Donald Trump is an accessory to mass murder // The consequences of inequality can be fatal
Donald Trump has
willfully botched our national response to this pandemic. We have lost over
150,000 American lives over the past five months and all Trump can say is, “We
are in the process of developing a strategy.” Another lie. Trump’s
plan has been in plain view from the very beginning: to deny, to scapegoat, to
gaslight, and to kill.
Trump decided early on
that losing American lives to COVID-19 was palatable and even preferable to
acknowledging the devastating and deadly force of this pandemic. He did not
want his re-election chances to be hurt by an economic downturn due to the
virus. So, in January and February Trump did not heed at least 12 warnings from
governmental agencies about the impending pandemic. His public statements to us
were dismissive mistruths: “We have it totally under control,” “It’s going to be
just fine,” and “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus…this is
their new hoax.”
Trump was warned about
the worldwide pandemic, but he responded reflexively by focusing on his own
political calculations, not the country’s welfare. Trump further botched
the pandemic by announcing that the federal government would be “backup” to the states’ efforts. In other words, there
was not going to be a formal national strategy for fending off and defeating
the worst pandemic in 100 years. Each governor was left alone to compete with
one another for PPE’s, ventilators, testing kits, money, and other necessities.
It was chaotic and confusing and a recipe for catastrophic failure….
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trumps-pandemic-botchery-must-be-his-undoing/The consequences of inequality can be fatal
Trump and his allies respond with pseudo-science as US death toll hits 150,000
Capitalism, as Thomas
Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows, relentlessly
worsens wealth and income inequalities. That inherent tendency is only
occasionally stopped or reversed when masses of people rise up against it. That
happened, for example, in western Europe and the U.S. during the 1930s Great
Depression. It prompted social democracy in Europe and the New Deal in the
United States. So far in capitalism’s history, however, stoppages or reversals
around the world proved temporary.
The last half-century witnessed a neoliberal
reaction that rolled back both European social democracy and the New Deal.
Capitalism has always managed to resume its tendential movement toward greater
inequality. Among the consequences
of a system with such a tendency, many are awful. We are living through one now
as the COVID-19 pandemic, inadequately contained by the U.S. system, savages
Americans of middle and lower incomes and wealth markedly more than the rich.
The rich buy better health care and diets, second homes away from crowded
cities, better connections to get government bailouts, and so on. Many of the
poor are homeless. ...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-consequences-of-inequality-can-be-fatal/
