11 July 20
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11 July 20
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "I don't know about you, but I'm feeling more and more as if we're all trapped on the Titanic - except that this time around the captain is a madman who insists on steering straight for the iceberg."
And his crew is too cowardly to contradict him, let alone mutiny to save the passengers.
A month ago it was still possible to hope that the push by Donald Trump and the Trumpist governors of Sunbelt states to relax social distancing and reopen businesses like restaurants and bars — even though we met none of the criteria for doing so safely — wouldn’t have completely catastrophic results.
At this point, however, it’s clear that everything the experts warned was likely to happen, is happening. Daily new cases of Covid-19 are running two and a half times as high as in early June, and rising fast. Hospitals in early-reopening states are under terrible pressure. National death totals are still declining thanks to falling fatalities in the Northeast, but they’re rising in the Sunbelt, and the worst is surely yet to come.
A normal president and a normal political party would be horrified by this turn of events. They would realize that they made a bad call and that it was time for a major course correction; they would start taking warnings from health experts seriously.
But Trump, who began his presidency with a lurid, fact-challenged rant about “American carnage,” seems completely untroubled by the toll from a pandemic that seems certain to kill more Americans than were murdered over the whole of the past decade. And he’s doubling down on his rejection of expertise, this week demanding full reopening of schools in defiance of existing guidelines.
Oh, and he still won’t call on Americans to protect one another by wearing masks, or set an example by wearing one himself.
How can we make sense of Trump’s pathologically inept response to the coronavirus? There’s an underlying core of utter cynicism: Clearly, Trump and those around him don’t care very much how many Americans die or suffer lasting damage from Covid-19, as long as the politics work in their favor. But this cynicism is wrapped in multiple layers of delusion.
On one side, it’s clear that the Trumpists still can’t accept that this is really happening.
Until early 2020, Trump led a charmed political life. All his recent predecessors had to deal with some kind of external challenge during their first three years. Barack Obama inherited an economy wracked by a financial crisis. Whatever you think of his response, George W. Bush faced 9/11. Bill Clinton faced stubbornly high unemployment. But Trump inherited a nation at peace and in the middle of a long economic expansion that continued, with no visible change in the trend, after he took office.
Then came Covid-19. Another president might have seen the pandemic as a crisis to be dealt with. But that thought never seems to have crossed Trump’s mind. Instead, he has spent the past five months trying to will us back to where we were in February, when he was sitting on top of a moving train and pretending that he was driving it.
This helps explain his otherwise bizarre aversion to masks: They remind people that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, which is something he wants everyone to forget. Unfortunately for him — and for the rest of us — positive thinking won’t make a virus go away.
That, however, is where the second layer of delusion comes in. By now it’s clear that the cynical decision to sacrifice American lives in pursuit of political advantage is failing even on its own terms. The rush to reopen did produce big job gains in May and early June, but voters were distinctly unimpressed; his polling just kept getting worse. This year, it’s not the economy, stupid — it’s the virus.
And now the surge in infections may be causing the economic recovery to stall.
In other words, the strategy of “damn the experts, full speed ahead” is looking foolish as well as immoral. But Trump, far from reconsidering, is digging the hole he’s in ever deeper — much the same way that he keeps turning up the dial on racism despite the fact that it’s not working for him politically. Incredibly, even as hospitalizations climb he’s still insisting that the rise in reported cases is just an illusion created by more testing.
So what can we do? Trump has another six months in office (if he’s still there after Jan. 20, God help us all). And it’s now clear that he won’t change course, no matter how bad the pandemic gets. As I said, we’re all passengers at the mercy of a mad captain determined to wreck his ship.
It’s true that federalism is our friend. Trump doesn’t actually have any direct authority over things like school openings. And many though not all states have rational governors who are trying to contain the damage, although it’s hard to keep the lid on in New Jersey or Michigan when the coronavirus is running wild in Florida.
But a lot more Americans are going to die. And if Joe Biden becomes president, he, like Obama 12 years ago, is going to take the helm of a nation in a deep crisis.
Roger Stone. (photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Trump Commutes Sentence of Roger Stone, Longtime Friend and Adviser
Maanvi Singh, Guardian UK
Singh writes: "Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser who was to spend three years and four months in jail for crimes related to the Russia investigation."
READ MORE
Maanvi Singh, Guardian UK
Singh writes: "Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser who was to spend three years and four months in jail for crimes related to the Russia investigation."
READ MORE
'Dataminr relayed tweets and other social media content about the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests directly to police, apparently across the country.' (photo: Soohee Cho/The Intercept/Getty Images
Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr
Sam Biddle, The Intercept
Biddle writes: "Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests that swept the country following the killing of George Floyd."
READ MORE
Sam Biddle, The Intercept
Biddle writes: "Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests that swept the country following the killing of George Floyd."
READ MORE
The Bridge of the Americas connects Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
How the Trump Administration Is Turning Legal Immigrants Into Undocumented Ones
Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Rampell writes: "The Trump administration is turning legal immigrants into undocumented ones."
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Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Rampell writes: "The Trump administration is turning legal immigrants into undocumented ones."
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Derrick Slaughter, age five, attends a march against the epidemic of heroin in Ohio. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Meagan Day, Jacobin
Day writes: "Disgraced opioid tycoon Jonathan Sackler died last week, two decades into a nationwide addiction epidemic that he helped create - and from which he pocketed billions."
His life of spreading addiction was a monument to the brutal pathologies of capitalism.
n 1999, two classmates asked me to the fifth grade dance. By 2009, both of them had developed opioid addictions. By 2019, one was sober, and the other was dead from a heroin overdose. The one who died left behind an infant son. “I never gave up on you,” my classmate’s mother posted on Facebook, “but you would not let me help you.” She chose a photo of him from around the time we slow-danced to the Aerosmith song from the Armageddon soundtrack.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention statistics on opioid overdose deaths start that same year, in 1999. Since then, nearly half a million Americans have died from overdoses on prescription and illicit opioids. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, and opioids are involved in two-thirds of them. Four out of five new heroin users are transitioning from misusing prescription opioids. More than one hundred people are now dying from opioid overdoses in the United States every day.
It’s well established now that the proliferation of prescription opioids, particularly the game-changing painkiller OxyContin, fueled the broader addiction epidemic. You can see the progression of the crisis in the data. The opioid deaths have come in three waves: first a rise in deaths from prescription opioids starting in 1999, followed by a rise in deaths from heroin overdoses beginning in 2010; then an explosion in deaths from dangerous synthetic opioids like fentanyl starting in 2013. For every person who dies, hundreds more are entangled in the criminal justice system, and thousands more are struggling with addiction as their lives fall apart.
The crisis has swallowed entire communities. The primary industry in the town of Oceana, West Virginia used to be coal mining. Now it’s the black-market opioid trade, and the town is nicknamed Oxyana. In a documentary about the town, an opioid addict explains, “If you don’t work in the mines, the only other way you’ve got to make money anywhere close to working in the mines is to sell drugs. If you don’t see somebody getting up in the morning and going to work, they’re selling pills.” Overdoses are common in Oceana, and so too is violence related to the drug trade. A local dentist describes the opioid crisis as a darkness that has descended so heavily on the town that it’s even cast a pall over its natural beauty, a gray shroud over the green mountains.
The life I shared with my classmates was worlds away from Oceana, but the pills are everywhere, from double-wides in rural West Virginia to McMansions in the Texas suburbs. The story of how they became so ubiquitous begins when Purdue Pharma decided to manufacture OxyContin. Emails from a Purdue executive in 1999 demonstrate awareness that there was no evidence that controlled-release opioids were less addictive, and yet the company consistently made this claim in order to get OxyContin on the market and into the hands of as many consumers as possible. Purdue then spent decades downplaying the drug’s abuse potential, despite knowledge to the contrary.
For several years now, Purdue has been dragged through both the formal legal system and the court of public opinion. The public backlash has been ferocious: Americans are now more inclined to place heavy blame on the pharmaceutical industry for encouraging doctors to overprescribe the drugs than on individual drug users for becoming addicted.
Correspondingly, it’s hard to think of an American capitalist dynasty more roundly condemned in recent years than the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma. The family has followed the philanthropic playbook, lavishing art museums and university departments with funds to burnish the Sackler image, but this hasn’t shielded them from popular wrath. Their transgressions are too intolerable, and the contrast between their astronomical wealth and the devastation they’ve left in their wake is too stark to ignore. The Sacklers are intensely private, but with $13 billion at their collective disposal it’s impossible not to picture them lounging on superyacht sundecks while ordinary Americans fill the halfway houses and the morgues.
It’s no surprise then that when news of co-owner Jonathan Sackler’s death broke earlier this week, the reaction on social media was unsympathetic, to put it gently. On the one hand, the role of a single person in orchestrating this crisis shouldn’t be overstated. The deceased was only one member of the family that built and profited from the OxyContin empire, and despite its outsize role, not even Purdue Pharma bears sole responsibility for the calamity. Consider the deindustrialization and austerity that have left places like Oceana vulnerable to an explosion in the pill trade, its people desperate for money and release.
On the other hand, it’s easy to comprehend why the news of Jonathan Sackler’s passing received such a cold reception. With the constant churn of the news cycle, the new distractions, and the fresh terrors, it’s easy for some to forget that the opioid epidemic is still raging. Others are still electrified with grief. Did the Sackler family mourn the loss of their spouse, child, or friend?
The opioid crisis has claimed nearly five hundred thousand lives since 1999. That’s five hundred thousand irreparable tears in the fabric of millions of people’s personal worlds. Not only that, but nearly one-third of Americans know someone who is currently addicted to opioids. That’s more than one hundred million people actively witnessing, at various distances, the slow fade from life to death. Most feel helpless to reverse it, not least because capitalists like the Sacklers prefer to redistribute their money on a thoroughly volunteer basis, starving public services and rendering help hard to find for those without means.
In 2009, the midpoint in this saga so far, another boy I knew died of an opioid overdose. He was sixteen. He’d already established himself as an athlete when he was serendipitously cast in a school musical, where he discovered — as we all discovered, with pride and delight — that he could really sing.
There’s a video of him still up on Facebook from shortly before he died singing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song at an open mic. “I better not leave before I get my chance to ride,” go the lyrics. “All my life to sacrifice.” And sacrifice for what? For $35 billion, $10 billion of it straight to the bank. Hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed at the altar of profit. That, more than all the museum wings and endowed professorships put together, will be the Sackler legacy.
Temuco police detain Mapuche vegetable vendors in Araucania, Chile. (photo: @RNahuel_XXI/Twitter)
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Chile's head of indigenous health issues at Chile's Medical Union, Dr. Nelson Vergara, stated the government's pandemic-management strategy discriminates aboriginal people."
Since the early pandemic, indigenous patients’ data collection has not been accurate, which hinders the actual virus’ impact on their communities.
hile's head of indigenous health issues at Chile's Medical Union, Dr. Nelson Vergara, stated the government's pandemic-management strategy discriminates aboriginal people.
"The government said it was well prepared for the pandemic, but these preparations were designed for Euro-descendant urban populations," said Dr. Vergara.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, indigenous patients' data collection has not been accurate, which hinders the actual virus' impact on their communities.
Alongside this situation, the main precautionary measures are intended for urban residents, neglecting rural or peripheral settlements that house most of the indigenous communities.
Araucania, the Mapuche people's territory, is one of the poorest Chilean regions. Local authorities registered about 2895 deceased due to the virus, forty-five percent of the national toll.
Besides, the Indigenous economy relies on informal activities, such as pine nuts selling, greens trade, and handcrafting. Facing poverty and income irregularities, they cannot comply with mandatory quarantines.
As of Friday, Chile's health authorities recorded 309,274 COVID-19 cases, 6,781 deaths, and 278,053 recoveries from the virus.
'Environmental justice often intersects with other public health issues for Black and brown communities.' (photo: Ira L. Black/Corbis/Getty Images)
Angely Mercado, Grist
Mercado writes: "As the U.S. enters another month of sustained protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality, organizers are working to turn the protests' energy into legislative action."
“We crafted this bill to be big,” said Gina Clayton Johnson, the executive director of Essie Justice Group and one of the act’s creators, during a virtual announcement event reported by New York Magazine’s The Cut. “We know the solution has to be as big as the 400-year-old problem itself.”
The proposal is divided into four sections that each address different approaches to sustainable public safety: The first two sections call for the divestment of federal resources from policing and incarceration, as well as federal grant programs for alternative community-led approaches to non-punitive public safety.
The proposal’s third section, however, demonstrates that environmental justice is central to the proposal’s vision. It calls for the creation of a grant that will fund solutions for environmental justice issues that affect Black communities around the country. The grant would fund “clear, time-bound plans” for states to ensure universal access to clean water and air that satisfies Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. The section also calls for for the creation of clear state plans to meet 100 percent of their electricity demand with “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Funding for community-owned sustainable energy projects would be subsidized by the grant. Disaster preparedness would also be prioritized.
Environmental justice often intersects with other public health issues for Black and brown communities. In recent months, for example, it’s become clear that Black and Latino communities in the U.S. suffer higher mortality and hospitalization rates from the novel coronavirus. This May, Democrats in Congress introduced the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act to look at the connection between air pollution and disproportionate COVID-19 outcomes for these communities.
The BREATHE Act has not yet been translated into actionable congressional legislation, but Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley both expressed their support for the proposal during a virtual meeting this week.
“The BREATHE Act is bold…. It pushes us to reimagine power structures and what community investment really looks like,” Tlaib said during a recent call with activists. “We can start to envision through this bill a new vision for public safety. One that protects and affirms Black lives.”
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