• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Trump VS COVID-19 Threat

Obama Says U.S. Lacks Leadership on Virus in Commencement Speech - The New York Times
“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Mr. Obama said in an address streamed online. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”

It was one of his few public addresses to a national audience during the outbreak, and he said a leadership void had created a clear mandate for the graduates: “If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you,” he said.

...
Mr. Obama called the current administration’s response to the pandemic “anemic and spotty” in a private call last week with thousands of supporters who had worked for him.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments,” Mr. Obama said on the call. “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mind-set — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mind-set is operationalized in our government.”
Click to expand...

There's a picture that I saw in a Twitter post that I now forget, a picture with a reopening schedule.
  • Phase 1
    • Construction
    • Manufacturing
    • Wholesale Trade
    • Select Retail for Curbside Pickup Only
    • Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing
  • Phase 2
    • Professional Services
    • Finance and Insurance
    • Retail
    • Administrative Support
    • Real Estate, Rental, and Leasing
  • Phase 3
    • Restaurants and Food Services
  • Phase 4
    • Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
    • Education
 
maxwell on Twitter: "for decades, republicans and democrats prioritized rooting out “fraud” over getting benefits quickly to the people who need them—and now, it’s placed the entire country in a terrible position. https://t.co/Pq0l3LPt8i" / Twitter

Our Broken Unemployment System Is a National Scandal - VICE
Months into economic shutdown, millions of Americans still haven't received unemployment checks—a travesty that is the direct result of anti-welfare decisions that make the process as difficult as possible.

...
With over 30 million people filing unemployment claims since the pandemic began, politicians of all stripes are sounding the alarm about what appears to be a historic economic collapse. But if unprecedented unemployment is a five-alarm national emergency, then our backlogged unemployment insurance system should be treated as a true national scandal—an unnecessary and wholly avoidable extra crisis at the worst possible time.

...
But if unprecedented unemployment is a five-alarm national emergency, then our backlogged unemployment insurance system should be treated as a true national scandal—an unnecessary and wholly avoidable extra crisis at the worst possible time.
Click to expand...
Florida's system is very bad, but it may not be unusual.
 
Secretive Right-Wing Nonprofit Plays Role in COVID-19 Organizing | Common Dreams Views
A shadowy right-wing nonprofit is helping coordinate coronavirus response strategy and promoting the lockdown protests.

Working alongside close allies that have helped coordinate the protests, including Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation and FreedomWorks, Council for National Policy Action (CNP Action) has been hosting conference calls and publishing action memos around reopening states' economies.

...
The email announcing the second call, which featured ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson and State Policy Network CEO Tracie Sharp, links to information about an April 21 car protest at the Alabama Capitol Building in Montgomery, organized by the anti-LGBTQ group Eagle Forum. The forum's founder, the late Phyllis Schlafly, was a CNP member, and several current staffers are part of the CNP-connected "Save Our Country Task Force."

...
CNP's founders include multiple members of the conspiracist John Birch Society and Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and ALEC.
Click to expand...

Ro Khanna on Twitter: "Instead of using the Defense Production Act for:
❌ Meatpackers
Trump should be using it for:
✅ Approved treatments
✅ Hospital gowns
✅ Testing kits
✅ Ventilators
✅ Gloves
✅ Masks
That's why @BernieSanders & I introduced the Emergency Medical Supplies Procurement Act." / Twitter
 
We Can and Must Do Better: Why I Will Vote No on the HEROES Act | Common Dreams Views by Pramila Jayapal
Our response here in Congress must match the true scale of this devastating crisis. The Heroes Act—while it contains many important provisions—simply fails to do that.

...
This legislation does not keep workers in their jobs and guarantee the certainty of paychecks. ...

This legislation does not guarantee affordable and accessible health care for everyone. ...

This legislation does not provide enough relief to businesses—including small, medium and minority-owned businesses—which are the backbone of our economy. ...

I am also disappointed that, in a last minute change, this legislation includes language that threatens the pensions of regular working people and harms collective bargaining, undermining existing pension plans and exposing retirees to greater risks. At a time when we should be strengthening collective bargaining and worker power, this legislation does the opposite.

I believe we can and must choose differently. That is why I will vote against this legislation.

...
I believe we can and must put forward a legislative package that meets the real needs of my constituents and people across the country who are desperate for Congress to have their backs, to help them get money back in their pockets and give them some certainty about being able to pay their bills and put food on the table. A package that ensures everyone has health care, that helps businesses to survive this crisis and that protects the rights of workers to get the pensions they already earned and were counting on.
Click to expand...
AOC: no to #4
PJ: no to #5
 
The Race to Replace a Dying Neoliberalism | Common Dreams Views
One is that the emergency necessitates extraordinary measures, but the basic structure of production and consumption is sound, and the problem lies only in determining the moment when things can return to "normal."

...
A second line of thinking is that we are now in the "new normal," and while the global economic system is not significantly out of kilter, important changes must be made to some of its elements, such as redesigning the workplace to accommodate the need for social distancing, strengthening public health systems (something even Boris Johnson now advocates after Britain's National Health System saved his life), and even moving towards a "universal basic income."

A third response is that the pandemic provides an opportunity for transforming a system that is ridden with deep economic and political inequalities and is profoundly destabilizing ecologically. One must not simply talk about accommodating a "new normal" or expanding social safety nets, but of decisively moving toward a qualitatively new economic system.
Click to expand...
A lot of the elite seems to think that it can return to the first one or maybe do the second one, but it may be too difficult now. More and more people are becoming dissatisfied with an economic order that promises a chicken in every pot yet fails to deliver for many people.
 
Author Walden Bello then claimed that only the Left and the Right are proposing alternatives.

The center-left parties are tainted with association with neoliberal compromising. Parties like the US Democratic Party and a lot of social-democratic parties elsewhere.
Progressives have come up with a number of exciting ideas and paradigms developed over the last few decades for how to move towards a truly systemic transformation, and these go beyond the left-wing technocratic Keynesianism identified with Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Among these truly radical alternatives are the already mentioned Green New Deal, democratic socialism, degrowth, deglobalization, ecofeminism, food sovereignty, and "Buen Vivir" on "Living Well."
Click to expand...

WB: "Advantage: Far Right"

Unfortunately, it is the extreme right that is currently best positioned to take advantage of the global discontent, because even before the pandemic, extreme right parties were already opportunistically cherry-picking elements of the anti-neoliberal stands and programs of the independent left—for instance, the critique of globalization, the expansion of the "welfare state," and greater state intervention in the economy—but putting them within a right-wing gestalt.
Click to expand...
Social democracy for Real Citizens only. "National Socialism", it might be called. Donald Trump has been good at that sort of rhetoric.
 
Alec MacGillis on Twitter: "Quite a graph here. In neighborhoods of the top 1 percent in income in NY, more than a third of residents left town. In the neighborhoods of the bottom 80 percent, only 7 percent left. (NYT) https://t.co/kkJ5cYDmwA" / Twitter

From the graph:
  • Top 1%: 35%
  • Top 5%: 30%
  • Top 10%: 14%
  • Top 20%, Bottom 80%: 7%
bruce macfarlane on Twitter: "@MrsAitchBee The first to run away are the rich.. Daniel Defoe..The Plague Journal 1665 (picture)" / Twitter
... the city, our neighbourhood continued very easy. But at the other end of the town their consternation was very great: and the richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry from the west part of the city, thronged out of town with their families and servants in an unusual manner; and this was more particularly seen in Whitechappel; that is to say, the Broad Street where I lived, indeed, nothing was to be seen but waggons and carts, with goods, women, servants, children, &c.; coaches filled with people of the better sort and horsemen attending them, and all hurrying away; then empty waggons and carts ap- peared, and spare horses with servants, ...
Click to expand...
 
lpetrich said:
Obama Says U.S. Lacks Leadership on Virus in Commencement Speech - The New York Times
“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Mr. Obama said in an address streamed online. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”

It was one of his few public addresses to a national audience during the outbreak, and he said a leadership void had created a clear mandate for the graduates: “If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you,” he said.

...
Mr. Obama called the current administration’s response to the pandemic “anemic and spotty” in a private call last week with thousands of supporters who had worked for him.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments,” Mr. Obama said on the call. “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mind-set — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mind-set is operationalized in our government.”
Click to expand...

There's a picture that I saw in a Twitter post that I now forget, a picture with a reopening schedule.
  • Phase 1
    • Construction
    • Manufacturing
    • Wholesale Trade
    • Select Retail for Curbside Pickup Only
    • Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing
  • Phase 2
    • Professional Services
    • Finance and Insurance
    • Retail
    • Administrative Support
    • Real Estate, Rental, and Leasing
  • Phase 3
    • Restaurants and Food Services
  • Phase 4
    • Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
    • Education
Click to expand...

Mentioning Obuma and the NYT in the same sentence is like Red Riding Hood telling the wolf directions to grandma's house!
 
angelo said:
Mentioning Obuma and the NYT in the same sentence is like Red Riding Hood telling the wolf directions to grandma's house!
Click to expand...
angelo, I thought that you believed in capitalism.

The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City - The New York Times
Hundreds of thousands of New York City residents, in particular those from the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, left as the coronavirus pandemic hit, an analysis of multiple sources of aggregated smartphone location data has found.

Roughly 5 percent of residents — or about 420,000 people — left the city between March 1 and May 1. In the city’s very wealthiest blocks, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, residential population decreased by 40 percent or more, while the rest of the city saw comparably modest changes.

...
There is already evidence that many New Yorkers have left town. There are reported accounts of New Yorkers fleeing to second homes and vacation towns. The weight of household trash is down in affluent neighborhoods. But to find more precise estimates, location data may be the best choice.

...
The phone data shows New Yorkers primarily went to surrounding counties — east into Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties, west to Monroe County in Pennsylvania, south to Monmouth County in New Jersey, north to Westchester County, northeast to Fairfield County in Connecticut and farther afield in all directions. Palm Beach County, in South Florida, was among the top locations for displaced New Yorkers.
Click to expand...

Where New Yorkers Moved to Escape Coronavirus - The New York Times
Mainly S Florida, DC, and Boston, then LA, then Atlanta, Chicago, and SF Bay.
 
Opinion | Obama Lives in Trump’s Head - The New York Times
Trump’s run for president was in part triggered by his enmity for Obama, his desire to one-up him, and he has performed his presidency as a singularly focused attempt at Obama erasure, dismantling what he can of what Obama built and undoing policies Obama instituted.

Obama is everything that Trump is not: intellectual, articulate, adroit, contemplative and cool. He also happens to be a black man. The fact that he could not only ascend to the height of power but also the heights of celebrity and adoration vexed Trump.
Click to expand...
But Trump considers Obama to be a recipient of affirmative action.
In 1989, Trump said in an NBC News interview, “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white, in terms of the job market.” Trump went so far as to say that “I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I was starting off today I would love to be a well-educated black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.”
Click to expand...
Then on Trump's response to the pandemic.
... Where we are with this virus was not inevitable. It is the direct result of Trump’s failed policies.

Trump has tried for months to do what he has always done: invent an alternate reality, lie, blame and brag, deny responsibility and claim victory. But that simply doesn’t work as well when the coronavirus has claimed more American lives in a few months than the Vietnam War claimed in a decade. It doesn’t work when tens of millions of Americans are out of work and the economy is teetering on a depression.
Click to expand...
Also disappointing is how the Republican Congressional leadership has been willing to enable him. Mitch McConnell reportedly looks down on him as "nuts" and not very smart, yet MMC continues to enable him.
 
Economists Want to Put Stimulus on Autopilot. Congress Has Other Ideas. - The New York Times
When there is an economic crisis, you want a government response that is scaled accordingly. But you don’t know in advance just how long a crisis will last or how severe it will be.

Economists have a crisp-sounding solution: Calibrate government help, such as unemployment insurance and aid to state governments, so that it rises automatically when the economy is weak and falls as the economy returns to health. The unemployment rate or other economic indicators can serve as triggers. The concept of automatic stabilizers is embraced by many centrist and left-of-center technocrats, including the last two leaders of the Federal Reserve.

Congress has had little interest in this over the years — instead choosing to pass ad hoc packages that may or may not have been aligned with the magnitude of trouble the economy was facing at that moment.
Click to expand...
Thus wasting a lot of time and effort that are better spent on oversight of continuing efforts.

So far, it has not gotten into any of the aid bills, not even the most recent one, the fifth so far.
But the fact that the automated approach didn’t get over even that first hump raises the possibility that Democrats are leaving themselves open to the same political-economic dynamic that haunted President Obama’s first term.

The lesson from the Great Recession is that when crisis strikes, even the quickest legislative response tends to be too slow and that needs tend to linger, while the environment for putting together policy solutions gets more challenging,” said Jacob J. Lew, who was a Treasury secretary in the Obama administration. Putting those programs on autopilot would have helped, he said.
Click to expand...
 
angelo said:
lpetrich said:
Obama Says U.S. Lacks Leadership on Virus in Commencement Speech - The New York Times
“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Mr. Obama said in an address streamed online. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”

It was one of his few public addresses to a national audience during the outbreak, and he said a leadership void had created a clear mandate for the graduates: “If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you,” he said.

...
Mr. Obama called the current administration’s response to the pandemic “anemic and spotty” in a private call last week with thousands of supporters who had worked for him.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments,” Mr. Obama said on the call. “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mind-set — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mind-set is operationalized in our government.”
Click to expand...

There's a picture that I saw in a Twitter post that I now forget, a picture with a reopening schedule.
  • Phase 1
    • Construction
    • Manufacturing
    • Wholesale Trade
    • Select Retail for Curbside Pickup Only
    • Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing
  • Phase 2
    • Professional Services
    • Finance and Insurance
    • Retail
    • Administrative Support
    • Real Estate, Rental, and Leasing
  • Phase 3
    • Restaurants and Food Services
  • Phase 4
    • Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
    • Education
Click to expand...

Mentioning Obuma and the NYT in the same sentence is like Red Riding Hood telling the wolf directions to grandma's house!
Click to expand...
What does that even mean?!
 
I sent masks to health workers but the Trump administration seized them instead of helping
A small group of volunteers came together to found Masks for America and teamed up with leading health care activist Ady Barkan's Be A Hero Fund, Social Security Works and National Nurses United to get our front-line heroes the equipment they needed to stay safe as they saved lives.

As the federal government failed to provide essential equipment, our small group of volunteers has successfully delivered nearly 200,000 FDA-certified, CDC-approved KN95 masks to front-line workers in hard hit areas — New York City, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico — in just a matter of weeks. But it wasn’t easy, because when the federal government finally decided to act, it wasn’t the way we had expected. Instead of helping us, they seized some of our PPE shipments without telling us where they were taking them.

On April 11, during the peak of COVID-19 cases and deaths in New York City, the Federal Emergency Management Agency intervened and demanded orders of medical equipment allocated to our relief efforts be redirected to the federal government. FEMA then seized 50,000 N95 respirators we had ordered without giving us an explanation or telling us where those respirators were going.

It wasn’t long before I realized it wasn’t only happening in New York and New Jersey. FEMA confiscated San Francisco’s PPE order as it went through customs, even as the Trump administration told states and cities to procure their own equipment rather than rely on the federal government. Since those reports of FEMA quietly seizing materials, at least six states have lodged similar complaints against the federal government interfering with their supply chains.
Click to expand...
Coronavirus: Feds accused of taking PPE, ventilator orders from states - Business Insider
  • States have been making their own orders for ventilators, masks, and other personal protective equipment since President Donald Trump told them in March not to rely on the national stockpile for medical supplies.
  • Trump has also instructed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to lead efforts to distribute equipment according to priority, the Los Angeles Times reported.
  • But state and health leaders in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Kentucky, Texas, and Florida are now accusing the federal government of of intercepting and diverting their equipment orders without explaining why.
  • "Either you're buying them and you're providing them to the states and letting us know what we're going to get and when we're going to get them. Or stay out and let us buy them," Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in comments addressed to FEMA on CNN.
  • A FEMA spokeswoman denied seizing any states' shipments, but told The Times that "prioritizing PPE deliveries to COVID hot spots can have the unintended consequence of disrupting the regular supply chain deliveries to other areas of the country."
Click to expand...
 
Can you imagine Angelo's and other right-winger's reactions if "Obuma" had done that?
 
ZiprHead said:
Can you imagine Angelo's and other right-winger's reactions if "Obuma" had done that?
Click to expand...
Trump supporters are disease. They are incapable of seeing him doing any wrong. Dictators stay in power because of people like this.
 
lpetrich said:
I came across this bizarre tweet:

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle!" / Twitter

This is a self-described "stable genius".
Click to expand...
Send names and events? Can we just send liberals to the secret FEMA camps?
ZiprHead said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
ZiprHead said:
Can you imagine Angelo's and other right-winger's reactions if "Obuma" had done that?
Click to expand...
Trump supporters are disease. They are incapable of seeing him doing any wrong. Dictators stay in power because of people like this.
Click to expand...

Hypocrisy at its finest.
Click to expand...
It isn't hypocrisy, it is cult of personality worship. It is dangerous, there is no cure, and we have to hope that a small group of Americans wake the fuck up and vote so we can at least cauterize the wound.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom