Coronavirus deaths in the U.S. have topped 63,000.
Still, Donald J. Trump wants everyone to know he’s made America so great they can still eat hamburgers during a plague. That’s why he signed an executive order this week invoking the Defense Production Act to require meat packing plants to remain open during the pandemic. Even if it costs workers their lives, Eugene Robinson need not remind us:
If you work in a meatpacking plant, by order of President Trump, you are officially considered less essential than the steak you’re cutting up. You have to risk being infected with the deadly coronavirus so that those of us who can stay home — and still get paid — may continue to enjoy our hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken wings.
But he will not require additional safety measures to help guarantee employees will be kept safe, Robinson adds. They’ve not been designated essential, but expendable.
Reuters reported Thursday night that a sixth employee has died of COVID-19 at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado where “in a number of days” cases have more than doubled.
As if the plague were not nightmarish enough, the “American carnage” inaugural address, the “weird shit” speech that introduced Trump’s reign, was not a promise to stop it but a pledge to guarantee it. A pledge to ensure in the name of the economy that low-wage men and women would be sacrificed to Moloch to ensure the Übermensch his dainty lifestyle. A pledge to separate migrant children from their parents and to lock them in cages. A pledge to pit one state against another in a mad scramble for life-saving medical supplies. A pledge to target nonwhites for amped-up discrimination. A pledge to allow armed brigands to threaten democratically elected legislators as if this is post-Soviet Russia.
And what of those meat packers (or anyone) who get sick enough to require hospitalization? How great is Trump’s America for them? How great is his promised and undelivered “best health care in the world.”
In the tradition of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, I’m leaving this right here:
Leah Blomberg and Marco Paolone both called an ambulance when their coronavirus symptoms worsened. Both spent time in intensive care, both were unconscious for days, and both were on a ventilator.
They were lucky — they survived a disease which has so far killed more than 230,000 people around the world. But while Blomberg, an American, walked away with medical bills totaling several thousands of dollars, Paolone’s treatment was free. In his home country of Italy, cost isn’t something coronavirus patients need to worry about.
The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing the deep divide between how health care is approached in the US and in Europe. In Italy, like on much of the continent, the system is publicly funded and almost entirely free for anyone who needs it. Meanwhile the United States is the only developed nation without universal health care.”
People do not avoid health care because of cost in Europe,” said Reggie D. Williams II, an international health policy expert at the US-based Commonwealth Fund. “Americans unfortunately face a dual burden of worrying about access to care … and then affordability.”
Americans face a choice this fall. Do we want to continue down this road or and embrace the Hobbesian vision of America toward which the Trump cult (and his Midas cult enablers) propels us with increasing velocity?
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
— Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan” (1651)
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.