RSN: There Is a Children's Coronavirus Manifestation. It's Called MIS-C

18 May 20

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18 May 20

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There Is a Children's Coronavirus Manifestation. It's Called MIS-C

Ariana Eunjung Cha and Chelsea Janes, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The day Juliet Daly's heart gave out started much like every other Monday during the quarantine."
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Lindsey Graham. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)

Karen J. Greenberg | Over There Is Now Over Here: America's Pandemic Role Reversal
Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch
Greenberg writes: "With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope."
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A grocery worker unpacks boxes of food outside of a Brooklyn grocery store on April 23. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Essential Workers Are Losing Their Hazard Pay Even Though the Hazard Isn't Over
Anna North, Vox
Excerpt: "Kroger and other companies provided 'hero pay' to employees as the pandemic ratcheted up the risk to their safety. For many, it will end this month."
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The debate over masks in America has its roots in a misunderstanding of personal freedom. (image: Getty Images Plus/Slate)

Refusing to Wear a Mask Is a Uniquely American Pathology
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Lithwick writes: "It is strange, about the masks. That it's masks that have become charged objects, signifying the difference between Americans who want to protect themselves and others from COVID-19 and those who refuse to believe in COVID-19, is no longer in doubt."
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A homophobic banner unfurled at a football match between OGC Nice and Olympique de Marseille in August last year. (photo: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images)

Homophobic Crimes Rise by More Than a Third in France
Agence France-Presse
Excerpt: "Homophobic attacks and insults in France rose by 36% last year, according to figures released by the interior ministry, prompting the government to talk of an 'anchoring' of homophobia in the country."
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Gravediggers wearing suits and face masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus bury a body Friday at the Jardínes del Recuerdo cemetery in Managua, Nicaragua. (photo: Inti Ocon/AFP/Getty Images)

'Express Burials' Raise Fears That Nicaragua Is Hiding a Coronavirus Tragedy
Ismael López Ocampo and Mary Beth Sheridan, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Guillermo Maltez called his son late one night to say goodbye. The 59-year-old taxi driver was being disconnected from a respirator in a Nicaraguan hospital."
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Leaders from East Pomio local-level government communities at the convention. (photo: Wide Bay Conservation Association/Mongabay)

Gender-Based Violence Shakes Communities in the Wake of Forest Loss
John C. Cannon, Mongabay
Cannon writes: "Women in the province of East New Britain in Papua New Guinea say they have faced increasing domestic violence, along with issues like teenage pregnancy and drug abuse, in their communities as logging and oil palm plantations have moved in."
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The FAKE GLOBAL PANDEMIC

From a good friend on FB, his words, not mine.

Andrew Young

Having worked at the National Institutes of Health and knowing folks from CDC, the fact that the excretory reject in the White House is blaming CDC for HIS OWN FAILURE to act early enough is so goddam telling.

The CDC is a top notch organization with professionals who monitor this stuff like there was no tomorrow. These were the people that were trying to get the president to act quicker.

If you still think that voting for this guy in November is good for the country --after which I'm sure we've had will have reached a 150,000 deaths.... How many more deaths does it take?

COMMENT: 
Yes indeed! Trumpianism is 1.) Point-Fingers, 2.) Blame-Shame, 3.) Name-Call, and 4.) Disavow all Responsibility or Knowledge (while being in "Full Authority"...LOL).

RSN: Harvey Wasserman | How the Woodrow Wilson Influenza of 1918 and the TrumpVirus Pandemic of 2020 Brought Fascism to America

18 May 20

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18 May 20

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ON FUNDING, AN EXTRAORDINARY EFFORT IS ALWAYS NEEDED - We don’t get reasonable donations by being reasonable. It always requires a major intense effort to get the few donations we need to meet our expenses. If you care about this project, bear with us, we have to battle for a budget. With respect and appreciation. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | How the Woodrow Wilson Influenza of 1918 and the TrumpVirus Pandemic of 2020 Brought Fascism to America

Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Wasserman writes: "The 2020 TrumpVirus Pandemic that is killing so many of us today has deep roots in World War I and the Woodrow Wilson Influenza that killed 50,000,000 back then."

Mark Twain once quipped that history doesn’t repeat itself, but “it does rhyme.”

Along with mass death, both viruses have brought fascism to America. To avoid a full-on replay, we need to know how.

Like today’s TrumpVirus catastrophe, the global pandemic of 102 years ago was almost entirely avoidable. It was not an innocent accident or Act of Nature. It spread from the fascist decisions of one man: Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was elected president in 1912 as a liberal democrat. He sold himself as a man of peace. But he was (like Donald Trump) a KKK-supporting White Supremacist. In 1915, for no good reason, he sent US troops crashing into Mexico City to “teach a lesson” to “our little brown brothers.”

In 1916, Wilson narrowly won re-election with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Then he dragged us in.

US involvement in WWI was hugely unpopular. Its best-known opponent was the legendary Indiana-born Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Workers and unionists by the tens of millions saw him as an “American Saint.” Tireless, incorruptible, and charismatic, he drew huge crowds wherever he spoke, and might well have become our first Socialist president in 1920.

But on September 11, 1918, using dubious dictatorial powers, federal agents imprisoned Debs for speaking against the war. Wilson’s Gestapo-style “Red Scare” illegally arrested, assaulted, and murdered countless grassroots organizers, activists, and laborers. Armed federal thugs broke into private homes, trashed offices, and assaulted peaceful protestors. J. Edgar Hoover’s nascent Federal Bureau of Investigations busted citizens who merely criticized Wilson in private conversations or carried his own quotations on placards at public marches.

Wilson’s 1918-1920 federal assault on the US Constitution was every bit as totalitarian as the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 or the CIA-sponsored Chilean putsch of 1973. Its purpose was to destroy an American Socialist Party widely embraced as a legitimate alternative to the Democrats/Republicans, and to guarantee Eugene Debs did not become president.

In 1920, Gene got 900,000 votes while locked in a federal prison cell. Had he been free to campaign, with his grassroots movement intact, he might have uprooted America’s two-party system and transformed our political economy forever.

But there was also a virus on the loose. Some 650,000 Americans were dead from the infamous 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic. Like Trump in 2020, Woodrow Wilson caused its spread.

Opinions differ about where the global pandemic originated. But the virus that killed so many Americans erupted in rural Haskell County in southeastern Kansas.

Historian John Barry believes the virus may have crossed from a pig to a farmer. As the flu spread, a local doctor warned federal health officials. Had they not been distracted by war, and had they responded with reasonable medical attention, the area would have been quickly quarantined. Few would have died. The virus might have been a minor footnote.

But Wilson was beating the drums of war. A young farmer brought the disease to the Army’s Camp Funston (later Fort Riley) 300 miles away. The astonishingly contagious virus tore through a cramped, overcrowded camp with more than 50,000 recruits. Soldiers, nurses, and ordinary citizens who took sick in the morning were often dead by nightfall.

By any standard of sanity, the camp and region should have been immediately isolated. But Wilson was hell-bent on war. His hastily constructed, absurdly packed barracks stretched across the nation and became the perfect network for mass breeding and spreading a communicable disease. Countless soldiers stuffed onto deathly trains spread Wilson’s flu like wildfire. Even deadlier ships took it overseas.

Countless previously healthy young men and women were pitched into mass graves or the ocean long before they saw battle. Survivors spread the virus into Europe, then worldwide. It became known as “the Spanish Flu” because only Spain, which was neutral in the war, openly reported on the hideous death toll, which soared into the millions, on their own soil.

Wilson upped the ante by staging mass rallies to sell war bonds. In Philadelphia, some 200,000 gathered. Then at least 15,000 quickly died. Corpses were stacked in the streets, where rats and wild dogs soon roamed. Medicines, caskets, and gravesites disappeared as medical personnel fell dead. Bereaved families hid bodies at home, then dumped them into unmarked mass graves.

As today in Trump’s disease-ravaged backwaters, civilization itself hovered at the brink of collapse.

Alone among big US cities, San Francisco limited 1918’s early death toll with masks and social distancing. But when the flu returned in the fall, skepticism and fatigue won out, and the dead piled up.

Focused on war, Wilson’s network of military camps was perfectly designed to spread the flu, which he caught himself in Paris, 1919. Deathly ill, he approved harsh German reparations that fed the rise of Hitler. A stroke soon followed, debilitating him for the final year of his term. “Madness,” he mourned, “has entered everything.”

(Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt also caught the flu. He recovered, but three years later fell victim to polio, and never walked again).

Had Wilson fought the virus instead of the war, some 675,000 Americans might have been spared their useless, painful deaths. Millions more might have avoided the terrible poverty, pain, and political terror that came with the shredding of the social fabric.

A century later, Donald Trump could also have spared America its viral catastrophe.

Before its arrival, Trump dismantled well-established agencies specifically designed to fight predictable pandemics like this one. When the virus hit, he ignored desperate medical professionals who warned him very explicitly of what was about to happen.

Desperate to preserve the illusion of a booming economy, Trump refused to protect public health. He let vital supplies and equipment run short, then made states fight for them. He promoted untested treatments like hydroxychloroquine (in which he has personal investments), advocated drinking bleach, and attacked Obamacare and other vital insurance programs.

Like Wilson’s pandemic, nearly all the Trump-COVID disease, death, and economic ruination could have been avoided.

Trump’s malignant neglect has not so far killed 650,000 Americans. But he may get there yet with the rapid escalation of the death toll by demanding “business as usual” without sane precautions.

As during WWI, the US has again been at the brink of transformation. Powered by Millennials, the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders drew in the 2016 and 2020 primaries a dozen times more votes than did Debs a century ago.

In response, like Wilson, Trump demands dictatorial powers. Authoritarian imposition, fascist death squads, illegal assault, wrongful imprisonment, vindictive retribution, armed street thugs, an anti-immigrant “final solution,” and a fascist iron fist are all on the Trump wish list.

Like Woodrow Wilson’s pandemic, today’s TrumpVirus nightmare shreds our health, kills our kin, destroys the heart of our legal infrastructure, the soul of our social fabric, and what’s left of our ravaged civilization.

If this is Mark Twain’s historic rhyming, it demands nothing less than an epic transcendent response … without which our nation and our species might well perish.

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Harvey Wasserman’s People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org along with Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. His Green Power & Wellness Show is podcast at prn.fm; California Solartopia is broadcast at KPFK/Pacifica 90.7 fm Los Angeles.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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