The present CoronaVirus Pandemic proves the need for an Empathetic President, and another “New Deal” And “Great Society” in the future!
“Big” Government is needed, as it was in the 1930s “New Deal” and the 1960s “Great Society”!
We need leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, as with all their foibles, as all human beings have, they demonstrated empathy and understood the need for federal government action!
Yes, state governors, such as Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, and many others, have stepped up in this present crisis, but the lack of concern and competency of Donald Trump and his advisers, only concerned about politics rather than human lives, needs to be repudiated once and for all!
Conservatism and limitation of national government since the time of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and many others has led to this debacle, and now needs to be in their death throes, as they have caused this debacle!
We need a nation where we do not have a few people having as much wealth and assets as half of the nation!
We need a nation where everyone is entitled to decent, affordable health care, and the opportunity for an education that meets their needs and abilities!
We need a nation where we do not have a wide percentage of people who are homeless, or are unable to gain enough nutrition, and where racism, nativism, and misogyny are actively prosecuted, rather than becoming government policy!
We need the kind of nation where everyone has opportunity to move forward, as was the aim and policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson!
Huge thumbs up to this!
Thanks, Former Republican!
This is the worst crisis in our lifetimes, and the hatred of national government promoted since Ronald Reagan, MUST end, as it is our only hope for a decent future for all Americans after this pandemic is overcome!
i will ask the same question that You and everybody else everywhere is ignoring religiously [because that’s all You have working for You: blind faith in The Federal Reserve]: Who is going to pay for all this, and How are they going to pay for it?
Again: Do the words “hyperinflation” and “Weimar Germany” ring a bell?
LOL…. more troll-talk.
Hey Doc…. Was this what You were talking about the the other day?
‘Oh Hell No’: DOJ Using Coronavirus Crisis to Push for Expansive Emergency Powers [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/21/oh-hell-no-doj-using-coronavirus-crisis-push-expansive-emergency-powers?]
Or this? “Coronavirus: What Newsweek Failed To Mention About ’Continuity of Government’”
[ https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/no_author/coronavirus-what-newsweek-failed-to-mention-about-continuity-of-government/%5D
And LBJ sure did a great job with Viet Nam, didn’t he? He surely could use another President like that.
Jeffrey, Richard Nixon presided over more Americans killed in Vietnam than under LBJ, and at this rate on the virus, more Americans may die than under LBJ AND Nixon, meaning more than the 58,000 who died in the Vietnam War!
It could reach numbers greater than all wars in American history combined, so Trump could go down as the most murderous President in American history, more concerned about profits than lives!
His reputation will be in tatters, and he will never arise from last place in rankings of all Presidents!
And hopefully, never again will a non government or military figure be allowed to run and win the Presidency, as we will see that a business career does NOT qualify you to be our President, but rather actual government experience!
RF: “Jeffrey, Richard Nixon presided over more Americans killed in Vietnam than under LBJ, and at this rate on the virus, more Americans may die than under LBJ AND Nixon, meaning more than the 58,000 who died in the Vietnam War!”
Here, Doc; I’ll let add up the numbers Yourself and see who killed more GIs. And that doesn’t include the Vietnamese, Laotians, or Cambodians killed. And let’s not forget who got us into that War in the first [expletive deleted]ing place: Ever hear of the Tonkin Gulf Lie, Hoax, Sham, and Scam Incident in August, 1964?
Year Killed
1964 216
1965 1,928
1966 6,350
1967 11,363
1968 16,899 LBJ
…………………………………………..
1969 11,780 RMN
1970 6,173
1971 2,414
1972 759
1973 68
1974 1
[Source: https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics%5D
RF: “It could reach numbers greater than all wars in American history combined, so Trump could go down as the most murderous President in American history, more concerned about profits than lives!”
Another inconvenient fact. By Your calculations, that would make Lincoln “the most murderous President in American history,” wouldn’t it? “Roughly 1,264,000 American soldiers have died in the nation’s wars–620,000 in the Civil War and 644,000 in all other conflicts. It was only as recently as the Vietnam War that the number of American deaths in foreign wars eclipsed the number who died in the Civil War.” [Source available on request; evidently one is only allowed one link at a time here.]
RF: “His reputation will be in tatters, and he will never arise from last place in rankings of all Presidents!”
At this point, i seriously doubt that he is too concerned about either his reputation or Your [or anybody else’s] “ranking” of him among Presidents. Or that the 60% of Americans who approve his handling of COVID-19 are terribly concerned either: “Gallup: Trump Approval Up 5 Points to 49%, His Handling of COVID-19 at 60% Approval” [Ditto on source.
RF: “And hopefully, never again will a non government or military figure be allowed to run and win the Presidency, as we will see that a business career does NOT qualify you to be our President, but rather actual government experience!”
So is Your next project a Constitutional Amendment to that effect? Or just a Law passed by nothing but folks with “Actual government experience!” ?
The people approving of Trump’s handling of this are idiots. The reality is that Trump is handling this poorly. He’s doing nothing to fix the lack of testing and the lack of equipment the hospitals in our country desperately need.
A Long-Term Plan to Save the Economy From Coronavirus
It will take more than a $2-trillion stimulus.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/03/26/a-long-term-plan-to-save-the-economy-from-coronavirus/
The future shape of the economic crisis driven by the federal government’s inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic is coming into focus. The widespread social isolation that has sent both the demand for and production of goods and services into a free-fall reflects our spotty knowledge about the contagiousness and lethality of the virus. At the same time, we don’t know where hospital admissions will spike next. These new facts of life point to two potential economic scenarios, based on aspects of the virus that are beyond our control.
If we’re lucky, the virus will dissipate by June. Let’s call that an Act-of-God scenario. In this case, a deep recession, spurred by broad social isolation and public anxiety through April and May, will persist through most of this year. It should end by 2021, because the $2 trillion in emergency relief expected to be passed in the coming days should be enough to support a decent recovery.
To solidify a new normal for the economy, Congress can’t stop with that stimulus. It should follow up early next year by providing $1 trillion in interest-free loans to capitalize new businesses, and another $1 trillion in an emergency federal work and infrastructure program to repair and build roads, bridges, airports, wastewater treatment plants, and mass transit systems. That money can also go toward redoing the electric grid and providing rural broadband.
If God doesn’t cooperate, however, and the virus spreads throughout 2020, we won’t be able to avoid a protracted economic breakdown as serious as the 1930s. In this case, we have to respond in ways that can help preserve the economy’s underlying strengths. One plan with merit, described recently by Andrew Sorkin in the New York Times, would create five-year, interest-free government bridge loans for businesses that maintain all or most of their employees.
This approach, while attractive in concept, would be daunting to carry out. Since the purpose is to help businesses and workers get through this crisis, the bridge loans have to cover a company’s fixed costs as well as its payrolls, including commercial and industrial rent, utilities, and interest on business loans. Moreover, two-thirds of Americans get their health insurance through their jobs, with employers covering 71 percent of the premiums for families and 82 percent of the premiums for individuals. The bridge loans clearly have to cover those benefits.
In 2019, payrolls and healthcare benefits cost private businesses $11,547 billion. Fixed costs added at least $1,203 billion to those labor costs—based on a rule of thumb that a business’s fixed costs should not exceed one-third of its revenues. So, payroll and fixed costs in 2019 came to some $12.75 trillion. If two-thirds of the private sector line up for the bridge loans, they will cost the government $4.25 trillion for six months.
That may sound difficult to implement, but the alternative is a protracted Depression-class crisis is that millions of businesses will disappear. By the time the virus does recede, tens of millions of Americans will have no jobs to which they can return.
You may sensibly ask: How can the Treasury raise all these funds on top of the underlying $1 trillion deficit we face, plus the $2 trillion in crisis assistance that is likely soon to be enacted, as it also continuously refinances existing federal debt?
Foreign governments and foreign investors currently own 39 percent of our public debt, but our Treasury may not be able to depend on them this time. Our largest foreign lenders will try to hold on to their nation’s savings for their own support and stimulus programs. Other countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, which are dealing with Covid-19 more successfully, also depend on trade flows, which have fallen sharply. In this environment, trying to borrow an additional $4 trillion through normal bond issues could spike interest rates and undermine the credit of the United States.
Therefore, the Federal Reserve will have to lead the way. Bridge loans for businesses are a lifeline for banks holding those businesses’ existing loans. In return, the Fed can direct the banks to purchase the bonds, perhaps with congressional approval. That’s not totally unprecedented: Congress took a version of that action to fund the Civil War. If necessary, the Fed can loan the banks the reserves to purchase the bonds. The Fed’s alternative here is to directly create the funds for the bridge loans. The benefit of that approach is that there would be little inflationary risk, at least in this environment, beyond food prices, which also could be controlled.
Finally, the IRS would give the Treasury the information it needs to determine the bridge loan each company needs to cover its labor and fixed costs. And to ensure that those loans go only to those ends, Congress can temporarily bar stock buybacks, freeze executive compensation, and enact a high surtax on profits that exceed those in 2019.
Nobody knows where the coronavirus crisis will end up. The realities on the ground change every day. But we are clearly heading toward an economic meltdown. Dramatic measures will be necessary. If we face the prospect of a Great Depression two months from now, the approach I’ve laid out would be a possible, if daunting, way to address it.
The orange blob is why we’re in this situation to begin with. Trump got rid of any and all pandemic planning that Obama had in place.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/24/dhs-pandemic-coronavirus-146884
Seconded, Former Republican. Where are these Navy hospital ships that Trump claims are supposed to be heading to New York and California? Guarantee you that’s one of his many lies he’s telling during this crisis.
I’m so mad at Trump for his poor handling of this that I wish I could reach through my TV slap him upside the head or punch him in the face.
The rest of us feel the same way, Pragmatic.
I have even worse thoughts on Trump, lol, and I am a GOOD person! LOL
‘The Worst Type Of Leader To Have In A Crisis’
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has an urgent message during the coronavirus crisis: Authoritarians like Trump don’t care about human life. They care about power.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-authoritarian-coronavirus-ruth-ben-ghiat_n_5e7bcc32c5b6cb9dc19995a4
Far-right leaders across the globe are responding to the historic coronavirus pandemic with an alarming mix of lies, incompetence, racism and corruption.
Among them is U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly sought to downplay the severity of the virus, and to obscure all the ways his administration has fumbled the federal government’s response.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a history professor at New York University who is a world-renowned expert on fascism and propaganda. She talked to HuffPost Wednesday about the grave dangers of having an authoritarian leader like Trump in charge of America’s effort to beat back the pandemic.
Not only will the president continue to put so many lives at risk, she argued, but he will seek to exploit the crisis to gain more power.
On Tuesday, you tweeted something about Trump that struck me. You wrote: “An amoral authoritarian does not care about human lives, I cannot emphasize this enough, only profit and loyalty and obedience matter to him. The politics of revenge and spite will continue.†And I was honestly just hoping you could expand on that for a minute.
For the general public, it can be hard to accept that we have a very different kind of leader. We have a leader who has an authoritarian mentality, and that kind of leader, they’re often narcissistic, they are amoral, totally immoral, only power and profit matters. It’s very much the end justifies the means. So they think in the aggregate, and they really don’t care about human life. So, this is the worst type of leader to have in a crisis because they’re incapable of acting for the public good. So that’s one part of it.
Another part is, Trump is the foe of expertise and science and any kind of fact that gets in the way of what he wants reality to be, and we’ve seen this with abundance in the way he handled the growing crisis of coronavirus. So he would rather send misinformation to the public — which he did recently recommending [drugs] that I understand put some people in the hospital — than tell the truth. And so the broader thing is that authoritarians, they fear transparency and they fear accountability, and this is another reason why they are terrible leaders to have in crises.
How, historically, have authoritarian leaders or fascist leaders exploited big crises?
For example, during the Depression with Mussolini, the censorship meant that you’re not allowed to tell bad news. There was no way to talk about, you know, the suppression of labor, there was no way to talk about suicide, and so that’s one way in which the whole historical record in crises is always distorted by them.
And another thing is that they are corrupt to the core and so they will make a profit off of any kind of crisis. And we saw this, you know, well it’s not clear to me what’s going on behind the scenes, there was already some talk of involving a company that is partly owned by [White House adviser and Trump’s son-in-law Jared] Kushner’s brother. And then the bailout plan that [Sec. of Treasury Steve] Mnuchin presented that was first rejected by the Democrats contains provisions that could, you know, help Trump’s businesses, so this is another example of the lack of the public good.
And historically what happened was very tragic. When authoritarians get into a crisis, for example, during World War II, Mussolini and Hitler were in a losing war which they started, they abandoned their people completely. Mussolini never bothered to have adequate anti-air defenses. And they retreated from the public and they were nonresponsive. And Hitler went into his bunker in the end, and actually said that Germany should just perish. They blame the people for the consequences of their own decisions, because they despise their people. This is the secret. They actively despise and scorn their people. So all of this adds up to a really dire picture if you are unlucky enough to have this kind of ruler when you have a crisis.
I’m doing fact-checking [for her forthcoming book “Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fallâ€] and going through the book … it’s just terrifying because Trump meets every criterion for this type of personality … So it’s been really weird to be going over the book one last time in this situation.
For people that maybe don’t know maybe the strictest definition of authoritarian, what criteria does he meet?
The amoral: only caring about himself and about having more power and more money. The being corrupt, so that you hire your family who are your co-conspirators and you have the opposite of transparency. You have what’s called an inner sanctum, where you have loyalists. There’s this demand for loyalty and the humiliation of everyone around you to make sure they stay loyal. And then there’s the compulsion to lie. The inability to trust experts or to take counsel from anyone. To think you’re always right. I could go on.
You mentioned that Mussolini, during the Great Depression, employed a lot of censorship. But that’s not necessarily what we’re seeing now. But what are we seeing now, when it comes to, you know, information?
We’re seeing disinformation. Trump is very uncomfortable with people who are giving blunt information, like [Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony] Fauci. He says he’s too blunt. And very quickly the coronavirus task force doesn’t have experts who are not loyalists on it. Like the Surgeon General is there, but he’s a loyalist and he himself is very unhelpful. So you are seeing censorship, you’re seeing false information distributed. You’re seeing manipulation of information. When Trump says, “Well, we want to go back to work in two weeks, and that will be fine, and we’ll crowd the churches for Easter?†This is denial of reality. So we’re seeing all of the tactics that the new authoritarians use.
There was a poll this week showing Trump’s approval numbers going up. Historically, you know, what’s the breaking point for the followers of authoritarian leaders? Like, what does it take for them to abandon those leaders?
So his numbers may be going up now, but that’s because more and more people have not gotten sick yet … And historically, you need to get to very dire straits, very dire circumstances before people will give up their cult of the leader.
It takes until you and your family are personally seeing with your own eyes the devastation, the mistakes of the leader and his inadequacy, and his incompetence, and it has to hit very close to home for that to happen with people who have been indoctrinated. But it does happen. It does happen.
That’s why, sooner or later, not that many of these leaders die in office. Most of them are forced into exile or they go out in a violent manner.
Yea. It strikes me that the story you were talking about yesterday about the couple that took the drugs that Trump had recommended. One of them died and the wife basically said, like, “We were listening to the president. Please, no one listen to him anymore.†So it kind of took, like, her own husband dying to like break the spell.
And one conclusion I reached, you know, it’s very important to publicize, to use people who have been indoctrinated and then have come out of it, to use them, to try to present them to people as proof. Yeah, like people, there’s this guy, you must know him, Christian …
Piccolini? [Ed. note: Christian Piccolini is a former neo-Nazi who now works to deradicalize white supremacists.]
Yeah, he’s in your beat. He’s extremist too. So, yeah, giving exposure to those people is really important because they have credibility, because they were part of the cult, whereas somebody like me, or you know, they’ll just say, “Oh, she’s another radical leftist. I don’t believe her to begin with. She works for CNN.†But the other people have more credibility. It’s all very sad.
At this point, if things get as bad as we think they’re going to get, do you foresee Trump being stronger or weaker by this November?
Well, unfortunately there’s a chance that he will do what his buddy [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu did in Israel, which was to use the coronavirus as an excuse for a power grab. He didn’t suspend Parliament, but he did, like, a purge. The Guardian has an article on it. And [Prime Minister Victor] Orban in Hungary is trying to rule through decree with the excuse being the coronavirus.
Authoritarians use emergencies. Again, all they care about is power. They use emergencies as an excuse to do that. And so there’s a chance that Trump would. He sees what these people are doing and he wants to do it. He’s made that very clear to us, that he wants to rule forever. He said, I think it was, like, right when he got into office, that he wanted to look at the Constitution. He has his ideas of what he wants to do.
So there’s a chance that he would use … growing unrest. We had the lovely news that [Attorney General] William Barr wants to ask Congress to detain people without trial indefinitely, so that’s a total authoritarian move. So, depending on how the economy goes, and if there’s social unrest, you could see a crackdown.
We could see the delay of elections. It’s hard to predict what would happen. And … if he finds that he’s losing support — we’re only in March, let’s say in July or August, there’s mass death, and people have turned against him, even from his core — he would certainly do a power grab to avoid losing. I have zero doubt. Whether he will, I don’t know. But he would.
Because I guess the final point I’d make is that these guys are so corrupt that they have to stay in power to avoid prosecution. And to keep their kleptocracy going. And that’s why, he has a really nice system there, he makes money off of being president and so Ivanka and Jared and the more people bought into it, the more incentive there is to stay.
The lovely scenario. [Laughs]
Speaking of social unrest, you can’t really protest during the pandemic.
No, you can’t have mass protests.
Yeah. So I guess, what kind of guidance does history offer us in ways of responding to authoritarian leaders during a crisis like this?
Well, I don’t think we’ve had a crisis like this in a democracy. We’re seeing, Netanyahu is an example, that’s a democracy, although he’s been eating away at it for a long time. And now he does this power grab. But some of the things that are most effective historically, like sustained mass protests, like people out there, you know, every weekend, that is harder in the States because it’s not like Hong Kong, where there’s one center. It’s a very, very large place and hard to make an impact.
So I don’t know what guidance to give in terms of substituting for mass protest, other than we still have representatives in a democracy so you have to make your voice heard, because all of Trump’s lackeys, what they care about is staying in office. And we saw how scared they got running away from constituents, from their town halls, over health care, if you remember that. That really unnerved them. Now again, we can’t show up in person, but people are home. Some people have more time on their hands, they certainly can make their voices heard. It’s arguably more important than ever.
And the other thing that doesn’t need in-person protests to do and has proved effective are economic pressure campaigns. Boycotts. There’s an account that this is on Twitter that’s very effective. I’m forgetting the name.
Sleeping Giants?
Yes! And there are others. So that is something that has worked off and on very successfully and we’re overlooking it a little bit right now because well, we’re all a little freaked out and trying to survive. That economic pressure campaign can work well.
And then I’d circle back to trying to give as much media to people who have seen the light, who believed Trump and Republicans and no longer do. That’s important.
Trump team ignored a 2016 pandemic playbook that warned about testing and protective equipment
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/26/1931425/-Trump-team-ignored-a-2016-pandemic-playbook-that-warned-about-testing-and-protective-equipment
The Trump White House has no excuses for its lack of pandemic preparedness. None. Every few days we learn about yet another warning from the past, another way some part of the government tried to prepare for a pandemic, only to have Team Trump ignore all the preparation and waste months denying that coronavirus was a danger to the United States, while the virus spread and our chances to contain it ebbed away.
The latest is a National Security Council pandemic playbook from 2016, building on the lessons of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Some of the topics covered feel like they could have been written specifically for COVID-19. “Is there sufficient personal protective equipment for healthcare workers who are providing medical care?†it asks, among many other important questions. “If YES: What are the triggers to signal exhaustion of supplies? Are additional supplies available? If NO: Should the Strategic National Stockpile release PPE to states?â€
That’s not the only part that feels like a time-traveler’s pointed rebuke to how the Trump administration has handled COVID-19. “What is our level of confidence on the case detection rate?†the playbook asks. “Is diagnostic capacity keeping up?â€
The playbook also emphasizes the importance of a coordinated response and offers insights into how the different federal agencies and departments could work together. “Encouraging top officials to jockey for power and suck up to a president obsessed with his personal political future†is not one of the suggestions.
The Trump White House claims it didn’t use the document for Very Good Reasons. “We are aware of the document, although it’s quite dated and has been superseded by strategic and operational biodefense policies published since,†an NSC official told Politico. “The plan we are executing now is a better fit, more detailed, and applies the relevant lessons learned from the playbook and the most recent Ebola epidemic in the [Democratic Republic of the Congo] to COVID-19.â€
Ha ha ha ha ha sob, they’re executing a plan that’s better fit and more detailed, they say.
I’d say this was taking it a little far with the determination to scrap everything that came from the Obama administration, but when you look at the other ways Trump has abandoned pandemic preparedness, it may not even be that specific. He fired a pandemic response team. The Department of Health and Human Services staged a simulated pandemic last fall but still managed to be unprepared when this one hit, while the Department of Homeland Security stopped holding pandemic simulations.
Then again, maybe Trump early on realized that pandemic preparedness was something Obama had done and decided to send it the way of everything else Obama did, like health care and environmental and labor protections. The fact that the Obama administration’s transition team included a pandemic in disaster response exercises during the Trump transition—yet another chance Team Trump had to be prepared to not completely screw this up—might be a clue on that front. Either way, Trump has failed and failed hard despite all of the government preparation for a pandemic over recent years, and hundreds of thousands of Americans are likely to pay with their lives.
Professor – We’ve had dark thoughts as well, such as Trump being assassinated.
Former Republican, SHHH, be careful with your language, but we get the drift! LOL
That Huffington Post article brought up a good point about the polling. These people giving Trump good approval ratings haven’t had dire circumstances hit their neck of the woods yet.
At the press briefing yesterday, Rump refused to accept medical supplies from our allies.
Shame on him for not accepting their help!
Democratic SuperPAC, Priorities USA, is going to be airing this ad in the battleground states: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkMwvmJLnc0&feature=youtu.be
Trump doesn’t want people seeing it and is threatening legal actions against TV stations that do so.
Stand strong, TV stations, don’t give in to his bullying!
Biden’s got some good posts and videos on his Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/joebiden/posts/?ref=page_internal
I’ve heard that, in these polls, governors are getting higher approval ratings for handling the crisis than Trump.
Biden still beats Trump in new general election polling, despite Trump’s coronavirus approval bounce.