Will they do something similar on bojo
Forgot to post this the other night:
Several months before the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, Reuters has learned.
The American disease expert, a medical epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency, left her post in July, according to four sources with knowledge of the issue. The first cases of the new coronavirus may have emerged as early as November, and as cases exploded, the Trump administration in February chastised China for censoring information about the outbreak and keeping U.S. experts from entering the country to help.
“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American who served in that role, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2007 and 2011. “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”
Zhu and the other sources said the American expert, Dr. Linda Quick, was a trainer of Chinese field epidemiologists who were deployed to the epicenter of outbreaks to help track, investigate and contain diseases.
As an American CDC employee, they said, Quick was in an ideal position to be the eyes and ears on the ground for the United States and other countries on the coronavirus outbreak, and might have alerted them to the growing threat weeks earlier.
No other foreign disease experts were embedded to lead the program after Quick left in July, according to the sources. Zhu said an embedded expert can often get word of outbreaks early, after forming close relationships with Chinese counterparts.
If trump manages to brazen this one out it will be his greatest triumph yet. If he gets the economy back going quick and they have relatively few deaths he’ll win a third term.
If corona virus hadn’t happened all would be rosy
Trump is up against sleepy joe ffs. He could personally laugh at covid victims and still cruise home in November.
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It’s quite mental to see the Brits pull back (too late) from the brink only to see the Yanks run headlong towards the very strategy the Brits abandoned. I guess the difference is that in Britain the Tory crackpots can occasionally be just about be shamed into showing some small token of social responsibility, whereas in the US, the ghoulish, sadistic nature of the Republicans is not just shameless and unchecked, but a point of outright pride for them.
An idea has started making the rounds the past few days as the coronavirus pandemic grows and the economy sputters. At first it only existed in the margins, a headshakingly stupid thought that was instantly dismissed as barbaric and literal fascism. The idea that the economy needed served and American lives should be put at risk just as the pandemic surged. That senior citizens and at-risk Americans should more or less sacrifice their lives for the sake of the market.
Then it picked up speed.
Where the President of the United States got it, like most of his other ideas, was Fox News. A talking head said it in passing and Donald Trump happened to hear it. Now, as his businesses take a hit and his possibility of reelection looks troubled like it never has been before, the idea sounds pretty good to him. So much so that he spent the press briefing on Monday interrupting his top experts and speaking over them, yet another instance in which Trump’s insecurity and personal delusion put us in danger.
Trump is now obsessed with the idea and corporate America agrees. Of course it does. On Fox News Monday night, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas spoke for the rest of elderly America saying they should be willing to sacrifice their lives for their children to have a good economy.
There’s no telling if Trump and Republican ghouls will get their way and steer back social distancing or societal emergency standards and flood the country with infection. To do so would likely kill millions and wreck the economy anyway. But the swell of this plan requires an understanding of the history of how corporations and the wealthy came to view the world in such brutal and inhuman terms, and how we might work to create a better, more human future.
The concept of a corporation as we know it today began in 1882 as former Senator Roscoe Conkling argued before the Supreme Court that corporations were actually people and should be granted constitutional rights, particularly freedom from unnecessary taxes.
Conkling was representing a railroad company and had been paid handsomely to perjure himself. Conkling had been a member of the committee that drafted the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment penned with the mission of giving freed slaves all the rights they deserved. Conkling took that noble mission and sold it to the highest bidder, going in front of the Court and lying by saying that the committee hadn’t just meant freed slaves, it’d intended corporations to have those same rights.
That lie was reinforced by another lie. The court would not rule on Conkling’s case, but Bancroft Davis, a former railroad executive, would report in his journalism that they had upheld and enforced the idea of a corporation as a person and later Stephen Field, a Supreme Court justice so tainted by corruption that he was often forced to recuse himself from certain cases, used Davis’s falsified reporting to establish precedent.
A lie based on a lie based on a lie.
The need for corporate personhood was necessary for the corporation to evolve to the form we know it today. Corporations had blossomed as financial vessels following the Civil War as they worked hand-in-hand with the government to cover the continent in railroads and telegraph wire. The government invested tons of its money into these businesses and was bought and sold by bribes that were hidden and often celebrated.
By the turn of the 20th century, these corporations and their obscenely wealthy beneficiaries controlled the government as a whole and the entire country. They had grown so large off their profits and power there was no limit to what they could, what legislation they could pass. Corporations had outgrown the government that birthed them.
History tells us this was a time of populist change. The corporations grew so large that they had to reined in by progressive movements, by labor unions, by Teddy Roosevelt and antitrust activities. This is true. But history was set to repeat itself again.
If there’s anything America is bad at it’s understanding history and learning from its mistakes. In this era, that tragic trait is most embodied by the Republican Party, which has a disgusting track record in the 20th century for causing massive crises, bungling them, and then recreating the crises again once recent memory has dissipated.
First it was the Depression-era Republicans who did nothing while Americans starved and the country crumbled, then it was the Reagan Revolution that destroyed the safety net that’d been created to rectify the GOP’s missteps.
What we’re watching now is history repeating itself, only blended with other elements for accelerated damage. Like the Depression-era Republicans, this Republican Party is doing literally nothing to curb the damage caused by the pandemic and the market cratering and urging everyone to remain calm while the deaths pile up. Like the Gilded Age, corporations have again grown so large that they have escaped the grasp of governmental oversight and have discarded any notions of civic responsibility.
Make no mistake, there is a way to fix this without sacrificing millions of lives. Without damning our elderly and vulnerable to certain death. Without doing untold damage to human beings and families and even the economy their deaths will certainly destroy. But that strategy would require change, and corporations and the wealthy will not permit even the slightest change or threat to their standing power.
What we have seen now, powered by Reaganomics and neoliberal globalism, is a new corporation that has straddled the world itself and lost any civic identity. Facebook isn’t American. Facebook is its own nation. Apple is its own nation. Amazon. Walmart. It goes on and on and on until you realize that these economic forums and summits are the actual United Nations that the UN only wishes it was.
Decisions like the one to push millions to certain deaths are the kinds of decisions that are made by unfeeling, unconcerned entities that have only the world to gain from each and every death. They see us pieces to move around in the pursuit of production and profit. Sometimes pieces come off the board. Sometimes it pays to have pieces come off the board and make room for other pieces.
This is how it has been and how it remains.
Donald Trump is the embodiment of the corporate ideal. While we are stuck viewing him in a traditional political sense, what we are missing is that his is a new kind of politics, or a new brand of politics anyway. Post-politics. A mindset dedicated to destroying the means of government, disabling the cogs of the governmental machine, so that business and the wealthy can operate unimpeded by oversight or pesky democracy. This post-political mindset is corporatism put into action, and like any corporation to meet to discuss the possibility their actions are killing scores of people, the question is always what the cost would be if that killing was left unsolved.
Conkling’s perjured testimony was a prophecy. That corporations would become people. That they would become living, breathing creatures that would plague the earth.
He was lying at the time, but he was completely right.
What we have in Donald Trump as President of the United States is the corporation come to life.
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random house. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of the Muckrake Podcast.
I see Trump is calling it the ‘invisible enemy’ now. Someone from Chi-na must have made a phonecall
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My friend’s husband is Andrew Farmery. He’s a Professor of Anaesthetics at the University of Oxford and today he has been all over @SkyNews. It started with a chat last Monday, with a friend who’s an engineer. They were both deeply worried about lack of ventilators and
knew that many would die if they couldn’t get them. Andrew deals with ventilating patients every week. He was worried when he heard that @BorisJohnson had asked car manufacturers to make ventilators because “they know sod all about ventilators.”
Andrew and his friend got together some of the top brains at Oxford and King’s to work on the design and prototype of a basic ventilator that would work and could be produced in large quantities very quickly.
They have worked night and day for a week, and assembled a team of 30, to come up with something. And the fantastic news is that they have done it! By 4.30 on Sunday morning they had a simple, cheap, easy to assemble ventilator that WORKS.
They think they could produce 20,000 of them in a couple of weeks. And yesterday they presented their prototype to @cabinetofficeuk. BUT they haven’t heard back and they fear the govt is going to go with v complex traditional ventilators, which will take much longer to produce.
And which, frankly, won’t be ready in time for the tens of thousands who are likely to need them. They can get theirs out pretty much straight away to “plug the surge” before the complex ones arrive, but govt will need to commission them NOW.
So I am urging @cabinetofficeuk to do this to save lives, and @MattHancock to read this, listen and act. This is to help them, you and all of us, so we can save us many lives as possible. There’s more about it here: https://theface.com/life/oxvent-prototype-ventilator-health-nhs-covid-19…
These are some of our finest brains, working day and night to come up with a practical solution to one of the biggest challenges we currently face. I have known my friend since we were both 11 and I’m SO proud of what her husband has done.
OMG the beautiful Julia Chatterley is on with Don Lemon. One of my favorite economic commentators, learned at the feet of giants. She has just made shit of every point he tried to make, and the dumb cunt didn’t understand anything she said.
Democrats are holding up the relief deal because they want workers on the boards of private companies. At this point Democrats should just concede the November election.
There’s a high as a kite Kennedy on Don Lemon now. Literally flaming high.
Would that not void the insurance?
Its shit now
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Head shot
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You could have put up her wedding photo
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