Trump is playing a deadly game in deflecting Covid-19 blame to China

As Mr ‘Total Authority’ keeps his focus firmly on re-election, he risks lives far beyond the United States

Simon Tisdall Sun 19 Apr 2020 

Donald Trump and vice-president Mike Pence listen to Anthony Fauci during the Covid-19 daily briefing on 16 April, in front of sign about easing state lockdowns. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP

Many had wondered what would happen when Donald Trump, failed salesman and gameshow host, faced a real crisis. Now they know. The man who pledged to stop “American carnage” in his inaugural address now owns it. Covid-19 has crowned him lord of misrule.

That’s fitting for a man who last week claimed to exercise “total authority”. Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor who understands what leadership means, reminded him the US does not do kings. But Trump and America’s last monarch, George III, share much in common, tyranny-wise.

Trump is more instinctive dictator than democrat, in the style of his favourite potentate, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Just look at his recent threat to shut down Congress, and his enthusiasm for suppressing minority voter turnout.

It’s worth recalling that old King George became mentally ill, since Trumpism is clearly dangerous for your health. It’s beyond reasonable dispute that his coronavirus posturing, preening, prevarication and paranoia fatally hindered the early US response.

“The president’s denial at the beginning was deadly,” Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, said last month. “As the president fiddles, people are dying.” She repeated the charge last week, claiming Trump was still causing “unnecessary death and disaster”.

The result, so far, is around 700,000 Covid cases and 35,000 US fatalities. Is it fair to blame him personally for every preventable death? No. But they all occurred on his watch. It’s his job to look out for the American people. He is ultimately responsible.


Trump’s inability to show competent, rational leadership at home and abroad is decimating America’s worldwide reputation

Trump’s primary motive in issuing “guidelines” last week to ease the lockdown was not concern for citizens’ welfare. It was about reviving the economy and getting himself re-elected, come what may. Health experts and state governors forced him to drop rasher measures.

Likewise, Trump endangers the world the US once aspired to lead. The under-resourced, under-pressure World Health Organization has made mistakes during this pandemic. But it retains a vital role in coordinating a global response. Trump unfairly maligned it.

Developing countries, which could be hardest hit in humanitarian and economic terms, need all the help they can get. Trump could not care less. His unjustified suspension of WHO funding threatens lives. Thanks to him, more people may die.

When it comes to scapegoats, however, Trump’s fall-guy of choice is China. Supplanting Iran, Beijing is his latest, indispensable bogeyman. This is truly dangerous. It risks turning an already badly strained relationship into a second cold war.

Trump raised the stakes again last week, alleging that China deliberately under-reported virus deaths. He gave credence to a conspiracy theory, already debunked by the Pentagon, that a biotech weapons lab in Wuhan caused the original outbreak.

Even Trump’s blinkered “base” can surely see what is going on. Their hero messed up big-time, so now he’s trying, as usual, to avoid responsibility by deflecting blame on to others, preferably foreigners and the Chinese communist party – an easy target.

Trump plans to use this crude anti-China narrative to bash Democrat presidential rival, Joe Biden. It has already started. A Trump online ad released this month claims “Biden stands up for China while China cripples America”.

Trump intends to brand Joe Biden as ‘soft’ on China during the presidential election campaign. Photograph: Brian Cahn/Rex

According to analyst Jonathan Swan, writing on Axios: “Trump officials had long been planning to brand Biden as ‘soft’ on China, but the coronavirus pandemic ... has stoked public anger towards Beijing and made the attack more resonant in polling.”

Trump also intends to highlight business dealings with China by Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, in a reprise of his spurious Ukraine impeachment defence. “You’d better believe voters will hear about that,” a Trump campaign operative said.

Trump’s ongoing inability to show competent, rational leadership at home and abroad is decimating America’s worldwide reputation. The WHO decision sparked a fierce backlash from G7 allies and the UN, who pointedly stressed the need for multilateral solidarity.

Meanwhile, Trump’s enduring hostility is bringing out the worst in Beijing. Anger over his Covid-19 smears, coupled with long-running trade disputes, regional tensions, and lecturing about human rights, has goaded China into dropping its non-threatening, diplomatic “peaceful rise” approach. A more aggressive generation of official and semi-official spokespeople has been unleashed by the emperor-president, Xi Jinping. These so-called “wolf warriors” are churning out propaganda and lies of their own, notably a claim that the US army planted the virus in China.

There is much to suggest that China, regardless of Trump, is exploiting the crisis to further its long-term aim of establishing a technological, economic and geopolitical advantage over the west. At home, rising ultra-nationalism and xenophobia are officially tolerated, even encouraged.

China’s top cadres should pause and think again. So, too, should Trump. His reckless blame-games and political machinations are not only killing Americans and American influence overseas. Intensifying mutual antagonism also risks killing any chance that the world’s two biggest powers will cooperate sensibly to eradicate this and future pandemics – for example, by backing a necessary, independent international inquiry into what went wrong. That, in turn, bodes ill for vital bilateral collaboration on the climate crisis and other urgent global challenges such as debt relief.

The world cannot afford another four years of the chaos and carnage personified by Trump. Voting him out in November is the best solution. But what if, fearful of losing amid continuing mayhem, he tries to delay the election?

Experts say he lacks power to do so. But Mr “Total Authority” may disagree. Amid so much avoidable death and destruction, why not kill the constitution and the Founding Fathers, too? As everybody surely realises by now, he’s capable of almost anything.

ITS NOT THE FOUNDING FATHERS ITS THE FOUNDING FARMERS, AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM

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What does the WHO do, and why has Trump stopped supporting it?

Trump has suspended funding to the World Health Organization over its coronavirus response

Peter Beaumont and Sarah Boseley Wed 15 Apr 2020
 

Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

What is the World Health Organization’s remit?The World Health Organization (WHO) was founded as the UN global health body in 1948 in the aftermath of the second world war with a mandate to promote global health, protect against infectious disease and to serve the vulnerable. It was inspired by the international sanitary conferences of the 19th century set up to combat communicable diseases such as cholera, yellow fever and plague.

Its current programme envisages expanding universal healthcare to a billion more people, protecting another billion from health emergencies and providing a further billion people with better health and wellbeing.
What does that involve?

In practical terms, the badly underfunded WHO acts as a clearing house for investigation, data and technical recommendations on emerging disease threats such as the coronavirus and Ebola. It also supports eradication of existing diseases such as malaria and polio and promotes global public health.

While its role on emerging diseases is most familiar in the developed world with its more resilient healthcare systems, its practical involvement is far more marked in the global south, where it has been working to expand basic healthcare, support vaccination and sustain weak and often stressed health systems through its emergencies programmes. Its 2018-9 budget was $4.8bn, which became $5.7bn when emergencies were included.

Why is the WHO under fire from Trump?Trump has presented the freezing of US funding to the WHO as a direct response to what he claims was its slow reaction in raising the alarm over the global threat from the coronavirus and being too “China-centric” in its response. But the organisation’s funding was already in his sights on 7 February, when his administration was suggesting cutting the US contribution, about $400m annually, by half as part of $3bn cuts to US global health funding across the board.

The WHO, to whom the US theoretically contributes roughly 10-15% of its budget as its largest contributor, has been appealing for an extra $1bn to help fight the coronavirus.

The allegation by Trump and his supporters that the WHO was slow to warn of the risk of human-to-human transmission, and that it failed to cross-examine Chinese transparency early on, is largely not borne out by the evidence. WHO technical guidance issued in early January was warning of the risk of human-to-human transmission and the organisation declared coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern a day before Trump announced his partial ban on flights from China.

Instead, it appears Trump is following a familiar playbook: finding others to blame amid his own handling of the coronavirus outbreak, which has included calling it the “Chinese virus”, blaming the previous Obama administration and taking aim at state governors.
How does the WHO’s performance in the coronavirus crisis compare with the 2014-15 

Ebola outbreak?

The WHO, under the then-director general, Margaret Chan, was savaged from all sides for responding so slowly to an Ebola outbreak that began in a remote forested part of Guinea where the borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia were virtually non-existent. By the time the WHO acted, six months late, it had reached the dense cities.

The fallout for the WHO was serious and undermined its credibility. US critics suggested scrapping it and setting up a new global public health body, although the idea did not take off and President Obama did not support it. An independent report commissioned by Chan said the WHO’s funding was inadequate and governments had not increased their contributions in years. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the current director general, and all other candidates for the role after Chan stood down pledged to reform its governance and funding.

Most health experts agree the organisation under Tedros has performed much better over the coronavirus.

How big an impact will the US funding cuts have?

While the suspension of funding by the US for 60-90 days is relatively small – not least because the US is so far in arrears in its annual payments – the potential for a general US withdrawal from global health funding under the cover of this announcement would be very serious and felt most profoundly in places that need the most support.

Even before the Trump announcement, the organisation was looking at potential cuts to already underfunded programming. Such impacts could be felt in programmes already complicated by the coronavirus, such as vaccination for communicable diseases and in building up early warning systems and resilience to deal with diseases such as Ebola in African countries.

Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, called Trump’s decision extremely problematic, noting that the WHO was leading efforts to help developing countries fight the spread of Covid-19. “This is the agency that’s looking out for other countries and leading efforts to stop the pandemic. This is exactly the time when they need more funding, not less,” she said.
What other impacts will there be?

Trump’s assault on the reliability of WHO data and early warning systems, in pursuit of his own agenda against China, threatens its leadership role. While global health diplomacy is a balancing act when dealing with countries like China, which have a poor record on freedom of speech, transparency and human rights, the information provided to health officials by the WHO is designed to be scientifically and clinically useful in the control of the spread of disease.

Beware a new wave of populism, born out of coronavirus-induced economic inequity

Big businesses and governments are fast making themselves inviolable. There could be a backlash


Nick Cohen Sat 18 Apr 2020 THE GUARDIAN 
 

Protesters ‘Rally Against Capital’ in London in February 2020. Photograph: Ollie Millington/Getty Images
SEE SOME PROTESTERS WERE ALREADY MASKED AGAINST COVID-19

Aglobal wave of injustice could follow the global pandemic. Pre-existing tendencies towards monopoly, Chinese dominance and predatory capitalism will explode unless governments take measures to contain them. I accept that it is hard to imagine public fury at a rigged economy when voters are rallying to their leaders and lockdowns are enjoying overwhelming support. Solidarity cannot last, however, as the crisis accentuates the division between insiders and outsiders.

You see them now. Employees with staff jobs, and the ability to work from home, are coping, for the moment. A few might experience lockdown as something close to a holiday and rhapsodise on the joys of home baking and box sets. As insiders stay inside, they save the money they would have spent in shops, restaurants, hotels and travel agents - the places where the insecure, the luckless nine out of 10 in the bottom half of earners who cannot work from home, once made their livings.


What applies to individuals applies to corporations and private equity funds that are strong enough to buy up distressed assets at a fraction of their pre-crisis value. I sat up and paid attention last week when I heard Sebastian Mallaby of the US Council on Foreign Relations warn that private equity is likely “to play both sides”: soaking up government largesse and profiting from market mayhem. It won’t, he concluded, “look great when we consider the political economy of the pandemic a year from now”.

You catch a glimpse of the future in the manoeuvres of the US private equity firms thinking of deploying hundreds of billions of dollars they hold in reserve as high-interest loans to struggling companies. The arguments this month about a Chinese state-owned investment firm buying up the British chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies are a further harbinger of a possible world to come. The Chinese Communist Party’s “2025 Made in China” strategy sees it leapfrogging the west by taking over companies and establishing a global lead in smart manufacturing, digitisation and emerging technologies. Covid-19 gives the party the opportunity it needs. Funds and states are operating in a market where the tendency towards monopoly was already established.

The 2008 crash, like recessions before it, concentrated economic power, as large firms used their resources and access to finance to ensure their survival. But, unlike in the last century, a multitude of rival businesses did not emerge once recession had passed, to provide competition and new employment opportunities for workers wanting to raise their wages by switching firms. In 2016, according to the Resolution Foundation, Britain’s 100 biggest firms accounted for 23% of total revenue across the economy, up by a quarter since 2004. As the economic crisis we are entering looks worse than 2008, worse indeed than anything anyone alive can remember, the rise of corporate giants seems assured. Big governments – and this crisis is making governments bigger than ever – will welcome them, because they want the convenience of dealing with big businesses, not with tens of thousands of small and medium-size firms.

Complaints about tax-exile billionaires wanting other people’s money are a warning

Do you begin to see how popular fury might build? Vulture capitalists swooping on undervalued assets. Chinese communists, who censored news of Covid-19 rather than alerting the world, benefiting rather than suffering. Big business trampling over all who might challenge it. It’s not a recipe for social peace.

Superficially, the crisis of 2020 does not appear anything like the financial crisis of 2007-08 and not only because it threatens to bring an incomparably greater level of impoverishment. Then there were human villains: bankers and captured regulators who broke the financial system, northern Europeans who congratulated themselves as they let southern Europe collapse. Now there’s just an invisible infectious agent that wants only to replicate itself. The similarities remain striking, for all that. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, like leaders across the west, weren’t interested in jailing bankers or making them pay back their bonuses. Their sole concern was to stop the collapse of the banking system. The morality of the bailout could wait – forever, as it turned out. Everywhere in the west, the public reaction was the same. Democracy was a racket. Taxpayers had to rescue the richest people in the world and then suffer years of stagnant wages and cut public services to meet the bill. If you need a one-line explanation for populism, this is the best there is.

Yet again, vast amounts of public money are being committed, but instead of stagnation we face catastrophe. Nervous commentators rererence how the Great Depression of the 1930s fuelled nazism and communism, as 2008 fuelled populism, and dread what awaits us. They should know there is no necessary link between economic and political failure. Far from enabling tyranny, the economic crisis of the 1970s, for instance, saw the end of the rightwing tyrannies in Spain, Portugal and Greece and the beginning of the decline and fall of the Soviet empire. Our future depends not only on the work of scientists but on the efforts of governments to stop democracy turning into a swindle.

The EU says countries must ensure that big business doesn’t use state funding to buy out rivals and adds that nation states should take stakes in companies threatened with Chinese takeovers. However the UK’s relationship with the EU ends, that’s good advice.

Governments should not forget natural justice as they did in 2008. Complaints about tax-exile billionaires in the Richard Branson mould wanting other people’s money are a warning, not a tabloid distraction. If, as seems likely, the government moves from subsidising wages to direct loans to big business, the first question must be what do taxpayers, employees and wider society gain in return.

Sociologists talk of the “Matthew effect”, an idea lifted from Saint Matthew’s account of the most unChristian words Jesus uttered: “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Our task is to make sure this miserable prophecy is not now vindicated.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

After the crisis, a new world won’t emerge as if by magic. We will have to fight for it Neal Ascherson

What will the landscape look like when we wake from the nightmare? The fantasies, and anxieties, about the future are already with us

Sun 19 Apr 2020
 

‘The landscape after the plague will be unfamiliar.’ 

Illustration: Dom McKenzie/The Observer


The French used to be mad about the cure de sommeil – the sleep cure. Dr Jakob Klaesi of Bern invented it. Drugged, you pass out for days or even weeks. Then, cautiously, you are woken up. You are supposed to find you feel quite differently about things.

Politicians insist that lockdown under coronavirus is like the experience of wartime. It’s not – except in one way, which I’ll come to. It’s so quiet, for one thing. War is noisy. Sirens, soldiers tramping past singing, Luftwaffe engines in the night sky.

These lockdown weeks are more like induced sleep. Nine out of 10 of us see and hear nothing of the nurses and doctors, the bus drivers and key workers. We learn of their bravery and their deaths only by radio, from a screen or a newspaper left by a boy in a mask. For most people, life is on hold. A trance descends, soothed by birdsong, a dog barking, an ambulance in the distance.

What happens when it’s over? European literature has a genre of “the landscape after the battle” – the ruins, the hunger and cold, the search for family survivors. The landscape after the plague will be unfamiliar, but not like that.

In the first place, emerging from isolation – waking up – must be handled carefully. It’s the phase de sevrage, weaning the patient from sleep. “This prolonged dive into the world of dream can allow a patient to exercise their fantasies, perhaps to discover the links between them,” warns a French doctor. “Harmful after-effects are possible, provoking in some patients paroxysms of depressive anxiety.”

The fantasies and anxieties are already with us. And here one comparison with wartime does work. The longer the virus emergency lasts, the more the memory of the pre-virus world begins to grow unreal, unconvincing. It was like that in the Second World War. “Peacetime…”

Was there really a Britain, only a few years ago, when you could buy as many sweeties as you wanted? A time when the work of millions of men and women wasn’t wanted, when the poor couldn’t afford a doctor, when middle-class families had servants they could sack when Madam was in a bad temper? It wasn’t just working-class people who began to ask: “Could we really have lived like that? This war’s changed everything. Pity, in some ways, but it couldn’t go on.”  

Was there really a Britain, only a few years ago, when, outside the schools medical service, the poor couldn’t afford a doctor? Photograph: Daily Herald Archive/SSPL via Getty Images

Now, unmistakably, there’s a feeling that “things will never be the same after it’s over” and “we can’t go back to all that”.

Can’t we, just? Some of those who govern us can imagine only restoring “their” Britain, disfigured by inequalities. They will exploit the real and moving solidarity shown in these pandemic months, as they confront the colossal debts left by rescue spending. They will impose another “we’re all in this together” campaign of savage austerity at the expense of social services and the poor.

And yet, just as in 1945, voices are starting to say “never again”. As in: never again “austerity”, which leaves people helpless in an emergency. Never again the emaciation of the welfare state, and the NHS above all. Come to that, never again neoliberalism. But who will do the politics of “never again” when we open our eyes? Or are these hopes just “prolonged dives into the world of dream”, pathetic fantasies dissolving into “paroxysms of depressive anxiety” as Britain wakes from its corona coma?

The landscape will look different. Mass unemployment, as hundreds of firms go bust in spite of government loans, made much worse if the suicidal idiocy of a no-deal Brexit really happens at the end of this year. Concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands, as big companies cannibalise what’s left of smaller enterprises. Bankruptcies devastating those charities and funds that maintained so much welfare and research as public spending withered under austerity.  

Never again? Londoners queue outside a butcher’s shop in 1947. 

Photograph: Pat English/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Yet there’s new light, too. Neoliberalism is dead, but Boris Johnson’s own path away from it leads to a UK version of European neopopulism: a powerful nationalist state, insular and xenophobic, harsh on human rights, big spender on the welfare of the “left-behind” masses. Rishi Sunak’s discovery of billions for business rescue, like the cities’ discovery of millions to house their rough sleepers, shows what was always possible. Debt and deficit soar but – turning Tory orthodoxy inside out – they seem not so lethal after all. And a dose of moderate inflation? Why not?

The state is back. A liberating thought for Labour under Keir Starmer. But a strong British state in the 2020s – what will that smell like? The historian David Edgerton, asking himself: “When was Britain?”, answers: not in the high days of empire, not even in 1940, but in the postwar decades after 1945. Then Britain became a strictly centralised and planned state. Almost self-sufficient (“Export or Die!”), it was industrialised as never before or since. Operated by Tories as well as Labour, this “economic nationalism” only broke down in the 1980s, says Edgerton. In came free-market dogma, the shrinking of the state and devolution wrenching open the faultlines of the United Kingdom.

That “strong Britain” left its peoples healthier, safer, better educated and more equal. But there’s no way back to it. The industrial economy is over. Dragging Scotland and Wales back under Whitehall control – forget it! Johnson’s “strong Britain” may amount only to England weakly imitating the repressive populism of Poland or Hungary.

Yet a great emergency, like this shared time of pestilence, leaves people sensing their own power, aware that they can act without waiting for yesterday’s leaders. When we finally wake up from the long sleep cure, there is a chance to make those “never agains” more than a fading dream. A chance – but lasting only for a few months of creative confusion as we all stand up again and look around. “Rise like lions after slumber,” said Shelley. There is plenty to do, but we have to do it fast.

• Neal Ascherson is a journalist and writer

Protesters decry stay-at-home orders in Maryland, Texas and Ohio capitals

Rightwing media and Donald Trump have supported demonstrators but they appear to represent a minority opinion
Thousands of Americans backed by rightwing donors gear up for protests

Lois Beckett in San Francisco Sun 19 Apr 2020

Protesters ANGRY WHITE MEN against the state’s stay-at-home order 
demonstrate in Austin. Photograph: Callaghan O’Hare/Reuters

A day after Donald Trump encouraged Americans to protest against strict public health measures aimed at limiting the spread of coronavirus, rallies were held in state capitals in Maryland, Texas and Ohio, with more planned for next week in other states.

Hundreds of people stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the Texas Capitol on Saturday, chanting “Fire Fauci!” as part of a protest organized by the conspiracy theory site InfoWars. Anthony Fauci is the top public health expert on the White House coronavirus taskforce.

In Maryland, protesters stayed inside their cars and honked their horns as they drove around the capital, Annapolis, to demand that Governor Larry Hogan “reopen Maryland”. In Columbus, Ohio, hundreds of protesters gathered, some chanting “We are not sheep”.

The protests demanding governors reverse shutdown orders have been boosted by rightwing media outlets and by the president, who tweeted on Friday “Liberate Minnesota!” and “Liberate Michigan!” in the wake of a protest in Michigan that drew thousands of people.


Trump calls protesters against stay-at-home orders 'very responsible'

Widespread shutdowns to prevent the spread of coronavirus have left many Americans unemployed, worried that their small businesses will not survive the next few months of the crisis, and afraid of deepening economic problems. But those actually taking to the streets to protest against public health measures represent a minority opinion, according to a recent poll.

Two-thirds of Americans fear that state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly, compared with only one third who worry they will not do so quickly enough, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of nearly 5,000 American adults.

Republicans were evenly divided on the issue, with 51% saying they were concerned about restrictions being lifted too quickly, the poll found.

In Texas, even the InfoWars contributor who organized the rally estimated that it had attracted, at most, a few hundred people.

In Maryland, organizers of the “Reopen Maryland” protest asked supporters to stay in their cars and keep their messaging respectful. Local news outlets shared footage of streets in Annapolis filled bumper-to-bumper with cars, many of them honking their horns. Some participants flew American flags and many scrawled protest messages on their windows.

“We are petitioning our governor, Larry Hogan, to immediately reopen our state’s business, educational and religious institutions,” the protest organizers wrote in an online letter, arguing that, while coronavirus was a serious public health concern, “the economic, social and educational disruption caused by shutdowns is guaranteed to cause significant, even greater, harm”. 

Demonstrators drive though downtown Annapolis, Maryland.
 Photograph: Tom Brenner/Reuters

One local resident who participated in the protest wrote that he wanted to show up so the governor “hears both sides” of the debate over how long to keep shutdown measures in place, and said he had seen hundreds of other cars participating.

“Right now it seems to be all shutdown, without consideration for those who are hurt by it. That does include me,” Tony, a 35-year-old personal trainer from Elkridge, Maryland, told the Guardian in a Twitter message. He declined to give his last name.

With gyms closed for weeks, Tony said, he has not been able to work, and as an independent contractor, he and similar workers have few support systems during the shutdown. If public parks had remained open , he said, he could hold socially distant fitness training sessions outside.

“It just seems like nonsense that spaces are closed that would be really minimal risk to open,” he wrote, saying the choice showed “a lack of balance”.

Tony wrote he believed some shutdown measures should stay in place, like keeping crowded club and stadium venues closed, but he wanted to see some businesses reopen, perhaps at reduced capacity.

In Texas, where the anti-shutdown protest was organized by conspiracy theorists, the rhetoric was more extreme, with an organizer referring to the “coronavirus hoax,” and the “narratives” of the “Deep State”.

Alex Jones, the InfoWars founder, stood at the center of a packed crowd of hundreds of people on Saturday afternoon and bellowed into a bullhorn, praising attendees for resisting tyranny. Few of the Texas protesters were wearing masks.
Lois Beckett(@loisbeckett)

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones speaking to a crowd of hundreds of people in Austin, Texas, at a protest organized by another InfoWars personality. Theme: "You Can't Close America." pic.twitter.com/0onNIZvj3OApril 18, 2020

“I see a bunch of healthy Americans out here who don’t seem to be afraid of a virus,” said Owen Shroyer, the InfoWars personality who organized the protest, according to footage of the protest livestreamed on Periscope.

Shroyer’s Twitter account was reportedly suspended this week after he shared posts about the protest.

“If I want to go out to the gym or the club, or a restaurant, I’m not going to wear a mask,” Shroyer said. “Neither am I!” a woman shouted back at him.

Shroyer suggested that if thousands of Americans held protests against the shutdown all over the country, they would be able to see that “the the virus doesn’t spread like they told us”. He referred to “the coronavirus hoax” on the livestream, then added that while there was a real virus, “the hysteria, the shutdown,” was the hoax.

A spokesperson for the Texas state police did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether there had been any arrests or citations at the rally.

Trump calls protesters against stay-at-home orders 'very responsible'



President tweeted that Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia should be ‘liberated’ after demonstrations against social distancing
David Smith in Washington Sat 18 Apr 2020 

Donald Trump has posted highly incendiary tweets stoking protests against physical distancing and other coronavirus stay-at-home measures in three states led by Democratic governors.

The rightwing groups behind wave of protests against Covid-19 restrictions


“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” the US president wrote in capital letters on Friday. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

He followed up with a third tweet: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” – a reference to Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, last week signing into law new measures on gun control.

Trump has repeatedly ignored his own entreaty to put partisan politics aside during the coronavirus pandemic. His latest provocative interventions followed demonstrations against stay-at-home orders in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and other states that have drawn elements of the far right.

Some protesters have carried guns, waved Trump and Confederate flags and sought to frame the debate as a defence of constitutional freedoms. They have been egged on by conservative media hosts such as Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, who said: “What happened in Lansing [Michigan] today, God bless them: it’s going to happen all over the country.”

At Friday’s White House coronavirus taskforce briefing, Trump played down fears that by crowding together, the protesters themselves could spread the Covid-19 illness. “These are people expressing their views,” he told reporters. “I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

In 2017 the president was condemned for reacting to a deadly clash between white nationalists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, by observing that there “were very fine people on both sides”.

On Friday, Trump also stood by his criticism of the Democratic governors, even though they are following his own federal guidelines. “I think some things are too tough,” he said. “And if you look at some of the states you just mentioned, it’s too tough, not only in reference to this but what they’ve done in Virginia with respect to the second amendment is just a horrible thing ... When you see what other states have done, I think I feel very comfortable.”

Asked if he believed Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia should lift their stay-at-home orders, the president added: “I think elements of what they’ve done are too much, just too much ... What they’ve done in Virginia is just incredible.”

Trump, known to watch Fox News closely, has offered mixed messages. On Monday he claimed “total” authority to order an end to the stay-at-home measures, but on Thursday issued phased “guidelines” that passed the buck to governors to make decisions on the ground about when and how to reopen. His tweets on Friday appeared to undercut his own experts’ warnings and drew sharp criticism.

Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, tweeted in response: “The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting Covid-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.”

Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman who like Inslee ran for the Democratic nomination, said: “Republicans will turn a blind eye [and] too many in the press will focus on ‘tone’. But history books will say: in April of 2020, when the pandemic had already claimed 35,000 lives, the president of the United States incited people to storm their statehouses with AR-15s and AK-47s.”

Armed protesters demand an end to Michigan's coronavirus lockdown orders – video

Michigan has taken big hits in both coronavirus cases and job losses and will be a critical battleground state in the presidential election. Wednesday’s “Operation Gridlock”, a demonstration against strict stay-at-home policies ordered by Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, attracted the Proud Boys and other far-right groups who have been present at pro-Trump and gun rights rallies in Michigan.

Most protesters stayed in their vehicles and circled the state capitol building in Lansing, but a small group stood on the capitol steps to flout physical distancing guidelines. They brandished signs that included “Trump/Pence”, “Recall Whitmer”, “Heil Whitmer” and “Stop the Tyranny”, and briefly chanted “Lock her up!”, echoing Trump campaign rallies’ targeting of Hillary Clinton.

Whitmer, who dismissed the stunt as “essentially a political rally”, has emerged as a possible running mate for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said at an online “Women for Trump” event Whitmer had “turned this crisis into a platform to run for vice-president”.

The protests have earned comparisons with the Tea Party movement of a decade ago and more are expected in coming days, with the tension between public health and economic reopening viewed through an increasingly partisan lens.

The Washington Post reported: “Uncertainty and fear over the economic impact of stay-at-home orders is fueling a sort of culture war between conservatives, whose political strength now comes from rural America, right now less affected by the virus, and liberals, whose urban strongholds have been most affected by it.”

Last Saturday, for example, the Republican senator Ted Cruz, a Trump ally, tweeted that he was going to the beach with his children. “Fortunately, I live in Texas – where we protect public safety, but aren’t authoritarian zealots – so they won’t arrest me!” he wrote.

According to Pew Research, 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say their greater concern is that governments will lift restrictions too quickly. About half (51%) of Republicans and Republican leaners say their bigger concern is that state governments will act too quickly.

The Anti-Lockdown Protests Are Getting Weird


The rallies have featured guns, Guy Fawkes masks, members of the far-right Proud Boys group and chants such as “facts over fear!”​

By Tess Owen Apr 16 2020

New York and Virginia’s state houses just became the latest venues for anti-lockdown protesters to vent their frustrations and demand that their respective governors reopen their states’ economies despite the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

The demand to “#ReOpenAmerica” made its way off the internet and into the real world in the past week, with rallies also taking place in Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, and Kentucky. Another is planned in Wisconsin on Friday. Wednesday’s rally in Michigan, dubbed “Operation Gridlock” was by far the largest, with about 100 attendees who gathered in person or swarmed the Capitol with their cars, blocking traffic and even preventing an ambulance from getting through.


The rallies have, so far, featured guns, Guy Fawkes masks, members of the far-right Proud Boys group, possible links to the family of Education Secretary Betsy Devos, and chants such as “facts over fear!”

Thursday’s rally at the New York state house in Albany had a comparatively poor turnout, drawing only around a dozen attendees — some of whom waved Trump2020 and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.

There were intermittent flurries of snow, and many of the protesters stayed in their cars outside the statehouse, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo had just announced that New York — where the virus has killed 11,586 people and sickened over 200,000 — would remain on “pause” until May 15.

A livestream by the Albany event’s organizer, named “Mike Gee”, showed one man holding a sign reading “Communist Cuomo Has Got To Go.” He called the governor a “communist dictator” because of his refusal to allow pharmacists to fill prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by President Donald Trump as a magical cure for coronavirus. There’s no conclusive medical evidence that shows that the anti-malarial drug does help with coronavirus.

“We don’t want handouts, we want to go back to work,” one man, identified as Jared Armstrong from Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, told Gee. “We can do it in a smart way. Everyone else in that building is waiting for someone else to say ‘jump’ because nobody wants to be responsible if something goes sideways. They’re still getting their pay, they’re still working on your dime.”

The Thursday rally in Virginia, organized by a coalition of groups, “ReOpen Virginia,” “End the Lockdown VA” and “Virginians Against Excessive Quarantine,” had a slightly larger turnout, with a couple dozen people chanting “end the lockdown.”

The #ReopenAmerica call has resonated with many of the millions of Americans who’ve suddenly found themselves jobless since coronavirus swept into the U.S. and forced an unprecedented economic shutdown. Much of conservative social media has become an echo chamber with people grasping for answers and voicing their frustrations, often casting doubt on the severity of coronavirus and accusing the media of overhyping the pandemic. Others have seized on Trump’s calling coronavirus a “China Virus,” even going as far to suggest that China intentionally released the virus to cripple the U.S. economy.

While many Republicans, including Trump, are chomping at the bit to reopen the U.S., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci has warned that we’re not there yet. In an interview with the Associated Press this week, Fauci said the goal of opening the country up by May 1 was “a bit overly optimistic” and that he’s concerned that opening up too quickly could lead to clusters of infections and even a second peak of COVID-19 cases in the fall.

Cover: Dawn Perreca protests on the front steps of the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing, Mich., Wednesday, April 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/04/white-supremacists-in-disguise-sic-this.html

With working Americans' survival at stake, the US is bailing out the richest

Without significant oversight, Congress’s economic relief bill will leave millions of everyday Americans in financial peril

Morris Pearl and William Lazonick
Tue 14 Apr 2020

 

People wait for the San Antonio Food Bank to begin 

food distribution as need soars. Photograph: William Luther/AP
Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives who, while enriching themselves, spent the past decade pushing business corporations to the edge of insolvency.

The very survival of working-class households is now at stake. Yet the $500bn dollars of public money that Congress’s relief bill provides will be used for a corporate bailout, with the only oversight in the hands of an independent council similar to the one used in the 2008 financial crisis. While that body was able to report misuses of taxpayer money, it could do nothing to stop them.

Moving forward, we need a guarantee from Congress that public money will not help billionaire shareholders or corporate executives protect, and even augment, their personal wealth. As currently structured, there is nothing to keep this bailout from, like its predecessor, putting cash directly into the hands of those at the top rather than into the hands of workers. Without strong regulation and accountability, asking corporations to preserve jobs with these funds will be nothing more than a simple suggestion, leaving millions of everyday Americans in financial peril.

America’s working class, not corporate executives, are the ones on the frontlines

Productive work and consumer spending are the dual engines that keep our economy running, which is why this pandemic poses such an acute threat. Therefore, the purpose of further government support must be to keep as many employees working as long and as productively as possible.

Working people were not prepared for this disaster. There are still tens of millions of American households that haven’t recovered from the Great Recession; nearly 50% of Americans were already living paycheck to paycheck before millions lost their jobs in the last few weeks, and 40% did not have enough savings accrued to cover a $400 emergency. It’s imperative that they be given the lifelines that they desperately need to survive.

The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America's poorest

Keeping Americans indoors to reduce their risk of spreading Covid-19 has almost completely shut down our massive service economy. It is fundamental that we ensure every company’s employees are able to be both productive and safe, and we can do that only by using every cent of corporate cash to put paychecks into their hands. America’s working class, not corporate executives, are the ones on the frontlines of America’s factories and service industries; they produce what these companies sell and make up the majority of our consumer economy. America’s workers will be the ones to resuscitate our economy long before excessively paid executives do.

When the House and Senate return to write the next stimulus package, they need to institute a total ban on share buybacks for any of the corporations that accept this bailout, rather than the temporary restrictions in last week’s bailout. “Buying back shares” is just another term for shareholders extracting value from a company. After Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect in 2018, corporations took the windfall and collectively spent over $1tn on buybacks, for the sole purpose of adding to the incomes of shareholders and executives.

Over the past five years alone, airline executives – who were first in line clamoring for a bailout – spent $52bn in corporate cash on buybacks, at the expense of employee wage increases, capital expenditures and investments in innovation. Now that these businesses are being handed government funds, we need to make sure that top executives and wealthy shareholders don’t do this again: channel money into their own bank accounts while leaving employees wondering how they are going to pay their bills.

If not properly managed, this economic disaster has the potential to be the worst in American history

If not properly managed, this economic disaster has the potential to be the worst in American history. Our country cannot allow a small number of executives and shareholders to profit from taxpayer funds that we have injected into these corporations for reasons of pure emergency. We need to stop this rot at the core of our economic system and realign the priorities of government with those of workers and consumers.

Even in normal times, America’s extreme economic inequality was a festering sore. Now, this previously unimaginable public-health disaster is pulling back the curtain to reveal how this inequality can make victims of all of us. As we join together in the struggle to defeat the coronavirus, it is vital that we protect vulnerable Americans against further harm.

Morris Pearl is chair of Patriotic Millionaires, which focuses on promoting public policy solutions that encourage political equality, guarantee a sustaining wage for working Americans, and ensure that wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fair share of taxes. He previously was a managing director at BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment firms

William Lazonick is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and president of The Academic-Industry Research Network.

• This article was amended on 14 April 2020 to update and clarify the positions held by William Lazonick.



'Coronavirus profiteers' condemned as polluters gain bailout billions

Leaders condemn backing of global sectors that disregard green economy goals

Polluter bailouts and lobbying during Covid-19 pandemic

Damian Carrington Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN Fri 17 Apr 2020
 

Plastic waste besides the Thames, Essex, UK. Environmentalists say only green sustainable societies could cope with climate change and pandemics. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Polluting industries around the world are using the coronavirus pandemic to gain billions of dollars in bailouts and to weaken and delay environmental protections.

The moves by the fossil fuel, motor, aviation, farming, plastic and timber sectors are described as dangerous and irresponsible by senior figures. Environmental campaigners describe some participants in these industries as “coronavirus profiteers”.

Economic and energy leaders say the unprecedented sums of money being committed to the global recovery are a historic opportunity to tackle the climate crisis and create a safer, more resilient, world. However, such action has been lacking to date, they warn.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said: “When I look at different parts of the world I have not seen yet a major emphasis on clean-energy technologies.” He warned of mistakes similar to those made after the 2008 financial crisis when stimulus packages led to the biggest leap in carbon emissions in 50 years, four times greater than the reduction initially seen.

“If we put the money in the right place, we can manage the [climate] risk, and have a much more modern, cleaner and safer energy system,” Birol told the Guardian. “But if you put the money in the wrong place we will lock ourselves in a dirtier energy system, making it much more difficult to reach our climate targets.”


Rachel Kyte, at Tufts University, US, a former UN special representative for energy and former World Bank Group vice president, said: “Covid-19 puts our economies at a fork in the road. Using public money to bail out firms that will take us on the road which doesn’t accelerate decarbonisation and doesn’t address inequality is not just unaffordable, it’s dangerous.”

Unlike in the US, where the Trump administration has rolled back environmental protections, the EU has backed a green recovery.

Frans Timmermans, executive vice-president for the Green Deal at the European commission, said: “[Tackling the Covid-19 emergency] cannot and will not throw us off course in our efforts to tackle the climate crisis that still looms large as one of humanity’s most daunting challenges.”

“Bailouts should all be linked with clear conditions that the money will be used for a green economy and a green society. The very least that should be done is to ascertain that none of our commitments are used to harm our climate goals.”

The nature of the global economic recovery is being shaped with meetings this week of G20 finance ministers and central bankers, and by the World Bank and IMF. Much of the initial financial aid from governments was rescue packages to prevent immediate economic collapse, but further huge sums are expected to build recovery.

Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation, who was France’s climate change ambassador when the global Paris climate deal was sealed in 2015, said: “We know speed is essential with so many lives and livelihoods at stake, but it would be irresponsible to knowingly lock in more human suffering by enabling more pollution.”

Lord Stern, a climate economist at the London School of Economics, UK, said: “The nature and shape of this recovery will determine our future. It is crucial [it] does not lock in our exposure to the great risks of climate change.” But he said it was important to distinguish between rescue packages and recovery packages and not, for example, to withhold support for the workers in high-carbon sectors.

Michael Liebrich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said the systems of the past were already failing the world before Covid-19. “As governments again load the helicopters with money to dump on the global economy … no fossil fuel-based businesses should be bailed out without committing to science-based, net-zero targets. No money should go to industries that have been living high on the hog on fossil fuel subsidies and tax loopholes, like the airline industry, unless they accept structural reform.”

Ben Backwell, CEO at the Global Wind Energy Council, said some governments had extended commissioning deadlines for new wind farms, including those of India, Germany and Greece. “But so far no government has explicitly included stimulus packages specific to the wind and other renewable sectors. Much diplomatic effort went into brokering the OPEC+ deal to stabilise oil prices but the discussion needs to move on now to ensuring that renewable energy is at the centre of economic recovery plans.”

The course of the recovery has yet to be decided, according to Tom Burke, chair of the E3G thinktank. “I think it is too soon to say that the battle for funds to rebuild our economy is being won by the polluting sectors of business, especially on climate change. There are some strong political forces already pushing hard to make it a recovery that is green.”

Timmermans said a sustainable society was the only way to create lasting growth and jobs. Birol, who highlighted energy efficiency for buildings and battery and hydrogen technologies as important goals, also said that the current low oil prices were an opportunity to abolish $400bn a year of consumer fossil fuel subsidies, boosting government budgets.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, was clear about the need to rebuild a different global economy. “Everything we do during and after this crisis must be with a strong focus on building more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies, and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change, and the many other global challenges we face.”

Coronavirus does discriminate, because that’s what humans do

People who face racism, sexism and inequality are more likely to get sick. Taking care of each other starts with understanding this

Rebecca Solnit THE GUARDIAN Fri 17 Apr 2020

A Las Vegas car park has been turned into a shelter for homeless people during the coronavirus pandemic. Photograph: David Becker/EPA

In theory, all of us are vulnerable to coronavirus, but in practice how well we fare has to do with what you could call pre-existing conditions that are not only medical but economic, social, political and racial – and the pandemic, which is also an economic catastrophe, has made these differences glaringly clear.

Age was the first factor most of us in the west heard about in the unequal impact of this virus. It seemed to affect older people the most and children hardly at all, with a lot of younger adults having mild cases. This was misread as young people having nothing to worry about. Then, March was full of stories of desperately ill and dying young people as cautionary tales warning that no one was guaranteed an exemption from this.

Perhaps the widespread attempts in recent years to try to think intersectionally – to understand how multiple factors affect each person’s identity and experience – has equipped us to understand how unequally affected we are by a disease and the measures taken to limit it. For example, the shutdowns that are meant to prevent its spread have wildly varying economic impacts. Some suddenly lost jobs. Some whose work was deemed necessary had to continue in the face of the danger of contagion – medical workers, firefighters, transport workers and food workers, from those on farms to supermarket stockers and cashiers. Some white-collar workers could work safely from home or were already based at home. Some of us are financially devastated; some are unchanged.


In many countries and most US states people were told to stay at home. What sheltering in place means for the impoverished, overcrowded majority in some parts of the world is hard to fathom. What does a family of eight do in two rooms with a dirt floor, little food on hand and no running water? Those who are in prison and other forms of detention find that lack of freedom means lack of freedom to take the necessary measures.

Some of us did not have homes – and some cities made an unprecedented effort to find safe housing for homeless residents, some did not. San Francisco continued to try to place homeless people in shared spaces where the disease had opportunities to spread, leading to 70 residents of one impromptu shelter testing positive for the virus. Oakland endeavoured to place unhoused people in hotel rooms where they would be at far less risk.

As schools were closed, the digital divide meant that more affluent families with computers, iPads and good internet connections had a very different home educational (and informational, social and entertainment) situation than families without these amenities. This newly intensified parenting meant very different things for two parents with one child and a single parent of three, for parents who were supposed to continue working full-time inside or outside the home and those who were suddenly out of work.

Some who live alone have been reporting devastating loneliness; people who live with others have reported everything from exasperation to fear

Universities that suddenly evicted their students and told them to “go home” seemed to proceed on the premise that every student had a loving pair of parents in a commodious home eager to receive them. Of course, some don’t have parents, others come from abusive households, or impoverished ones with no room for a sudden arrival, or no stable home, or ones in which parents are already overwhelmed or ill.

Some who live alone have been reporting devastating loneliness; people who live with others have reported everything from exasperation to fear, including fear of roommates, partners and adolescent offspring who refused to follow the recommended protocols for avoiding contagion. Warnings are emerging about a likely wave of mental health problems from these new situations. 

Domestic violence has risen dramatically in many places.
Gender assumed many roles in this pandemic. Cisgender men were more likely to die from the virus, which seemed to be about inherent vulnerabilities of those with XY chromosomes. Anecdotally, less effective self-care, from handwashing to avoiding contact to less responsiveness to early symptoms, was said to be a factor. Women, on the other hand, had other burdens. If they live with male spouses, children, or both, they are already likely to be saddled with what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “the second shift” – the housework, food preparation and childcare, all of which intensify when life takes place almost entirely at home.

We were encouraged to start making masks at home – sewing has no inherent gender, but I have yet to see a man making masks and I’ve seen many women producing everything from a few funky masks to hundreds to distribute to strangers. Masks in the US are widely understood as self-protection, while the Asian practice of people wearing masks while potentially contagious is intended to protect others. I also saw on social media someone complain that white men were refusing to wear masks with floral patterns because they were interested in protecting, first, their masculinity, and saw others note that for black men floral and festive patterns were desirable ways of defusing the racist perception of them as threatening. Other black men are afraid to wear masks at all, for fear it will heighten the racist perception of them as menacing or criminal.

It has also become clear that health disparities due to racism increased the chances of becoming severely ill or dying. From New Orleans to Chicago, black people were at disproportionate risk of death. Higher levels of diabetes and hypertension can be linked to the stress of racism; asthma and respiratory problems are tied to the polluted air of many urban and industrial areas; and lack of long-term access to good medical care and food sources (due to poverty and discrimination) play their part.

In the US, another kind of racism blamed the virus on Chinese-Americans, Chinese immigrants or – with the usual sloppiness of racists – those who looked Asian, in some sort of ugly fantasy of collective guilt. One’s ethnicity has nothing to do with whether or not one has been to China recently, and there is no biological difference in vulnerability or contagiousness. Undocumented residents were unable to access some resources and understandably reluctant to seek out others.

Nearly everyone on Earth is, or will be, affected by this pandemic but each of us is affected differently. Some of us are financially devastated, some are gravely or fatally ill or have already died; some face racism outside the home or violence within it. The pandemic is a spotlight that illuminates underlying problems – economic inequality, racism, patriarchy. Taking care of each other begins with understanding the differences. And when the virus has slowed or stopped, all these problems will still need to be addressed. They are the chronic illnesses that weaken us as a society, morally, imaginatively, and otherwise.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist