Let me quote a Trumpian figure from long ago, Henry Ford. That’s right, the bigot who created the Ford Motor Company (and once even ran for president). Back in 1916, in an interview with a Chicago Tribune reporter, he offered this bit of wisdom on the subject of history:

Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don’t care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.

As it happened, Napoleon Bonaparte died only 42 years before Henry Ford was born and I’m not sure he tried to cross anything except a significant part of Russia (unsuccessfully). My suspicion: Ford may have been thinking, in the associative fashion we’ve become used to in the age of Trump, of Julius Caesar’s famed crossing of the Rubicon almost 2,000 years earlier. But really, who knows or cares in a world in which “bunk” has become the definition of history — a world in which Donald Trump, in news conference after news conference, is the only person worth a tinker’s dam (or damn)?

In fact, call Ford a prophet (as well as a profiteer) because so many years after he died in 1947 — I was three then, but you already knew I was mighty old, right? — we find ourselves in a moment that couldn’t be bunkier. We now have a president who undoubtedly doesn’t know Nero — the infamous fiddling Roman emperor (although he was probably playing a cithara) — from Spiro — that’s Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president who lived god knows how long ago. In fact, Agnew was the crook who fell even before his president was shown the door. But why linger on ancient history? After all, even yesterday’s history is water through the gate, if not under the bridge, and in these glory days of Donald Trump, who cares? Not him, that’s for sure.

A president who deserves the Medal of Honor? All of this is my way of introducing a vivid piece of imagery that our president snatched out of the refuse pile of history and first used in late March. It was a figure of speech he’s repeated since that didn’t get the kind of media commentary — hardly a bit of it — it deserved. Nor did The Donald get the praise for it he deserved. Henry Ford would have been deeply proud of him for bunking, as well as debunking, history in such a fashion.

We’re talking about a president who couldn’t get a historical fact right if he tried, which he has absolutely no reason to do. After all, in early March, facing the coronavirus, he admitted that he had no idea anyone had ever died of the flu. Weeks later, he spoke at a news conference about mobilizing military personnel to deal with the modern equivalent of the flu pandemic of “1917.” (“We’ll be telling them where they’re going. They’re going into war, they’re going into a battle that they’ve never trained for. Nobody’s trained for, nobody’s seen this, I would say since 1917, which was the greatest of them all.”) He was, of course, referring to the catastrophic “Spanish flu” of 1918 in which his own grandfather died, but no matter. Truly, no matter. After all, that must have been 1,000 years ago in a past beyond the memory of anyone but a very stable genius. Under the circumstances, what difference could a year make?

Which brings me to the bunkable historical image I referred to above. At his March 24th coronavirus briefing, speaking of scary death counts to come (or perhaps, given what I’m about to mention, I should use that classic Vietnam-era phrase “body counts”), President Trump offered an upbeat glimpse into the future. His exact words were: “There’s tremendous hope as we look forward and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Ah, yes, the light at the end of the tunnel. Such a bright, hopeful, and striking image that others among his supporters and administration figures promptly ran with it. Speaking of the then-latest grim coronavirus figures from New York state, for instance, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham said: “If that trend does hold, it’s really good news about when this nightmare actually peaks, and then we start seeing light at the end of the tunnel.” Surgeon General Jerome Adams added, “What the president, in my mind, is doing is trying to help people understand that there is a light at the end of this tunnel.” And Admiral Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing coordinator, chimed in: “There are beginning to be indicators that we are getting ahead of this — that there’s light at the head of the tunnel.”

A week later when things had grown far worse than he predicted, the president added, “We’re going to have a very tough two weeks” before the country sees the “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Now, historically speaking, here’s the strange thing: you could barely find a hint — whether from Donald Trump, his advisers, or media sources of any kind — of where, historically speaking, that striking image had come from. In official Washington, perhaps the sole echo of its ominous past lay in the sardonic response of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “The light at the end of the tunnel,” she said, “may be a train coming at us.” Or, as a friend commented to me, maybe it was light from a refrigerated truck like the ones New York hospitals are now using to store the overflow of dead bodies from the pandemic.

History? Yes, there actually is a history here, even if it’s from a past so distant that no one, not even a president with a “very, very large brain,” seems to remember it. And yet few who lived through the Vietnam War would be likely to forget that phrase. It was first used, as far as we know, in 1967 when the war’s military commander, General William Westmoreland, returned to Washington to declare that the conflict the U.S. was fighting in a wildly destructive manner was successfully coming to an end, the proof being that “light” he spotted “at the end of the tunnel.” (He later denied using the phrase.) That memorably ill-chosen metaphor would become a grim punch line for the growing antiwar movement of the era.

So let’s say that there’s a certain grisly charm in hearing it from the president who skipped that war, thanks to fake bone spurs, and has talked about his own “Vietnam” as having been his skill in avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, in various home-front sleep-arounds. He once even claimed to radio personality Howard Stern that he should have gotten “the Congressional Medal of Honor” for doing so. (“It’s Vietnam. It is very dangerous. So I’m very, very careful,” he told Stern, speaking of those STDs.)

In any case, to have picked up that metaphorical definition of failure from the Vietnam era seems strangely appropriate for a president who first claimed the coronavirus was nothing, then a “new hoax” of the Democrats, then easy to handle, before declaring himself a “wartime president” (without the necessary tests, masks, or ventilators on hand). In some sense, President Trump has been exhibiting the sort of detachment from reality that American presidents and other officials did less openly in the Vietnam years.  And for this president, Covid-19 could indeed prove to be the disease version of a Vietnam War.

Given his success so far with that largely unchallenged light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel metaphor, I thought it might be worth mentioning a few other choice phrases from the Vietnam era that the president could wield at future news conferences. Take, for instance, President Nixon in his 1971 State of the Union Address: “We have gone through a long, dark night of the American spirit, but now that night is ending.” Or the classic description by an anonymous U.S. major of the retaking of the town of Ben Tre in the wake of the Tet Offensive of 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Or, should the president want to stick with General Westmoreland, there’s always his 1967 National Press Club speech highlighting progress in the war: “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”

Give Donald Trump credit. He seems to be leading the richest, most powerful country on the planet in an ill-equipped, ill-organized, ill-planned battle (though not in any normal sense a war) against the pandemic from hell. Whether or not it ends in a Vietnam-style helicopter evacuation from that hell (or even from the White House) remains to be seen, but at least the imagery chosen so far has been unnervingly apt, though next to no one in our increasingly bunkable world even noticed.

Peace in the dark? Still, in a Trumpian spirit, let’s take the president and his team at their word for a moment. Let’s consider what glimmer of grim hope might be discovered in that light they claim to see flickering at the end of the coronaviral tunnel — at least when it comes to twenty-first-century American war.

Let’s start with the obvious: like the Black Death of the 14th century that ended feudalism, it’s at least reasonable to assume that, whenever it finally disappears (if it goes at all), Covid-19 will indeed have ended something on this planet of ours. Imagine an American future (more than 100,000 body bags worth of it) in which the global economy has been thoroughly cracked open and the Pentagon and the U.S. military, perhaps the most powerful institutions in twenty-first-century America, find themselves among the wounded and the crippled.

Let’s imagine, as with the USS Theodore Roosevelt, that the coronavirus is likely to run riot through the closed ranks of that military, filling some of those very body bags. What, then, of the conflicts our twenty-first-century “warriors” have been fighting from Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia and beyond, those never-ending post-9/11 wars of terror (officially, of course, “on terror”)? Will our troops, trainers, advisers, and military contractors soon find themselves in what may be little short of pandemic wars?

Can you even imagine what that might involve? One thing crosses my mind, at least: that such wars will become too dangerous to fight and that, sooner or later, American troops might simply leave Covid-19 battle zones for home. Such possibilities aren’t in the headlines yet, although reports of the first tiny evacuations — of Green Beret units — from such pandemic battlegrounds are just beginning to pop up and the first U.S. trainers in Iraq seem to have been withdrawn (“temporarily”) due to the spread of the coronavirus in that country.

It’s true that these initial small steps seem like anything but the equivalent of the final dramatic evacuation from the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975 as North Vietnamese troops moved into town. Still, with the first tiny evacuations seemingly underway, my question is: Could the coronavirus turn out, in some strange fashion, to be a grim, death-dealing peacemaker for Americans? The United Nations of diseases? Is it possible that, on the hotter, more imperiled planet to come, the hundreds of American bases still scattered around the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion and all those troops, as well as the forever wars that go with them, could be part of our past, not our future?

Could a post-coronavirus planet be one on which the U.S. military and the national security state were no longer the sinkholes for endless trillions of taxpayer dollars that could have been spent so much more fruitfully elsewhere? Could there, in other words, be just the faintest glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel from hell or is that still darkness I see stretching into the distant future?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 April 2020

Word Count: 2,009

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The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) virus, which causes Covid-19, seemed to emerge from deepest history, from the Black Death of the 14th century and the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. In just months, it has infected more than 1.5 million people and claimed more than 88,000 lives. The virus continues to spread almost everywhere. In no time at all, it’s shattered the global economy, sent it tumbling toward a deep recession (possibly even a depression), and left much of a planet locked indoors. Think of it as a gigantic stress test.

Doctors use stress tests to assess the physical fitness of patients. Governments use them to see whether banks have enough cash in reserve to honor their obligations to depositors and creditors in economic crises. The International Monetary Fund conducts stress tests on national financial systems.  Now, like several other countries, notably Italy and Spain, the United States faces a different, far tougher stress test imposed by Covid-19.  The early results are alarming.

Since the first infection in the U.S. came to light in the state of Washington on January 20th, the disease has spread across the country at a furious pace. Hospitals, especially in New York City, have been deluged and are already at the breaking point. And things will get worse — and not just in New York.  Yet the most basic necessities — protective masks, gowns, rubber gloves, and ventilators — are so scarce that they are being reused, further increasing the risk to healthcare workers, some of whom have already contracted Covid-19 from patients.  The experiences of China, Italy, and other countries suggest that the disease will take the lives of many of these brave people; indeed, some here have already paid the ultimate price.

And this pandemic will subject our political system, economy, and society to a set of stress tests into the distant future.

The “wartime president” By mid-January, the news from China made it obvious that the virus would spread across borders and soon reach the United States. The sheer volume of travel between the two countries should have made that reality all too obvious.  Nearly three million Chinese visitors came to this country in 2018 and 2.5 million Americans, counting only tourists, traveled to China. In fact, we now know that, in the weeks after Covid-19 was disclosed in Wuhan, China, more than 430,000 people flew here from that country, thousands of them from Wuhan itself — and this continued even after Donald Trump put his much-vaunted travel measures in place. (“I do think we were very early, but I also think that we were very smart, because we stopped China,” he nonetheless claimed.)

In addition, President Trump and his team remained unruffled, never mind that the country wasn’t remotely prepared for what was clearly coming. Despite secret intelligence reports as early as January warning that Chinese leaders were understating the coronavirus threat’s severity, the administration failed to develop any kind of emergency plan to prepare for the pandemic.

That proved to be a monumental blunder. China confirmed its first coronavirus fatality on January 11th.  An infection was first reported in Washington state barely a week later. More than a month after that, at a February 26th press conference, President Trump nonetheless dismissed the seriousness of the disease, noting that seasonal flu kills as many as 69,000 in the U.S. annually. He failed to mention that the virus may have a fatality rate up to 10 times higher than the flu and that a Covid-19 vaccine was nowhere in sight. Only 15 infections had been reported here, he claimed breezily, and “when you have fifteen people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Close to zero? By mid-March, infections had risen to 1,200 (which soon would prove a drop in the pandemic bucket as “America First” acquired a new meaning). Yet the president called that number inconsequential. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh did him one better: “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” He accused the media of exaggerating “in an effort to get Trump.”

True to form, the president was quick to personalize the pandemic. He preened about how scientific experts marveled at his grasp of the complex details of virology and the way supposedly awestruck doctors asked, “How do you know so much?” The president’s self-effacing answer: natural ability, possibly even a genetically-derived aptitude, thanks to “a great, super-genius uncle” who’d worked at MIT.

He declared himself a “wartime president,” despite the lack of any evident strategy to vanquish this particular foe. His response when governors of hard-hit states began pleading for urgent help from the federal government: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves.”  The governors, he groused, were “complainers,” who should have stockpiled what they were now begging for. Thin-skinned as ever, he told Vice President Mike Pence that those like Governor Gretchen Whitmer, “the woman from Michigan,” who weren’t appreciative enough of his help didn’t even deserve to have their phone calls returned, at least by him. Inevitably, he had a Limbaugh-like conspiracy theory ready: fear-mongering Democrats were exploiting the Covid crisis to bash him. The virus, he said during a campaign rally — yes, he was still holding them in late February — was their “new hoax.” Fox News and the president’s base duly ran with this theme. 

Despite the warning of epidemiologists that the virus’s transmission rate would skyrocket unless Americans were scrupulous about “social distancing,” Trump tarried (and to this day can’t keep his distance from anyone at his news conferences). He failed to use the presidential bully pulpit to disseminate this advice quickly.

Nor, despite an evident shortage of medical supplies and equipment, did he act decisively. The 1950 Defense Production Act (DPA) gives him the authority to order private companies to produce essential medical supplies and equipment, including ventilators, and then distribute them in ways that would prevent hard-hit states from outbidding each other.  He rejected widespread calls to use the Act. “We’re not,” he quipped, “a country based on nationalizing our business. Call a person over in Venezuela. How did the nationalization of their businesses work out? Not too well.” Of course, no one had called for a government takeover of American companies. Trump did eventually invoke the DPA reluctantly in late March but has used it sparingly and ineffectively. 

Continuing to downplay the Covid-19 threat, he declared during a March 31st  Fox News “virtual town hall” on the coronavirus that he would love to have the economy up and running two weeks later on Easter Sunday with “packed churches all over the country.”  That was, of course, a pipedream: by March 30th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had already reported more Covid-19 cases — 140,904 — here than in any other country and 2,405 deaths.  (And yet, in early April, Trump was still talking about the need to fill sports stadiums “sooner rather than later”; the cure, he said, cannot “be worse than the problem itself.”)

As of April 11th, the CDC’s tally had risen to 492,416 infections and 18,559 fatalities, while John Hopkins University’s tracking site reported 526,296 infections and 20,463 deaths (the highest numbers in the world in both categories).  Physicians and public health specialists have, however, warned that the toll could already be much higher given the shortage of test kits. President Trump seemed finally to be grasping the gravity of the pandemic, thanks in part to the patient tutelage of specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-time head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  But put this in your no-good-deed-goes-unpunished file: on social media, radio, and television, Fauci has been pilloried by Trump fans for supposedly undercutting the president or, as one acolyte tweeted, for trying to create a “Police State Like China in Order to Stop the coronavirus.” Fauci even started receiving death threats.

Unable to stay out of the limelight, Rudolph Giuliani, evidently seeking to displace Dr. Fauci as Trump’s top coronavirus expert, took to Twitter, practicing medicine without a license and touting the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a sure-fire cure for the disease. This despite doctors’ warnings that the drug’s efficacy was unproven and that it could have fatal results, as well as the American Medical Association’s counsel that a rush to use it could lead to hoarding and reduce its availability for treating people with ailments for which it’s actually been approved. The president has followed Dr. Giuliani’s advice on hydroxychloroquine, repeatedly hailing it “the biggest game-changer in the history of medicine.”

At a March 29th press conference, Trump finally ditched his goal of restarting the economy by Easter and asked non-essential workers to stay home until the end of April, venturing outdoors only when essential. The Covid-19 death toll could, he now conceded, end up ranging between 100,000 and 240,000, a number, he asserted, that would only prove “we all, together, have done a very good job” given that he’d heard estimates of “up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that” if the pandemic were not dealt with effectively here. Later, he allowed that even 240,000 deaths in the U.S. could be a low end figure. Then he again praised himself for taking decisive steps — assumedly by denying for weeks that the virus was a massive problem, predicting that it would perish in the summer heat, and assuring Americans that you could, in any case, cure it with anti-malarial drugs, which he “may take” himself. Compared to two million possible deaths, 240,000 was, he boasted, “a very low number.” Give him credit for the math, at least: 240,000 is indeed a far lower figure than two million.

Economic pain — acute, with more to come As the stock market plunged — it had lost more than a third of its value by the end of March — and it became undeniable that the fallout from the virus would cause the economy to crater, Congress passed a $2 trillion-plus Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) bill on March 27th, which the president signed within hours. The main provisions of that mammoth, nearly 900-page piece of legislation included:

* $1,200 to people with annual incomes below $75,000;

* $2,400 to those who file taxes jointly and earn less than $150,000;

* $500 per child for households with dependent children;

* 13 weeks of unemployment compensation beyond individual state government limits plus a weekly supplement of $600;

* a 50% payroll tax credit up to $10,000 for businesses that continued to pay non-working employees and whose revenues have shrunk by at least 50% compared to a year ago;

* loans to small businesses to help them cover the costs of employees’ salaries and health insurance;

* a $30.75 billion “Education Stabilization Fund,” providing various forms of economic assistance to hard-pressed students;

* six-month deferments on federal student loans and the suspension of penalties for overdue payments;

* $500 billion in loans and guarantees for corporations.

These were certainly much-needed moves and $2.2 trillion was hardly chump change. Still, the number of the unemployed may far exceed current expectations as the economy more or less shuts down. Some economists estimate that the gross domestic product could eventually shrink by a staggering 30%, with unemployment reaching at least 32%, or 47 million people, a figure that would surpass the 24.9% peak during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The CARES stimulus package, geared significantly to big banks and big corporations, may not suffice to meet the needs of an increasing number of jobless people. At least 6.6 million had filled unemployment claims by end of March alone. By early April, the number edged close to 17 million, and millions more will follow. And who knows how much of the $500 billion allotted to corporations will be devoted to protecting workers’ jobs and benefits when less than 10% of it has strings attached?

Furthermore, some of the measures in the CARES Act to help the jobless expire on July 30th and others at the end of the year, although it could take far longer to truly contain the virus.  The government could pony up more money, but the bill itself has no renewal clause, which means that we could be in for another grim legislative battle. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already stated that he’ll oppose rapid follow-on legislation until the effects of the current bill are known, lest Democrats “try to achieve unrelated policy items they would not be able to pass.”

The intricately linked global economic system has broken down in just a couple of months, so time isn’t on the side of the unemployed. In addition, the maximum duration of unemployment benefits varies strikingly by state. In North Carolina, it’s only 12 weeks; in Massachusetts, 30. Likewise, the maximum weekly amount paid ranges from $823 in Massachusetts to $235 in Mississippi. Unemployment insurance certainly helps, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that it averages just over $300 a week nationally, covering only 46.6% percent of a worker’s former earnings. Yet if Covid-19 leaves many millions without jobs well beyond July 30th, or perhaps even the end of the year, they will have to pay for food, rents or mortgages, and utility bills, to mention just a few of the basics.

Households with incomes in the bottom 20% will face a particularly hard struggle, to say nothing of the 38 million people already living in poverty.  Monthly rent in 2018 averaged $1,450 and monthly food costs (not counting spending in restaurants) $363. The average savings of Americans — excluding investments, retirement accounts, and homes — totaled only $4,830 that year. Unsurprisingly, approximately 27% of them report that they may not be able to cover even a month’s worth of basic expenses; another 25% say that they could hang on for three months. Then what? Already, laid-off low-wage workers, who could barely meet their basic expenses when they had jobs, have become desperate, while those still employed who work in restaurants and hotels hit hard by social distancing have seen their hours cut back and their tips diminished.

No one knows just how bad things could get, how many people will succumb to Covid-19, or what heights the jobless rate will reach, but of this much we can be certain: the virus’s wave hasn’t crested yet and may not for weeks, or even months. And because the United States lacks the strong social safety nets of European countries, people with meager savings will be especially vulnerable. Apart from the trauma of suddenly losing jobs, people filing unemployment claims have already been wearied by chronically busy phones and crashing websites as unemployment offices face a tsunami of a sort never previously imagined.

The social fabric under stress The loss of a job doesn’t just create economic insecurity, it can also produce psychological stress and a diminished sense of self-worth. Covid-19 is likely to leave startling numbers of Americans feeling bereft.  Social isolation may provide welcome solitude for a while (at least for those who can half-afford it). Before long, though, it will likely disorient people, particularly the elderly and those who are alone and cut off from friends and family, not to speak of exercise, eating out, or even trips to the local library. Zoom and Skype won’t, in the long run, qualify as the real deal. Well before Covid-19 made its appearance, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) reported that a fifth of Americans already felt isolated and two out of five claimed to lack “meaningful” social networks.” Loneliness, the HRSA concluded, had become an “epidemic” — and that was before an actual epidemic hit. Medical professionals concurred at the time. Imagine what they’d say now.

Among other things, the coronavirus experience will undoubtedly increase the risk of suicide (especially given the rush to purchase weaponry), already at epidemic levels.  In 2017 alone, 47,000 Americans killed themselves. By then, suicide had already become the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more lives than homicides or motor vehicle accidents. The suicide rate has increased for the last 13 years straight.  Among youth, it has jumped 56% in the past decade alone, among blue-collar workers by 40% in less than two decades. Sixty thousand veterans have died by their own hand since 2008, a suicide rate 1.5 times higher than for other adults.

By ratcheting up stress, dejection, and isolation, Covid-19 could also increase domestic violence, the neglect and mistreatment of children, and drug and alcohol abuse, especially among recovering addicts.  Globally, the virus has also turbocharged demagogues, for whom the pandemic provides an opportunity to commit hate crimes and engage in scapegoating, racial tropes, and weird conspiracy theories, while using social media to whip up fear, suspicion, and animosity, and deepen social divisions. Admittedly, such problems can’t all be chalked up to the pandemic. Still, they could all get worse as this insidious virus continues to wreak havoc.

Now for the good part Crises highlight and exacerbate a society’s problems, but they also put some of its best attributes on display. Covid-19 hasn’t been an exception. Doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and first responders knowingly endanger their lives daily to care for those sickened by the virus. By April, 25,000 healthcare workers from other parts of the country had converged on New York State, the pandemic’s epicenter, to help. Volunteers have mobilized nationwide to sew masks for hospital workers, stepping in where the government has failed. People have found ways to help elderly neighbors. Strangers have been engaging in acts of kindness and generosity toward one another — an acknowledgement that we confront a shared problem that will consume much more than our livelihoods if we don’t stand together (social distancing aside). Civic groups, non-profit organizations, and companies are pitching in to help in a variety of ways. Governors — Andrew Cuomo of New York, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Larry Hogan of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California — have been working tirelessly to protect their states, showing that not all parts of the political system are as dysfunctional as Washington, D.C., today.

At some point, we’ll emerge into a different world. What it will be like no one can yet know. Covid-19 has certainly created much despair but reasons for gratitude and admiration as well — something to keep in mind as this terrible stress test continues without letup.

Rajan Menon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Copyright ©2020 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 April 2020

Word Count: 3,069

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Every West Point class votes on an official motto. Most are then inscribed on their class rings. Hence, the pejorative West Point label “ring knocker.” (As legend has it, at military meetings a West Pointer “need only knock his large ring on the table and all Pointers present are obliged to rally to his point of view.”) Last August, the class of 2023 announced theirs: “Freedom Is Not Free.” Mine from the class of 2005 was “Keeping Freedom Alive.” Each class takes pride in its motto and, at least theoretically, aspires to live according to its sentiments, while championing the accomplishments of fellow graduates.

But some cohorts do stand out. Take the class of 1986 (“Courage Never Quits”). As it happens, both Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are members of that very class, as are a surprisingly wide range of influential leaders in Congress, corporate America, the Pentagon, the defense industry, lobbying firms, Big Pharma, high-end financial services, and even security-consulting firms. Still, given their striking hawkishness on the subject of American war-making, Esper and Pompeo rise above the rest. Even in a pandemic, they are as good as their class motto. When it comes to this country’s wars, neither of them ever quits.

Once upon a time, retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute (Class of ’75), a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, taught both Esper and Pompeo in his West Point social sciences class. However, it was Pompeo, the class of ’86 valedictorian, whom Lute singled out for praise, remembering him as “a very strong student — fastidious, deliberate.” Of course, as the Afghanistan Papers, released by the Washington Post late last year, so starkly revealed, Lute told an interviewer that, like so many U.S. officials, he “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking in Afghanistan.” Though at one point he was President George W. Bush’s “Afghan war czar,” the general never expressed such doubts publicly and his record of dissent is hardly an impressive one. Still, on one point at least, Lute was on target: Esper and Pompeo are smart and that’s what worries me (as in the phrase “too smart for their own good”).

Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist, had particularly hawkish views on Russia and China before he ever took over at the Pentagon and he wasn’t alone when it came to the urge to continue America’s wars. Pompeo, then a congressman, exhibited a striking pre-Trump-era foreign policy pugnacity, particularly vis-à-vis the Islamic world. It has since solidified into a veritable obsession with toppling the Iranian regime.

Their militarized obsessions have recently taken striking form in two ways: the secretary of defense instructed U.S. commanders to prepare plans to escalate combat against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, an order the mission’s senior leader there, Lieutenant General Robert “Pat” White, reportedly resisted; meanwhile, the secretary of state evidently is eager to convince President Trump to use the Covid-19 pandemic, now devastating Iran, to bomb that country and further strangle it with sanctions. Worse yet, Pompeo might be just cunning enough to convince his ill-informed, insecure boss (so open to clever flattery) that war is the answer.

The militarism of both men matters greatly, but they hardly pilot the ship of state alone, any more than Trump does (whatever he thinks). Would that it were the case. Sadly, even if voters threw them all out, the disease runs much deeper than them. Enter the rest of the illustrative class of ’86.

As it happens, Pompeo’s and Esper’s classmates permeate the deeper structure of imperial America. And let’s admit it, they are, by the numbers, an impressive crew. As another ’86 alumnus, Congressman Mark Green (R-TN), bragged on the House floor in 2019, “My class [has] produced 18 general officers… 22-plus presidents and CEOs of major corporations… two state legislators… [and] three judges,” as well as “at least four deans and chancellors of universities.” He closed his remarks by exclaiming, “Courage never quits, ’86!”

However, for all his gushing, Green’s list conceals much. It illuminates neither the mechanics nor the motives of his illustrious classmates; that is, what they’re actually doing and why. Many are key players in a corporate-military machine bent on, and reliant on, endless war for profit and professional advancement. A brief look at key ‘86ers offers insight into President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex in 2020 — and it should take your breath away.

The West Point mafia The core group of ’86 grads cheekily refer to themselves as “the West Point mafia.” And for some, that’s an uplifting thought. Take Joe DePinto, CEO of 7-Eleven. He says that he’s “someone who sleeps better at night knowing that those guys are in the positions they’re in.” Of course, he’s an ’86 grad, too.

Back when I called the academy home, we branded such self-important cadets “toolbags.” More than a decade later, when I taught there, I found my students still using the term. Face facts, however: those “toolbags,” thick as thieves today, now run the show in Washington (and despite their busy schedules, they still find time to socialize as a group).

Given Donald Trump’s shady past — one doesn’t build an Atlantic City casino-and-hotel empire without “mobbing-it-up” — that mafia moniker is actually fitting. So perhaps it’s worth thinking of Mike Pompeo as the president’s latest consigliere. And since gangsters rarely countenance a challenge without striking back, Lieutenant General White should watch his back after his prudent attempt to stop the further escalation of America’s wars in Iraq and Iran in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. Worse yet for him, he’s not a West Pointer (though he did, oddly enough, earn his Army commission on the very day that class of ’86 graduated). White’s once promising career is unlikely to be long for this world.

In addition to Esper and Pompeo, other Class of ’86 alums serve in key executive branch roles. They include the vice chief of staff of the Army General Joseph Martin, the director of the Army National Guard, the commander of NATO’s Allied Land Command, the deputy commanding general of Army Forces Command, and the deputy commanding general of Army Cyber Command. Civilian-side classmates in the Pentagon serve as: deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy, and environment; a civilian aide to the secretary of the Army; and the director of stabilization and peace operations policy for the secretary of defense. These Pentagon career civil servants aren’t, strictly speaking, part of the “mafia” itself, but two Pompeo loyalists are indeed charter members.

Pompeo brought Ulrich Brechbuhl and Brian Butalao, two of his closest cadet friends, in from the corporate world. The three of them had, at one point, served as CEO, CFO, and COO of Thayer Aerospace, named for the “father” of West Point, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, and started with Koch Industries seed money. Among other things, that corporation sold the Pentagon military aircraft components.

Brechbuhl and Butalao were given senior positions at the CIA when Pompeo was its director. Currently, Brechbuhl is the State Department’s counselor (and reportedly Pompeo’s de facto chief of staff), while Butalao serves as under secretary for management. According to his official bio, Butalao is responsible “for managing the State Department on a day-to-day basis and [serving as its] Chief Operating Officer.” Funny, that was his exact position under Pompeo at that aerospace company.

Still, this mafia trio can’t run the show by themselves. The national security structure’s tentacles are so much longer than that. They reach all the way to K Street and Capitol Hill.

From Congress to K Street: the enablers Before Trump tapped Pompeo to head the CIA and then the State Department, he represented Wichita, Kansas, home to Koch Industries, in the House of Representatives. In fact, Pompeo rode his ample funding from the political action committee of the billionaire Koch brothers straight to the Hill. So linked was he to those fraternal right-wing energy tycoons and so protective of their interests that he was dubbed “the congressman from Koch.” The relationship was mutually beneficial. Pompeo’s selection as secretary of state solidified the previously strained relationship of the brothers with President Trump.

The ’86 mafia’s current congressional heavyweight, however, is Mark Green. An early Trump supporter, he regularly tried to shield the president from impeachment as a minority member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The Tennessee congressman nearly became Trump’s secretary of the Army, but ultimately withdrew his nomination because of controversies that included sponsoring gender-discriminatory bills and commenting that “transgender is a disease.”

Legislators like Green, in turn, take their foreign-policy marching orders from the military’s corporate suppliers. Among those, Esper, of course, represents the gold standard when it comes to “revolving-door” defense lobbying. Just before ascending the Pentagon summit, pressed by Senator Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation hearings, he patently refused to “recuse himself from all matters related to” Raytheon, his former employer and the nation’s third-largest defense contractor. (And that was even before its recent merger with United Technologies Corporation, which once employed another Esper classmate as a senior vice president.) Incidentally, one of Raytheon’s “biggest franchises” is the Patriot missile defense system, the very weapon being rushed to Iraq as I write, ostensibly as a check on Pompeo’s favored villain, Iran.

Less well known is the handiwork of another ’86 grad, longtime lobbyist and CNN paid contributor David Urban, who first met the president in 2012 and still recalls how “we clicked immediately.” The consummate Washington insider, he backed Trump “when nobody else thought he stood a chance” and in 2016 was his senior campaign adviser in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania.

Esper and Urban have been close for more than 30 years. As cadets, they served in the same unit during the Persian Gulf War. It was Urban who introduced Esper to his wife. Both later graced the Hill’s list of Washington’s top lobbyists. Since 2002, Urban has been a partner and is now president of a consulting giant, the American Continental Group. Among its clients: Raytheon and 7-Eleven.

It’s hard to overstate Urban’s role. He seems to have landed Pompeo and Esper their jobs in the Trump administration and was a key go-between in marrying class of ’86 backbenchers and moneymen to that bridegroom of our moment, The Donald.

Greasing the machine: the moneymen Another ’86er also passed through that famed military-industrial revolving door. Retired Colonel Dan Sauter left his position as chief of staff of the 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command for one at giant weapons maker Lockheed Martin as business developer for the very systems his old unit employed. Since May 2019, he’s directed Lockheed’s $1.5 billion Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program in Saudi Arabia. Lockheed’s THAAD systems have streamed into that country to protect the Kingdom, even as Pompeo continually threatens Iran.

If such corporate figures are doing the selling, it’s the Pentagon, naturally, that’s doing the buying. Luckily, there are ’86 alumni in key positions on the purchasing end as well, including a retired brigadier general who now serves as the Pentagon’s principal adviser to the under secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics.

Finally, there are other key consultants linked to the military-industrial complex who are also graduates of the class of ’86. They include a senior vice president of Hillwood — a massive domestic and international real estate development company, chaired by Ross Perot, Jr. — formerly a consultant to the government of the United Arab Emirates. The Emiratis are U.S. allies in the fight against Pompeo’s Iranian nemesis and, in 2019, awarded Raytheon a $1.5 billion contract to supply key components for its air force missile launchers.

Another classmate is a managing partner for Patriot Strategies, which consults for corporations and the government but also separately lands hefty defense contracts itself. His previous “ventures” included “work in telecommunications in the Middle East… and technical security upgrades at U.S. embassies worldwide.”

Yet another grad, Rick Minicozzi, is the founder and CEO of Thayer Leader Development Group (TLDG), which prides itself on “building” corporate leaders. TLDG clients include: 7-Eleven, Cardinal Glass, EMCOR, and Mercedes-Benz. All either have or had ’86ers at the helm. The company’s CEO also owns the Thayer Hotel located right on West Point’s grounds, which hosts many of the company’s lectures and other events. Then there’s the retired colonel who, like me, taught on the West Point history faculty. He’s now the CEO of Battlefield Leadership, which helps corporate leaders “learn from the past” in order to “prepare for an ever-changing business landscape.”

A class-wide conflict of interest Don’t for a moment think these are all “bad” people. That’s not faintly my point. One prominent ’86 grad, for instance, is Lieutenant General Eric Wesley, the deputy of Army Futures Command. He was my brigade commander at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 2009 and I found him competent, exceptionally empathetic, and a decidedly decent man, which is probably true of plenty of ‘86ers.

So what exactly is my point here? I’m not for a second charging conspiracy or even criminal corruption. The lion’s share of what all these figures do is perfectly legal. In reality, the way the class of ’86 has permeated the power structure only reflects the nature of the carefully crafted, distinctly undemocratic systems through which the military-industrial complex and our political world operate by design. Most of what they do couldn’t, in fact, be more legal in a world of never-ending American wars and national security budgets that eternally go through the roof. After all, if any of these figures had acted in anything but a perfectly legal fashion, they might have run into a classmate of theirs who recently led the FBI’s corruption unit in New Jersey — before, that is, he retired and became CEO of a global security consulting firm. (Sound familiar?)

And that’s my point, really. We have a system in Washington that couldn’t be more lawful and yet, by any definition, the class of ’86 represents one giant conflict of interest (and they don’t stand alone). Alums from that year are now ensconced in every level of the national security state: from the White House to the Pentagon to Congress to K Street to corporate boardrooms. And they have both power and a deep stake, financial or otherwise, in maintaining or expanding the (forever) warfare state.

They benefit from America’s permanent military mobilization, its never-ending economic war-footing, and all that comes with it. Ironically, this will inevitably include the blood of future West Point graduates, doomed to serve in their hopeless crusades. Think of it all as a macabre inversion of their class motto in which it’s not their courage but that of younger graduates sent off to this country’s hopeless wars that they will never allow to “quit.”

Speaking of true courage, lately the only exemplar we’ve had of it in those wars is General “Pat” White. It seems that he, at least, refused to kiss the proverbial rings of those mafia men of ’86.

But of course, he’s not part of their “family,” is he?

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge, and his forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 April 2020

Word Count: 2,515

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Last month, Donald Trump retweeted a doctored photo of himself playing the fiddle that was labeled “My next piece is called: nothing can stop what’s coming.” It was clearly an homage to the Emperor Nero who so infamously made music while Rome burned. To it, the president added this comment: “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”

Whether Trump is fiddling these days or not, one thing is certain: in a Nero-like fashion, he continues to be irresponsibly unresponsive to the crisis caused by Covid-19. One reason may be that, however inadvertently, the arrival of the pandemic has helped green-light plans and projects he’s held dear to his heart and that had, before the crisis, repeatedly encountered opposition.

Here are six examples of how the coronavirus, like a malign magic wand, has helped cast a disempowering spell over that opposition and so furthered Trump’s long-term goals.

1. The southern border: Since the day he entered the Oval Office, Trump has been focused on closing and sealing the border between Mexico and the United States. Incrementally, his administration had moved from incarcerating upwards of 50,000 migrants and asylum seekers attempting to enter the United States at that border to — in the wake of the coronavirus — closing it completely to nonessential traffic and anyone trying to claim asylum. Migrants who enter the U.S. illegally now will be returned to their native countries illegally. “Border security is health security,” the president claims.

In his persistent determination to close the border and punish migrants and asylum seekers alike, Trump has long allied with the Department of Justice to clear a path for his policies. Attorney General William Barr’s department has, for instance, fought battle after battle to counter legal challenges to the prolonged detention of both migrants and asylum seekers, to prevent aid to sanctuary cities that offer protection to such migrants, to overrule Board of Immigration Appeals decisions, and to withhold bail from detained asylum seekers. Until the coronavirus pandemic hit, however, the courts had increasingly been blocking some of these policies or putting them on hold.

Now, although judges, lawyers, and legal organizations have urged that immigration courts be closed until the pandemic lifts, they have generally remained open even, in some cases, after people in them had tested positive for the virus. The danger, not to say inhumanity, of all this, should be undeniable, but it does reflect President Trump’s ongoing immigration urges.

In addition, the administration has doubled down on an existing policy of denying medical services to detained immigrants. This past winter, for instance, doctors were prevented from delivering flu vaccines to those in immigration detention camps. Now, with more than 37,000 men, women, and children confined, the dangers of the virus spreading among them are obvious and inevitable. As a former acting director of ICE puts it, the crowded conditions of detention, “which are designed to have people remain in close contact,” are “the opposite of the social distancing that is needed to save lives.”

2. The Census: The census has long been a source of contention for this president. He waged a campaign to exclude non-citizens from participating in it only to be stalled in his efforts by the justices of the Supreme Court who decided that they needed more information to make a final decision on the subject. The issue at hand is that census results are used to determine how many congressional seats (based on population) are to be given to each state. If immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are not counted — and estimates are that roughly 6.5 million people fall into those two categories — then fewer politicians and less federal funding will be distributed to areas with more sizeable populations of them.

Originally, Trump responded to the Supreme Court’s decision by advocating that the census simply be put off. Eventually, the administration backed down and the census was not delayed. Now, however, the sands have shifted. Covid-19 has turned the largely door-to-door gathering of census information into so many online, phone, and mail responses. The consequences of an inaccurate census could indeed prove dire. As National Public Radio’s Hansi Lo Wang reported, citing data collected by the Urban Institute, the 2020 census could result in “the worst undercount of black and Latino and Latina people in the U.S. since 1990.” According to one local San Francisco paper, “If the Census count is artificially low, the ramifications in this and every city will be real. It is estimated that each undercounted person costs his or her municipality $2,000 in federal resources.” Funding for public schools would reportedly be severely hit by such cuts in federal funding.

3. Global Conflicts: In his three years in office, Trump has escalated tensions with numerous powers, China and Iran in particular. In the period leading up to the global spread of the virus, China had already taken on special enemy status. In January, the president imposed yet more tariffs on that country’s products while sanctions on $370 billion worth of Chinese imports were left in place even though his administration claimed to have successfully concluded what he called “phase one” of a future trade deal.

Now, he’s labelled Covid-19 the “Chinese virus,” using that label to escalate tensions with China (and provoke a xenophobic backlash here at home). He recently mentioned a friendly hour-long conversation with that country’s president, Xi Jinping, about combatting the virus. But while reportedly preparing temporary relief when it comes to tariffs generally, Chinese imports are expected to be exempted from the proposed pause in payments.

So, too, the virus has been used to escalate tensions with Iran. Trump had already increased the drumbeat to war with that country by ordering the drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, leading to retaliatory missile strikes on U.S. military bases in that country. Congress then passed a law aimed at preventing the president from further attacks on Iran without its approval. Nevertheless, in the early days of the devastating spread of the pandemic in Iran, the Trump administration launched several attacks on pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and continued to uphold its economic sanctions on Iran itself. And there are reports of more to come from his administration.

4. Isolationism: Since the onset of his presidency, Trump has sought to separate the U.S. from allies and diminish its participation in international treaties and agreements of all sorts. He, for instance, withdrew from the nuclear agreement with Iran and announced his intention to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord. As if to put a fine point on his disapproval of global engagement, there has also been a wholesale reduction in the size of the State Department in his years in office. A hiring freeze from the spring of 2017 to the spring of 2018 was reinforced by recommendations from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his successor, Mike Pompeo, which reduced the State Department’s operating budget by one-third, while many key ambassadorships went unfilled. Today, 13% of them remain vacant.

The spread of the coronavirus gave that urge new oomph. In the post-Covid world, the America First-style isolationism that Trump values has become even more emphatically the name of the game. The border with Canada is now closed. He’s banned travel from European countries. Visa offices are shut worldwide. Using the virus as its excuse, the State Department has even halted indefinitely the addition of a new class of 179 foreign-service officers to the diplomatic corps. During the Covid-19 outbreak, American disengagement from the world has taken another step forward.

5. Prosecutions: The coronavirus has also put on hold an array of investigations into the president’s personal and professional dealings. As of March 16th, the Supreme Court closed its doors to the public and postponed oral arguments in pending cases. It is now operating in remote capacity. This means a Supreme Court argument scheduled for this session about whether New York prosecutors and the House of Representatives can have access to the president’s financial records will not take place in the foreseeable future. In addition to their subpoenaing his financial records, New York prosecutors launched multiple investigations last spring into the president’s businesses, some of which continue to this day. Recently, Trump called upon Governor Andrew Cuomo and state District Attorney Letitia James to “stop” all of their state’s “unnecessary lawsuits & harassment.” Now, he may get his wish as the state courts, like the federal courts, are proceeding with reduced speed, staff, and activities.

Meanwhile, inquiries into Trump’s political misdeeds have also been put on hold due to the pandemic. Attorney General Barr, for instance, had been called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee at the end of March. It would have been his first appearance before that committee. Now, however, Congress has adjourned. As its chairman, Jerrold Nadler, explained as March ended, Barr was to have faced questioning about “the misuse of our criminal justice system for political purposes” — specifically, “a pattern of conduct in legal matters… that raises significant concerns,” including interference in the prosecutions of Trump Deputy Campaign Manager Rick Gates, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and long-time associate Roger Stone. Bottom line, the investigations and proceedings against Trump, personal and presidential, are on hold for the foreseeable future.

6. Rigged Elections: Trump has long cast doubts on the viability of presidential elections. As the 2016 campaign played out, for instance, he was already expressing his fears of a “rigged election.” He accused the media of misreporting and twisting the preferences of voters in support of Hillary Clinton, while later claiming her campaign had meddled in the election process. The 2018 election only brought a further sense of distrust to the proceedings, as accusations of voter fraud, voting machine malfunctions, and voter suppression marred the process in states like Florida and Georgia. The result: the groundwork has been laid for ever greater distrust of such elections even though they are the sine qua non of a functioning democracy.

Now, the future of the November presidential election is uncertain owing to Covid-19. As numerous pundits and experts have reminded us, the social distancing necessary to halt the spread of the virus has called into question the logistics of normal voting and even the future viability of a full and fair election in November. Already primaries have been delayed, and expectations of turnout have diminished. Even in some of those that did take place in March, turnout was clearly diminished. Moreover, it was difficult to find people willing to staff polling places and sign in the thousands of voters who would ordinarily pass through on primary day. Solutions like balloting by mail have been proposed, but the ability of Trump and others to challenge the results have undeniably grown in the wake of the virus’s spread across the nation.

With some of his long-stymied plans now falling into place as the devastating pandemic hits, how telling of the president to tweet a picture of himself as Nero, as he delays or refuses to provide adequate amounts of medical supplies from reaching needy states. In unsettling ways, the crisis is working for him as previously untenable policy options are becoming essential to curtailing the coronavirus.

Whether it comes to air travel, the courts, the census, or the voting booth, keeping people apart and grounded makes perfect sense right now, but all of this is also providing dangerous opportunities for the president. Once past this crisis, it will be crucial for Americans to remind one another of the fundamentals of a secure democracy in which respect for immigrants, the desire for peace, election safeguards, and a respect for internationalism can be allowed to thrive even in times of turmoil. Otherwise, Covid-19 could usher in the ultimate success of Donald Trump’s destructive agenda.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, as well as the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief. She is the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State and editor of Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink. Julia Tedesco contributed research to this article.

Copyright ©2020 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 April 2020

Word Count: 1,916

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To say that these are unprecedented times would be the understatement of the century. Even as the United States became the latest target of Hurricane COVID-19, in “hot spots” around the globe a continuing frenzy of health concerns represented yet another drop down the economic rabbit hole.

Stay-at-home orders have engulfed the planet, encompassing a majority of Americans, all of India, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe. A second round of cases may be starting to surface in China. Meanwhile, small- and medium-sized businesses, not to speak of giant corporate entities, are already facing severe financial pain.

I was in New York City on 9/11 and for the weeks that followed. At first, there was a sense of overriding panic about the possibility of more attacks, while the air was still thick with smoke. A startling number of lives were lost and we all did feel that we had indeed been changed forever.

Nonetheless, the shock was momentary. Small businesses, even in the neighborhood of the Twin Towers, reopened quickly enough while, in the midst of psychic chaos, President George W. Bush urged Americans to continue to fly, shop, and even go to Disney World.

Think of the coronavirus, then, as a different kind of 9/11. After all, the airlines are all but grounded, restaurants and so many other shops closed, Disney World shut tight, and the death toll is already well past that of 9/11 and multiplying fast. The concept of “social distancing” has become omnipresent, while hospitals are overwhelmed and medical professionals stretched thin. Pandemic containment efforts have put the global economy on hold. This time, we will be changed forever.

Figures on job cuts and business closures could soon eclipse those from the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008. The U.S. jobless rate could hit 30% in the second quarter of 2020, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard, which would mean that we’re talking levels of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many small companies will be unable to reopen. Others could default on their debts and enter bankruptcy.

After all, about half of all small businesses in this country had less than a month’s worth of cash set aside as the coronavirus hit and they employ almost half of the private workforce. In truth, mom-and-pop stores, not the giant corporate entities, are the engine of the economy. The restaurant industry alone could lose 7.4 million jobs, while tourism and retail sectors will experience significant turmoil for months, if not years, to come.

In the first week of coronavirus economic shock, a record 3.3 million Americans filed claims for unemployment. That figure was nearly three times the peak of the 2008 recession and it doubled to 6.6 million a week later, with future numbers expected to rise staggeringly higher.

As sobering as those numbers were, Treasury Secretary Steve “Foreclosure King” Mnuchin branded them “not relevant.” Tone-deafness aside, the reality is that it will take months, once the impact of the coronavirus subsides, for many people to return to work. There will be jobs and possibly even sub-sectors of the economy that won’t rematerialize.

This cataclysm prompted Congress to pass the largest fiscal relief package in its history. As necessary as it was, that massive spending bill was also a reminder that the urge to offer corporations mega-welfare not available to ordinary citizens remains a distinctly all-American phenomenon.

Reflections from the financial crisis of 2008 The catalyst for this crisis is obviously in a different league than in 2008, since a viral pandemic is hardly nature’s equivalent of a subprime meltdown. But with an economic system already on the brink of crashing, one thing will prove similar: instability for a vulnerable majority is likely to be matched by nearly unlimited access to money for financial elites who, with stupendous subsidies, will thrive no matter who else goes down.

Once the virus recedes, stock and debt bubbles inflated over the past 12 years are likely to begin to grow again, fueled as then by central bank policies and federal favoritism. In other words, we’ve seen this movie before, but call the sequel: Contagion Meets Wall Street.

Unlike in 2020, in the early days of the 2008 financial crisis, economic fallout spread far more slowly. Between mid-September of that year when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and October 3rd, when the Troubled Asset Relief Program, including a $700 billion Wall Street and corporate bailout package, was passed by Congress, banks were freaked out by the enormity of their own bad bets.

Yet no one then should have been surprised, as I and others had been reporting that the amount of leverage, or debt, in the financial system was a genuine danger, especially given all those toxic subprime mortgage assets the banks had created and then bet on. After Bear Stearns went bankrupt in March 2008 because it had borrowed far too much from other big banks to squander on toxic mortgage assets, I assured listeners on Democracy Now! that this was just the beginning — and so it proved to be. Taxpayers would end up guaranteeing JPMorgan Chase’s buyout of Bear Stearns’s business and yet more bailouts would follow — and not just from the government.

Leaders of the Federal Reserve would similarly provide trillions of dollars in loans, cheap money, and bond-buying programs to the financial system. And this would dwarf the government stimulus packages under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama that were meant for ordinary people.

As I wrote in It Takes a Pillage: An Epic Tale of Power, Deceit, and Untold Trillions, instead of the Fed buying those trillions of dollars of toxic assets from banks that could no longer sell them anywhere else, it would have been cheaper to directly cover subprime mortgage payments for a set period of time. In that way, people might have kept their homes and the economic fallout would have been largely contained. Thanks to Washington’s predisposition to offer corporate welfare, that didn’t happen — and it’s not happening now either.

None of this is that complicated: when a system is steeped in so much debt that companies can’t make even low-rate debt payments and have insufficient savings for emergencies, they can crash — fast. All of this was largely forgotten, however, as a combination of Wall Street maneuvering, record-breaking corporate buybacks, and ultra-low interest rates in the years since the financial crisis lifted stock markets globally.

Below the surface, however, an epic debt bubble was once again growing, fostered in part by record corporate debt levels. In 2009, as the economy was just beginning to show the first signs of emerging from the Great Recession, the average American company owed $2 of debt for every $1 it earned. Fast forward to today and that ratio is about $3 to $1. For some companies, it’s as high as $15 to $1. For Boeing, the second largest recipient of federal funding in this country, it’s $37 to $1.

What that meant was simple enough: anything that disrupted the system was going to be exponentially devastating. Enter the coronavirus, which is now creating a perfect storm on Wall Street that’s guaranteed to ripple through Main Street.

The Fed, the casino, and trillions on the line In total, the CARES Act that Congress passed offers about $2.2 trillion in government relief. As President Trump noted while signing the bill into law, however, total government coronavirus aid could, in the end, reach $6.2 trillion. That’s a staggering sum. Unfortunately, you won’t be surprised to learn that, given both the Trump administration and the Fed, the story hardly ends there.

More than $4 trillion of that estimate is predicated on using $454 billion of CARES Act money to back Federal Reserve-based corporate loans. The Fed has the magical power to leverage, or multiply, money it receives from the Treasury up to 10 times over. In the end, according to the president, that could mean $4.5 trillion in support for big banks and corporate entities versus something like $1.4 trillion for regular Americans, small businesses, hospitals, and local and state governments. That 3.5 to 1 ratio signals that, as in 2008, the Treasury and the Fed are focused on big banks and large corporations, not everyday Americans.

In addition to slashing interest rates to zero, the Fed announced a slew of initiatives to pump money (“liquidity”) into the system. In total, its life-support programs are aimed primarily at banks, large companies, and markets, with some spillage into small businesses and municipalities.

Its arsenal consists of $1.5 trillion in short-term loans to banks and an alphabet soup of other perks and programs. On March 15th, for instance, the Fed announced that it would restart its quantitative easing, or QE, program. In this way, the U.S. central bank creates money electronically that it can use to buy bonds from banks. In an effort to keep Wall Street buzzing, its initial QE revamp will enable it to buy up to $500 billion in Treasury bonds and $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities — and that was just a beginning.

Two days later, the Fed created a Commercial Paper Funding Facility through which it will provide yet more short-term loans for banks and corporations, while also dusting off its Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to allow it to buy securities backed by student loans, auto loans, and credit-card loans. TALF will receive $10 billion in initial funding from the Treasury Department’s Emergency Stabilization Fund (ESF).

And there’s more. The Fed has selected asset-management goliath BlackRock to manage its buying programs (for a fee, of course), including its commercial mortgage and two corporate bond-buying ones (each of which is to get $10 billion in seed money from the Treasury Department’s ESF). BlackRock will also be able to purchase corporate bonds through various Exchange Traded Funds, of which that company just happens to be the biggest provider.

Surpassing measures used in the 2008 crisis, on March 23rd, the Fed said it would continue buying Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities “in the amounts needed to support smooth market functioning.” In other words, unlimited quantitative easing. As its chairman, Jerome Powell, told the Today Show, “When it comes to this lending, we’re not going to run out of ammunition, that doesn’t happen.” In other words, the Fed will be dishing out money like it’s going out of style — but not to real people.

By March 25th, the Fed’s balance sheet had already surged to $5.25 trillion, larger than at its height — $4.5 trillion — in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and it won’t stop there. In other words, the 2008 playbook is unfolding again, just more quickly and on an even larger scale, distributing a disproportionate amount of money to the top tiers of the business world and using government funds to make that money stretch even further.

A relief package for whom? By now, in our unique pandemic moment, something seems all too familiar. As in 2008, the most beneficial policies and funding will be heading for Wall Street banks and behemoth corporations. Far less will be going directly to American workers through tangible grants, cheaper loans, or any form of debt forgiveness. Even the six months of student-loan payment relief (only for federal loans, not private ones) just pushes those payments down the road.

The historic $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package is heavily corporate-focused. For starters, a quarter of it, $500 billion, goes to large corporations. At least $454 billion of that will back funding for up to $4.5 trillion in corporate loans from the Fed and the remainder will be for direct Treasury loans to big companies. Who gets what will be largely Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s choice. And mind you, we may never know the details since President Trump is committed to making this selection process as non-transparent as possible.

There’s an additional $50 billion that’s to be dedicated to the airline industry, $25 billion of which will be in direct grants to airlines that don’t place employees on involuntary furlough or discontinue flight service at airports through September. Right after the bill passed, the airline industry announced that more workforce cuts are ahead (once it gets the money).

Another $17 billion is meant for “businesses critical to maintaining national security,” one of which could eventually be White House darling Boeing. There’s also a corporate tax credit worth about $290 billon to corporations that keep people on their payrolls and can prove losses of 50% of their pre-coronavirus revenue.

More than $370 billion of that congressional relief package will go into Small Business Administration loans meant to cover existing loans and operating and payroll costs as well. Yet receiving such loans will involve a byzantine process for desperate small outfits. Meanwhile, the big banks will get a cut for administering them.

About $150 billion is pegged for the healthcare industry, including $100 billion in grants to hospitals working on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis and other funds to jumpstart the production of desperately needed (and long overdue) medical products for doctors, nurses, and pandemic patients. Another $27 billion is being allocated for vaccines and stockpiles of medical supplies.

An extra $150 billion will go to cities and states to prop up budgets already over-stretched and in trouble. Those on unemployment benefits will get an increase of $600 per week for four months in a $260 billion unemployment expansion.

Ultimately, however, the relief promised will not cover the basic needs of the majority of bereft Americans. With Main Street’s economy sinking right now, it won’t arrive fast enough either. In addition, the highly publicized part of Congress’s relief package that promises up to $1,200 per person, $2,400 per family, and $500 per child, will be barely enough to cover a month of rent and utilities, let alone other essentials, for the typical working family when it finally arrives. Since disbursement will be based on information the Internal Revenue Service has on each individual and family, if you haven’t filed tax returns in the last year or so or if you filed them by mail, funds could be slower to arrive — and don’t forget that the IRS is facing coronavirus-based workforce challenges of its own.

The best offense is a good defense The global economic freeze caused by the coronavirus has crushed more people in a shorter span of time than any crisis in memory. Working people will need far more relief than in the last meltdown to keep not just themselves but the very foundations of the global economy going.

The only true avenue for such support is national governments. Central banks remain the dealers of choice for addicted big corporations, private banks, and markets. In other words, given congressional (and Trumpian) sponsored bailouts and practically unlimited access to money from the Fed, Wall Street will, in the end, be fine.

If ground-up solutions to help ordinary Americans and small businesses aren’t adopted in a far grander way, one thing is predictable: once this crisis has been “managed,” we’ll be set up for a larger one in an even more disparate world. When the clouds from the coronavirus storm dissipate, those bailouts and all the corporate deregulation now underway will have created bank and corporate debt bubbles that are even larger than before.

The real economic lesson to be drawn from this crisis should be (but won’t be) that the best offense is a good defense. Exiting this self-induced recession or depression into anything but a less equal world would require genuine infrastructure investment and planning. That would mean focusing post-relief efforts on producing better hospitals, public transportation networks, research and development, schools, and far more adequate homeless shelters.

In other words, actions offering greater protection to the majority of the population would restart the economy in a truly sustainable fashion, while bringing back both jobs and confidence. But that, in turn, would involve a bold and courageous political response providing genuine and proportionate stimulus for people. Unfortunately, given Washington’s 1% tilt and Donald Trump’s CEO empathy, that is at present inconceivable.

Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). Her latest book is Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. She is also the author of All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power and five other books. Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb work on this piece.

Copyright ©2020 Nomi Prins — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 April 2020

Word Count: 2,678

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As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity. One, widely circulated within right-wing conspiracy circles, is that it originated as a biological weapon developed at a secret Chinese military lab in the city of Wuhan that somehow (perhaps intentionally?) escaped into the civilian population. Although that “theory” has been thoroughly debunked, President Trump and his acolytes continue to call Covid-19 the China Virus, the Wuhan Virus, or even the “Kung Flu,” claiming its global spread was the result of an inept and secretive Chinese government response. Scientists, by and large, believe the virus originated in bats and was transmitted to humans by wildlife sold at a Wuhan seafood market. But perhaps there’s another far more ominous possibility to consider: that this is one of Mother Nature’s ways of resisting humanity’s assault on her essential life systems.

Let’s be clear: this pandemic is a world-shattering phenomenon of massive proportions. Not only has it infected hundreds of thousands of people across the planet, killing more than 40,000 of them, but it’s brought the global economy to a virtual stand-still, potentially crushing millions of businesses, large and small, while putting tens of millions, or possibly hundreds of millions, of people out of work. In the past, disasters of this magnitude have toppled empires, triggered mass rebellions, and caused widespread famine and starvation. This upheaval, too, will produce widespread misery and imperil the survival of numerous governments.

Understandably, our forebears came to view such calamities as manifestations of the fury of gods incensed by human disrespect for and mistreatment of their universe, the natural world. Today, educated people generally dismiss such notions, but scientists have recently been discovering that human impacts on the environment, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are producing feedback loops causing increasingly severe harm to communities across the globe, in the form of extreme storms, persistent droughts, massive wildfires, and recurring heat waves of an ever deadlier sort.

Climate scientists also speak of “singularities,” “non-linear events,” and “tipping points” —  the sudden and irreversible collapse of vital ecological systems with far-ranging, highly destructive consequences for humanity. Evidence for such tipping points is growing —  for example in the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Arctic icecap. In that context, a question naturally arises: Is the coronavirus a stand-alone event, independent of any other mega-trends, or does it represent some sort of catastrophic tipping point?

It will be some time before scientists can answer that question with any certainty. There are, however, good reasons to believe that this might be the case and, if so, perhaps it’s high time humanity reconsiders its relationship with nature.

Humans vs. nature It’s common to think of human history as an evolutionary process in which broad, long-studied trends like colonialism and post-colonialism have largely shaped human affairs. When sudden disruptions have occurred, they are usually attributed to, say, the collapse of a long-lasting dynasty or the rise of an ambitious new ruler. But the course of human affairs has also been altered —  often in even more dramatic ways —  by natural occurrences, ranging from prolonged droughts to catastrophic volcanic activity to (yes, of course) plagues and pandemics. The ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean, for example, is widely believed to have disintegrated following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (now known as Santorini) in the 17th century BCE. Archaeological evidence further suggests that other once-thriving cultures were similarly undermined or even extinguished by natural disasters.

It’s hardly surprising that the survivors of such catastrophes often attributed their misfortunes to the anger of various gods over human excesses and depredations. In the ancient world, sacrifices —  even human ones —  were considered a necessity to appease such angry spirits. At the onset of the Trojan War, for example, the Greek goddess Artemis, protectress of wild animals, the wilderness, and the moon, stilled the winds needed to propel the Greek fleet to Troy because Agamemnon, its commander, had killed a sacred deer. To appease her and restore the essential winds, Agamemnon felt obliged —  or so the poet Homer tells us —  to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia (the plot line for many a Greek and modern tragedy).

In more recent times, educated people have generally seen coronavirus-style calamities as either inexplicable acts of God or as explicable, if surprising, natural events. With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in Europe, moreover, many influential thinkers came to believe that humans could use science and technology to overpower nature and so harness it to the will of humanity. The seventeenth-century French mathematician René Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that “we can… render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”

This outlook undergirded the view, common in the last three centuries, that the Earth was “virgin” territory (especially when it came to the colonial possessions of the major powers) and so fully open to exploitation by human entrepreneurs. This led to the deforestation of vast areas, as well as the extinction or near-extinction of many animals, and in more recent times, to the plunder of underground mineral and energy deposits.

As it happened, though, this planet proved anything but an impotent victim of colonization and exploitation. Human mistreatment of the natural environment has turned out to have distinctly painful boomerang effects. The ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest, for example, is altering Brazil’s climate, raising temperatures and reducing rainfall in significant ways, with painful consequences for local farmers and even more distant urban dwellers. (And the release of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thanks to increasingly massive forest fires, will only increase the pace of climate change globally.) Similarly, the technique of hydraulic fracking, used to extract oil and natural gas trapped in underground shale deposits, can trigger earthquakes that damage aboveground structures and endanger human life. In so many ways like these, Mother Nature strikes back when her vital organs suffer harm.

This interplay between human activity and planetary behavior has led some analysts to rethink our relationship with the natural world. They have reconceptualized the Earth as a complex matrix of living and inorganic systems, all (under normal conditions) interacting to maintain a stable balance. When one component of the larger matrix is damaged or destroyed, the others respond in their unique ways in attempting to restore the natural order of things. Originally propounded by the environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s, this notion has often been described as “the Gaia Hypothesis,” after the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life.

Climate tipping points Posing the ultimate threat to planetary health, climate change —  a direct consequence of the human impulse to dump ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially heating the planet to the breaking point —  is guaranteed to generate the most brutal of all such feedback loops. By emitting ever more carbon dioxide and other gases, humans are fundamentally altering planetary chemistry and posing an almost unimaginable threat to natural ecosystems. Climate-change deniers in the Trumpian mode continue to insist that we can keep doing this with no cost to our way of life. It is, however, becoming increasingly apparent that the more we alter the climate, the more the planet will respond in ways guaranteed to endanger human life and prosperity.

The main engine of climate change is the greenhouse effect, as all those greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere entrap ever more radiated solar heat from the Earth’s surface, raising temperatures worldwide and so altering global climate patterns. Until now, much of this added heat and carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the planet’s oceans, resulting in rising water temperatures and the increased acidification of their waters. This, in turn, has already led to, among other deleterious effects, the mass die-off of coral reefs —  the preferred habitat of many of the fish species on which large numbers of humans rely for their sustenance and livelihoods. Just as consequential, higher ocean temperatures have provided the excess energy that has fueled many of the most destructive hurricanes of recent times, including Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, and Dorian.

A warmer atmosphere can also sustain greater accumulations of moisture, making possible the prolonged downpours and catastrophic flooding being experienced in many parts of the world, including the upper Midwest in the United States. In other areas, rainfall is decreasing and heat waves are becoming more frequent and prolonged, resulting in devastating wildfires of the sort witnessed in the American West in recent years and in Australia this year.

In all such ways, Mother Nature, you might say, is striking back. It is, however, the potential for “non-linear” events and “tipping points” that has some climate scientists especially concerned, fearing that we now live on what might be thought of as an avenging planet. While many climate effects, like prolonged heat waves, will become more pronounced over time, other effects, it is now believed, will occur suddenly, with little warning, and could result in large-scale disruptions in human life (as in this coronavirus moment). You might think of this as Mother Nature saying, “Stop! Do not go past this point or there will be dreadful consequences!”

Scientists are understandably cautious in discussing such possibilities, as they are harder to study than linear events like rising world temperatures. But the concern is there. “Large-scale singular events (also called ‘tipping points,’ or critical thresholds) are abrupt and drastic changes in physical, ecological, or social systems” brought about by the relentless rise in temperatures, noted the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its comprehensive 2014 assessment of anticipated impacts. Such events, the IPCC pointed out, “pose key risks because of the potential magnitude of the consequences; the rate at which they would occur; and, depending on this rate, the limited ability of society to cope with them.”

Six years later, that striking description sounds eerily like the present moment.

Until now, the tipping points of greatest concern to scientists have been the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Those two massive reservoirs of ice contain the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of square miles of water. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into neighboring oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world’s most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. In its 2014 study, the IPCC predicted that this might occur over several centuries, at least offering plenty of time for humans to adapt, but more recent research indicates that those two ice sheets are melting far more rapidly than previously believed —  and so a sharp increase in sea levels can be expected well before the end of this century with catastrophic consequences for coastal communities.

The IPCC also identified two other possible tipping points with potentially far-reaching consequences: the die-off of the Amazon rain forest and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Both are already under way, reducing the survival prospects of flora and fauna in their respective habitats. As these processes gain momentum, entire ecosystems are likely to be obliterated and many species killed off, with drastic consequences for the humans who rely on them in so many ways (from food to pollination chains) for their survival. But as is always the case in such transformations, other species —  perhaps insects and microorganisms highly dangerous to humans —  could occupy those spaces emptied by extinction.

Climate change and pandemics Back in 2014, the IPCC did not identify human pandemics among potential climate-induced tipping points, but it did provide plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures.

Combined with mechanized agriculture and deforestation, climate change is also undermining subsistence farming and indigenous lifestyles in many parts of the world, driving millions of impoverished people to already crowded urban centers, where health facilities are often overburdened and the risk of contagion ever greater. “Virtually all the projected growth in populations will occur in urban agglomerations,” the IPCC noted then. Adequate sanitation is lacking in many of these cities, particularly in the densely populated shantytowns that often surround them. “About 150 million people currently live in cities affected by chronic water shortages, and by 2050, unless there are rapid improvements in urban environments, the number will rise to almost a billion.”

Such newly settled urban dwellers often retain strong ties to family members still in the countryside who, in turn, may come in contact with wild animals carrying deadly viruses. This appears to have been the origin of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, which affected tens of thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Scientists believe that the Ebola virus (like the coronavirus) originated in bats and was then transmitted to gorillas and other wild animals that coexist with people living on the fringes of tropical forests. Somehow, a human or humans contracted the disease from exposure to such creatures and then transmitted it to visitors from the city who, upon their return, infected many others.

The coronavirus appears to have had somewhat similar origins. In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures.

The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case. If so, we had better take heed.

Heeding Mother Nature’s warning Suppose this interpretation of the Covid-19 pandemic is correct. Suppose that the coronavirus is nature’s warning, its way of telling us that we’ve gone too far and must alter our behavior lest we risk further contamination. What then?

To adapt a phrase from the Cold War era, what humanity may need to do is institute a new policy of “peaceful coexistence” with Mother Nature. This approach would legitimize the continued presence of large numbers of humans on the planet but require that they respect certain limits in their interactions with its ecosphere. We humans could use our talents and technologies to improve life in areas we’ve long occupied, but infringement elsewhere would be heavily restricted. Natural disasters —  floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the like —  would, of course, still occur, but not at a rate exceeding what we experienced in the pre-industrial past.

Implementation of such a strategy would, at the very least, require putting the brakes on climate change as swiftly as possible through the rapid and thorough elimination of human-induced carbon emissions —  something that has, in fact, happened in at least a modest way, and however briefly, thanks to this Covid-19 moment. Deforestation would also have to be halted and the world’s remaining wilderness areas preserved as is forever. Any further despoliation of the oceans would have to be stopped, including the dumping of wastes, plastics, engine fuel, and runoff pesticides.

The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up. The only way to avert such a catastrophe and assure ourselves that Earth will not become an avenger planet is to heed Mother Nature’s warning and cease the further desecration of essential ecosystems.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, including the just-published All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books).

Copyright ©2020 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 April 2020

Word Count: 2,830

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Before I found myself “sheltering in place,” this article was to be about women’s actions around the world to mark March 8th, International Women’s Day. From Pakistan to Chile, women in their millions filled the streets, demanding that we be able to control our bodies and our lives. Women came out in Iraq and Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Peru, the Philippines and Malaysia. In some places, they risked beatings by masked men. In others, they demanded an end to femicide — the millennia-old reality that women in this world are murdered daily simply because they are women.

In 1975 the future was female This year’s celebrations were especially militant. It’s been 45 years since the United Nations declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and sponsored its first international conference on women in Mexico City. Similar conferences followed at five-year intervals, culminating in a 1995 Beijing conference, producing a platform that has in many ways guided international feminism ever since.

Beijing was a quarter of a century ago, but this year, women around the world seemed to have had enough. On March 9th, Mexican women staged a 24-hour strike, un día sin nosotras (a day without us women), to demonstrate just how much the world depends on the labor — paid and unpaid — of… yes, women. That womanless day was, by all accounts, a success. The Wall Street Journal observed — perhaps with a touch of astonishment — that “Mexico grinds to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of women paralyzed Mexico in an unprecedented nationwide strike to protest a rising wave of violence against women, a major victory for their cause.”

In addition to crowding the streets and emptying factories and offices, some women also broke store windows and fought with the police. Violence? From women? What could have driven them to such a point?

Perhaps it was the murder of Ingrid Escamilla, 25, a Mexico City resident, who, according to the New York Times, “was stabbed, skinned and disemboweled” this February. Maybe it was that the shooting of the artist and activist Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre in Ciudad Juarez, a barely noted reminder to an uninterested world that women have been disappearing for decades along the U.S.-Mexico border. Or maybe it was just the fact that official figures for 2019 revealed more than 1,000 femicides in Mexico, a 10% increase from the previous year, while many more such murders go unrecorded.

Is the pandemic patriarchal? If it weren’t for the pandemic, maybe the Wall Street Journal would have been right. Maybe the Day Without Women would have been only the first of many major victories. Maybe the international feminist anthem, “El violador eres tú” (You [the patriarchy, the police, the president] are the rapist), would have gone on inspiring flash-mobs of dancing, chanting women everywhere. Perhaps the world’s attention might not have been so quickly diverted from the spectacle of women’s uprisings globally. Now, however, in the United States and around the world, it’s all-pandemic-all-the-time, and with reason. The coronavirus has done what A Day Without Women could not: it’s brought the world’s economy to a shuddering halt. It’s infected hundreds of thousands of people and killed tens of thousands. And it continues to spread like a global wildfire.

Like every major event and institution, the pandemic affects women and men differently. Although men who fall sick seem more likely than women to die, in other respects, the pandemic and its predictable aftermath are going to be harder on women. How can that be? The writer Helen Lewis provides some answers in the Atlantic.

First of all, the virus, combined with mass quarantine measures, ensures that more people will need to be cared for. This includes older people who are especially at risk of dying and children who are no longer in school or childcare. In developed countries like the United States, people fortunate enough to be able to keep their jobs by working from home are discovering that the presence of bored children does not make this any easier.

Indeed, last night, my little household was treated to a song-and-dance performance by two little girls who live a couple of houses down the street. Their parents had spent the day helping them plan it and then invited us to watch from our backyard. What they’ll do tomorrow, a workday, I have no idea. A friend without children has offered to provide daily 15-minute Zoom lessons on anything she can Google, as a form of respite for her friends who are mothers.

As recently as a week ago, it looked as if shuttered schools might open again before the academic year ends, allowing one New York Times commentator to write an article headlined “I Refuse to Run a Coronavirus Home School.” An associate professor of educational leadership, the author says she’s letting her two children watch TV and eat cookies, knowing that no amount of quick-study is going to turn her into an elementary school teacher. I applaud her stance, but also suspect that the children of professionals will probably be better placed than those of low-wage workers to resume the life-and-death struggle for survival in the competitive jungle that is kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade education in this country.

In locked-down heterosexual households, Helen Lewis writes, the major responsibility for childcare will fall on women. She’s exasperated with pundits who point out that people like Isaac Newton and Shakespeare did their best work during a seventeenth-century plague in England. “Neither of them,” she points out, “had child-care responsibilities.” Try writing King Lear while your own little Cordelias, Regans, and Gonerils are pulling at your shirt and complaining loudly that they’re booored.

In places like the United Kingdom and the United States, where the majority of mothers have jobs, women will experience new pressures to give up their paid employment. In most two-earner heterosexual households with children, historic pay inequalities mean that a woman’s job usually pays less. So if someone has to devote the day to full-time childcare, it will make economic sense that it’s her. In the U.S., 11% of women are already involuntarily working only part-time, many in jobs with irregular schedules. Even women who have chosen to balance their household work with part-time employment may find themselves under pressure to relinquish those jobs.

As Lewis says, this all makes “perfect economic sense”:

“At an individual level, the choices of many couples over the next few months will make perfect economic sense. What do pandemic patients need? Looking after. What do self-isolating older people need? Looking after. What do children kept home from school need? Looking after. All this looking after — this unpaid caring labor — will fall more heavily on women, because of the existing structure of the workforce.”

Furthermore, as women who choose to leave the workforce for a few years to care for very young children know, it’s almost impossible to return to paid work at a position of similar pay and status as the one you gave up. And enforced withdrawal won’t make that any easier.

Social reproduction? What’s that? And why does it matter? This semester I’m teaching a capstone course for urban studies majors at my college, the University of San Francisco. We’ve been focusing our attention on something that shapes all our lives: work — what it is, who has it and doesn’t, who’s paid for it and isn’t, and myriad other questions about the activity that occupies so much of our time on this planet. We’ve borrowed a useful concept from Marxist feminists: “social reproduction.” It refers to all the work, paid and unpaid, that someone has to do just so that workers can even show up at their jobs and perform the tasks that earn them a paycheck, while making a profit for their employers.

It’s called reproduction, because it reproduces workers, both in the biological sense and in terms of the daily effort to make them whole enough to do it all over again tomorrow. It’s social reproduction, because no one can do it alone and different societies find different ways of doing it.

What’s included in social reproduction? There are the obvious things any worker needs: food, clothing, sleep (and a safe place to doze off), not to speak of a certain level of hygiene. But there’s more. Recreation is part of it, because it “recreates” a person capable of working effectively. Education, healthcare, childcare, cooking, cleaning, procuring or making food and clothing — all of these are crucial to sustaining workers and their work. If you’d like to know more about it, Tithi Bhattacharya’s Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression is a good place to start.

What does any of this have to do with our pandemic moment? How social reproduction is organized in the United States leaves some people more vulnerable than others in a time of economic crisis. To take one example, over many decades, restaurants have assumed and collectivized (for profit) significant parts of the work of food preparation, service, and clean up, acts once largely performed in individual homes. For working women, the availability of cheap takeout has, in some cases, replaced the need to plan, shop for, and prepare meals seven days a week. Food service is a stratified sector, ranging from high-end to fast-food establishments, but it includes many low-wage workers who have now lost their jobs, while those still working at places providing takeout or drive-through meals are risking their health so that others can eat.

One way professional class two-earner couples in the United States have dealt with the tasks of social reproduction is to outsource significant parts of their work to poorer women. Fighting over who does the vacuuming and laundry at home? Don’t make the woman do it all. Hire a different woman to do it for you. Want to have children and a career? Hire a nanny.

Of course, odds are that your house cleaner and nanny will still have to do their own social reproduction work when they get home. And now that their children aren’t going to school, somehow they’ll have to take care of them as well. In many cases, this will be possible, however, because their work is not considered an “essential service” under the shelter-in-place orders of some states. So they will lose their incomes.

At least here in California, many of the women who do these jobs are undocumented immigrants. When the Trump administration and Congress manage to pass a relief bill, they, like many undocumented restaurant workers, won’t be receiving any desperately needed funds to help them pay rent or buy food. Immigrant-rights organizations are stepping in to try to make up some of the shortfall, but what they’re capable of is likely to prove just a few drops in a very large bucket. Fortunately, immigrant workers are among the most resourceful people in this country or they wouldn’t have made it this far.

There’s one more kind of social reproduction work performed mostly by women, and, by its nature, the very opposite of “social distancing”: sex work. You can be sure that no bailout bill will include some of the nation’s poorest women, those who work as prostitutes.

Women at home and at risk It’s a painful coincidence that women are being confined to their homes just as an international movement against femicide is taking off. One effect of shelter-in-place is to make it much harder for women to find shelter from domestic violence. Are you safer outside risking coronavirus or inside with a bored, angry male partner? I write this in full knowledge that one economic sector that has not suffered from the pandemic is the gun business. Ammo.com, for example, which sells ammunition online in all but four states, has http://ammo.com/experienced more than a three-fold increase in revenue over the last month. Maybe all that ammo is being bought to fight off zombies (or the immigrant invasion the president keeps reminding us about), but research shows that gun ownership has a lot to do with whether or not domestic violence turns into murder.

Each week, Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax hosts a chat line offering suggestions for help of various sorts. For the last two weeks, her readers (myself included) have been horrified by messages from one participant stuck in quarantine in a small apartment with a dangerous partner who has just bought a gun. Standard advice to women in her position is not just to run, but to make an exit plan, quietly gather the supplies and money you’ll need and secure a place to go. Mandatory shelter-in-place orders, however necessary to flattening the curve of this pandemic, may well indirectly cause an increase in domestic femicides.

As if women weren’t already disproportionately affected by the coronavirus epidemic, Senate Republicans have been trying to sneak a little extra misogyny into their version of a relief bill. In the same month that Pakistani women risked their lives in demonstrations under the slogan “Mera jism, meri marzi” (“My body, my choice”), Republicans want to use the pandemic in another attempt to — that’s right — shut down Planned Parenthood clinics.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently revealed that the $350 billion being proposed to shore up small businesses that don’t lay off workers would exclude nonprofits that receive funds from Medicaid. Planned Parenthood, which provides healthcare for millions of uninsured and underinsured women, is exactly that kind of nonprofit. Democratic congressional aides who alerted Sargent to this suggest that Planned Parenthood wouldn’t be the only organization affected. They also believe that

“…this language would exclude from eligibility for this financial assistance a big range of other nonprofits that get Medicaid funding, such as home and community-based disability providers; community-based nursing homes, mental health providers, and health centers; group homes for the disabled; and even rape crisis centers.”

Meanwhile, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas are trying to use the coronavirus as an excuse to prevent women’s access to abortion. On the grounds that such procedures are not medically necessary, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has ordered abortion providers to stop terminating pregnancies. Earlier, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sent letters to abortion providers in that state forbidding all “nonessential” surgical abortions.

A return to normalcy? When Warren Harding (who oversaw a notoriously corrupt administration) ran for president in 1920, his campaign slogan was “a return to normalcy” — the way things were, that is, before World War I. What he meant was a return to economic dynamism. As we know, the “Roaring Twenties” provided it in spades — until that little crash known as the Great Depression. Today, like Harding, another corrupt president is promising a prompt return to normalcy. He’s already chafing at the 15-day period of social distancing he announced in mid-March. At his March 23rd press conference, he hinted that the United States would be “open for business” sooner rather than later. The next day, he suggested that the country reopen for business on Easter (a “very special day for me”), saying he wants to see “packed churches all over our country.” He can’t wait until everything, including our deeply unequal healthcare and economic systems, gets back to normal — the way they were before the spread of the coronavirus; until, that is, we can go back to being unprepared for the next, inevitable crisis.

Unlike the president, I hope we don’t go back to normal. I hope the people of Venice come to appreciate their sparkling canals and their returning dolphins. I hope that the rest of us become attached to less polluted air and lower carbon emissions. I hope that we learn to value the lives of women.

I hope, instead of returning to normalcy, we recognize that our survival as a species depends on changing almost everything, including how we produce what we need and how we reproduce ourselves as fully human beings. I hope that, when we have survived this pandemic, the world’s peoples take what we have learned about collective global action during this crisis and apply it to that other predictable crisis, the one that threatens all human life on a distinctly warming planet.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 March 2020

Word Count: 2,672

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My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.

The year 1929 brought the Great Depression and lean times. My father’s father had left the family, so my dad, then 12, had to pitch in. He got a newspaper route, which he kept for four years, quitting high school after tenth grade so he could earn money for the family. In 1935, like millions of other young men of that era, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a creation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that offered work on environmental projects of many kinds. He battled forest fires in Oregon for two years before returning to his family and factory work. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army, going back to a factory job when World War II ended. Times grew a little less lean in 1951 when he became a firefighter, after which he felt he could afford to buy a house and start a family.

I’m offering all this personal history as the context for a prediction of my dad’s that, for obvious reasons, came to my mind again recently. When I was a teenager, he liked to tell me: “I had it tough in the beginning and easy in the end. You, Willy, have had it easy in the beginning, but will likely have it tough in the end.” His prophecy stayed with me, perhaps because even then, somewhere deep down, I already suspected that my dad was right.

The COVID-19 pandemic is now grabbing the headlines, all of them, and a global recession, if not a depression, seems like a near-certainty. The stock market has been tanking and people’s lives are being disrupted in fundamental and scary ways. My dad knew the experience of losing a loved one to disease, of working hard to make ends meet during times of great scarcity, of sacrificing for the good of one’s family. Compared to him, it’s true that, so far, I’ve had an easier life as an officer in the Air Force and then a college teacher and historian. But at age 57, am I finally ready for the hard times to come? Are any of us?

And keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Climate change (recall Australia’s recent and massive wildfires) promises yet more upheavals, more chaos, more diseases. America’s wanton militarism and lying politicians promise more wars. What’s to be done to avert or at least attenuate the tough times to come, assuming my dad’s prediction is indeed now coming true? What can we do?

It’s time to reimagine America Here’s the one thing about major disruptions to normalcy: they can create opportunities for dramatic change. (Disaster capitalists know this, too, unfortunately.) President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this in the 1930s and orchestrated his New Deal to revive the economy and put Americans like my dad back to work.

In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney capitalized on the shock-and-awe disruption of the 9/11 attacks to inflict on the world their vision of a Pax Americana, effectively a militarized imperium justified (falsely) as enabling greater freedom for all. The inherent contradiction in such a dreamscape was so absurd as to make future calamity inevitable. Recall what an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scribbled down, only hours after the attack on the Pentagon and the collapse of the Twin Towers, as his boss’s instructions (especially when it came to looking for evidence of Iraqi involvement): “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” And indeed they would do just that, with an emphasis on the “not,” including, of course, the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

To progressive-minded people thinking about this moment of crisis, what kind of opportunities might open to us when (or rather if) Donald Trump is gone from the White House? Perhaps this coronaviral moment is the perfect time to consider what it would mean for us to go truly big, but without the usual hubris or those disastrous invasions of foreign countries. To respond to COVID-19, climate change, and the staggering wealth inequities in this country that, when combined, will cause unbelievable levels of needless suffering, what’s needed is a drastic reordering of our national priorities.

Remember, the Fed’s first move was to inject $1.5 trillion into the stock market. (That would have been enough to forgive all current student debt.) The Trump administration has also promised to help airlines, hotels, and above all oil companies and the fracking industry, a perfect storm when it comes to trying to sustain and enrich those upholding a kleptocratic and amoral status quo.

This should be a time for a genuinely new approach, one fit for a world of rising disruption and disaster, one that would define a new, more democratic, less bellicose America. To that end, here are seven suggestions, focusing — since I’m a retired military officer — mainly on the U.S. military, a subject that continues to preoccupy me, especially since, at present, that military and the rest of the national security state swallow up roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending:

1. If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. There was never, for example, any sense in investing up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal. (Why are new weapons needed to exterminate humanity when the “old” ones still work just fine?) Hundreds of stealth fighters and bombers — it’s estimated that Lockheed Martin’s disappointing F-35 jet fighter alone will cost $1.5 trillion over its life span — do nothing to secure us from pandemics, the devastating effects of climate change, or other all-too-pressing threats. Such weaponry only emboldens a militaristic and chauvinistic foreign policy that will facilitate yet more wars and blowback problems of every sort. And speaking of wars, isn’t it finally time to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? More than $6 trillion has already been wasted on those wars and, in this time of global peril, even more is being wasted on this country’s forever conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (Roughly $4 billion a month continues to be spent on Afghanistan alone, despite all the talk about “peace” there.)

2. Along with ending profligate weapons programs and quagmire wars, isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? Roughly 800 U.S. military bases circle the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion at a yearly cost somewhere north of $100 billion. Cutting such numbers in half over the next decade would be a more than achievable goal. Permanently cutting provocative “war games” in South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere would be no less sensible. Are North Korea and Russia truly deterred by such dramatic displays of destructive military might?

3. Come to think of it, why does the U.S. need the immediate military capacity to fight two major foreign wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon continues to insist we do and plan for, in the name of “defending” our country? Here’s a radical proposal: if you add 70,000 Special Operations forces to 186,000 Marine Corps personnel, the U.S. already possesses a potent quick-strike force of roughly 250,000 troops. Now, add in the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. What you have is more than enough military power to provide for America’s actual national security. All other Army divisions could be reduced to cadres, expandable only if our borders are directly threatened by war. Similarly, restructure the Air Force and Navy to de-emphasize the present “global strike” vision of those services, while getting rid of Donald Trump’s newest service, the Space Force, and the absurdist idea of taking war into low earth orbit. Doesn’t America already have enough war here on this small planet of ours?

4. Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. It’s time for a new Civilian Conservation Corps focused on fostering a Green New Deal. It’s time for a new Works Progress Administration to rebuild America’s infrastructure and reinvigorate our culture, as that organization did in the Great Depression years. It’s time to engage young people in service to this country. Tackling COVID-19 or future pandemics would be far easier if there were quickly trained medical aides who could help free doctors and nurses to focus on the more difficult cases. Tackling climate change will likely require more young men and women fighting forest fires on the west coast, as my dad did while in the CCC — and in a climate-changing world there will be no shortage of other necessary projects to save our planet. Isn’t it time America’s youth answered a call to service? Better yet, isn’t it time we offered them the opportunity to truly put America, rather than themselves, first?

5. And speaking of “America First,” that eternal Trumpian catch-phrase, isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism, not to speak of politics that divide, distract, and keep so many down? President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that only Americans can truly hurt America, but there’s a corollary to that: only Americans can truly save America — by uniting, focusing on our common problems, and uplifting one another. To do so, it’s vitally necessary to put an end to fear-mongering (and warmongering). As President Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear inhibits our ability to think clearly, to cooperate fully, to change things radically as a community.

6. To cite Yoda, the Jedi master, we must unlearn what we have learned. For example, America’s real heroes shouldn’t be “warriors” who kill or sports stars who throw footballs and dunk basketballs. We’re witnessing our true heroes in action right now: our doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, together with our first responders, and those workers who stay in grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like and continue to serve us all despite the danger of contracting the coronavirus from customers. They are all selflessly resisting a threat too many of us either didn’t foresee or refused to treat seriously, most notably, of course, President Donald Trump: a pandemic that transcends borders and boundaries. But can Americans transcend the increasingly harsh and divisive borders and boundaries of our own minds? Can we come to work selflessly to save and improve the lives of others? Can we become, in a sense, lovers of humanity?

7. Finally, we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet. For if we keep treating our lands, our waters, and our skies like a set of trash cans and garbage bins, our children and their children will inherit far harder times than the present moment, hard as it may be.

What these seven suggestions really amount to is rejecting a militarized mindset of aggression and a corporate mindset of exploitation for one that sees humanity and this planet more holistically. Isn’t it time to regain that vision of the earth we shared collectively during the Apollo moon missions: a fragile blue sanctuary floating in the velvety darkness of space, an irreplaceable home to be cared for and respected since there’s no other place for us to go? Otherwise, I fear that my father’s prediction will come true not just for me, but for generations to come and in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined.

A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, William Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2020 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 2,038

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Americans are facing “A Spring Unlike Any Before.” So warned a front-page headline in the March 13th New York Times.

That headline, however hyperbolic, was all too apt. The coming of spring has always promised relief from the discomforts of winter. Yet, far too often, it also brings its own calamities and afflictions.

According to the poet T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month.” Yet while April has certainly delivered its share of cataclysms, March and May haven’t lagged far behind. In fact, cruelty has seldom been a respecter of seasons. The infamous influenza epidemic of 1918, frequently cited as a possible analogue to our current crisis, began in the spring of that year, but lasted well into 1919.

That said, something about the coronavirus pandemic does seem to set this particular spring apart. At one level, that something is the collective panic now sweeping virtually the entire country. President Trump’s grotesque ineptitude and tone-deafness have only fed that panic. And in their eagerness to hold Trump himself responsible for the pandemic, as if he were the bat that first transmitted the disease to a human being, his critics magnify further a growing sense of events spinning out of control.

Yet to heap the blame for this crisis on Trump alone (though he certainly deserves plenty of blame) is to miss its deeper significance. Deferred for far too long, Judgment Day may at long last have arrived for the national security state.

Origins of a colossus That state within a state’s origins date from the early days of the Cold War. Its ostensible purpose has been to keep Americans safe and so, by extension, to guarantee our freedoms. From the 1950s through the 1980s, keeping us safe provided a seemingly adequate justification for maintaining a sprawling military establishment along with a panoply of “intelligence” agencies — the CIA, the DIA, the NRO, the NSA — all engaged in secret activities hidden from public view. From time to time, the scope, prerogatives, and actions of that conglomeration of agencies attracted brief critical attention — the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Iran-Contra affair during the presidency of Ronald Reagan being prime examples. Yet at no time did such failures come anywhere close to jeopardizing its existence.

Indeed, even when the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War removed the original justification for its creation, the entire apparatus persisted. With the Soviet Empire gone, Russia in a state of disarray, and communism having lost its appeal as an alternative to democratic capitalism, the managers of the national security state wasted no time in identifying new threats and new missions.

The new threats included autocrats like Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, once deemed valuable American assets, but now, their usefulness gone, classified as dangers to be eliminated. Prominent among the new missions was a sudden urge to repair broken places like the Balkans, Haiti, and Somalia, with American power deployed under the aegis of “humanitarian intervention” and pursuant to a “responsibility to protect.” In this way, in the first decade of the post-Cold War era, the national security state kept itself busy. While the results achieved, to put it politely, were mixed at best, the costs incurred appeared tolerable. In sum, the entire apparatus remained impervious to serious scrutiny.

During that decade, however, both the organs of national security and the American public began taking increased notice of what was called “anti-American terrorism” — and not without reason. In 1993, Islamic fundamentalists detonated a bomb in a parking garage of New York’s World Trade Center. In 1996, terrorists obliterated an apartment building used to house U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia. Two years later, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up and, in 2000, suicide bombers nearly sank the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer making a port call in Aden at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. To each of these increasingly brazen attacks, all occurring during the administration of President Bill Clinton, the national security state responded ineffectually.

Then, of course, came September 11, 2001. Orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and carried out by 19 suicidal al-Qaeda operatives, this act of mass murder inflicted incalculable harm on the United States. In its wake, it became common to say that “9/11 changed everything.”

In fact, however, remarkably little changed. Despite its 17 intelligence agencies, the national security state failed utterly to anticipate and thwart that devastating attack on the nation’s political and financial capitals. Yet apart from minor adjustments — primarily expanding surveillance efforts at home and abroad — those outfits mostly kept doing what they had been doing, even as their leaders evaded accountability. After Pearl Harbor, at least, one admiral and one general were fired. After 9/11, no one lost his or her job. At the upper echelons of the national security state, the wagons were circled and a consensus quickly formed: no one had screwed up.

Once President George W. Bush identified an “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), three nations that had had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, as the primary target for his administration’s “Global War on Terrorism,” it became clear that no wholesale reevaluation of national security policy was going to occur. The Pentagon and the Intelligence Community, along with their sprawling support network of profit-minded contractors, could breathe easy. All of them would get ever more money. That went without saying. Meanwhile, the underlying premise of U.S. policy since the immediate aftermath of World War II — that projecting hard power globally would keep Americans safe — remained sacrosanct.

Viewed from this perspective, the sequence of events that followed was probably overdetermined. In late 2001, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan, overthrew the Taliban regime, and set out to install a political order more agreeable to Washington. In early 2003, with the mission in Afghanistan still anything but complete, U.S. forces set out to do the same in Iraq. Both of those undertakings have dragged on, in one fashion or another, without coming remotely close to success. Today, the military undertaking launched in 2001 continues, even if it no longer has a name or an agreed-upon purpose.

Nonetheless, at the upper echelons of the national security state, the consensus forged after 9/11 remains firmly in place: no one screws up. In Washington, the conviction that projecting hard power keeps Americans safe likewise remains sacrosanct.

In the nearly two decades since 9/11, willingness to challenge this paradigm has rarely extended beyond non-conforming publications like TomDispatch. Until Donald Trump came along, rare was the ambitious politician of either political party who dared say aloud what Trump himself has repeatedly said — that, as he calls them, the “ridiculous endless wars” launched in response to 9/11 represent the height of folly.

Astonishingly enough, within the political establishment that point has still not sunk in. So, in 2020, as in 2016, the likely Democratic nominee for president will be someone who vigorously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Imagine, if you will, Democrats in 1880 nominating not a former union general (as they did) but a former confederate who, 20 years before, had advocated secession. Back then, some sins were unforgivable. Today, politicians of both parties practice self-absolution and get away with it.

The real threat Note, however, the parallel narrative that has unfolded alongside those post-9/11 wars. Taken seriously, that narrative exposes the utter irrelevance of the national security state as currently constituted. The coronavirus pandemic will doubtless prove to be a significant learning experience. Here is one lesson that Americans cannot afford to overlook.

Presidents now routinely request and Congress routinely appropriates more than a trillion dollars annually to satisfy the national security state’s supposed needs. Even so, Americans today do not feel safe and, to a degree without precedent, they are being denied the exercise of basic everyday freedoms. Judged by this standard, the apparatus created to keep them safe and free has failed. In the face of a pandemic, nature’s version of an act of true terror, that failure, the consequences of which Americans will suffer through for months to come, should be seen as definitive.

But wait, some will object: Don’t we find ourselves in uncharted waters? Is this really the moment to rush to judgment? In fact, judgment is long overdue.

While the menace posed by the coronavirus may differ in scope, it does not differ substantively from the myriad other perils that Americans have endured since the national security state wandered off on its quixotic quest to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq and purge the planet of terrorists. Since 9/11, a partial roster of those perils would include: Hurricane Katrina (2005), Hurricane Sandy (2012), Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria (2017), and massive wildfires that have devastated vast stretches of the West Coast on virtually an annual basis. The cumulative cost of such events exceeds a half-trillion dollars. Together, they have taken the lives of several thousand more people than were lost in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Earlier generations might have written all of these off as acts of God. Today, we know better.  As with blaming Trump, blaming God won’t do. Human activities, ranging from the hubristic reengineering of rivers like the Mississippi to the effects of climate change stemming from the use of fossil fuels, have substantially exacerbated such “natural” catastrophes.

And unlike faraway autocrats or terrorist organizations, such phenomena, from extreme-weather events to pandemics, directly and immediately threaten the safety and wellbeing of the American people. Don’t tell the Central Intelligence Agency or the Joint Chiefs of Staff but the principal threats to our collective wellbeing are right here where we live.

Apart from modest belated efforts at mitigation, the existing national security state is about as pertinent to addressing such threats as President Trump’s cheery expectations that the coronavirus will simply evaporate once warmer weather appears. Terror has indeed arrived on our shores and it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or ISIS or Iranian-backed militias. Americans are terrorized because it has now become apparent that our government, whether out of negligence or stupidity, has left them exposed to dangers that truly put life and liberty at risk. As it happens, all these years in which the national security state has been preoccupied with projecting hard power abroad have left us naked and vulnerable right here at home.

Protecting Americans where they live ought to be the national security priority of our time. The existing national security state is incapable of fulfilling that imperative, while its leaders, fixated on waging distant wars, have yet to even accept that they have a responsibility to do so.

Worst of all, even in this election year, no one on the national political scene appears to recognize the danger now fully at hand.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 March 2020

Word Count: 1,811

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The other morning, walking at the edge of a local park, I caught sight of a beautiful red cardinal, the first bird I ever saw some 63 years ago.

Actually, to make that sentence accurate, I should probably have put either “first” or “ever saw” in quotation marks. After all, I was already 12 years old and, even as a city boy, I had seen plenty of birds. If nothing else, New York, where I grew up, is a city of pigeons (birds which, by the way, know nothing about “social distancing”).

Nonetheless, in a different sense, at age 12 I saw (was struck by, stunned by, awed by) that bright red bird. I was visiting a friend in Connecticut and, miraculously enough, though it was 1956, his parents had a bird identification book of some kind in their house. When I leafed through it, I came across the very bird I had seen, read about it, and on going home wrote a tiny essay about the experience for my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Casey (one of those inspirational figures you never forget, just as I’ll never forget that bird). I still have what I wrote stuffed away amid ancient papers somewhere in the top of my bedroom closet.

Six decades later, in this grim coronavirus March of 2020, with my city essentially in lockdown and myself in something like self-isolation, I have to admit that I feel a little embarrassed writing about that bird. In fact, I feel as if I should apologize for doing so. After all, who can doubt that we’re now in a Covid-19 world from hell, in a country being run (into the ground) by the president from hell, on the planet that he and his cronies are remarkably intent on burning to hell.

It was no mistake, for instance, that, when Donald Trump finally turned his mind to the coming pandemic (rather than denying it) as the economy he had been bragging about for the previous three years began to crash, one of the first groups he genuinely worried about didn’t include you or me or even his base. It was America’s fossil-fuel industry. As global transportation ground down amid coronavirus panic and a wild oil price war between the Saudis and the Russians, those companies were being clobbered. And so he quickly reached out to them with both empathy and money — promising to buy tons of extra crude oil for the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve (“We’re going to fill it right to the top”) — unavailable to so many other endangered Americans. At that moment he made it perfectly clear that, in an unfolding crisis of the first order, all of us remain in a world run by arsonists led by the president of the United States.

So, a cardinal? Really? That’s what I want to focus on in a world which, as it grows hotter by the year, will only be ever more susceptible to pandemics, not to speak of staggering fires, flooding, extreme storms, and god knows what else. Honestly, given a country of closed schools, self-isolating adults, and the sick and the dying, on a planet that seems to be cracking open, in a country which, until recently, couldn’t test as many people for Covid-19 in a couple of months as South Korea could in — yes, this is not a misprint — a day, where’s my sense of proportion?

A secret life Still, if you can, bear with me for a moment, I think there’s a connection, even if anything but obvious, between our troubled world and that flaming bird I first saw so long ago. Let me start this way: believe it or not, birds were undoubtedly the greatest secret of my teenage years.

On spring weekends, my best friend and I would regularly head for Central Park, that magnificent patch of green at the center of Manhattan Island. That was the moment when the spectacular annual bird migration would be at its height and the park one of the few obvious places in a vast urban landscape for birds to alight. Sharing his uncle’s clunky old binoculars, my friend and I would wander alone there (having told no one, including our families, what we were doing).

We were on the lookout for exotic birds of every sort on their journeys north. Of course, for us then they were almost all exotic. There were brilliant scarlet tanagers with glossy black wings, chestnut-and-black orchard orioles (birds I wouldn’t see again for decades), as well as the more common, even more vivid Baltimore orioles. And of course there were all the warblers, those tiny, flitting, singing creatures of just about every color and design: American redstarts, blackburnians, black-and-whites, black-throated blues, blue-wingeds, chestnut-sideds, common yellowthroats, magnolias, prairies, palms, yellows.

And here was the secret key to our secret pastime: the old birders. Mind you, when I say “old,” I mean perhaps my age now or even significantly younger. They would, for instance, be sitting on benches by Belvedere Castle overlooking Belvedere Lake (in reality, a pond), watching those very birds. They were remarkably patient, not to say amused (or perhaps amazed) by the two teenaged boys so eager to watch with them and learn from them. They were generous with their binoculars, quick to identify birds we otherwise would never have known or perhaps even noticed, and happy to offer lessons from their bird books (and their own years of experience).

And, for me at least, those birds were indeed a wonder. They were genuine beauties of this planet and in some odd way my friend and I grasped that deeply. In fact, ever since we’ve grown up — though this year may prove to be the self-isolating exception — we’ve always tried to meet again in that park as May began for one more look at, one more moment immersed in, the deep and moving winged beauty of this planet of ours.

Of course, in the 1950s, all of this was our deepest secret for the most obvious of reasons (at least then). If you were a boy and admitted that you actually wanted to look at birds — I’m not sure the phrase “bird watch” was even in use at the time — god knows what your peers would have said about you. They would — we had no doubt of this — have simply drummed us out of the corps of boys. (That any of them might then have had their own set of secret fascinations would never, of course, have crossed our minds.) All you have to do to conjure up the mood of that moment is to imagine our president back then and the kind of mockery to which he would certainly have subjected boys who looked at birds!

Now, so many decades later, in another America in which the coronavirus has already reached pandemic proportions (potentially threatening staggering losses, especially among old folks like me), in which the stock market is already tanking, in which a great recession-cum-depression could be on the horizon, and our future FDR — that is, the president who helped us out of the last Great Depression in the 1930s — could an over-the-hill 77-year-old former vice president, it seems odd indeed to write about beautiful birds from another earthly moment. But maybe that’s the point.

Fini? Think about it this way: as last year ended, Science magazine reported that, in North America, there were three billion fewer birds than in 1970; in other words, almost one out of every three birds on this continent is now gone. As Carl Zimmer of the New York Times put it, “The skies are emptying out.” Among them, warblers have taken one of the heaviest hits — there are an estimated 617 million fewer of them — as well as birds more generally that migrate up the East Coast (and so have a shot at landing in Central Park). Many are the causes, including habitat loss, pesticides, and even feral cats, but climate change is undoubtedly a factor as well. The authors of the Audubon Society’s most recent national report, for instance, suggest that, “if Earth continues to warm according to current trends — rising 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 — more than two-thirds of North America’s bird species will be vulnerable to extinction due to range loss.”

Extinction. Take that word in. They’ll be gone. No more. Fini.

That, by the way, is a global, not just a North American, reality, and such apocalyptic possibilities are hardly restricted to birds. Insects, for instance, are experiencing their own Armageddon and while — monarch butterflies (down 90% in the U.S. in the last 20 years) aside — we humans don’t tend to think of them as beauties, they are, among other things, key pollinators and crucial to food chains everywhere.

Or think about it this way: on Monday, March 8th, in my hometown, New York City, it was 68 degrees and that was nothing. After all, on February 19th, in Central Park, the temperature had hit a record-breaking 78 degrees in the heart of winter, not just the highest for that day on record but for the month of February, historically speaking. At the time, we were passing through a “winter” in which essentially no snow had fallen. And that should have surprised no one. After all, January had started the year with a bang globally as the hottest January on record, which again should have surprised no one, since the last five years have been the warmest ever recorded on this planet (ditto the last 10 years and 19 of the last 20 years). Oh, and 2020 already has a 50% chance of being the warmest year yet.

And by the way, soon after that 68-degree day, in our parks I began to notice the first crocuses and daffodils pushing through the soil and blooming. It was little short of remarkable and, in truth, would all have been beautiful, not to say glorious — the weather, the flowers, the sense of ease and comfort, the springiness of everything — if you didn’t know just what such “beauty” actually meant on a planet potentially heating to pandemic proportions.

How sad when even what’s still truly beautiful on this globe of ours increasingly tells a story that couldn’t be grimmer. So, think of this as my in-memoriam essay about the planet I thought I grew up on and the birds I thought I knew. Consider it a kind of epitaph-in-advance for a world that, if the rest of us can’t get ourselves together, if we can’t rid ourselves of arsonists like Donald Trump and his crew or those fossil-fueled CEOs that he loves so much, may all-too-soon seem unrecognizable.

In the meantime, consider me — semi-locked in my apartment — to be, in my own fashion, in mourning. Not for myself, mind you, though I’m almost 76 and my years on this planet are bound to be limited, but for those I’ll be leaving behind, my children and grandchildren in particular. This just wasn’t the world I ever wanted them to inherit.

In truth, in this coronaviral moment of ours, our world is being transformed before our eyes into one of missing beauties. Given my teenage years, I want to leave my grandchildren the pleasure of entering Central Park in some distant May, long after I’m gone, and still seeing the brilliant colors of a scarlet tanager. That’s my hope, despite everything.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 March 2020

Word Count: 1,898

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