Let's Fix This Country

How Fox News Handled Trump’s Disinfectant Gaffe

The day after President Trump mused about disinfectant injections and interior light as cures for Covid-19, he tried to make it go away, saying he was just being “sarcastic”. It was not the first time the president, esteemed as a television adept, seemed to forget that he stages his daily briefings precisely to be on television, that they are recorded, that they are then played back endlessly on news programs. He doubles the ridicule by trying to contradict what we plainly heard him say and the way he said it.

Fox personalities that night were silent. The next day, beginning even on Trump’s favorite show, the fawning “Fox & Friends”, Steve Doucy said injecting disinfectants “is poisonous“, and several during the day warned viewers that “it’s not safe” and “please don’t try this at home”. But none were critical of the president for saying it until Bret Baier allowed “it is clearly something he clearly stepped in”.

Fault finding would go no further. That night — prime time, when far more watch the channel — reporter Trace Gallagher had this to say:

“One day after the president suggested that light and disinfectant might have potential to treat Covid-19, the White House says the media took the president’s comments out of context and the president said it was sarcasm.”

Cut away to video of Trump at the White House that next day in which the president said to reporters in the Oval Office,

“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen”.

After that, Gallagher wrapped with:

“The Department of Homeland Security did say that sunshine and household bleach are extremely effective at killing the virus on surfaces.”

That’s all folks! Gallagher and the “Hannity” program let stand Trump’s total lie. We are unaware of any further coverage of the incident on Fox. Did its viewers ever see the video?

“Out of context” has become the reflexive excuse every politician reaches for to feebly explain a gaffe. As a service to history, here is the entire context, everything President Trump said. See if you can find the sarcasm, or the “question to reporters”:

“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultra-violet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked and you’re going to test it [turning Homeland Security Acting Under-Secretary Bill Bryan who Trump had been asked to study heat, light, and disinfectant and report on them] and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body which you can do either through the skin or in some other way and [turning again to Bryan] I think you said you’re going to test that too? Sounds interesting.

“And then I see the disinfectant [on surfaces] knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number, so it would be interesting to check that, so you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me.

“A lot of people have been talking about summer. Maybe this is one of the reasons. We’ve, uh, I once mentioned that maybe it does go away with heat and light and people didn’t like that statement very much. The fake news didn’t like it at all and I just threw it out as a suggestion, but it seems like that’s the case.

[To Bryan] “I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there is any way you can apply light and heat to cure, you know, if you could, and maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Again, I say maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor. I’m like a person that has a good you know what. Deborah [turning to Dr. Birx] have you ever heard of that, the heat and the light relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?”

Dr. Birx evaded the question referring to fever as a response to a virus. Phil Rucker of The Washington Post followed, taking issue with Mr. Trump:

“Sir, you’re the president and people tuning in to these briefings, they want to get information and guidance and want to know what to do. They’re not looking for rumors”.

Trump’s reply:

“Phil, Phil, I’m the president and you’re fake news and you know what I’ll say to you? I’ll say very nicely, I know you well, I know you well because I know the guy, I see what he writes, he’s a total faker, so are you ready? Are you ready? It’s just a suggestion. From a brilliant lab, by a very, very smart, perhaps brilliant man. He’s talking about sun, he’s talking about heat, and you see the numbers. So that’s it. That’s all I have. I’m just here to present talent. I’m here to present ideas because we want ideas to get rid of this thing. If heat is good and if sunlight is good, that’s a great thing as far as I’m concerned.”

The makers of Clorox and Lysol felt they had to issue formal warnings to the public not to inject or ingest their products. Health hotlines around the country were besieged with questions causing states such as Maryland and Washington to issue public advisories not to take disinfectants.

dr. trump

Mr. Trump seems to put science, medicine and controlled studies on equal footing with rumor and anecdotes, said Sudip Parikh, a biochemist who is chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. With hardly any evidence in support, the president had heavily promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, as a cure for those ill with Covid-19. “I think it could be something really incredible,” Mr. Trump said on March 19th.

A New York Times analysis reported that on that day, on only the president’s say-so, prescriptions for the drug jumped by more than 46 times the normal weekday volume: 32,000 were written by doctors and in specialties having nothing to do with infectious diseases. The surge continued in the days that followed, with prescriptions running at almost five times the norm. Fox News anchors were eager to echo the president’s enthusiasm. Laura Ingraham, especially, championed the drug on her nighttime show, even to the extent of visiting the president in the Oval Office to press for its use.

A weeks-long controversy ensued with those promoting hydroxychloroquine pointing to success stories, and health experts calling such results anecdotal. Advocacy of a drug used often in conjunction with the antibiotic, azithromycin — a combination that could cause heart problems — paid little heed to the dangers it could pose. Moreover, its use showed inconclusive outcomes with Covid-19 patients. It is certainly not a cure, is a palliative at best, and evidence was in numbers too small for being statistically reliable.

Negative reports began to flow in. Doctors at a New York hospital confirmed the hazard, reporting that heart rhythm abnormalities developed in most of 84 Covid-19 patients treated with the drug combination Trump promoted as “a game-changer”. It changed the game for an Arizona coupled who self administered a variant — hydroxychloroquine phosphate. Both died.

The Veterans Administration reported that in a group of 368 patients, again not a large enough number but the largest so far, more had died (28%) in the group who had taken hydroxychloroquine than among those who had not (11%). That was followed by the Food and Drug Administration warning physicians against use of the drug except in hospitals where its effect on the heart can be monitored against its inducing too-fast heartbeats called ventricular tachycardia.

Suddenly, all went silent at the White House, and there’s been no further mention at Fox, not even from Ms. Ingraham.

meanwhile, what the right hand was doing

At the same time that Trump was advocating disinfectants as “almost a cleaning” of the lungs, his administration declined to tighten regulations on industrial soot emissions, the fine airborne particulates called PM 2.5 that are about 1/30th the width of a human hair. Also at the same time, a Harvard study found that people who lived in areas with high degrees of air pollution — breathing in PM 2.5 soot for years — are more likely to die from Covid-19.

But the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, said the scientific evidence for the regulation, months in the works after years of study, is insufficient. EPA’s public health experts point to their own research that shows PM 2.5 leads to tens of thousands of premature deaths annually. Wheeler was a coal industry lobbyist before Trump appointed him to get rid of environmental regulations. The New York Times reported that his decision “brought praise from Republican lawmakers and the nation’s oil companies and manufacturers”.

Apr 30 2020 | Posted in Media | Read More »

The Purge of the Inspectors General

In the two weeks preceding the total authority episode (see accompanying article “Worries Mount…”), there was an epidemic of the president’s petty vengeance. He is intolerant of anyone whose job obligates reporting facts or taking action not to his liking. His pathology is such that he cannot let that go without retribution. He had already been getting rid of those who testified in the House impeachment proceedings, but his kill list is long. He is devoting particular attention to removal of professional inspectors general in various quarters and replacing them with loyal political appointees unlikely to find any fault.

Well into the black hole of a Friday night to escape notice, Trump fired the intelligence agencies’ inspector general, Michael Atkinson. He had been 15 years with the Justice Department beginning in the Bush administration. He was Trump’s own nominee for the job. Atkinson’s crime? He had obeyed the law. Under the federal whistleblower statute, he was obligated to report to Congress receipt of a complaint that he deemed met the criterion of “serious concern”. It surely did. It led to no less than Trump’s impeachment.

But for exposing Trump’s misdeeds — his holding up Congressionally-authorized military assistance funds for Ukraine contingent on its president investigating Joe Biden and son and on fabricating that Ukraine not Russia interfered in the 2016 elections — Trump called Atkinson “a disgrace” who “did a terrible job”. Atkinson had forwarded “a whistleblower report, which turned out to be a fake report — it was fake. It was totally wrong”, except that just about everything in the whistleblower complaint was corroborated by a dozen government officials who testified to Congress in the impeachment proceedings. The president said he felt there was a lack of loyalty, describing Atkinson as “not a big Trump fan”, as if loyalty to him was in everyone’s job description.

This was Trump rewriting history, projecting his reconstructed version to his base, which by now has forgotten details it may never have noted at the time and are now to think, as Trump purges one after another, that inspectors general across the government have no business overseeing Trump’s government. This is the mentality of a dictator, who designs not to govern but to rule.

The inspector general of Health and Human Services came out with a report saying that a survey of 323 hospitals around the country revealed that they faced severe shortages of coronavirus test supplies. The report made no judgments about the department or the administration but Trump called it “Another Fake Dossier!”. In his news briefing he said,

“It’s wrong…Could politics be entered into that?…You didn’t tell me also that this inspector general came out of the Obama administration”.

The report was from government watchdog Christi Grimm whose service dates from 1999, but for Trump — who has spoken also of “Obama judges”, invoking a reprimand from Chief Justice Roberts — everyone with any connection to Obama is out to get him.

In the midst of the pandemic, the president would remove another career government official who has served both Republican and Democratic administrations, acting Defense Department Inspector General Glenn Fine. The four top leaders of Congress had appointed Fine to the oversight board mandated by the Cares Act that is to keep watch over how $550 million of the the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus money will be spent to aid large corporations.

House Democrats had insisted that there be a rigorous oversight panel to prevent the money from being corruptly misappropriated to political favorites. That looked all too likely when Trump signaled in a signing statement that he did not intend to share information with the oversight board about how the money is being spent. “Look, I’ll be the oversight”, he said, and to that end replaced Fine in the fifth slot on the board with his own man, Brian Miller, of the White House Counsel office. It was Miller who, in a brusque three sentence e-mail, rebuffed Congress’s Government Accountability Office when it sought information pertinent to the impeachment proceedings.

Dwell on that: In place of a long-term career professional inspector general, whose creed is fair-minded impartiality, we have a political appointee out to please the boss overseeing half a trillion in funds we taxpayers are on the hook for.

the enemies list

The autocrat knows that his arrogation of power breeds enemies. Paranoia dictates that he purge all around him of those who show hints of disagreement or disloyalty. Axios reported that Trump gave his 29-year-old body man, John McEntee, the new assignment of ridding his government of all believed to be anti-Trump.

The White House already had in hand lists of those to oust and replace, compiled over 18 months with the assistance of allies, among them even the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who runs a conservative activist network called Groundswell. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan gained access to such lists that form Trump’s notions of subversion, his “deep state” filled with what he calls “snakes”. Authenticating that claim, we heard Trump apply that insult to Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee.

As The New York Times‘s Peter Baker wrote, “officials show up for work now never entirely sure who will be there by the end of the evening — themselves included”.

Apr 23 2020 | Posted in Governance | Read More »

Worries Mount That an Autocratic Trump Threatens Our Democracy

Donald Trump was confident that the booming economy for which he takes credit will bring him re-election in November. Then Covid-19 struck. Not only is the economy so suddenly devastated by lockdown, with the unemployed percentage

nearing that of the 1930s Great Depression, but he is undergoing severe criticism for his slow response and blame for the added deaths resulting.

He is pressing to “open” the country, held back only by his medical experts, with the risk that the pandemic could rage on,. Guidelines for a phased restoration have been announced. He seems to think enough economic health can be restored by November for voters to reward him a second term. But should that hope dim, there is increasing worry about what he might do to stay in office.

He has long expressed admiration of authoritarian heads of other governments able to run their countries free of constraints: Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, Egypt’s Sisi, Turkey’s Erdogan, Saudi Arabia’s Salman, the Philippines’ Duterte. He looks about the world and sees other leaders granting themselves extra powers to deal with the pandemic. Israel’s prime minister shut down the courts and is using cellphone surveillance to track infected citizens, casting aside privacy concerns. Hungary’s parliament has just given Prime Minister Viktor Orban plenary power to rule by decree. Will these powers ever be relinquished?

Mr. Trump betrays his desire to reform the American presidency in the mold of other countries. Instead, he here runs up against state governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo. He exhibits growing autocratic behavior, thuggishly slandering Inslee of Washington, Whitmer of Michigan, Cuomo. He expects governors to show their “appreciation” for what he is doing for them as if the president of the 50 states and his administration are under no obligations to do so. He favors governors who praise him (as they know they must or be denied covid supplies) and penalizes those who don’t show sufficient respect. “The governors will be very, very respectful of the presidency”, he warns. Regardless of a state’s plight and removed from the illness and death the governors are dealing with, he tells Vice President Pence, “If they don’t treat you right, don’t call” them. In his conception of the presidency, it is for him to command, and the states to be brought to heel. He tweeted on April 13th:

That same day, he was asked by a reporter about regional consortia of states that have banded together “to cooperate and decide when to re-open, undermining what you’re trying to do…”. Trump interrupted with:

“No, not at all. Let me just say, very simply…The president of the United States has the authority to do what the president has the authority to do, which is very powerful. The president of the United States calls the shots…It’s a decision of the president of the United States. Now that being said, we’re going to work with the states…They can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States.”

Asked about that authority, what “if a governor issues a stay at home order…”

“You say my authority? The president’s authority. Not my, because it’s not me. When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be.

Reporter: “The authority is total?”
Trump: “Total, it’s total.”

Faced with bipartisan objection, he backtracked. “The governors are responsible”, Trump said, “They have to take charge.” His guidelines will now “allow” states to stay closed. His minders may have persuaded him that putting the onus on the states will give him cover if things don’t go well. But he immediately began issuing tweets: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA” and then, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and then, “LIBERATE VIRGINIA”.

removing congress

His authoritarian beliefs were vented in full force in mid-April when he threatened to adjourn Congress in order to make recess appointments to posts he claims need to be filled because of the virus. “The senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments”, was his directive.

His belief in total authority says he thinks laws can be swept aside. (He has said, “I can do anything I want as president of the United States”). His responses to court decisions say he has little regard for the judicial branch, and now it is Congress’ turn to absent itself.

The Constitution gives the president the right to adjourn Congress but only in the peculiar instance of the two bodies — the House and Senate — being unable to agree with each other when to adjourn. The president can step in as referee. Neither chamber is today in disagreement, but that seems for Trump only a technicality to be brushed aside so that he can adjourn the legislature at his will.

Is he also ignorant of the Supreme Court’s decision when it ruled against Obama’s attempt to make recess appointments? The former president had acted on the specific provision in the Constitution that empowers him “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate” when he filled three seats of the National Labor Relations Board that had been kept unoccupied for over a year. The Court ruled “Recess” meant only the annual interregnum at the turn of the year between formal Senate sessions, not the many long disappearances from Washington by our hundred senators throughout the year.

Or, in the full knowledge of the Court’s decision, does Trump plan nevertheless to do as he pleases, if not now, at some point throwing down a challenge to the Supreme Court with the assurance of how can the court and what army stop him?

Recall that Trump said “I can do anything…” the same day that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s feeble performance before Congress put an end to his report. The president went ahead to do that “anything” the very next day when he called Ukraine President Zelenskyy with his “perfect” extortion of favors for money. Trump would then revel again when the Senate failed to convict following the House impeachment. What does it say that every last Republican save Mitt Romney had been made so fearful of Trump’s wrath, of his threats to campaign against their re-election, that all the rest voted against his removal from office? How can we continue to call this a democracy if a strongman in the White House can so easily take control? Of course, thanks to the Electoral College, — its tilt that accords extra weight to less populous states and the general practice of a state awarding all its delegates to the winner, wiping out all votes for the loser — an argument can be made that ours never was a true democracy. Trump stands to benefit from that distortion once again.

the trump show

Trump’s narcissism is is boundless. It’s fair to say that it is on display to a degree that none of us ever thought imaginable in a human. In the latest manifestation, he has turned his daily briefing, originally for pandemic reports, into a podium for political gain. He is freely using broadcast and cable for his re-election. In one session Trump ran a several-minute campaign video and the channels, taken by surprise, let it run. As this is written, he is carrying on not about the pandemic but something about Virginia and the 2nd Amendment. He tweets about his ratings, marveling that they’re the equal of the finale of the television show “The Bachelor”.

The latest celebration of self is that his grandiose signature will appear in the memo field of the $1,200 checks being send to individuals as part of the emergency relief package. There is no precedent for this act of megalomania. Trump wants Americans to think that he is personally giving them the money and not we taxpayers.

Mr. Trump claims he had no part in that. To believe it would require a lobotomy. His reflexive habit of lying (The Washington Post has kept score for years) has led to the psychological conjecture that he must believe his lies. They are re-workings of reality to feed narcissism’s demands. It is this sincere belief on his part — if the analysis is correct — that makes for an emerging threat as election approaches. It says that no matter reality, Trump will have persuaded himself that he has done a “tremendous” job, a “fantastic” job, that anything contrary such as an election that goes against him will have been “fixed”. We will hear him lay that groundwork — saying everything is fixed — as November 3rd approaches.

the 200 day countdown

The crippling pandemic has given rise to conjecture about the upcoming election. Will it be disrupted? Will the administration seek to postpone it, thus keeping Trump in power? Will Republicans in Congress remain silent for even that maneuver? If the election goes forward and Trump loses, will he cite the ravages of SARS-CoV-2 as grounds to invoke emergency powers and refuse to leave office?

the alternative government

If these questions sound alarmist, as historian Jon Meacham said in the The New York Times, then you haven’t “paid even glancing attention to the president’s will to power and contempt for constitutional convention”. Take note of the president saying above, “The president of the United States has the authority to do what the president has the authority to do, which is very powerful”. Actually, what the president can do under the Constitution is very limited. He is commander in chief of the military, to be sure, but otherwise there’s little specifically authorized beyond treaties with other nations and making appointments, and even they need Senate approval. It is as good as certain that Trump’s “very powerful” refers coyly to a body of secret documents underpinning emergency declarations available to him under the Stafford Act and the National Emergencies Act, provisions he knows about and is hinting that we don’t.

These are draft executive orders, proclamations, and proposals to Congress that lie dormant and are secret to the extent that none of them have ever even been leaked to the public nor have they even been presented to Congress. They are called Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs. First devised at the outset of the Cold War as powers for the president to invoke should a nuclear exchange cripple government, they are designed “to implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations”. Nothing could be more extraordinary than a virus having shattered the nation’s economy.

There are believed to be 50 to 60 such documents; their constant review and revision begun under Obama in 2012 continues in the Trump administration. All that is known of their contents is from references to them that have emerged between the cracks, as in Freedom of Information requests of FBI memorandums. Gleanings from such sources reveal that PEADs call for chilling measures to be taken on proclamation of emergency — suspension of the Constitution, martial law, curfews, suspension of habeas corpus, voiding of Americans’ passports, more.

Does invocation of these powers seem unlikely? You should know that Bill Barr’s Justice Department has already quietly asked Congress for the authorization for judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies. Justice proposed that the chief judge of any district court could pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation”. This would apply to:

“[A]ny statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings”

How does this not amount to suspension of habeas corpus, the right we otherwise have requiring authorities to present to a judge or court valid reasons for our detention?

We are on a knife edge with this president and his lust to hold onto power, faced with the alarming realization that there exists below the surface a parallel government, an authoritarian blueprint that could burst into being, ready-made for this president to dispense with democracy and its laws. One could say that there is indeed a “deep state”, and it belongs to Donald Trump.

Apr 23 2020 | Posted in Politics | Read More »

Fox News Says Forget Wet Markets. The Virus Came from Wuhan’s Bio-Lab

The network has been strongly advancing its theory that the Wuhan virus emanated from the country’s only Biosafety Level 4 biological laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which only by chance is near Wuhan’s wet markets. The contention is that it is more likely that a lab employee became infected and then spread the virus to the outside world. This version has been reported by Bret Baier on his afternoon news program, “Special Report”, and amplified by Tucker Carlson at night.

They point out that China first ascribed the virus vector to pangolins, a scaled ant- and termite-eating animal, then it was civets, sometimes called a type of cat, and now bats, but the wet markets are so-called because they sell fish, not these mammals, and the horseshoe bat in question is from far away, or as one Carlson guest said, “We all know now that a solitary bat did not fly 600 miles from its cave dwelling in another province to the city of Wuhan and land in someone’s soup”.

What we do know is that China has engaged in a determined cover-up to deflect blame from itself, infamously reprimanding the doctor who first reported trouble and then died from the disease, silencing journalists, blaming first the Italian military, in town earlier for the World Military Games, then the American military who attended a Wuhan conference, and has been, says Fox, “working frantically to destroy evidence”. The accusation is that the wet market was made the villain to cover-up that the city is home to a level-4 bio-lab.

Labs such as the one in Wuhan work on deadly pathogens hopefully for the purpose of finding cures and not the creation bio-weapons. There are several around the world. The U.S. Army has a level-4 at Fort Meade in Maryland. It had its own moment in 1980 of a near Ebola breakout chronicled in a 1992 exposé titled “Crisis in the Hot Zone”.

Some have said the Wuhan facility does not operate at level-4. An article in “Nature” from 2017 said “Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping”. The U. S. State Department cables a year later voiced the same concern, citing dangerous safety practices at Wuhan.

Arkansas’ Republican Senator Tom Cotton raised the issue back on February 16th on the Fox channel in an on-the-fly interview in the Capitol:

“A few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level-4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning we need to at least ask the questions.”

The Fox guest cited earlier, Steven Mosher, a population expert who focuses on China, seems to follow infectious diseases as well. He wonders whether the Wuhan lab had been working on the virus with “gain of function” technology whereby one makes an existing virus more infectious. Why? So as then to develop a vaccine or other cure to defeat it. Unsaid was the intimation that one’s own population would then be protected, making viable unleashing the virus in an enemy country. Mosher’s claim is that the laboratory director, Chaoyang Li, “has been using gain of function research for years to create new more deadly coronaviruses”. A search of the Wuhan institute website lists her as a “principal investigator”, not a lab director, though. She has a PhD from Penn State. Among 35 members of “our team” she is the only one without a photograph and her “Research interests” are listed as “N/A”.

For Carlson it is conclusive:

“As of today, says someone in a position to know, there is — quote — almost unanimous agreement in the American intelligence gathering agencies that the virus currently destroying much of the world emerged from a lab in Wuhan. Almost unanimous. That’s a phrase almost never used to describe any conclusion coming out of the intel community”.

Regrettably, his arrogance means he cannot do reporting without disparaging everyone else. They “mocked Cotton as a paranoid lunatic”, he says, with no examples of anything that severe. We are given clips of earlier news practitioners getting it wrong, although in fairness, some called the bio-lab notion a “conspiracy theory”. For that, Fareed Zakaria is a “mediocrity”. Brian Williams “simply joined the herd of other dumb people mocking a story they didn’t understand”. His crime was to say, “There is no evidence to support that”. As yet, there isn’t. A New York Times headline said, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked”. Nor has it been debunked. His vindictiveness is because Carlson has a conspiracy theory of his own. “The people who bring you the news were lying about it”. The rest of the media is covering for China. “China pushed that story to western media to deflect blame from itself and, of course, our press corps, as they always do, ate it up immediately”.

Where the case becomes interesting is the difference between whether the virus derived from animals or the Chinese pathogen lab. The first is from nature, however ignorant the Chinese are not to safeguard the barrier. But the latter makes it a man-made disaster, compounded by China’s secrecy and the refusal to provide the rest of the world with information that led to tens of thousands more deaths. Bret Baier reports that there are a lot of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that share that thinking, that China’s cover-up in the early stages could have changed the dynamic of the contagion around the world for the worse. It becomes an issue of liability, and measured in trillions of dollars. Baier says Congress could amend the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act which forbids Americans suing other countries. This would allow class action lawsuits against China and the Chinese Communist Party. Already, he says, two lawsuits against the CCP have been filed in Miami waiting for just that change.

Apr 21 2020 | Posted in Media | Read More »

With the U.S. in Dire Straits, China Thinks This Is Their Moment

You had best believe that many in China’s leadership are quietly musing that the U.S. failure to stem the pandemic that has shattered its economy has delivered to Beijing so much simpler a weapon to bring

America to its knees than any military confrontation for which it has been preparing. China’s businesses are opening, people are returning to their jobs, they are even exporting medical protective gear to the U.S. In contrast, with millions thrown out of work at companies that may never re-open, the U.S. may be looking at the second Great Depression.

the china model

China wants the world to look to them where it once looked to the United States. It hopes to make the case that its performance in the face of the pandemic compared to the weeks of bungled response by the United States is proof that its authoritarian model is more successful. While the U.S. struggles, China has embarked on a vast propaganda war,intent to change its reputation. It has engaged in an aggressive program of assisting other countries in trouble — replacing the United States in a role for which it was once renowned — while at the same time attempting to prove that China was not the cause of the virus’s release. That China cordoned off an entire city of 11 million while America’s politicians squabbled about what to do — doesn’t that show that one-party rule, given unchecked power to do what is needed, is far more effective?

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 already persuaded China that its system is superior to democracy, and now, fortifying that belief, they see the failure of the Trump administration to act, allowing Covid-19 to get out of hand. They are nor probably bemused to see this country adopt China’s centralized authoritarian model; Americans harangue the president to force companies to produce medical equipment on demand, and force the populace to curfew. Some commentators expect China will emerge from the crisis a stronger global power, and that the U.S. may even need China’s help to recover.

China’s Foreign Ministry says it has helped 120 countries, and they are letting the world know it with a brash public relations campaign. They sent over a hundred medical personnel to Italy
Chinese doctors on the way to help Italy.

to help with its viral conflagration. In March, a plane from Shenzhen delivered three million medical masks to Hungary. added the touch that each package bore the words “Hajrá Magyarország!” or “Bring It On, Hungary!” which is a local football cheer as well as, to his delight, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s campaign slogan.

Over two-weeks in March, Chinese government agencies, companies, and charities donated supplies to 89 countries that included more than 26 million face masks and 2.3 million testing kits, or at least that’s what a culling of state media and government and company statements found, as reported by the Journal. China’s government has sent experts and teleconferenced guidance to medical staff in countries across Europe and Asia, taking over the role the U.S. played during the 2014 Ebola epidemic when it assisted West African nations. China’s Foreign Ministry said China was “bearing the responsibility of a great power”.

China’s French embassy went to Twitter to taunt, “When the epidemic started to explode everywhere, it was China who the entire world asked for help, and not the United States, the ‘beacon of democracy,’” the embassy said. “It is China who lent a helping hand to more than 80 nations. Not the United States.”

suppressing truth

To make the case for the China model requires hiding its faults. Xi Jinping’s government is waging a campaign to shift blame for the outbreak away from China, conceal its botched initial response, and cover up what look to be much higher infection and death rates. The first case dates from November 17th, according to government data seen by The South China Post. Chinese officials knew about the new virus in December, but rather than warn its people, it suppressed all information for weeks, refused to allow in teams from America’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), depriving the world of samples for analysis, and for his sounding the alarm that a new virus was abroad, infamously threatened whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang, who would die from the disease and become a national hero to a newly critical public, many of whom have been jailed for speaking out over the Internet. Dr Li was reprimanded by Chinese police, accused of “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the social order,” and was made to admit to “illegal behavior”. Clamping down on vital information lest the Communist Party leadership be embarrassed — General Secretary Xi Jinping first and foremost — has had serious consequences for the rest of the world.

China then began promoting a theory that the virus did not originate in their country, that it was hatched by the U.S. Army during a visit to Wuhan in October when the city hosted the Military World Games. This propaganda ruse, proposed in a

tweet by the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, was then advanced by China’s state television to the public as a serious possibility.

U.s-China animosity peaking

Relations with China are turning poisonous. Their “peaceful rising”, always a mask to conceal its aim of dominance, has been discarded, and the virus has — from the Chinese point of view — given them reason to hate America. They are incensed that we have called covid-19 the “Chinese virus”, not accepting that diseases are often named for their place of origin (viz.: Ebola, Marburg, Zika, Lyme, etc.). “Wuhan virus” would be more appropriate, but not to the Chinese.

American multinationals have long been angered over requirements that they be paired with unwanted Chinese partners with whom they were required to share their technology, that Beijing’s agencies have hacked corporate databases stealing proprietary technology in torrents, that they are now harassed with arbitrary rules aimed at driving them out, that China has run roughshod over World Trade Organization rules that had made trade between nations equitable and fair until China was allowed to join.

China, still carrying the bitterness of its subjugation by the West and 19th Century “gunboat diplomacy”, rationalizes its actions as dispensations owed to them by a West that has always tried to hold them back. U.S. companies, always focused on short-term profits and paying little heed to the damage they were doing to their future — the CEO of the moment would be rich and gone by then — are now paying the price of technology transfer as they see Chinese companies, nurtured by American technology, overtake them.

With the current U.S. administration, animosity has intensified. Trump first rudely withdrew from the Paris climate accord that Obama and Xi had signed, then erected tariff walls against Chinese goods and waged a campaign to block a major Chinese company, Huawei, from installing its equipment around the world out of suspicion that it is an espionage arm of the Chinese military. With the onset of coronavirus, he barred the entry of China nationals into the United States, which apparently incensed the Chinese, and most recently the two countries have engaged in a tit for tat expulsion of the other country’s journalists.

The U.S. view is that it has raised China to an unheard of level of prosperity by importing enormous quantities of Chinese manufacture at the expense of millions of jobs exported to China. Chinese officials answer that American companies have made fortunes selling in the Chinese market and it is America’s failing to educate its own workers that has allowed the yawning chasm of income and wealth inequality, and it is wrong to scapegoat China as the villain. Officials and scholars in Beijing no longer trouble to hide their scorn for an America they view as exhausted and mired in feuding factions.

point counterpoint

“The Chinese Communist Party poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated”. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo could not have been more blunt. China may choose this moment to declare itself as the world’s new hegemon, but it will have a tough time selling its societal model to anyone other than the growing club of dictators and autocrats around the globe. China under Xi has become an increasingly closed world that censors the Internet, polices social media, arrests people who criticize the Party, and watches everyone’s every move. Surveillance cameras are everywhere (but so are they in London), with facial recognition software capable of identifying anyone who dares to cross that street against a red light — that is, if the cameras can see through the fog of pollution from coal-generated electricity that is suffocating its cities. Hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year are attributable to air and water pollution. To keep everyone in line, the country is adopting a social rating scheme by which everyone’s actions are graded. Too many demerits and you will be denied the right to travel or get a job. It is East Berlin’s Stasi on high-tech steroids.

Under Mr. Xi, China is also a nation retreating from the market-oriented economy that brought it such phenomenal growth. In the wake of the coronavirus shutdowns, privately-owned manufacturers are drawing the short straw when seeking loans to restore production. In contrast, some 95% of the 20,000-or-so industrial companies under the control of the central government have received the funding needed to crank up production — including millions of face masks for export. State-owned companies can more readily be told what to do. An official from the regulator that oversees state-controlled firms said, “It’s like in a battlefield, and state-owned enterprises are the ones who can act fast and decisively”. Xi is using state control to produce “national champion” companies in industries favored by the government such as semi-conductors, 5G communications, artificial intelligence in a quest to dominate these fields worldwide. State planning of industries is anathema to the West’s capitalism model of freely-chosen enterprise, but the West, which abjures industrial policies that aid key industries, could find itself left in the dust.

Only the United States has stood in the way of China achieving its grand ambition, and now, suddenly, the U.S. is hobbled and brought low, its economy shattered and reeling in debt. How bold is it likely to be if China decides this is the moment to challenge U.S. warships plying the South China Sea to make the point of freedom of navigation? How likely that the U.S.will honor its pledge to defend Taiwan if China decides it’s time to move against the island? Aren’t the Chinese now thinking that America will shrink from a challenge and cede the Pacific? That will be the moment the global balance of power shifts forever.

Apr 11 2020 | Posted in World | Read More »

“It’s Our Stockpile. It’s Not for the States”, Says Kushner

As the first week of April ended, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has apparently added medical supply logistics to his vast portfolio, announced that the Trump administration has made off with the Strategic National Stockpile as its own:

“[T]he notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

The country is its 50 states, DC, and territories. When was the stockpile “not supposed” to be for the states? Whom, now, is the stockpile for? Who is “our”?

This president has shown a stunning attitude toward the states grappling with the coronavirus — and before it is predicted to become far worse. He has shown outspoken skepticism about the states’ estimates of what they will need. What does he plan to do with “our” — now his — stockpile. Is he planning magnanimous gifts to other countries at cost to our own? Does he want to abandon this country and compete with the largess of China’s headman, Xi Jinping, who is waging a public relations campaign to win the world to his side (see “China’s moment” story) by helping other nations.

The president has devised a theory that the stockpile is not meant to protect the country in accordance with the federal government’s primary role. His fellow Republicans consider the government’s job to be little other than defense. That’s what the federal Health and Human Services website said in an archive search by the Associated Press:

The “Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out. When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency”.

That mission has since vanished from the agency’s website which now says
the stockpile is only to be a short-term backup for states, filling in only when they run out. All 50 states, always lacking of money, are to build their own stockpiles, each vast enough to cope with a pandemic, apparently.

This is the culmination of what Trump has been hinting, that it is up to the states to grapple with a national emergency on their own. Washington is meant to play more of a supporting role.

diy

As this is written, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo reports that China is about to deliver 1,000 ventilators to his state that the governor or his aides had to seek out and order direct, given Trump’s hoarding. Oregon volunteered to send 140 ventilators to a desperate New York City. The owner of the New England Patriots loaned the team plane to the state of Massachusetts to pick up over a million masks from China. Russia has sent medical equipment to the U.S. Canada is shipping gloves and testing kits. But Trump has said he’d prevent the export of N95 protective masks to Canada and other nations. Even if eventually we have surplus?

The president said he’d like to hear a more resounding “thank you” from Cuomo for providing medical supplies and added hospital capacity as if these are gifts from Trump himself . “We have given the governor of New York more than anybody has ever been given in a long time,” he said at a news conference. Well, yes! It’s a pandemic! He doesn’t realize that it is his job to assess what each state needs and get it done as best possible with no thanks due. It’s defense of the nation.

lock them up!

Behind all this seems to be the aphorism that “a thief thinks everyone is a thief”, revealing how Trump thinks. Governors dealing with hot spots in their state, most notably Cuomo, needing protective gear for medical personnel and ventilators for the coming onslaught of patients, have been pleading with the federal government for help. Odd that Trump, who professes wealth in the billions of dollars, has trouble grasping quantities in thousands that governors are requesting. He hears such numbers and believes that “something is going on”, airing his suspicions more than once — and in public. On March 26th he said,

“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be. I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go into major hospital, sometimes they’ll have two ventilators, and now all of a sudden they’re saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators…and you know they’d say, like Governor Cuomo and others, they’d say, ‘we want 30,000 of them’ — 30,000! Think of this. You go to a hospital. They’ll have one in a hospital and now all of a sudden everybody’s asking for these vast numbers.”

At a subsequent briefing, “PBS NewsHour” reporter Yamiche Alcindor, whose digging for facts Trump has called “nasty”, brought this up:
Alcindor: “You’ve said repeatedly that you think that some of the equipment that governors are requesting, they don’t actually need. You said New York might not need 30,000″.
Trump: “I didn’t say that.”
Alcindor: “You said it on Sean Hannity’s Fox News.”
Trump: “I didn’t say — come on.”
He did say that.

A few days later — March 29th — in his daily Rose Garden briefing, he went one worse, accusing hospital personnel — those unbelievably courageous people who are risking their lives in the midst of horror — of theft:

“They’ve been delivering for years 10, 20 thousand masks. OK, it’s a New York hospital. It’s packed all the time. How do you go from 10 to 20 to 300,000 — 10 to 20 thousand masks to… three…hundred…thousand!, even though this is different. Somethin’s goin’ on, and you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door?…I would like them to check that because I hear stories like that all the time… We’re delivering millions and millions of products and all we do is hear can you get some more. So I think people should check that because there’s something going on. I don’t think it’s hoarding. I think it’s maybe worse than hoarding.”

Mr. Trump seems strangely detached from the states, the United States, over which he presides, as if they don’t belong here and should take their problems elsewhere. “Some of these governors take, take, take and then they complain,” Trump groused to Sean Hannity on Fox News. As for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, “All she does is sit there and blame the federal government”. Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee, who has so far successfully contained the nation’s first outbreak, “should be doing more, he’s always complaining”, says Trump. Like Cuomo, both are Democrats. “You know, we don’t like to see the complaints”, Trump said. He wants governors “to be appreciative” of the federal government’s efforts because “we have done a hell of a job.”

Not according to governors. They made clear in a conference call with Trump that the federal government isn’t doing enough. “We are way behind the curve on test kits,” Inslee said, speaking for all on the call. The president doesn’t seem to know that by common consensus — and the fact that he is Commander in Chief — that the federal government’s primary job is to protect the country — a country consisting of states — in time of war. Trump declares himself a wartime president but hasn’t yet realized that we are at war with a deadly invader.

Apr 7 2020 | Posted in Governance | Read More »