Global
On the surface, the coronavirus emergency has nothing in particular to do with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. What’s obvious is that Donald Trump’s unhinged bluster and inaction let the pandemic get a lethal jump on the United States, people are dying while huge numbers of lives are in jeopardy, and quick drastic steps are imperative. Yet at the same time, the differences between what Biden and Sanders are advocating have enormous implications for what could be done to curb the deadly virus in this country.
Trump is moving in the direction of another upper class New Yorker who also became president in an era of extreme crisis. It’s time for some “bigly” Federal government action - again.
Facing a global pandemic, America’s very existence hasn’t been this threatened since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration confronted the Great Depression and World War II. The coronavirus is challenging the USA with a double whammy that combines both dangers: Economic collapse and an invasion causing massive loss of life. To combat these twin perils requires a response on a par with Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Allied war effort against fascism.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- High on hope, Americans and other foreigners have
arrived selling satellite imagery, financial services, grow lights and
other products to profit from Thailand's recently legalized medical
marijuana before Thais figure out how to do it themselves.
Foreigners are excitedly gathering at cannabis networking events in
Bangkok and elsewhere in this Southeast Asian nation, spouting sales
spiels and describing the most fantastic things since seedless joints.
They are also unraveling Thailand's newly created tangle of cannabis
laws to find loopholes and ways to squeeze money from weed.
Medical marijuana became legal in 2019. Recreational use did not and
still includes imprisonment.
As a result, the current investment rush is toward niche
infrastructure for government-controlled medical research and
production.
The Dutch are one of the new dominating suppliers of potent seeds to
Thailand. The Netherlands has spent decades producing some of the best
cross-bred seeds, which are now being purchased by government-approved
Thai researchers.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.…
The only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance….
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 4, 1933
Forget all the bad press.
Forget that Donald Trump has completely mismanaged the Coronavirus pandemic. ( https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=873866223038639&id=261478257610775 )
10. Recognizing that a problem that has grown severe in other countries could grow severe in the United States would require thinking of the United States as existing in the same world, susceptible to the same forces, as everyone else. A willingness to recognize that would have led to earlier action and wiser action more coordinated with the rest of the world.
As the human onslaught against life on Earth accelerates, no part of the biosphere is left pristine. The simple act of consuming more than we actually need drives the world’s governments and corporations to endlessly destroy more and more of the Earth to extract the resources necessary to satisfy our insatiable desires. In fact, an initiative of the World Economic Forum has just reported that ‘For the first time in history, more than 100 billion tonnes of materials are entering the global economy every year’ – see ‘The Circularity Gap Report 2020’ – which means that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials each year extracted from the Earth.
On August 9, 2019 the commander-in-tweet attacked “Liberal Hollywood” for having “great Anger and Hate! …The movie coming out [which] is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence and then try to blame others." The movie in question was The Hunt and the day following Trump’s Twitter tantrum Universal Pictures pulled the Blumhouse Production from its scheduled theatrical release on Sept. 27. Of course, if anybody knows anything about great Anger and Hate! and inflaming and causing chaos, it’s the president. But Universal didn’t scratch opening the movie solely because the studio was heeding the counsel of a world class expert in rendering incendiary public statements.
“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”
No matter who wins the Democratic presidential nomination, many millions of people will refuse to unsee what has become all too clear. On the verge of spring 2020, we can see what we’re up against:
•A crowing media establishment, eager to relegate the Bernie Sanders campaign to the political margins.
•A gloating Democratic Party establishment, glad to rally around Potemkin candidate Joe Biden and extol his carefully crafted façade.
•Overall, interlocking systems based on greed and corporate power instead of shared resources and genuine democracy.
A critical factor accelerating the spread of coronavirus in the United States is our lack of universal health care.
As we debate the costs of providing medical treatment for all, and as the virus tears through the fabric of our society, it’s become clear that many of the factors accelerating the spread of illness and death associated with this new plague are associated with the for-profit nature of our health care system.
Because we have a patchwork medical system whose primary motivating engine is corporate profit, rather than a unified public medical system whose motivating engine is the health of the public, communicable diseases are treated in a mindset of individual outcome. Our system focuses on the immediate needs of insured patients rather than treating the overall disease as a public emergency, thus hampering the containment and treatment of epidemics like these.