Georgia demoted McConnell; what comes next?

Posted on by Tim

Joe Biden will begin his presidency with a legislative majority in both the House and Senate for the first two years of his presidency.

Democrats need to take a lesson from the Republicans who have proven themselves wholly unfit to govern, and use that majority to its full effect to put out a full and complete repudiation of McConnell and Trump’s legislative policy.

First priority, after correcting the COVID Vaccination rollout, should be appointing an Attorney General who will investigate and prosecute the crimes committed by the Trump administration.

Second priority should be addressing their assault on the judicial branch of government through impeachment, where possible, of his appointments and by adding seats to the Supreme Court bench to eliminate the Republican majority and the power of the three Trump appointed Justices.

While all that is happening, rebuilding the CDC, reconnecting with the WHO and UN, treating white supremacy militias as domestic terrorism cells, releasing the caged immigrants and returning their abducted kids back to them, rejoining the Paris Accords, police reform, and ending funding to the border wall should all be taken care of.

Improving the ACA and working toward a single payer health care system needs to begin. 

A national minimum wage that provides a living wage, tied to inflation rates needs to be established.

And, the government needs to make a massive commitment to national infrastructure including job training and placement programs to create and fill the jobs necessary, not just to repair and maintain the current infrastructure, but to also upgrade it for the future.

Biden may not be the progressive I wanted, but he is an improvement over Trump, he will assemble a competent cabinet and empower them to lead without heavy handed micromanagement, and he will sign the bills put in front of him by a Democrat majority congress.

This means he will be as progressive as the Congress we, as voters, give him.

So, while we expect him to get to work on repairing the damage of the McConnell/Trump era, we need to get to work on the 2022 midterm elections to provide him an even stronger congressional support system to write the policies and create the budgets we want signed by the President.

The incredible work to drive record breaking voter registration and turnout to defeat Trump and flip the Senate was just the first step, not the end game. Don’t sacrifice the momentum. This is our opportunity to truly start checking and correcting our #Culturalinertia.

Reality Check

Posted on by Tim

Time for some real talk.

Regardless of your political viewpoint, regardless of its origin, COVID-19 is real.

We had an opportunity in the early part of this year to minimize its spread and the death toll.   For a variety of reasons it would be counterproductive to list here, we — as a nation — failed to do so.

People are sick and suffering across the country as a result.  Hundreds of thousands have died, and very likely hundreds of thousands more will.  Many of those who survive will have long lasting health issues.

Regardless of the outcome of the current election, we are faced with an important reality check.

We only have a few options to choose from:

Option 1:

Issue a three go four week national stay at home order, limit interaction to deliveries and pickups cleaning things before handling them, and essentially kill off the virus by eliminating its ability to transfer to new hosts.  This will not save those already infected, it will save the largest possible number of us though. This is the fastest path to economic recovery.

Option 2:

Do nothing, reopen everything, allow the the virus to achieve maximum infection and death rate and then those lucky enough to survive without long term health concerns as a result attempt to return to normal.  Our health care system cannot handle the burden of this option
Countless additional people will die due to the lack of available space, resources, and medical staff to save them. Our consumer economy cannot survive the loss of that many consumers.

Option 3:

Continue a half-assed piecemeal approach with varying reactionary steps being taken in different regions while people travel back and forth through them defeating the purpose of such measures.  Our health care system cannot handle the burden of this option
Countless additional people will die due to the lack of available space, resources, and medical staff to save them. Our consumer economy cannot survive the loss of that many consumers.

Where Does That Leave Us:

Both options 2 and 3 result in continued suffering and death, collateral damage, an overburdened health care system, and long term economic devastation that will not begin to reverse until a safe vaccine is developed.

With the combination of our for profit health care system and the anti-vaxxer movement in our nation, that vaccine will still not likely be available to enough people that will take it to effectively achieve the goal of herd immunity without all the suffering and death caused by the illness.

The only viable option available to us, truthfully, is option 1. No other option saves as many lives or saves the economy (not just the stock market values) as quickly. Options 2 and 3 will take years before they have run. their course.

We will need leadership with the courage to make the call and the willingness to enforce it.

If we choose wrong, you or someone you know will suffer direct consequences. Everyone will suffer the indirect consequences.

Looking To The Future Through A Hindsight Filter

Posted on by Tim

We are now in our 8th month of dealing with COVID-19 in the US and the 11th month since China first began publicly acknowledging their outbreak and taking large scale preventative measures.

While we don’t, yet, have a cure or reliable vaccine ready for mass distribution, we do have a pretty clear understanding of the science outlining how we can minimize its infectious spread.

This along with the material leaked by various congressional and White House staff members (current and former), the rhetoric and sources being disproved by those leaks, and the physical confessions of criminal intent Woodward suppressed for half a year offer us the wisdom of hindsight.

What is clear to anyone looking at the whole picture is that Republican politicians bet big on the hope that refusing to allow the proper steps to be taken in time would kill off a massive segment of the already elderly, infirm, impoverished, and marginalized minority community members in a natural biological warfare eugenics scheme before it could reach their cloistered and fortified ranks.

They weaponized the willful ignorance of their racist supporters to hasten the process and used #StochasticTerrorism to whip them into a frenzy.

They did this while accelerating their long term efforts to strip access to health care away from the millions they want to eliminate.

They even managed to fabricate an economic crisis that escalated the risk to those lower income workers in societally essential, but underappreciated and underpaid jobs. Making them choose a death by pandemic illness or homelessness due to loss of income.  And they created an imbalanced stimulus package to benefit the employers and companies that were abandoning their workers by the 10s of thousands.

All to eliminate a huge segment of their opposition voting base and protect their dying grasp on the levers of power in our nation.

Horrifically, they were largely successful. A quarter of a million Americans died, millions more fell ill – many permanently, and tens of millions dropped further into poverty and face homelessness in their near future.

But they weren’t successful enough. The people were galvanized instead of broken. We began using social media to organize large scale resistance and defeat the propaganda spin. They prepared en masse to reclaim democracy.

This increased resistance threatening the decades of work the Republicans spent gerrymandering and redlining districts and suppressing votes by every legal and illegal means possible, forced them to take larger, faster, more obvious steps toward establishing a fascist kleptocracy under the influence and control of an adversarial foreign power.

If they had managed to kill more, and crush the resistive spirit of enough of the rest of us, faster, they would have immediately adopted the necessary protocols to stop the spread of the disease to save themselves.

But, we persevered for too long, and the illness reached them before they could secure victory over their own citizenry and constituents. Now it is too late to admit their intent openly without their own violent supporters being forced to realize how they were being used and being disregarded and discarded along with everyone else in the process.

So they have to maintain the lie at any and all costs, even as they begin to suffer the same detrimental health effects and possible deaths within their own gilded halls sequestered from the masses.

And that is where we are now.

The only way we begin to recover is to sweep everyone who has supported, protected, enabled, and emboldened this presidential administration from every level of our federal, state, and local governments.

Then we can work on passing some new laws, abolishing some old ones, and begin correcting the course of our #Culturalinertia. It will be generations before we are done, especially if Trump and McConnell secure a 6-3 imbalance on the Supreme Court.

We will never complete the journey unless we decide right now to take every possible step necessary to begin it.

The first step is making sure your ballot is properly submitted between now and November 3rd.

No Excuses

Posted on by Tim

It is imperative that, this November, you remember that the first reported case of COVID-19 occurred in China in mid-November of 2019. A few months prior the Trump administration had terminated the position of the CDC doctor embedded with China’s version of the CDC to provide us with an early warning of any outbreaks there. This was after disbanding all of the people and protocols that President Obama had put in place to deal with such pandemic outbreaks during the early states of the Ebola epidemic. It was also after cutting funding to the CDC and diverting much of it’s remaining funding toward an idiotic border wall.

U.S. Intelligence officials were aware of the outbreak in China and began briefing Trump in December of last year, but he; himself, admits that he doesn’t give credence to their agencies nor does he read all of their briefing reports.

You can be sure that when Trump was briefed, so were the House and Senate intelligence, foreign affairs, and commerce committees. Yet the Republicans on those committees continued repeating Trump’s lies and dismissals to conservative media audiences.

In January, major American retailers began taking note of the situations developing with their supply chains in China. H.E.B, one of our nation’s leading grocery chains, began preparing then for what they expected to become a national shelter in place order similar to the regional quarantines already starting in Wuhan and other regions of China at that time.

The first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S. on January 20, of this year.

Still our government would do nothing.

Trump would spend the following two months downplaying it and decrying it as a hoax and partisan diversion instead of handling it.

As Americans continue to suffer and die due to this illness, and others experience loss of income and economic devestation due to our delays in responding appropriately as well as the malevolent incompetence of our presidential administration, Trump is playing games with their lives, demanding fealty from opposition party governors before helping the citizens of the nation as a whole.

First he told them to get their own medical supplies, then he outbid them for those same supplies with federal funds so he could control which states could and could not get them based on whether their governors openly support or oppose his politics and policies.

Now it is March 29th, and this is where we are at:

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The fact that New York is home to nearly half of the United States’ reported COVID-19 infections is not so much an indication of them as a “hot spot” of illness but of testing.

Realtime states at: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

With that lack of testing across the rest of the nation, the U.S. is still averaging 374 infections per million people of population and 7 deaths per million. And those are just with the cases we have tested and reported.

The respective global averages are 86.9 and 4.1.

We are nearly double the global average death rate and quadruple the global average infection rate based on available testing data.

Realtime stats at: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

That is a failure of both a populace that refuses to comply for the common good and a for profit health care system.

Dealing with it doesn’t have to tank our national economy, that is a failure of a system we have accepted despite being based on feudal lords and Robber Barons.

This pandemic, and our response (or lack thereof) to it, is trying to teach us some important #Culturalinertia lessons.

Will we be willing to learn them and change direction as we come out of the stall, or will we just start ourselves right back down the same path, racing blindly and unprepared toward the next preventable crisis?

As a start, if you are still alive in November of this year, you better damn well find a way to vote. Not just for the office of president, but for every position at every level of government. Everyone involved in protecting, enabling, or participating in this malevolent incompetence must be removed from any positions of power over the lives of the rest of us.