The Cult Of Ignorance-- Will It Kill Us All?

 

Cult Of Ignorance by Nancy Ohanian

By the end of last week, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. passed 10 million. On Saturday there were 127,167 new cases reported in the U.S., along with 1,030 new deaths. Yesterday 102,726 new cases were reported. There are now over 31,000 cases per million Americans. Anything over 20,000 is a catastrophic out-of-control pandemic. In North Dakota, the most infected place on the planet, one in 10 residents will have been infected with the coronavirus before Trump is expelled from the White House. Some will die; some will recover fully; many will be side-effects for years if not for a lifetime. South Dakota is close behind (62,625 cases per million residents.) 10 other states-- all of which voted for Trump in 2016-- have over 40,000 cases per million residents:

• Iowa- 48,431 cases per million residents
• Wisconsin- 45,928 cases per million residents
• Nebraska- 42,594 cases per million residents
• Mississippi- 42,568 cases per million residents
• Alabama- 41,542 cases per million residents
• Utah- 41,367 cases per million residents
• Tennessee- 41,272 cases per million residents
• Idaho- 40,827 cases per million residents
• Louisiana- 40,432 cases per million residents
• Arkansas- 40,382 cases per million residents

In another couple of days, Florida (39,292 cases per million) will join that exclusive club of contagion. For comparison's sake, France has 29,691 cases per million, Spain has 29,691, the U.K. 17,526, Italy 15,474 and Germany 8,071. Our pals in Asia? Japan has 848 cases per million, South Korea has 537, Hong Kong 716, Thailand 55 and Taiwan 69. China? 60 cases per million residents.

Everyone in Asia is wearing a mask. Everyone in the Dakotas has decided mask-wearing infringes on their liberty. From the beginning I've been saying that somewhere between a million and two million Americans would have to die before Americans either started wearing masks on an Asian level or, started being shot down in the streets for not wearing them and infecting the rest of us. Maybe Pfizer will save us, the way it saved the stock market today. Maybe. This morning's report by Dan Goldberg and Miranda Ollstein for Politico, Pandemic on course to overwhelm U.S. health system before Biden takes office, wasn't exactly sanguine. Hoover left FDR the Great Depression. Trump-- a much worse president than Hoover-- is leaving Biden a depression and an out of control pandemic with a "surging coronavirus outbreak on pace to hit nearly 1 million new cases a week by the end of the year."

Congress, still feeling reverberations from the election, may opt to simply run out the clock on its legislative year. Meanwhile, the virus is smashing records for new cases and hospitalizations as cold weather drives gatherings indoors and people make travel plans for the approaching holidays.

“If you want to have a better 2021, then maybe the rest of 2020 needs to be an investment in driving the virus down,” said Cyrus Shahpar, a former emergency response leader at the CDC who now leads the outbreak tracker Covid Exit Strategy. “Otherwise we’re looking at thousands and thousands of deaths this winter.”

The country’s health care system is already buckling under the load of the resurgent outbreak that’s approaching 10 million cases nationwide. The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 has spiked to 56,000, up from 33,000 one month ago. In many areas of the country, shortages of ICU beds and staff are leaving patients piled up in emergency rooms. And nearly 1,100 people died on Saturday alone, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

“That’s three jetliners full of people crashing and dying,” said David Eisenman, director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. “And we will do that every day and then it will get more and more.”

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts 370,000 Americans will be dead by Inauguration Day, exactly one year after the first U.S. case of Covid-19 was reported. Nearly 238,000 have already died.

...Some governors in the Northeast, which was hit hard early in the pandemic, are imposing new restrictions. In the last week, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island activated nightly stay-at-home orders and ordered businesses to close by 10 p.m. And Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills on Thursday ordered everyone to wear a mask in public, even if they can maintain social distance.

But in the Dakotas and other states where the virus is raging, governors are resisting calls from health experts to mandate masks and restrict gatherings. On Sunday morning, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem incorrectly attributed her state's huge surge in cases to an increase in testing and praised Trump's approach of giving her the "flexibility to do the right thing." The state has no mask mandate.

And unlike earlier waves in the spring and summer that were confined to a handful of states or regions, the case numbers are now surging everywhere.

In New Mexico, the number of people in the hospital has nearly doubled in just the last two weeks and state officials said Thursday that they expect to run out of general hospital beds in a matter of days... Minnesota officials said last week that ICU beds in the Twin Cities metro area were 98 percent full, and in El Paso, Texas, the county morgue bought another refrigerated trailer to deal with the swelling body count.

An “ensemble” forecast used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-- based on the output of several independent models-- projects that the country could see as many as 11,000 deaths and 960,000 cases per week by the end of the month. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory suggest that the U.S. will record another 6 million infections and 45,000 deaths over the next six weeks, while a team at Cal Tech predicts roughly 1,000 people will die of Covid-19 every day this month-- with more than 260,000 dead by Thanksgiving. The University of Washington model forecasts 259,000 Americans dead by Thanksgiving and 313,000 dead by Christmas.

Eisenman predicted that by January, the United States could see infection rates as high as those seen during the darkest days of the pandemic in Europe-- 200,000 new cases per day.

“Going into Thanksgiving people are going to start to see family and get together indoors,” he said. “Then the cases will spread from that and then five weeks later we have another set of holidays and people will gather then and by January, we will be exploding with cases.”

A report by Sarah Mervosh, Mitch Smith and Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio in the NY Times this morning indicated much the same: "hospitalizations have nearly doubled since mid-September, and deaths are slowly increasing again." A pandemic response expert in hard-hit South Carolina, Dr. Krutika Kuppalli: "We are in a terrifying place. All I see is cases continuing to go up, unless we do something." The Trump regime and their Republican allies in Congress have washed their hands of doing anything to fight the pandemic. In fact, the GOP would rather fight the Democrats trying to respond to it. The Republicans in Congress are like snipers taking aim at firefighters trying to put out a 10-alarm blaze.

Politicians Have Taken A Huge Amount In Legalized Bribes To Allow This Pfizer-Allergen Inversion To Happen

Earlier today we looked at a proposition about Republicans enthusiastically backing Bernie Sanders for president, as so many of them in Vermont have backed him for Senate. Normally the number of votes down-ticket diminishes. So in 2012 Obama was at the top of the ticket in Vermont and he did incredibly well. He beat Romney almost everywhere and took 199,259 votes (67%) to Romney's 92,700 (31%). That same day Peter Shumlin was reelected governor and considerably fewer people voted, especially Democrats. Schumlin got 170,767 votes (58%) to Republican Randy Brock's 110,953 (38%).

But Bernie was also up for reelection that day-- and none of the normal political rules applied. He got more votes and a greater percentage of votes than Shumlin and Obama-- 208,253 (71%) to Republican John MacGovern's 72,629 (25%). Plenty of ticket-splitting for Bernie from Republicans who had voted for Brock and for Romney. Bernie won every single constituency in the state. Obama lost a couple and Shumlin lost a couple dozen. An exit poll showed that 27% of Republicans voted for Bernie. (By way of comparison, 11% of Republicans voted for Obama and 12% of them voted for Shumlin.)

In the earlier post Elizabeth Coggins, a professor at Colorado College who studies American political psychology and ideological identification, was quoted saying that "Sanders has focused primarily on economic issues on which Americans are not divided. There is a strong consensus in agreement with Sanders on many of his core ideas, and his rhetoric has been largely centered on these sorts of issues." I had that in mind today when I read Bernie's statement about the $160 billion Pfizer and Allergen merger announcement, the largest corporate inversion ever, meant to allow Pfizer to get away without paying U.S. taxes. Bernie immediately thundered that "the Pfizer-Allergen merger would be a disaster for American consumers who already pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. It also would allow another major American corporation to hide its profits overseas. The Obama administration has the authority to stop this merger, and it should exercise that authority. Congress also must pass real tax reform that demands that profittable corporations pay their fair share of taxes." American as apple pie, right? No reason for any Republican to turn away from Bernie on that one, correct?

But congressional conservatives, particularly Republicans, who take immense amounts of legalized bribes from corporations and have steadfastly blocked legislation on inversions, see the problem differently, claiming that an across the board corporate tax rate decrease would de-incentivize corporations to move overseas. Yesterday's New York Times Editorial Board called the merger exactly what it is: "a tax-dodging maneuver that enriches shareholders and executives while shortchanging the public and robbing the Treasury of money that would pay for a host of government programs-- including education, scientific research and other services that also benefit corporations."

Pfizer, with a market value of nearly $200 billion, will be acquired by the smaller Allergan, which is run from New Jersey but technically headquartered in Ireland. This will allow Pfizer, which is based in New York, to pass itself off as Irish as well. Once the paper shuffling is complete, much if not most of Pfizer’s earnings-- including those that are made in the United States-- will be taxed at global tax rates that are generally lower than American tax rates.

...[I]nverted companies continue to enjoy the protection of patent laws in the United States, as well as their connections, official and unofficial, with federal research agencies-- all of which are crucial to drug-company profits. Contrary to popular belief, much high-risk, pathbreaking research and development can be traced not to the big drug companies but to taxpayer-funded research at the National Institutes of Health.

Traditionally, corporate taxation was a way to repay the public for benefits companies received from federal support. But in recent decades, corporate taxes as a share of federal revenue have shriveled. Inversions will only worsen that trend, effectively bolstering corporate profits at the expense of the public.

...It is not hard to write legislation and draw up rules outlawing inversions, and bills currently in Congress could put a stop to them quickly. What is lacking is political will to tell powerful corporate interests to stop. The Treasury Department under President Obama has issued rules to curb the practice. But the Pfizer and Allergan hookup is expected to get around these constraints. The administration could do more, but even more aggressive executive action would not be as effective as robust legislation.

Reincorporating abroad is a sophisticated variation on the old practice of avoiding corporate taxes by renting a post office box in the Caribbean and calling it corporate headquarters. Congress put a stop to those tactics in 2004. It is past time to shut down inversions as well.

Several weeks ago one of the most progressive Members of the House, Madison, Wisconsin's Mark Pocan introduced H.R. 3935, the Putting America First Corporate Tax Act, which was immediately referred to the Chamber of Commerce-controlled House Ways and Means Committee for unceremonious burial, just as Jan Schakowsky's earlier H.R. 1790, the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, was buried in the same ultra corrupt committee, then chaired by Paul Ryan, who has taken $650,959 from Big Pharma-- nearly half of which came after he because chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. Aside from Ryan, who has skipped off to be Speaker where he will get even bigger bribes from corporations intent on cheating America, these are the major players in killing the corporate inversion legislation; the money next to their names is how much they took from Big Pharma last cycle alone:

• Pat Tiberi (R-OH)- $141,150
• Charles "Lord Charles" Boustany (R-LA)- $85,800
• Peter Roskam (R-IL)- $168,050
• Kevin Brady (R-TX)- $124,332
• Erik Paulsen (R-MN)- $239,179
• Devin Nunes (R-CA)- $105,000
• Tom Price (R-GA)- $104,600
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)- $191,400
• Joe Crowley (New Dem-NY)- $116,900

Crowley was also the crook who took the biggest legalistic bribes from Pfizer last cycle, $28,200, even more than notoriously corrupt Speaker John Boehner ($17,900). This year the chair of Pfizer's corrupt PAC, lobbyist Sally Susman is a "Hillblazer" (which means she has committed to raising at least $100,000 for Hillary Clinton's presidential run). Hillary's response to Bernie's denunciation of the merger was, as always, "me too, me too." Trump's following Bernie on this too, denouncing the merger but getting all the details wrong, as usual. "The fact that Pfizer is leaving our country with a tremendous loss of jobs is disgusting... Our politicians should be ashamed." Among the products Pfizer makes-- in case you're thinking about not doing business with them anymore-- are Advil, Lipitor, Viagra, Preparation H, Lyrica (which rarely works anyway and should be avoided), Zoloft, Chantix, Diflucan, Xanax, Celebrex, Zithromax and Prevnar. Some of the better known products Allergen makes are Botox, Linzess, and Restasis.