Friday, 3.27.2020 Check In

I'm behind on a long piece I'm working on related to COVID-19, our national readiness for a pandemic, and the half century fight which has created the state of affairs which amounts to unreadiness. A few standard life distractions have come along over this past week which took some hours which would have otherwise been used for that piece. A few of them were welcome, keeping in touch with long time friends, helping some new ones with being able to keep their sanity in what looks like a long term self quarantine. A few of them were of the variety of a useless self indulgence, which didn't even have the pay off of being particularly enjoyable, like too much time on Facebook and Twitter.

This morning though, I'm distracted by a number. 8,175,000. If we take the estimated number of people in the country, 327 million, and we multiply it by 2.5%, the result is eight million one hundred seventy five thousand. It's the roughly estimated number of people who would die as a result of coronavirus, calculated by the estimated mortality rate for the virus by itself. Letting the majority of the country contract the virus at the same time is the decision to sacrifice over 8 million people, in order to attempt to insure the economy is running in a way very similar to the way it did before COVID-19 made an appearance.

There is currently a push from conservatives to "get people back to work," even as the exponential spread of COVID-19 has pushed the US past every other nation in recorded cases, while the majority of the country is engaging in self quarantine and social distancing. Many hospitals have already run into a shortfall in necessary protective supplies for health care workers and treatment necessities for patients. One other major difference here being that we're seeing cases in a number of different regions in the nation, and the Chinese were able to keep their outbreak limited to one region. China hasn't had a nationwide outbreak. We're looking very much like that is going to be the case here, and this detail does matter.

I don't say this to alarm anyone. I'm not sure anything I might say, if I'm attempting to be truthful, would be more alarming than what public health officials and doctors in a number of major cities are saying. What I am saying is that there's a push from a frightening number of leading conservatives and conservative elected officials to threaten the lives of over 8 million people in order to preserve the stock market. Understand, a majority of the problems they are claiming to contemplate, including the government not having enough revenue as payroll taxes disappear, along with a number of other revenue sources related to commerce could be solved very quickly, and it would take one thing which a majority of Americans have long supported: taxing billionaires.

While Jeff Bezos begs the public to crowd fund so the employees of his companies to have their needs met, as he is sitting on a the world's largest pile of money like some kind of humanoid dragon, it's being suggested that over 8 million lives are worth sacrificing, instead of taxing billionaires.

The rationale being put forward for this, that people should believe it some patriotic act to die for the "good of the economy" and that it's more than likely going to be seniors and the elderly who will die from COVID-19, should be chilling. This should cause those of us who are considered "average" or "ordinary" "everyday" people to feel a sense of revulsion to our core. It is, exactly the variety of argument used during The Third Reich to make it acceptable to "average" and "ordinary" Germans to see the disabled, mentally ill and otherwise "unproductive" or "burdensome" (who were, let's not forget, preventing Germany from being strong and "great again") to be sent off to concentration camps, along with Jews and gays, who had been branded as undermining the Aryan race and German moral character. Nazis demonized Jews. They used a utilitarian argument to send many, many others into their industrialized genocide machine in service of returning Germany to a glorious existence which only existed in the mind of Germans. It's something which has been documented in every ardently factual accounting of the rise of The Third Reich. Now they're essentially making the argument which says seniors are expendable, and can be sacrificed for the good of "becoming great again," or "getting back to normal," depending on which variety of fascist thought they promote.

Let's also be clear about how much of the leadership of the conservative movement are themselves seniors. Nearly all of it's political leadership on the national level, and the majority of it on the state level, as well as a not insignificant percentage of it's academic and media leadership. Does anyone believe the leadership of the conservative movement think for a second they are going to be sacrificing their own "for the good of the economy"? No. They believe, as history has proven true thus far, being of a sufficient economic and political class will insure them the absolute best in medical care, and early detection.

In the new "COVID-19 stimulus bill" written as a relief measure, Congress has agreed to $500 billion in corporate subsidies. The Trump administration pulled out of a $1 billion deal to get ventilators made in a joint venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems, because it "cost too much." This would have added a badly needed 80,000 ventilators to the national supply. New York alone needs between 30,000 and 40,000, though the 70 year old adolescent who happens to be president is acting like he comprehend it.

$500 billion to stabilize Wall Street, but 1/500 of that isn't worth helping to save thousands of lives.

The speed with which this has spread through the conservative movement shouldn't be shocking, but it is. It's the kind of fascist creep anyone whose been at all engaged with anti-fascist politics in the last five years has been worried about. The shock comes from how openly it's being embraced, and it's embrace coming from the fear being stirred up as the same arrogant fascist instincts are responsible have been what kept us from being prepared for the thing we now fear.

It's frightening to see how quickly so many can be convinced their own lives are worth sacrificing on the altar of values, and the systems those values created, which are plainly failing us at precisely the same time.