Thursday, March 26, 2020:   The Most Dangerous Virus Is In The Oval Office
Coronavirus was coming. We knew that at the start of the year. The likelihood that there would be no significant impact on Americans was remote, but did it have get to this level of crisis? Not if we were prepared, which we were not. The lack of national preparedness is somewhere between rabid incompetence and criminal felony malfeasance.

What has become abundantly clear is that widespread testing is a key to identifying the infected, isolating those who are carriers, and limiting the spread of the virus. We weren't even remotely close to being able to test for this virus let alone take actions to mitigate its impact.

It is a generally true that you do not see the weakness or flaws in something until it is under stress. That is true of dams, software, and marriages. In the course of the last 3 years, Trump and his Republican conspirators have managed to dismantle and cripple a good portion of the Federal government agencies that were created to protect us against pandemics and other natural disasters. A lot of what he has done is simply pure racism. He wasn't about to let stand anything that some black man created.

Another factor contributing to our current crisis is that incompetence breeds incompetence. Institutional competence, personality, and culture start at the top and works down through the organization. If the person at the top is an incompetent, racists, misogynistic ass hole, then it is guaranteed that those under him will be of like ilk.

A March 26, 2020 article in the New York Times, "Job Vacancies and Inexperience Mar Federal Response to Coronavirus" by Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, outlines the problem.

"Some 80 percent of the senior positions in the White House below the cabinet level have turned over during Trump's administration, with about 500 people having departed since the inauguration. Trump is on his fourth chief of staff, his fourth national security adviser and his fifth secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Between Trump's history of firing people and the choice by many career officials and political appointees to leave, he now finds himself with a government riddled with vacancies, acting department chiefs and, in some cases, leaders whose professional backgrounds do not easily match up to the task of managing a pandemic."

"Of the 75 senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary who recently was unable to tell a Senate committee how many respirators and protective face masks were available in the United States.

The National Park Service, which like many federal agencies is full of vacancies in key posts, tried this week to fill the job of a director for the national capital region after hordes of visitors flocked to see the cherry blossoms near the National Mall, creating a potential public health hazard as the coronavirus continues to spread.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, workers are scrambling to order medical supplies on Amazon after its leaders, lacking experience in disaster responses, failed to prepare for the onslaught of patients at its medical centers.

Empty slots and high turnover have left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century, said numerous former and current federal officials and disaster experts.
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Winston Churchill said that "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." I want to once again thank all those ignorant and down right stupid Americans who voted for the dumb ass that currently occupies the oval office. Your stupidity has put me and all those I love at risk.


Friday, March 6, 2020:   Deaths Of Despair: A Real Cost Of Unbridled Capitalism
Over the past three decades, deaths of despair (alcohol, drugs, and suicide) among whites without a college degree – especially those under 50 - have soared. But this should be no surprise for anyone working in programs that support the working poor.

Inequality has risen more in the United States — and middle-class incomes have stagnated more severely — than in France, Germany, Japan or elsewhere. Large corporations have increased their market share, and labor unions have shriveled, leaving workers with little bargaining power. Outsourcing has become the norm, which means that executives often see low-wage workers not as colleagues but as expenses.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton — a married couple who are both economists at Princeton — try to explain this emerging trend in a new book, "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism." Working-class life in the United States is more difficult than it is in any other high-income country. "European countries have faced the same kind of technological change we have, and they're not seeing the people killing themselves with guns or drug or alcohol," Case says. "There is something unique about the way the U.S. is handling this."

Case and Deaton emphasize that the problems aren't merely financial. Life for many middle- and low-income Americans can lack structure, status and meaning. People don't always know what days or hours they will be working the following week. They often don't officially work for the company where they spend their days, which robs them of the pride that comes from being part of a shared enterprise.

And the United States suffers from by far the world's most expensive health-care system. It acts as a tax on workers and drains resources that could otherwise be spent on schools, day care, roads, public transit and more. Despite its unparalleled spending, the American medical system also fails to keep many people healthy.

So basically Trump voters, which fall into the socioeconomic group fitting the Case and Deaton profile, are nothing but the chaff of the capitalist grist mill. And democratic socialism is bad. Explain to me how it's worse than death and despair.

The above in part are excerpts from a March 6, 2020, NYT article titled "Could a College Degree Save Your Life?" By David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson