Tulsi Gabbard: Say no to getting dragged into Erdogan’s war with Russia
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Simple and direct—the correct statesmanship, instead of the treacherous gyrations of the warmongering duopolists.
Tulsi Gabbard Donald Trump needs to make it clear to NATO and Erdogan that the United States will not be dragged into a war with Russia by the aggressive, Islamist, expansionist dictator of Turkey, a so-called “NATO” ally. #StandWithTulsi
Acclaimed by critics, Ron Ridenour’s incisive history of the struggle between the US and Russia, extending from the Bolshevik revolution to our day, plus a wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis of many cultural America features which continue to bolster the US drive for world domination, is now available in print at a discount price. It’s 564 pages packed with information, many critical but practically unknown facts, and an uncompromising revolutionary perspective on the colossal challenges confronting this generation. (Click here or on the image below to order.)
Interview with Diana Johnstone by the Saker Italia
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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e interviewed Diana Johnstone, journalist and political writer, whose articles on politics and analysis on the contemporary global “hot” issues have already been published on Saker Italia. Thanks to her experience and activism (“the political is personal”), Diana offers an always lucid and uncompromising look at current issues. In fact, you may well remember the controversy and the censorship suffered for her position on Srebrenica (“Well, I am very much a genocide denier, and I’m proud of it and I can say why”), and the support Noam Chomsky also gave her on that. With this interview to Diana, we want to face what we now consider most urgent issues: the gap between the Eastern (Russia, China, Iran) and the Atlantic bloc, USA’s global role and its deep “identity crisis”, and the current social and political movements fleeing the European model. Trying to take a look at our geopolitical future.
S.I. One of the hot and “macro” topics is the so-called “new world order”, in particular the evolution of the model of power balance from bipolar to multipolar. The historic opposition between the USA and Russia has been enriched with new players (China and Iran), and of course the American role is changing, a role that also influences the European balance and dynamics. What is the “picture” you can take of this moment? What evolution? Which new players do you think will appear? What is the Israel’s role and/or the Israeli lobby’s influence in this context?
Is there really “historic opposition” between the USA and Russia? Russia supported the North in the U.S. Civil War while Britain and France were on the side of the South, and Russia and the USA were on the same side in two world wars. The historic opposition to Russia was more British, recalling the “Great Game” of 19th century rivalry in Central Asia.
Russia was seen as a U.S. adversary on grounds of communism. The communist scare emerged as the perfect ideological pretext for the United States to maintain the dominance it gained from World War. Western Europe had to be defended from communism. Third World countries had to be prevented from going communist.
Russians themselves evidently believed that U.S. animosity was purely ideological, based on communism. I think they really believed that the fall of Soviet communism would make the two nations into friendly partners.
All that happened is that the opposition was exposed as purely a matter of power relations. It becomes clearer that this is not an ideological battle between “liberal democracy” and “communist dictatorship” but between the United States and whoever resists U.S. world hegemony.
After two major twentieth century wars that ruined all the major powers, the United States moved in and occupied the power vacuum. Educated to consider America morally superior to the “old world”, U.S. leaders easily considered their new supremacy to be natural, inevitable and eternal. They are psychologically ill-equipped to think in Putin’s terms of “a world of equals”.
This attitude has been very successfully exploited by Israel’s champions, whether the neoconservative policy elite, Hollywood or AIPAC. They have managed to identify Israel as a little America, land of those who escaped wicked European persecution to create a free nation in the wilderness and who must forever fend off the enemies of democracy. The Israeli influence has had a very negative effect on both the American ideology and American methods, from targeted assassinations of political enemies to methods of crowd control.
I would not call Iran a “new player”. The United States holds an old grudge against the Islamic Republic dating back to the 1979 embassy hostage crisis. Saudi Arabia and especially Israel exploit this to portray their own most powerful regional adversary as a threat to the United States, when in reality Iran only seeks peaceful relations with the West.
The “new players” that could make a difference would be Western European countries whose leaders would manage to free themselves from the military and ideological occupation by the United States that has lasted over seventy years. But so far, Europe’s irresponsible obedience provides the decisive support to U.S. worldwide pretensions.
S.I. Focusing on Europe, the EU is increasingly perceived by its citizens as a bureaucratic rather than a political or cultural entity. Also considering the foreign policy of Macron and Merkel, what’s your view on the current EU’s state of health?
The EU is indeed a bureaucratic rather than a political or cultural entity. Still worse, its treaties lock its member States into neoliberal economic policies and bind its defense to NATO. In short, the EU is the most advanced experiment in U.S.-dominated globalization.
In this context, neither the EU itself nor its member states can pursue their own foreign policy. That is why they are flailing about helplessly as they recognize that following the United States is leading them off the cliff.
French President has been widely quoted for remarking that NATO is “brain dead”. I just read an interview with Alain de Benoist who rightly observed that it is the European Union which is brain dead, whereas NATO is flourishing. That is all too true. NATO is actually making Europe’s foreign policy through its military buildup against Russia, and they all go along, although only Poland and the little Baltic States really approve.
The EU’s domestic policies are widely unpopular, and the foreign policy is dictated by NATO. Yet the EU persists because populations have been indoctrinated for generations that only these particular supranational structures preserve Europe from war – even as Europe has been being dragged into wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria… and what comes next?
S.I.The resolution of the European Parliament, which historically equated Nazism with communism, has recently aroused much controversy. Recalling also that the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazism will be celebrated this year in May – a victory obtained mainly thanks to the Soviet government – what is your opinion on this ideological operation, easy to become a decisive political-cultural watershed for the identity of the European Union itself?
The European Parliament has no authority to do much of anything, least of all to define historic truth. This shameful resolution illustrates the intellectual vacuity of the current European political class as a whole.
The equation of Nazism with Soviet communism is based on the propagandistic practice of throwing both of them into a bag labeled “totalitarianism”, a questionable abstract concept which refers to techniques of ideological control, ignoring the sharp differences of intention and practice. The point is to discredit extreme left and extreme right and preserve the “liberal center” as the only innocent place to be. By installing an official version of history and an official liberal ideology, the European Parliament seems to be leaning toward a bit of totalitarianism itself. Since there is no such thing as a common European sensibility, the EU tries to identify itself with abstract ideas and historic myths, much like its sponsor, the United States.
S.I. Still talking about Europe, we see the movement of the yellow vests and the recent victory of Sinn Fein in the Irish elections. We see all these movements and expressions that are strongly in contrast not only with the concept of the EU but are also openly anti-establishment. What kind of future do you see for these movements? Which others are possibly ready to explode?
The European Construction was designed (notably along the lines laid out by Jean Monnet) to put an end to nation states and even to politics, replaced by capitalism and technocratic governance. But politics is reasserting itself in various ways. The lid is shaking and may come off. In France, the problem with the EU is that the neoliberal straitjacket blocks the sort of mixed economy, with a strong State role, an industrial policy, public services and social benefits. For Hungary, EU immigration policy threatens the identity of a small nation with a difficult language. These movements call attention to the growing differences between historic nations that according to the concept of the EU were supposed to grow into one European people. But right in the very center of the EU, Belgium is coming apart because prosperous right-leaning Dutch-speaking Flanders doesn’t want to share social costs with French-speaking, left-leaning Wallonia. This illustrates a North-South split that haunts the EU. If little Belgium can’t hold together after two hundred years, a King and a good soccer team, how will Finland and Portugal, Malta and Denmark, Germany and Greece merge into a nation?
S.I. In what is geographically Europe, we are witnessing the terrible conflict in Ukraine. Can you give us your opinion on the role of Europe? Do you think that the end of the conflict is likely to happen, and if so, how?
The role of Europe is simply deplorable. Seen from Washington, Ukraine is a big wedge to drive into Russia. Using Ukraine against Russia has been U.S. policy since the end of World War II. The usual U.S. tactic is exploitation of minority discontent to promote regime change, and the massive immigration of anti-Soviet, anti-Russian Ukrainians to North America has provided plenty of encouragement.
European policy makers should have had a more profound understanding of how dangerous it would be to exploit internal Ukrainian differences, stemming from a violent and complicated history marked by conflicting interpretations of history.
In the contrary, the whole current mess began with demands that Ukraine make a sharp choice in favor of economic accords with the EU, cutting ties with Russia, its main trading partner with strong historic links. This was bound to revive and exacerbate divisions between the two halves of the country – Western Ukraine which looks West and Eastern Ukraine which looks East. Germany had its own pawns in Ukraine, and was pushing the EU takeover, but lost to the Americans. The United States exploited the uproar to back a coup giving control of the Kiev government to forces favorable to NATO membership. This amounted to a clear threat to bring Russia’s principal naval base in Crimea under US control. Russia was able to fend off this unacceptable threat peacefully, thanks to the well-established fact that most Crimeans wanted their territory to return to Russia. This was overwhelmingly demonstrated by referendum.
Now, any seriously educated person in Europe can understand that this was not a “Russian invasion” of Ukraine but a deft move to head off a potential military confrontation. Contrary to the NATO bombing that detached Kosovo from Serbia, it was both peaceful and democratic.
Meanwhile, the people of the Russian-speaking Donbass region revolted against the coup that overthrew the President they had voted for in favor of a hostile regime including neo-Nazi elements. Russia very easily could have invaded Eastern Ukraine in support of Donbass rebels but did not do so. Yet Atlantic solidarity obliged everyone to proclaim that Russia “invaded Ukraine” and thus “threatens to invade its neighbors”.
So Ukraine is mired in a frozen conflict. Yet the way out was clear enough almost from the beginning, when leaders from France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine met in 2014 during commemorations of the D-Day Normandy landings in an attempt to work towards a solution. The outlines of a solution have been obvious from the beginning: a decentralized Ukraine, perhaps a federation on the German model, which would enable the regions to enjoy self-government. Only the Americans have an interest in the ongoing Ukrainian civil war, as a thorn in the side of Russia. The United States made it clear during the Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s that it could not stand back and allow Europeans to solve their own problems. Ukraine is a critical test of that control.
S.I. Looking at the world map, what are your thoughts and predictions on the near geopolitical future?
Today, Syria is still the central point of confrontation between great powers. I try to understand the past and the present, and never venture to predict the future. But I can worry. I worry about insane NATO military exercises on Russia’s borders. I worry today about the reckless and totally illegal Turkish intervention in Syria, which is bringing a NATO member into direct conflict with Russia. The very existence of NATO is a threat to the world, and if European leaders weren’t “brain dead”, they would demand its dissolution. Meanwhile, I read that there is strong opposition to Erdogan’s adventurism from the Turkish people. Instead of artificial “regime change” engineered by U.S. agencies, we need more genuine critical movements of European peoples demanding that governments meet domestic needs and end military confrontation.
Diana Johnstone is an American political writer, focusing primarily on European politics and Western foreign policy. She received a BA in Russian Area studies and a PhD in French literature at the University of Minnesota. Active in the movement against the Vietnam War, she organized the first international contacts between American citizens and Vietnamese representatives.
Diana worked for Agence France Presse, for In These Times as European Correspondent, and she was press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to 1996. Most of Johnstone’s adult life has been spent in France, Germany, and Italy, and from 1990 she has lived in Paris. Her writings have been published in New Left Review, Counterpunch, and Covert Action Quarterly.
She is author of the books “The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe’s Role in America’s World” (1984), “The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe’s Role in America’s World (1985), Fools’ Crusade , Nato, and Western Delusions” (2003), Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (2015 – Disponibile in italiano col titolo “Hillary Clinton. Regina del caos”). In 2020 she published “Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher”, a book recounting Diana’s lifelong effort to understand what is going on in the world, seeking the truth about our troubled times beyond the veils of government propaganda and media deception.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he red-baiting of Bernie Sanders sank to a new low during the Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week, courtesy of mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg. Responding to the Vermont senator’s charge that Bloomberg’s employees were at least partly responsible for his business success, the former Republican New York City mayor replied: “We’re not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn’t work.”
This wasn’t the first time Sanders has been smeared in this fashion. Indeed, as I noted in a Truthdig column posted in May 2016, pundits and politicians affiliated with both major parties attacked Sanders relentlessly the last time he ran for president.
Among Sanders’ earliest and most vicious antagonists was Claire McCaskill, the former Democratic senator from Missouri, who is now one of MSNBC’s deep stable of neoliberal cheerleaders. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show in June 2015, McCaskill complained, incredulously, that major media outlets were giving Sanders a pass compared to their reporting on Hillary Clinton. “I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie that he’s a socialist,” McCaskill cracked. Declaring that Clinton was destined to become the party’s nominee, she blasted Sanders for being “too liberal” and “too extreme” to be elected.
By early 2016, as Sanders showed no sign of folding, other Clinton supporters and surrogates joined McCaskill in sounding the alarm at the prospect of a real challenge.
In January 2016, political correspondent Jonathan Martin cataloged the anxieties rippling across the Democratic establishment for The New York Times. “Here in the heartland, we like our politicians in the mainstream, and he is not — he’s a socialist,” then-Missouri Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon was quoted as saying. “[A]s far as having him at the top of the ticket, it would be a meltdown all the way down the ballot.”
Martin also included comments from Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., who said that a Sanders candidacy “wouldn’t be helpful outside Vermont, Massachusetts, Berkeley, Palo Alto and Ann Arbor,” and from McCaskill, who insinuated, “The Republicans … can’t wait to run an ad with a hammer and sickle.”
True to McCaskill’s prediction, Republican operatives soon joined the jingoistic chorus. In an interview with — wait for it — Bloomberg News reporter Sahil Kapur in April 2016, GOP strategist Ryan Williams asserted that Sanders would be a weak general election candidate because “Bernie Sanders is literally a card-carrying socialist.”
Over the course of the 2020 campaign, this red-baiting has grown even more desperate and unhinged.
Perhaps the leading fearmonger of this election cycle has been MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, whose talk show, “Hardball,” airs five nights a week. In a special late-night panel discussion broadcast after the New Hampshire Democratic debate earlier this month, Matthews implied that if elected, Sanders would destroy democracy and initiate a dictatorship with deadly consequences. “I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed,” he rambled. “I don’t know who Bernie Sanders supports [sic] over these years. I don’t know what he means by socialism.”
Two days later, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who anchors the network’s Sunday morning and weekday afternoon program “Meet the Press,” upped the ante, approvingly citing an article by right-wing columnist Jonathan Last of The Bulwark that described Sanders’ online supporters — the purportedly menacing “Bernie Bros” — as a “digital brownshirt brigade.”
Not to be outdone by Todd, Matthews exploded on air in an anti-Semitic meltdown following the Nevada caucuses, comparing Sanders’ landslide win to Nazi Germany breaking through the Maginot line — this despite the fact that the Vermont senator’s family was slaughtered in the Holocaust.
Matthews and Todd are by no means alone. In a recent column titled “Bernie’s Angry Bros,” conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens detailed a conversation he had with former California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer about Sanders. “There is so much negative energy; it’s so angry,” said Boxer, a staunch backer of Hillary Clinton in 2016. “You can be angry about the unfairness in the world. But this becomes a personal, deep-seated anger at anyone who doesn’t say exactly what you want to hear.”
Clinton herself could barely contain her disdain for Sanders while promoting a new documentary series on her life set to stream on Hulu in March. “Nobody likes him,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “Nobody wants to work with him.” The implication, once again, was that Sanders is too left-wing to be elected.
Red-baiting did not originate with Sanders, of course. It has a long, inglorious history in the United States that began with the persecution of anarchists in the late 19th century, continued through the Red Scare of the World War I era and came to full flower in the form of McCarthyism during the late 1940s and 1950s.
But while the attacks on Sanders contributed to his defeat in 2016, they proved less effective than the red-baiting of old. In an effort to understand why, I reached out in 2016 to Ellen Schrecker, professor emerita of history at Yeshiva University in New York City. Considered by many the nation’s foremost authority on McCarthyism, Schrecker is the author of numerous essays and books, including her highly praised interpretive monograph, “The Age of McCarthyism” (1994), and more recently, “The Lost Soul of Higher Education” (2010).
Schrecker voted for Sanders in her state’s 2016 primary, and the longstanding socialist is still going strong at age 81, providing expert commentary in the new PBS documentary “McCarthy: Power Feeds on Fear.”
To understand why the attacks on Sanders were less damaging than they might have been, Schrecker said in a phone interview, we must look to Sanders’ base of support: America’s youth. “I think red-baiting is losing its bite, particularly among the young, because they don’t know what communism was, and, as a result, baiting has lost its Cold War sting,” she said.
“The fragmentation of American politics [in the internet era] is also a factor,” she continued. “In the ’50s, we had three TV networks and a few major newspapers. It was easier to marginalize left-wing figures. Now, we have a proliferation of outlets. There are so many other things today people can be made to fear besides being a socialist: terrorism, transgenderism, guns or the lack of them.”
Schrecker added, “Bernie Sanders has made it safe to be a socialist in American politics. That could very well be his most important long-term achievement. He has offered a way of thinking about politics that we haven’t considered in 50 to 60 years. And he’s done so in sync with what people feel at a gut level. The Occupy Movement brought the issue of income inequality to the forefront, and it has stayed there. Sanders has given the issue a public face.”
Public-opinion research appears to bear out her observations. A Pew poll from June 2015 found that 69% of voters under 30 were willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate, while a Gallup poll released in November 2019 revealed that attitudes toward capitalism have declined dramatically among 18-to-39-year-olds. Socialism is now almost as popular as capitalism among that demographic.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Sanders currently enjoys the highest net favorability ratings of all the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, topping the list at 51%. (His next closest rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are at 49% and 47% respectively). Contrary to the Bernie Bro narrative, Sanders is actually more popular among minorities than he is with white people, and just as popular among women as he is with men, per a pair of polls from Harvard-Harris Poll and Morning Consult.
None of this means that the moderate and right wings of the party are politically obligated to abandon their efforts to nominate a candidate more to their liking. If the centrists and business interests want to argue against Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, substantial increases in the minimum wage, bringing an end to big money in elections, imposing significantly higher taxes on the super-rich, forgiving student debt and any number of other uplifting Sanders-backed policies, let them have at it in a fair primary fight.
But if Donald Trump is to be unseated in November, the red-baiting of the Democratic frontrunner and the demonizing of his supporters must end — full stop, once and for all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Blum is a former judge and death penalty defense attorney. He is the author of three legal thrillers published by Penguin/Putnam ("Prejudicial Error," "The Last Appeal" and "The Face of Justice") and is a contributing writer for California Lawyer magazine. His nonfiction work has appeared in such publications as Crawdaddy magazine, In These Times, The Nation, The Progressive, the ABA Journal, the Orange County Register, the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and Los Angeles magazine.
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Syria – A Short Note on Recent Developments
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DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B" This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he current situation in Syria is confusing.
The Russian airforce and air defense went quiet after the bombing of the Turkish infantry battalion. Putin presumably wants a deal over Idleb but neither Damascus nor Ankara are willing to agree to whatever he proposed. Unfortunately there has been no official comment on the situation from Moscow or Damascus. All 'experts' are currently just guessing.
Turkey used the Russian air defense pause to send armed drones behind the Syrian lines. These caused damage though less than Turkey claimed.
Some Hizbullah and Iranian troops were hit and Turkey has received warnings from Iran and Lebanon that this will have consequences for the Turkish soldiers in Idleb.
Today Syria's air defense was again activated and shot down 6 Turkish drones. The Jihadis thought it was a Syrian plane and celebrated.
Turkey responded by shooting down a Syrian jet over Idleb. The missile was fired from Turkey.
Another drone was shot down near the Russian air base in Latakia.
The Syrian army is advancing in Saraqib.
Syria's Foreign Minister met his Libyan colleague from the Libyan National Accord under General Haftar. They criticized the "Turkish aggression" against both countries and signed some agreements.
ISWNews Analysis Group: Iran’s consultative center in Syria said they don’t revenge Turkey for the incidents of Idlib but…
Iran’s consultative center:
– We answered Syria’s army and government request regarding liberation of M5 highway so we participated.
– Forces who liberated M5 were under command of IRGC, Hezbollah and resistance groups.
– Resistance forces did not target Turkish forces due to respect for commander of the operation and we are still following this rule.
– In past four days, groups Tajik, Turkistan party and al Nusrah launched extensive attacks to Syrian army positions and our forces support the army. In despite of our defensive stance, Turkish army targeted us in ground and air.
– We sent messages to Turkish army through intermediary. But they continued bombing and martyred our forces.
– Syrian army answered by artillery and we haven’t responded directly. We told Turkish army that commander of the operation emphasized on political solutions regarding Syria and Turkey issues and we ordered our forces not to target Turkish forces.
– Turkish army continues bombing and we ask them to act wisely.
– We tell Turkish people that their children are within our reach and we can take revenge but withhold under command of the operation leader.
– We ask all sides to be wise and understand the dangers of the war.
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The Chinese government silenced whistle-blowers, withheld information and played down the threat of the new coronavirus. Now the ruling Communist Party is trying to rehabilitate its image by rebranding itself as the leader in the fight against the virus.
When a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown origin appeared in Wuhan the first reaction was of course confusion and not an immediate large scale response. Yes, China could have been a bit faster and some local administrators made mistakes, but who please, if not the Chinese government, has since led the global fight against the novel coronavirus?
The report of the WHO mission to China is lauding it for good reasons:
China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic. A particularly compelling statistic is that on the first day of the advance team’s work there were 2478 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in China. Two weeks later, on the final day of this Mission, China reported 409 newly confirmed cases. This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real.
It is the U.S. which is lagging in the fight as it still can not even test people who need to be tested:
The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.
Some American Cities May Need to Wait Weeks For a Virus ‘Test That Works’
Across the U.S., fewer than 2,000 people had been been checked for the virus by Thursday -- a bare fraction of those in other large countries. City and state officials are frustrated by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s slowness to distribute accurate tests that could identify spreaders of the coronavirus.
That the CDC botched its response is probably not astonishing when its highest boss calls the obvious danger a 'hoax':
President Donald Trump on Friday night tried to cast the global outbreak of the coronavirus as a liberal conspiracy intended to undermine his first term, lumping it alongside impeachment and the Mueller investigation.
He blamed the press for acting hysterically about the virus, which has now spread to China, Japan, South Korea, Iran, Italy and the U.S, and he downplayed its dangers, saying against expert opinion it was on par with the flu.
“The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. They're politicizing it,” he said. “They don't have any clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa. No, they can't. They can't count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax.”
Then Trump called the coronavirus “their new hoax.”
It is not a hoax for the government workers who cared for the COVID-19 cases the U.S. evacuated from Japan but were left unprotected and had received no training. They should all be in quarantine but were seemingly allowed to leave. It is not a hoax for the guy in Brooklyn who just came back from Japan, developed a high fever and can not get a test. It is not a hoax for the man in Miami who came from China, was tested and will now have to pay $3,270 for it. It will not be a hoax for many million U.S. citizens.
The U.S. is botching its response to the outbreak just like Japan has botched it. South Korea shows how it should be done.
South Korea has gone through over 10,000 COVID-19 tests today. People who have any slightest of symptoms (or not) can even get themselves tested at these testing drive-thru stations. The whole process takes 10 mins.
I'm in awe.
As @jeeabbeylee points out, these COVID-19 tests are FREE. Anyone can get tested.
And with emergency localised messages being beamed to (almost) every phone in the country (you cannot switch these alerts off), people know exactly whether they've been in the path of the virus or not. It's really incredible.
Might I also point out that not only is COVID-19 testing in S. Korea free, it's open to all, including foreign residents, INCL. undocumented immigrants.
Medical centres are exempt from obligation to notify immigration office of visa status of patients.
Oh also, while COVID-19 tests in S. Korea are free, if the medical team determines the test to not be necessary but someone insists on wanting to be tested, they'll have to fork out 160,000 won ($132).
The way the U.S. health system is structured will make it difficult to avoid an wider epidemic. It will hit workers especially hard:
The CDC released very clear instructions to help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, including staying home when you are sick. Not everyone has that option.
Overall, just under three-quarters (73%) of private sector workers in the United States have the ability to earn paid sick time at work. And, as shown in the figure below, access to paid sick days is vastly unequal. The highest wage workers are more than three times as likely to have access to paid sick leave as the lowest paid workers. Whereas 93% of the highest wage workers had access to paid sick days, only 30% of the lowest paid workers were able to earn sick days.
...
The second recommendation from the CDC is to contact your healthcare provider.
We know in that the United States, millions of people delay getting medical treatment because of the costs. The latest Census numbers tell us that over 27 million people in this country are uninsured, up nearly two million over the previous year. These trends are moving in the wrong direction, notably because of losses in Medicaid coverage.
...
The CDC recommendations all seem well and good but how does someone with no paid sick days or insurance cope?
There are also the undocumented immigrants who will fear that health personal may inform the immigration authorities.
National Nurses United warns that U.S. hospitals and hospital staff are unprepared for handling an epidemic:
The single COVID-19 patient admitted to the [UC Davis Medical Center] on Feb. 19 has now led to the self-quarantine at home of at least 36 RNs and 88 other health care workers.
These 124 nurses and health care workers, who are needed now more than ever, have instead been sidelined. Lack of preparedness will create an unsustainable national health care staffing crisis.
...
National Nurses United is conducting a survey of registered nurses across the country on hospital preparedness and will be releasing those results next week.
Preliminary results from more than 1,000 nurses in California are worrisome:
Only 27 percent report that there is a plan in place to isolate a patient with a possible novel coronavirus infection. 47 percent report they don’t know if there is a plan.
Only 73 percent report that they have access to N95 respirators on their units; 47 percent report access to powered air purifying respirators (PAPRs) on their units.
Only 27 percent report that their employer has sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) stock on hand to protect staff if there is a rapid surge in patients with possible coronavirus infections; 44 percent don’t know.
Most of the issues above can be fixed if the government and Congress start to take the Covid-19 seriously. I have yet to see any sign that this is the case.
Tests must be freely available for anyone with even slight symptoms. Those who test positive must be isolated. There must be teams to trace and alarm all their contacts. All costs for COVID-19 cases, including money to pay people during for quarantine, must be paid by the government. Services must be set up for deliveries to people who quarantine themselves at home. Each new cluster must receive an immediate response on a large scale. Health staff needs to get extra pay.
The above will require new legislation. It should be discussed today, not tomorrow.
China has shown how a response can be done effectively. South Korea is following that path and will likely be equally successful.
There are also the economic consequences which only slowly start to come into view. Economist Nouriel Roubini predictsthat the pandemic will cause a very strong global recession:
I expect global equities to tank by 30 to 40 percent this year.
The recession will also require massive government stimulus and work programs as most central banks already have extremely low interest rates and no room left to act.
To panic over the above facts is not useful at all. But people should press their governments and legislators to at least start the fight against the epidemic and its predictable consequences.
Posted by b on February 29, 2020 at 19:21 UTC | Permalink
Comments Sampler
Measures should be taken, but a few points to ponder: 1) The US is much more socially isolated than many other nations. South Korea and Japan have far greater average population densities. 2) The cat is already out of the bag. It seems very possible that nCOV started 6 months ago - and so there have been infected carriers traveling worldwide for about that period of time. Since the disease affects working age people far less, it is very possible that the nCOV already out there is largely indistinguishable from the regular flu for those people. 3) The primary problems noted above: the US government response plus the US health care system in general - not entirely clear what Trump and the federal government should do about it. Would the Democrats agree to a major travel ban plus quarantine regimes? Note that Trump will certainly make any such proposals contingent on US citizenship/legal residence. Certainly it is doubtful that the political lobbyists for the US health care industry would countenance any form of government response that interferes with their profit-making machinery.
However, you can draw out the process - think 50 percent of the population ill at the same time to 5 percent during two years. Plus treatment discovered in a few months.
You will need the capacity to treat people who are not so lucky as to have just light symptoms.
If you force everybody to stay at home you may as well just switch off the lights.
Funny thing, b was right - China (and online deliveries as well really) managed to snuff the spread out well, and it seems that the rest of the world and their 'representative bureaucracies' will show all how limited they are when a fast acting 'unknown unknown' (Rummy, how you made sense here!) does its thing.
Posted by: Ilya G Poimandres | Feb 29 2020 19:59 utc | 5
There is no system to take care of housebound people. For me there is no medical personal to make housecalls, no social support, no personal care workers, nothing. And this at a time when nationwide there are only small numbers of people like myself. Multiply this non-system by 100 or 1000 and people will die at home and no one will even notice.
Uncle Sam's Day of Reckoning may be fast approaching. And we will have well-earned every bit of suffering headed our way.
Posted by: Trailer Trash | Feb 29 2020 19:59 utc | 6
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"b" is Moon of Alabama's founding (and chief) editor. This site's purpose is to discuss politics, economics, philosophy and blogger Billmon's Whiskey Bar writings. Moon Of Alabama was opened as an independent, open forum for members of the Whiskey Bar community. Bernhard )"b") started and still runs the site. Once in a while you will also find posts and art from regular commentators. You can reach the current administrator of this site by emailing Bernhard at MoonofA@aol.com.
Measures should be taken, but a few points to ponder:
1) The US is much more socially isolated than many other nations. South Korea and Japan have far greater average population densities.
2) The cat is already out of the bag. It seems very possible that nCOV started 6 months ago - and so there have been infected carriers traveling worldwide for about that period of time. Since the disease affects working age people far less, it is very possible that the nCOV already out there is largely indistinguishable from the regular flu for those people.
3) The primary problems noted above: the US government response plus the US health care system in general - not entirely clear what Trump and the federal government should do about it.
Would the Democrats agree to a major travel ban plus quarantine regimes? Note that Trump will certainly make any such proposals contingent on US citizenship/legal residence.
Certainly it is doubtful that the political lobbyists for the US health care industry would countenance any form of government response that interferes with their profit-making machinery.
Posted by: c1ue | Feb 29 2020 19:33 utc | 1