Trump takes Social Security hostage in his latest COVID-19 stimulus demand

The very stable genius is at it again.  Remember his campaign promise not to touch Social Security?

Joan McCarter

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Monday May 04, 2020 · 10:46 AM MDT

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Impeached president Donald Trump has decided to take his own hostage in the next coronavirus stimulus bill: Social Security.

"We're not doing anything without a payroll tax cut," he said in a Fox News interview Sunday. That's exactly the kind of policy solution you'd expect from him—it does absolutely nothing to help in the current economic crisis and will do long-term and potentially immense harm to the health of Social Security, while giving a big tax cut to the highest of earners.

In addition to creating another big giveaway to the wealthiest people, Trump probably wants to do it because President Barack Obama did it already in response to the great recession of 2008-09. It was problematic then, but at least helpful to a degree. People who had jobs got more money in their paychecks and had the opportunity to spend it, helping to bolster the economy. This isn't that crisis. Laid-off people aren't going to see any benefit because they're not getting paychecks to be taxed!

The above chart from Social Security Works shows where the benefit would go: Trump, members of Congress, and CEOs of Wall Street banks and Fortune 500 companies would get an annual tax cut of $2,754. Unemployed workers and the millions of state and local workers who contribute to state pension programs rather than Social Security would get $0 in tax cuts. Zero. Dollars.

Of course, employers already got their deal, albeit temporarily. The CARES Act gave them a reprieve from their portion of payroll taxes until the end of the year in order to try to encourage them to keep people on payroll. Trump argues that he wants to give workers the same benefit, but for millions of them, it's bullshit. And it won't help those in the most dire straits at all—they don't have a paycheck in the first place. Nothing is being withheld from them. As Len Burman, a fellow at the Urban Institute says, it's a "terrible idea."

"The main problem with the proposal is that it would go to the people who least need help," Burman told CNBC. "It seems like you're deliberately targeting it to people who are in the best situation […] the ones who are still working." Ding, ding, ding. Beyond that, it threatens the most vulnerable among us now; the payroll taxes being paid into Social Security are helping to keep seniors afloat.

"Trump's actions are a war on seniors," Nancy Altman, president of advocacy organization Social Security Works, said in an emailed statement. "He wants to open up the economy, even though COVID-19 is disproportionately costing seniors their lives. Now he is insisting on threatening Social Security on which most seniors rely for their food, medicine and other basic necessities."

This is a demand that Democrats should have no problem whatsoever refusing. It does absolutely nothing for the people who need assistance the most and will harm them in the long run.

Trump's Nationalism Advances on a Predictable Trajectory to Violence. His Supporters Will Kill When They're Told To.

Armed men take part in an 'American Patriot Rally,' organized by Michigan United for Liberty on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, demanding the reopening of businesses, April 30, 2020. (photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)

By Aleksandar Hemon, The Intercept

02 May 20
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ver since Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and rank racism in 2015, those of us who’d witnessed the nationalist undoing in the Balkans at the end of the last millennium have found the subsequent rise of Trumpism frighteningly familiar. We quickly recognized a host of nationalist pathologies: the tactical importance of bigotry, since enemies must be ceaselessly identified and hated; relentless misogyny as a means of controlling women and their bodies, because the nation is a masculinist project where women serve as wombs for national reproduction; a profusion of lies, conspiracy theories, and plain nonsense, since reality is controlled by the enemies (fake news, deep state, the Jews, etc.) and must be perpetually undone and redone; the coalescing of a diverse political field around a leader and a stupidly conceptual goal (Greatness! Capitalism! Freedom!); loyalist cabals who are vetted, validated, and eliminated by the leader’s whims; and rampant venality combined with a criminal reconfiguration of the economy.

But the most important and troubling symptom is the open and ceaseless commitment to conflict meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization. As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful.

Because those who experienced the bloody undoing of Yugoslavia have already seen the havoc nationalism wreaked in their own lives and countries, it is hard not to worry about its symptoms again — or, as a Bosnian saying goes: If you were bitten by a snake, you’re scared of lizards. It would be wrong, of course, to ignore the differences between the histories, including the respective political conditions, in pre-dissolution Yugoslavia and in the United States in the last few years (or decades). Still, insisting there are no points of comparison means accepting the proposition at the root of every emanation of nationalism: that “our” nation is unlike any other, historically unique and incomparable. If one is not blinded by that kind of essentialist entitlement, the common practices of nationalism become recognizable across cultures and histories.

Take the nationalist conviction that the nation is oppressed by state structures controlled by (the) others and is therefore unable to fulfill its unique potential, which is why state structures need to be smashed, along with those who control them. Such a conviction is repeatedly fueled by Trump and widely shared by his supporters, not least by those brandishing assault rifles around the state legislatures of Michigan, Virginia, and Ohio, soon to arrive in your neighborhood.

Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader who in died in 2006 in the Hague while on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, similarly framed his nationalist narrative. He insisted that the Serbian people made sacrifices for Yugoslavia but were instead cheated out of their victorious gains by those who controlled the federal state. He wanted to reshape Yugoslavia so that his people could rightfully dominate it and thus make Serbia great again, or greater. Similarly, for the Croat nationalists, led by Franjo Tudjman, once a general in the Yugoslav People’s Army, only an ethnically pure nation state could provide freedom and actualization. Milosevic and Tudjman were on opposing sides, but their projects were akin. Both strived to destroy the Yugoslav state by any means necessary. Pursuing a conflict that would irreversibly undo civic and governmental structures was essential to their nationalist projects.

The destructive urge was placed, however, onto the shoulders and arms of “the people” who needed to exhibit their anger and show that the current state could not respond to their unquenchable thirst for justice and liberty. A crucial role in the rise of millennial Serbian nationalism was played by rallies where masses of aggrieved Serbs protested against myriad injustices. The rallies were presented as spontaneous happenings of the people (dešavanje naroda, in Serbian), but were orchestrated by Milosevic’s proxies and underlings. These extra-systemic performances of mass infuriation were bludgeons with which the nationalists attacked weak state structures, as well as the doubters in their own ranks. The rallies also constituted loyalist spaces from which warriors and collaborators could be recruited for the future wars.

What was invariably promised at the rallies, implicitly or explicitly, were revenge and punishment for those who “the people” believed wronged them. Milosevic’s nationalist project would carry out those promises, which eventually landed him at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Once he set out to follow the trajectory of destructive confrontation, there was no way or reason for him to stop until he reached its logical extreme: genocide.

The conflictual essence of Trumpism was made fully evident very early, in the course of the Republican primaries in 2016. While all the other GOP candidates tried to validate their garden-variety bigotry by importing fancy reactionary ideas and referring gratuitously to the Bible, the Framers, or some historical figure or another, the only thing Trump consistently offered was his pathological narcissism (exactly matching the popular belief in American exceptionalism) and his penchant for conflict and aggression. He promised, implicitly and explicitly, revenge and punishment for those who wronged white America. As we now know all too well, white America’s response to Trumpian revenge fantasies was quick and enthusiastic, and thus the GOP graduated from a routinely racist conservative party to one unquestionably committed to white nationalism, up to and including outright white supremacy.

In the meantime, Trump, the chosen tool of undoing, has been carrying out his promises, with the full and passionate support of the GOP and many of its rich donors. The claims of false and foolish pundits notwithstanding, at no point was Trump going to relent, change, or metamorphose into being “presidential,” for the simple reason that Trumpism is nothing without the constant perpetuation of conflict.

For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.

When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.

What is even more frightening is the hankering across the political range for a magical national correction, the indulging of a persistent fantasy that some essential American quality (decency, reasonability, checks and balances, etc.) will finally kick in and halt the Trumpist madness, thus allowing the country to snap out of its nightmare and revert to its good old national essence. That was never going to happen: The ongoing conflict is not a glitch but a process that cannot be stopped or resolved politically.

With the GOP in death-cult mode, a steady destruction of checks and balances previously imagined to be fail-safe, the jelly-spined leadership of the Democratic Party, and the Soviet-grade purging of any disloyalty or disobedience in the federal systems, Trump has effectively destroyed American politics.

What the actual resolution might look like, I fear to envision, but I know it will not resemble anything Americans can remember or dare to imagine.

Happy May Day: Power to the People

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders greets supporters during a rally. (photo: Juan Figueroa/AP)

By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

02 May 20

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et me take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you a very happy May Day.

The concept behind May Day is extremely profound. It is the understanding that real power lies in solidarity, and that when working people in our country and around the world come together, there is nothing that can stop us in the struggle for justice. It is also a day in which we recommit ourselves to take on the incredible greed of the corporate elite and the exploitation and misery they create.

On this May Day 2020, I wanted to give you an overview of what working people are going through in this country and throughout the world and where we need to go from here.

In America, even before the pandemic, we had more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth.

While the 3 wealthiest people in America owned more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, nearly 20 percent of our children lived in poverty.

While the top one percent owned more wealth than the bottom 92 percent, more than half of our workers were living paycheck to paycheck.

While nearly half of all new income was going to the top one percent and CEOs were making over 300 times as much as the average worker, over half a million Americans were sleeping out on the streets or in homeless shelters on any given night.

While 87 million Americans were uninsured or underinsured, the health care industry made $100 billion in profits.

And let’s be clear: The issue of income and wealth inequality is not just an American issue. It is a global issue.

Last year, Oxfam reported that the richest one percent of the world’s population owned more than twice as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Meanwhile, nearly half of the global population was trying to survive on less than $5.50 a day and 820 million were going hungry.

And, I might add, all of that was taking place before the horrific coronavirus pandemic swept America and the world and created an economic meltdown.

In other words, since the pandemic, a bad situation for the working class has turned into a nightmare. Meanwhile, the wealthiest people in this country and throughout the world keep getting richer and richer.

Over the past six weeks, while over 30 million Americans lost their jobs and many small businesses have gone bankrupt, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the wealthiest person in the world, increased his wealth by over $40 billion.

While workers at Walmart continue to make poverty wages and are putting their lives at risk, the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, has seen their wealth go up by more than $30 billion — just since March 12th.

Workers all over this country are losing their jobs, they are losing their health care, they are going hungry and cannot pay the rent. Globally, the economic disaster resulting from this pandemic could push more than half a billion people into poverty.

Neither the United States or the international community can sustain itself when so few have so much, while so many have so little. If this crisis has taught us anything, it is that we are all in this together and must create a world that reflects that reality.

The need to create an economy and a government that works for all of us has never been clearer. Now, more than ever, we need an economic bill of rights similar to what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlined in his State of the Union Address in 1944.

What does that mean?

It means that everyone in America who wants to work should be entitled to a good-paying job with decent benefits. How much better shape would Americans be in today if we had a federal jobs guarantee program that provided a living wage job to everyone who needed one?

It means that everyone in America should be entitled to health care as a human right through a Medicare for All, single-payer health care system. This crisis has highlighted the absurdity and cruelty of our dysfunctional health care system that ties health insurance to employment. Losing your job should never mean losing your health care.

It means guaranteeing decent and affordable housing for all, and eliminating homelessness. Before the pandemic, 18 million families in America were paying over half of their limited incomes on rent. Today, it has gotten worse. No American should be evicted from their home because they can’t afford to pay for housing.

Nobody in the richest country in the world should be sleeping out on the streets.

It means the right to a secure retirement by expanding Social Security and protecting pensions. Before the pandemic, half of Americans aged 55 and older had no retirement savings. We have got to make sure that every senior citizen can retire with dignity and every person with a disability can live with the security they need.

It means that everyone in America should be entitled to a complete education — from child care through college. Essential workers should not have to worry about leaving their kids at home alone because they can’t afford child care. Young adults should not have to go deeply into debt for the "crime" of getting a college degree.

On this May Day 2020, let us keep our eyes on the prize. Yes. If we stand together in solidarity — Black, white, Latino, Native American and Asian American — we can create a nation of economic, social, racial and environmental justice. Yes. If we stand together in solidarity, we can stop spending trillions on weapons of mass destruction, and create a world in which all people live in peace and dignity.

The struggle continues.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

Trump's Nazification of the GOP is why there's serious discussion of killing off the 'unfit'

"Very fine people" at the deadly 2017 Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Friday May 01, 2020 · 7:59 AM MDT

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Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party is racing toward a transformation that mimics the greatest evil of the 20th century. Long before the Nazis fully engaged with genocidal murder against the Jews, there were persecutions of people deemed "unfit." These were people whom Adolf Hitler’s extremists arbitrarily deemed insufficiently able to contribute to the greater German society. They included the infirm, people with learning disabilities, the mentally ill, those suffering from epilepsy, the physically disabled, and those struggling with alcohol issues.

According to the Nazis' white supremacist ideology, those people were not only impediments to their quest in perfecting their master race, but were also economic burdens to society. The Nazis started a campaign of propaganda to mock them.

They were called "unworthy of life” and labeled as "useless eaters." The propaganda even expanded to math textbooks, which were revised to include arithmetic problems on how much it costs to care for these undesirables. This was the first stage.

Then the Nazis moved to the next stage; they worked with political and medical authorities to divide communities between who they deemed as the “fit” and “unfit” members.  The arbitrary classification system would serve a deadly purpose.

This ultimately led to the final stage: the systematic, targeted killing of those labeled as a burden. At that point, the Nazis had groomed the German population by getting a little bit worse every single day—just enough to normalize the inhumanity. By the time the Nazis reached this stage, the populace had gotten so used to the cruelties, it seemed like murder of “the weak” was simply the next logical step. They had justified it in their minds.

The concept of social Darwinism and arbitrary human classification is based upon Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch theory of superhumans. These are people not impeded by the needs of others deemed inferior. The weaker humans—characterized as the burdens of society—are to be left to fend for themselves.

Hitler used this theory as the ideological foundation for his belief in a master race.

Another person known to borrow heavily from this theory is the prophet of American conservatism, author Ayn Rand.

Born, raised, and educated in Russia, Rand’s entire philosophy is centered around the concept of individual supremacy and radical free market fundamentalism. Rand and her ilk applied the Übermensch theory to capitalism, which justifies the wealthy’s belief that they have an absolute right to plunder. She called it ”the virtue of selfishness.” Her philosophy was simple: The weak are weak and should be taken advantage of, because it is the natural order of things. Therefore, society needs to focus only on developing the strong, and allow the weak to suffer or die.

Rand’s theory did not spare anyone, even children. Two years before her death in 1982, she appeared on Phil Donahue’s eponymous talk show to explain why it was wrong for our government to ever consider the needs of “subnormal” children and the “handicapped.” I encourage you to watch the whole clip. In case you can’t view it, here’s a glimpse of the beginning.

AYN RAND: “The newest proposals of having special, millions spent on subnormal children and on the handicapped. You are getting the so-called "needing" [school] buses is the attempt to bring everybody to the level of the handicapped. [...]

But it includes the mentally retarded which is the subnormal, which is the children who are unable to learn, so that at the end of spending thousands or millions of taxpayers’ money, you're left with a half-idiot who MAY learn to read and write. MAY.”

She goes on to explain how she values some human lives over others … to applause. 

Ayn Rand isn’t the sole driving force behind the right-wing’s belief in their superiority over others, but she is probably the most direct and honest about it—and the Grand Old Party loves her for it. Rand’s brand of social Darwinism can be found in the right-wing support of eliminating social safety nets for the poor in order to support massive tax breaks and subsidies for the top 1% of the wealthiest Americans. It’s this sort of mindset that forces the poor in this nation to fight for the crumbs that rarely trickle-down.

Randian capitalism hit the mainstream in the 1980s. It was the Reagan era, when a new crop of right-wing devotees adopted the principle that good governance, which is supposed to work toward the collective good, was no longer an ideal.

Conservatives during this timeframe focused heavily on deregulation for big business, giving tax cuts to the richest Americans, and ending antitrust protections against monopolies. Ever since, Republicans have retooled their party to only serve the interests of the ultra-rich. Their destructive policies on everything—from education, health care, and shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy—has made U.S. income inequality the highest it’s been since the Census started tracking it over a half-century ago.

You would be hard-pressed to find any Republican today who doesn’t speak fondly of Ayn Rand. White House officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pay homage to her ideals. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said he got into politics because of her. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was even named after her by his father, former presidential candidate Ron Paul. But it’s Donald Trump—infamously known for hating to read—who said that The Fountainhead was one of his favorite books of all time, because it glorified the alpha male capitalist who had no regard for human consequence.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump also subscribes to the theory of inherent biological superiority. His father, Fred Trump, a white supremacist who marched with the Klan, instilled in his son the idea that their family’s success was genetic, according to Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. According to D’Antonio, the elder Trump told his children that he and his wife were superior people, and produced superior offspring. To be fair to Donald Trump, a lot of autocrats also subscribe to this idea. 

The Koch brothers were taught by their father, a Nazi-sympathizer, that plutocrats deserved the right to rule, even at the expense of democracy, because they were naturally superior.

Donald Trump, who idolized his father, took his lessons to heart. He repeatedly tells people that he has “good genes”; he primarily consults with himself over anyone else because he believes he has such a great brain. Hilariously, Trump even claims his orange skin tone is the result of "superior" genes. 

Democrats, of course, hold views that are the polar opposite to Rand’s ideology. Our values stem from our unshakable belief in equality and opportunity. We don’t subscribe to people being genetically superior or inferior, or makers and takers, or fit or unfit. We don’t see any class of people that doesn’t deserve basic human rights, or shouldn’t be treated with a humane level of decency, even though our political foes might label them with terms such as “vermin” or “an infestation.” Democrats see value in the lives of all humans, even our enemies.

Even though many Democrats have been hyper-aware of this difference between our parties’ two philosophies, it has typically manifested itself in our respective parties’ priorities in legislation. The Republicans would always ignore the needs of the poor, the sick, the uninsured: the weak. The Democrats would insist on fighting for them, even if it meant a slightly higher tax burden, preferably on the wealthy. It worked this way for years—until Trump came to power.

Although the modern conservative has always courted the impoverished, bitter, uneducated populace with xenophobic and racist dog whistles, it was because their purposefulness lay in their numbers: they were useful idiots to the plutocracy. At some point, a populist politician was bound to come along who took that hatred to heart. Now, within Trump’s party, hatred is no longer the means to achieving its goal, but rather, it is the goal itself.  

White supremacists Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon exiting Air Force One

For most Republicans, the intention was never to turn the Party over to the unabashed racists and Nazis, but rather to court them and use them. Trump has flipped this script on its head. The people in the White House who are closest to Trump—the ones manipulating him—are people like Stephen Miller, who is working for genocide to become a reality. 

Miller is behind the worst of the worst impulses of the Trump administration, including abandoning the United States’ longstanding legal practice to not deport sick children. Trump ordered critically ill migrant children, such as kids with cancer, to be deported—even if it meant death. Immigrants who escaped here with their families to run from hit squads were ordered back without regard for their circumstances, only to be tortured and killed upon return to their home country.

The Trump administration even ordered immigration courts to take down all CDC coronavirus posters to stop the spread of the virus—the only possible reason being to encourage the spread of the disease among those deemed a burden.

Letting immigrants die was beyond cruel, as was tearing babies from their mothers and putting them in cages indefinitely, yet half of America just shrugged as it happened. Trump is still seriously being considered as a presidential contender, and most Republicans still haven’t abandoned him. In fact, Trump has effectively taken the Party over. The worst people, now in high places within Trump’s new GOP, have pushed Republican ideology ever closer to Nazi ideals.

It’s no secret that the people most in danger of dying from COVID-19 are the sick, the elderly, and the infirm. Conservative pundits also gleefully point out, incorrectly, that the virus is primarily a problem in Democratic areas. Yet I cannot imagine any Republican choice for president in this century—Mitt, Dubya, or McCain—coming out in favor of letting the virus ”wash over the masses.” I can’t fathom any of them suggesting that the sick and elderly should die to save the stock market. A nation’s economy is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around, and no one should ever be asked to die for Wall Street.

It wasn’t so long ago that the party of George W. Bush was outraged over Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state whose husband wanted to remove her from life support. It has only been a handful of years since the Republican rallying cry was “All Lives Matter.” It doesn’t surprise me how far Republicans have fallen, but it does amaze me how quickly Trump has turned them.

Yet that is exactly where we are now. Trump’s reelection and the GOP’s hold on power is so critical in their minds, they are demanding sacrifices be made.

Of course, the sacrifice these Republican leaders always speak of is from the weak and the poor. It is never their families who are asked to give up their money, their resources, or their lives.

Last month, White House National Economic Council chairman Larry Kudlow claimed in an interview that “The cure can’t be worse than the disease, and we’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs.” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said on live television that “lots of grandparents” are willing to “take a chance” on their survival for the good of the economy. Brit Hume of Fox News said it’s “entirely reasonable” to let family members die for the stock market.

The nation’s billionaires, along with other members of our elite, who have the luxury of being able to socially distance while making money, are almost unanimously in favor of getting people back to work. After all, they are dependent on the workers making them money if they want to keep their lifestyle intact. Who cares if health officials say it’s unsafe? If workers die, they can be replaced.

I can’t believe they say things like this out loud: 

“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know. “—Dick Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo 

“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people.” —Tom Golisano, the founder and chairman of payroll processor Paychex Inc.

Putting aside the immorality that making money for rich people should take precedence over a public health emergency, the very concept of allowing vast numbers of Americans to die to “save the economy” is completely illogical. By relaxing social restrictions too soon, the death rate will skyrocket. Our extremely fragile healthcare system will then collapse, and more businesses will crumble. Ironically, opening prematurely won't just kill more people, it will cause even more devastating economic harm.

At least one billionaire, Mark Cuban, was honest about billionaires’ intentions: "Ignore anything someone like me might say … lives are at stake.”

For all of the screaming about individual freedom that the right does, including attacks on our party for being “socialist,” I find it ironic that the Trumpian right-wing is now demanding that people submit to death for the state: the expendable workers, the sick, the grandparents and great-grandparents who have already lived their lives. All should sacrifice to serve for Trump’s reelection bid.

That’s the Republican plan, anyway. This is a serious discussion that’s worth having, we are being told. Many state and local leaders have fought strongly against opening too soon, but others are caving to the pressure to open up immediately. Although many will die, the Republicans will believe they have protected the business class elite—our “superiors.” The Nazification of the GOP will be complete.  

Republican governors are caving to their party’s demand to reopen, the consequences for their vulnerable constituents be damned. If that’s not an indication of how far our country has fallen since Trump, nothing is. It turns out that Trump openly mocking the disabled wasn’t the basement low of his party, but the ceiling. The trajectory of where the Republican Party is headed is far, far worse. 

I didn’t think we’d fall this far this fast. I can’t believe I’m literally debating—with Trump supporters in my neighborhood—the value of letting people live during this outbreak. How the fuck are we still having serious discussions about Trump’s electability?

Serious discussions of sacrificing the weak weren’t acceptable too long ago; I don’t even want to think what might be considered acceptable four years from now, if the right-wing is still clinging to power.

This terrifying stance should scare you to do everything you can to make sure this Nazified version of the GOP is thrown out of power this year. Otherwise, you or your family might be subjected to the "next stage." Right now, the right is asking for voluntary sacrifices of the old and weak, but history shows it's just a few atrocities away from being made mandatory.

Data be damned, Trump touts 'very strong' U.S. death totals per million Americans

Kerry Eleveld

Daily Kos Staff

Friday May 01, 2020 · 10:56 AM MDT

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You can't make this stuff up. The U.S. has now recorded far more deaths due to coronavirus than any another country—nearly 65,000 deaths as of about noon on Friday.

But Donald Trump is convinced this is a good thing. Right on the heels of son-in-law Jared Kushner declaring the rising U.S. death toll a "great success story," Trump framed the numbers in a positive light at Thursday's press conference. "Our death totals, our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong," Trump said. "We're very proud of the job we've done."

Trump was ever so inartfully suggesting that, in terms of deaths per million residents, the U.S. was really smelling like a rose. But that's just another lie that he wasn't even able to properly articulate. The U.S. is middling at best—doing better than some countries, such as Belgium, Spain, and Italy, but much worse than other countries, such as Germany, Austria, Canada, Mexico, and many, many others.

What's more, while many of the other European countries are starting to reach the back side of their spikes in cases, the U.S. is still in the middle of that journey. In other words, the U.S. could still easily end up crushing most other comparably situated countries in terms of deaths per million people.

Whatever the case, our country is presently skyrocketing past the 60,000 death toll that Trump floated last month as a huge victory for his administration. Now the stable genius and his minions are quickly moving the goal posts even as the U.S. government orders up 100,000 new body bags. 

Just go ahead and mark me down as tired of all the winning. Oh, and Kushner's proving to be just as sociopathic as Trump. I'm sure all those Americans currently grieving the loss of a loved one or even several loved ones were cheered by his celebration of Trump's exquisitely lethal successes.

 

Trump's efforts to find a COVID-19 scapegoat could make the disaster much, much worse

Of course, it was China and Obama teaming up.  Next thing you know he'll be blaming COVID-19 on Joe Biden.  Oh, he's already working on it. 

Mark Sumner

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday April 30, 2020 · 12:36 PM MDT

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Donald Trump spent a good deal of time on Thursday morning searching for a fresh distraction. After all, the press has proved again and again that they’ll jump at any crumb tossed their way, so Trump decided to have another go. However, in a situation where people are literally dying by the thousands, whether or not Michael Flynn has to spend one week in jail just doesn’t really move the news needle all that far.

So it hasn’t really taken Trump long to return to the main theme of this day and every day for the foreseeable future: Something else is to blame for the coronavirus disaster. That something? China. China. China. And, of course, Barack Obama.

Over the last several days, Donald Trump has regularly mixed somewhat cryptic remarks into his daily press events about “someone” making the decision “long ago” to not protect the United States against COVID-19.

On Thursday, Trump got more specific. In the midst of bragging about his “spectacular” response to the pandemic, Trump claimed: “We started off with bad, broken tests, and obsolete tests” bequeathed to him by the Obama administration.

CNN’s Jim Acosta, given the chance to ask a question, followed up to inquire just how it was possible that Obama could have provided Trump with “broken tests” for a virus that had not even been discovered until December of last year. Both China and WHO developed tests for SARS-CoV-2 in January, and the WHO tests were available around the world. But the United States spent all of that month and February fumbling around with a test that first generated bad results, then was finally available in extremely limited quantities.

That testing gap allowed COVID-19 to establish itself on both U.S. coasts almost undetected, with hundreds or even thousands of cases circulated at a time when the official numbers listed only dozens.

Trump’s response to how it was that Obama reached through time to provide bad tests for a virus that was completely unknown when he left office? "We had broken tests,” said Trump. “We had tests that were obsolete. We had tests that didn't take care of people." With that nonsense answer, Trump hustled back to bragging on the spectacularity of his outstandingly great response.

But of course, a gigantic disaster requires a gigantic scapegoating operation. Trump may not have lifted a finger to plan for the novel coronavirus, and he may feel like testing is something that has to be left the states, but when it comes to Operation Find Me A Scapegoat, Trump is engaging every aspect of the federal government.

That includes not just forcing the intelligence community to investigate China-related conspiracy theories along with ways to tie Joe Biden to the origins of the virus, but launching full speed ahead on “retaliating” against China before it’s proven that there is something to retaliate against.

It’s not as if China has done nothing wrong. Both local and national officials definitely did cover up the outbreak of novel coronavirus during the first weeks of December. China definitely did persecute doctors who tried to speak up about the first cases that came stumbling into Wuhan emergency rooms toward the end of the month. China did fail to warn people in the region, meaning that Wuhan went ahead with a Lunar New Year banquet attended by about 40,000 families—which was likely the cluster event that really sparked the outbreak, then epidemic, then pandemic.

China does not have “clean hands” in any sense when it comes to COVID-19. And China has since engaged in a game of matching conspiracy theories, responding to every claim that COVID-19 was generated in a Chinese biolab with claims that the virus could have originated from a U.S. lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Both the biolab conspiracy theories are just that—conspiracy theories. Careful examination of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has revealed no evidence that it was in any sense modified by humans. Instead, it appears to be closely related to other coronaviruses that made the trek from bats to humans through some other host. In fact, cases in which both cats and dogs have come down with COVID-19 indicates that the virus can infect a very wide range of mammals. The chain between bats and people may have more than one link.

The truth is that China did try to cover up the early days of COVID-19, likely out of concern for creating a dent in their own economy and providing an issue that could be fodder for dissidents. But the truth is also that by the end of December, China was forced to fess up to the World Health Organization and seek help in dealing with the fast-growing outbreak. Throughout January, China regularly produced updates on the situation and the WHO produced daily situational reports.

China provided samples of the virus within days of that first announcement and the genetic sequence of the virus was established within a week.

In one of his first appearances to discuss the virus on Jan. 24, Trump had nothing but high praise for his old golf-and-cake buddy Xi Jinping and for the efforts of the Chinese government. He followed up with this tweet:

The Trump went back to playing golf and holding rallies right up until the first week of March, by which point the explosive growth of cases within the United States, fostered by an utter lack of testing, was unstoppable.

Since then, Trump’s sudden need for someone else to take the fall has resulting in cutting off all funding to the World Health Organization in the midst of a global pandemic—an act that might be slotted into the dictionary under “crimes against humanity.” Trump has also made it clear that he now wants to thank President Xi by taking action against China. But it’s absolutely unclear just what kind of action Trump intends to take.

Trump’s White House dream team—including the brain trust of Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, and Stephen Miller—are seeking out ways that China might be punished.

That has included coughing up such thoughts as removing China’s sovereign immunity, an act that would go a long way toward completing Trump’s previous efforts to make the U.S. into a rogue nation. Or the U.S. could simply declare some of those trillions in U.S. bonds that China is holding to be worthless, which would probably have the result of taking the U.S. economy and burying it a mile deep. Or the U.S. could demand that China pay reparations. That last option is likely the best, because it would only result in in the world finding the Trump White House ridiculous, and that’s already a done deal.

COVID-19 is a devastating pandemic that is going to kill hundreds of thousands and signal the end of over a decade of economic growth both in the U.S. and around the world. However, it need not be a true “black swan” event in the sense of representing a disruption that sets back world progress and triggers a cascade of additional disasters, including a genuine economic collapse.

It doesn’t have to be that bad. But Donald Trump is doing everything he can to make it that bad.