines have contracted COVID over the past 10 months – including nearly 20,000 Amazon warehouse workers. At a minimum, they need generous hazard pay and paid sick leave.

When the last COVID relief package was passed on March 27th, there were 18,093 new cases that day. Now, there are over 100,000 new cases every day. With hospitalizations lagging behind cases, and deaths lagging behind hospitalizations, it’s clear that this is going to get much, much worse unless people shelter in place. But most Americans can’t do this without relief.

The writing is on the wall. Do your job, Mitch McConnell. Our lives depend on it. 

Off the Top of My Head

Will We Be Able to Gather Safely by Next Thanksgiving?

by John Lawrence, November 26, 2020

A vaccine is on the way, but what about the time frame? Will we be able to celebrate Thanksgiving with large family multigenerational gatherings next year? Probably not safely. It won't be until spring when most Americans can start to get vaccinated. So what if half the family has been vaccinated by next Thanksgiving and half hasn't? Will it be safe to gather? Perhaps not. A person who has been vaccinated can still be contagious even if they are asymptomatic. So they can give COVID to the half of family members who haven't been vaccinated yet. It will take everyone at the Thanksgiving table to be vaccinated before we can gather safely for Thanksgiving dinner in 2021. To make matters worse, the vaccines will undoubtedly be released without the normal approval protocol. The vaccine makers will apply for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and probably get it. This means that the normal follow-up study which typically takes 6 months will not be undertaken. Instead the EUA lets pharmaceutical companies monitor trial participants for only 2 months. The follow-up is to make sure that the vaccines are safe and don't lead to serious side effects. We already know that there are "long haulers" that experience severe symptoms months after they have tested negative for COVID.

The mRNA technology used by Moderna and Pfizer allows fast development, but it hasn't ever been used before in the development of a vaccine. The vaccines are said to be 95% effective. What that means is that 5 people out of 100 actually came down with COVID even after they were vaccinated. If you are older or have underlying conditions, you need to bear in mind that being vaccinated will not guarantee that you will not get COVID or even die from it although the chances are that the vaccine will protect you. However, because the COVID virus will still be out there floating around, safety precautions should still be undertaken long after everyone has been vaccinated. Until everyone has been vaccinated and the number of new positive cases is down to zero, people shouldn't let down their guards.

Another thing about the Pfizer and Moderna studies is that not everyone that either got the vaccine or the placebo was tested. Only those were tested that displayed symptoms. That means that there could have been far more positive cases both in those who got the vaccine and those that got the placebo. The studies did not test everyone to see how many people in the vaccinated group got infected compared to the placebo group. The bottom line is that the vaccine will likely prevent you from getting seriously sick. However, it won't prevent you from getting infected and passing it along to others. That's why it is important that public health measures like mask wearing and social distancing stay in effect until not only when everyone is vaccinated but until the hospitalization rate comes down to zero. Depending on how much testing will be in effect next year it is also a consideration that the number of positive cases come down to almost zero. Especially if you're older or have underlying conditions, don't jump the gun and let down your guard prematurely. Another thing we don't know is what happened to the ones that did get sick both in the vaccinated group and in the unvaccinated group. Did any of them die or were intubated? What kind of treatment did they get and how effective was the treatment? Did they get monoclonal antibody therapy/ If so and it prevented them from becoming seriously ill, why isn't that treatment (similar to what President Trump got) more readily available to the average person?

Because there is so little testing in the US, there are a lot of asymptomatic cases out there who have never been tested. That means that there is a lot more COVID that can be transmitted to those who are vulnerable. The problem right now is that the testing of vaccines so far has not shown whether the vaccine protects you from the disease or does it also protect you from being infected? That is unknown at this time. So public health measures must stay in place long after everyone has been vaccinated. The only reliable measure is the number of hospitalizations. When that number comes down to zero, then it will be safe to return to normal. Until then, we are all guinea pigs. The vaccine is no panacea.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Off the Top of My Head

Are We Really All in This Together?

by John Lawrence, October 21, 2020

The pandemic in terms of dying has affected mainly old people and minorities, but also there have been many at the highest level White House related cases including 87 year old Senator Chuck Grassley. I assume that these high level cases have been and will be treated with monoclonal antibodies like Remdesivir which "cured" President Trump. These treatments it should be noted are not available to everyone. Why not if they are so efficacious. Those who have the best treatments available can subscribe to the thesis that the coronavirus is no big deal. Mainly others are doing the dying.

Pope Francis' words of wisdom, Fratelli Tutti, his encyclical letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship represents a plea that we all should be in this together even though it's clear that in many parts of the world we're not. His words of wisdom follow:

"All too quickly, however, we forget the lessons of history, “the teacher of life”. Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of “them” and “those”, but only “us”. If only this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing. If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of healthcare systems. If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.

"Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness. Nor should we naively refuse to recognize that “obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction”. The notion of “every man for himself” will rapidly degenerate into a free-for-all that would prove worse than any pandemic."

Yet in the US we are divide into two nations fundamentally at war with each other. Even religious institutions fan the flames of political divides. Masc wearing has become something that freedom loving Americans feel free to not do on Constitutional grounds. Caring about the welfare of others is unAmerican when it takes away from some Americans' freedoms. That's the American way: freedom trumps "Fraternity and Social Friendship" as the Pope would say. Is freedom the only value worth supporting? Must it dominate all other values? Must saving the earth from global warming be politicized into a Left-Right issue? Those who want to convert to renewable energy are characterized as "too far Left?" It isn;t a matter of Left Right. It's a matter of what is the right thing to do.

When it comes time to give the American people a tax break, there's no hue and cry about deficit spending. When the big banks were bailed out costing trillions of dollars, there was no hue and cry about deficit spending. Even though many of the bankers had committed fraud, none of them went to jail and the fines were just a slap on the wrist. But when a government program that forgives student loan debt or funds a massive green infrastructure program is mentioned, all of a sudden Republicans are concerned about deficit spending. It's "too far Left." Providing affordable housing, feeding the hungry, creating jobs for the unemployed - all those ideas are "too far Left." It's more important to preserve American values than it is to solve social problems. In other words despite the Pope's pleas, we are not all in this together. Freedom is more important than social cohesion.

Who Wins from Trump’s Final Travesty?

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.

The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay at home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.

The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.

Trump is continuing this charade because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024, whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.

Leading Republicans like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell are going along with it because donors are refilling GOP coffers.

The biggest beneficiaries are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.

Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47 trillion richer.

A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.

The upward redistribution of $47 trillion wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.

Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other peoples’ money and was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.

When Covid-19 hit, Big Tech cornered the market, the rich traded on inside information, and the Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared while most Americans have become poorer.

How could the oligarchy get away with this in a democracy where the bottom 90% have the votes? Because the bottom 90% are bitterly divided.

Long before Trump, the GOP suggested to white working-class voters that their real enemies were Black people, Latinos, immigrants, “coastal elites,” bureaucrats and “socialists.” Trump rode their anger and frustration into the White House with more explicit and incendiary messages. He’s still at it with his bonkers claim of a stolen election.

The oligarchy surely appreciates the Trump-GOP tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and the most business-friendly Supreme Court since the early 1930s. But the Trump-GOP’s biggest gift has been an electorate more fiercely split than ever.

Into this melee comes Joe Biden, who speaks of being “president of all Americans” and collaborating with the Republican party. But the GOP doesn’t want to collaborate. When Biden holds out an olive branch, McConnell and other Republican leaders will respond just as they did to Barack Obama – with more warfare, because that maintains their power and keeps the big money rolling in.

The president-elect aspires to find a moderate middle ground. This will be difficult because there’s no middle. The real divide is no longer left versus right but the bottom 90% versus the oligarchy.

Biden and the Democrats will better serve the nation by becoming the party of the bottom 90% – of the poor and the working middle class, of black and white and brown, and of all those who would be $47 trillion richer today had the oligarchy not taken over America.

This would require that Democrats abandon the fiction of political centrism and establish a countervailing force to the oligarchy – and, not incidentally, sever their own links to it.

They’d have to show white working-class voters how badly racism and xenophobia have hurt them as well as people of color. And change the Democratic narrative from kumbaya to economic and social justice.

Easy to say, hugely difficult to accomplish. But if today’s bizarre standoff in Washington is seen for what it really is, there’s no alternative.

'It's Even Worse on Video': Trump Adviser Welcomes Killing Loved Ones With Covid-19 as This May Be 'Their Final Thanksgiving' Anyway

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow my policies may kill you."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

8 Comments

Dr. Scott Atlas, a top White House coronavirus adviser, said Monday that Americans should flout public health guidance and gather as normal for the holidays as this may be "the final Thanksgiving" for many. (Photo: screenshot)

In his latest anti-science appeal to Americans, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas on Monday night called on families to ignore the guidance of public health experts who say the holiday season should not include indoor gatherings—suggesting to Fox News that families should take the risk even for elderly or sick relatives this Thanksgiving because they will no longer be alive next year.

"This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told don’t see your family at Thanksgiving," Atlas, who has no public health expertise, told Fox host Martha MacCallum. "For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here?"

Stanford University, where Atlas was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution before joining President Donald Trump's coronavirus team, promptly distanced itself from the doctor's comments, while political observers expressed shock on social media.

 

Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall wrote that for many Americans it will be their last Thanksgiving "because they're attending Thanksgiving."

Protecting the elderly from Covid-19 is one of the main reasons infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and other officials have called on Americans to skip indoor family gatherings and traveling this year. Last week he advised Americans to wear face coverings at any gatherings they do have if they don't know the Covid-19 status of all attendees. 

Meanwhile, Atlas has falsely stated that face masks don't reduce transmission of Covid-19 and is a proponent of the U.S. government taking a "herd immunity" approach to the pandemic—encouraging people who are relatively young and healthy to go about their daily lives with no regard for mask-wearing, social distancing, or the existence of a virus that's killed more than 246,000 people in the U.S. this year, while using unspecified methods to separate them from people who are elderly or at high risk for severe Covid-19 infections.  

The "herd immunity" approach, euphemistically rebranded as "focused protection" by some proponents, has been denounced as "fringe" by seasoned public health officials. 

On Sunday, Atlas also called on Michigan residents to "rise up" against public health guidance after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced that in-person learning, indoor dining, organized sports, and other activities would be shut down for three weeks to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.

"This guy is a public health menace and it needs to stop now," tweeted one emergency room physician on Monday evening following Atlas's comments about Thanksgiving.

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Off the Top of My Head

Why Isn't Monoclonal Antibody Therapy Widely Available?

by John Lawrence, November 17, 2020

Monoclonal antibody therapy similar to what knocked out COVID for Donald Trump has been shown to knock out the virus if administered within the first couple days of showing symptoms. Trump is a living example that it works, but now as of November 9 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) showed that Eli Lilly's COVID-19 convalescent plasma–derived virus-neutralizing monoclonal antibody treatment reduced viral loads, lowered the severity of symptoms, and had no serious adverse effects in outpatients. So it knocks out the virus and also may give short term immunity. "It is important to treat people with COVID-19 as soon as possible after diagnosis in order to forestall development of more severe disease," said Peter Chen, MD, of Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles and first author of the NEJM study. "Our findings indicate that neutralizing antibodies may have the potential to be useful in this early-stage intervention," he added.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that starting November 13, Medicare beneficiaries can receive coverage of monoclonal antibodies to treat COVID-19 with no cost-sharing during the public health emergency. CMS’ coverage of monoclonal antibody infusions applies to bamlanivimab, which received an emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Today, CMS is announcing a historic, first-of-its kind policy that drastically expands access to COVID-19 monoclonal antibodies to beneficiaries without cost sharing,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “Our timely approach means beneficiaries can receive these potentially life-saving therapies in a range of settings – such as in a doctor’s office, nursing home, infusion centers, as long as safety precautions can be met. This aggressive action and innovative approach will undoubtedly save lives.”

The only problem is that this life saving treatment is not widely available. The President got it in the form of Remdesivir, and it worked for him. Why are so many people dying who could have been treated with this therapy? The question remains as to why this therapy was not factory produced in the millions of doses just in case it worked like several of the potential vaccines have been.So many Americans are dying just because they have not had access to the same therapy that the President of the US had access to.

Off the Top of My Head

Trump's 'Cull the Herd' Philosophy wrt COVID

by John Lawrence, November 2, 220

Trump's philosophy is that people who succumb to COVID are 'suckers and losers' which is what he said about those who die in war. He himself exemplifies this survival of the fittest philosophy. Take him as an example. He got COVID and bounced back within a couple of days. He's out there doing four or five campaign rallies a day, quite remarkable for a 74 year old man. So he must have some superior constitution to overcome the virus and be bouncing back big time. His example is that people with superior constitutions will hardly be affected with COVID, and that the US should cull the herd of suckers and losers that are so affected. Especially since most of the suckers and losers that succumb to COVID are blacks Latinos and old people who were going to die anyway.

Hitler had a somewhat similar philosophy. In addition to Jews, he was culling the herd of mentally defectives, homosexuals and non-Aryans, in other words people he considered to be weaklings or inferiors. Trump has the same philosophy: why let the American economy go down the tubes in order to try and save the lives of suckers and losers especially since a preponderance of them are minorities ^i.e. non-Americans. Beyond that Trump and his followers are only interested in short term profits for themselves. They adhere to the Ayn Randist philosophy of extreme selfishness. Nobody counts for anything except themselves. It's the extreme opposite of the philosophy of caring which the Biden campaign represents. Trump and his cultlike following don't care about anyone but themselves.They don't want to diminish their own prospects in order to do anything (example: mask wearing) to help anyone else, especially those whom they consider inferior to themselves. Hitler would smile on this philosophy.

The Trumpistas worship power whether that power is political, financial or athletic. They relish powerful pickup trucks flying Trump flags, sports bars, football and anything else that represents power and winning. They could care less about what happens to the earth 10 years or 100 years from now. They want their selfish interests to be realized now. They're not interested in doing anything about gloabal warming because it's not in their immediate interests. Wall Street seconds this emotion by only promoting those who can demonstrate short term profits. As in football winning is the only thing that matters, winning by any means necessary. The values of Trumpistas are that people who care for those who are poor or sick or vulnerable are suckers and losers. People who succumb to COVID are weaklings. People like Trump who get over it in a few days are the winners. They want to cull the herd of the losers who get COVID and die.

There are those like Joe Biden and mostly other Democrats who want to take care of those like the elderly and the sick and the weak rather than letting them die and have the herd culled from their prescence. After all they are someone's loved ones too. Nixon had a philosophy of "benign neglect." In other words just let them die. And let the earth die as well if it gets in the way of corporate profits which it does if respect and caring for the environment is taken into consideration. So let's just have another maskless motorcycle rally or campaign event and see who is superior and who is a loser that gets COVID and dies. After Trump's Tulsa rally Herman Cain, former black Presidential candidate and Trump supporter, got COVID and died. In Trump's view probably he was just another loser. Since mostly minorities are doing the dying, this just proves the superiority of the white race. Hitler would seem to be vindicated.

So the opposite philosophy from the philosophy of power and selfishness and winning is the philosophy of caring. It is exemplified by the Hippocratic Oath which all doctors take. It requires doctors and health care professionals to save every life if at all possible. If it were not for this attitude and philosophy, in a Trumpian value system, doctors might make the decision to let people die who couldn't pay for their services or to let people die who weren't of the same race or to let old people die who were going to die shortly anyway or to let people die who they considered to be suckers and losers. Joe Biden and the Democrats generally have the opposite philosophy, the philosophy which the Pope has called a  'preferential option for the poor,' a philosophy of caring for the weakest among us. In a few days we shall see which philosophy will hold sway in America and quite possibly in the rest of the world as America sets the example.

Off the Top of My Head

Conservatives Argue That Phasing Out Fossil Fuels is Socialism. They Argue That Saving the Planet from Global Warming is Socialism. They Argue That Universal Health Coverage is Socialism. I Say Bring It On!

by John Lawrence, October 27, 2020

So anything that would benefit the people as a whole or the planet is socialism. Creating jobs by a government sponsored infrastructure program is socialism. Yet private enterprise has not built any infrastructure. It won't do so unless the money is provided by the government. Rebuilding roads and bridges is not something private enterprise is equipped to do. If it was, they'd build roads and bridges and then charge tolls to recoup their investment. Private enterprise is good at inventing things and starting entrepreneurial enterprises, but not large picture enterprises which are properly the domain of government or require government cooperation with the private sector. A government that makes sure that everyone has health care complements private enterprise. They want healthy workers after all. Private enterprise benefits from safe roads, tunnels and bridges more so than does the average citizen. They use infrastructure in the conduct of their business.

President Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Yeah, it's the problem when it doesn't do its proper job. It's the problem when President Trump doesn't take any responsibility for the pandemic or attempts to do anything about it. Reagan also said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Really? We could use a little help from the government in the midst of a pandemic. The private enterprise system is doing its part inventing a vaccine, but they're doing it with the help of government money. Pfizer got $1.95 Billion to produce a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year. Johnson & Johnson got a billion dollars. Without government being "here to help" there would be no vaccine on the horizon. Private enterprise would not take that money out of its own research budget especially if it didn't figure to make a profit selling the vaccine.

So socialism will be responsible for developing a coronavirus vaccine and eventually ending the pandemic. It will be done with the "government help" that Ronald Reagan thought was so terrifying. The problem is that we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The rich spend tons of money lobbying Congress to pass legislation in their favor. In a truly free market they wouldn't be spending money making sure government was doing their bidding in their interests. They would be spending money on research, development and promoting their products. Rich people don't want government so small that they can "drown it in the bathtub" as Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist said. No, they are manipulating government everyday to get government just the right size to suit their financial interests. Defense contractors lobby to get the government to spend more money on the military-industrial complex. Pharmaceutical corporations lobby to get government not to allow Medicare to negotiate with them for lower drug prices. This is something Joe Biden said he would do: allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma.

Most civilized nations have universal health care. The US is the only outlier. Most civilized countries want to do something about global warming. The US under Trump is the outlier. Most civilized countries have a social safety net so that people don't suffer needlessly. At the same time most countries facilitate a partnership between government and private enterprise that works for entrepreneurs and business people and the citizenry as a whole, in partnership and cooperation. There is a balance between capitalism and socialism that works for the benefit of all the people. That's what makes for a successful nation. Right now this is very out of whack in the US. A bloated military has wasted trillions of dollars on disastrous wars that have made the nation less safe. And yet the military was absolutely impotent to do anything about COVID-19. The money would have been better spent strengthening our knowledge and preparations for a pandemic and for better health among Americans so that they don't have so many underlying conditions that have led to more deaths from the coronavirus.

As jobs are being destroyed by automation, robotization and AI, it's imperative that jobs be created addressing the needs of infrastructure and the need for renewable energy. This endeavor can be in part a joint mission for both government and private enterprise, but without government's input the nation will keep on spewing fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere because that's what's in the interests of existing corporations. That dynamic needs to change and government has to be instrumental in bringing about that change. That's why it's important to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Many vested interests will continue making money by polluting and emitting greenhouse gasses unless government changes the dynamics of energy production. This means countering the demand of lobbyists and putting government in a direction that benefits the people as a whole and not just special interests.

VOTE!

 

 

'We're Rounding the Corner Beautifully,' Trump Lies Just Before US Hits Another Record: 85,000+ New Covid-19 Cases

Published on Saturday, October 24, 2020 by Common Dreams

"Trump's lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives. We need a new president," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

17 Comments

President Donald Trump speaks during his campaign event on October 23, 2020 in The Villages, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump late Friday repeated his lie that the United States is on its way to defeating the coronavirus pandemic just before the country reported a single-day record of more than 85,000 new Covid-19 infections, nearly 10,000 more cases than were tallied at the height of the devastating surge in mid-July.

But the president's remarks during a campaign rally Friday at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, conveyed zero indication that the U.S. is entering what could be the worst phase of the pandemic yet.

"It's true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic. We are spiraling out of control."
—Dr. Zoë McLaren,School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County

"I mean, you look at what's going on and we're rounding the turn. We're rounding the corner. We're rounding the corner beautifully," Trump said, recycling an egregious falsehood that has become a staple of his stump speech even as infections and hospitalizations surge nationwide.

The New York Times reported late Friday that "since the start of October, the rise in cases has been steady and inexorable, with no plateau in sight... By that measure, Friday was the worst day of the pandemic, and health experts warned of a further surge as cold weather sets in. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 has already risen 40 percent in the past month."

Consistent with his reckless downplaying of the pandemic from the very start, Trump once again peddled the lie that the U.S. is "rounding the turn" during a late Friday rally in Pensacola, one of many largely maskless and closely packed in-person campaign events the president has held in recent days against the warnings of public health officials.

Watch:

"It's true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic," responded Dr. Zoë McLaren, associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "We are spiraling out of control."

In addition to the record number of cases, the U.S. also reported more than 940 coronavirus deaths on Friday, bringing the nation's death toll to nearly 224,000—the highest in the world.

"This is only getting worse," tweeted epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, warning that the U.S. could soon reach 100,000 new cases per day as the winter months approach.

With the November 3 election less than two weeks away, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Friday that "Trump's lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives."

"We need a new president," Sanders said.

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Off the Top of My Head

Trump Holds Super Spreader Events with Old People as COVID Sets Record in US

by John Lawrence

Yesterday a record was set: 83,000 COVID infections, the highest ever. Meanwhile, Trump was holding a mainly maskless event in the Villages, a retirement community in Florida.The New England Journal of Medicine reported on October 8, 2020:

Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.

The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.

Is this Vietnam's revenge? Vietnam is the country we ravaged burning women and children alive with Agent Orange while affecting our own soldiers as well. The number of Vietnam veterans affected by the chemical Agent Orange is astonishing. Roughly 300-thousand veterans have died from Agent Orange exposure -- that's almost five times as many as the 58-thousand who died in combat. Be that as it may, the fact that the death rate from COVID in the US is 3000 times greater than the death rate in Vietnam is astonishing. Could it have to do with the fact that Vietnam is the least obese country in the world while the US is among the most obese? Out of 191 countries Vietnam has an obesity rate of 2.1% while in the US the obesity rate is 36.2%. As we know obesity is an underlying condition for COVID morbidity. The American diet may be the main underlying condition. Burgers, pizza and fast food may have been a contributing factor to the COVID death rate.

We also know that countries that have got the pandemic under control have been able to reopen their economies successfully. China is on track to expand by roughly 5% in the third quarter roughly at the same rate as in 2019 before the pandemic hit. On the other hand countries that haven't gotten the pandemic under control such as the US have not been able to reopen successfully see sawing back and forth between reopening and reshuting as the COVUD infection rate see saws back and forth. Consumers are wary to come out in public as long as the infection rate is high. Since consumption is 70% of the US economy, much larger than the European consumption rate of 50%, it is more important in the US that consumption remains high in order for the economy to sustain itself. After the election, providing Biden wins, there will probably be another installment of the CARES Act putting money directly in consumers' hands thus preventing the US economy from free fall.

Expert opinion holds that US leadership, namely Trump and his cronies, has abjectly failed in its response to the COVID pandemic. Elections have consequences. Electing clowns like George W Bush, who lied us into a tragic war in Iraq, and Trump who was Missing in Action with respect to the COVID pandemic shows the ignorant mistakes the American electorate has made. Gore and Hillary Clinton would have been infinitely more competent in dealing with the crises that America has had to face. Let's not make the same mistake again! This time we must elect Joe Biden or the US is finished as a world leader. A democracy is only as good as the competence and intelligence of the citizens comprising it. So far the American people - some of them - have displayed their ignorance and incompetence by not wearing masks and complaining that they have a right not to do so. Freedom may just be another name for nothing left to lose as the Kris Kristofferson song says.

Off the Top of My Head

If You Thought American Inequality Was Bad Before COVID, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

by John Lawrence, October 19, 2020

Pandemics should be the great equalizer, but COVID has exacerbated inequality. The rich have gotten richer. The poor have not only gotten poorer, they've slipped into poverty and homelessness. Around the world the Economist estimates that about 100 million people are falling back into extreme poverty, that is they are living on less than $2 a day. In the US between 6 and 8 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty within the last few months. CNBC reported that nearly 40% of cash-strapped Americans can't last a month on their savings. But there are success stories if you want to call them that. Amazon has seen its market cap increase by $750 billion to around $1.7 trillion. Jeff Bezos' net worth is now around $200 billion. Clearly the COVID economic depression has not been bad for everyone.

Americans are not encouraged to save for a rainy day, and 2020 has seen a series of the all time rainiest of days. We are encouraged to consume, consume, consume. Consumption is 70% of GDP in the US, much higher than the 51% share in Europe and 57% in China. The problem now is that Americans can't consume if they don't have the money to do it. That is why the CARES Act  was so important and why a further relief package is as important. If people don't spend to consume, the US will go into a depression. Consumer spending is important for the US economy much more so than elsewhere in the world.

China's economy will be the only one to grow this year while the US economy shrinks. China got COVID under control months ago, and its economy now is in full swing. It goes to show the wisdom of getting COVID under control first no matter how severe the measures that have to be taken to do so. Then the economy can open with no problem. The US, under the leadership of President Trump, did a half ass job of getting COVID under control with the result that opening the economy was done in a half ass way also. Now COVID is on the upswing in the US, and Trump is holding super spreader event rallies as he seemingly wants to take his supporters down with him if he fails to win on election day. The economy is on a roller coaster of half openings and half closings.

Clearly, there has been a K shaped recovery with the rich doing very well and the poor slipping into poverty. Poor essential workers such as meat packers and agricultural workers presumably still have their jobs. Nonessential poor workers such as maids in the hospitality industry and restaurant and bar workers have lost their jobs as those industries have either shut down or are struggling. The worst thing for these struggling industries would be to have to shut down completely again although that may be necessary if COVID cases continue to spike. Although the situation is bad for poor people in the US, it's worse in the rest of the world. The World Bank has revised its analysis of the effects of COVID, and they now estimate that the COVID pandemic is likely to push between 88 and 115 million people into extreme poverty in 2020, setting back poverty reduction by around three years. Meanwhile, billionaires saw their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2 trillion from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.

The US' response to COVID has been among the poorest in the world with the result that America's influence in the world, already on the downswing, is further eroding. Inevitably China will take over as the world's largest economy just based on its superior response to the COVID pandemic alone. That makes this year's elections crucial to resuming some semblance of American influence and respect in the world community. Not to mention that if Trump is reelected there is no hope for a remediated response to global warming and climate change. Either the US will get on the right track in several different dimensions with Joe Biden as President or Trump, if he serves another 4 years, will take America and the world down with him.

Off the Top of My Head

Has China Won?

by John Lawrence, October 16, 2020

Ian Bremmer wrote in Time magazine: "You might think 2020 had been a pretty good year for China, at least when compared with the West. Though COVID-19 began its global march there, China’s recovery has been remarkable. The government’s unprecedented capacity for surveillance, large-scale testing, contact tracing and quarantine helped contain the outbreak inside China within two months. That success allowed for the restart of supply chains and enabled a state investment-led rebound. China could be the world’s only large economy to grow this year. And as second waves of COVID-19 appear in Europe and the U.S., China hasn’t had any serious outbreaks over the past month. Life there is nearly back to normal."

The Chinese and the US economies were neck and neck prior to COVID. The fact that China has handled its response much better than has the US means that China will emerge as the world's largest economy by 2021. In his book, "Has China Won?", author Kishore Mahbubani sums up the strengths and weaknesses of both societies. He contends that the "Chinese Communist Party" is a misnomer. It should be called the Chinese Civilization Party as it owes more to China's 3000 year civilization than it does to communism. China values stability over chaos. It has pulled 800,000 Chinese citizens out of poverty in the last 40 years, largely because it has privatized large swaths of its society. Chinese citizens are well satisfied with their lot in life because among other things they have access to as wide a variety consumer goods as do the developed western societies.

So what has been the US response to China's rapid economic growth and expansion particularly with regard to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is building infrastructure all over the world with the intention of recreating the ancient Silk Road trade route? Obama initiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which would have been a trade alliance rivaling the BRI. Trump immediately withdrew from the TPP as well as withdrawing from other global initiatives and alliances under his America First go-it-alone philosophy with the result that even US allies are giving Xi Jinping and China more credibility than the US. Under the Trump administration the response to China's rise has been to try and put roadblocks in the way of Chinese corporations. They had Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, China's largest privately held company, arrested on December 1, 2018 in Canada under the pretext that Huawei had sold equipment to Iran violating US sanctions. Subsequently, she was extradited to the US. On February 13, 2020 Meng was personally indicted by the DOJ on charges of trade secrets theft which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment.

Similarly, the Trump administration sought to prohibit the popular Chinese app Tik Tok from being downloaded by American consumers. Tik Tok, however, received a reprieve in September 2020 from an American federal court when a judge put a temporary stop to the Trump administration's ban. The government had argued that Tik Tok may have a "back door" through which it could share American data with the Chinese government. A ban would “be no different from the government locking the doors to a public forum,” said John Hall, a lawyer for TikTok. “We’re pleased that the court agreed with our legal arguments and issued an injunction preventing the implementation of the TikTok app ban,” a spokesman for TikTok said after the judge’s decision.

The American response to the success of Chinese private corporations might have been to cheer the at least partial privatization of the Chinese economy, a laudable development in accordance with US free enterprise, capitalistic principles. Instead, the US under Trump has sought to hinder Chinese corporations every step of the way even when they have won competitions fair and square. It is what I would call the Tonya Harding response. In January 1994, skater Tonya Harding became embroiled in controversy when her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, orchestrated an attack on her fellow U.S. skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. Both women then competed in the February 1994 Winter Olympics, where Kerrigan won the silver medal and Harding finished eighth. Harding was later banned from the sport. The US response to China over China's pulling ahead of it is reminiscent of Tonya's response to Kerrigan. If you can't beat your opponent with your natural talent, try to injure them (in this case sanction or ban them) instead.

This leaves aside the legitimacy of the US use of sanctions to demand that another country (in this case China) must not do business with some other country if the US says it can't. A Biden administration would reenter the Iran nuclear agreement which reduced sanctions against Iran, and, supposedly, Meng would be released. Tik Tok also would be allowed to continue its ability to sell its app all over the world. The US should engage constructively and diplomatically with China to allay any fears about "back doors." Diplomatic treaties and agreements are the way to go, not retaliation over imagined and ill defined fears. It's important that the US and China cooperate especially when it comes to global warming. They are the 2 largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, and their cooperation is necessary in working with the rest of the world (in particular India) in bringing GHG emissions to net zero in the shortest time. The destructive effects of global warming are manifesting themselves now all over the world in addition to the wildfires on the US west coast and hurricanes in the Gulf states.

Off the Top of My Head

China Back to Normal. US COVID Surging.

by John Lawrence,, October 14, 2020

According to The Lancet: "As of Oct 4, 2020, China had confirmed 90,604 cases of COVID-19 and 4739 deaths, while the USA had registered 7,382,194 cases and 209,382 deaths." Clearly, China has had a much better response to the pandemic than has the US. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, offered “deepest congratulations...to the front-line health workers in China and the population who worked together tirelessly to bring the disease to this very low level”. Fareed Zakaria in his excellent book, "Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World," writes:

The pandemic has accelerated America's selfish turn - its abandonment of its role as leader of the free world and provider of public goods within the multilateral system. Perhaps the most striking example came with its vaccine strategy. Far from coordinating a global effort, or even encouraging its allies to pool resources, the Trump administration was simply looking to "win," edging out other countries in a race to get the vaccine first. The German press reported that the American government offered "large sums of money" to secure a German company's vaccine "for the US only." Meanwhile, partners like France, Brazil and Canada accused the US of swooping in on deals to acquire critical medical equipment and outbidding them, or even blocking shipments.

But it has been to no avail. The Trump administration's botched handling of its response to the pandemic has landed the US up in the situation that COVID is on the upsurge 9 months after Trump first knew about it. The denouement is that China is surging ahead with its economy while the US is surging ahead with the virus. What's more is that people are dying at a rate of some 700 a day  while the President himself, having caught the virus, was given Regeneron's monoclonal antibodies cocktail which seems to have killed off the virus in short order. Unfortunately, that treatment isn't available to everybody.

Zakaria opines on the US relationship with China. Trump can't condemn China too much as a huge amount of American products from American corporations are manufactured in and imported from China. The two countries are intertwined despite Trump's "Made in America" push. American corporations will not make their products in America as long as they can get cheaper labor elsewhere. After all their imperative is the bottom line and maximizing profits. Wall Street has told them this is what they must do, patriotism be damned.

Zakaria details the US response to the rise of China, its growing influence in the world even among US traditional allies, who seem to have more respect for Xi Jinping than for Trump. Trump is considered a loose cannon in the world today. The US can degenerate into Cold War II with China or America can play a more constructive role with its chief rival, which rivalry has come about rather suddenly. For example, the US can quibble with China about the situation in the Xinjiang region with the Uighurs, an Islamic minority, while ignoring its own history of forcing the Indians off their lands and onto reservations. In the long run, more is at stake in the US-China relationship them petty rivalries. As the two largest emitters of greenhouse gasses (GHGs), the US and China must cooperate to achieve net zero carbon emissions in short order or the earth will become uninhabitable. Scientists think Venus was inhabitable for billions of years before runaway GHGs made it uninhabitable. The same thing could happen to earth unless we take the situation seriously. For this reason the US and China must cooperate, not compete. We must avoid Cold War II or else the winner of this rivalry will win nothing more than a scorched earth.

Off the Top of My Head

It's Not the Quantity of Government. It's the Quality.

by John Lawrence, October 13, 2020

Fareed Zakaria has written a brilliant book: "Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World." In it he says that the old debates between the Left and the Right are invalid. He notes that most major countries are a part of the world economic system. That system was set up after WWII by the US. China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. The WTO deals with regulation of trade in goods, services and intellectual property between participating countries by providing a framework for negotiating trade agreements and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants' adherence to WTO agreements. So China which is arguably the world's largest economy is playing on the same field and under the same rules as the US, the EU and 123 other nations. It's fair to say that all countries party to the WTO are hybrids of capitalism and socialism, some leaning more one way and some leaning more the other way.

Zakaria writes: "... the old ideologies are obsolete. The divide that has organized politics for centuries has been between left and right. The Left has advocated a larger role for the state in the economy. The Right has staunchly defended free markets. For the twentieth century, the great political debate was about the size and role of government in the economy - the quantity of government. But what seems to have mattered most in this [pandemic] crisis was the quality of government." Zakaria argues that the US' response to the pandemic was hindered by the fact of US federalism. The creation of a national strategy for dealing with the pandemic was "complicated by the existence of 2,684 state, local and tribal health departments each jealously guarding its independence. To make matters even messier, the US has 90,126 units of state and local government, many of which were tasked with devising their own rules on mask-wearing and public gatherings."

Zakaria continues: "But this patchwork of authority is a nightmare when tackling a disease that knows no borders. The fragmentation of standards is especially acute when handling Covid-19 tests. ... (It is a far cry from Taiwan's system of 'health cards', which link up with a single data base for all relevant medical information.)" Imagine if every US citizen was covered by a health card that linked up with a national data base. It will never happen as long as the US remains a fragmented national state with so many conflicting jurisdictions. This fragmentation contrasts with a country like Canada which has one health card which any citizen can use anywhere, and the doctor can access all that patient's records. The medical visit costs the Canadian citizen nothing. This streamlining of medical records saves a lot of money and effort compared to the hodge podge of American medical record keeping.

This hodge podge and fragmentation of the US extends to many other areas. It has made police reform almost impossible as there are 18,000 police departments across the country. The fact of the matter is that this Federalism precludes any coherent national strategy when it comes to the COVID pandemic or much of anything else. It's the reason that the medical system in the US is so expensive while returning mediocre results. China and some other countries have handled the pandemic in an intelligent and coherent way with the result that they have controlled COVID. Therefore, their economies have gotten more or less back to normal while the US is still struggling to get a handle on the pandemic with the result that the US economy is still a shambles.

Off the Top of My Head

Quantitative Easing = Printing Money

by John Lawrence

In her book, "Deficits Don't Matter," author Stephanie Kelton makes the case that we don't have to worry about deficit spending. That's when the US government spends more than it takes in in taxes. So in a sense taxes don't matter either at least as far as balanced budgets go. The US dollar is a sovereign currency. This means we don't have to ask anyone's permission to print money. The US dollar was taken off the gold standard in 1971 under President Nixon. It is a fiat currency meaning that it is not backed by anything other than the word of the US government. The US has experienced the phenomenon of printing money to bail out the banks in the Great Recession of 2008. As of September of this year, the Fed's balance sheet was $7.1 trillion. As of January 2008, the Fed's balance sheet was less than $1 trillion. That means that the Fed has printed money to the tune of over $6 trillion since 2008. Yet there has been no inflation in the US economy which is the danger a lot of economists had predicted from printing so much money.

The Federal Reserve bank can print US dollars just by a few keystrokes on a computer. Approximately $3.5 trillion was printed to bail out the banks during the Great Recession. Another $2.5 trillion has been printed so far to deal with the COVID pandemic. The question arises that, if the Fed can print money any time it wants, why can't there be Quantitative Easing (QE) for the people? In other words, if the Fed can bail out the banks, why can't it bail out the homeless, why can't it bail out the $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure spending, why can't it bail out the hungry and the poor? The answer is that it can do all those things, but this tool, QE, for that is what it is - a tool - should be used judiciously. It should be used to accomplish useful and necessary goals. It should not be used frivolously. It should be used in conjunction with other tools like tax policy. It should be used to promote a full employment economy and achieve socially useful goals.

Tax policy should be used to raise most of the money needed for government spending, and it should be used to redress the balance of the high amount of inequality in the American economy. Taxing the wealthy both in terms of income and wealth while giving tax breaks to the middle class and poor while implementing policies to help them build wealth is one of the major things US Federal tax policy should do. Additional money can be obtained by reducing the bloated military and military-industrial complex budget. If, however, there are additional goals that should be met like hastening the switch to renewable energy or a fuller safety net for the American people, then QE for the people should be implemented. The goal is to have a balanced and useful economy, one that promotes net zero carbon emissions, one that promotes sustainable development on other parts of the world, one that hastens the day when no child goes hungry or uneducated, one that reduces financial inequality.

It has already been demonstrated that deficits don't matter because the Great Recession of 2008 was quelled by the Fed's policy of printing money with no adverse effects on the economy. We have seen again the salubrious effects pf printing money or QE, if you want to call it that, during the COVID pandemic during which another $2.5 trillion has been printed so far. There is no reason why any country that has a sovereign currency like the US does cannot print money. Since the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, other countries and individuals are willing to buy up most if not all of US debt. But if they didn't buy up any of it, the Fed could still take it - or as much as necessary - on its balance sheet. In other words the fact that other countries are buying US debt means that the Fed doesn't have to print as much money. Any country with a sovereign currency can do the same even if their currency is not much in demand on world markets. Since the US dollar is used a lot in world trade, other countries need a supply of US dollars and are willing to buy US debt to get them.

There is no reason why any American should go hungry or be homeless or lack health care. Speaking of health care, Medicare for All would not eliminate private health care as some have suggested. Even with Medicare some doctors refuse to see patients because they don't like the reimbursement Medicare provides. There would be a private market for the wealthy who would just pay out of pocket to doctors who refused to accept Medicare patients. The wealthy don't even need health insurance. It could not be made illegal for such a market to exist. So even though everyone would have health care under a Medicare for All plan, the wealthy would still hire private and presumably better doctors at their own expense.

The policy of the Fed's buying US debt, which is equivalent to printing money, should be used wisely and the money not wasted.  QE for the people combined with the fact that deficits don't matter should lead to a more productive society providing that those additional tools and resources are used in a constructive way and not used to further militarize the society and the world. Any tool can be used for good or for ill. QE for the people could be used for a more healthy, beneficial and well balanced society for all people, could eliminate poverty in the US and the world, bring US infrastructure into the modern era and combat global warming and future pandemics.

Health Experts 'Stunned' as Trump Says He Will Resume In-Person Rallies While Infected With Covid-19

Published on Friday, October 09, 2020

by Common Dreams

Trump and White House officials have repeatedly refused to say whether the president has tested negative for the coronavirus since his diagnosis last week.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

16 Comments

President Donald Trump greets a crowd during a campaign rally at Smith Reynolds Airport on September 8, 2020 in Winston Salem, North Carolina. The president also made a campaign stop in South Florida on Tuesday. (Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

After refusing to say whether he has tested negative for Covid-19 since his diagnosis late last week, President Donald Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News Thursday night that he is hoping to hold a pair of in-person rallies this coming weekend in the key battleground states of Florida and Pennsylvania despite the potential risk of spreading a virus that has now killed more than 212,000 Americans on his watch.

"I'll tell you, I took this Regeneron, it's phenomenal," Trump said, blowing past Hannity's question about whether he has recently tested negative for Covid-19. "Eli Lilly has something very comparable, it's phenomenal. It's a whole new day."

When asked later in the interview if he's had a coronavirus test since his diagnosis, Trump said, "Well, what we're doing is probably the test will be tomorrow, the actual test, because there's no reason to test all the time. But they found very little infection or virus, if any. I don't know that they found any—I didn't go into it greatly with the doctors."

Watch:

Amid ongoing questions about the president's condition following his release from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, White House doctors and administration officials have repeatedly declined to say when Trump's last negative coronavirus test was, prompting concerns that the president is still contagious and poses a risk to others.

"I don't want to go backwards," White House physician Dr. Sean Conley said Monday when asked about the president's last negative test result. White House Deputy Press Secretary Brian Morgenstern told reporters that he doesn't know when the president last tested negative for the coronavirus and is not interested in finding out.

"We're not asking to go back through a bunch of records and look backwards," Morgenstern said, parroting Conley's line.

In a brief memo on Thursday, Conley—who has come under fire for evading reporters' questions and omitting crucial information during his briefings on the president's condition—wrote that "based on the trajectory of advanced diagnostics the team has been conducting," he believes Trump will be able to safely "return to public engagements" as early as Saturday.

 

But public health experts immediately voiced skepticism in response to Conley's proposed timeline. Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University's Milken School of Public Health, said she was "stunned" by Conley's claim that the president is nearly ready to return to public activities.

Saturday is "day 10, according to White House's own time course," Wen noted. "Patients with severe Covid-19 can be infectious for 20 days."

Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-disease physician based in South Carolina, told the New York Times Thursday that while "everyone is going to have a different point of view," he would "err on the safe side, and keep [Trump] isolated for 20 days."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that "for most persons with Covid-19 illness, isolation and precautions can generally be discontinued 10 days after symptom onset and resolution of fever for at least 24 hours, without the use of fever-reducing medications, and with improvement of other symptoms." Based on the White House's public statements, it's unclear when Trump began showing coronavirus symptoms.

"This is bigger than him," Kuppalli said, alluding to the public health risks associated with the president resuming public events.

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Off the Top of My Head

There is No Such Thing as a National Solution to a Global Crisis

by John Lawrence, October 9, 2020

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced its 2020 Goalkeepers report with the above words. COVID-19 has killed more than 850,000 people worldwide. Every year until this one the world has made progress towards reducing poverty and disease. Notice the Gates foundation emphasis on the world as one coherent unified organism rather than just on US national boundaries. The pandemic knows no national boundaries. Until it's stamped out worldwide, the US is vulnerable. The foolishness of spending a trillion dollars a year on the US military which was powerless to do anything about the pandemic has been demonstrated. International cooperation is crucial to ending this pandemic, as well as others which are likely to follow, and reducing the conditions of poverty and disease in the world which breed war and terrorism. When will the US get its priorities straight?

The Goalkeepers report tracked 18 indicators included in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In recent years, the world has improved on every single one. This year, on the vast majority, we’ve regressed.There is also a worldwide recession that the military and military-industrial complex is powerless to do anything about. The US is not an island. Pandemics, global warming - these are problems affecting the whole world not just the US. Nations that have the resources need to assist other nations that don't have the resources. That means that the developed world has to help the developing world to combat these problems: disease, poverty, weaponization, global warming.

In 2015, 193 world leaders agreed to a series of 17 ambitious goals to end poverty, fight inequality, and stop climate change by 2030. The Global Goals are within our reach, but we must remain committed—embracing what works and addressing what doesn’t, while holding ourselves and others accountable. In 2016 President Trump dropped out of global cooperation with his America First policy. That has gotten the US nowhere. Whichever countries handle the pandemic intelligently are going to come out of the recession as world leaders. That won't be the US unless Joe Biden gets elected and is able to turn the shambles of Trump's response to the pandemic around.

The first and most important goal is ending poverty. Eradicating poverty is not a task of charity, it's an act of justice and the key to unlocking an enormous human potential. Still, nearly half of the world’s population lives in poverty, and lack of food and clean water is killing thousands every single day of the year. Together, we can feed the hungry, wipe out disease and give everyone in the world a chance to prosper and live a productive and rich life. The second goal is zero hunger. Hunger is the leading cause of death in the world. Our planet has provided us with tremendous resources, but unequal access and inefficient handling leaves millions of people malnourished. If we promote sustainable agriculture with modern technologies and fair distribution systems, we can sustain the whole world’s population and make sure that nobody will ever suffer from hunger again.

The third goal is good health and well-being. Over the last 15 years, the number of childhood deaths has been cut in half. This proves that it is possible to win the fight against almost every disease. Still, we are spending an astonishing amount of money and resources on treating illnesses that are surprisingly easy to prevent. The new goal for worldwide Good Health promotes healthy lifestyles, preventive measures and modern, efficient healthcare for everyone. The fourth goal is quality education. Education liberates the intellect, unlocks the imagination and is fundamental for self-respect. It is the key to prosperity and opens a world of opportunities, making it possible for each of us to contribute to a progressive, healthy society. Learning benefits every human being and should be available to all.

The fifth goal is gender equality. Gender bias is undermining our social fabric and devalues all of us. It is not just a human rights issue; it is a tremendous waste of the world’s human potential. By denying women equal rights, we deny half the population a chance to live life at its fullest. Political, economic and social equality for women will benefit all the world’s citizens. Together we can eradicate prejudice and work for equal rights and respect for all. The sixth goal is clean water and sanitation. This will require major infrastructure development. It's not rocket science. The techniques involved are well known in the developed world. One in three people live without sanitation. This is causing unnecessary disease and death. Although huge strides have been made with access to clean drinking water, lack of sanitation is undermining these advances. If we provide affordable equipment and education in hygiene practices, we can stop this senseless suffering and loss of life.

Actually I would put clean water and sanitation right up there with ending poverty. It would put an end to many of the diseases that occur in the underdeveloped world. The emphasis on healthy living and basic creature comforts needs to spearhead the use of resources worldwide. That means that developed nations have to give back to the underdeveloped ones instead of putting their further enjoyment and well being first which is the gist of America First. Global cooperation to combat global problems needs to take precedence over preparations for war and bullying other nations by the most powerful ones. The negligence and incompetence with which Trump has treated the COVID pandemic, the withdrawal of the US from universal institutions, almost assures that the US will assume a secondary status in the world unless the next administration can make up for the damage Trump has done and set us on a new and more constructive course.

'Telling All Working People...to Drop Dead': Trump Ended Covid Relief Talks After McConnell Said Republicans Wouldn't Vote for Deal

Published on Wednesday, October 07, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Trump is turning his back on you," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. "He doesn't care about workers and families. He only cares about himself."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

64 Comments

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) walks from the Senate floor to his office on Thursday, July 30, 2020. (Photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump's abrupt decision Tuesday to order a halt to coronavirus relief negotiations despite widespread and growing economic suffering, hunger, and a looming mass eviction crisis came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told the president that any compromise deal would likely be doomed to fail in the Republican-controlled chamber.

On a call with Trump shortly before he fired off a series of tweets announcing the end of stimulus talks, McConnell "suggested to Trump that [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi was stringing him along and no deal she cut with [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin would command broad GOP support to pass in the Senate," the Washington Post reported, citing two unnamed sources with knowledge of the conversation.

"We are looking at the potential of hunger in the United States exploding on a level that we have never seen since the Great Depression. And all of it is preventable. All of it."
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

McConnell publicly voiced agreement with the president's instructions to push off stimulus negotiations until after next month's election and focus fully on confirming right-wing Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, despite polling showing that even a majority of Republican voters want the Senate to prioritize another aid package.

"I think his view was that they were not going to produce a result and we needed to concentrate on what's achievable," the Kentucky Republican told reporters Tuesday, just 24 hours after Trump departed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after a brief stay for coronavirus treatment.

For months, in the face of increasingly dire economic circumstances and nationwide desperation, McConnell and his GOP allies in Congress have obstructed progress on an additional aid package, allowing relief programs approved by previous stimulus legislation to expire and abandoning tens of millions of jobless Americans to drastically reduced incomes.

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, not a single Republican representative voted for a $2.2 trillion compromise version of House Democrats' HEROES Act. McConnell has dismissed the House-passed legislation as a "political stunt" and refused to allow the bill to reach the Senate floor for a vote.

"They are telling all working people, no matter who we vote for or what state we live in, to drop dead," tweeted the Working Families Party.

In an interview on MSNBC Tuesday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) warned that "if the president and the GOP follow through with walking away from Covid relief, we are staring down the barrel at one of the largest mass eviction crises in this country since the Great Depression."

"We're looking at a potential second wave [of the coronavirus] that could be catastrophic," said Ocasio-Cortez. "We are looking at the potential of hunger in the United States exploding on a level that we have never seen since the Great Depression. And all of it is preventable. All of it."

Just hours after killing negotiations over a broad relief package that likely would have included aid to state and local governments, stimulus checks, and an extension of the lapsed federal unemployment insurance boost, Trump took to Twitter once more to advocate stand-alone bills to assist the airline industry and provide another round of direct $1,200 payments.

"If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY," the president tweeted. "I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?"

Following the president's earlier call for an end to relief negotiations, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—tweeted that "by walking away from the Covid package we just passed, Trump is turning his back on you—and on economic relief, expanded unemployment assistance, stimulus checks, eviction moratoriums, help for businesses."

"He doesn't care about workers and families," Jayapal added. "He only cares about himself."

Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US, echoed Jayapal in a statement late Tuesday. "Economic experts and working Americans agree: the time for Congress to secure a new aid deal is now," said Herrig. "Unfortunately, President Trump and his Senate allies don't feel the same."

"While Trump and his friends in Congress prioritize Barrett's nomination over new coronavirus relief," Herrig continued, "American families and small businesses—and by extension, the nation's economy—continue to suffer."

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Off the Top of My Head

What's Wrong With This Picture: Essential Workers Depending on Food Handouts While Non-essential workers Paid Millions of Dollars

by John Lawrence

Are professional football players essential workers? I don't think so. Yet they are paid millions of dollars. Are agricultural workers essential workers? I think so. Yet they are standing in food lines. What's wrong with this picture? Essential workers are becoming homeless while non-essential workers are perusing their stock portfolios. 80,000 refugees in other parts of the world are homeless due to US wars in the Middle East. Yet the US spends a trillion dollars a year on its military and military-industrial complex. All this money did absolutely nothing to defend the American people from the coronavirus. Our priorities are absolutely distorted. Wildfires and hurricanes devastate parts of the US. Yet the President denies global warming. Trump holds a COVID super spreader event that has infected at least 18 people at this writing. Yet all he can think about is demonstrating his machoism in conquering the virus. But he's still not out of the woods, and the average American does not have the benefit of the "compassionate usage" of the drugs Trump had access to.

Trump's supporters, the WPP, (White Peoples Party) are a bunch of good ol' boys who drive around in pickup trucks with a gun rack, drinking beer, listening to WPM (White Peoples Music - Country & Western), and throwing the empty cans out the window. Some of the more environmentally conscious like those in liberal Austen, TX, throw their empty beer cans in a litter bag. Trump appeals to his base by trying to appear to be strong and macho. His party is the party of machoism. He is so strong that a little virus cannot defeat him. Yet 210,000 people have died from COVID. Were they all weak? Is it better then that they are no longer with us. Will the virus cull the herd of weak people leaving only the master race? Maybe they should change the name "compassionate use" to "strong stuff for strong people." Compassion has nothing to do with it.

Are we reevaluating what is important in American life? Some people are. They are thinking essential workers should be paid more than inessential workers. Otherwise, we are living in a semi-slave state. Here's what's essential: food, housing, medical care, transportation, education, the internet. Here are the essential workers: agricultural workers, house builders, doctors and nurses, caregivers, drivers and teachers. Here's what's inessential: professional and college sports, amusement parks, movie theaters, bars, cruises, music festivals. Entertainment including movies is available over the internet and is piped into all homes that have a TV and internet service. Beer is available in stores and can be drunk at home. Food can be eaten at home. Restaurants are inessential. It comes down to values. Living more simply and less luxuriously means that resources are freed up to provide homes for the homeless, food for those who are food insecure, good infrastructure replacing fossil fuel energy with renewable energy, proper sanitation for the 2.5 billion in the world that don't have it, repatriotizing refugees.

It's no longer commendable to think narrowly just in terms of what is good for America or Americans. COVID is a pandemic that affects the whole world. It does not recognize national borders. Global warming is a phenomenon that affects the whole world. It doesn't just go on a country by country basis. It becomes of paramount importance that the nations of the world cooperate and not dwell on the petty grievances they have with each other. They are quiveling over trivial matters when the fate of the world and human civilization is at stake. A change of heart, a change of lifestyle, a change of values is necessary so that people can eventually live in peace and harmony with a reasonable amount of creature comforts wherever they live in the world. Think globally, not nationally.

Trump’s Covid: Empathy for the World’s Least Empathetic Person?

by Robert Reich

Sunday, October 4, 2020

For about a minute today I found myself feeling sorry for Donald Trump. The poor man is now “battling” Covid-19 (the pugilistic verb is showing up all over the news). He’s in the hospital. He’s out-of-shape. He’s 74-years old. His chief of staff calls his symptoms “very concerning.”

Joe Biden is praying for him. Kamala Harris sends him heartfelt wishes. President Obama reminds us we’re all in this together and we want to make sure everyone is healthy.

But hold on: Why should we feel empathy for one of the world’s least empathetic people?

Out of respect. He’s a human being. And he’s our president.

Yet there’s an asymmetry here. While the Biden campaign has taken down all negative television advertising, the Trump campaign’s negative ads continue non-stop.

And at almost the same time that Biden, Harris, and Obama offered prayers and consoling words, the Trump campaign blasted “Lyin’ Obama and Phony Kamala Harris” and charged that “Sleepy Joe isn’t fit to be YOUR President.”

Can you imagine if Biden had contracted Covid rather than Trump? Trump would be all over him. He’d attack Biden as weak, feeble, and old. He’d mock Biden’s mask-wearing – “See, masks don’t work!” – and lampoon his unwillingness to hold live rallies: “Guess he got Covid in his basement!”

How can we even be sure Trump has the disease? He’s lied about everything else. Maybe he’ll reappear in a day or two, refreshed and relaxed, saying “Covid is no big deal.” He’ll claim he took hydroxychloroquine, and it cured him. He’ll boast that he won the “battle” with Covid because he’s strong and powerful.

Meanwhile, his “battle” has distracted the nation from revelations that he’s a tax cheat who paid only $750 in taxes his first year in office, and barely anything for fifteen years before that; and that he’s a failed businessman who’s still losing money.

And from his vicious, cringeworthy debate performance last week, in which he didn’t want to condemn white supremacists.

It even takes our mind off the major reason Covid is out of control in America: because Trump blew it.

He downplayed it, pushed responsibility onto governors, and then demanded they allow businesses to reopen – too early – in order to make the economy look good before the election.

He has muzzled and disputed experts at the CDC, promoted crank cures, held maskless campaign events, and encouraged followers not to wear masks. All of this has contributed to tens of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.

Trump’s “battle” with Covid also diverts attention from his and Mitch McConnell’s perversions of American democracy.

This is where the asymmetry runs deeper. McConnell is now moving to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, after having prevented Obama’s nominee from getting a Senate vote for almost a year on the basis of a concocted “rule” that the next president should decide.

Yet Biden won’t talk about increasing the size of the court in order to balance it, and Democratic leaders have shot down the idea.

Nor do Biden and top Democrats want to suggest making Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico into states – a step that would remedy the bizarre inequities in the Senate where a bare majority of Republicans representing 11 million fewer Americans than their Democratic counterparts are able to confirm a Supreme Court justice.

It would also help rebalance the Electoral College, which made Trump president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by more than 3 million.

Democrats worry this would strike the public as unfair.

Unfair, when Trump won’t even commit to a peaceful transition of power and refuses to be bound by the results?

When he’s already claiming the election is rigged against him and will be fraudulent unless he wins?

When he’s now readying slates of Trump electors to be certified in states he’ll allege he lost because of fraud? When he’s urging his followers to intimidate Biden voters at the polls?

Whether responding to Trump’s hospitalization this weekend or to Trump’s larger political maneuvers, Democrats want to act decently and fairly. They want to protect democratic norms, values, and institutions.

This is admirable. It’s also what Democrats say they stand for.

But the other side isn’t playing the same game. Trump and his enablers will do anything to retain and enlarge their power.

It’s possible to be sympathetic toward Trump during his “battle” with Covid-19 while acknowledging that he is subjecting America to a profound moral test in the weeks and perhaps months ahead.

What kind of society do we want: one based on decency and democracy, or on viciousness and raw power?

Off the Top of My Head

The Economy Will Come Back But With a Different Paradigm

by John Lawrence, October 4, 2020

It's not enough to have a full employment economy. What's also important is what those jobs and industries consist of. Are the jobs socially useful and constructive or are people fully employed fighting wars and polluting the environment? The American economy pre-pandemic consisted of 70% consumption. So people were employed selling stuff to other people. Investment in infrastructure was minimal. What's needed now is to put people to work building a green economy. Government will have to play a bigger role in this development. Some people are worried that this will add to the national debt. They didn't worry when the Federal Reserve spent a couple trillion bailing out the too big to fail banks. Also trillions have been added to the debt as stimulus during the pandemic. The fact of the matter is that deficits don't matter not because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, but because the US has a sovereign currency and can print money whenever it pleases.

Historically, the US has had no problem selling US debt in the form of Treasury bonds to other countries. Because the dollar is the world's reserve currency, other countries purchased Treasuries so they would have dollars because most business is conducted in dollars worldwide. So what happens if other countries don't want to buy US debt? The same thing that happened during the Fed's trillion dollar bailout during the Great Recession. The Fed just printed the money, that's all. If it can print money to bail out banks, it can print money for government programs to rebuild infrastructure in accordance with a Green New Deal of Joe Biden's Green Deal which amount to about the same thing. The US does not need other countries to buy its debt. It can just be swallowed by the Fed's money printing machine and disappear on the Fed's balance sheet.

With the government spending money to build a green economy, it does not all have to be deficit spending, but, if it were, like I've explained above, this is no big deal because the US dollar is a sovereign currency. However, money can also be generated by revising the tax code so that the rich pay their fair share. Some enterprises will generate a return on investment as the Tennesee Valley Authority did which was created by the original New Deal. Also the bloated military budget can be reduced. Socially useful jobs can be created replacing the many socially useless jobs that comprised the full employment economy before the pandemic. The limitation of Fed money printing is 1) inflation and 2) the value of the dollar. So far the Fed's prolific money printing has not been cause for concern since there has been no inflation and the dollar has not lost value vis a vis other currencies.

In order to combat the nation's real enemies - global warming and future pandemics - the US needs to reorient its priorities. This means that the government will have to play a larger role in the economy and limit some economic activities that now exist, for example, fracking and oil production. This does not mean that jobs will be subtracted from the economy. They will be replaced by different jobs, more constructive and socially useful jobs. In terms of consumption, American consumption should probably be reduced to be in line with consumption in other major developed countries like the EU, for example. As other countries develop, they will emulate the US in terms of consumption and lifestyle. Americans have historically overconsumed with respect to their share of the earth's finite resources. Consumption worldwide needs to come into balance as developing countries start consuming more. Because of this Americans need to consume less. Instead of the present level of US consumption and the concomitant lack of saving, Americans need to start saving more and building wealth for the middle class instead of going into debt to maintain a certain overconsuming lifestyle.

The good news is that there's no reason for a Biden administration not to go full steam ahead in converting the economy from an oil based one to one run on renewable energy. For sure government would play a bigger role than it has in an economy in which many socially destructive activities provide jobs. A Green New Deal (or Biden's Green deal if you prefer) can provide enough jobs for a full employment economy. They would also be better paying jobs than many jobs were in the pre-pandemic full employment economy. The quality of the jobs would be better and the output would be more socially constructive in terms of combating global warming among other things. Providing the money for a full employment green economy would be no problem as deficits can be taken on the Fed's balance sheet. The Fed can print money as necessary which in fact it has been doing consistently at least since the Great Recession with its policy of quantitative easing.

'Postpone the Hearing': Democrats Demand Delay in Barrett's Confirmation Process After Third GOP Senator Tests Positive for Covid-19

Published on Saturday, October 03, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Rushing to have the hearing under these circumstances just shows that Republicans know they won't have the votes after Election Day."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

0 Comments

Seventh U.S. Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, meets with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) in the Mansfield Room of the U.S. Capitol on September 30, 2020 in Washington, D.C. Tillis announced he had tested positive for Covid-19 on Friday. (Photo: Bill Clark-Pool/Getty Images)

Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocates demanded on Friday and into Saturday that the Senate Judiciary Committee postpone Judge Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearing for the U.S. Supreme Court after at least three Republican senators tested positive for the coronavirus.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) announced his positive result on Saturday morning, a day after two Senate Judiciary Committee members—Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)—were also diagnosed with Covid-19. 

Johnson did not attend the White House gathering last Saturday where President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Barrett, but he has been attending lunches with other Republican senators three times per week, including this past week. Lee and Tillis have also been attending the gatherings, suggesting that they may have exposed several of their Senate colleagues. Democratic senators have suspended their in-person lunches in light of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The progressive advocacy group Demand Justice was among those who called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to postpone Barrett's hearings, which are set to begin Oct. 13. 

"They need to postpone the hearing because voting on Barrett before the election would gravely damage the legitimacy of the Court itself," wrote Susan Hennessey, executive editor of Lawfare. "Rushing to have the hearing under these circumstances just shows that Republicans know they won't have the votes after Election Day."

Johnson's diagnosis calls into question—even if the Senate Judiciary Committee moves forward with a virtual hearing—whether Barrett could be confirmed before Election Day, one month from Saturday. 

As CNN reported Saturday, "If the three senators remain out this month, it would effectively prevent Barrett from being confirmed to the Supreme Court until they return, which could be after Election Day during a lame-duck session."

"A lame-duck confirmation is a situation that GOP leaders are eager to avoid in case they lose control of the chamber next month," reported Manu Raju and Lauren Fox. "The fear is that one or two GOP senators may break ranks after seeing the election results and citing the will of the voters." 

Two Republican senators—Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have already indicated they do not support moving forward with Barrett's confirmation process before the election, but have not ruled out a confirmation during a potential lame-duck session should Trump lose to Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted late Friday that with at least two Covid-positive Judiciary Committee members, "The Senate cannot safely proceed on the Supreme Court nomination. We must focus on containing this virus to protect members and staff."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, issued a joint statement Friday along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), noting the "bipartisan agreement that a virtual confirmation hearing for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench is not an acceptable substitute" for an in-person hearing and calling on committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) postpone the hearing. 

"All circuit court nominees have appeared in person during the pandemic, and there is far more at stake for the American people with this Supreme Court nomination, including the Affordable Care Act being struck down and more than seven million Covid survivors being denied health coverage," the lawmakers said. "It’s critical that Chairman Graham put the health of senators, the nominee and staff first – and ensure a full and fair hearing that is not rushed, not truncated, and not virtual. Otherwise this already illegitimate process will become a dangerous one.” 

The statement followed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's indication that Republicans intend to move "full steam ahead" with Barrett's confirmation. McConnell made his statement before Tillis announced his positive test result.

"How many Senate Judiciary Committee members need to test positive to get Lindsey Graham to postpone Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearing?" asked UCLA political scientist Miranda Yaver after Tillis's diagnosis became public.

David Segal, executive director of progressive campaign group Demand Progress,called for the hearing to be postponed while urging voters to "prepare to push for further postponement thereafter."

Yep postpone the hearing - and prepare to push for further postponement thereafter. Call your senators, no matter where you are, at 202-899-8938. (Will get script to use once you dial.) https://t.co/hj8UeClo5p

— David Segal (@DavidSegalRI) October 3, 2020

"Call your senators, no matter where you are," Segal tweeted.

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Off the Top of My Head

Is Ruth Bader Ginsburg Looking Down on Us?

by John Lawrence, October 3, 2020

People say when people die, they are looking down on us. I'm not sure this is true, but if it is, I'm sure RBG and God are totally pissed that Trump ignored this woman's dying wish that the next President pick her replacement. In a flagrant disregard for a woman's dying wish, Trump and a whole bunch of hypocrite Republicans including Lindsay Graham ("mark my words") went full steam ahead with putting their pick on the Supreme Court. Now it looks like RBG will get her dying wish as 2 Republican Senators who are on the Senate judiciary committee have come down with COVID. So it looks like Republicans don't have their majority after 2 others said they wouldn't vote with them. If this is the fallout from Trump and cohorts coming down with COVID, I'm sure that RBG, looking down on us, is saying Mazel Tov!

In a flagrant disregard for the health and safety of the American people, not to say of his own health and the health of other Republicans and his "base", Trump has ignored science and the advice of medical experts at his peril. Now it's time to pay the piper. I have mixed feelings about the President of the US coming down with COVID, but I can't say I'm praying for him. If I were a praying man, which I am to a small extent, I would pray for the 200,000 plus families who have lost a loved one due to Trump's misleading the American people. He mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask as if he were the fearless macho man and Joe was just a wimp. In an attempt to appear strong and powerful, Trump has been reduced to the lot of 7 million ordinary individuals who have been laid low by a common virus. We dodged a bullet with SARS when it broke out in 2002. Over the next several months, SARS infected more than 8,000 people, killed 774, and threatened a worldwide pandemic. The crisis was averted only when cutting-edge science was combined with sophisticated communications strategies and close international cooperation. None of that was present this time thanks to Donald Trump. So I can't feel sorry for him.

Joe Biden is a compassionate and intelligent man. Trump considers this a sign of weakness. He tries to represent himself as a macho man and brings this out in his followers. Science be damned. Intelligence be damned. Compassion be damned. USA. USA. Lock her up. Lock her up. OK, Trump, now you've got what you so richly deserved. I can't feel sorry for you just because you're President of the US. You've put children in cages and separated them from their families. You've put nincompoops, toadies and sycophants in positions of power, people whose only qualification was their loyalty to you. You've gutted every environmental regulation you could get your hand on. You've denied the most looming crisis of our time - global warming.

Is Trump's diagnosis divine retribution? Is it God's punishment? I can't bring myself to think so. However, it is retribution for ignoring the advice of medical experts. It is retribution for ignoring science. It is retribution for not taking COVID seriously. I think this is the end of Trump's campaign. In a sense he has proven himself wrong in the eyes of any intelligent voter by coming down with COVID himself. He has held superspreader events with fellow Republicans sitting shoulder to shoulder with no masks on like the event in the Rose Garden when he presented his pick for RBG's replacement. Was this RBG's revenge for ignoring her dying wish? Was this God saying, "Too much. I have to intervene." Trump's swaggering hubris, his towering stupidity - all has come to nought for him. Pride comith before a fall. And now large numbers of Republicans including Senators and Congressmen and women and one Catholic priest, the President of Notre Dame, are coming down with COVID.

All I can think, hope and pray for is that RBG's dying wish will come to fruition, the election will come soon with Joe Biden being elected, Democrats will take control of both Houses of Congress, Joe Biden's Green Deal will be implemented (amazing how little time it took for Republicans to demonize "Green New Deal") and Trump will become a footnote in history.

Off the Top of My Head

Trump Brags About Shutting Down Travel From China. But Did He?

by John Lawrence

Trump's travel ban from China did little or nothing to prevent COVID cases from coming into the US. Why? He did not ban travel from Hong Kong and Macao, and the virus was already spreading there. He did not ban US permanent residents and US citizens. Many US citizens flew back and forth from China after the travel ban went into effect. In addition there were so many loopholes in regards to Chinese citizens themselves that Trump's travel ban was more like a travel sieve. The New York Times reported: "Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak of a mysterious pneumonialike illness to international health officials on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries."

Factcheck.org reported:

At a House subcommittee hearing on the coronavirus on Feb. 5, Ron Klain, White House Ebola response coordinator under the Obama administration, took issue with the characterization of the travel restrictions as a travel “ban.”

“We don’t have a travel ban,” Klain said. “We have a travel Band-Aid right now. First, before it was imposed, 300,000 people came here from China in the previous month. So, the horse is out of the barn.”

“There’s no restriction on Americans going back and forth,” Klain said. “There are warnings. People should abide by those warnings. But today, 30 planes will land in Los Angeles that either originated in Beijing or came here on one-stops, 30 in San Francisco, 25 in New York City. Okay? So, unless we think that the color of the passport someone carries is a meaningful public health restriction, we have not placed a meaningful public health restriction.”

Furthermore, Klain said, the import of goods from China is exempt from the travel restrictions, “and, of course, the people who fly the planes and drive the boats that bring those goods from China. We couldn’t ban that activity. We vitally need that. Ninety percent of the antibiotics in this country come from China. All kinds of vital medical supplies … we will use to treat people. So, travel bans … that’s not what we’re imposing, that’s not what exists.”

Even according to the White House proclamation, there were many exceptions to the "travel ban" such as the following:

(vii) any alien traveling as a nonimmigrant under section 101(a)(15)(C) or (D) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(C) or (D), as a crewmember or any alien otherwise traveling to the United States as air or sea crew;

(viii) any alien seeking entry into or transiting the United States pursuant to an A-1, A-2, C-2, C-3 (as a foreign government official or immediate family member of an official), G-1, G-2, G-3, G-4, NATO-1 through NATO-4, or NATO-6 visa;

(ix) any alien whose entry would not pose a significant risk of introducing, transmitting, or spreading the virus, as determined by the CDC Director, or his designee;

(x) any alien whose entry would further important United States law enforcement objectives, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their respective designees based on a recommendation of the Attorney General or his designee;

There were 11 exceptions in all not counting the exceptions of travelers from Hong Kong and Macau. Trump's travel ban, that he brags about all the time how it saved American lives, in fact did nothing to prevent the spread of COVID. Americans were allowed to travel back and forth to China. There was no ban on travel to and from Hong Kong and Macao where the disease had already spread. The self quarantining of Americans was a joke. Nothing was known at the time about asymptomatic spread of the virus. There were so many loopholes in the "travel ban" especially for ship and airplane crews. Bill Gates thinks Trump's travel ban made the spread of COVID in the US worse because after it was announced there was a rush of US citizens trying to get home who were not screened or tested. Also there were a lot of COVID positive American citizens coming in from Europe. For a travel ban to be effective it would have to apply to everyone, not just to foreigners.

Off the Top of My Head

Deaths in US and China due to COVID

by John Lawrence, September 11, 2020

There have been over 6.4 million cases of COVID in US and over 190,000 deaths. As a comparison there have been 4,634 deaths in China due to COVID and about 85,000 cases. There are 1.4 billion people in China; 328 million in the US. There are over 4 times as many people in China as in the US. Yet at this time there have been 185,366 fewer deaths in China. So who is the greater leader - China's Xi Jinping or the US' Donald Trump? Trump knew that COBID was a deadly virus, but he told the American people that it was nothing - just a few cases, and it would go away in April just like the flu. He knew it was 5 times deadlier than the flu thanks to information shared with him by Xi. Xi expressed empathy for the American people. Trump had none for the Chinese once he figured out it was better for him politically to diss the Chinese. Here's a timeline of what Trump knew and what he told the American people.

American Journal of Managed Care on January 9: WHO Announces Mysterious Coronavirus-Related Pneumonia in Wuhan, China

American Journal of Managed Care on January 21: CDC Confirms First US Coronavirus Case. A Washington state resident becomes the first person in the United States with a confirmed case of the 2019 novel coronavirus, having returned from Wuhan on January 15.

Washington Post on January 28: “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Al Jazeera on January 29: US coronavirus task force created. The White House starts its coronavirus response task force, headed by US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

Al Jazeera on January 31: Trump blocks travel from China

Politico on Feb 7: Recounting a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump told Woodward on Feb. 7 that the coronavirus is “more deadly than your, you know, your — even your strenuous flus. “This is more deadly,” he said. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff."

From Time Feb. 10: At a rally in New Hampshire, Trump began to spread the idea the coronavirus may simply disappear."Looks like by April, you know in theory, when it gets a little warmer it miraculously goes away," he said. "I think it's going to all going to work out fine."

From whitehouse.gov on February 10: "Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now."

From Time Feb. 26: Fewer than three weeks after telling Woodward the coronavirus was deadlier than a strenuous flu, the president said during a White House coronavirus task force briefing: "The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me. And, so far, if you look at what we have with the 15 people and their recovery, one is -- one is pretty sick but hopefully will recover, but the others are in great shape. But think of that: 25,000 to 69,000."

From Time, March 9: On Twitter, Trump again said the flu is worse than the coronavirus, writing, "So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. ... Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!"

Time on March 27: U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping pledged in a phone call to cooperate in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, signaling a fresh detente between the two countries after weeks of rising tensions.

Trump tweeted: “Just finished a very good conversation with President Xi of China. Discussed in great detail the CoronaVirus that is ravaging large parts of our Planet,” Trump tweeted Friday. “China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus. We are working closely together. Much respect!”

“Both sides will benefit if we cooperate, both will lose if we fight each other,” Xi said, according to Xinhua. “Cooperation is the only correct choice. I hope the U.S side could take real actions. The two sides should work together to enhance cooperation fighting the virus and develop non-confrontational” relations, he said.

Xi also expressed concern about the outbreak in the U.S., which has surged ahead of China’s number of confirmed cases and turned New York City into a global epicenter. The number of infections worldwide has climbed past 530,000, with 24,000 deaths, less than three months after authorities disclosed a couple dozen cases in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

“I am very worried about the outbreak in the U.S., and I’ve noticed the series of measures being taken by the U.S. president,” Xi said. “Chinese people sincerely hope the outbreak can be contained very soon.”

[Trump, however, did not shut down travel from Europe where most of the cases were coming from].

From Washington Post: The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

Trump had a conversation with Woodward on February 7 in which he recounted a conversation with China's Xi in which Xi told him that COVID was more deadly than the flu. Yet 3 days later he told a crowd at a rally that it was no big deal. He misled the American people and had them thinking that everything was going back to normal very shortly. The American people were not psychologically prepared for the long duration of this pandemic. He continues to this day to hold rallies where there is no social distancing or mandatory mask wearing. Not only is Trump the worst President in American history, he is completely derelict in his duty as a leader of the American people. Just compare the number of American deaths with the number of Chinese deaths from the pandemic. There is no comparison. Trump is an embarrassment on the world stage and a continuing threat to the welfare of the American people.

Off the Top of My Head

COBID-19 More Deadly for Those Suffering from Pre-Exisitng Condition of Inequality

by John Lawrence, August 17, 2020

The rich have gotten even richer since March 15 when COBID shut down the economy. House prices are soaring. The stock market is going up. Apple is close to being valued at $2 trillion. The total wealth of US billionaires has soared $685 billion since the middle of March to a combined $3.65 trillion. Rock-bottom interest rates have triggered a home sales boom for some as those with the money have no problem snapping up good deals. Meanwhile, unemployment is approaching depression era levels. The lower half of society economically was holding on as long as their unemployment was being boosted by $600. a month. Now it seems Trump and Mitch McConnell are satisfied the economy is doing good enough without that stimulus even as they write off the poorer half of the population.

About 30 million people, about 20% of the work force, are unemployed. They will soon be joining the ranks of the homeless which are swelling on a daily basis. Their only hope is that Trump will not be reelected in November. Only the higher paid professionals are able to work from home. For them the pandemic is only an inconvenience. Their income keeps on rolling in. “It’s white-collar professionals who are able to work from home. In some ways, this is a sign that the economy is just officially split in two,” Glenn Kelman, chief executive of property company Redfin, told NPR last week.

The Guardian reports:

“We are all in this together” may be the rallying cry for the pandemic but the truth is the poor, and particularly people of color, have been devastated by coronavirus and its attendant recession while the wealthy have weathered it and in some cases made huge gains. Research into previous recent pandemics from economists at the International Monetary Fund suggests it’s a trend that may continue even after the outbreak abates.

So the outcome of the pandemic may be that the rich will get even richer. Those who can work from home will still be doing OK while the bottom 20-30% will probably be even worse off. Most of these people are black or brown. The homeless population will increase to perhaps a million people as more renters are being evicted while rents are still going up.

More jobs are being automated as the pandemic drags on. Robots can come to work every day and never get sick. So the robotization of American society is accelerating due to the pandemic at a greater pace than it would have otherwise. As jobs for the most disadvantaged segment disappear, money needs to be pumped into those families or else they will end up on the streets. Either the government must create jobs if the private sector can't supply them or a Universal Basic Income (UBI) needs to be implemented as Andrew Yank suggested.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

Mainly Old People Are Doing the Dying

by John Lawrence

In Trump world this means big savings on social security and Medicare. That means that the government can fund more huge tax breaks for the rich. Other than old people it's mainly the poor, the undocumented and non-whites that are kicking the bucket. So the WPP (the White Peoples Party) figures that the ones that are dying off wouldn't vote for them anyway. So it's a win-win. The essential workers are mainly black, brown and poor so by not giving them an extra $600 in unemployment benefits, that means that they will be forced to go back to work. Teachers too are being coerced or forced back into the classrooms. Those whose husbands or wives also work may have the choice of quitting their jobs and staying home to ride out the pandemic. Single Moms won't have that choice.

Of course the wealthy always have the choice of not working and not exposing themselves to the virus. Only the poor and some financially stressed members of the middle class are forced to work if unemployment benefits are inadequate to put food on the table and pay rent. The fact that Congress is not coming up with another bail out package for poor and middle class reflects the fact that the WPP wants everyone to get back in the work force so that the economy doesn't become more of a shambles than it already is. Those forced to work in close quarters with others will suffer the most, but the WPP considers that this is only collateral damage. They won't vote for the WPP anyway.

So why in the midst of this pandemic, amid near depression rates of economic activity, is the stock market not plummeting? In fact it keeps rising higher and higher. In the Great Depression the bottom fell out of the stock market. Isn't this what we should expect to happen in the current Great Great Recession? The fact is that the stock market has become completed disengaged from the real economy. It only exists as a free floating asset class where rich people park their money. As such the Fed will do whatever it takes to keep the stock market from tanking. The money that the Fed has injected into the economy in the last decade has been, with the exception of the first pandemic bailout which benefited all of the American people, mainly for the benefit of the rich. That money didn't produce inflation as inflation is currently defined. However, it did inflate the asset classes consisting of the stock market and real estate. That's why rents and house prices are so high. The current pandemic quasi-Depression will continue that trend with the result that rents will rise even higher forcing more people into homelessness. Eventually, only hedge funds will own real estate and almost everyone will become renters.

The antidote to this horrible dystopia is for Joe and Kamala to displace Trump in the November election. To think it's a democratic election is a fallacy. The WPP will do everything it can to make sure that Democratic votes are not counted. They have considerable means at their disposal. Defunding the Post Office is just their latest trick. The next thing is that, because of the electoral college, most votes will not be counted. The electoral college determines that each state is winner take all. That means, if the WPP wins by only one vote in a particular state, all the votes for the candidate of the other party are not even counted in the final vote tally. Some democracy. That's why in recent elections the person who won the popular vote was not elected.

The only hope for America is that the WPP loses and loses big in the coming election. Democrats need to win the Presidency and both Houses of Congress or else nothing will get done of any help to most of the American people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Morally Obscene,' Says Sanders as McConnell Adjourns Senate for Month-Long Recess Without Deal on Coronavirus Relief

Published on Friday, August 14, 2020

by Common Dreams

"During the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans think they can take a long vacation while millions of Americans face hunger and eviction."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

20 Comments

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) waits for the Senate subway to leave on June 3, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell adjourned the U.S. Senate for the rest of August on Thursday after failing to come anywhere close to approving another Covid-19 relief package, leaving tens of millions of out-of-work, hungry, and eviction-prone Americans without additional financial aid as the pandemic and economic crisis continue with no end in sight.

"During the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans think they can take a long vacation while millions of Americans face hunger and eviction. That is morally obscene," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in response to McConnell's decision. "It's time for the do-nothing Republican Senate to finally do its damn job."

"Almost 30 million are on unemployment and 160,000 Americans are dead. McConnell just adjourned the Senate for a month. Every time I think Republicans can't run this country any further into the ground, they prove me wrong."
—Sen. Ron Wyden

The departure of the Republican-controlled Senate comes after an attempt to revive Covid-19 relief talks earlier this week quickly failed as Democratic leaders and Trump administration officials remained far apart on key issues, from emergency funding for the U.S. Postal Service to aid to faltering state and local governments. In her weekly press conference Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said White House negotiators refused to budge from their insufficient relief offers.

The Senate is not expected to return until September 8, when economic conditions are likely to be even more dire for the 40 million people at risk of eviction, 30 million facing drastic income cuts due to the lapse in enhanced unemployment benefits, and 14 million households with children that don't have enough to eat.

"This is pathetic and devastating," consumer advocacy group Public Citizen tweeted after McConnell adjourned the upper chamber until after Labor Day. Just before skipping town, the Kentucky Republican advanced five more of President Donald Trump's right-wing judicial nominees.

Senate adjourned until 9/8, but not before @senatemajldr moved forward on 5 more of Trump’s judicial nominees. It’s shameful that McConnell is focused on stacking the courts instead of saving USPS, funding elections, and extending census deadlines. Our democracy deserves better. https://t.co/cR6tr664i5

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) August 13, 2020

Earlier Thursday, the Labor Department reported (pdf) that 963,000 Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week—a figure that corporate news outlets presented as the first time since March that initial weekly jobless claims dipped below a million.

But Julia Wolfe, state economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog post Thursday that the Labor Department's report downplays the number of workers who filed for unemployment benefits last week. The actual figure, according to Wolfe, is 1.3 million.

"Astonishingly high numbers of workers continue to claim UI, and we are still 12.9 million jobs short of February employment levels," Wolfe wrote. "And yet, Senate Republicans allowed the across-the-board $600 increase in weekly UI benefits—the most effective economic policy crisis response so far—to expire."

"In an unserious move of political theater, the Trump administration has proposed starting up an entirely new system of restoring wages to laid-off workers through executive order (EO)," Wolfe continued. "But even in their EO wishlist, the Trump administration would slash the federal contribution to enhanced unemployment benefits in half, to $300. This inaction and ongoing uncertainty is causing significant economic pain for workers who have lost their job during the pandemic and their families."

With tens of millions of low-income and middle-class Americans facing financial ruin as the White House and congressional Republicans stonewall an additional relief package, the Washington Post's Heather Long reported Thursday that the coronavirus-induced recession "is over for the rich."

"U.S. stocks are hovering near a record high, a stunning comeback since March that underscores the new phase the economy has entered: The wealthy have mostly recovered. The bottom half remain far from it," Long wrote. "This dichotomy is evident in many facets of the economy, especially in employment. Jobs are fully back for the highest wage earners, but fewer than half the jobs lost this spring have returned for those making less than $20 an hour."

NEW: The recession is largely over for the rich. The working class remain in deep pain.

-Stocks r near record highs
-Home values at all-time highs
-Jobs r back for affluent

Meanwhile...
-Jobs less than 1/2 recovered for low-wage workers
-$600 UI expired https://t.co/csGZqYefLN pic.twitter.com/c88yBcCeVo

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) August 13, 2020

In a statement Thursday, Kyle Herrig, president of advocacy group Accountable.US, slammed the Republican-controlled Senate for opting to "pack up and leave Washington for a month without making a new deal to assist American workers and small business owners."

"The luxuries of paid time off and premium health insurance afforded to senators is of little help to the millions of Americans who lost their jobs during this crisis," said Herrig. "Where is the urgency to get workers and their families the help they need?"

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the architects of the now-expired $600-per-week unemployment insurance boost, tweeted: "Donald Trump is suppressing votes to steal an election. Almost 30 million are on unemployment and 160,000 Americans are dead. McConnell just adjourned the Senate for a month."
 
"Every time I think Republicans can't run this country any further into the ground," Wyden wrote, "they prove me wrong."

---

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Off the Top of My Head

Making America Great Again or Running the Country into the Ground?

by John Lawrence, August 14, 2020

It's obvious that Congress will not approve another coronavirus relief program. They've decided to go on vacation rather than work for the benefit of the people. So Americans are left to their own devices to deal with the pandemic as best they can. There won't be another $600. added to unemployment by the Federal government. Those days are over folks. Now it's every family for itself. We are all essential workers in the sense that we had better go back to work regardless of the risk, that is if we want to eat and/or pay the rent or the mortgage. If we don't have a job, we need to create one. That's the American way. In the long run we're all self-employed. Don't expect the government or private enterprise to provide us with one. It's not their responsibility.

Trump is doing his level best to undermine the Post Office and run it into the ground lest he lose the election. He knows that the WPP (the White People's Party aka the Republican party) has a better chance of getting themselves elected if all those nonwhites and essential workers can't make it to the polls. He is even ordering the government to release more methane into the environment in the hopes that fossil fuel workers will be energized. However, the WPP always needs to have something of entertainment value that they can rally around. So the latest thing is Qanon. Q is an a real person, but someone who wants to remain anonymous hence his name, get it, Q who wishes to remain anonymous or Q - anon. Now Q is someone who knows a lot about the government and he is doing his best to protect the interests of the WPP. The WPP believes in Q although there is no evidence that he (it has to be HE) really exists. Q is probably up there sitting on the left hand of God. I think Jesus is on the right hand so the left hand is still available. The WPP is rallying around Q because they need something or somebody to believe in. It's not that they are really a cult; it's just that the WPP has become more cult-like.

Leave it to Q to come up with the deep state knowledge that Kamala Harris was not really born in the US just as Barack Obama was not either. Since her parents were illegal immigrants, she does not and cannot qualify for a leading position in the US government, potentially becoming President of the United States. She will appeal not only to the African American constituency but also to the Indian American constituency. That's too many constituencies for the WPP even to deal with . What's next? A Mexican-African-Indian-Native American-Chinese American running for President. That would check too many boxes. But by then the WPP should have entirely eliminated the Post Office so none of these supposedly essential workers would be able to vote by mail. As for senior citizens, they will have been mostly eradicated by the coronavirus pandemic so no need for them to vote by mail either.

So what will Trump come up with for a nickname for Kamala? He already has Sleepy Joe, who never leaves his basement, for Joe Biden. Let's see, hmmmm, Rajah Kamala? No that sounds too regal. Prosecutor Kamala? No that sounds like someone too much in charge. Bussed to school Kamala? No there's just no creative name that really sticks. Trump's henchmen will have to put their heads together and come up with something. Maybe Q can help.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trump’s Dangerous Lies About the Covid Economy

by Robert Reich

Saturday, August 8, 2020

“The recovery has been very strong,” Donald Trump said last week. Then the Commerce Department reported the U.S. economy contracted between April and June at the fastest pace in nearly three-quarters of a century, which is as long as economists have been keeping track. The drop wiped out five years of economic growth.

But pesky facts have never stopped Trump. Having lied for five months about the coronavirus, he’s now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he can dupe his way to election day.

The comeback “won’t take very long,” he reassured Americans on Thursday. But every indicator shows that after a small uptick in June, the US economy is tanking again. Restaurant reservations are down, traffic at retail stores is dwindling, more small businesses are closing, the small rebound in air travel is reversing.

What’s Trump’s plan to revive the economy? The same one he’s been pushing for months: just “reopen” it.

He wants the public to believe the shutdown orders that began in March caused the economy to tank in the first place, so reversing them will bring the economy back.

Rubbish. It was the virus that caused the downturn, and its resurgence is taking the economy down again. The virus is surging back because governors reopened prematurely, before the virus was under control – at Trump’s repeated insistence.

The sequence of cause-and-effect is clear. The virus has surged most in states that were among the first to reopen, such as Florida, South Carolina, Texas and much of the rest of the Sun Belt.

Because of this resurgence, many states are pausing plans to reopen and some are reimposing restrictions. But these restrictions are not the reason the economy is slowing. They are the necessary consequence of allowing the pandemic to get out of control.

Even the White House’s own coronavirus taskforce concludes that 21 states have outbreaks serious enough to justify more restrictions.

Notably, the economy is sliding again even though the government has pumped trillions of dollars into it. 

What happens when the money stops? We’re about to find out. Senate Republicans can’t agree among themselves, let alone with House Democrats, about more funding, while Trump says “we really don’t care” about reaching a spending agreement.

That means starting this week more than 30 million Americans will no longer receive $600 in extra weekly employment benefits. As a result, tens of millions will not be able to make rent or mortgage payments. More will go hungry, including children. The economy is likely to slide even further.

The White House argues that the extra unemployment payments have discouraged workers from seeking jobs because some are receiving more money in benefits than they would earn by working.

“We don’t want to create disincentives to work,” says Trump adviser Larry Kudlow.

More rubbish. A study by Yale economists finds “no evidence” that people who have lost their jobs are choosing to stay unemployed because of the extra federal aid. In fact, “workers facing larger [unemployment] expansions generally appear to be quicker to return to work than others, not slower.”

People can’t go back to work because there is very little work for them to do. Fourteen million more people are unemployed than there are jobs.

In fact, the extra benefits have been keeping some 3 million employed because the money has gone into the pockets of people who spend it, thereby sustaining economic activity. Shrinking those benefits will put less money into consumer pockets, with the result that millions more jobs will be lost.

Lies about the economy are harder to spot than lies about the coronavirus because the virus’s grim death count is painfully apparent while the economy is complicated. 

But Trump’s economic lies are no less egregious than his coronavirus lies, and, like the coronavirus lies, his economic ones are about to cause a great deal of unnecessary suffering.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Bill Gates on COVID: Most US Tests Are Garbage

by John Lawrence, August 10, 2020

I have reported on this blog that a very inexpensive, highly reliable and accurate COBID test with quick turnaround results has been available for at least 4 months. On March 24 Lancaster University announced the development of this test. That was over 4 months ago. Why has our government failed to act on this?The question is why hasn't the Defense Production Act been put into effect to ramp up production? The government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have spent billions building factories to produce vaccines many of which may not even be proven to be safe and reliable just on the hope that when some vaccine is proven safe and effective, that vaccine will be already vialed up and ready to be distributed. But the cheap and effective COBID test kit, where is it? The government and the experts completely dropped the ball, and that is the difference between the US and other countries that have managed the pandemic quite successfully. It hasn't helped either that President Trump has totally denigrated testing.

In an interview on Wired, Bill Gates said:

Wired: But people aren’t getting their tests back quickly enough.

Gates: Well, that’s just stupidity. The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.

Wired: Why don’t we just do that?

Gates: Because the federal government sets that reimbursement system. When we tell them to change it they say, “As far as we can tell, we’re just doing a great job, it’s amazing!” Here we are, this is August. We are the only country in the world where we waste the most money on tests. Fix the reimbursement. Set up the CDC website. But I have been on that kick, and people are tired of listening to me.

I wrote previously:

Brunel University London, together with Lancaster University and the University of Surrey have joined forces with GB Electronics (UK) Ltd, Inovo Robotics and Unique Secure to develop an inexpensive, rapid, diagnostic test kit that can inform people if they have COVID-19 in under 30 minutes and make it widely available. 

The new partnership deal will bring together industry and academic experts in the fields of electronic and software engineering, diagnostics, virology, robotics and artificial intelligence to fast track the development of a new COVID-19 testing kit.

Yesterday, August 9, on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Peter Navarro repeatedly about testing. This was his response: "We're issuing grants to make sure that we get point-of-care virus testing. This to me is going to be the game changer, where right now we've got two types, right? We've got a lab test that takes a number of days, which is not optimal. It's highly accurate. We've got the ID NOW of Abbott, which takes 15-20 minutes. [implication: not accurate] We're rapidly extending that reach. What we'd love to do is have a point-of-care kind of like a pregnancy test but the same idea where you can do it at your home."

So why hasn't the Defense Production Act been used to ramp up production of this test which was developed over 4 months ago? They totally dropped the ball, and the result is that the US is in deep doo doo to quote a previous US President. Peter Navarro is finally on the right track. This test module capable of providing unlimited tests for approximately $5 per test developed by 3 universities in the UK would cost about $100, and it could be in every home for that price. People could test every day, multiple times a day if needed. The US has totally screwed up! Now finally after 4 months Peter Navarro who is in charge of the Defense Production Act mentions in passing that we have a rapid cheap point-of-care test kit? This is absurd. Meanwhile, the US is languishing with a death count from COBID that will exceed all the American lives lost in World War II before it's over. Already 3 times as many lives have been lost as American lives lost in the Vietnam war.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

Why is the Government Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes Regarding Testing?

by John Lawrence, August 6, 2020

There's a handheld device linked to your smart phone for about $100. that gives an accurate test for COBID in about half an hour. Why isn't the Defense Production Act being invoked to ramp up production of these devices? The pandemic could be over in short order. Why, why is nothing being done? The hardware itself is battery-operated and connects to a smartphone application to display diagnostic results and works with nasal or throat swabs, without requiring that samples be round-tripped to a lab. No special expertise is required to do this test. It should be in every home. This test was developed by researchers in the UK. Why isn't Dr. Fauci or Sanjay Gupta or Bill Gates talking about it.

Lancaster University reported on June 29:

Brunel University London, together with Lancaster University and the University of Surrey have joined forces with GB Electronics (UK) Ltd, Inovo Robotics and Unique Secure to develop an inexpensive, rapid, diagnostic test kit that can inform people if they have COVID-19 in under 30 minutes and make it widely available. 

The new partnership deal will bring together industry and academic experts in the fields of electronic and software engineering, diagnostics, virology, robotics and artificial intelligence to fast track the development of a new COVID-19 testing kit.

It is envisaged that the portable testing device, which can carry out six highly accurate tests every 30 minutes, can be used in areas with large concentrations of people, such as care homes, sizeable employers and airports, to quickly determine if an individual has the virus. The results from the current virus detection tests normally take several hours to process.

Are US politicians and experts just ignorant of what's going on in the rest of the world? This test detects the virus. It is not an antibody test. Antibody tests don't find people infected with COBID until later because it takes a few days to develop antibodies.

Inovo reports:

Our portable diagnostics system analyses a throat swab sample taken from a patent to detect the presence of the SARS-COV-2 (Covid19) virus RNA. It is highly sensitive and able to detect the virus 2-3 days from the point of first infection, even before other symptoms show. It is also highly specific which means it is extremely unlikely to get a false positive from similar viruses, an issue which is present with many other forms of diagnostics system.

The unit is based on LAMP (loop mediated isothermal amplification) and is able to perform the sample analysis in approximately 30 mins which is two to three times faster than traditional PCR testing.

The Inovo test unit is a molecular diagnostics unit that detects the presence of the SARS-COV-2 (Covid19) virus. It can identify a patient infected with the virus from day 2-3 through the remaining stages of the infection. When the patient has recovered from an infection the test will no longer return a positive result. An antibody tests in contrast is not able to detect the virus until the patient’s immune response has developed, and they have started producing antibodies. This kind of test will not return a positive result until 7 or more days after being infected.

Or is it just not profitable to produce such a low cost test? What is going on. For sure ignorance, the profit motive and just plain lack of knowledge may be hindering the US response to COBID. Is it about patents or intellectual property? Other countries seem to know something we don't know. Or is it national pride that we can't use a test developed in some other country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Mitch McConnell’s Republicans are Destroying America

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Senate Republicans’ shameful priorities are on full display as the nation continues to grapple with an unprecedented health and economic crisis.

Mitch McConnell and the GOP refuse to take up the HEROES Act, passed by the House in early May to help Americans survive the pandemic and fortify the upcoming election. 

Senate Republicans don’t want to extend the extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits, even though unemployment has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression.

Even before the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. Now many are desperate, as revealed by lengthening food lines and growing delinquencies in rent payments.    
McConnell’s response? He urges lawmakers to be “cautious” about helping struggling Americans, warning that “the amount of debt that we’re adding up is a matter of genuine concern.” 

McConnell seems to forget the $1.9 trillion tax cut he engineered in December 2017 for big corporations and the super-rich, which blew up the debtdeficit.  

That’s just the beginning of the GOP’s handouts for corporations and the wealthy. As soon as the pandemic hit, McConnell and Senate Republicans were quick to give mega-corporations a $500 billion blank check, while only sending Americans a paltry one-time $1,200 check.

The GOP seems to believe that the rich will work harder if they receive more money while people of modest means work harder if they receive less. In reality, the rich contribute more to Republican campaigns when they get bailed out.

That’s precisely why the GOP put into the last Covid relief bill a $170 billion windfall to Jared Kushner and other real estate moguls, who line the GOP’s campaign coffers. Another $454 billion of the package went to backing up a Federal Reserve program that benefits big business by buying up their debt.

And although the bill was also intended to help small businesses, lobbyists connected to Trump – including current donors and fundraisers for his reelection – helped their clients rake in over $10 billion of the aid, while an estimated 90 percent of small businesses owned by people of color and women got nothing.

The GOP’s shameful priorities have left countless small businesses with no choice but to close. They’ve also left 22 million Americans unemployed, and 28 million at risk of being evicted by September. 

For the bulk of this crisis, McConnell called the Senate back into session only to confirm more of Trump’s extremist judges and advance a $740 billion defense spending bill. 

Throughout it all, McConnell has insisted his priority is to shield businesses from Covid-related lawsuits by customers and employees who have contracted the virus.

The inept and overwhelmingly corrupt reign of Trump, McConnell, and Senate Republicans will come to an end next January if enough Americans vote this coming November.

But will enough people vote during a pandemic? The HEROES Act provides $3.6 billion for states to expand mail-in and early voting, but McConnell and his GOP lackeys aren’t interested. They’re well aware that more voters increase the likelihood Republicans will be booted out.

Time and again, they’ve shown that they only care about their wealthy donors and corporate backers. If they had an ounce of concern for the nation, their priority would be to shield Americans from the ravages of Covid and American democracy from the ravages of Trump. But we know where their priorities lie.

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

UK Gets Test Results in 90 Minutes. How Come It Takes a Week in the US?

by John Lawrence, August 8, 2020

Rapid test results are crucial to getting the pandemic under control. Other countries seem to be able to do it. In the US the response to the pandemic has been pathetic in large part because the American President doesn't believe in testing. So Americans suffer under a regime displaced from the Dark Ages. The American regime is partnered up with the WPP (White People's Party) which is into conspiracy theories and intellectual baloney. This is similar to the Middle Ages where the people believed in trolls, gremlins, fairies, elves, changelings, incubus etc. The American people, despite a very advanced educational system, seems to have created a populace that would rather believe in falsehoods and nonsense, a populace entirely devoid of critical thinking skills.

The President's response to 1000 deaths a day was, "It is what it is." Uncontrolled spread in 32 states? It is what it is. The United States is ranked last in coronavirus response by the CDC. The economy going from recession to depression. It is what it is. Well, at least we have maintained American freedom - freedom not to wear a mask. Land of the free and home of those brave enough not to wear a mask. Poor spoiled children. Can't have our spectator sports? Boo hoo. Can't go to parties? Boo hoo. Can't go to bars? "It is what it is."

We are free, however, to yell, "Lock her up." Her who would have had an intelligent response to the pandemic. Her who won the popular vote. Her who was the most experienced and prepared presidential candidate ever. Instead let's elect a dumb cluck and see how that goes. The results were not preordained. How were we to know that a Trump rally in Tulsa would leave one black pizza CEO dead from the coronavirus? How many others fit into the same category has not been publicly divulged. Now 3 times as many Americans have died from the pandemic as died in the Vietnam war which lasted 19 years. But no worries. We have the strongest military in the world. It is what it is.

The UK government said that the 90 minute turnaround tests "will hugely increase testing capacity ahead of winter, delivering fast results that will help to break chains of transmission quickly." These tests will also detect other types of flu as well giving a comprehensive response to a myriad of public health problems. No word yet on whether or not Trump wants to use the Defense Production Act to ramp up 90 minute testing in the US. He thinks the US response is adequate. It is what it is. The less testing the better according to Trump. Less testing means fewer confirmed cases. If we test less enough, we might lead the world in the fewest coronavirus cases, but probably also the greatest number of deaths. The Brits, by the way, are also being treated by their government to half priced dinners. God save the queen.

Meanwhile, the American people have spoken in the election of 2016 in such a way as effectively to have said, "Find us the most bumbling, third rate American idiot and let's make him the most powerful man in the Free World." Let's get the American equivalent of Inspector Clouseau to lead us. After all he will Repeal Obamacare! Yea we can't have poor people getting free health care. This is America! But alas, Clouseau/Trump has not even been able to do that. As far as getting Mexico to build a wall, that endeavor failed as well. Trump's approach to the Presidency has been, "Grab 'em by the pussy." Plus a lot of other nincompoopery. He has been good to the hat manufacturers though. Orders for MAGA hats have been rolling in. It's as if the WPP can't get enough of them. I hear he even has put the Brooklyn Bridge up for sale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

The Trump Virus: Transformation of the Presidency into  Reality Show

by John Lawrence, August 2, 2020

My name is Trump, King of Kings. Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair. The Trump virus has killed hundreds of thousands while trillions have been spent on military hardware useless to confront the virus. Rusting hulks of Joint Force Strykers lie on the desert floor stretching into oblivion as far as the eye can see. M1126 Stryker combat vehicles, F-35s, all manner of military hardware that has resulted in a few terrorists dead. Hundreds of thousands, meanwhile, have died from the Trump virus. The American Presidency turned into a television reality show while at Trump Turnbull they play underwater golf. Climate change makes no abatement for a pandemic.

I, Trump, am the most powerful man in the free world, yea, in the whole world, yet I can't get Germany to pay their fair share for their protection. They have protected themselves from this Trump virus, however. They don't need our protection. I could remove the 41 American military bases in Germany thereby saving tons of money. Then Germany would have to provide its own protection. The first amendment means little in terms of free speech and expression where TikTok is concerned. We must protect the American people from TikTok. Therefore, I Trump, censor TikTok's freedom of speech. I Trump am triumphant.

Rusting hulks of F-35 Lightnings, Joint Force Strykers, F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts lie rotting in 130 degree desert heat stretching over the desert as far as the eye can see. Deathstalker scorpions frolic in the cockpits while armadillo lizards circumvent the controls. While public health has been neglected in favor of Strykers and Thunderbolts, new pandemics are on the horizon. There is an abundant supply of new voracious pathogens waiting to spillover to humans as public health conditions deteriorate around the world, but more and more money is allocated to phenomenally sophisticated airplanes in order to kill a couple of terrorists.

Must we spend $13 billion on an aircraft carrier while we spend squat on public health? Late last October the Trump government allowed Predict, a program focused on emerging diseases to end. Republicans, however, stuck $8 billion for military weaponry in the latest COVID-19 relief bill for Pentagon weapons systems built by defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics - corporate titans that sit atop the Washington influence industry. While hundreds of thousands die from the COVID pandemic, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics have their way with the relief bill. I Trump am triumphant.

My name is Trump, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!  Round the decay of those colossal wrecks, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

Trump Gets Test Results in 15 Minutes: Why Can't the Rest of Us?

by John Lawrence, August 31, 2020

For contact tracing to be effective, COVID test results must be learned rapidly. In Trump's White House he and those around him can get test results in 15 minutes. The test device used is called ID Now and is produced by Abbott Laboratories.  It's about the size of a toaster. This is the test that determined that Rep. Louie Gohmert — a Texas Republican who has been walking around the Capitol without a mask — was positive for the coronavirus. Gohmert was scheduled to fly to Texas with President Trump and tested positive in a pre-screen at the White House. Subsequently, Gohmert asserted that he probably got COVID from wearing a mask on the few occasions when he did. Also Wesley Hunt, an Army veteran and candidate for Houston’s 7th Congressional District, was on his way to meet Trump in Midland when he got the results that he tested positive. The two said in statements that they are asymptomatic as of now. Who knows how many others these two have infected?

Today for most Americans the results come back in a week to 2 weeks making contact tracing useless. That's one reason why the US is doing so poorly. I wrote previously:

So how did China test almost 11 million people, the entire population of Wuhan, in only 10 days? They had a lot more testing centers per square mile than anywhere in the US, and they devoted a lot more personnel to the job including contact tracing. They did batch or pool testing which just now is being rolled out in the US. China has been able to manufacture enough test kits to test huge numbers of people and the results were available in 48 hours. The cost of testing is covered by the government. The US has been further hampered by a lack of reagents, the chemicals used in the test kits. Evidently, a lot of the critical components of test kits are not manufactured in the US and the stock of them is in short supply.

In South Korea you call the COVID-19 hotline to get information on local testing sites, walk to the nearest one, have a brief one-on-one visit with a doctor, and have your nasal or oral sample collected. The whole process takes less than 30 minutes. Later that evening, you get a text message letting you know whether you're COVID positive. All this for free or just under $20. So results in less than 24 hours? How come South Korea can do it, but the US can't?

Germany has a test that gets results back in 2.5 hours. All these countries have better tests. So why does the US not have them? Are other countries hoarding them or does the US just not want to pay the money to get them? Or does the US refuse to use some other country's test out of pride?

Meanwhile, Republican Congressmen are walking around the Capitol without masks. How many others will be hospitalized within the next two weeks?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOP Plan to Slash Unemployment Benefits by $1,600 Per Month Condemned as 'Absolutely Unacceptable'

Published on Monday, July 27, 2020

by Common Dreams

"The country is on fire and the chief concern for Senate Republicans is that unemployed people have too much money."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

2 Comments

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) conducts a news conference after the Senate Republican Policy luncheon in the Hart Building on Tuesday, July 21, 2020. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Progressives are rejecting out of hand a proposal by Senate Republicans to temporarily slash the weekly federal boost to unemployment benefits from $600 to $200 until states develop the capacity to implement a more complex system that would pay laid-off workers 70% of what they earned prior to losing their jobs.

Bloomberg reported Monday that the Senate GOP plan, which was approved by the Trump White House, will call for a two-month transition to the new unemployment system and provide states with an option to apply for a waiver for up to two additional months. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is expected to officially unveil the plan later Monday as part of the GOP's coronavirus stimulus package.

"Senate Republicans want to cut unemployment benefits for 30 million Americans by $400 a week. This cannot stand."
—Sen. Sherrod Brown

 

"Millions of Americans are out of work and millions of renters will soon face eviction," said advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires. "Meanwhile, Trump and Senate Republicans want to cut unemployment benefits from $600 to $200 a week. Absolutely unacceptable."

Analysts warn that replacing the flat $600-per-week payment with an individualized benefit would overwhelm antiquated state unemployment insurance (UI) systems, potentially causing massive relief delays for millions of people on the brink of financial collapse.

Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst with the National Employment Law Project, tweeted Monday that the GOP's proposed "70% income replacement is a weird technocratic solution to a problem that doesn't exist."

"This would require a different individual calculation for every person. States will take months to get this up while still processing historic new claims," Evermore wrote. "The fact that low income folks are getting more on UI is a good thing and has kept unemployed workers’ pain from spreading in their communities. This is giving people the economic power to make good choices to slow the spread of Covid, which is out of control."

Under the GOP proposal, the $400-per-week reduction in UI payments would be implemented as states transition to the wage replacement program. The change would amount to a $1,600 monthly income cut for the tens of millions of Americans currently relying on the boosted UI benefits to cover basic expenses.

The steep benefit reduction would also cost the U.S. more than three million jobs over the next year, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Unless Congress reaches a deal to avoid a lapse in additional federal payments, state unemployment benefits will revert to the pre-pandemic rate—which averaged about $370 per week nationwide—starting August 1.

"Senate Republicans want to cut unemployment benefits for 30 million Americans by $400 a week," tweeted Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). "This cannot stand."

🚨 Senate Republicans proposing to cut the incomes of 30 million+ unemployed Americans and their families by $1,600 per month in the middle of a pandemic. 🚨 https://t.co/zQ9gqUqv7x

— Charlie Anderson (@EconCharlie) July 27, 2020

With bipartisan negotiations over the stimulus package expected to begin late Monday, Democratic leaders have not said the Republican unemployment proposal is a deal-breaker.

Asked about the UI payments in an appearance on CBS "Face the Nation" Sunday morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized the GOP's 70% wage replacement idea as overly complicated but said "you don't go into a negotiation with a red line."

In May, the House passed a bill that proposes extending the $600-per-week benefit through January of next year. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced legislation earlier this month that would extend the $600 weekly UI boost until economic conditions improve.

"These negotiations are absurd," HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter tweeted Monday. "The country is on fire and the chief concern for Senate Republicans is that unemployed people have too much money."

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Off the Top of My Head

If Women Ruled the World, We'd Probably All Be Better Off

by John Lawrence, July 24, 2020

Number 1. There would be much less war. War is a man's game. It's testosterone fueled. Men want the glory heaped on them for having been in a war. Number 2. Since women have historically had the role of caregivers, they would probably have much more empathy for the poor and vulnerable especially poor and vulnerable children. They wouldn't be so obsessed with having a powerful war machine under their control. The President of the United States never wants to look weak, and, as Commander-in-Chief, revels in the power under his command. That's why he always wants to increase the defense budget. Even Trump, who campaigned on getting the US out of futile wars, can't resist the urge to have even more military power at his disposal and is spending more on the military budget. A woman as President would probably not feel the need not to look weak. Her priorities might be more oriented towards curing the ills affecting humankind which are related to poverty, health and education.

There has never been a period in human history in which there has not been a war or the threat of war. World War 1 was started for no good reason whatsoever. It makes no sense that the assassination of a minor Serbian official could have caused the devastation involved in the First World War. It was so bad that the First World War was called the War to End All Wars. President Woodrow Wilson called it "the war to make the world safe for democracy." English soldiers wanted to cover themselves with glory and then be home in time for Christmas. Instead many of them died miserable deaths in muddy trenches breathing mustard gas. The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, was around 40 million. There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths included 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians. European civilization before WW 1 was very advanced. All that was destroyed essentially by male testosterone and pride.

Despite the best intentions of Wilson and others that there would never be another war especially one that caused the devastation of WW 1, just a few years later we had World War 2. Wilson established the League of Nations, a precursor of the United Nations, a noble effort which, however, did nothing to prevent World War 2. The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose mission was to maintain world peace. It didn't. President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the leading architect of the League. Despite Wilson's leadership, the United States never joined the League. So much for diplomacy, negotiation and arbitration. War has been primarily conducted by males whose testosterone directed anger, lack of empathy and quest for glory have led them in the direction of war. Peace after all is boring.

Now even in the midst of a pandemic which affects the whole world, you might think it would be a moment when the whole world comes together. Instead Trump and his chief warmonger, Mike Pompeo, are trying to weaponize the coronavirus and start a cold war with China who the US has decided is its chief rival. Instead of cooperation, Pompeo has decided a better policy is to exacerbate tensions with China as much as possible. CNBC reported:

Top officials of the World Health Organization on Thursday slammed “unacceptable” comments made by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who alleged that China had co-opted the WHO.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the claims made Tuesday in London by Pompeo that China had “co-opted international institutions like the World Health Organization” were untrue and a distraction from the global coronavirus pandemic response.

“The comments are untrue and unacceptable and without any foundation for that matter,” Tedros said at a news briefing from the United Nations agency’s Gevena headquarters on Thursday. “WHO will not be distracted by these comments and we don’t want the international community also to be distracted.”

Tedros has repeatedly defended the WHO against criticism of its response to the coronavirus. U.S. President Donald Trump and others have alleged the U.N. health agency has a favorable relationship with China, where the virus emerged at the end  of 2019. Tedros reiterated comments on Thursday that the politicization of the pandemic is one of the greatest threats to the global response.

Pompeo wants his cold war with China because this is the only way he knows to do diplomacy as, supposedly, America's top diplomat. He's not a diplomat. A diplomat would not try to deliberately provoke another country. Now the US has turned its attention from Russia to China as America's main bogieman. They do not even try to be peace makers or negotiators. Conciliation and cooperation are not words in their vocabulary. Maybe Pompeo has his eyes on a lucrative job in the military-industrial complex after he is out of his job as Secretary of State. So his interest is in justifying America's immense defense budget by starting a cold war which might even become a hot war. But a hot war is not even necessary to justify outsize defense budgets. A cold war will do very nicely, thank you very much.

Meanwhile many Americans are on the verge of homelessness. They will swell the ranks of the 500,000 who are already homeless. While Congress argues over the next bailout package, people are losing their jobs, their businesses, their health care and their homes. A bailout package could pay people's mortgages, rents and employee salaries for the rest of the year until, hopefully, a vaccine is discovered. That way the most economic damage could be averted. But it will probably be a paltry cash sum that will do little to protect the great majority of Americans.

What Stephanie Kelton points out in her book, Deficits Don't Matter, is that, well, they don't matter so a bailout 100 times the size of the projected bailout would not be a problem and would never have to be repaid since the US dollar is a sovereign currency. US debt can just be disappeared on the Fed's balance sheet. So both conservatives and liberals can rejoice. There's no reason not to have massive tax cuts as well as massive increases to the Health and Human Services budget. Wow, finally a cause for celebration. We can have it both ways. Now if Americans can only realize this and climb aboard the gravy train. There are some restrictions, however, as Ms. Kelton points out.

The biggest question that people asked Bernie Sanders with his ambitious social programs like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal is "How ya going to pay for it?" Stephanie Kelton has the answer and now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex is getting on board. Ocasio-Cortez also said that Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that the government doesn't need to balance the budget and that budget surpluses actually hurt the economy, "absolutely" needed to be "a larger part of our conversation."

Off the Top of My Head

It's Out of Control

by John Lawrence, July 19, 2020

The Trump policy is now clear: Let 'er rip. They are not going to spend any more money on testing, contract tracing and the CDC. The Obama administration had a plan in place to deal with a future pandemic. Trump did away with it, pulled the CDC out of China, withdrew the US from the World Health Organization. He is willing to sacrifice about 2% of the American people to get his economy back on the road before the election and hope that a vaccine will soon be available which would solve all his reelection problems. It's not going to work.

Biden has better plans not only for the pandemic, but also for the economy. His foreign policy, however, vis a vis China is still stuck in an antagonistic, competitive stance. It should be clear now that the major problems in the world including climate change in addition to the pandemic can only be resolved by cooperation, not competition. First of all the US is in no position to try and outcompete China. Both countries were essentially tied for the world's largest economy before the pandemic. Now China will be pulling ahead while the US languishes due to Trump's disastrous response to the pandemic. Instead of quibbling with China over the South China Sea, Hong Kong and the Uighuers, issues which amount to judging China's internal affairs and/or affairs in China's immediate territory, the US essentially should mind its own business and let China resolve the situations with its neighbors. There is much that China could criticize about America's internal affairs concerning human rights including both political and economic rights - #BlackLivesMatter, for instance. It is not constructive to be criticizing another country's internal affairs when a more constructive, cooperative and diplomatic approach could resolve the major issues between the countries instead of harping on issues within a country that don't affect the US at all.

China has achieved a lot in recent history even though it is a 5000 year old civilization, much older than either America or Europe. Disrespecting China at a time when China is actually becoming the most respected and dominant world player could be a disaster for America and also the whole world. If the world is to solve the climate change situation, all the world's players especially the most powerful and leading nations, must be on board, not indulging in criticism of one another. China is willing to do that. Is the US under either Trump or Biden?

There are seemingly intractable problems in every country of the world including the US and China. Working together, however, instead of alienating each other is something that is absolutely necessary at this time in human and world history. Otherwise, whoever wins the battle will surely lose the war as far as climate change is concerned. Other problems are trivial by comparison. It would be just like the human race to harp at each other while the planet Earth goes up in flames. Sorry but that's my opinion based on human history so far. Will the so-called 'better angels' of humanity rise up and do an about face with regards to that history?

Trump Rush to Reopen America is Causing a Covid Resurgence

by Robert Reich

Friday, July 17, 2020

Donald Trump said that June’s jobs report, which showed an uptick, proves the economy is “roaring back.”

Rubbish. The Labor Department gathered the data during the week of June 12, when America was reporting 25,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day. By the time the report was issued, that figure was 55,000.

The economy isn’t roaring back. Just over half of working-age Americans have jobs now, the lowest ratio in over 70 years. What’s roaring back is Covid-19. 

Until it’s tamed, the economy doesn’t stand a chance.

The surge in cases isn’t because America is doing more tests for the virus, as Trump contends. Cases are rising even where testing is declining. Deaths have resumed their gruesome ascent.

The surge is occurring because America reopened before Covid-19 was contained.

Trump was so intent on having a good economy by Election Day that he resisted doing what was necessary to contain the virus. He left everything to governors and local officials, then warned that the “cure” of closing the economy was “worse than the disease.” Trump even called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public health restrictions.

Yet he still has no national plan for testing, contact tracing and isolating people with infections. 

It would be one thing if every other rich nation in the world botched it as badly as has America. But even Italy – not always known for the effectiveness of its leaders or the pliability of its citizens – has contained the virus and is reopening without a resurgence.

There was never a conflict between containing Covid-19 and getting the economy back on track. The first was always a prerequisite to the second. By doing nothing to contain the virus, Trump has not only caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but put the economy into a stall.

The uptick in jobs in June was due almost entirely to the hasty reopening, which is now being reversed. Across America, a vast re-closing is underway, as haphazard as was the reopening. 

In the biggest public health emergency in US history, in which nearly 136,000 have already lost their lives, still no one is in charge.

Brace yourself. Not only will the virus take many more lives in the months ahead, but millions of Americans are in danger of becoming destitute. Extra unemployment benefits enacted by Congress in March are set to end July 31. About one in five people in renter households are at risk of eviction by September 30. Delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March.

An estimated 25 million Americans have lost or will lose employer-provided health insurance. America’s fragile childcare system is in danger of collapse, with the result that hundreds of thousands of working parents will not be able to return to work even if jobs are available.

What is Trump and the GOP’s response to this looming catastrophe? Nothing. Senate Republicans are trying to ram through a $740 billion defense bill while ignoring legislation to provide housing and food relief.

They are refusing to extend extra unemployment benefits beyond July, saying the benefits are keeping Americans from returning to work. In reality, it’s the lack of jobs.

Trump has done one thing, though. He’s asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. If the court agrees, it will end health insurance for 23 million more Americans and give the richest 0.1% a tax cut of about $198,000 a year.

This is sheer lunacy. The priority must be to get control over this pandemic and help Americans survive it, physically and financially. Anything less is morally indefensible.

Off the Top of My Head

Russian and Chinese Hackers Trying to Get Research on Coronavirus Vaccine?

by John Lawrence, July 17, 2020

Why isn't research on a vaccine widely shared with every laboratory in the world? It's a pandemic, for Pete's sake. It affects everyone in the world. Oh, but American corporations think it's proprietary, I guess. They're hoping to make a killing off the vaccine if they are the first to develop it. They want to make everyone pay. That's it. It's so called intellectual property, the kind of property China has been stealing from us supposedly. Give me a break. First they politicize the pandemic; now they want to weaponize it.

The New York Times said: "Russian hackers are attempting to steal coronavirus vaccine research, the American, British and Canadian governments said Thursday, accusing the Kremlin of opening a new front in its spy battles with the West amid the worldwide competition to contain the pandemic." So now it's a competition? I thought everyone in the world would be cooperating to come up with a vaccine. Or is it that the US has to turn everything into a competition. Elsewhere in the world people seem to cooperate more. The US has to think of everything as a competition even when it is something the solution of which will save lives all over the world. It shouldn't be a competition nor should any company make a ton of profits. Where is Dr Jonas Salk who did not patent his polio vaccine thereby forfeiting $7 billion in profits according to Forbes, when we need him now?

This accusation of hacking reaches a new low in Pompeo's and the Trump administration's attempts to vilify Russia and China. This international hacking situation, which the US also participates in, needs to be resolved by diplomacy rather than ratcheting up the tensions between the US, Russia and China. It is the kind of thing that, rather than justifying a new Cold War, could be resolved by peace making efforts rather than war making and mutual alienation. But the US has not had any real diplomats for years. The Trump State Department is all about threatening other nations with either economic sanctions or war.

And where has it gotten us? The US is becoming a pariah in the eyes of the rest of the world. Even our allies are turning against us. The Intelligencer reports:

Two weeks into the Trump presidency, the British parliament has barred America’s commander-in-chief from addressing the House of Commons; a leading German newspaper has called on all freedom-loving peoples in Europe and Asia to mobilize against the United States; a senior cabinet minister in the Australian government has coined the phrase normal Trump tantrum; Israeli intelligence agents are (reportedly) unsure if they can safely share information with the White House; the Mexican president can’t meet with the U.S. president without inviting a political backlash; members of the global economic elite have started referring to China as “the leader of the free world”; and Canada won’t stop putting its southern neighbor to shame.

Trump's approach to world affairs is a zero, but the whole Republican approach in the last 20 years has been led by neocons and super hawks, people who saw threats everywhere rather than opportunities to peacefully resolve situations and further increased understanding between potential partners. Their approach has been to bully, alienate and piss off the other countries of the world especially those chosen nations who they decided would be our enemies. They need enemies in order to make Americans think we live in a dangerous world that requires spending a trillion dollars a year on the military-industrial complex, more than the next 10 highest spending nations combined. If we chose to get along with other nations instead, such large expenditures on "defense" would not be justified. All this money did nothing to defend us from the coronavirus pandemic. Maybe our priorities are totally out of whack.

Off the Top of My Head

Take Heart Americans: We May Have the World's Worst Response to the Coronavirus, But We Still Have the World's Strongest Military

by John Lawrence, July 15, 2020

Even though we have reduced spending on public health to near zero, we spend about a trillion dollars per year on our military. Trump's response to the pandemic has been, "Pandemic? What pandemic? Let's not let the pandemic ruin a beautiful economy. Open up the economy. It's mainly people of color, the elderly and meatpackers who are doing the dying. So let it rip. If everybody gets it, and there's a 2% death rate, that's only .02x330 million = 6 million Americans who will die. That still leaves 224 million healthy Americans and a fully open beautiful economy." That is the thinking that is the opposite of the thinking of the health professionals, scientists and people who care about the elderly, people of color and meatpackers. Some might say that it is the thinking of a sociopath, a sociopath that cares more about getting himself reelected than he does about the people of America.

Trump knows that it isn't rich people in his base that are doing the dying. Sure, there are the libertarians, non-mask wearers and COVID partyers in his base who are stupid enough to follow his suggestions, those deserving of Darwin awards. True conservatives don't believe in public health. They only are concerned about private health care for those who can pay for it.That's why Trump has defunded every public health agency in the government he could get his hands on. If there's no profit in it for private enterprise, conservatives are against it. That means the CDC, WHO and Dr. Fauci. In an article, Public Health’s Falling Share of US Health Spending, we find this:

There is no absolute measure of the optimal level of public health spending. However, an Institute of Medicine panel recently concluded that public health agencies are markedly underfunded, and that US health spending is out of balance, with spending for clinical care disproportionately high compared with spending for “population-based activities that more efficiently and effectively improve the nation’s health.

While spending on public health is declining, spending on private health care is increasing. That's because health care insurance and pharmaceutical costs are going through the roof. But you get what you pay for in private health care as opposed to public health which treats everyone more or less equally. That's why Trump and Republicans in general seek to defund governmental public health initiatives and to deregulate private health care corporations. The rich then will always get the best health care because they can afford to pay outrageous prices while the poor will get what they can pay for which is not very much. If they lose their job and their health insurance, they will get nothing.

So in Trump's mind it's not worth ruining his beautiful economy for the sake of  a few million people of color, immigrants, people of color, meatpackers and old people who were going to die anyway. He could Make America Great Again without these people who were not in his base without them.

But we can all rejoice in the fact that America's military budget is greater than the combined military budgets of most of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. The U.S. outpaces all other nations in military expenditures. World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total. All this spending hasn't been able to fight off the coronavirus though. While other countries spent their money on public health, the US spent on weapons of destruction. It seems the only thing we've destroyed is our own society. Trump's real slogan should be MAPA - Make America Pitiful Again. That's exactly what he has done.

Off the Top of My Head

The Essential Economy Should Replace an Economy Based on Consumerism

by John Lawrence, July 7, 2020

The economy is never going back to what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. Brick and mortar stores were already failing. Now their fate is being sealed. J Crew, JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus, Chesapeake Oil, Gold's Gym, Hertz, Tuesday Morning, Diamond Offshore, Whiting Petroleum, Sur La Table, 24 Hour Fitness, GNC, Chuck E Cheese, Lucky Brand, Men's Wearhouse, Pier 1 - the list goes on and on. Many of these businesses were carrying huge amounts of debt even before the virus hit. This huge number of bankruptcies is going to slam the economy, and the economy will be restructured as a result. Brick and mortar stores will never be the same as more people are going online to order goods. More schools and businesses will also be going online and staying online. This is good as it will slow the greenhouse gas emissions from commuter vehicles.

The economy needs to be restructured even if we never had the pandemic. Maybe the pandemic is a blessing in disguise if it forces a restructuring which reduces the market for fossil fuels. There needs to be massive restructuring in this regard in the next 10 years if we are to have a prayer to escape runaway global warming. This restructuring will also allow the next President if it's Joe Biden to address economic inequality and uplift the lower half of family incomes. Joe Biden is calling for a $15.00 minimum wage with no exception for tipped workers. This is a step in the right direction. There needs to be massive hiring in fields which will rebuild American infrastructure in a way that uses renewable energy. Fossil fuel companies that are carrying huge amounts of debt should be left to go bankrupt instead of being propped up by interest free loans from the Federal Reserve.

Medicare for All needs to be implemented and updated to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Both Medicare and Obamacare are currently prohibited by law from negotiating with drug companies to get lower drug prices. Whether Biden calls it Medicare for All or enhanced Obamacare, the health care system needs to be radically overhauled and updated so that the poor and middle class get the same level of care as the rich. This is all predicated on both Houses of Congress being controlled by Democrats. Otherwise, nothing will get done, and the US will continue to go down the path of degeneration.

The current American economy is predicated on 70% consumption. It is predicated on private enterprise and very limited government. The result is immense economic inequality and lack of investment in public health, which the pandemic has made evident, and also lack of investment in infrastructure. Instead, the only government investment has been in a ginormous military establishment which has been used in disastrous wars, the only result of which has been to create millions of refugees. It has done nothing to help the 40% of the world's population that does not even have access to clean water or proper sanitation. This situation has only been made worse by the current President whose only goal has been to make the world safe for white people. He has used economic sanctions with the result that the world has turned away from using the US dollar and turned toward China as an ally. Case in point: China has been helping Iran economically as the US policy of trying to trash Iran's economy has left it no alternative.

Instead of making America Great Again, Trump has absolutely trashed the nation including his response to the pandemic. While other countries have mounted a credible response, Trump has only further trashed the American economy by insisting that opening the economy was the only thing that mattered. "So I said to my people, slow down the testing, please." Exactly the wrong response. Trump said to his people (the Supreme Court) "Slow down the legal process, please." He got his wish there. His tax returns will not become public until after the election if ever. The Supreme Court said it has to go back to a lower court. From there it will probably go to a court of appeals and from there back to the Supreme Court in a neverending circular process that only rich people can afford. Lawyers will make a fortune though. That's why rich people get justice. Poor people can't afford it.

The political system needs to be restructured so that the Senate can never again be captured  by one political party which then stymies any initiatives put forward by the other party. Democrats in the House can put forward progressive legislation, but, as long as Mitch McConnell is leader of the Senate, it will never see the light of day or be implemented. It becomes a joke. The result is that the political process is only spinning its wheels and has been for 40 years. Let's hope a Democratic President and a Congress in which both Houses are controlled by Democrats can implement, instead of just talking about, progressive policies starting in 2021.

Off the Top of My Head

Going Through Hell ... Twice

by John Lawrence, July 7, 2020

This is what happens when Governors, Mayors and Presidents don't follow the guidelines laid out for them by medical experts and scientific data. Governor Andrew Cuomo did the right thing, and his state is recovering nicely. Trump and his coterie of mainly southern macho men who think they know it all did not, and, as a result, they are ping ponging back and forth - open and shut, open and shut. These A-holes want the economy to sing nicely even if it means sacrificing a few senior citizens. Trouble is COBID has other plans for them. It is still out there, liable to spring up again unless people and political leaders do the right thing and model the right behavior.

Certain parts of the country will recover. New York state proved that. A Democratic governor did do the right thing while Trump and his henchmen were only posturing and talking tough. While they were doing that, Cuomo was demonstrating that New Yorkers were not only tough, but caring, intelligent and loving. That's how he ended his press conferences every day. Trump supporters can yell, "USA, USA" all they want. The fact is that Trump is not making this country great again: He's reducing it to a shit pile. The European Union will not even let Americans travel there. China, which has gotten the pandemic under control, is becoming he undisputed world's number one economy. China is being looked up to by many of our allies, whom Trump has gone out of his way to alienate, while the US is being looked down upon.

Trump can huff and puff all he wants about looters and anarchists and agitators. No one cares any more. Those terms ring hollow. People are waking up to the real American history as found in "A People's History of the United States," by Howard Zinn instead of the fairy tale history we all learned in school. The fact is that America was founded on slavery and theft of Native American lands. According to History.com:

In an era in which the international slave trade was starting to grow, Columbus and his men enslaved many native inhabitants of the West Indies and subjected them to extreme violence and brutality. On his famous first voyage in 1492, Columbus landed on an unknown Caribbean island after an arduous three-month journey.

On his first day in the New World, he ordered six of the natives to be seized, writing in his journal that he believed they would be good servants. Throughout his years in the New World, Columbus enacted policies of forced labor in which natives were put to work for the sake of profits. Later, Columbus sent thousands of peaceful Taino “Indians” from the island of Hispaniola to Spain to be sold. Many died en route.

No wonder his statues are being taken down. He is as much an affront to Native Americans as Jefferson Davis is to African Americans. The Spaniards were just after gold and other riches, and when they couldn't get any more work out of the Indians, they started importing African slaves. Some US states have replaced Columbus Day with Native American Day. At least thirteen states do not celebrate Columbus Day (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, DC; Wisconsin); South Dakota officially celebrates Native American Day instead.

The point is that all white people are immigrants. My family came here from Europe some 11 generations ago at about the same time the first slave ships arrived. America is a nation of immigrants and the first white settlers did not treat the so-called Indians (a name made up by Christopher Columbus) all that well. Let's acknowledge the real American history and not celebrate murderers and enslavers.

Off the Top of My Head

Culture Wars: Neither Here Nor There

by John Lawrence, July 4, 2020

So they change a name of  a military base: is one black family any better off? Conservatives love it when the debate is confined to cultural stuff. It doesn't threaten their bank accounts one tiny little bit. But when you get down to anything substantive, anything concrete, like defunding the military-industrial complex and using the money for free public education from pre-school to college, well, wait a minute that's socialism. They already consider public education K-8th socialism. Well what about health care? When you start talking about free health care, or even reasonably priced health care, well that's socialism. Hey let's confine the discussion to whether or not we should allow confederate statues to exist. Taking one down does not make one black family any better off and doesn't threaten the white elite one bit. It doesn't cost them one dollar and it doesn't add one dollar to any black family's income.

So let's talk about concrete issues, ones that could really benefit the hoi polloi and take a few dollars out of wealthy peoples' pockets:

    1. Medicare for All

    2. A Financial Transactions Tax

    3. Forgiveness of student loan debt

    4. A Green New Deal that would create good paying jobs for millions of black, Native American and     Latinx people

    5. Raising the minimum wage to a living wage

    6. A wealth tax

    7. Defunding the military which is the police force of the world and increasing the budget of the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization

Instead of debating these concrete issues conservatives want to argue over symbols. That's where their mentality is at. Don't trample on my flag. Don't trample on my history. Don't burn my flag. None of these symbolic and cultural issues improve the life of any American. They just preserve the status quo and the economic inequality that is only getting worse and which will get worse at a faster rate due to the pandemic. In short the ones mired in these issues know that nothing really will change as long as they can keep the discussion at this level. And those who could profit by changing the system are too often persuaded by those who wouldn't just to argue about symbols. Eliminating all the statues of slaveholders will not change American history one bit and will not make one black person better off.

As long as they don't eliminate the military bases and reduce the inflow of money to the military, the big wigs would be happy to entertain changing the name of Fort Bragg to Fort Rosecrans. General Rosecrans whipped Bragg's ass in Tennesee. As Commander of the Army of the Cumberland, he fought against Confederate General Braxton Bragg at Stones River, and later outmaneuvered him in the brilliant Tullahoma Campaign, driving the Confederates from Middle Tennessee. So it's a logical change of name. But it won't do anything to improve the lives of blacks, native Americans or Latinx. All the government help given to whites like the GI bill after WW II effectively excluded blacks as did all the land given to whites by the Homestead Act. First slavery, then Jim Crow laws served to keep black wealth at a minimum even negative in many cases. Instead of gaining wealth as whites did, they were targeted to be debtors and kept there by PayDay loan operators charging exorbitant rates of interest. Native Americans were gypped out of their lands by Americans not honoring treaties and by outright theft. They were also killed by a pandemic the white man brought with him from Europe. Thus Montezuma's revenge and now maybe COBID will do the same thing to Trump's non-mask wearing base.

So Trump is getting his base excited about cultural issues. It's a total sideshow designed to keep the status quo intact and to let the rich keep on getting richer. The poor, especially blacks, need to be kept in their place. All the progressive legislation designed by Cory Booker to reform the police nationwide will never see the light of day as long as the Senate is controlled by Republicans. He might as well not waste his breath. It's meaningless and never has a chance in hell of passing the Senate and being enacted into law. So why don't the Democrats do something more productive instead of spinning their wheels with great ideas that will never see the light of day.

Off the Top of My Head

We Spent a Trillion Dollars on the Military-Industrial Complex: It Didn't Save Us From the Biggest Killer.

by John Lawrence, July 3, 2020

Do we have our priorities misallocated? The biggest killer has been the pandemic. China has won by default because it has triumphed over - not us - but the COBID-19. That catapulted the world's second largest economy into first place. The US pathetic response misdirected by Trump has guaranteed that the US is not great again but a "pitiful helpless giant" as President Nixon said. How many lies are Trump's base going to believe before they realize that they've been scammed? The pandemic might not magically end some day, and then things might not go back to normal. There are other pandemics waiting in the wings. We need to defund the defense budget as it's now configured and start funding our real defense priorities.

In the book, Spillover, David Quammen writes that we dodged a bullet when the SARS virus hit the streets in 2003, but we weren't so lucky this time:

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent in the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, a person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever and the chils - maybe even the cough - precede the major discharge of virus towards other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this appears to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally were not emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or the subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - not just lucky but salvational. With influenza and many other diseases the order is reversed, high infectivity preceding symptoms by a matter of days. A perverse pattern: the danger, then the warning. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918-1919 influenza: high infectivity among cases before they experienced the most obvious and debilitating stages of illness. The bug traveled ahead of the sense of alarm. And that infamous global epidemic, remember, occurred in the era before globalization. Everything nowadays moves around the planet faster, including viruses. If SARS had conformed to the perverse pattern of presymptomatic infectivity, its 2003 emergence wouldn't be a case history in good luck and effective outbreak response. It would be a much darker story.

The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like the angel of death.

How prescient! COBID-19 is the Next Big One. The book quoted above was written before the current pandemic but was predictive of it, especially the part about the infections being spread by asymptomatic people. That order reversed is what saved the SARS epidemic from becoming a pandemic, but we weren't so lucky this time, and maybe we won't be next time. The COBID-19 virus has already mutated into a more highly infectious form. Trump's ineffectual and misguided response almost guarantees that this pandemic will destroy the US both medically and economically.

Off the Top of My Head

What the SARS Epidemic Can Teach Us

by John Lawrence, July 2, 2020

In 2003 SARS broke out in China. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is a coronavirus in the same family as COBID-19. Fortunately, it was confined to Singapore, where an authoritarian government locked it down and quenched it out and a few other mostly Asian countries. Cases were also found in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Toronto, Canada, but the US escaped the spread and the fire was put out quickly. About 8000 people contracted SARS and 774 died. Compared to the current COBID pandemic, the US and the world dodged a bullet. Currently, there are almost 11 million cases worldwide and 500,000 deaths. In the US alone there have been almost 130,000 deaths. However, research on SARS has helped to gain a better understanding of COBID especially on the role of PPE and the importance thereof since most of the cases of SARS were spread from an infected patient to medical personnel who weren't properly protected.

People in the south of China eat all kinds of exotic animals including civet cats which were indicted as the animal host from which SARS was transmitted to humans. The Chinese government went back and forth from killing all civet cats to only thinking that only farmed civet cats were the culprits and not wild ones. The current thinking is that civic cats were an amplifier host. An amplifier host is a larger animal than the reservoir host capable of generating larger amounts of virus before transmitting it to humans. The reservoir host is thought to be bats. So bats transmitted the virus to civet cats and then it was amplified and transmitted to humans.

It is important to note that even though the SARS epidemic was quenched, it is still present in its reservoir hosts as is other viruses including COBID-19. So other cases of SARS can still pop up and will always pop up as long as it is present in its reservoir host. That's the meaning of a reservoir host. Killing all the amplifier hosts does not wipe out the virus so it was a futile exercise just to kill all civet cats. There is no vaccine for SARS. There may never be a satisfactory vaccine for COBID-19. That's why the measures of mask wearing and social distancing are so important. Other coronavirus outbreaks may occur at any time in the future as the virus mutates or as other viruses transfer from animal hosts to humans. The wet markets in China, where all kinds of exotic animals are butchered for food, are thought to be the areas most likely in which SARS, COBID-19 and other viruses are transmitted from animals to humans.

Americans have been misled about the coronavirus first in terms that the economy could reopen and get back to normal in a couple of months or that "flattening the curve" is all that would be necessary or even that a safe and effective vaccine would be found by the end of the year or in fact ever. The only known way to reduce the impact of this pandemic or future pandemics is by means of testing in huge numbers with short turnaround times, contact tracing, mask wearing and social distancing. Americans want a magical solution, a pill or a shot, that can make them safe against the virus. It may or may not happen. It hasn't happened with a whole multitude of viruses including SARS, HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. Any of these maladies can break out at any time if there is a transmission from an animal reservoir or amplifier host to a human.

COBID-19 is not necessarily the end of pandemics. It is more realistic to think that there are even more future pandemics out there especially as humans encroach on animal habitats. Certainly, the Chinese appetite for exotic animals sold in so-called "wet markets" is a potential culprit. If there were a cooperative and productive relationship between the US and China, perhaps the world could come to an understanding about closing down or regulating these markets. The wet market in Wutan where COBID-19 presumably originated has been shut down. In the meantime perhaps the US defense budget should be rethunk. As of 2015 the number of Americans killed by terrorism in the previous decade: 24. Number of Americans killed by guns in the last decade: 280,024.

The number of Americans killed world wide by our "enemies" including ISIL, al-Qaeda and various other terrorists is insignificant compared to those killed by the COBID pandemic in a few short months yet we spend $1 trillion a year on so-called "defense" while almost nothing on pandemic preparedness and research. Trump has attempted to defund the CDC and WHO, the agencies that do research and preparedness, the agencies that study viruses and virus transmission. Instead of defunding the police we should defund the military and refund those agencies that defend us from future pandemics. Today the US set a record: 50,000 new cases of COBID in one day.