Trump's Doctor Just Screwed Everyone Fighting This Pandemic
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54397"><span class="small">Daniel Summers, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Tuesday, 19 May 2020 08:14
Excerpt: "If the White House doctor really did write the president a prescription for the risky, unproven treatment just because he asked for it, it's grossly irresponsible."
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Trump's Doctor Just Screwed Everyone Fighting This Pandemic
By Daniel Summers, The Daily Beast
19 May 20
If the White House doctor really did write the president a prescription for the risky, unproven treatment just because he asked for it, it’s grossly irresponsible.
actually thought we were through with hydroxychloroquine.
That medication, which has legitimate uses for the treatment of malaria and certain autoimmune disorders like lupus, was dubiously touted by President Trump earlier this spring as a potential miracle treatment for COVID-19. At one point, he proclaimed that tens of millions of doses had been released to the nation’s doctors struggling with the pandemic illness that has now killed more than 90,000 Americans.
Unfortunately, at this time, there is no reliable evidence to support the use of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of the novel coronavirus. There is, however, ample evidence of the potential for very serious, potentially fatal side effects from the medication. It was because of these side effects that clinical trials using it to treat COVID-19 were halted in France and Brazil, and that an NIH-backed (not peer-reviewed) study of patients at the Veterans Administration concluded it was more strongly associated with killing than relieving ailing veterans. The Food and Drug Administration went so far as to issue a warning to the general public about use of the medication outside of hospital settings.
For ailments where its benefits are well-established, these risks may be worth accepting. Without evidence of genuine benefit, touting it for widespread use is grossly irresponsible.
Which is to say, precisely the kind of thing that Trump is apt to do.
As physicians nationwide, myself included, rushed to discourage people from demanding hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19—and news of halted trials began to mount—Trump had largely stopped talking about it. Fox News did the same thing.
Now Trump, at least, is back at it—and this time, he’s gone even further.
At a press briefing Monday, the president declared that he is taking the medication himself. Citing the kind of hearsay that informs most of his decisions, he said he’d asked the White House physician for it and was rewarded with a prescription.
I happened to be in my kitchen when this news started showing up in my Twitter feed. If heads could really explode from rage, my kitchen would be in need of an extremely thorough cleaning.
The decision to prescribe hydroxychloroquine, confirmed by a White House spokesperson, represents not just one more failure on the president’s part but one on the part of his physician as well. (An official letter attributed to the doctor is evasive, and Trump, of course, has only a glancing awareness of facts or truthfulness.)
Among the most important responsibilities of a medical provider is to provide only treatments or other interventions that are truly in a patient’s best interest, that have sufficient evidence in favor of ordering them. Many times I have had to explain to my own patients or their parents why a medication they want (an antibiotic for an illness that I suspect is viral, to cite a common example) is not appropriate for me to prescribe. Those conversations are not always easy, but having them anyway is an obligation I take very seriously.
“The evidence for hydroxychloroquine just isn’t there. It may be good enough for Trump, but it’s not good enough for my patients.”
If a doctor in the White House prescribed a medication to the president just because he asked for it, without sound evidence to support it and with risk of serious ill effects, that was a failure of his professional responsibilities.
When it comes to Trump himself, of course, expecting behavior that indicates a sense of obligation is absurd at this point. If there’s one thing his time in office has made clear, he is plainly incapable of meeting the most basic of presidential responsibilities. One may as well ask an emu to merengue.
But however plain his failings by any measure you could choose, he still has millions of people nationwide who take him seriously, and who listen to what he says. Which means that once again those followers could start seeking hydroxychloroquine treatments that may do them no good, could seriously harm them, and could deprive others who truly need them.
Compared to some of the other treatments Trump has publicly flirted with, including injecting household cleaners or somehow getting UV radiation into a person’s body, at least hydroxychloroquine is an actual medication. That doesn’t make taking it a good idea.
We all want an effective treatment for COVID-19. I can think of nothing that would fill me with more joy than to know there was one I could prescribe, one that could help reduce the horrible toll this pandemic is taking on our nation and the world. I understand well why people would look for anything that seemed like it could be the one we’re all hoping for.
The evidence for hydroxychloroquine just isn’t there. It may be good enough for Trump, but it’s not good enough for my patients.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29596"><span class="small">Eve Andrews, Grist</span></a>
Tuesday, 19 May 2020 08:13
Andrews writes: "When I gave up my car nearly four years ago, I anticipated it would come with certain challenges. But one I did not anticipate was not being able to get tested for a highly contagious virus that had covered the world in a pandemic."
'The great awakening that the coronavirus pandemic has dealt to city-dwellers, in particular, is that true independence was always a myth.' (photo: David Becker/AFP/Getty Images)
Will Social Distancing Kill Car-Free Culture?
By Eve Andrews, Grist
19 May 20
hen I gave up my car nearly four years ago, I anticipated it would come with certain challenges: hauling groceries by hand, navigating bus transfers, squeezing into crowded subway cars. But one I did not anticipate was not being able to get tested for a highly contagious virus that had covered the world in a pandemic — I mean, I wasn’t really anticipating that scenario at all in the summer of 2016, but here we are.
And when I did get sick — a swift collapse into unbearable body aches and violently protruding lymph nodes — I sort of refused to consider the possibility that it could be COVID-19. But a text message (!) from the sole person I had spent any time with in the last couple of months upended my denial — I had been exposed.
I had read the news and knew that tests are precious and limited, so I was assuming that I’d never get a diagnosis more satisfying than “eh, probably.” As someone who is young and generally healthy, I knew my lesser vulnerability might not merit a test. So I called my doctor’s office describing my situation and asking for advice, and received an email a few hours later:
For various reasons, they said I didn’t qualify; but the strangest one mentioned was that I didn’t have access to a vehicle.
Drive-thru COVID-19 testing was devised as a safer way to get people the medical assessments that they need while limiting other patients’ potential exposure to the disease. You could get probed by a mask-clad medical professional within the protective pod of your private vehicle and be on your way to await the results by phone. The idea got President Trump’s endorsement as early as March 13, when during a Rose Garden briefing he announced a website (that did not yet exist) that would direct people to an (again, nonexistent at the time) national network of drive-thru testing sites. In the two months that followed, business chains such as CVS, Walgreens, Target, and Walmart have started offering drive-thru COVID-19 tests at select locations with “thousands” more sites slated to open by the end of May.
But a necessary prerequisite for such a test is, of course, owning a car — or knowing someone who is willing to lend their car to a person who has at least some reason to believe they are infected. I, of course, did not have the former (and asking for the latter felt like it would be an unfair burden on any friend).
I’m hardly alone in living car-free — according to the latest U.S. census, nearly 9 percent of households do not have any available vehicles. In larger cities, the proportion tends to be much higher. It will likely come as no surprise that race and income also play a role. The rate of carlessness among households of color is about double that of white households, and households with incomes below $25,000 a year are nine times more likely to be carless.
There are many reasons people end up not owning cars. For some, the choice is made for them — cars can be prohibitively expensive to purchase and maintain. Some cannot bear to sit in traffic, or their public transit options render personal cars irrelevant. Still others decide to shed their vehicles because of environmental concerns. Car use has been tied, to a greater and greater extent, to climate change–causing carbon emissions. It’s extremely inefficient to heave a couple of tons of metal around at great speed for the transportation of one single person. Dense downtown neighborhoods have become more desirable due in part to their facilitation of short, car-free commutes. Recent years have seen the development of fairly successful campaigns to get people out of cars and onto public transit, bikes, and simply sidewalks.
My decision to get rid of my car was voluntary and largely financially motivated — but it quickly became a lifestyle ethos. Yes, there was the tiniest degree of smugness about the environmental aspect of it; but more than anything it was freeing. I had liberated myself from hundreds of pounds of metal, thousands of dollars in annual repair bills from the mechanic who was surely ripping me off, and any combustion engine-related climate guilt!
Unburdened by concerns like parking availability or car expenses, I was more easily able to afford apartments in dense, desirable areas. When I needed to run a particularly burdensome errand or take a long weekend trip, I could use a car share or a rental.
Car manufacturers have been peddling their wares using the promise of independence for a long, long time, and were eventually able to shape cities to make independence actually unattainable without a car. But at some point, as city populations grew and streets couldn’t expand anymore to accommodate so many single-occupant vehicles, the freedom afforded by car ownership got whittled down by traffic. And gas prices, and car loan interest, and parking and registration fees.
The effort to get urban planners to prioritize those people and the vitality of their daily lives over vehicles in their design of streets and communities goes at least as far back as urban studies icon Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which was published in 1961. “The Great Blight of Dullness,” she writes, “is allied with the blight of traffic congestion … A strategy of erosion by automobiles is thus not only destructive to such city intensity as already exists; it also conflicts with nurturing new or additional intensity of use where that is needed.”
As we barreled into 2020, it almost looked like American cities were starting to trend, ever so slowly, toward less car-dependent cities — if you squinted, at least. “There’s been slow progress made toward tangible change,” said Geeti Silwal, principal urban designer with the firm Perkins & Will in San Francisco, noting that it took a full decade to bring the car-free design of Market Street that she worked on to fruition.
And then came coronavirus, a swift wrecking ball for that tentative, incremental driving-optional progress. Any force that demands a bubble of at least 6 feet of personal space is a direct threat to the dense, “lively” city life for which Jacobs and most climate-focused planners have pushed. It has transformed sidewalks into too-narrow thruways, public transit options into probable Petri dishes.
The impact of these shifts is still unclear. For the moment, most people are still driving a lot less, because most cities have some sort of shelter-in-place order. And due to that lack of traffic, some streets are getting converted to safe thoroughfares for bikes and pedestrians. But people will have to leave their homes eventually. In an interview with Streetsblog, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director Jeff Tumlin declared: “If San Francisco retreats in a fear-based way to private cars, the city dies with that, including the economy. Why? Because we can’t move more cars. That’s a fundamental geometrical limit.”
“There’s still just the strategy of trying to get people to understand that everyone can’t own cars and drive in a city,” noted Katie Wilson, director of the Seattle Transit Riders’ Union, in an interview. “It feels challenging to get people back on public transit, but that needs to happen. There’s just not a realistic scenario where [everyone] can just go back to driving.”
The great awakening that the coronavirus pandemic has dealt to city-dwellers, in particular, is that true independence was always a myth. You cannot really protect yourself from coronavirus without measures that protect everyone. You cannot retreat to your car because if everyone does the same, the streets will be filled with a million completely immobile vehicles, trapped by a mass panic of self-protection.
And yet, in the past two months, I have longed for a car. My bike is broken — I took a bus once (to get the bike fixed) and someone got on and immediately took his pants off, which I found, as a lifelong transit rider well accustomed to that sort of thing, strangely comforting — and I am tired of walking the same few blocks of my neighborhood over and over with no real destination in mind. I crave nothing more than real escape; as I have admitted before, I actually love to drive. My deep, dark environmentalist secret is that I find unmatched peace in long highway trips at 80 miles an hour, with drive-thru french fries and an iced coffee the size of my torso in the console. And of course, if I had had a car when I got sick, I might now have some answers about my own past coronavirus status.
But I have craved things that are bad for me before, and I have known better than to make them a permanent fixture in my life. (Most of the time.) I have watched cities like my own make slow, careful progress toward a more car-free future, and I do not want to see that progress destroyed by the illusion that we can turn inward and take care of ourselves just fine.
Almost 60 years ago, Jacobs wrote: “What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? … In that case we Americans will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia: What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established, and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.”
I don’t know what my life will be once this pandemic is over, but what will drive me, philosophically speaking, will not be gas-powered.
John Gleeson Got John Gotti. Now He's Taking on Michael Flynn.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54393"><span class="small">Johnny Dwyer, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Monday, 18 May 2020 12:41
Dwyer writes: "His appointment is a step in the right direction. It doesn't ordain an outcome but guarantees a level of integrity to the process."
Then-national scurity adviser Michael Flynn talks to others in the East Room of the White House on Feb. 13, 2017. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
John Gleeson Got John Gotti. Now He's Taking on Michael Flynn.
By Johnny Dwyer, The Daily Beast
18 May 20
His appointment is a step in the right direction. It doesn’t ordain an outcome but guarantees a level of integrity to the process.
n August of 2015, I caught a glimpse of Michael Flynn’s future in a Brooklyn federal courtroom.
It was at the sentencing of an Albanian man named Agron Hasbajrami on charges of material support for terrorism.
Hasbajrami, like Flynn, had a circuitous path towards his sentencing. Like Flynn, he had been caught on a wire. And, like Flynn, he pleaded guilty, then brought in a new attorney and sought to convince a judge to let him withdraw his guilty plea.
The judge in Hasbajrami’s case, a plainspoken former prosecutor named John Gleeson, had been patient through this years-long process.
Gleeson’s docket was filled with accused terrorists. And these cases were rife with allegations of government misconduct—coercive interrogations, abuse of FISA warrants, torture by client states.
Terrorism cases, particularly in New York after 9/11, brought out emotions in the courtroom. Defense attorneys expressed exasperation with the sprawling powers of the national security state. Federal prosecutors shouldered the thousand-pound pressure of keeping terrorists off the street.
Gleeson had a gift for listening. To foreign defendants describing the Kafkaesque experience of being rendered to solitary confinement in the United States. To young prosecutors pushing for the harshest sentences allowed under the law.
He also knew when to cut people off—and remind them that this was his courtroom and that he was the judge.
On this day, Gleeson caught the defendant in a lie. And, rather than let it pass, he added a year to his sentence.
“The last year of your sentence you can chalk up to that statement, Mr. Hasbajrami,” he said when he delivered his sentence.
On Wednesday, D.C. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan appointed Gleeson, who retired from the bench in 2016, to weigh in on Michael Flynn’s case. He was given two tasks: to argue against the government’s effort to throw out the criminal case against Michael Flynn; and to make a determination whether Flynn perjured himself and should face potential imprisonment for doing so.
“He doesn’t suffer liars and doesn’t suffer people trying to avoid the system,” said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law.
Gleeson’s decade as a prosecutor was marked by an almost Faustian bargain: the decision to take on self-professed murderer Sammy “the Bull” Gravano as a cooperator against John Gotti. The rival Southern District had pushed to take the case, but the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division—Robert Mueller—gave it to the Eastern District. In 1992, Gleeson secured the conviction against Gotti — who’d earned the nickname the Teflon Don after winning acquittals in his previous three trials — and, with that, a bit of immortality among organized crime prosecutors.
Two years later, at the age of 41, Bill Clinton appointed him to the federal bench, in the Eastern District, where he served for 22 years.
As a judge, Gleeson was difficult to pin down. The Eastern District is stacked with judges who take a dim view of the war on drugs, and have pushed to mitigate the collateral consequences of federal convictions. But while Gleeson was concerned by the “excessive severity” of the federal system, he isn’t easily characterized as a reformer. He ruled in favor of Bush administration officials sued by Muslim men detained after the 9/11 attack. And he later pushed a model to forgive federal convictions.
Throughout his time on the bench, Gleeson adopted a self-effacing approach. He never wore a robe. And he always entered the courtroom from chambers without a knock. As a prosecutor, he played basketball with the federal marshals who worked the courthouse. (“He was actually pretty good,” a former marshal recalled.)
District courtrooms in New York are often waystations for the ambitious and powerful, and Gleeson’s courtroom drew the Eastern District’s most aggressive and overachieving young prosecutors looking to make their names.
Many of these prosecutors did just that: Shreve Ariail went on to serve as deputy general counsel for litigation and investigation at the CIA; Seth Ducharme took the job as counselor to the attorney general then principal associate deputy attorney general; and Zainab Ahmad moved to Main Justice where she joined Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and, as it turned out, helped win the conviction of Michael Flynn.
After the Justice Department moved to dismiss the charges against Flynn, Gleeson penned a Washington Post editorial reminding readers that the decision to drop a case doesn’t belong to Attorney General William Barr, or a line prosecutor acting on his behalf. It belongs to the judge overseeing the case.
Judge Sullivan’s order to appoint Gleeson came the next day, after what had, otherwise, been a pretty lousy week for separation of powers.
First, the Justice Department had moved to dismiss its own case against Flynn on Monday. On Tuesday, a majority of Supreme Court justices seemed skeptical of arguments that the president, or his financial records, should be subject to subpoenas by Congress or a grand jury. Then, on Wednesday, new acting director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell—who has not been confirmed by Congress—chummed the waters of the 2020 election with a laundry list of Obama officials involved in unmasking Flynn’s identity from intelligence reports following the election, including Vice President Joe Biden.
Before the pandemic, it seemed that the Trump administration’s most irreducible legacy would be in the courts. This president has waged a quiet but successful effort to reshape the federal bench in the image of the Federalist Society, with conservative judges dutiful to the notion of executive power. The irony is how unsophisticated President Trump is when it comes to measuring the quality of judges. He has one brutally simple metric: whether they rule in his favor or not.
The unraveling of the Flynn prosecution is only the latest challenge to the judiciary—yet, it has an almost allegorical quality in the era of COVID-19. There are only bad choices for how to resolve it. On the one hand, there’s Attorney General Barr’s bald, deliberate campaign to rewrite the history of Russian interference in the 2016 election. On the other, an ugly, ham-handed, politically tinged FBI investigation in the wake of an election. Either path leads to the same place. The recognition that the institutions that are meant to protect our body politic have been infected with corruption.
This is not the perennial sickness that we’ve come to accept as a feature of our federal justice system—the onerous sentencing guidelines, the outsize power of prosecutors, the revolving door between the Justice Department, the media, and the private sector. This is a virulent strain that threatens the balance of powers in our government. But as a nation, we’re unable to come to a consensus on the diagnosis, let alone how exactly it should be treated.
The appointment of John Gleeson is a step in the right direction. It doesn’t ordain an outcome but guarantees a level of integrity to the process.
As David A. Schulz of Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic said, Gleeson is “smart, fair-minded and deeply committed to the rule of law.”
That doesn’t bode well for those who see the law as an extension of politics and truth as something to be defined by the powerful.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54392"><span class="small">Amee Chew, Jacobin</span></a>
Monday, 18 May 2020 12:41
Chew writes: "Amid the worsening COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, the US government is brokering a billion arms sale to Rodrigo Duterte's repressive regime. The sale would only pour further fuel on an already dire human rights catastrophe."
Rodrigo Duterte. (photo: ABS-CBN News)
Stop the $2 Billion Arms Sale to the Philippines
By Amee Chew, Jacobin
18 May 20
Amid the worsening COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, the US government is brokering a $2 billion arms sale to Rodrigo Duterte’s repressive regime. The sale would only pour further fuel on an already dire human rights catastrophe.
n April 30, the US State Department announced two pending armssales to the Philippines totaling nearly $2 billion. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Bell Textron, and General Electric are the main weapons manufacturers contracted to profit from the deal.
Following the announcement, a thirty-day window for Congress to review and voice opposition to the sale commenced. It is imperative that we stop this avalanche of military aid for Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s regime.
Duterte’s human rights record is atrocious. If the arms sale goes through, it will escalate a worsening crackdown on human rights defenders and on dissent — while worsening an ongoing bloodbath. Duterte is infamous for launching a “War on Drugs” that since 2016 has claimed the lives of as many as twenty-seven thousand, mostly low-income people, summarily executed by police and vigilantes.
In Duterte’s first three years of office, nearlythree hundred journalists, human rights lawyers, environmentalists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, and human rights defenders were assassinated. The Philippines has been ranked the deadliest country for environmentalists in the world after Brazil. Many of these slayings are linked to militarypersonnel. Now, Duterte is using COVID-19 as a pretext for further militarization and repression, despite the dire consequences for public health.
Around the world, and particularly for the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore how increasing military capacity means worsening average people’s well-being. The US government is yet again grossly misallocating resources toward war profiteering and militarization, rather than health services and human needs. The Pentagon’s bloated budget of trillions has done nothing to protect us from a public health catastrophe and has failed to create true security. Only a complete realignment of federal priorities away from militarization, here and abroad, and toward strengthening infrastructures of care can do that.
Duterte’s Militarized Response to COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a pretext for Duterte to impose military checkpoints, mass arrests, and de facto martial law throughout the Philippines. As of late April, over 120,000 people have been cited for quarantine violations, and over 30,000 arrested — despite the severe overcrowding in Philippine jails, already exacerbated by the drug war. “Stay at home” orders are enforced by the police, even as in many urban poor communities, people live hand to mouth.
Without daily earnings, millions are desperate for food. By late April, a majority of indigent households had still not received any government relief. A thousand residents in Pasay were forced into homelessness when their informal settlement was destroyed in the name of slum clearance at the beginning of the lockdown, even as the homeless are arrested and thrown in jail.
Duterte has placed the military in charge of the COVID-19 response. On April 1, he ordered troops to “shoot dead” quarantine violators. Human rights abuses immediately surged. The next day, a farmer, Junie Dungog Piñar, was shot and killed by police for violating the COVID-19 lockdown in Agusan del Norte, Mindanao.
In the face of widespread hunger, absent health care, and lethal repression, grassroots social movement organizations have created mutual aid and relief initiatives providing food, masks, and medical supplies to the poor. Cure Covid, a network of volunteers across myriad organizations in the greater Metro Manila region, has organized relief packs and community kitchens for thousands, while engaging in community organizing to strengthen mutual aid. Movement organizers are calling for mass testing, basic services, and an end to the militarized COVID-19 response.
Kadamay is a mass-based organization of two hundred thousand urban poor people across the Philippines that has been at the forefront of resisting Duterte’s drug war and reclaiming vacant housing for homeless people. In 2017, Kadamay led twelve thousand homeless people in occupying six thousand vacant homes that had been set aside for the police and military in Pandi, Bulacan. Despite repression and intimidation, #OccupyBulacan continues to this day.
With COVID-19, Kadamay has led mutual aid efforts and #ProtestFromHome pot-banging actions, with videos disseminated on social media, to demand relief and health services, not militarization. In immediate reprisal for voicing dissent after one pot-banging, the national spokesperson of Kadamay, Mimi Doringo, was threatened with arrest. In Bulacan, a community leader was taken to a military encampment and told to cease all political activity and “surrender” to the government or he would get no relief aid.
Efforts at mutual aid are being criminalized and targeted for repression. Since late April, police have carried out mass arrests of relief volunteers, besides street vendors and those seeking food. On April 19, seven relief volunteers from Sagip Kanayunan were detained while on their way to distribute food in Bulacan and later charged with inciting “sedition.” On April 24, fifty urban poor residents in Quezon City including a relief volunteer were detained for not carrying quarantine passes or wearing face masks. On May 1, ten volunteers conducting relief with the women’s organization GABRIELA were arrested while conducting a community feeding in Marikina City. This targeting is no accident.
Since 2018, an executive order by Duterte has authorized a “whole-of-nation approach” to counterinsurgency, through a broad array of government agencies, resulting in increasedrepression against community organizers and human rights defenders generally.
The crackdowns against mutual aid and survival have prompted campaigns on social media to “stop criminalizing care and community.” Save San Roque, a network supporting the resistance of urban poor residents against demolition, has started a petition to immediately release relief volunteers and all low-level quarantine violators. Humanrightsorganizations are also petitioning for the release of political prisoners, many of them low-income farmers, trade unionists, and human rights defenders facing trumped-up charges, including the elderly and ill.
As a direct result of the government response focused on militarization, rather than adequate health care, food, and services, the Philippines has among the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Southeast Asia, and the pandemic is quickly worsening.
Colonial Roots
Today’s US-Phillippine military alliance has its roots in the US colonization and occupation of the Philippines over a hundred years ago. Despite granting the Philippines independence in 1946, the United States has used unequal trade agreements and its military presence to maintain the Philippines’ neocolonial status ever since. For decades, propping up oligarchic rulers and preventing land reform guaranteed the United States cheap agricultural exports. The US military assisted with countering a string of continual rebellions. US military aid still continues to help corporate extraction of Philippine natural resources, real estate monopoly, and repression of indigenous and peasant struggles for land rights — particularly in Mindanao, a hotbed of communist, indigenous, and Muslim separatist resistance and the recent center of military operations.
The Philippine armed forces are focused on domestic counterinsurgency, overwhelmingly directing violence against poor and marginalized people within the country’s own borders. Philippine military and police operations are closely intertwined. In fact, historically the Philippine police developed out of counterinsurgency operations during US colonial rule.
The US military itself maintains a troop presence in the Philippines through its Operation Pacific Eagle and other exercises. In the name of “counterterrorism,” US military aid is helping Duterte wage war on Philippine soil and repress civilian dissent.
Since 2017, Duterte has imposed martial law on Mindanao, where he has repeatedly dropped bombs. Military attacks have displaced over 450,000 civilians. Carried out with US backing and even joint activities, Duterte’s military operations are shoring up the corporate land-grabbing of indigenous lands and massacres of farmersorganizing for their land rights. Paramilitaries backed by the armed forces are terrorizing indigenous communities, targeting schools and teachers.
In February, prior to the announced arms deal, Duterte nominally rescinded the Philippines–United States Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which allows US troops to be stationed in the Philippines for “joint exercises.” On the surface, this was in response to the United States denying a visa to former drug war police chief Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa. However, Duterte’s revocation of the VFA is not immediately effective, and only begins a six-month process of renegotiation. The proposed arms sale signals that Trump intends to strengthen his military backing for Duterte. The Pentagon seeks to maintain a close military “partnership.”
End US Military Aid
A growing international movement, in solidarity with indigenous and Filipino communities, is calling for an end to military aid to the Philippines. US direct military aid to Duterte’s regime totaled over $193.5 million in 2018, not counting pre-allocated amounts and donated weapons of unreported worth. Military aid also consists of grants to purchase arms, usually from US contractors. Relatedly, the US government regulates the flow of private arms sales abroad — such as the current proposed sale. Sales brokered by the US government are often a public subsidy to private contractors, using our US tax dollars to complete the purchase. Congress must use its power to cut the pending sale off.
The latest proposed $2 billion armssale includes twelve attack helicopters, hundreds of missiles and warheads, guidance and detection systems, machine guns, and over eighty thousand rounds of ammunition. The State Department says these, too, would be used for “counterterrorism” — i.e., repression within the Philippines.
Due to lack of transparency and Duterte’s deliberateefforts to obscure aid flows, US military aid may well end up providing ammunition to the armed forces waging Duterte’s drug war, to vigilantes, or to paramilitaries, without public scrutiny.
Duterte is using the pandemic as a pretext to continue crushing political opposition. He has now assumed special emergency powers. Even prior to the pandemic, in October 2019, police and military raided the offices of GABRIELA, opposition party Bayan Muna, and the National Federation of Sugar Workers, arresting over fifty-seven people in Bacolod City and Metro Manila in one sweep.
Repression is quickly escalating. On April 30, after weeks of police intimidation for conducting feeding programs, Jory Porquia, a founding member of Bayan Muna, was assassinated inside his home in Iloilo. Over seventy-six protesters and relief workers were illegally arrested on May Day, including four youth feeding program volunteers in Quezon City, four residents who posted online photos of their “protesting from home” in Valenzuela, two unionists holding placards in Rizal, and forty-two people conducting a vigil for slain human rights defender Porquia in Iloilo. Sixteen workers in a Coca-Cola factory in Laguna were abducted and forced by the military to “surrender” posing as armed insurgents.
The US war machine profits its private contractors at our expense. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Boeing relied on the Pentagon for a third of its income. In April, Boeing received a bailout of $882 million to restart a paused Air Force contract — for refueling aircraft that are, in fact, defective. But for-profit weapons manufacturers and other war profiteers should have no place steering our foreign policy.
Congress has the power to stop this but must act swiftly. Rep. Ilhan Omar has introduced a bill to stop arming human rights abusers such as Duterte. This month, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, Communications Workers of America, and others will launch a bill specifically to end military aid to the Philippines. In the meantime, we must urge Congress to stop the proposed arms sales to the Philippines, as this petition demands.
The COVID-19 pandemic is showing the need for global solidarity against militarization and austerity. In taking up the fight against the deep footprint of US imperialism, here and abroad, our movements will make each other stronger.
RSN: How the Woodrow Wilson Influenza of 1918 and the TrumpVirus Pandemic of 2020 Brought Fascism to America
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Monday, 18 May 2020 11:06
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."
Donald Trump speaking about Covid-19 on television screens. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT)
How the Woodrow Wilson Influenza of 1918 and the TrumpVirus Pandemic of 2020 Brought Fascism to America
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
18 May 20
Mark Twain once quipped that history doesn’t repeat itself, but “it does rhyme.”
he 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.
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.
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.
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.
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.
actually thought we were through with hydroxychloroquine.
hen I gave up my car nearly four years ago, I anticipated it would come with certain challenges: hauling groceries by hand, navigating bus transfers, squeezing into crowded subway cars. But one I did not anticipate was not being able to get tested for a highly contagious virus that had covered the world in a pandemic — I mean, I wasn’t really anticipating that scenario at all in the summer of 2016, but here we are.
n April 30, the US State Department announced two pending 
he 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.
