Chris Hedges's Blog, page 2

Trump Uses Coronavirus to Spread Racism

There is nothing like a global pandemic to unleash the forces of racism in society. In the United States, with a virulently racist administration already in power before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we might not even notice the offensive rhetoric and policy emanating from President Donald Trump, given how much he has normalized xenophobia. But it bears identifying, for if ever there was a need for solidarity among Americans, it is now. 

For a while, Trump seemed unsure of what to do as news of the virus became more serious. He was deeply worried about the economic impact of the virus on his reelection bid. He then found his footing—on the racist ground where he is most comfortable—now routinely calling the novel coronavirus strain “the Chinese virus.” In one of his many online rants, he cast himself like the leader of a cult might do, as the savior of those Americans deeply impacted by the virus, saying, “For the people that are now out of work because of the important and necessary containment policies, for instance, the shutting down of hotels, bars and restaurants, money will soon be coming to you.” He then implied that China was to blame, saying, “The onslaught of the Chinese Virus [sic] is not your fault!”

When confronted by reporters at a White House press briefing, Trump dug his heels in, saying that, “China was putting out information which was false that our military gave this to them,” and therefore, “rather than having an argument I said I have to call it where it came from. So I think it’s a very accurate term.” He repeated this claim on Wednesday when a reporter confronted him asking, “why do you keep using this [term], a lot of people say it’s racist.” Trump responded saying, “It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China. It comes from China.” The video clip of his words is worth watching just to see how he enunciates the word “China” repeatedly, as though it were a dirty word.

Trump is implying that he’s simply engaging in a tit-for-tat exercise (hardly an appropriate approach for a head-of-state) because a Chinese media outlet apparently claimed the U.S. military had created the virus as a biochemical weapon. But Trump failed to mention that right-wing sources in the U.S. were also promoting similarly conspiratorial claims of Chinese scientists creating the virus in a lab.

It’s no coincidence that Trump’s racist language around the coronavirus pandemic is being echoed in his favorite media outlet, Fox News. Tucker Carlson has ranted and raved in his insistence that the virus ought to be labeled as originating from China. Carlson has implied that there has been some sort of malicious intent toward Americans in particular, saying, “our country’’ greatest rival is denying reality about a plague they unleashed on the world and is then openly threatening to kill American citizens in our country.”

The xenophobic associations from Trump and Fox News are already having a racist impact. CBS News’ White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, a Chinese-born American, said on Twitter, “This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face. It makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.” A Chinese American student told the New York Times how deeply it impacted her to hear racist statements made by her fellow students after the coronavirus made the news. She said, “young Asian Americans like me are feeling hate infect every part of our lives.” There have been many documented cases of virus-related racist incidents against Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. and this is only likely to worsen as Trump continues referring to coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.”

There is a clear reason why Trump is invoking racism in the face of an infectious virus that threatens us all: It is so he can deflect the blame for its spread. After months of denying the seriousness of the coronavirus and failing to take quick and early action on ensuring widespread testing, Trump is now claiming, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” What better way to distract Americans from his own failure and dangerous incompetence than to scapegoat a non-white community? 

This is a script he has used many times before, most notably in his 2016 campaign. Trump’s speeches repeatedly zeroed in on immigrants as the problem, calling Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals” and exhorting his supporters to elect him so he could save them from the economic ruin they have suffered.

Today the pandemic offers Trump the cover to discriminate against multiple groups. His administration has wasted no time in taking advantage of a global move to shut down borders in order to slow the spread of the virus. This week Trump’s government will cite the coronavirus as the basis for a project he has ardently and repeatedly sought to fulfill: shutting down the U.S. border with Mexico. Currently, there are far more cases of the coronavirus in Canada (470) than there are in Mexico (82) and although there is now a northern border closure, the Trump administration has taken pains to ensure that it is “temporary” and “by mutual consent.” In fact, the U.S. is a greater threat to both its neighbors with cases numbering in the thousands. Although Europe has been hard hit by the virus, Trump did not use racist rhetoric in making his decision for a temporary travel ban to and from Europe. He did not say, “We need to stop Italians and Spaniards from bringing their disease to American shores and threatening our people and our economy.”

Officers with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency—conducting themselves as Trump’s de facto anti-immigrant militia—have continued their operations in spite of the calls for “social distancing,” making a mass arrest of undocumented immigrants in California just one day after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced strict guidelines related to the virus. David Marin, the director of Enforcement and Removal Operations for ICE in Los Angeles told the L.A. Times, “We’re out here trying to protect the public by getting these criminal aliens off the street and out of our communities.” To Marin, the question of what would happen to the families of immigrants he arrested was simply irrelevant, raising the question of who exactly he and other ICE agents are protecting. 

We’ve been here many times before. Writing in Quartz, William Thomson explained, “This pattern of conflating race with a specific disease is a constant thread in American history. To name a few, Irish immigrants were associated with cholera epidemics in the 1830s, and some venereal diseases like syphilis were mislabeled as a ‘black disease,’ leading to the horrific and inhumane treatment of African American men during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.”

What can actually combat the spread of the deadly coronavirus is collaboration, cooperation and solidarity. The virus does not discriminate based on skin color. It has impacted residents of dozens of nations across every continent except Antarctica. Trump clearly wants us to blame anybody but himself for the lightning speed with which the disease is moving through the nation. If we are to survive this nightmare, our best hope is to trust one another, working to end the spread of both the deadly virus and the racist rhetoric.

Here’s Why Americans Need a Basic Income During the Coronavirus Outbreak

As the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic escalates, support is growing for immediate economic relief for the millions of Americans whose lives have been upended. Utah Senator Mitt Romney has proposed sending a one-time infusion of $1,000 to every American adult during the crisis, while Trump Administration officials are also weighing the idea of direct cash payments to Americans.

While one-time “stimulus checks” are an option— as they were in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—many Americans are going to need longer-term support to weather the coming financial storm. Rather than a single shot of cash, struggling Americans will need an “emergency basic income”—i.e. no-strings-attached, continuing cash support, similar to what former presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed on the campaign trail.

At the time of his campaign, Yang was pushing for a “universal basic income”– a $1,000 per month entitlement for every American. The idea was expensive, impractical. and rife with the potential for unintended consequences. But now, Yang’s original conception, with some important variations, could save millions of Americans from financial catastrophe. That helps explain why its finding new life from proponents l New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Yang himself). Yet UBI need not be adopted in its original form to do a lot of good; it need not be as generous as an indefinite entitlement of $1,000 a month, nor does it need to be universal. At least not yet.

Congress should begin with a targeted EBI benefit, aimed especially at lower-wage workers in the financially hemorrhaging hospitality, food service, and entertainment industries. Full-time, hourly workers in these sectors should receive at at least six months of emergency aid—at say, $500 a month.

This targeted relief to the Americans in greatest distress would be more likely to get through Congress quickly, without a detour into the ideological logjams that have plagued the original debate over UBI. Over time, Congress can consider expanding relief for longer periods and to more Americans as the fallout ripples through the economy.

As Americans hunker down in their homes to avoid the risk of contagion, restaurants, bars, hotels, and convention centers have been the first to suffer the fallout. In the Washington, D.C. area, for instance, union official John Boardman told the local ABC affiliate that 75 percent of the region’s hospitality workers are already idled, and that the share of workers on the sidelines could rise to 90 percent within a week.

Taken to a national scale, this means millions of Americans are already out of work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that 13.3 million Americans work in food service, including as cooks, bartenders, waitstaff, dishwashers, and other occupations; more than 3 million work as janitors, maids, and housecleaners; and another 500,000 work as ticket takers, ushers, and amusement park attendants. And as Americans stop shopping, getting haircuts, or going to the gym, as more restrictions take hold, that means a heavy financial hit for the 400,000 Americans who work as hairdressers and barbers; the more than 300,000 who work as fitness trainers; and the 4.5 million who work in retail sales.

Few of these workers can afford to go an extended period of time without pay. Food service workers make an average of $25,580 a year, while hairdressers earn an average of $30,190, according to BLS. Maids and house cleaners earn $25,520 on average, while “amusement and recreation attendants” make $23,460. In 2020, the federal poverty line for a family of three is $21,720.

The nonprofit group Prosperity Now finds that more than a third of U.S. households are “liquid asset poor,” meaning they don’t have enough the cash on hand to meet three months of household expenses. Among households of color, who are also disproportionately represented in lower-wage occupations, the liquid poverty rate is as high as 53 percent.

Providing these workers with a stable source of income in the medium-term could help them keep to paying the rent and putting food on the table. It could help stave off the direst hardships of eviction and hunger and help the vulnerable avoid turning to payday lenders, pawnshops, and other predatory financial providers who might be all too eager to profit from this crisis.

EBI would also be more immediate than simply expanding unemployment insurance benefits, as the coronavirus relief package recently passed by the House would do. While the $1 billion for unemployment benefits included in that bill is a vital step, many workers are still likely to miss out if they are temporarily idled. Most state unemployment insurance programs require applicants to prove they are looking for work, a requirement that makes little sense when entire industries have simply evaporated for the time being. Workers also need to be unemployed to be eligible, versus simply furloughed from their jobs. Plus, they must file for new benefits weekly—a bureaucratic detail that makes sense in normal circumstances but is a needless barrier to relief today. And while the proposed relief would provide $500 million in emergency grant aid to states, those states must then show a 10 percent increase in unemployment to be eligible for these dollars—a seemingly high bar that could take some time to reach. In short, these programs and proposals do not meet the demands of an unprecedented pandemic. We will need something more.

The good news is that the Administration’s embrace of direct aid means it might be acknowledging the flaws of the payroll tax cut that President Donald Trump first proposed, which would largely benefit more affluent workers and those who manage to keep their jobs.

The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic will no doubt need long-term, ongoing attention. But we need to take dramatic actions now to blunt the immediate pain of America’s most vulnerable workers.

Coronavirus Reminds Americans That Pursuit of Happiness Is Tied to the Collective Good

At its core, the United States Declaration of Independence argues that all human beings have “unalienable rights.” These include right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These rights apply to all human beings, and cannot be given away.

What is more, the Declaration says that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” In other words, the primary objective of government is to afford citizens the opportunity to exercise these rights; the right to be left alone and to be free to pursue their own notion of happiness.

These ideas – that all people have the right to freely pursue their own self interest, and that government is concerned primarily with defending that right – show that the United States is, speaking philosophically, a very liberal society.

I have been researching questions about American political philosophy since I was a graduate student studying social ethics in the 1990s and those questions still occupy my research. With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, one question in particular has emerged as front and center:

Is a society founded on liberal principles able to preserve itself when confronted with an existential threat, such as the coronavirus pandemic?

Is liberalism insufficient?

With the end of the Cold War, Soviet-style communism was banished to what President Ronald Reagan called “the ash heap of history.” Several countries throughout the former Soviet bloc, and throughout the world, embraced the ideals of civil rights, free enterprise and democratic equality.

This dominance of Western liberalism was also reflected in American political philosophy. In the 70s and 80s, political theorists like Joseph Raz, Robert Nozik and John Rawls all sought to refine the features and implications of liberal thought.

For example, John Rawls, in my opinion, the most important American political philosopher of this time, argued that liberal society required as much freedom and as much equal distribution of resources as possible. Any inequality or restriction of rights was only acceptable when it made society better off.

But neither Rawls nor any of these eminent theorists questioned the idea that liberalism was the best way to organize society.

In fact, political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously argued for liberalism saying that the question about how people should live together was effectively over.

But at the time, there also emerged a group of scholars who did question the sufficiency of liberalism. Political philosophers Michael Sandel Charles Taylor and sociologist Amitai Etzioni all came to be identified as Communitarians.

They shared the belief that individual rights were not a sufficient foundation on which to build and sustain a good society. Communitarians agreed with Aristotle’s famous phrase: Humans beings are “political animals.” In other words, society is more than just a collection of individuals.

It’s not about individual rights

This philosophical debate, in my view, is suddenly very relevant again.

As the coronavirus spreads, appeals about social distancing, washing one’s hands and the like appear to be focused primarily on the individual’s self-interest of not falling ill.

Such appeals would seem to fit nicely with liberalism and its focus on individual rights.

But the pandemic is at the same time demonstrating that these kinds of appeal are not enough. Just a few days ago, for example, Today’s Parent magazine offered the following advice about how to talk to children about the coronavirus and washing their hands: “Assure them that kids don’t tend to get seriously ill with it, but other people in society are more susceptible, and they can do this small thing to help others stay healthy.”

Data is still sketchy, but it appears that for young people, the mortality rate from the coronavirus is not much different from seasonal flu. But even so, they can still transmit the virus to those who are more vulnerable – especially older people and those with underlying health conditions.

Also, people are being urged not to load up on hand sanitizer and surgical masks. Neither of these are absolutely necessary to keep the average person from contracting the virus.

But they might be very helpful for someone else – health care professionals, for example, need their patients to wear masks so they don’t get infected. Because of their repeated interactions with those same sick people, they are in more frequent need of the hand sanitizer as well.

Obligations to each other

This crisis makes it all too clear that pursuing one’s own self-interest is not enough. While every one of us has the legal right to purchase as much hand sanitizer as we can find, if that is all we think about, the welfare of others and society itself are at risk.

Like the Communitarians from 30 years ago, Americans need to challenge the idea that everyone is just pursuing their own happiness as individuals. When we live together in society, we depend on each other. And therefore we have obligations to each other.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Christopher Beem, Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Saudi’s Brave Women Pull Back the Curtain on Crown Prince MBS

Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia’s 34-year-old de facto ruler, has been on a tear recently. He arrested members of his own royal family and initiated an oil price war with Russia that has sent the price of oil—and the world’s stock markets—plummeting. Behind the headlines, however, another critical event will take place in Saudi Arabia starting March 18: women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, who was arrested almost two years ago for advocating the right to drive, is due in court. The diabolical MBS wants the world to believe he is the Arab world’s liberal reformer and took credit for eventually granting women the right to drive, but he is also the one who had al-Hathloul and nine other women thrown in prison, charging them as foreign agents and spies. The imprisonment of these peaceful women activists exposes the brutal nature of MBS’s regime and the duplicity of the Western democracies that continue to support him.

Loujain al-Hathloul gained notoriety in 2013 for campaigning against the driving ban when she posted videos of herself driving as an act of civil disobedience. She was first arrested in December 2014 when she attempted to drive from the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia and spent 73 days in prison at that time. Al-Hathloul has also been an outspoken advocate for an end to the male guardianship system that treats women as no more than children throughout their entire lives.

On May 15, 2018, a group of armed men from the state security agency raided Loujain’s family’s house and arrested her. For the first three months of her detention, she was held incommunicado with no access to her family or a lawyer. According to the communication she was later able to have with her family, during those three months, she was beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed, and threatened with rape and murder.

Loujain languished in a Saudi prison for almost a year before the public prosecutor’s office finally announced that it had concluded its investigation and alleged that Loujain was involved in activities that “aim to undermine the Kingdom’s security, stability, and national unity.” She was accused of contacting “enemy groups”—a reference to cooperation with the United Nations and human rights groups such as Amnesty International.

Loujain’s initial hearing was in March 2019, but she was not allowed access to a lawyer or to hear the charges prior to the hearing. Her family members were permitted to attend, but the court was closed to both diplomats and journalists.

According to her family, in August 2019, al-Hathloul was offered her freedom in exchange for denying, on video, that she was subjected to torture. She refused. For her incredible bravery and determination to fight for women’s rights, eight members of the U.S. Congress have nominated al-Hathloul for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The case of al-Hathloul and the other women’s rights activists on trial in Saudi Arabia is a tremendous embarrassment for MBS, who has been putting an enormous effort into convincing his Western allies that he is a reformer and that Saudi Arabia is becoming more liberal. But behind the facade of new musical concerts and theme parks, the Crown Prince has overseen a vast crackdown on all forms of opposition and dissent. In November 2018, the CIA concluded that MBS was the one who ordered the gruesome assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS is also responsible for dragging Saudi Arabia into an internal conflict in Yemen, where constant Saudi bombings have decimated what was already a poor country.

The fact that MBS lifted the driving ban and simultaneously put in prison those who had campaigned and suffered for such reforms makes clear his actual motive: to silence dissent and prevent these women’s voices from being heard. Loujain’s sister Lina al-Hathloul says that the regime arrested these women’s rights activists “so that they make the [Saudi] people understand that change only comes top down. And the people should not even try to make the changes.” This sentiment was echoed by Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America. “These gutsy women have challenged one of the world’s most notoriously misogynist governments, inspiring the world with their demand to drive, to govern their own lives, and to liberate all Saudi women from a form of medieval bondage that has no place in the 21st century,” she said.

“The very existence of this sham trial pulls the veil off of the authorities’ so-called push for reforms in the Kingdom,” said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Middle East research director. “How can they initiate change in the country when the very women who fought for these reforms are still being punished for it?”

The bogus trial against Loujain al-Hathloul taking place this week should compel governments around the world to put more pressure on the Saudis and demand al-Hathloul’s immediate and unconditional release. Her imprisonment—as well as MBS’s arrest of royal family members and Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen—should be particularly embarrassing to the world community in light of the G20 meeting scheduled to take place in Saudi Arabia in November. How can the world’s leaders pretend that it is acceptable to meet in a country that imprisons and tortures peaceful women activists and bombs civilians in Yemen? It isn’t.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

Ariel Gold is the national co-director of CODEPINK and runs the organization’s Middle East program.

This article was produced by  Local Peace Economy , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Left Behind

Bernie Sanders presumptive loss of the Democratic Party nomination for president demonstrates the limits of electoral politics for the left. I have already seen some pre-postmortems speculating that Sanders simply arrived to soon, that his staggering margins among young voters presage a socialist wave of the future, perhaps a decade or two from now, when the rising left-leaning generations become a majority of the electorate.

This is bad analysis on two fronts. First because it under-credits Sanders’s catalytic impact on the consolidation of a collective political identity for the socialist left. The two decades leading up to Sanders’s 2016 run were marked by a number of powerful and public anti-establishment protests, from the street-fighting of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, through the Occupy movement in 2011, both ultimately put down by paramilitary police brutality. But these popular movements never coalesced around an explicit left-socialist program, and there was always the risk that their fringes would spin out into vulgar anarchism or libertarianism, and the rest subsumed into milquetoast Obama-style consensus liberalism.

Sanders, then, was a figure around which some fairly diverse left tendencies could coalesce to form a coherent popular bloc and legitimate mass movement at a time when the inextricably linked phenomena of neoliberal economic austerity and dire social atomization seemed as impregnable as they have ever been. There’s no need to indulge in crass great-man speculation in order to note that Sanders served as a necessary agent in the consolidation of socialist tendencies into an actual socialist movement. If he were not here, now, then it becomes spurious to imagine some future incarnation could capitalize on a political project that no one had organized in the first place. Whatever else it may be, history is contingent.

But the second reason this analysis fails is that it indulges in the same fantasy that has dogged Democratic politics for the last forty years at least, which is a crude demographic determinism that assumes that if we wait long enough, just until today’s youth are a majority, or until the country is “majority-minority,” or until women vote as a single bloc, then historical inevitability will kick in. Yeah, well, remember what I just said about history.

A more dispassionate analysis says that there is no reason to believe that demography is destiny, no reason to believe that a popular movement that reflects—what, a quarter of the country?—will either this year or twenty years hence have the power to wrest control of the state from all of the interests and resources that will continue to be aligned against it.

Nor is it “realistic”—to use the frequently disingenuous bugbear of conservative Democrats—to imagine that this is a simple problem of communication and outreach. If polls are to believed, a majority of Democratic voters and likely voters strongly support Sanders’s policies, from Medicare for All to an at-least-slightly more modest and less militaristic foreign policy, but the evidence is pretty clear at this point: policy agreement did not drive voting choice, certainly not in the numbers necessary. There is at least anecdotal evidence that this was the result of media coverage that obscured and obfuscated the very distinct divergences between Sanders and the rest of the field, and there is polling to suggest that a substantial chunk of voters who ultimately broke for Biden believe that he supports Medicare for All, which he explicitly, aggressively does not. But again, there is no reason to believe that this media landscape will be better or fairer in the future. If present trends in media continue, it will be worse and less fair.

The left may continue to make up marginal ground in legislatures, where campaigns are still run on a smaller scale and the pavement-pounding democracy of knocking on doors in a single district really does have advantages over mass media manipulation. (You can see this in races like the one that brought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to office, where the incumbent has effectively decamped permanently to D.C. and has only a kind of absentee-landlord connection to their ostensible home turf.) But if we are being—here is that word again—realistic, then we have got to admit to ourselves that on a national scale, in a country the size of this one, a country with two centuries of imperial inertia and a vast, entangled complex of corporate finance, media, and national security bureaucracy, the prospects of winning a free and fair election is very, very small. (Swings in exit poll data in a number of American states, including Massachusetts, during the current primary season, are already strongly indicative of direct vote manipulation, or would be taken as such if they were observed in any other country but our own.)

All of this leaves a conundrum for which I have no prescriptive answer. Labor organizing is the obvious suggestion, since it seems to present the only path to a locus of non-state power, but that will be a decades-long project at least, given the parlous state of American labor. I could of course, write, optimistically, that there is nothing inherently wrong with a decades-long project, that if the left is going to think in historical terms, it had better get used to the fact that history is rather long by definition. But, of course, the ice caps are melting; Siberia is thawing; the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached white.

But the feel of historical acceleration that we all feel, the sense that the long duration of time is compressing before our eyes, with whole relative eras passing in the cycle of a day’s news, may herald some kind of break, a tectonic juncture in which one plate slips and a few things rattle loose. I don’t hope for catastrophe, but I do think the present COVID-19 outbreak, a symptom of the same forces driving climate change itself, of a metastasizing human civilization bumping in ever closer, weirder ways against the natural world in an age of near-instantaneous travel, heralds . . . something. Maybe the best and only hope for the left is to tighten our grip on the rails and steer the prow into unpredictable times.

Inside the Pro-Trump Facebook Group Where First Responders Call Coronavirus a Hoax

In a 27,000-member private Facebook group for first responders who support President Donald Trump, firefighters and paramedics have posted thousands of comments in recent weeks downplaying the coronavirus pandemic that they are responsible for helping to handle.

Posts in the group, which is called IAFF Union Firefighters for Trump and has been endorsed by Trump, scoffed at the seriousness of the virus, echoing false assertions by Trump and his allies comparing it to the seasonal flu. “Every election year has a disease,” read one meme, purporting to be written on a doctor’s office whiteboard. “This is a viral-pneumonia being hyped as The Black Plague before an election.”

As of Monday, there were 4,464 cases and 78 deaths in the U.S., according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

As confirmed cases and deaths expanded and officials began shutting down mass gatherings and public places, the posts intensified their attacks on Democrats and the media. “I believe this is all by design,” wrote a Texas firefighter whose identity was corroborated by ProPublica. “Democrats have wanted to slow down and even kill the economy. It’s the only hope they have of beating Trump. Sad and disgusting the depths of shit the Democrats will descend to in order to gain power.”

Posts containing factual information or firsthand experiences with the virus were met with more accusations of plots to harm Trump’s reelection. When a Florida firefighter said action was required now to prevent a crisis like is currently underway in Italy, where 27,980 have been infected and 2,158 have died, because the virus spreads at an exponential rate, the first reply was poop emojis and “Trump2020.”

Some comments promoted a baseless conspiracy theory that the virus is a biological weapon developed by the Chinese in collaboration with Democrats.

“By the Chinese to stop the riots in Hong Kong,” one member wrote.

“[Y]ou are absolutely correct,” another replied. “I said that in the beginning. Democrats saw an opportunity to use it against Trump and get rid of older people which they have been trying to do for a while.”

Commenters contacted by ProPublica declined to answer questions or didn’t respond to messages. ProPublica reviewed hundreds of screenshots provided by co-workers of members of the group who asked to be anonymous, fearing retaliation. Those people said the social media posts are not idle online venting — they reflect real-world attitudes that are leading some first responders to potentially shun special plans and protective equipment. That dismissiveness, the people said, could put first responders and others at risk as they attend to emergency calls with potentially infected people.

Leaders at the International Association of Fire Fighters are also concerned. “I’ve read the social media. I know there are going to be accusations that this is all hype,” Jim Brinkley, IAFF assistant to the general president for technical and information resources, said in a video that the union posted online. “If we ignore it, if we take it lightly, we will set a new standard in the wrong direction for infectious disease in this country.”

Firefighters and paramedics, who jointly respond to 911 calls in most places, are among those at the greatest risk of encountering the coronavirus, and their exposure could endanger others if they have to be quarantined and are no longer available to work. Dozens of firefighters who responded to the nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, that was a hot spot of the outbreak had to be quarantined for weeks.

The private Facebook group was formed last year to protest the IAFF’s official endorsement of Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. Trump encouraged his followers to join the Facebook group in May 2019.

The group’s founder, Kelly Hallman, told ProPublica he doesn’t speak for everyone who posts, but he can understand why many emergency professionals share his skepticism about the coronavirus. He said previous outbreaks such as SARS, the H1N1 “swine flu” and Ebola didn’t prompt such a big response, and he thinks the reason is politics.

“There’s never been this much hoopla given to the other things,” Hallman said. “They’re doing it to crash the economy and make Trump look bad.”

Hallman’s view hasn’t changed as Trump went from calling concerns over the coronavirus a “hoax” on Feb. 28 to declaring a national emergency on Friday. Hallman said Trump has had to address fears stirred up by the media.

“If you had to point a finger at why the leftist media and the left in general has a smile on their face about this whole thing, it’s the Dow,” Hallman said, referring to the historic decline in stock prices. “My wife and kids are scared, they’re believing what they’re seeing on TV. And I’m trying to tell them it’s not as bad as the media makes it out.”

Public health experts are unified in calling for drastic measures to contain and mitigate the spread in the U.S. “When you’re dealing with an emerging infectious diseases outbreak, you are always behind where you think you are,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a White House press conference on Monday. “It will always seem that the best way to address it would be doing something that looks like it might be an overreaction. It’s not an overreaction. It’s a reaction that we feel is commensurate with what is actually going on in reality.”

The government’s guidelines, Fauci said, “will fail if people don’t adhere to them.”

IAFF spokesman Doug Stern said views like those expressed in the Facebook group reflect the minority of first responders, citing conversations with local leaders who are eager for more information about how to prepare for the coronavirus.

“Our leadership is aware of this issue, and we are taking it seriously because we know how important it is,” Stern said of COVID-19. Most important, Stern said, is for 911 callers to tell the dispatcher if anyone is experiencing flu-like symptoms so responders can wear protective gear and send a smaller team.

Caroline Chen contributed reporting.

“A Seller’s Market for Bankruptcy Talent:” The Beginning of the End of Methane-Producing Fracking?

On Monday, the price of West Texas Intermediate petroleum fell below $30 a barrel for the first time in four years. Elliot Smith at CNBC reports that BP CFO Brian Gilvary is braced for petroleum demand actually to contract in 2020.

This prediction is very bad news for US fracking firms, most of which need a price point of from $40 to $60 a barrel to make their hydraulic fracturing method of oil production profitable.

In the Democratic primary debate on Sunday, Bernie Sanders pledged to ban fracking entirely, and even Joe Biden said no new fracking would be allowed. Fracking may be moribund anyway by November, and if a Democrat wins the presidency, the industry may never recover.

Not only is petroleum likely headed way below that profitability floor, but many energy firms involved with fracking are deeply in debt, and had taken out the debts with their petroleum fields as collateral. Since their collateral is worth only half what it used to be, the banks will call in their loans. Other energy firms involved in fracking have held significant assets in their own stocks, the price of which just zoomed to earth like a crashing meteor.

Reuters observed,

“Energy investor EnCap Investments pulled off a rarity in the U.S. shale business earlier this month, the $2.5 billion sale of oil producer Felix Energy to rival WPX Energy Inc, striking a deal at a time when energy mergers have all but dried up. EnCap’s big payday, 153 million WPX shares valued at $1.6 billion plus $900 million in cash, proved short-lived as convulsing oil and stock markets knocked nearly two-thirds off the value of WPX shares within days of the closing.”

Fracking has been banned by countries such as France, and by states such as New York because it is highly polluting, leaving behind ponds of toxic water. Moreover, research has demonstrated that the process of fracking, which involves pumping water under high pressure underground to break up rocks and release oil or natural gas, causes gargantuan methane emissions that had earlier been underestimated as much as 45%. The methane in the atmosphere is burgeoning, and scientists had puzzled over why. But scientists have fingered the culprit: fracking. Methane is 80 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as carbon dioxide over two decades, and carbon dioxide is no slouch. A quarter of the global heating effect of greenhouse gas emissions put out by humans burning fossil fuels is owing to methane emissions. Rapid heating is melting the North and South Poles, causing sea level rise that will soon be calamitous.

Given that the world population is increasing and that developing countries such as China and India and Indonesia are seeing more and more people abandoning their bicycles or bus rides for mopeds or automobile ownership, for the world to want less petroleum this year than it did last is extremely unusual.

We are getting a preview courtesy COVID-19 of what will happen through the next decade and a half as electric vehicles take off, significantly reducing demand.

The world produces about $100 million barrels of petroleum a day, and given the Saudi determination to expand production starting on April 1, it could be producing 102 million barrels a day later this spring. The world may only want 90 mn. barrels a day this spring. What with the novel coronavirus pandemic, fewer trucks and cars will be on the road. Petroleum is largely used for transportation fuel.

Do you know what happens if demand falls and production increases? The price falls. In fact, it doesn’t just fall. It collapses. It takes a deep dive. It falls off a cliff. It craters deep beneath the earth’s crust.

How steep the fall is depends in part on whether Saudi Arabia and Russia keep playing chicken. Saudi Arabia wants to discipline Moscow, which rejected OPEC + production quotas aimed at reducing supply and supporting a $60 per barrel price. So Riyadh is opening the spigots, upping its production by two million barrels a day. Saudi Aramco says it is comfortable with a price point of $30 a barrel. But unfortunately for Aramco, the price may not have stopped falling.

Andreas de Vries at Oilspot.com believes the price could fall to as little as $10 a barrel later this spring. In 2019 the price tended to be around $60 a barrel.

The fossil fuel companies that lack deep pockets could well just fail this year. Brenda Sapino Jeffreys quotes Jason Cohen, an attorney at Bracewell in Houston, as saying of the oil industry, “There is, I’d say, a sellers market for bankruptcy talent.” His observation gave me my title.

This steep decline in stock prices and oil prices comes on top of a 5-year run in which the market has destroyed 90% of the value of US investor stocks in oil services. That is, we could this year be entering an oil market crisis as severe as the Asian banking crash of 1997-1998.

The difference is that by the time fossil fuels come out of their economic doldrums, renewables will have stolen a further march on them. From here on in, hydrocarbons are beginning their death spiral. Friends don’t let friends invest in petroleum companies, and nobody should have those stocks in their retirement accounts– if they want ever to retire.

Why America Can’t Respond to the Current Crisis

Dr. Anthony S Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and just about the only official in the Trump administration trusted to tell the truth about the coronavirus, said last Thursday: “The system does not, is not really geared to what we need right now … It is a failing, let’s admit it.”

While we’re at it, let’s admit something more basic. The system would be failing even under a halfway competent president. The dirty little secret, which will soon become apparent to all, is that there is no real public health system in the United States.

The ad hoc response fashioned late Friday by House Democrats and the White House may help a bit, although it’s skimpy, as I’ll explain.

As the coronavirus outbreak in the US follows the same grim exponential growth path first displayed in Wuhan, China, before herculean measures were put in place to slow its spread there, America is waking up to the fact that it has almost no public capacity to deal with it.

Instead of a public health system, we have a private for-profit system for individuals lucky enough to afford it and a rickety social insurance system for people fortunate enough to have a full-time job.

At their best, both systems respond to the needs of individuals rather than the needs of the public as a whole. In America, the word “public” – as in public health, public education or public welfare – means a sum total of individual needs, not the common good.

Contrast this with America’s financial system. The Federal Reserve concerns itself with the health of financial markets as a whole. Late last week the Fed made $1.5 trillion available to banks at the slightest hint of difficulties making trades. No one batted an eye.

When it comes to the health of the nation as a whole, money like this isn’t available. And there are no institutions analogous to the Fed with responsibility for overseeing and managing the public’s health – able to whip out a giant checkbook at a moment’s notice to prevent human, rather than financial, devastation.

Even if a test for the Covid-19 virus had been developed and approved in time, no institutions are in place to administer it to tens of millions of Americans free of charge. Local and state health departments are already barebones, having lost nearly a quarter of their workforce since 2008, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Healthcare in America is delivered mainly by private for-profit corporations which, unlike financial institutions, are not required to maintain reserve capacity. As a result, the nation’s supply of ventilators isn’t nearly large enough to care for projected numbers of critically ill coronavirus victims unable to breathe for themselves. Its 45,000 intensive care unit beds fall woefully short of the 2.9 million that are likely to be needed.

The Fed can close banks to quarantine financial crises but the US can’t close workplaces because the nation’s social insurance system depends on people going to work.

Almost 30% of American workers have no paid sick leave from their employers, including 70% of low-income workers earning less than $10.49 an hour. Vast numbers of self-employed workers cannot afford sick leave. Friday’s deal between House Democrats and the White House won’t have much effect because it exempts large employers and offers waivers to smaller ones.

Most jobless Americans don’t qualify for unemployment insurance because they haven’t worked long enough in a steady job, and the ad-hoc deal doesn’t alter this. Meanwhile, more than 30 million Americans have no health insurance. Eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps and other public assistance is now linked to having or actively looking for work.

It’s hard to close public schools because most working parents cannot afford childcare. Many poor children rely on school lunches for their only square meal a day. In Los Angeles, about 80% of students qualify for free or reduced lunches and just under 20,000 are homeless at some point during the school year.

There is no public health system in the US, in short, because the richest nation in the world has no capacity to protect the public as a whole, apart from national defense. Ad-hoc remedies such as House Democrats and the White House fashioned on Friday are better than nothing, but they don’t come close to filling this void.

How to Talk to Someone You Believe Is Misinformed About the Coronavirus

The medical evidence is clear: The coronavirus global health threat is not an elaborate hoax. Bill Gates did not create the coronavirus to sell more vaccines. Essential oils are not effective at protecting you from coronavirus.

But those facts have not stopped contrary claims from spreading both on and offline.

No matter the topic, people often hear conflicting information and must decide which sources to trust. The internet and the fast-paced news environment mean that information travels quickly, leaving little time for fact-checking.

As a researcher interested in science communication and controversies, I study how scientific misinformation spreads and how to correct it.

I’ve been very busy lately. Whether we are talking about the coronavirus, climate change, vaccines or something else, misinformation abounds. Maybe you have shared something on Facebook that turned out to be false, or retweeted something before double-checking the source. This can happen to anyone.

It’s also common to encounter people who are misinformed but don’t know it yet. It’s one thing to double-check your own information, but what’s the best way to talk to someone else about what they think is true – but which is not true?

Is it worth engaging?

First, consider the context of the situation. Is there enough time to engage them in a conversation? Do they seem interested in and open to discussion? Do you have a personal connection with them where they value your opinion?

Evaluating the situation can help you decide whether you want to start a conversation to correct their misinformation. Sometimes we interact with people who are closed-minded and not willing to listen. It’s OK not to engage with them.

In interpersonal interactions, correcting misinformation can be helped by the strength of the relationship. For example, it may be easier to correct misinformation held by a family member or partner because they are already aware that you care for them and you are interested in their well-being.

Don’t patronize

One approach is to engage in a back-and-forth discussion about the topic. This is often called a dialogue approach to communication.

That means you care about the person behind the opinion, even when you disagree. It is important not to enter conversations with a patronizing attitude. For example, when talking to climate change skeptics, the attitude that the speaker holds toward an audience affects the success of the interaction and can lead to conversations ending before they’ve started.

Instead of treating the conversation as a corrective lecture, treat the other person as an equal partner in the discussion. One way to create that common bond is to acknowledge the shared struggles of locating accurate information. Saying that there is a lot of information circulating can help someone feel comfortable changing their opinion and accepting new information, instead of resisting and sticking to their previous beliefs to avoid admitting they were wrong.

Part of creating dialogue is asking questions. For example, if someone says that they heard coronavirus was all a hoax, you might ask, “That’s not something I’d heard before, what was the source for that?” By being interested in their opinion and not rejecting it out of hand, you open the door for conversation about the information and can engage them in evaluating it.

Offer to trade information

Another strategy is to introduce the person to new sources. In my book, I discuss a conversation I had with a climate skeptic who did not believe that scientists had reached a 97% consensus on the existence of climate change. They dismissed this well-established number by referring to nonscientific sources and blog posts. Instead of rejecting their resources, I offered to trade with them. For each of their sources I read, they would read one of mine.

It is likely that the misinformation people have received is not coming from a credible source, so you can propose an alternative. For example, you could offer to send them an article from the Centers for Disease Control for medical and health information, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for environmental information, or the reputable debunking site Snopes to compare the information. If someone you are talking to is open to learning more, encourage that continued curiosity.

It is sometimes hard, inconvenient, or awkward to engage someone who is misinformed. But I feel very strongly that opening ourselves up to have these conversations can help to correct misinformation. To ensure that society can make the best decisions about important topics, share accurate information and combat the spread of misinformation.

Emma Frances Bloomfield is assistant Professor of Communication Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Open Letter from Truthdig’s Publisher & CEO: Breaking My Silence

I am proud of what Truthdig has accomplished. Truthdig has received wide acclaim and many awards. We are a voice for progressive politics, social justice, humanitarian issues, the environment, women’s rights and more. We created our Global Voices initiative to encourage progressive female journalists around the world. We fight violence against women and strive to empower them.

As you may know, a statement was posted March 11th by some Truthdig staff and contributors. Contrary to the statement, the real underlying issue is negotiations to end the business partnership between me, Truthdig’s Publisher and CEO, and Robert Scheer, its Editor-in-Chief. Unfortunately, the staff and contributors have gotten caught in the middle. While I sought to shield them and to respect confidentiality, Bob internally and externally waged a campaign of misinformation.

Sadly, the situation seems to have devolved into Bob having an attitude of “If-I-can’t-have-Truthdig, no-one-will.” Indeed, he even pushed me to permanently shut down Truthdig. But I care deeply about Truthdig’s staff and contributors, loyal readers, donors, and other supporters. I am committed to maintaining Truthdig’s important mission and work.

As a female executive and professional, I have had to endure a certain amount of harassment and bullying. Fortunately, society now recognizes that men no longer get to disrespect women in the workplace without recourse.

When multiple female staffers came to me and complained about mistreatment by Bob, my moral compass required me to take action. While I sought legal advice, Bob, through his personal lawyer, sent a letter seeking to forbid Truthdig from conducting an investigation of allegations regarding Bob’s behavior.

Because of a variety of untenable actions by Bob and because he previously indicated to me that he desired to step aside from Truthdig to pursue other projects, I asked him to leave. But he refused to go unless I personally paid him a large sum of money. When I refused, he began to feed employees and the public misinformation about the underlying issues and resulting separation negotiations.

I am a progressive and care deeply about workers’ rights. As such, I was surprised to read the allegations of labor and employment issues raised in the statement, which were never previously brought up to me, to our HR or, as far as I know, to Bob. I have always had an open-door policy with staff and contributors.

While Truthdig is a small organization, we have always sought to be generous with the benefits we provide our employees. Beyond complying with labor and employment laws, we provide subsidized medical, dental, and eye care benefits, up to 3 weeks paid vacation depending on tenure, and a number of paid religious and national holidays as well as employees’ respective birthdays as a paid day off.

Our dream at Truthdig is for a democratic culture and a just society. I’m sure you share this goal. We thank you for your support of Truthdig as we pursue this vision and continue to dig for the truth.

Sincerely,

Zuade Kaufman

Publisher and CEO, Truthdig