The Ostrich Policy: Trump Ready to Kill Hundreds of Thousands to Avoid Bad Coronavirus Optics for Election

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

17 June 20

 

rump and Pence on Monday were busy trying to spread the Big Lie that the only reason the US coronavirus numbers are spiking is increased testing.

Trump is embarrassed because our situation is so dire, and it is in some large part his fault.

More and more of it will be his fault if he goes around the country staging 20,000-strong rallies, as he plans to start doing soon (beginning at Tulsa). No, I repeat, no other world leader is acting this irresponsibly, and there are some real wack jobs heading up the 195 countries in the world. Well, maybe Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is as bad, but that’s it. And that’s what they call a low bar.

Professor Ashish Jha at Harvard’s Global Health Institute points out that we are looking at 25,000 to 30,000 new deaths a month, every month, for the foreseeable future, and that we are still stuck in the first wave. (There may be a second, bigger wave this fall). NPR quoted Jha as saying,

“This is really quite bad. And the level of virus and the level of disease burden in our country is very, very large.”

In other words, unless something changes, we can expect 100,000 Americans to die every four months from Covid-19.

New US daily infections peaked at 31,000 in mid-April, then fell to 22,000 a day by about May 15. But the problem is that they’ve stayed at about that level ever since, and it has been a month of no improvement in case levels. Moreover, over 800 people are dying a day nationally, and that is not going down either. Hence Jha’s estimate of 25,000 dead a month, which could easily rise given that most Americans are now just mingling as though there was no pandemic.

I saw Jha today on CNN and he was lamenting the lack of a national program of testing for the virus, which threw people onto state resources and set states to competing with one another for resources. And, of course, some states are not well governed (*cough*GOP) and so aren’t doing much testing. He was pressed as to why the Federal government does not step in. He said what he heard from his contacts in the Centers for Disease Control is that there is pushback from Trump about expanding testing with Federal resources. I will add that this is because he is convinced that more testing will turn up more cases, and the statistics will make him look bad as he runs for a second term.

Just to confirm what Jha was told, Trump said, or, rather, vomited up a word salad on Monday:

“DONALD TRUMP: Again, our testing is so far advanced. It’s so much bigger and better than any other country that we’re going to have more cases. We’re always going to have more cases. And as I said, this morning, that’s probably the downside of having good testing is you find a lot of cases that other countries, who don’t even test, don’t have. If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases. If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any, but we do. We’re at a level that Mike is going to talk about that’s so high, but we will show more cases when other countries have far more cases than we do. They just don’t talk about it . . .

Trump made an elementary error known from quantum physics, of suggesting that the state of the world is determined by our perception of it. “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any, but we do.” Quantum particles, you see, behave like either waves or particles, and some scientists in the 1930s suggested that the way a particle could be fixed as either a wave or a particle is for it to be observed by a human being. This fallacy is illustrated by the thought experiment, Schroedinger’s cat.

We’d have the cases whether we test for them or not, we just wouldn’t know about as many of them without testing.

Although it is true that sometimes increased cases reflect increased testing, that does not seem to be what is going on in many states today. Philip Bump at WaPo writes,

“In six states — Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — the seven-day average of new cases has increased since May 31 while the average number of daily tests being conducted has declined… In 14 other states, the rate of new cases is increasing faster than the increase in the average number of tests.”

The United States has about 4 percent of the world’s population but about a fourth of its coronavirus cases and the same proportion of its deaths. In short, cases and deaths here are 6 times what they should be.

Trump tried to blame the disparity on the US testing apparatus, which he says is better than that of other countries. The problem is that this is true for some countries but not for others. South Korea tests much more than the United States, and reported its first case the same day the US did. But South Korea has had just over 12,000 cases. Given that the US is 6 times more populous, that would be like 73,000 US cases. But US cases are about 2 million. That disparity cannot be explained by the US testing more.

On June 12, in the US 1.25 tests were performed per 1,000 people, or about 400,000. Medical experts say we need to be testing about 900,000 people per day, and find new positive cases, and then warn their friends and acquaintances that they’ve been exposed. We need 100,000 contact tracers to do that. In May we had less than 6,000 nationwide, though progress is being made. California hopes to have 10,000 by July 1. Other states, not so much. Even if the five most populous states succeed in their plans to ramp up contact tracing they’d only get to about 66,000, 2/3s of what is needed.

The difference is that the national leadership of South Korea cares about its citizens and has invested in its public health system, and so has been able to do massive testing and contact tracing. Also, South Koreans are not addled in the pate and wear masks when they go out. A mountain of evidence has accumulated that if 100% of the population wear masks when they go out, the rate of transmission falls below 1 and the number of cases dwindles. One reason large numbers of American’s won’t wear a mask is that they are following Trump’s lead.

This is guaranteed to get their grandmothers killed.

Will the Death of George Floyd Mark the Rebirth of America?

By Nick Turse, TomDispatch

17 June 20

 

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I’m almost 76 years old, in Covid-19 isolation, and -- though I’ve been to many demonstrations in my life -- haven’t been to one since George Floyd was murdered. I haven’t even been near one and that will, I suspect, be one of the regrets of my life. Thank goodness Nick Turse, TomDispatch’s managing editor, has been (as he describes in his post today). Somehow, even at one remove, it makes me feel better, as does the latest poll showing that, in Donald Trump’s America -- of all places! -- 74% of us actually support those protests still occurring in hundreds of cities and towns across the country. I mean, in such a deeply splintered Trumpian land, who would have guessed that 74% of Americans could support much of anything these days? And that’s one of the points Turse makes today: just when you’ve hit rock bottom, this world of ours has a way of surprising you.

I don’t mean to imply, however, that this latest movement of the young has gone unopposed. It hasn’t, not in a White House that’s transformed itself into a fortified, Baghdad-style Green Zone; nor in the mind of a president who came into office as the birther-in-chief, riding racism like a bucking bronco to the White House; nor in a Justice Department that has been turned into his enforcer (and little more); nor among predominately white police forces that, in these years, have been transformed into the equivalent of occupying troops in black and brown communities and have recently been whacking away at protestors nationwide with a brutality that, given the new age of instant video, has been on display for all to see. It hasn’t even gone unopposed by some citizens in a land of civilians more heavily armed than any on earth (Yemen comes in a distant second) -- where trucks, cars, and conventional weapons have been wielded against protestors by right-wing extremists of various sorts.

It’s a deadly, dangerous world out there, no question about it, which leaves me even more awed by those now protesting in the streets of our country. Still, surprising as these developments may be, the urge to breathe is such a natural one that it couldn’t be more sensible to demonstrate for everyone’s right to do so in a world that seems ever more breathless. The unexpected, as Nick Turse writes today, is sometimes the saving grace of our all-too-often unsavory world.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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hey were relegated to the protest equivalent of a ghetto. Their assigned route shunted them to the far fringes of the city. Their demonstration was destined for an ignominious demise far from any main thoroughfare, out of sight of most apartment buildings, out of earshot of most homes, best viewed from a dinghy bobbing in the Hudson River.

Those at the head of the march had other ideas. After a brief stop at city hall, they turned the crowd onto the main drag, Washington Street, and for the next few hours, a parade of protesters snaked through Hoboken, New Jersey.

“Whose streets? Our streets!” is a well-worn activist chant, but for a little while it was true as Hoboken’s motorcycle cops played catch-up and the march turned this way and that -- first, uptown on Washington, where a conspicuous minority of businesses were boarded up, expecting trouble that never came. Then, a left onto Sixth, another onto Jackson. Monroe. Park. Finally, back to Washington and onward.

All the while, the voices of the mostly white marchers, being led in call-and-response chants mainly by people of color, rang through the streets and echoed off high-rent low rises.

“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”

“No justice! No peace!”

“Say his name! George Floyd!”

As an ever-more middle-aged white guy who, a decade ago, traded covering U.S. protests for reporting from African war zones, I have little of substance to add to the superlative coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have erupted across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. For that, read some of the journalists who are on the front lines innovating and elevating the craft, like the great Aviva Stahl’s real-time eyewitness observations, incisive interviews, and on-the-fly fact-checking, while marching for miles and miles through the streets of Brooklyn, New York.

Instead, bear with me while I ruminate about something I said to Tom Engelhardt, the editor of this website, TomDispatch, at the beginning of March when our lives changed forever. Instead of simply bemoaning the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic -- however devastating and deadly it might prove to be -- I uncharacteristically looked on the bright side, suggesting that this could be one of those rare transformative moments that shifts the world’s axis and leads to revolutionary change.

I bring this up not to brag about my prescience, but to point out the very opposite -- how little foresight I actually had. It’s desperately difficult for any of us to predict the future and yet, thanks so often to the long, hard, and sometimes remarkably dangerous work of organizers and activists, even the most seemingly immutable things can change over time and under the right conditions.

A Latter Day Lynching

Despite my comments to Tom, if you had told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldn’t have believed it. If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a major American city to announce their intent to defund the police and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a murderous nineteenth-century monarch who slaughtered Africans, I would have dismissed you. But history works in mysterious ways.

Four hundred years of racism, systemic abuse of authority, unpunished police misconduct, white skin privilege, and a host of other evils at the dark core of America gave a white Minneapolis police officer the license to press a black man’s face to the pavement and jam a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. For allegedly attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes with a phony $20 bill, George Floyd was killed at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by police officer Derek Chauvin.

At the beginning of the last century, whites could murder a black man, woman, or child in this country as part of a public celebration, memorialize it on postcards, and mail them to friends. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the American South, more than a death a week for 73 years. But the murders of blacks, whether at the hands of their owners in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries or of unaccountable fellow Americans in the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries never ended despite changes in some attitudes, significant federal legislation, and the notable successes of the protests, marches, and activism of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

From 2006 to 2012, in fact, a white police officer killed a black person in America almost twice a week, according to FBI statistics. And less than a month before we watched the last moments of George Floyd’s life, we witnessed a modern-day version of a lynching when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was gunned down while jogging on a suburban street in Glynn County, Georgia. Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old white retired district attorney, investigator, and police detective, and his son Travis, 34, were eventually arrested and charged with his murder.

Without the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s botched response to it, without black Americans dying of the disease at three times the rate of whites, without the suddenly spotlighted health disparities that have always consigned people of color to die at elevated rates, without a confluence of so many horrors that the black community in America has suffered for so long coupled with those of a new virus, would we be in the place we’re in today?

If President Trump hadn’t cheered on the efforts of mostly older white protesters to end pandemic shutdowns and “liberate” their states and then echoed a racist Miami police chief of the 1960s who promised “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” essentially calling for young black protesters to be gunned down, would the present movement have taken off in such a way? And would these protests have been as powerful if people who had avoided outside contact for weeks hadn’t suddenly decided to risk their own lives and those of others around them because this murder was too brazen, too likely to end in injustice for private handwringing and public hashtags?

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd drew his last embattled breath, a veto-proof majority of the city council recently announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s police department. As council president Lisa Bender put it:

“We’re here because we hear you. We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.”

A month ago, such a statement by almost any council chief in any American city -- much less similar sentiments voiced across the nation -- would have been essentially unthinkable. Only small numbers of activists working away with tiny chisels on a mountain of official intransigence could even have imagined such a thing and they would have been dismissed by the punditocracy as delusional.

But the reverberations of George Floyd’s death have hardly been confined to the city where he was slain or even the country whose systemic bigotry put a target on his back for 46 years. His death and America’s rampant racism have led to soul-searching across the globe, sparking protests against discrimination and police brutality from Australia to Germany, Argentina to Kenya. In Ghent, Belgium, a bust honoring King Leopold II was defaced and covered with a hood bearing Floyd’s dying plea: “I can't breathe.” In Antwerp, Leopold’s statue was set on fire and later removed.

It was Leopold, as TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild so memorably documented in King Leopold's Ghost, who, in the late nineteenth century, seized the vast territory surrounding Africa’s Congo River, looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and presided over a fin de siècle holocaust that took the lives of as many as 10 million people, roughly half the Congo’s population. Belgian activists are now calling for all the country’s statues and monuments to the murderous monarch to be torn down.

A Cultural Renaissance or a Societal Black Death?

Like the island off its coast, Hoboken was born of a great swindle. In 1658, the Dutch governor of Manhattan reportedly bought the tract of land that now includes that mile-square New Jersey city from the Lenape people for some wampum, cloth, kettles, blankets, six guns and -- fittingly enough, given Hoboken’s startling bars-to-area ratio -- half a barrel of beer.

In other words, the city where I covered that demonstration is part and parcel of the settler colonialism, slavery, and racism that forms the bedrock of this nation. But even in that white enclave, that bastion of twenty-first-century gentrification, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic with no cure, 10,000 people flooded its parks and streets, carrying signs like “Racism is a pandemic, too” and “Covid is not the only killer” that would have made little sense six months ago.

There were also posters that would have been shocking in Hoboken only several weeks ago, but didn’t cause anyone to bat an eye like “ACAB” (an acronym for “All Cops are Bastards”) or “Are you a:

[ ] Killer cop

[ ] Complicit Cop”

Not to mention dozens and dozens of signs reading “Defund the Police” or “Abolish the Police.” Suddenly --- to most of us, at least -- such proposals were on the table.

In reality, social change rarely occurs by accident or chance. It usually comes in the wake of years of relentless, thankless, grinding activism. It also takes a willingness to head for the barricades when history has illuminated the dangers of doing so. It requires persistence in the face of weariness and distraction, and courage in the face of abject adversity.

Where this movement goes, how it changes this nation, and what it spawns around the world will be won or lost on the streets of our tomorrows. Will it mean an America that inches closer to long-articulated but never remotely approached ideals, or usher in a backlash that leads to a wave of politicians in the Trumpian mold? In moments like this, there’s no way of knowing whether you’re on the cusp of a cultural Renaissance or a societal Black Death.

It takes a long time, but the earth’s orbit and axis do change and once they do, things are never the same again. Already, from Minneapolis to Antwerp to modest Hoboken, this world is not what it was just a short while ago. A man forced to die with his face pressed to the ground may yet shift the earth under your feet.

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Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.