The US Debacle Grows as Trump Twitters
Anger is producing new state alliances that are the future
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 13, 2020
Watching Netflix and sending endless text messages with animated gifs still represents the pandemic quarantine for the parts of the population with education and salaries. The massive disruption appears to be the only real hardship, but it was so sudden that the shock has not yet worn off.
There is the stress of not knowing what is going to happen or when and the collapse of the US federal government is disturbing but more an embarrassment than a real problem for these people. The federal government has been steadily destroyed over the last fifty years by an elite group seeking to deny any responsibility for the nation’s population, so people expect nothing.
This abandonment of national responsibility is complicated by the natural laws that dictate viral infections without a vaccine or cure. The slow incubation rate of COVID-19 and its ability to infect some without symptoms put it beyond the range of fundamental human planning. If nothing happens for a week or so, then nothing will ever happen until it does, and the absence of national healthcare producing comorbidities with poor nutrition and stress of the precariat life ramps up the death rate. It is relentless unless rigid isolation is maintained.
Nothing can be done about the months of infection until the spread slows naturally, or an effective treatment reduces the death rates. And the risk will remain until we have a vaccine, tested, and most of the population inoculated. There is no appeal, no way to cheat, and no way around this two-year-long process. That is this pandemic’s reality.
The effect of this on half of the population who has been exploited for decades or centuries by racism and wage slavery is a very different and descent into starvation or sickness and death, whichever comes first. The devastation in no small part of the US population is a massive threat to the nation-state and the pattern of lies, propaganda, and brutal exploitation that is now standard for the US government. $1,200 plus $500 per child will, at some point in the next few weeks, buy families a month.
What should happen is a massive food distribution enacted nationally. But we know from the Trump regime’s criminal incompetence, blithely maintained as blameless, nothing like this will happen.
The states and cities with legitimate governments are working to fill this gap, but that is difficult without the national resources. Those resources and their distribution was the responsivity of the federal government, Forcing states into a competition for their emergency resources is criminal. But this will not hold for three more months, and that is what is needed.
But that is not my point here. We have a far bigger problem that is only now being worried over in the more extended form media. That means it is only now beginning to filter down from the educated to a broader audience. And, yes, this is again the widening gap that has destroyed the national identity and broken the US into castes that can barely communicate.
The economy has crashed. The neoliberal, hypercapitalist economics led by the US since the 1970s has died. We had to stop everything planetwide from slowing the spread of COVID-19 but, despite the expensively maintained facade of health, the economy has collapsed. Some parts of it will be resuscitated, having been put on life support with the infusion of trillions of dollars, but it will not recover. The longer it is immobile, the fewer parts that will be salvageable.
The stunning realization is that the pre-COVID world is gone. Efforts to recover that world and simply carry on are hopeless, and no one has any real idea of what to do. As the remote work, Netflix upper class slowly realizes this; they will become terrified. I know I am.
Sadly, the very slow realization is building among the propagandized population that Trump has no clue. While that realization starts as an abstraction, it becomes genuine when their parents, neighbors, and friends begin to die from the ‘flu.’ That is happening now. What will these people do?
The absurd claims by Trump of control of state shelter in place rules while almost nothing is done at the federal level is finally breaking the barrier to unified state action. With New York on one coast and California on the other building alliances to handle reopening their state economies carefully, How far and how fast will this go?
But that doesn’t deal with the giant issue of redistributing assets to all the people struggling with no income and very weak medical services. These people need Universal Basic Income, to begin with, and guarantees of food, and housing support.
Netflix is not an option for these folks. Merely being able to order a week or two of groceries online to occupy their time will not be an option for many of them, either. We are facing an ugly future that has, at this point, no likelihood of change until late 2021, and by then, we have no idea of our condition.
The oligarchs, billionaires, and hypercapitalists who have lucked into fortunes are the product of their self-serving world of statistics. That world they see as driven, relentlessly, by the 80–20 rule, and they are the 20% who have succeeded. The 80% inevitably fail or struggle to survive, and that is as it should be. But that 80% have very different ideas about suffering silently and dying quietly.
The economy that is the product of this thinking has collapsed in the face of the pandemic, and that is only one planetary disaster in the waves of the oncoming climate crisis. We cannot live with this type of economy, and we cannot merely sneer at 80% of the population for not succeeding in a rigged game and having been criminally exploited by their so-called leaders.
At this point, there appears to be no idea of what to do. The oligarchic elite, fronted by Trump, want everyone to go back to work and take their chances of dying and killing their families. Even Trump looks completely stupid, suggesting this.
The criminal remnant of the Republican Party is a log jam blocking any solution or any hope. The pressure builds, and greed, stupidity, and ignorance do not sell well in times of desperation. The problem is irreconcilable, and the old political system cannot resolve this. I don’t know anyone with any confidence in the November election.
All options are ugly and seem to lead to thousands of more deaths.
Is it time to move away from the union? The Pacific Coast states make a far better 21st-century alliance.
