Trump's Tyranny
Bobby Bobby, Bobby Kennedy, my dear dear friend of so many years, my co-author at Rolling Stone, Bobby, why are you threatening my life? Why are you threatening lives across America and even our not-yet-born great-grandchildren? You’ve blocked mRNA vaccine research.
Research!
Bobby, you know damn well that mRNA is our best hope for an anti-cancer vaccine. What are you doing to us, Bobby?
You’ve kicked out over 3,000 scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. Who do you have left, Bobby, to control diseases? So, when the next pandemic hits, we won’t have mRNA, we’ll have beef tallow and bleach.
You’ve terminated over 800 medical research grants. Let’s take one: Why in the world did you terminate the brain injury outpatient education program at Seattle Children’s Hospital? Did Dr. Joe Rogan suggest that?
Should your employer be allowed to ban you from taking another job? Most Americans would say that’s ridiculous — but it’s more common than you think.
When I was head of the policy office at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), I read thousands of public comments about how employers used “noncompete clauses” to trap workers into jobs. Many people shared deeply personal stories of being stuck in abusive workplaces, enduring punishing commutes, or working for years and years without a raise.
Noncompete clauses force workers to agree not to take a job with a competitor after they leave their position. They’re often framed as tools to prevent senior executives from taking trade secrets with them. But the evidence tells a different story.
Imagine your town flattened overnight. No power. No water. Families trapped in rubble. For days, you wait for help that never seems to arrive.
The first thing that hit me in Gulfport, Mississippi, wasn’t the sight. It was the smell. Raw sewage from flooded treatment plants. Rotting seafood from capsized shrimp boats.
Diesel and gasoline spilled across the water. All mixed together in water so thick with debris it didn’t move like water anymore.
One of my shipmates handed me a jar of Vicks VapoRub. “Put it in your nose,” he said. “It’ll help.” It didn’t help enough.
A World Washed Away
What I saw looked like a scene out of an apocalyptic film. Whole neighborhoods gone. Homes ripped from their foundations and carried into the bayou.
Those that remained were filled with mud several feet high. I went building to building on search-and-rescue, marking walls with spray paint — an “X” and a number telling the world how many people, alive or dead, had been found inside.
It was devastating. It was lawlessness. And at times, it felt like we were the only ones left.
[VILLA PARK, ILLINOIS] – “No one locks their doors in Villa Park,” says village board President Kevin Patrick.
This town of 22,000 could be the set for Andy of Mayberry, a Norman Rockwell painting of America.
Patrick sports a military haircut befitting his years in the Coast Guard and steel blue eyes that reflect military determination, compassion — and fear. Fear of what could happen to his town.
We filmed Patrick while he watched the videos of bodies floating face down in another small town, in Kerr County, Texas, where the death toll from a flood in July has reached 136 and counting.
Patrick was shaken. Because it’s a horror he knows all too well.
Twenty years ago this month, Coast Guardsman Patrick was one of the first responders sent in after Hurricane Katrina drowned Gulfport and New Orleans. He told me about recovering the bloated bodies of pregnant women — or pieces of pregnant women — out of the water. He tried to pull one corpse from the flood, but the “arm slid off like a chicken wing.”
In some ways it is refreshing to have a president who is so profoundly ignorant that one’s expectations regarding what good policies might actually come out of the federal government are really, really low. It took Donald Trump six months to accept the reality of the slaughter going on in Gaza where Israel is killing roughly one hundred Palestinians every day whose only crime is that they are looking for food, water and shelter. Admittedly Trump has actually been bold enough to challenge his Israeli masters by declaring that videos from Gaza show a lot of people who Trump admitted were “starving”, and promised to “take care” of it. Yet he has done nothing but support the Israeli blockade and repress or even deport any voices in America who protest against the war crimes.