Coop Scoop #17: The Suicide Pact Edition
The Involuntary Suicide Pact Edition
Issue #17
April 29, 2020
coopscoopnews@gmail.com
Indefinite Lockout
Let’s cut through all the crap and get to the point. Donald Trump is pushing us into an involuntary suicide pact.
What become crystal clear this week, especially after the marathon Monday presidential presser in which a conga line of corporate CEOS (all of whose companies are wildly profiting from the pandemic and who joined the Feel Good chorus), is that Trump has made up his mind to sacrifice an untold number of lives in hope of winning an elusive re-election.
With about 60,000 deaths (officially) we have now surpassed the death toll of 12 years of bloody war in Vietnam and, as was the case there, the US president is responsible for a whole lot of them.
Trump’s sliding poll numbers, and they are sliding, have sent him into a tizzy and it seems he wants to “open” the economy as much as possible and wherever possible in the slim hope that there will be a V shaped recovery with enough upward impetus in the Fall to save his re-election. He and his cronies could not care less how many Americans are or are not tested. I don’t think he gives one hot damn when and how a vaccine is established. As David Frum said on MSNBC immediately following Monday’s insulting propaganda show, Trump plans to “just muscle through” the pandemic, no matter how many how people die in the coming months. He’s easily accepted 60,000 and now he says he’s ok with 70,000 and if it turns out to be double the number he will shrug his shoulders and exclaim: Hey, I saved us from having 2.2 million deaths, Excuse me, now, while I step over this pile of bodies.
My long-time friend (50 years) and noted author Mike Davis wrote in Jacobin this week that American workers have been forced into an “indefinite lockout.” They have been forced out of work, tossed a few crumbs to keep them above water a month or two (maybe) but now are being pressured to go back to work even if it is potentially lethal for them. “Millions of working families feel like they have been kidnapped and sent to hell,” writes Davis. And if and when they do get sent back, soon as Trump desires, Davis affirms that what looks like Hell today will look like Paradise a few months down the road compared to the human and economic pandemic that will ensue from premature opening. Writes Davis:
Sending millions of people back to work without protection or testing would be a death sentence for thousands. Thirty-four million workers are over fifty-five; ten million of them over sixty-five. Millions more suffer from diabetes, chronic respiratory problems, and so on. Straight from home to work to ICU to morgue.
Millions of our “essential workers” face intolerable hazards because of the shortage of protective equipment. It will be weeks, at best, before there will be an adequate supply for medical workers. Workers in warehouses, markets, and fast food have no guarantee of ever receiving masks, unless legislation compels it. If this is a war, Trump’s refusal to use existing laws to federalize the manufacture of masks and ventilators is a war crime.
The proposal to test people’s blood and then issue back-to-work certificates if they have the right antibodies is mere fantasy at the moment. Washington has allowed more than a hundred different firms to sell serological kits without human trials or FDA certification. The results they give are all over the map, just a mess. It may be weeks or longer before public health workers have reliable diagnostics to use. Even then it would take months to test the workforce and it’s doubtful that enough people would have the antibodies to safely staff all the closed businesses.
The most heroic assumption is that a vaccine could be available by spring 2021, although no one knows how long its conferred immunity would last. Meanwhile, hundreds of research teams and smaller biotech firms are working on medicines that will reduce the risk of respiratory failure and serious heart or kidney damage. But this sprawling scientific experiment lacks coordination and funding from Washington.
Bully Barr
The most scabrous event this past week, something that has been reported but not widely enough, are the open threats Trump lapdog William Barr has issued against the states (primarily Democratic states).
He has ordered his DOJ prosecutors to finely sift through all of the restrictions put in place by the states to be, as he put it, "on the lookout for state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens."
"Many policies that would be unthinkable in regular times have become commonplace in recent weeks, and we do not want to unduly interfere with the important efforts of state and local officials to protect the public," Barr wrote. "But the Constitution is not suspended in times of crisis. We must therefore be vigilant to ensure its protections are preserved, at the same time that the public is protected.”
Pretty fancy language for essentially telling the states, we are going to use full federal police power to punish governors, mayors and other state officials who have been, in a sense, too careful in protecting human lives.
Trump backed up Barr on Monday saying: "The attorney general doesn't want rights taken away. There are some people, they are not allowed to open up their store. They're going to lose their livelihood. And, by the way, that causes death also. ... The fact that people aren't allowed to have their freedom causes tremendous amounts of problems, including death, so that's what he's talking about."
Actually, no. Closing your small business or losing your job does not create mass death. It creates mass poverty unless there is a national government in place that offers real and sustained support for its people. Not gonna happen here. Not with Trump and probably not much better under Biden.
This is a hair-raising threat from Barr and the statements from his boss, lay bare the administration’s strategy of sending more thousands into the morgue in order to get our hallowed private sector up and running again.
And let’s put this in context. Barr’s threat against state governments comes at a time when those administrations are flat broke and going deeper in debt while the White House barely lifts a finger to support them.
I find this so outrageous that I feel compelled to repeat it all in even simpler terms. In the midst of a pandemic that has killed tens of thousands, the Federal government instead of throwing everything it can at the killer virus, is instead threatening to prosecute local officials who have shielded their constituents. To call this Madness is not enough. It’s simply off the charts.
TRUMP TO STATES: DROP DEAD
I am going to continue my role as a Cassandra and opine that without a doubt we are not even at the beginning of what is going to become an economic apocalypse no matter when Trump forces “open” the country.
The budget crisis shaking the states has already become cataclysmic and will only get worse. Especially when you have a reptile like Mitch McConnell running the Senate who has already suggested – to universal jeers—that the states should just declare bankruptcy.
As Yale law prof David Schleicher writes in Slate even if the administration increases its aid to the states, which is likely in reduced form in the near future, it will not be enough and it will come with strings that tie up local programs for years to come. He writes:
“The pandemic has particularly decimated sales tax revenue, one of the steadiest forms of state revenue. The numbers are gruesome. Gov. Andrew Cuomo estimated that New York would need to cut education and other areas by as much as 20 percent. Michigan is expected to lose between $1 billion and $3 billion by this June, and then between another $1 billion and $4 billion next fiscal year. And this doesn’t count the budget carnage and already mounting layoffs we see at the municipal, county, school district, and public authority level.
"Illinois’ state Senate leader earlier this month asked Congress for a $41 billion bailout.
"What does this mean? States will have to raise taxes and cut spending drastically to make ends meet. This will worsen the recession—states and cities will have to lay off lots of workers when unemployment is at its worst. And it will mean that all aspects of state spending that are not about COVID-19 will face steep cuts. Transportation and other infrastructure spending, higher education, K–12 reform, affordable housing, and many other state initiatives will all be set back substantially. To the extent that they borrow to get out of the hole, state debt burdens will get bigger and their capacity to do big things going forward will be further reduced. On top of this, local newspapers, declining before the crisis, have been hit hard, and access to the local press is an important means for governors to communicate what is going on in their states. The governors now dominating the airwaves with their popular coronavirus press briefings will likely soon be reduced to the role of grim accountants.”
The country’s governors had their moment in the spotlight the last month, filling in the horrifying gaps in public health and safety abandoned by the federal government. But make no mistake. Economics are forcing them into a secondary position where they will remain for a long time regardless of who wins the national election in the Fall.
In the meantime, the Trump administration’s remedial efforts continue to flop and flounder. The second bailout of small business this past week turned into a catastrophe when banks were confronted with crashing and unresponsive web sites run by the feds. In any case, to make small business whole, we would need about a half dozen more bail outs over the next year and who knows if any of that is coming.
Trump is much more concerned about his pals in the big corporate C-suites who have been doing just great thank you. The public has already seen the grotesque grabbing of small business funding by greedy billionaire organizations from the Los Angeles Lakers to Shakedown Shack etc etc. A true sign of our desperate times.
BILLIONAIRE BONANZA
Thanks to the great Institute for Policy Studies who has just issued a full report – Billionaire Bonanza 2020--that details how the very richest have gotten that much richer while 30 million American workers are unemployed, losing their jobs and insurance, probably many their houses, and now have the pleasure of standing in line at food banks. Here are the key findings of the IPS report: