When Will People Start Calling It What It Is-- Trump Genocide?

Poof! into thin air- by Nancy Ohanian

There are a lot of ways to interpret the data Worldometers puts out on the pandemic. One that I find useful is to look at daily new cases, which generally track future mortality. Cases per million residents is also important since it's otherwise pointless to compare a state with very few people to a state with many millions of people. But however you look at it, when it comes to U.S. states, the ones that have followed Trump's denialism are generally the ones in the worst shape.

Yesterday, for example, 16 states had more than a thousand new cases. Eleven have Republican governors and of the 5 with Democratic governors, two-- North Carolina and Louisiana-- have Trumpist state legislatures that have interfered with their ability to protect the state from the pandemic.

• Texas +9,750 (15,279 cases per million Texans)
• Florida +9,007 (21,901 cases per million Floridians)
• California +7,878 (12,703 cases per million Californians
• Georgia +4,066 (17,552 cases per million Georgians)
• Arizona +3,212 (23,907 cases per million Arizonans)
• Tennessee +3,088 (15,516 cases per million Tennesseans)
• North Carolina +2,012 (11,691 cases per million North Carolinians)
• Illinois +1,980 (14,214 cases per million Illinoians)
• Alabama +1,961 (17,891 cases per million Alabamans)
• Louisiana +1,799 (25,013 cases per million Lousianans)
• Missouri +1,547 (8,295 cases per million Missourans)
• Ohio +1,531 (7,800 cases per million Buckeyes)
• South Carolina +1,444 (17,289 cases per million South Carolinians)
• Nevada +1,264 (15,612 cases per million Nevadans)
• Maryland +1,169 (14,613 cases per million Marylanders)
• Mississippi +1,168 (19,739 cases per million Mississipans)

Most Americans blame Trump and knee-jerk Trumpist governors, particularly Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Greg Abbott (R-TX), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), Brain Kemp (R-GA) and Bill Lee (R-TN). But there were actual plans-- or semi-plans-- within the Trump White House that could have averted the catastrophe... and were sabotaged because some didn't want to see the catastrophe averted. Huh? Yep... there were some with genocidal thoughts dancing in their twisted brains. On the face, it looks like the person who needs to be tried is Jared Kushner-- and maybe he does; but not by himself.

Kushner headed "a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level," wrote Katherine Eban. He did a terrible job, but it can't all be chalked up to the incompetence that is his trademark.

Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control.

Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group-- working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp-- emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science-- or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”

The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”

But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”

The White House did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request to interview Mr. Kushner or to a detailed list of questions.

This summer has illustrated in devastating detail the human and economic cost of not launching a system of national testing, which most every other industrialized nation has done. South Korea serves as the gold standard, with innovative “phone booth” and drive-through testing sites, results that get returned within 24 hours, and supportive isolation for those who test positive, including food drop-offs.

In the U.S., by contrast, cable news and front pages have been dominated by images of miles-long lines of cars in scorching Arizona and Texas heat, their drivers waiting hours for scarce diagnostic tests, and desperate Sunbelt mayors pleading in vain for federal help to expand testing capacity. In short, a “freaking debacle,” as one top public health expert put it.

We are just weeks away from dangerous and controversial school reopenings and the looming fall flu season, which the aborted plan had accounted for as a critical deadline for establishing a national system for quickly identifying new outbreaks and hot spots.

Without systematic testing, “We might as well put duct tape over our eyes, cotton in our ears, and hide under the bed,” said Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, research director for the Harvard Medical School Program in Global Public Policy.

Though President Trump likes to trumpet America’s sheer number of tests, that metric does not account for the speed of results or the response to them, said Dr. June-Ho Kim, a public health researcher at Ariadne Labs, a collaboration between Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who leads a team studying outlier countries with successful COVID-19 responses. “If you’re pedaling really hard and not going anywhere, it’s all for naught.”

With no bankable national plan, the effort to create one has fallen to a network of high-level civilians and nongovernmental organizations. The most visible effort is led by the Rockefeller Foundation and its soft-spoken president, Dr. Rajiv Shah. Focused and determinedly apolitical, Shah, 47, is now steering a widening and bipartisan coalition that includes three former FDA commissioners, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, a movie star, and 27 American cities, states, and tribal nations, all toward the far-reaching goal of getting to 30 million COVID-19 tests a week by autumn, up from the current rate of roughly 5.5 million a week.

“We know what has to be done: broad and ubiquitous testing tied to broad and effective contact tracing,” until a vaccine can be widely administered, Shah told Vanity Fair. “It takes about five minutes for anyone to understand that is the only path forward to reopening and recovering.” Without that, he said, “Our country is going to be stuck facing a series of rebound epidemics that are highly consequential in a really deleterious way.”

Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article.

Kushner’s brain trust included Adam Boehler, his summer college roommate who now serves as chief executive officer of the newly created U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government development bank that makes loans overseas. Other group members included Nat Turner, the cofounder and CEO of Flatiron Health, which works to improve cancer treatment and research.

A Morgan Stanley banker with no notable health care experience, Jason Yeung took a leave of absence to join the task force. Along the way, the group reached out for advice to billionaires, such as Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.

The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace.

According to one participant, the group did not coordinate its work with a diagnostic-testing team at Health and Human Services, working under Admiral Brett Giroir, who was appointed as the nation’s “testing czar” on March 12. Kushner’s group was “in their own bubble,” said the participant. “Other agencies were in their own bubbles. The circles never overlapped.”

As it evolved, Kushner’s group called on the help of several top diagnostic-testing experts. Together, they worked around the clock, and through a forest of WhatsApp messages. The effort of the White House team was “apolitical,” said the participant, and undertaken “with the nation’s best interests in mind.”

And for all Kushner's tragic flaws, the plan was a good one, with the federal government coordinating distribution of test kits, overseeing a national contact-tracing infrastructure, blowing out contracts with laboratories and incompetent companies that couldn't deliver testing results but, wrote Eban, "the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it-- efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically-- and erroneously, it would turn out-- predicted the virus would soon fade away. Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

Eban wrote that "that logic may have swayed Kushner. Her expert source told her that 'It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out.'" Trump never delivered any part of the plan and instead shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states, abrogating all responsibility and telling each of the 50 states that they were on their own-- "a recipe for disaster," wrote Eban, "not just in Democratic-governed areas but across the country."

Second Spike by Nancy Ohanian

There's no doubt the decision was ultimately made by Trump with the advise of Stephen Miller, his Minister of Genocide. They thought they were smart and that lots of dead folks in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut would be a plus, especially since the pandemic was hitting minority communities hardest. But today, none of those states are being hit with large numbers of new cases or large numbers of new deaths. Trump was probably going to lose reelection anyway but he's going to drag the GOP down with him because of the way they all handled the pandemic, especially in the states where his brain trust thought it wouldn't speed to. And the most new deaths on Thursday and Friday?

• Texas- 617
• Florida- 508
• California- 305
• Arizona- 240
• Georgia- 110
• Mississippi- 100
• South Carolina- 97

Thursday and Friday saw 29 new deaths in Massachusetts, 28 in New York, 31 in New Jersey, 15 in Maryland and 7 in Connecticut. The death rates are rapidly declining in those states-- and rapidly increasing in the 6 Trump states (+ California) above.

Who Gets The Shitty End Of The Stick? Always?

On Friday morning, Karine Jean-Pierre, author and chief public affairs office for MoveOn, tweeted the meme above about the Ahmaud Aubrey scandal. Rev. Jacqui Lewis, one of my colleagues from Vote Common Good wrote she's "sick of writing emails about dead Black people. This week, video footage surfaced of the February 23rd murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The video is horrific, but I put it here because SOMEONE who gets this letter needs to be stunned with the truth of the permanence of White supremacy in this nation. This heinous crime can only be described as a lynching-- two men (and maybe a third?) hunted Ahmaud as he was jogging, and killed him in cold blood."


 

What's even more sickening is that the police simply ignored this horrifying attack until the video was made public. I'm glad to see two men were charged last night, but it should not take more than two months to prosecute grotesque White supremacist violence. I am so tired and heartbroken living in a country where-- again and again-- Black lives are disregarded as if we do not matter. Why does a lynching need to be captured on film to be treated as a crime?

We need a revolution of values in this country, and we need it badly. And I am convinced that there is something happening at the heart of our incredible church that can teach this nation what it means to live as a beloved community. You all give me hope that, someday, Black lives will indeed be treated as if we matter. But until that moment comes, we must continue to cry out for justice until our voices grow hoarse.

Today is Ahmaud's 26th birthday; let's honor his life!!

Those who are more concerned... what do they call it?... Southern Heritage? would rather honor the murderers, Gregory and Travis McMichael. This is real-- from a Facebook group with 37,000 members.

Writing for the Black Agenda Report earlier in the week, Shaun Ossei-Owusu got into the idea of the politics of disposability in the midst of the pandemic. Remember, the African-American infection rate, death rate and unemployment rate are all higher.

When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.

“The people whose disposability is on widest display are those who work in immediate-risk industries: the financially precarious service workers, the health care workers tasked with ‘equity work.’”

In the final chapter, “The Space Traders,” of his 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Persistence of Racism, Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School’s first tenured black professor, described a fictive world eerily similar to the one we know today. Local and federal governments ostensibly had no money. “Decades of conservative, laissez-faire capitalism had emptied the coffers of all but a few of the very rich,” the narrator says. Because of a host of poor choices, the country “was struggling to survive like any third-world nation,” and financial exigencies “curtailed all but the most necessary services.” The parallels are acute: “the environment was in shambles, as reflected by the fact that the sick and elderly had to wear special masks whenever they ventured out-of-doors.”





In the story, English-speaking extraterrestrial beings land on the shores of New Jersey and offer to solve everything: gold to bail out companies, chemicals to unpollute the environment. The country could have this deal for one sweet price: “all the African Americans who lived in the United States.” This was the central, controversial claim in Bell’s science fiction: that white people would sell black people to aliens for the right price. The story concludes with a successful trade. Twenty million black men, women, and children are stripped to just one undergarment, lined up, chained, and whisked away, like many of their ancestors’ centuries before.

In Bells book, ‘Decades of conservative, laissez-faire capitalism had emptied the coffers of all but a few of the very rich.’”

Bell’s story lays bare the politics of disposability. But unlike the cosmos of the Space Traders, the world of coronavirus is not simply black/white. It is white and non-white; poor and not poor; essential and non-essential; white collar and blue collar; Asian and not Asian; undocumented and citizen; able-bodied and sick; young and elderly; first-generation higher ed students and  their wealthier counterparts; the free and imprisoned; celebrities with access to instant testing and plebeians; red states and blue states; and countless other binaries. From these overlapping inequities we get a glimpse of who is disposable: the people who occupy the wrong category. The scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux analyzes this politics in his book Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (2008). “It is a politics in which the unproductive (the poor, weak and racially marginalized) are considered useless and therefore expendable,” he writes-- and “in which entire populations are considered disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”

Tragically, demographic data about COVID-19 deaths are beginning to bear this vision out. On Monday Kaisher Health News reported  that “A Disproportionate Number Of African-Americans Are Dying, But The U.S. Has Been Silent On Race Data.” Seventy percent of those who have died from coronavirus in Chicago are black. Last week saw calls from a range of politicians, journalists, and scholars for more fine-grained data than has been made available thus far. But for many observers, who was being impacted was the first question on their mind. Beyond the latest numbers, we have other data points: history, what is visible from news and experience, and media accounts. These are imperfect, but they supply some information, and the implications are grim.

“A Disproportionate Number Of African-Americans Are Dying, But The U.S. Has Been Silent On Race Data.”

This is certainly not to say-- as some multiracial groups of conspiracy theorists allege-- that there is some sinister grandmaster plot afoot to harm vulnerable populations. In Bell’s allegory intent can often be a sideshow, if not an outright distraction. The truth is more banal: systemic social inequalities have made some groups more vulnerable than others, and the question of intent is irrelevant. As a criminal law professor, I teach my students that intent matters, but in some instances it does not. In this context, malfeasance, misguided policies, and indifference suffice. Moreover, while government is the easy and most identifiable culprit, popular complicity is at play here too, which makes this version of disposability different from Bell’s telling.

The people whose disposability is on widest display are those who work in immediate-risk industries. The financially precarious service workers out with the epidemiological wolves so the rest of society can buy groceries. The health care workers plastered on the news, who labor in a profession that tasks minority and women nurses, physician assistants, and technicians with what sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield calls “equity work” labor that makes health institutions more available to marginalized groups. The homeless population, which was already noticeable in U.S. cities, but is now more conspicuous because of their inability to shelter in place.

Then there are the undocumented agricultural workers in the west and southwest who can’t work on Zoom like their white-collar counterparts and have now become more precious in a country that has insisted on calling them illegal. There are Native Americans-- some of whom have been facing a long-standing water crisis-- who have uniquely high rates of diseases that make COVID-19 more lethal. There the Asian Americans who have been subject to hate crimes since this virus surfaced in the U.S. And there are the residents in poorly serviced public housing projects in places like Chicago, Baltimore, and my native South Bronx, where 2,000 public housing residents woke up to no water during an epidemic that requires vigilant hand washing.

“Systemic social inequalities have made some groups more vulnerable than others, and the question of intent is irrelevant.”

The recent history of other U.S. disasters is also telling. The Chicago  Heatwave of 1995 killed more than 700 people, mostly poor and elderly, and necessitated refrigerated trucks for dead corpses in ways that are similar to New York now. A decade later, Hurricane Katrina took the lives of more than 1,800 people in Louisiana, many of whom were poor and could not leave their homes as advised. Poor people in New York City face the same today: they do not have the benefit of escaping to second homes in Long Island and New England. And then there was Hurricane Maria, which was a little more than eighteen months ago. That disaster, which killed approximately 3,000 people in Puerto Rico, elicited similar criticisms of the federal government’s slow response and accusations that the death count was severely understated. Jason Cortés has described President Trump’s paper-towel-throwing spectacle during his visit to Puerto Rico as “the American commander-in-chief [choosing] to toss disposable paper to disposable people.”




On Palm Sunday, Surgeon General Jerome Adams gave an ominous warning. “This is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly,” he cautioned. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment. Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.” But who exactly will be dispensed with? It certainly won’t be all of us. Collective pronouns-- the “we” and “our” and “us” of public discourse-- are dangerously comforting. They give the impression of equal susceptibility, while celebrities and other prominent figures gain access to testing and top-flight health care. COVID-19 is not discriminatory as a biological matter, but history and available accounts indicate that the epidemiological fallout will be weighty and uneven.

“Collective pronouns-- the ‘we’ and ‘our’ and ‘us’ of public discourse-- are dangerously comforting.”

During the debates about the Affordable Care Act, hysteria emerged around government-run “death panels”: committees of doctors who would ration care and decide who would receive treatment. This alarm ignored the long history of rationing and unequal access to health care-- the subject of Beatrix Hoffman’s book Rights and Rationing in the United States Since 1930 (2012)-- but it echoes legitimate dismay about bureaucrats making decisions about who lives and who dies. People with disabilities, racial minorities, undocumented immigrants, prisoners, and the poor did not figure prominently into the frenzy around death panels, but they have reason to be worried now. The uninsured, elderly, and an ever-growing portion of the middle class should be added to that list.

Social science data has already shown that African Americans are often denigrated, disregarded, and disbelieved by medical professionals when they claim they are in pain. Where will they fit in the treatment queues? Can we rest assured that American doctors will not take a cue from those in Italy, who deprioritized the lives of coronavirus patients who are chronically ill, disabled, or elderly? What about the Latinx folk who constitute a third of uninsured people in the country? Bioethical scenarios usually reserved for grad school seminars are likely to be actualized.

“Doctors in Italy deprioritized the lives of coronavirus patients who are chronically ill, disabled, or elderly.”

Rural whites have been relatively safe from the virus for now (but not its economic impact). Most live in the approximately 1,300 counties that have no confirmed cases and where social distancing is ordinary. But many of these counties are also medical deserts unequipped to handle this virus. If COVID-19 creeps into these locales, as it has in Albany, Georgia, will this group of people-- many of whom perceive themselves to be “strangers in their own land,” as the title of the sociologist Arlie Hochshild’s 2018 book put it-- be disregarded, too? And if the virus does not make its way to rural America, what does that say about the disposability of everyone else?

Bell’s “Space Traders” struck a nerve because it highlighted the vulnerability of an entire class of people. The difference now is that the people being sacrificed extends beyond African Americans, and responsibility can be tethered not only to government but to the private sector, the media, and the parts of the general public. The outcome of this story is uncertain. But when the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Looks like page one of the current Republican Party platform has been leaked; not that we didn't already know by their tweets, their actions, and those little red KKK hats that they brazenly wear right out in the open.

What's a Morally Appropriate Response to Climate Deniers?

A small part of a much larger infographic showing our bright bright technical future. None of this will happen.

by Gaius Publius

What's a morally appropriate response to climate deniers?

What's a morally appropriate response to those who enable mass murder?

This short piece is the start of a much longer consideration of the state of the U.S. at this crossroads moment. It's an odd state. I remember the Y2K explosion of fear and concern, that there may be a global collapse due to computers not having been told that the year portion of a date contains four digits, not just two. Many computers stored the year as two digits, for example, as "68" for 1968. That works until 1999. What would happen when all those computers, if they weren't fixed, rolled the date to January 1, 2000? Would they all be fixed?

Y2K fear was in all the newscasts of the day, and appropriately so. No one knew what would happen, and if the very worst did occur, it could indeed have been a disaster. It wasn't, but we sure heard about it.

When it comes to global warming, however, at the rate we're fixing the problem — which is achingly slow, the slowest rate anyone can manage and still be pretending to care — there will be a global disaster. And yet there's been nary a peep from the media or any public official in position to act effectively.

Newscasters talk about driverless cars in 2030; about cheap, widespread DNA-inspired nanotech in 2033; about designer molecules from "superatoms" in 2036; an unhackable quantum internet; a feast of wonders at the next stage of culture and development. (See graphic at this link for all of these technologies.) And none of that will happen unless the disaster we're headed for is avoided. Any movie set in 2030, that doesn't have global chaos as its backdrop, is set on a planet none of are living on, unless we effectively address global warming now.

If a meteor were approaching the earth, the will of the world would be bent toward salvation. Global warming is that meteor. No one with any power is acting appropriately.

Those with power, of course, are paid not to act. For example:

Entire towns are burning to nothing in California. People are being incinerated alive in their cars attempting to flee. But a majority of Democrats still won’t reject fossil fuel money, and no one has put forward a climate plan that is remotely commensurate with the IPCC findings

— Claire Sandberg (@clairesandberg) November 11, 2018

And those without power — the mass of the public — are encouraged by a well-paid media campaign not to act. Many in that mass, our aggressive climate deniers, are in fact deliberately in the way. Many of those aggressive climate deniers are our sisters, fathers, neighbors, friends, co-workers. What's a morally appropriate response to climate deniers, even among our friends?

Consider this from Eric Anderson, first published at Ian Welsh's excellent site (lightly edited; emphasis added):

Shun the Climate Change Deniers

I have a little boy. He is my first, and most likely, only child — and he is everything to me.

I once thought that I knew what love is. I am still learning that I had no idea I could love anyone so deeply. I would lay my life down for him in a heartbeat, and will viciously attack any who dare threaten it.

There are those that threaten it every day.

Those that, in the past, I have professed to love and who, in turn, profess to love my son:

They are my parents.
They are my older sisters.
They are my Aunt, and my Uncle.

They move their mouths as they profess their love for my son, but I know in my heart that it’s not true. They are lying to both him and themselves.

They are lying because they are climate change deniers.

Because they vote for people, parties, policies and platforms that are actively contributing to the destruction of the planet my son depends on for his future survival. [...]

I ask them, “If there were even the tiniest chance you could be wrong, why would you risk the future of your family?” To which, they consistently reply in some manner of, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m so old I’ll be long gone.” And so, their words of love are hollow. They are selfish. They are hypocrites. They are killers.

They care more about their ideology, than they care for my son. I have to call them what they are.

Therefore, if I continue to profess my love for both them and my son, what does that make me? What does that make the man who professes that he is willing to go to any lengths to try and ensure that his son has a future that doesn’t read like a dystopian novel? A future wherein, my son doesn’t look at me and say “Daddy, why didn’t you do something???”

To do both makes me the hypocrite. But I’m not a hypocrite.

Which is why I have made the decision to shun them all.

They need to feel the repercussions of their actions.

Everyone one of them do. Immediately. There is simply no time to lose. [...]

I exhort you to do the same, if indeed, the love you profess for your children is true.

We all must shun the climate change denying hypocrites that profess to love us from one side of their face, while they sell our future down the road with the other. Enough is enough.

Please think hard about joining me in shunning them all.

"Shun them" means to cut off all social interaction. Remove them completely and totally from your life. Sit shiva for them and declare them dead to you. Shunning is a non-violent act, but a public declaration, and frankly it's the mildest of responses. (For contrast, consider a Jack Reacher response to those who enable what kills.)

Anderson admits the extremity of this act: "I would be lying if I told you this isn’t the most difficult decision of my life."

And yet: If a neighbor cheers a murder as you watch, how should he then be treated? If an aunt cheers an active genocide as you watch, how should she then be treated? What if the genocide included you and your children?

It's the same here. If a person is seduced by Fox News for reasons of hate — the Fox News product is entirely hate, and its viewers watch it just for that — and thus helps choke the life from the species you share, how should that person be treated?

Like a man who verbally backs the wife in a dispute, when you back the husband? Or like an accessory to murder?

Something to think about...

GP
 

Is Genocide Inevitable Under Fascism? Let's Take A Look-See

Herero survivors 

Can you point to Namibia on a map? Señor Trumpanzee couldn't even pronounce it at a meeting with African leaders. But when he was a dumb little Trump, failing all his classes, it was much easier to find Namibia on a map-- because it had a different name, a name with an excellent hint: South West Africa. Presumably even a dumb little Trumpanzee could figure that out on a map. I collected stamps so I was always interested in other countries. Other has ever interested Trump except himself. In 1882 Chancellor Otto von Bismark gave a German merchant "protection" to set up in southwest Africa. Two years later the German flag was flying over the territory. Once diamonds, gold, copper and platinum were discovered, German settlers and military units started moving in in significant numbers. By 1886, Hermann's pappy, Heinrich Ernst Göring, was appointed Commissioner. He created a dual legal system there, one for whites and one for non-whites, leading to clashes and eventually to a series of full scale wars, which became a wars of extermination, also a way for the Germans to grab all the native peoples' land and to use them as slaves (calling them terrorists). The worst of the genocides-- with an actual Vernichtungsbefehl-- an extermination order-- came in 1904 against the Herero people and then the Nama. The Germans developed a string of concentration camps to lock up-- and exterminate-- the natives. The Germans were kicked out of South West Africa in 1915 and fter World War I, it became a protectorate of South Africa, In 1990 an independent country, Namibia, or, as Señor T likes to call it, Nambia.

Yesterday I met a Catholic priest while I was waiting for a prescription to be filled at a Von's. He said he reads DWT but I didn't get the idea that he's progressive. He asked me a really strange question, especially for a man of the cloth. He wanted to know if I thought all of Trump's supporters should be consigned to Hell. I said it wouldn't be fair to punish people who were addicted to drugs or people with really low IQs, pretty typical Trump supporters, but the conscious ones, for sure. I couldn't tell if he agreed with me or not, but he certainly took Hell more literally than I do. I got back to him with a question about the Germans in South West Africa. During the genoicide German researchers back in Berlin wanted dead bodies or just heads to experiment on. Basically they wanted to prove, scientifically, that Africans are inferior beings, Untermenschen. What the Germans did in South West Africa was a precursor to what they did some years later in Europe, particularly to Jews, Roma (gypsies), gays and Russians. But what I asked my new priest friend is if what the German's actually proven was that they themselves are Untermenschen for the way they interacted with other mensche. I couldn't get an answer out of him on that either but he seemed touched when I read him a translation of General Lothar von Trotha's extermination order:

The Herero are no longer German subjects. The Herero people will have to leave the country. If the people refuse I will force them with cannons to do so. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, with or without firearms, with or without cattle, will be shot. I won’t accommodate women and children anymore. I shall drive them back to their people or I shall give the order to shoot at them.

You know how competent the Germans can be. They killed 80% of the Herero, many by shooting them but also many by preventing them from having any access to water, even poisoning wells. Holocaust?

Yesterday, The Times of Israel published a story about the descendants of the murdered Herero are trying to get a formal apology and reparations from Germany.

Germany on Wednesday handed back human remains seized from Namibia a century ago after the slaughter of indigenous people under its colonial rule, but angry descendants slammed Berlin for failing to properly atone for the dark chapter.

Herero chief Vekuii Rukoro, whose ancestors were among the tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people massacred between 1904 and 1908, said the handover ceremony should have taken place not in a Berlin church, but a German government building.

He also accused Berlin of taking too long to formally apologize for what is often called the first genocide of the 20th century.

...Many were murdered by German imperial troops while others, driven into the desert or rounded up in prison camps, died from thirst, hunger and exposure.

Dozens were beheaded after their deaths, their skulls sent to researchers in Germany for discredited “scientific” experiments that purported to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans.

In some instances, captured Herero women were made to boil the decapitated heads and scrape them clean with shards of glass.

Research carried out by German professor Eugen Fischer on the skulls and bones resulted in theories later used by the Nazis to justify the murder of Jews.

When Former Guatemala President Efrain Ríos Montt Gets Out Of Prison, He'll Be 166 Years Old

Reagan supplied the weapons, Rios Montt used them

We've mentioned Ríos Montt before-- first in 2007, when crooked Illinois Republican Congressman Jerry Weller (now retired) married the former dictator's daughter and absconded to Guatemala with all his loot. More recently we looked at Reactionary Mind author Corey Robin's review of a book by Greg Granlin, Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. How, I wondered, could any serious examination of the reactionary mind-- particularly the American reactionary mind-- not deal with the enormity of what was visited (by reactionary minds) on the Mayan native people of Guatemala, the ones whose ancestors had managed to escape being slaughtered in previous centuries by Spanish imperialists? And whose reactionary mind-- albeit an extraordinarily weak one-- would be better to start with than Ronald Reagan's?

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity... totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan’s death in June, it was probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos Montt. After all, it wasn’t Reykjavik. But Reykjavik’s shadow-- or that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall-- does not entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents. While it’s tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders. Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had worked closely with the country’s small but influential Communist Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that 1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform and promised his followers that ‘Cuba will not be Guatemala.’ In 1966, Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the ‘disappearances’ that would come to define the dirty wars of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike, US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote: ‘The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.’ With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end-- in the same place it had begun-- making Guatemala’s the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere’s civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed acts of genocide.

And then there was the report almost exactly a year ago that the ex-Presidente was in custody, along with a This American Life program about one particular Guatemalan massacre. What struck me about it-- aside from the cold blooded and horrific murders of all the women and children-- was the impetus to "let bygones be bygones" and just move on. Oligarchs and ruling elites across the world have seen to it that social orders are organized by, of, and for the one percent. Under those circumstances accountability is almost nonexistent. The U.S. has no moral standing to complain about Syria, I wrote at the time, until Bush and his cronies are hanging or rotting in prison cells. Our entire society is rotting from inside because there is no accountability at the top.

Reagan ally and mass murderer, former Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, now 85, has finally been arrested. Since he was responsible for the brutal deaths of between a hundred and two hundred thousand innocent Mayan Indians, it's nice he's been indicted and is languishing in his mansion under house arrest. But the drumbeat to let bygones be bygones is already sounding and the current fascist in control of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, is carefully weighing his options.

For those not familiar with Ríos Montt, here's the briefest of summaries: In 1951 he attended the U.S. terrorism school in Georgia, School of the Americas, which indoctrinates budding young Latin American fascists and trains them to keep their countrymen down fight Communism. Three years later he was part of the CIA plot to overthrow populist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A religionist fanatic and close associate of both Pat Robertson's and Jerry Falwell's, Ríos Montt preached that a true Christian had the Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other. He soon seized power with the help of the CIA. He immediately targeted labor unions-- literally targeted... and not with Bibles, with the other hand. Tens of thousands of deaths mounted and mounted, mostly of impoverished, maginalized Mayans, and over a million were displaced and forced to live in concentration camps and to work in the fields of Guatemalan land barons, that country's one percent.

This weekend, the American media is reporting-- without much of the grisly background material or the U.S. role-- the guilty verdict in Ríos Montt's genocide trial. I haven't seen many in the mainstream media asking when it will be Dick Cheney's turn or Henry Kissinger's turn.

A Guatemalan court on Friday found Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during one of the bloodiest periods of its long civil war, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Judge Yasmín Barrios sentenced General Ríos Montt, 86, to 80 years in prison. His co-defendant, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, who served as the director of intelligence under the general, was acquitted of the same two charges.

“We are completely convinced of the intent to destroy the Ixil ethnic group,” Judge Barrios said as she read the hourlong summary of the ruling by the three-judge panel. Over five weeks, the tribunal heard more than 100 witnesses, including psychologists, military experts and Maya Ixil Indian survivors who told how General Ríos Montt’s soldiers had killed their families and wiped out their villages.

The judge said that as the commander in chief of Guatemala’s armed forces, the general knew about the systematic massacres of Ixil villagers living in hillside hamlets in El Quiché department and did nothing to stop them or the aerial bombardment of the refugees who had fled to nearby mountains.

The crowd packed into the courtroom was quiet for much of Judge Barrios’s reading. But cries of “Justicia! Justicia!” erupted when she pronounced the lengthy sentence and ordered General Ríos Montt to begin serving it immediately.

As the general tried to walk out a side door, Judge Barrios shouted at him to stay where he was and called for security forces. An hour after the verdict and sentence were read, General Ríos Montt was escorted from the courtroom by a dozen police officers. He said he was ready to go to prison.

How long he will stay there is less clear than the verdict. His lawyers said they would appeal, and injunctions filed during the case still await rulings.

...For international human rights organizations, the trial took on a significance beyond Guatemala’s own history.

Adama Dieng, the United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide, said last month that the case was the first in which a former head of state had been indicted by a national tribunal on charges of genocide.

The “historical precedent,” and especially a guilty verdict, he said, could serve as an example to other countries “that have failed to hold accountable those individuals responsible for serious and massive human rights violations.”

Don't get excited; they're talking about Assad, not Cheney, Bush or Kissinger.

Will Martian Sheen Save Humanity... Well I Mean Rock Varnish, Not To Be Overly Cute

Bamako is the largest city and capital of Mali and Timbuktu is the most famous place in the country. It wouldn't surprise me if Robert Wexler (D-FL), Howard Berman (D-CA), Brad Miller (D-NC), Gary Ackerman (D-NY) or even Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) or Ron Paul (R-TX), all members of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, could tell me where to stay in Bamako and possibly even Timbuktu. But when I was planning a trip deep into the heart of Mali's inaccessible interior, I knew there was only one member of Congress I could turn to for advice on where to stay in Bangiagara and Sangha: Alan Grayson, who isn't even on Foreign Relations but is the most well-traveled member of Congress and one of the most intellectually curious. (He told me no matter where I stayed in either place to bring my own sheets because there would be no escaping the bed bugs. I took his advice.)

Today I was working out an as yet unwritten post on the history of the Hutus and the Tutsis and I recalled learning that the tall, light-skinned Tutsis had moved south into Hutu country in around 1400 and conquered and enslaved the smaller, darker Hutus (who had arrived 300 years earlier and conquered the even smaller Twa pygmies). The Tutsis were the cattle-owning aristocracy and the Hutus were the food growing peasants. My interest was stoked because Christiane Amanpour did a tear-jerking special on the Rwandan genocide yesterday and my sympathy turned to thoughts about not really feeling very sorry for Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy when I read how they were guillotined. Actually, truth be told, I cheered. Didn't feel much sympathy for the Romanovs either. And if I were to read that a bunch of Wall Street Masters of the Universe went to their Maker prematurely... I don't drink but I might make an exception. This line of thought made me start thinking about one of my favorite scenes in a Hemingway book, the one where the people in a small town lock the abusive, oppressive priests in a church-- long the enforcers for the landed aristocracy in the area-- and set it ablaze. But which book? Which town? And the phone rang. It was Grayson. He wasn't sure either, like me figuring it was probably For Whom The Bell Tolls. But he thought I should stick to using A Tale Of Two Cities for my literary analogy.

But he was eager to tell me that there are alternative theories and I should look into it more thoroughly. I knew he had spent some time in Rwanda and, sure enough, he had been to the Kigali Memorial Center, a museum of the genocide. There, they push the theory that Tutsis and Hutus are one big happy genetic family and that the colonials-- they had Germans and then Belgians there-- had created artificial definitions to play the old divide-and-conquer routine. Obviously, this isn't what the congressman had called to talk to me about.

Nor did he know that I've been worried sick over what I'm reading everyday in Thom Hartmann's latest book, Threshold. It was bad enough last week when I found out all the fish will be gone by 2048 but now I'm in the part of the book about air-- and that doesn't look too promising either. Quoting a startling paper, widely considered the "smoking gun" identifying man with global warming, by James Hansen, the top climate scientist for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hartmann paints a very dismal picture of what kind of world we are creating-- just in case that End of Days fairy tale that nuts like Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence, Virginia Foxx, Trent Franks, Heath Shuler, John Boozman, Randy Forbes, Marsha Blackburn and Zach Wamp are always pushing, somehow doesn't turn out to be reality. Some of the paper sounds technical (meaning it involves arithmetic):

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm... If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

You can see why Grayson caught me in a funk. Hartmann rubs it in, by emphasizing that we're "near the point where our use of carbon-based fossil fuels could throw the planet so out of balance that eventually the oceans will heat up to the point that they're uninhabitable for complex current life forms and much of the complex life as we know it will vanish." And some of the stuff Hartmann quotes isn't even that abstract-- like Hansen's conclusion:

Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the ear beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

But Grayson had no way of knowing I was dwelling on any of this stuff. He had just called with some good news, an article he had read in New Scientist that he thought I should take a look at Martian Sheen. It seems to offer a glimmer of hope that if we screw this planet up badly enough, we could just like Michele Bachmann and Dick Cheney and all the conservatives to reap what they've sown and... move the rest of humanity to Mars!

When NASA's Viking landers touched down on Mars, they were looking for signs of life. Instead, all their cameras showed was a dry, dusty-- and entirely barren-- landscape.

Or so it seemed. But what the 1976 Viking mission, and every subsequent one, saw was a scene littered with rocks coated with a dark, highly reflective sheen. That coating looks a lot like a substance known on Earth as "rock varnish," found in arid regions similar to those on Mars. The latest evidence hints that rock varnish is formed by bacteria. Could there be microbes on Mars making such material too?

Rock varnish has long been something of a mystery. It is typically just 1 to 2 micrometres thick, but can take a thousand years or more to grow, making it very hard to discover whether biological or purely chemical processes are responsible. If it is biological, though, the race will be on to discover whether the same thing has happened on Mars-- and whether microbes still live there today.

Future missions will be better equipped for the hunt. The next rover to land on the Red Planet will be NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, due to arrive in 2012. MSL can detect rock varnish, says Roger Wiens, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who will run a new instrument on MSL called a laser-induced breakdown spectrometer. This will fire laser pulses at the rock coatings, and the wavelengths of light emitted as the coating atomises will tell Wiens what elements are present.

NASA is also working with the European Space Agency on the ExoMars programme, which will send two rovers in 2018, in part to hunt for evidence of life on rock surfaces. A subsequent ESA mission, Mars Sample Return-- pencilled in for 2020-- might finally get the definitive answer, as for the first time the mission will bring Mars samples back to Earth.

If the cave varnish and the Mars varnish turn out to be the same as rock varnish, then Mars Sample Return might actually be bringing Martians to Earth.