Honesty over unity and justice over peace

I downloaded the Michigan coronavirus data today as I’ve done for many Saturdays since summer. There’s a downturn in cases per day over the last ten days. However, I don’t yet trust it as real. First, because Thanksgiving Day disrupted record gathering. Second, a peak about 2½ weeks ago has risen from 9,500 new cases to 10,000 as cases are assigned to the day symptoms first appeared, not the day reported. If a day 2½ weeks ago was adjusted I’m pretty sure days since then will be too. I noticed a new feature on the state website – a slide deck giving all sorts of data on the virus in Michigan. The deck was created on November 24 based on data up to November 21, so about a week old. There were comparisons to other states, comparisons amongst cities in the state, data on testing, on numbers of cases, and deaths. I’m glad my personal charting program shows lines that match those in the state charts. The data also has data on cases by age, race, and ethnicity. A chart shows the likely places of contact – assisted living, K-12 schools, and manufacturing are at the top of the chart. Another shows cases by region of the state – around Grand Rapids and the Upper Peninsula are hotspots. A chart shows rate of ICU use and another shows data on contact tracing. I got it all here. I found it interesting, though know it might be more data than you want. I read through another episode of Gaslit Nation hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled The Breitbart Senate. Chalupa reminded us we can all do something to get two Democrats elected in the Georgia runoff on January 5th. If they win they will boot Moscow Mitch from the job of Senate Majority Leader. So do what you can! Back to the coup. It’s not over yet, though we seem to be in a quiet time. Though none of the predicted tactics have worked there are still plenty the nasty guy can do. There are still attempts at litigation to get a case before the Supreme Court where his lackeys, Kavanaugh and Barrett, can grant a second term. Kendzior wrote:

Trump and his backers may also turn to actual violence, threats of violence that function as intimidation, continued bureaucratic obstruction or creating a national emergency as a pretext to invoke the military. This is worth considering given all the strange hirings and firings at the DoD over the last month. These are just a few possible measures. Trump may also be cutting a deal behind the scenes so that he is not prosecuted for his long litany of crimes, which would be disastrous for our nation.

Kendzior repeats her call for prosecution of the nasty guy, and also of the elite criminals that back him. She is afraid that Joe Biden’s calls for unity and the end of demonization mean he might wimp out on prosecuting administration crimes.

For what would actually unite the United States is an end to elite criminal impunity. For four decades, we have not only seen the exact same crimes carried out, but the same criminals committing or enabling them for decades on end, Manafort, Stone, Barr, the Trump and Kushner families and so on. The US operates according to mafia dynasty politics where entire families are deemed above the law—like the mass murdering Sackler family, for example—and child traffickers immersed in massive espionage plots like Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell now have more of a voice in US politics than the everyday citizen. This is a vile and unsustainable situation and ignoring it is what led us to this point to begin with. The point of cracking down on Trump and his crime cult is not about revenge, and it is certainly not about partisanship; it is about preventing these crimes from occurring again and protecting the American people from dangerous criminal elites who have stolen our livelihoods and opportunities.

Chalupa reminded us that the relief when Obama became president meant people stopped paying attention. That resulted in heavy GOP gerrymandering in 2011 and the party becoming more obstructionist, leading to the nasty guy. So even if the nasty guy isn’t lying to us on the news every day the threat is not gone. President Biden is buying us time to allow us to dismantle the systems that allowed the rise of the nasty guy. How can we have unity with people intent on dehumanizing us? Unity with people stuck in Big Tech information silos? The GOP senators appear to be in one of those information silos, in a conservative Breitbart echo chamber. How can we have unity while disinformation flourishes? Yeah, Biden may be making adult decisions, but there will be a rabid backlash. Chalupa said the backlash won’t end until Facebook is broken up, it’s head Mark Zuckerberg is removed, and there are laws against harmful disinformation. Kendzior added that calls for unity seem facile because they never say on what premise. Should we just trust our institutions? We have plenty of evidence that we can’t – see William Barr, head of the Department of No Justice. Kendzior said:

So I think what we need to emphasize here—and this goes for the Biden administration as well—is honesty over unity and justice over peace. I think whatever unity flows from that will be a true unity, and that is the reason that I emphasized going after elite criminal impunity. … I think disillusionment is the main mood of this country and that disillusionment stems from things like elite criminal impunity, from watching for decades on end wealthy people getting away with whatever they want, whatever brutal action, that does trickle down to us as ordinary people. … The thing is, is that the corrosion, the rot, it is systemic. It is everywhere and that means it's within the Democratic Party, it's within a bunch of institutions that are supposed to be neutral. It's the whole thing. With the election of Biden, we get a second chance. We would not have had this second chance had Trump stayed in for a second term. Then it would have been the end. It would have been the end of the American experiment. We're in for tough times anyway, but we finally have a chance to kind of dig deep and root out elite criminal impunity, kleptocracy, corruption in the tech industries, the use of surveillance by them, very long rooted problems like poverty, income inequality.

The Biden administration will not be able to pursue their policies …

when you have a nexus of white collar crime and organized crime breathing down your throats, inhibiting your movements, pulling you away from the People and into a vortex of dark money. That is what the result will be if they do not pursue, at the least, rigorous investigations of what's transpired and share that truth with the American public.

Chalupa listed some of the things on Biden’s agenda. It will still be many months before the virus is contained. Lots of people are hurting because of lost family and lost jobs. Beyond those with recent loss are the millions of people in poverty in a rich nation. There is the huge profitable prison system. There is a lot we have to do. Stay grounded in empathy. Chalupa listed a couple historical examples. One was Ulysses Grant, president a few years after the Civil War. Chalupa mentioned it because there is a new miniseries of Grant now out. He gets praise because he was the first civil rights president. He was a KKK hunter, sending the army to squash them. Only after Grant listened to idiot pundits who accused him of acting like a dictator did he stop – which was the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. The other is from the PBS series The Rise of Hitler. It describes how fragile democracy can be. Chalupa mentioned Josef Hartinger. He investigated the first deaths at Dachau. The soldiers said the four men were trying to escape. But Hartinger saw they were Jews and that they were beaten and shot at close range – murdered – and their bodies piled together. In the six months Hartinger was allowed to investigate there were no more murders at Dachau. But when the Nazis shut him down, murders resumed and spread. Chalupa talked about the nasty guy’s family separation policy, which constitutes torture. She said:

How can you treat human beings that way? That is the question we must always scream and be hysterical and alarmist over. We must risk our careers and reputations when lives are at stake. We can never normalize these threats, even in the face of cultish worship and fascist machinery or indifference. Seeing the murder of four human beings or seeing children separated from their families, it's the same ideology of hate and dehumanization that allows that to happen. We must always be outraged by that and get in its face. That's the Hartinger Law. His investigation was killed, but it was used years later in the Nuremberg trials. The Hartinger Law demands that we fight, even if the only way left for us to fight is to bear witness. This is important to talk about because the relief so many are feeling can be misinterpreted as the danger being over. Trump created a cult and the cult is still with us, fueled by rampant disinformation, powered by consolidated far-right media, big tech and American oligarchs like the Mercer family and Mark Zuckerberg, and a mainstream media populated by mostly white people who are not on the front lines of the worst dangers of this cult and its machinations.

The Nazi terror had an inspiration – race laws in the American South. Chalupa said:

For all those white people who are going to tune out, who are going to just go back to normal: there was never a normal to begin with for people of color in America. Understand that it's a fascist, mass murdering ideology that's at the root of it and it mutates and it gaslights, and it uses pretty language and pretty people to try to button it up and seem respectable and palpable. That threat is still with us and none of us should be comfortable yet. We still have a long way to go to dismantle these systems.

Kendzior said the nasty guy has committed many crimes, but there are two that are the worst because they are crimes against humanity. One is the family separation policy. These families can’t be reunited because no records were kept of where they are. The other is his response to the coronavirus, with a quarter million dead. Instead of preventing it, he tried to profit from it. Investigations into these crimes must be rigorous to make sure people like the pandemic prince and Stephen Miller are included. We must prosecute these crimes so a slicker GOP candidate in 2024 can’t repeat them. So with those crimes against humanity (plus others like conflict of interest and obstruction of justice) how can pundits say “Move on!” and still live with themselves? Chalupa and Kendzior review Biden’s cabinet picks. I won’t go into detail on each one (and in some cases they go into quite a bit of explanation). Antony Blinken as Secretary of State – they’re thrilled. With the nasty guy, a Kremlin asset, in the White House America got a taste of Putin’s aggression. We know better what we’re up against and we better understand what Putin has been doing in Ukraine and other countries. A Kremlin asset in the White House is another reason why we must have full investigation and prosecution. The nasty guy is leaving with a great deal of classified information. That’s an ongoing national security crisis. Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban immigrant, for Homeland Security. This department has such a history of abuse and brutality it is in desperate need of reform. Whether Mayorkas is up to that task is not clear. Chalupa said:

If you build that strong social fabric, you're building immunity to the fake populism of Trump. When people are hurting, when people are desperate, they want to bash something. They want to bash the system, so they either don't vote—because what difference will it make?—or they vote for some raging anger cathartic vehicle like Trump. The way we protect ourselves from that is by truly, truly building back better. That's not going to happen without free universal healthcare, free college. We've got to build up the minds of our citizens, one of our greatest resources. That's how they're seen in countries like Denmark, where they have free schools, because the minds of the citizens are a national natural resource to develop and you get paid back as a society with more engaged citizens, stronger systems, creativity, innovation, all of it. America really, really needs to Trump-proof our democracy by taking care of the most vulnerable. I just don't want us to just celebrate the fact that we're no longer soon going to be under this constant threat of a Kremlin asset. I want us to really, really Trump-proof our democracy.

Janet Yellen at Treasury – During the Obama years the Kremlin infiltrated the Treasury. They may still be there. One reason for gutting career bureaucrats is to allow the lackeys to carry out massive crimes. We need someone to clean out the corruption and we need a full report of what happened. Is Yellen up to the task? Maybe. Yellen has the support of Elizabeth Warren, whose main issue is corruption. But it is likely a problem too big for one person. We’ll need a commission. At least Yellen doesn’t have a Wall Street background. John Kerry for Special Envoy for Climate. Good that Biden is taking the threat seriously. Kerry has a famous name (having been Sec. of State), which will draw top people to the table for serious work. Though Kerry and Biden might lessen the damage, a considerable amount of damage to the climate has already been done so part of the job will be learning how to live with the wreckage – the rising seas, the stronger hurricanes, the fires, the refugee camps. More takes on cabinet nominees as they are announced.