American ' Federalies'

Trump is in trouble. His poll numbers even those done by Fox are in the toilet. He is desperate. And like a cornered rat he is becoming ever more dangerous and vicious. This law 'n order gambit worked for Nixon in '68 and '72. Portland is Trump's test case. If it works there, it can used on demonstrations all across the land. Street demonstrations made worse by police overreaction coupled with the criminally mishandled Pandemic could lead to an upward spiral of public anxiety beyond what now exists. BLM inspired demonstrations are largely composed of peaceful types but mixed in are some who see themselves as serious revolutionaries and believe this is some kind of 'October Revolution' moment and feel encouraged to engage in 'direct action'. Along with them are always opportunists who are out for a little plunder and mayhem just for the fun of it. So property damage, vandalism and looting (probably also abetted by pro-Trump agent provocateurs) will enviably crop up in any large demonstration making good television as well as alarming the good citizens of the politically centrist burbs. Add to this the serious effort of BLM and their white supporters to relieve the South of their statues that are tributes to the old Confederacy as well as ugly reminders of the Jim Crow era.

Trump hopes this racial discord will get people's minds off the fact that the Pandemic is totally out of control. Any and all resulting mayhem can be blamed on the so-called 'Antifa' thus giving Trump a rationale to take another giant step into 'Amerikan fascism'. So he has assembled without any authority an armed-to-the-teeth camouflage clad corp of 'American federalies' to wade in and exacerbate things if the local cops don't. A feedback loop of violence is thus created. The more Trump's new Federalies beat, gas and extra-legally arrest people, the more concerned progressive types feel compelled to come out and demonstrate. And thus the more possibilities for random property damage incidents to occur. Trump is hoping for many Portlands across the land so he can have both an election issue and take another giant step closer to a full-on police state. The House Democrats must fight back. But with the Senate still in Trump-enabling GOP hands, the House's authority over the budget is Nancy Pelosi's only weapon. But, alas, passing a relief bill ASAP is paramount. The need to provide financial support for the millions of American who are suffering from the economic carnage of this Pandemic will hold hostage any important budgetary confrontation to Trump's latest dangerous power grab. Thus we slowly inexorably descend into a post-democratic state.

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We're Number One

As I write this it's another gloomy, gray day here on the N. California coast. The news as always is also equally gloomy. The pandemic rages on. And Trump-driven new cycles, too, rage on. We are all sick of masks, precautions, hand washing and most of all the loss of normality. But the worst part of this collective misfortune is having the worst President in history during this unprecedented crisis.

The data below are from the today's NY Times on how things now stand. Not good!

 

                                  US

                                     GLOBAL

                                   Note sharp descent in hard hit countries (except Iran).

As is obvious the pandemic is not letting up one iota. Worse the USA, with the most cases in the world and the most deaths, is seeing its caseload not trending sharply down from the peak as has occurred almost every other country that got hit about the time we did. Instead we have leveled off at a high number of new cases coming every day - and now that's increasing.

Instead of going precipitously down after hitting a peak in April, our graph has flattened into an ugly plateau with a stubbornly large number of new cases still coming in each day. The US, which never ceases to brag about its wealth and power, has only 4.2% of the world's population but has 25.7% of Covid-19 fatalities. How could we have blown it so bad? How can Donald Trump even dare to show his face in public?  Where are the mobs with pitchforks?

Of course Trump's fumble re: this emergency is just the latest in a litany of monumentally bad moves. In just three and a half years his damage is immeasurable. A partial list includes withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, walking away from the World Health Organization, eviscerating the EPA and commandeering the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security for his own nefarious purposes both personal and political. His ineptitude geopolitically has fully undermined our credibility on the international stage.  Our State Department has been gutted and perverted and is no longer a force of diplomatic soft power to counterbalance our historical and often tragic over reliance on our massive over-built military machine. And a most alarming is his reckless cancellation a whole host of arms treaties painfully negotiated by both Democrats and Republican Administrations.

And then there is his sick admiration for the world’s most brutal dictators. Does he have ambitions in that direction? Alarmingly many fear that his support from heavily armed conspiracy-crazed right wing militia groups along with many rank and file cops across country could encourage him to refuse to leave office if defeated in November.

Now that our Blacks citizenry have had enough of routine police encounters becoming an excuse for summary executions, they are now robustly politically engaged. With a backdrop of a raging pandemic they are daily massing on the streets backed by a new generation of young white, Asian and Latino progressives. Trump and his supporters are being pushed into a dangerous defensive posture. The facilitating GOP overlords who benefited financially from the Trump Administration's cavalcade of corruption are running scared as two sides of a divided America face off. As Jim Morrison, poet, revolutionary, rabble rousing and self destructive madman said in the rebellious Sixties, “They got the guns we got the numbers”.

We also have the votes!

A Spring Fever from hell

Who would have expected that in the last year of the Trump presidency with the country  pathologically divided we (the humans race) would be visited by a monumental catastrophe - a pandemic of biblical proportions. The anti-Trumpians including Never Trump Republicans and the entire punditry often wondered how DJT would fare when confronted with a real crisis rather than the ones he inflicted on himself which he could at any time turn on or off like a spigot - see Trade War with China. Now we know.  

All of the kings horses and all of the kings men cannot now put this Humpty Dumpty back together again. We live in an age when too much is recorded digitally. Even the most obscure Internet user can find his or her life unraveling due to an unwisely posted video. And many a promising career has been short-circuited by some email note, jpeg file or video from their past. So it is with DJT in spades. It's all been recorded for all to see. It is totally impossible for this ultra publicity seeking cult figure and the 'President of the Free World' to extricate himself from his digitally recorded past. The televised blustery Nurenbergesque rallies, his rambling press conferences and his morning batches of spelling/grammar challenged Tweets are all there for posterity (and future political ads).


But in this case it is not only what he said or did, it was what he did not do during that fatal fallow period of inaction as the Covid-19 pestilence ramped up its insidious momentum. South Korea saw it. Taiwan saw it, Canada saw it. Hong Kong saw it. Why not us? With 14 intelligence agencies and a constant NSC presence in the White House, it must have taken DJT and his acolytes Herculean will power (or breathtaking stupidity) to so assiduously ignore this looming hell storm. But The Donald team managed to do so for a whole month.

But Trump aside we are still in deep doo doo. The data below are from the NY Times' daily updated mapping of the numbers of the pademic's carnage extracted from Johns Hopkins University's global tracking.  Some countries below like Japan and Brazil have lower numbers than one would expect probably due to a low level of testing or an early stage in the outbreak.

 

So as this pandemic engulfs the world, our numbers (shown in red) are positively numbing. As of yesterday (4/15/20) the US by far leads the rest of the  world in both the number infected with Corvid19, with 607318, and also with the number who have succumbed to it – over 26,000 and climbing. The table above shows those countries with the most (identified) cases along with that country's mortality rate. 

 Those countries shown in green have so far seem to have responded most successfully with low mortality rates. China is not included because their figures seem suspiciously low with a 2.2 billion population and only 84,802 infections. Those in gray have been hit the hardest so far both in terms of a high infection and a high mortality rates. It is really too early to see how this plays out globally. So far the only\ main takeaway is that US has over 3 times as may cases as any other country.  Our mortality rate at 4.29% still fairly low. Some have overwhelmed their health care systems like Spain and Italy. . This means our over worked, over burdened and under protected health workers are doing a truly selfless and heroic job.

This is just health care side of it all.  As much of the world's workforce is suddenly pulled from service in a unprecedented way no one yet has any real idea of how this will change the the once interconnected global economy as well each country's relative situation - or for that matter when all of this it will end.