TROUBLE SPAWN
Retired educator / military officer(Army Colonel) - Current Ops Div Chief (G333), HQDA / married / political progressive / ED.D. and Army War College Grad. 3277
Joined Nov 2017
There are two options here. Either Americans will be rudely jerked toward sanity by the sight of rapidly filling graves, or leaders of determination and talent will rise above the self-destructive strife and make deliverance from illness and death a unifying national cause. The president has left this role vacant. It needs filling.
President Trump’s claim that 99 percent of covid-19 cases are “totally harmless” is a cruel lie.
Second, allowing the exponential spread of the disease will eventually make protecting the vulnerable an impossible task. All our islands of safety for the ill and elderly are endangered when the sea level of infection rapidly rises.
Michael Gerson in WaPo on Trump doing absolutely nothing to stem the COVID-19 tide...
But there are two problems. First, following covid-19’s assault on the body, a significant number of younger people end up with long-term health complications. One doctor I know says that 40-year-old patients he has treated sometimes end up climbing stairs like wheezing senior citizens. Researchers warn of lingering damage to the brain.
(Unfortunately, in already-signed agreements with Barda, some drug makers have explicitly watered down or eliminated that proviso.)
Drug companies deserve a reasonable profit for taking on this urgent task of creating a Covid-19 vaccine. But we deserve a return, too.
So before these invaluable vaccines hit the market, we should talk about an actual price. Otherwise we will be stuck paying dearly for shots that the rest of the world will get for much less.
That feels particularly galling for treatments and vaccines against Covid-19, whose development and production is being subsidized and incentivized with billions in federal investment.
The federal government could, for example, invoke a never-before-used power called “march-in rights,” through which it can override a patent holder’s rights if it doesn’t make its medicines “available to the public on reasonable terms.”
and monopoly power often lets manufacturers set any price, no matter how extraordinary. A new cancer treatment can cost a half-million dollars and old staples like insulin have risen manifold in price to thousands of dollars annually.
Every other developed country has evolved schemes to set or negotiate prices, while balancing cost, efficacy and social good. The United States instead has let business calculations drive drug price tags, forcing us to accept and absorb ever higher costs.
Elizabeth Rosenthal in NYT on the costs of a vaccine and what Congress has allowed in its deference to the Drug Industry...(We fought the wrong drug war, we went after the low-hanging fruit while allowing the real drug pushers, Drug Companies, to gain monopolies...
Now we are looking for viral deliverance when drug development is one of the world’s most lucrative businesses, ownership of drug patents is disputed in endless court battles, ...
In any case, the point is that America’s defeat at the hands of the coronavirus didn’t happen because victory was impossible. Nor was it because we as a nation were incapable of responding. No, we lost because Trump and those around him decided that it was in their political interests to let the virus run wild.
The irony is that Trump’s willingness to trade deaths for jobs and political gain has backfired.
Reopening did lead to large job increases in May and June, as around a third of the workers laid off as a result of the pandemic were rehired. But Trump’s job approval and electoral prospects just kept sliding.
But what strikes me, when looking at America’s extraordinary pandemic failure, is how top-down it all was.
Those anti-lockdown demonstrations weren’t spontaneous, grass-roots affairs. Many were organized and coordinated by conservative political activists, some with close ties to the Trump campaign, and financed in part by right-wing billionaires.
In so doing, he effectively declared White House support for protesters demanding an end to the lockdowns governors had instituted to bring Covid-19 under control.
And on June 16, of course, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by Vice President Mike Pence declaring that there wasn’t and wouldn’t be a coronavirus second wave. Given the Trump administration’s track record, this virtually guaranteed that the wave was about to hit. And so it was.
Paul Krugman in NYT on how America lost the COVID-19 war...
When did America start losing its war against the coronavirus? How did we find ourselves international pariahs, not even allowed to travel to Europe?
I’d suggest that the turning point was way back on April 17, the day that Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”
That gives laid-off workers leverage to bargain for an offer that sustains their new, higher level of income.
Second, to protect employers and encourage them to offer these higher wages, provide employers with a federal subsidy that covers the full difference between an unemployed worker’s former wage and their new one. Call it a “fair wage guarantee.”
On workers raises to help them become more economically viable...
The latest June data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that average wages dropped as more low-wage workers were called back to work, a troubling indication that a surge of income loss may already be underway.
Congress can address this dilemma with two tweaks. First, change the rules so that people lose unemployment insurance only if they turn down offers with wages comparable to their current unemployment benefits.
As the country tries to come to terms with the sins of its past and turns toward a future in which it moves closer to being the more perfect union that our founders envisioned, Trump is banking his reelection on clinging to a past that should have been left behind long ago. That is all he has to offer a nation in a time of crisis.
Four more years? Even four more months of this will be hard to bear.
Karen Tumulty in WaPo on enduring the next four months under Trump...
What must be most worrisome for Trump’s strategists is the sharp slippage among two groups who supported him in 2016: seniors and white working-class women.
In recent interviews, when Trump has been asked why he wants a second term, and what he would do with it if he is given one, he has made it clear that he has no clue.
Their silence isn’t just enabling Trump; it’s also enabling white supremacy to hijack a major American political party.
The others — Tillis, Perdue, Cornyn, Ernst, Gardner, McSally and Daines — responded as Republicans generally do when asked about Trump’s racism: with crickets.
They think their silence protects them. But it does something else: It turns them into the handmaidens of white supremacy.
The silence, often attributed to cowardice, is really complicity. As I’ve noted, racial resentment has become the primary driver and predictor of support for the Republican Party, a trend that has accelerated under Trump. If Republican lawmakers continue to “fret privately” as Trump bases his reelection on clumsy racist demagoguery, they must be held to account for condoning the redefinition of the GOP as the new home of the white power movement.
When you stand in a forest, you see trees, but you have no idea of the immensity of the forest...Such is the current situation for the GOP when they face Trump's racism.
Dana Milbank in WaPo
So Trump’s enablers are unnerved by his overt racism — not because it’s despicable on its face but because they fear losing power. And the enablers fret, but in private.
TROUBLE SPAWN
Retired educator / military officer(Army Colonel) - Current Ops Div Chief (G333), HQDA / married / political progressive / ED.D. and Army War College Grad. 3277
Joined Nov 2017