You may have noticed a contradiction among members of the president’s most loyal voting bloc, white evangelical Christians. On the one hand, their leaders are not taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously. Pastors continue to hold Sunday services, many in the thousands, thus exposing their congregations, which include the sick and elderly, to a contagion that has killed 13,000 people in this country, 2,000 yesterday alone.

On the other hand, their leaders are taking the disease outbreak very seriously, seeing it as an outcome of mankind’s sinful ways, and thus encouragement to seek salvation through Jesus Christ. Rev. Franklin Graham spelled this out Saturday on Fox News:

This is a result of a fallen world, a world that has turned its back on God. So I would encourage people to pray and let’s ask God for help. I don’t think that God planned for this … It’s because of the sin that’s in the world. Man has turned his back against God. We have sinned against Him. We need to ask for God’s forgiveness.

In plain English, here’s the contradiction: the viral rampage is serious enough to fall to your knees in penitence, but not serious enough to cease attending church, where you are most likely to contract it among throngs of worshipers. If you don’t go to church Sunday, does that mean you’ve sinned against God? If you get sick, does that mean you’ve sinned against God? Are you damned if you do and damned if you don’t?

The answer is yes.

Now the popular thing for me to do at this point in the argument is to say damn the religion. Being put between a rock and hard place is why all religions, and all genuine commitments to God, are the world’s bane. This is not only popular in certain liberal-progressive-leftist quarters; it’s expected. A person of faith can’t be totally with it.

There are counterarguments aplenty, but here’s mine. Being put between a rock and a hard place is not what an all-knowing and all-loving God would ever do. No God I am bound to respect using the gifts of reason and empathy endowed to me would force my fellow human beings to choose between offending God and death by disease. By extension, no God I am bound to respect would ever threaten people with an eternity of pain and suffering for one brief lifetime, however “sinful” it was. Rev. Graham says humanity turned against God. More likely, his spiteful God turned against humanity.

This counterargument is doubly moral. I am making not only a claim on a situation Graham’s vindictive God put me in (a low-stakes version of Sophie’s choice); I am making a claim on the nature of God itself. I am making a claim on a God I believe should exist given the powers of consciousness and compassion I was born with as a human being. (I’m not really sure if I’m a theist or not; just roll with it, please.)

My counterargument is therefore better than the kind popularized by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Sam Harris. They say they are making anti-religious arguments, but in choosing to dismiss believers rather than holding them to their respective standards of morality, their arguments are in fact deeply anti-moral.

This is important to note for reasons that might not be obvious. By making anti-moral arguments against believers, militant atheists — and the liberal-progressive-leftist quarters that can’t quite take people of faith seriously — make room for Graham and other white evangelical leaders to appear deeply moral when they are in fact not.

You can’t be moral when you refuse to think through the ramifications of holding Sunday services in the middle of a global pandemic, thus endangering the sick and elderly as well as the young and healthy. You can’t be moral when you rationalize bad decisions using your earned, or unearned, reputation among religious Americans.

More importantly, and this is my big point, you can’t claim to be a follower of Jesus. Despite everything you think you know about him, Jesus was first of all an empiricist. He could not have been anything less, because empiricism lies at the heart of the Golden Rule. To do unto others what I would have done unto me, which is the center of Christ’s teachings, I must work toward an honest grasp of reality, a fact-based sense of truth and falsehood, an acceptance of human limits without despair, and a trust in the shared state of our fleeting existence. We, all of us, are equal in the eyes of God.

This isn’t new. Indeed, this argument is ancient.

But it’s hard to see through the fog of militant (and fashionable) atheism claiming to know the truth and white evangelical Christians claiming to know the true God.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 April 2020

Word Count: 799

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JB Pritzker appeared on PBS Newshour last night. The Democratic governor of Illinois said the White House had arranged for personal protective equipment (PPE) to be flown in from China to meet shortages in the US. On its arrival, Pritzker said, the PPE will be turned over to private firms. States like his, which are experiencing the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, are expected to bid against each other for access to it.

The US Supreme Court overruled Monday a lower court’s decision to extend the period in Wisconsin to count absentee ballots. State law requires votes tallied by Election Day (today), but the lower court made an exception for the pandemic. The high court said no exceptions. As a consequence, many votes will be invalidated.

How are these two events related? At first, it seems they aren’t. But if you look closely, what they share in a wholesale rejection of the common good, a refusal to recognize the social contractual bonds that hold together a political community — a nation, a union. On the one hand, profit is privileged above human life and liberty. On the other, power is privileged above equality and democratic participation in the American franchise. Both, I think, are expressions of what I’ve come to consider a soft civil war.

I say “soft” because it’s entirely one-sided. (Feel free to pick your own nomenclature.) For all the outrage vented by leftists, liberals and Democrats, there’s still a sense, an unfounded faith, that everything will get better once Donald Trump is gone. But there’s more at work than false hope. There’s a sense — a blind faith — that history is working against the Republican Party, that the invisible hand of “progress” is pushing us steadily toward justice, with or without human agency. For this reason, I think, Democrats can’t quite bring themselves to see what’s happening before their eyes.

Brian Schatz, a liberal senator from Hawaii, was correct in saying, after the US Supreme Court handed down its ruling Monday, that “they are throwing away ballots. They are literally going to not count votes. We Democrats need to understand the magnitude of the Republicans enterprise here.” But he stopped short, and said only that, “They are systematically going to try to make it less easy, and less safe, to vote.”

Well, what does that mean when the highest court in the land makes citizens choose between good health and the right to vote? Let’s take it to its logical conclusion. What does it mean when a party has successfully created legal conditions with which to enforce minority rule in a majoritarian republic? For one thing, it’s sabotage of the common good. For another, it’s a deep betrayal of our national values, myths and interests. For yet another, it signals a civil-war posture. Democracy be damned.

The New York Times published a map last week showing parts of the country in which people are continuing to travel during the epidemic and parts of the country in which people are sheltering at home. The entire map is a variation of yellow and green, indicating state governors understand the importance of the common good in a time of a nationwide crisis. The more people do their part as individuals, the better off everyone will be.

I say the entire map but with a huge exception—the southeast quarter of the US. That’s the section of the country in which state governors have been either slow to react to the pandemic or have been hostile to those calling for greater commitments to public health. And it so happens that’s the part of the country that does not, historically speaking, care about the common good, because the common good is democratic.

Colin Woodard, in his book American Nations, divides that quarter in three. Each part represents the politics of the white Europeans who settled them. In what he calls “Tidewater”: “17th-century gentry recreated semi-feudal manorial society of English countryside. Conservative; respect for authority and tradition, not equality or political participation.” In “Greater Appalachia”: “Settlers from war-ravaged Ulster, northern England, lowland Scotland. Deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty; intense suspicion of external authority. In “Deep South”: “Established by slave lords from English Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society. Modeled on slave states of the ancient world — democracy was the privilege of the few” (stresses mine).

Assuming Woodard’s thesis is correct — that our politics can be explained to a degree by settlement patterns established centuries ago — it’s clear why the southeast isn’t doing its part in a viral pandemic. It won’t, even if that means people die. It won’t, because serving the common good is undermining their respective political orders.

Americans in other parts of the country, especially white liberals in big cities, might not have noticed the soft civil war. White people have more access to better health care. White people are not generally blocked from voting. White people might have continued believing the Republicans when they said states rights means the federal government shouldn’t get involved in local matters. Then the GOP tipped its hand.

In 2017, the Republicans passed a law cutting taxes for the very rich and very large corporations but paid for it by extracting wealth from rich states. Rich states, mostly blue, had already been sending more money to the treasury than poor, mostly red, states. By repealing deductions for state and local taxes, the Republicans in effect said blue states have no sovereignty they are bound to recognize. A federal government under GOP control will take your money as quickly as it throws away your votes.

When does a civil war turn from soft to hard? When the other side sees it.

So far, the national Democrats won’t.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 April 2020

Word Count: 953

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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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”This is a total eclipse of sound reason,” tweeted Emrah Altindis, commenting on the measures taken in Turkey to deal with the coronavirus outbreak. Altindis, a Turkish-American assistant professor of biology at Boston College, has been fiercely warning the Turks about the “viral tsunami” that is fast approaching Turkey.

”With great sadness, I must tell you,” he added, “from next week, the daily loss (in Turkey) will exceed 100 per day. The number of cases, which is [currently] about 18,000, will rise to between 32,000-36,000.”

Altindis points out another interesting phenomenon in Turkey, which is different from some other highly infected countries. According to his findings, the number of deaths in Italy of people under the age of 60 stood at only 1.7% and 4.59% in Spain. However, 20% of those who have been killed by the virus in Turkey were under the age of 60.

In terms of reaching the approaching peak, Dr Alpay Azap, a member of the Health Ministry’s Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board, agrees with Altindis. He expects the epidemic to reach its zenith in 4-6 weeks.

How is the Erdogan government handling the crisis? The steps and decisions taken, so far, have only added to the confusion and mistrust. While in a state of despair it struggles to keep the wheels of the economy turning. The authorities show no sign of allowing any moves for solidarity or public charity nor do they show any sign of reconsidering releasing political prisoners from overloaded prisons.

The patterns of official behaviour expose Turkey’s well-known hard-line reflexes at play. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to the loud protest of opposition parties, recently asked people to send money to an official IBAN account, mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, both representing the opposition bloc, felt encouraged to start fundraising to deal with the catastrophe. But one day later, they were greeted with a stern countermove to block them. “Non-state entities will not be allowed to handle the affairs of the state,” said Erdogan, reminding everyone of the extremely centralised structure he has been busy building over the past six years.

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu is in a desperate situation and he knows it. According to global statistics, coronavirus is spreading in Turkey faster than anywhere else and 60% of cases, according to Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, are in Istanbul, which has a population of around 16 million. The central government’s half-measures are leaving large segments of the population in Turkey to move around freely and defiance of travel restrictions is high. As of March 4, nearly 15% of Istanbulites were out and about.

“This means more than 2 million people (are still going out), and this is very frightening. It’s as much as the population of a prominent city in Europe,” İmamoglu said. Even more worrisome, the under-pressure mayor revealed that he had made several attempts to reach Erdogan but received no response.

Ignoring all the calls from various segments of society to treat the whole nation without discrimination and act in a unifying manner to face the crisis, Erdogan’s mind is, obviously, elsewhere. His statements signal that he is much more concerned about the “second wave,” namely the socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic, at a stage where the Turkish economy is cracking already under the current conjuncture. The Turkish lira is tumbling, small businesses are closed, exports are falling, tourism (about 13% of the economy) seems lost, but Erdogan remains opposed to a lockdown, determined to keep some industrial sectors open.

“Erdogan’s statements give the impression that he sees this pandemic not only as a serious crisis but also as an opportunity for Turkish manufacturers. The hope is that, after the Chinese shutdown, European producers, which depend on Chinese companies for a range of semi-finished products, may consider Turkey as an alternative supplier in the longer term,” commented Bulent Gokay, professor of International Relations at Keele University in the UK, writing for the blog site The Conversation. “That’s why the government is still allowing millions of workers to go to factories, mines and construction sites despite the huge health risk.”

At this stage, it is difficult to predict what the possible social consequences of the pandemic in Turkey will be. Unlike many other governments, it became clear that Erdogan’s government had not much to offer to the unemployed and dismissed the elderly and poor segments of society. The financial resources of the state are utterly strained, limiting Ankara’s room for manoeuvre. Whether or not social unrest is brewing on the horizon is very hard to tell. It depends on the level of mismanagement of, or tardy responses to, the crisis.

Gokay may have a point. “During the next few months, it’s expected that Turkey, alongside South Africa and Argentina, could be sliding towards insolvency and debt default. After that, everything depends on how this crisis progresses and how long it will take to end,” he concluded.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 April 2020

Word Count: 815

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Political and social scientists have an interest in appearing aloof from the subjects of their research. So they, like their journalistic counterparts, created a vocabulary for talking about their work. Three words are now so ubiquitous as to be invisible. The US is “divided” and “polarization” is extreme due the historic forces of “partisanship.”

The problem, of course, is this vocabulary does more to misinform than it does inform. The major parties are in fact unequal in their influence. The Republicans can and will use democratic institutions to sabotage the American republic. The Democrats, meanwhile, mostly try defending these institutions, nurturing them when they can. The public, however, often doesn’t see the difference. As you often hear me say, most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics.

Most of the time. That changes in times of war — and during a global outbreak of the new coronavirus, which can cause a deadly disease called COVID-19. The US is today expected to surpass 10,000 deaths since the pandemic first started. The president, meanwhile, has abdicated his responsibility to defend and protect the public. He’s either left governors to their own devices or he’s undermined their efforts. He holds daily White House briefings giving the illusion of leadership without its substance.

That might be enough for just enough Americans, but Donald Trump’s fortunes tend to suffer when two variables collide in an instant. One, when the public is highly engaged, as it is now. Two, when the topic of discussion is falsifiable — when Trump’s claims can be proven right or proven wrong — as when he says people should try hydroxychloroquine, a drug once used to treat malaria that might treat COVID-19.

Most people most of the time are disengaged. Most of Trump’s statements might be true or might be false. These are normal variables. But when the president of the United States encourages Americans to take a pill to counteract the effects of a lethal virus, that’s singularity. Either he’s right or he’s wrong. We all of us will see clearly which is which. Lots of people will recover and live, or they will suffer and die.

Fact is, hydroxychloroquine (as well as chloroquine) can kill you. Poison Control: “Two old drugs used for malaria, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are being studied for their potential to treat coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19). Side effects from these drugs can be very serious and include irregular heart rhythms that can result in death.”

Don’t believe it? An item from Live Science: “An Arizona man is dead and his wife is hospitalized after both of them self-medicated with chloroquine phosphate, a chemical used to treat fish for parasites, in an effort to ward off the novel coronavirus.”

The couple, both in their 60s, listened to President Donald Trump tout chloroquine, a decades-old antimalarial drug, as a very promising treatment for COVID-19 in a recent press conference. The woman, who asked not to be named, said she was familiar with the chemical because she used it to treat her koi fish (my stresses).

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s pandemic point man, keeps saying that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine might be beneficial but we can’t yet know. The president, meanwhile, keeps ignoring his public health advisor, or kneecapping him. “What do you have to lose?” he asked last week. “Take it. I really think they should take it. But it’s their choice. And it’s their doctor’s choice … Try it, if you’d like.”

What do “divided,” “polarization” and “partisanship” mean when a president suggests taking a experimental drug that might harm or kill you? It could mean that even death itself — the ultimate truth — is subject to Trump’s fatalist demagoguery. Lots of Americans will take chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine believing he really means well. Lots of Americans will find a scapegoat to blame for their dearly departed.

It could mean those words do more to conceal empirical reality than reveal it. Most Americans are now highly engaged. The president is therefore highly exposed. With lives on the line, now’s not the time for a vocabulary of professional disinterestedness. We need more than ever a vocabulary spelling out for all who’s doing what to whom.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 April 2020

Word Count: 702

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News of a US intelligence report alleging Chinese fabrications about the coronavirus outbreak came in, coincidentally, the very week that marked the 17th anniversary of the American seizure of Baghdad International Airport.

The intelligence report on China and the pandemic was handed to the White House at the end of March. It was on April 4, 2003 that the United States took control of Baghdad airport, just a few miles from the centre of the Iraqi capital. The timing of the US report is unfortunate.

The allegation that China intentionally concealed the extent of the domestic outbreak is clearly meant to buttress attempts by American politicians to make a moral case that Beijing pay damages. What it actually does is revive memories of the false prospectus for the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The United States has not been held to account for its false public justification for invading a sovereign nation without provocation. It has not acknowledged moral responsibility for the millions of casualties inflicted by the war, the bloody sectarian civil strife that was subsequently triggered in Iraq and the destruction of basic infrastructure in the country. It has not compensated the Iraqi people, although it’s hard to even begin to tally the cost of decades of bloodshed, chaos and tragedy.

According to a 2019 estimate, the death toll from 16 years of US military intervention in Iraq stands at 2.4 million. How do you put a price on that?

In any case, if China were to be sued over the coronavirus pandemic, then the US should be sued over Iraq — and the case against the United States would be the stronger.

The Chinese government is protected by the doctrine of sovereign immunity and its obfuscations in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak do not constitute sufficient grounds for a waiver. But the legal precedent set by the post-Second World War Nuremberg trials is strong. During the tribunals, prosecutors successfully argued that the Nazi leadership was liable for crimes of aggression and crimes against humanity by invading sovereign nations without provocation.

In 2004, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the Iraq invasion “illegal.” In 2009, Benjamin Ferencz, one of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg, wrote that “a good argument could be made that the US invasion of Iraq was unlawful.” In 2010, the Dutch parliament called it a breach of international law. It was the first independent legal assessment of the decision to invade.

All of the above is worth remembering at this point of time. US President Donald Trump, his administration and members of his Republican Party refer to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.” They have been dropping dark hints about the reparations due from China. A Republican congresswoman and a Republican senator have introduced resolutions in the House and Senate respectively, calling for an international investigation into the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged cover-up of the early spread of the coronavirus and for China to pay back all affected nations.

But as Yale law Professor Stephen Carter recently noted, sovereign immunity is a “broad” doctrine, an act of reciprocity. The US 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) maintains that shared global understanding, with one US federal court saying FSIA is intended “to protect foreign sovereigns from the burdens of litigation, including the cost and aggravation of discovery.” It was only in 2016 that the United States passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which allows US citizens to sue foreign governments for terrorist acts such as 9/11 on American soil. President Barack Obama had vetoed it, warning that JASTA could expose American companies, troops and officials to lawsuits in other countries but Congress overrode him.

Obama’s warning assumes new importance now that the US administration seems keen to blame and shame China for the high costs of its behaviour. It’s entirely likely that this will renew the focus on the illegality of the Iraq invasion and its terrible toll. In December 2016, the US Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals heard the only case ever filed in the United States that questioned the legality of the Iraq war. The court affirmed immunity for the executive branch, no matter the scale of the crime.

But then on October 9, Trump tweeted that the United States “went to war under a false & now disproven premise” and that “millions of people have died on the other side.” Trump’s fulminations were the first such admission by a sitting US president. The tweet could be seen as official acceptance by the US government that the Iraq war was wrong and resulted in mass murder. It may not necessarily result in a viable prosecution of the US government. However, it does highlight a key difference between America’s war in Iraq and China’s actions after the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic is something that is referred to in law as an act of God. War is an act of man.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 April 2020

Word Count: 822

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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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One thousand Americans died yesterday from the coronavirus. One thousand Americans died the day before. One thousand Americans are probably going to die today. This is the reality governors are witnessing in their states. This is a hard fact they know well. In the face of the sheer scale of death, it’s a fact they won’t forget.

Jared Kushner knows better, though. The president’s “senior advisor” doubts whether governors know what they need. He doubts whether they know the inventory of medical supplies they already have. He doubts whether governors understand what he understands well, which, per the New York Times, is “how to make the government effective.”

Young Master Jared doubts their abilities so much he took time out of his busy day to explain how the government is supposed to work. During a White House press briefing Thursday, the multimillionaire real estate magnate, who never worked in a public capacity before his father-in-law won the presidency four years ago, said:

 

The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use. … Some governors you speak to … they don’t know what’s in their state. Don’t ask us for things when you don’t know what you have in your own state. Just because you’re scared, you ask your medical professionals and they don’t know. You have to take inventory of what you have in your own state and then you have to be able to show that there’s a real need (my stress).

Never mind the bodies piling up. Never mind the fear and panic. He knows better. The pandemic, Kushner said, has revealed which leaders are “better managers than others.” Put slightly differently, don’t blame us for all the people dying. First blame yourselves.

I’m not going to talk about the staggering level of arrogance that goes into telling governors facing mass death that they don’t know what they are talking about. Michelle Goldberg has done that heavy lifting. In “Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed,” the Times columnist revealed the 39-year-old’s public health bona fides:

 

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal [in the Middle East] — have been failures.

Which is to say, he has no public health bona fides.

I am, however, going to expand on Goldberg’s foray into political psychology, which I think is the best way of understanding what the hell is going on. To be sure, Kushner’s arrogance is blinding. To be sure, his very presence in the White House offends the American creed of hard work, fair play and merit. But there’s more here, I think, than rank nepotism and hubris. Kushner is a classic example of a political paranoid.

I know what you’re thinking. Kushner might be egotistical and breathtaking in his incompetence, but he’s not crazy. He’s not Joe McCarthy or Robert Welch, men who really believed communists lurked behind every bush and tree. He’s different from state legislators banning Sharia Law without fully understanding what it is. Paranoids feared that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim bent on destroying America. Sure, Kushner and his wife are complicit in the smear, but they didn’t really believe it.

This, however, is a one-dimensional view of political paranoia. Crazies believing crazy stuff is hardly worth bothering with. The problem, as Richard Hofstadter saw it in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in Politics,” is when non-crazies believe crazy stuff. “The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds,” Hofstadter wrote in 1963. “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

Paranoids aren’t irrational. Just the opposite. Paranoids are hyperrational, as Alan Wolfe noted in a 2013 reassessment of Hofstadter’s essay. That’s what makes them so dangerous. Their mode of thinking is clinical — and cold-blooded. It will not take into account non-rational human values, like compassion. It looks at a pandemic, with its attendant body count, and sees not a human tragedy but a management failure.

The reason paranoids refuse to account for non-rational human values is pretty simple, as I see it. It’s fear. They can’t trust. They can’t risk trusting. They can’t risk trusting what might happen after exposing themselves to opposing people and ideas.

They can’t trust themselves to decide what’s right for them or for the greater good. They can’t risk listening to public health officials. Listening might lead to changing their minds, and that’s impossible. To change one’s mind is to betray one’s tribe.

Which is the only thing paranoids trust.

Kushner won’t believe governors know what they are talking about when they say they need more ventilators and other things needed during a disease outbreak because believing they know what they are talking about is a leap of faith he will never take. “You have to be able to show that there’s a real need.” Meanwhile, 1,000 died yesterday. One thousand died the day before. One thousand are probably going to die today.

His incompetence won’t kill us. His paranoid mind will.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 April 2020

Word Count: 906

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I said during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial that the Republicans were acting less like a party and more like a separatist movement. A Republican president who breaks the law, as Trump did when he blocked congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine, is not only above it; he is it. A law-breaking Democratic president, on the other hand, “deserves the full-force of Congressional investigation, prosecution and removal.”

 

The common view is that the Republicans are so partisan they are willing to follow Trump to hell. But that explanation is unsatisfying. Partisanship is one thing. Surrendering to the enemy is another. That, to me, explains why Ted Cruz said, “If we call John Bolton, I promise you, we are calling Hunter Biden.” Cruz isn’t voicing ordinary partisanship so much as the political desperation of a suicide bomber.

I said yesterday the Republican Party is best understood as an insurrection. Perhaps “separatist movement” is a better phrase. That would communicate the binary thinking of the Republican value system. There are two, separate but not equal.

I think that theory holds up now that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Many Republicans still behave as if the virus that has now killed 5,000 Americans is part of a secret conspiracy to bring down Trump. Some GOP governors behave as if doing the right thing (shutting down state economies) is a sign of disloyalty. The president himself still behaves as if now’s a good time to reward friends and punish enemies.

One thousand Americans died Wednesday. One thousand more could die today. Six and a half million filed for unemployment insurance benefits in one week, on top of 3.3 million last week. Yet leading Republicans, like Senator Ron Johnson, are urging people to go back to work. And leading Republicans, like Senator Tom Cotton, are calling for revenge on China. All the while, Trump appears poised to divvy up the spoils of last week’s passage of the $2 trillion economic stimulus so friendly states like Florida get all the help they need while unfriendly states like New York get jack.

The legislation, called the CARES Act, sets aside half a trillion dollars in corporate loans. (That’s on top of $4 trillion in unlimited “quantitative easing” and direct borrowing by and from the Fed.) A provision requires the president to designate an inspector general to oversee accountability of the fund. But in a signing statement, the president said he will do no such thing. After all, acquittal means a president is no longer constitutionally bound to take care that the law is faithfully executed. Well, a GOP president, anyway. Separate but not equal means Democrats go to the wall.

The GOP is acting like a separatist movement.

The rich get richer. The rest get whatever’s coming to them.

Too much? I don’t see why. This state of affairs has been crescendoing for some time. I had occasion recently to reread Sam Tanenhaus’ canonical piece in The New Republic. Published more than a decade ago, parts of “Conservatism Is Dead” read like they were written last month. Here’s how the former New York Times Book Review editor characterized the debate among conservatives in the years after World War II:

 

On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare (my stress).

What has been the target of such a strategy? Well, everything these “revanchist counterrevolutionaries” were against, Tanenhaus said in plain English: “Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy — ‘statist’ social programs; ‘socialized medicine’; ‘big labor’; ‘activist’ Supreme Court justices, the ‘media elite’; ‘tenured radicals’ on university faculties; ‘experts’ in and out of government (again, my stress).

What did they stand for? Tanenhaus said “movement conservatives” always struggled with that question. But if Trump’s election is any indication — if Trump’s acquittal is any indication — conservatives, such as they are, no longer struggle. Why bother? To be against “the enemy” is enough, even if the enemy is American civil society itself.

To be sure, as Michael Harriot reminds us, that enemy has been Americans on the margins of civil society, specifically Americans of color. The margins are growing, though. Unemployment numbers are worse than they were in the Great Depression. Americans might die from the novel coronavirus in greater numbers than all the men who died fighting in World War II. In normal times, white Americans might not have noticed the Republican Party’s separatist movement. Normal times are history now.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 April 2020

Word Count: 814

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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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