A stadium full of Americans

Leah McElrath tweeted this along with a picture (you’ll have to follow the link to see it):

If a stadium full of Americans had been bombed and killed, people would understand the urgency of the need to respond to the threat, right?

Well, this is Dodger Stadium in LA on opening day in 2017.

That’s how many people have died in the US from COVID19.

So far.

Dodger Stadium seats 56,000 people. McElrath tweeted that a couple days ago. The US death toll has passed 57,000. And that’s the people we know died of the virus. There are likely thousands more who died of the virus but, because they weren’t tested, aren’t a part of the official count.

Replying to someone else McElrath noted this is the number dead in three months and is almost the number of US soldiers who died in Vietnam over ten years.

This number of dead doesn’t make sense to some people – why would the nasty guy cause a mass casualty event – including in his own base – just before an election? Sarah Kendzior replied:

He never intended to be re-elected; he intends to be reinstalled. Trump and his backers never sought a free and fair election, so they don't have the normal concerns that come with one -- like winning people over, or not killing your own potential voters.

Karine Jeah-Pierre, chief public affairs officer for Move On, tweeted a quote from a CBS News article:

Roughly 95% of Black-owned businesses, 91% of Latino-owned businesses, 91% of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander-owned businesses, & 75% of Asian-owned businesses stand close to no chance of receiving a PPP loan through a mainstream bank or credit union.

Samuel Sinyangwe reinforces the point:

The PPP program is going to produce one of the most severe expansions of the racial wealth gap in history. A $660,000,000,000 wealth transfer to a privileged class of white-owned businesses while black and brown businesses are left struggling.

More about Moscow Mitch and his insistence on no blue state bailouts. Various red state officials are are also saying such things as why should someone on Dodge City, KS pay more in taxes to bail out NY and NJ?

Because, says Kos of Kos, blue states bail out red states every year. Red states got bailed out after long term flooding last spring. Then there are those bailouts to red state Florida after every hurricane. And red states get a budget bailout every year. Kentucky (Moscow Mitch’s state) is at the top of that windfall. And Florida and Kansas get a sweet bonus too. Nearly all of the top states who get more from the feds than they pay in taxes were red in the 2016 election.

Wrote Kos:

Red states clearly think they can keep up this bullcrap—pretending to be budgetary stalwarts in the face of profligate Democratic spending, claiming that it’s Democratic states and cities (i.e. Black Americans), that are sucking the budget dry. Yet the reality is the exact opposite.

And yet Democrats, with their desire to help people, were far too tolerant of this misinformation. No more.

Republicans don’t want disaster relief for the states hit hardest by the virus? Then no more disaster relief for states hit with hurricanes and floods and droughts.

Republicans want to shrink the budget deficit, and don’t want to raise taxes on the rich? Fine. Kentucky, you go first.

And…

A day later several red states are asking for bailouts, money to fix their budget holes caused by the virus.

Kos asks why don’t we start acting like the United States and stop with this red/blue stuff? Kos then shared a couple maps, saying they show what the country could become if it splits. I had written about the first map, the West Coast Pact and the pact of states around NYC, at about the time Michigan and neighboring states were forming a pact.

The second map shows similar coordination efforts and agreements along the Missouri River, around Arizona, among the central mountain states, between six states in the south, North Carolina to Maryland, and in New England. I think I count about ten of these agreements, some overlapping. There are even pacts between counties and between cities. And Washington State is also working with British Columbia.

Sarah Parcak, who wrote Archaeology from Space, also tweeted this second map and notes this same rise of regional power centers happened when the Old Kingdom of Egypt collapse about 4,000 years ago.