Politics that forgives cruelty as the price of profit

I didn’t post anything last night. I had posted something for 57 straight days (it’s been eight weeks already?). I tag my posts with topics (which doesn’t show up when posts are sent by email) and the “coronavirus” tag has been used on 51 posts. I’m sure that is the fastest rise of any tag in my blog’s twelve year history.

So after all that as I reviewed news stories yesterday I kept thinking each one was another example of something I’ve already written about.

So I didn’t.

However, there are things to write about today.



Spoon & Tamago tweeted about an experiment done by NHK. They applied fluorescent paint to the hands of one person, then had ten people dine at a cruise buffet.

In 30 min the paint had transferred to every individual and was on the faces of 3.

The tweet has a short video showing what happened.



The drug remdesivir is showing promise as a way to treat people with COVID-19 and got approval from the Food and Drug Administration for distribution as fast as it can be produced. Doctors complain that the distribution is being botched. And Gilead, the company that makes it, is estimated to spend $1 for a one day dose, yet will probably charge $450 for that dose.

So don’t trust the nasty guy and his minions to smoothly make a vaccine available that everyone can afford.



G. Elliott Morris tweeted a chart of the monthly change in people on payrolls. Prior to the April numbers released yesterday, the biggest changes were a drop of 2 million in Sept. 1945 and a rise of 1.1 million in Sept. 1983. In April (actually, mid March to mid April) the number of people on payrolls dropped by 20.5 million.

So what happened at the end of WWII to cause such a sharp drop in employment? Soldiers and sailors leaving the military? Rosie the Riveter going home?

Meteor Blades of Daily Kos has more details of the April jobs report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.



Kerry Eleveld of Kos says the nasty guy had stopped bothering with phase I of his coronavirus respose – pretending to care that the death toll keeps rising at alarming rates. On to phase II! Wrote Eleveld:

After thoroughly hobbling the entire U.S. pandemic response in the first phase and then feigning concern, Trump's second phase is all about leading a completely unprepared country into the buzz saw of an economic reopening.

Naturally, Trump has laid no actual groundwork to avoid a public health calamity, he's simply greased the skids to shirk responsibility for the mounting death toll. Governors will be on hook for the potentially catastrophic consequences of his reckless push to reopen the economy; and a skyrocketing American death toll is simply the price that must be paid in order for Trump to maintain his grip on power.
...
But epic stories never involve just two acts. In the final months leading up to the November election, Trump will roll out Phase III, a fantastical effort to gaslight America about the trauma it continues to endure, who's really at fault (not Trump—China, the governors, Obama!), and whether it's even real (the body count's fake news!).

Worldometer reports today that the US total cases is above 1.3 million and the total deaths has topped 80 thousand. The numbers worldwide are 4 million cases, 280 thousand deaths, 1.4 million recovered.



With a death count that high Matthew Dowd tweeted:

Exactly what can the incumbent President run on? He can’t run on the economy. He can’t run on healthcare. He can’t run as a moral leader. He can’t run on bring the country together. He can’t run on leaders he put in power. He can’t run on justice. Exactly what can he run on?

Agent NDN replied:

Hate.

Worked well the first time.

Others add: voter suppression.

Lean McElrath retweeted from Marc Elias who commented on a story in Politico:

@RNC says it is doubling its budget to oppose voting rights in court to $20,000,000.

Republican spox: RNC is prepared to sue Democrats "into oblivion and spend whatever is necessary."

Which is why I’m not paying as much attention to the polls as my friend and debate partner.



The Department formerly known as Justice has dropped its case against Michael Flynn. I don’t remember what he did, only that he’s a nasty guy crony. That prompted Garry Kasparov to tweet:

Corrupt regimes don’t fight crime, they legalize it. They don’t chase the crooks, they hire them. They don’t stop lying, they tell you the truth is whatever they say.

A quote of the day:

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
~~Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)

And another. This one from Evan Osnos of the New Yorker

On the ground where I grew up, some of America’s powerful people have championed a version of capitalism that liberates wealth from responsibility. They embraced a fable of self-reliance (except when the fable is untenable), a philosophy of business that leaches more wealth from the real economy than it creates, and a vision of politics that forgives cruelty as the price of profit. In the long battle between the self and service, we have, for the moment, settled firmly on the self. To borrow a phrase from a neighbor in disgrace, we stopped worrying about “the moral issue here.”

Max Berger tweeted:

Who is @TheDemocrats spokesperson on Trump’s failures that led to the Great Depression and mass death?

Why isn’t there one?

Why aren’t Biden and Nancy Pelosi (or someone they deputize) on TV every day explaining what Trump and the GOP did wrong and what Democrats are going to do to fix it?

I feel like I’m going insane.

We are witnessing a social collapse the scale of which we haven't seen, at least since the Great Depression. The Trump admin is destroying our democracy in broad daylight.

And it feels like we don't have an opposition party that's offering an alternative program or vision.

Heathter Havrilesky also tweeted her complaints of the Dems:

For the stretch of my entire life, I've watched Democrats lose sleep over how the GOP would spin their story. The insecurity of that. It's just baffling.

Tell your own story without cringing! You don't even have to be a storyteller anymore! Open your f***ing eyes and reflect what we're all seeing. If this isn't a time for Democrats to make a scene, they're not even alive in there.

… I want to see your red, sweating face on my tv screen or it didn't happen.

Thousands of students jumped on the idea of having Barack and Michelle Obama speak at a virtual commencement for the Class of 2020. Aysha Qamar of *Kos* noted, “Within five hours, the tweet was retweeted over 40,000 times with almost 200,000 likes, and even celebrities reposted it, Business Insider reported.” The Obamas accepted the invitation and will take part in several virtual events. Cool!



Leah McElrath is asking people to observe a memorial moment every evening. We must remember the dead. Today’s stats:
280,000+ dead worldwide
4,200+ deaths today
80,036 dead in the US
1,421 deaths today

McElrath wrote:

We must never become desensitized to mass death happening in our communities and around the world.