When the media discovered most of the people dying from Covid were Black or Hispanic, not White people - It hit conservative media and Donald Trump like a lightning bolt
This is why Mike Pompeo calls him one of the most dangerous men on earth; not the terrorists, because most of them are simply following the directives of those who call the shots. And in spite of all his criminal acts, he strolls freely about Mar-a-Lago, why? because as one of America's "rich celebrities", he's on a different level of "justice" than ordinary folk like you and I.
Unfortunately, there will never be the will among officials to classify the gross negligence and malfeasance as a genocide based on bias and racial discrimination or animosity, even though those were clearly front and center. However, the number of collateral deaths of whites, including children, medical personnel, seniors (like me), and people of all ages and from all levels of the social strata should be enough of an outrage to motivate some serious condemnation for the history books. And, the reality is, that before anyone made the racial connection, we know that Trump had already failed to take any action to stop the pandemic before it became a pandemic in this country, as he easily could have done and was done elsewhere by moving quickly to contain the virus and to protect everyone.
Sadly, you are right: because T didn't actually declare a military "police action" or command "brownshirt" gangs to go out and kill blacks and hispanics, most people will never connect the horrific Plan to the excess deaths. Are you too cynical, that only white deaths will get historical attention? As the old saying goes, it depends on who writes the history. When T did command his gangs to invade the Capitol of The United States of America, within days many people in power were already trying to erase that from history, so there you go.
Sorry for the delayed response. The good news is that there will be a wide variety of historians recording the events that are taking place unless the reactionaries and fascists do manage to take over completely and actually control what gets printed and documented on tape or digitally. The truth is likely to survive and be told eventually, regardless of the feeble attempts to suppress it. That may or may not prevent the crazies from destroying democracy and our way of life for generations. It will be up to the voting and protesting public and things aren't looking so good right now because ignorance is the goal of much of our schooling thanks to corporate and state influence which discourages inquiry and critical thinking.
Just so you know, there were nearly double the COVID deaths under the Biden administration for the same period as under Trump. This is not excusing Trump's insanity, but it is Biden who proclaimed the pandemic to be "over." It is Biden who 6 months ago said masking and other protective measures were a "personal responsibility," just like the Trump administration. It is Biden who has removed mask mandates for health care facilities. This is disastrous public health policy, or it is actually a mockery of it, so we should be cautious in our divisive rhetoric and desire to clickbait certain demographics for our own personal gain.
You know, you ought to be cautious about accusing Thom Hartmann of producing the fact-based, rationally interpreted explications such as above for the sake of divisive rhetoric and out of his desire to clickbait certain demographics (proud to plead guilty, for one!) for his own personal gain.
I appreciate Thom's wisdom that's why I have been listening to him and subscribe to his report. But in the past 7 years Thom's facts have become selective and are presented in a biased fashion that does not help solve problems or mobilize people into action. His obsession with (obvious) Republican malfeasance and propping of of Trump by constantly giving him airtime is what he has to do to maintain the liberal audience. This is not the Thom Hartmann of 20 years ago, as erudite as his writings may be. He has called Nancy Pelosi a progressive, Hillary Clinton was a "brilliant" Secretary of State and was an "identical" candidate to Bernie Sanders. These and so many other false assertions lead to a complacency among the liberal base and Americans in general that they accept the crumbs thrown to them by neoliberal Democrats and a foreign policy based on escalation of war and interventional war steeped in a nationalism that Thom himself is stoking. His show has become a form of state-run media, existing almost exclusively to protect the Democratic Party which precludes the critical thinking vital to sustain the "democracy" he claims to be protecting.
Over the last several months I have asked a number of Republican friends to list 10 good conservative Republican ideas about how to make America better for everyone . . . the Republicans have no good ideas. If they do they must be classified top secret and nobody has clearance.
Just so youy know, TRUMP had a short window of opportunity to act fast to contain the virus before it spread and became uncontainable . . . in January, February, maybe March, 2020, long before Biden became president a year later . . . Trump sat on his hands for a year . . . and hundreds of thousands of people died.
He needs to be prosecuted and convicted for hundreds of thousands of counts of negligent homicide, involuntary manslaughter. See my post above.
Thom calls it the Trump "genocide," and cites the reasons why. The reversal of policy to the day the reporting came out that the virus was supposedly a smart, selective virus killing Democrats. Of course, I remember when the cruise ship was denied disembarcation in San Francisco because Trump said, out loud and up front, that he didn't want more positive cases counted to make him look bad. After that , its a litany of monstrous, calculated manipulations to lead more Americans to die. I can't believe that the Post Office is still cursed with DeJoy, who clearly vandalized the nation's infrastructure hoping to lessen the vote count of virus-leery Democrats, while Trump nursed the delusion of his own voters that it was "just the flu." In a way, is it understandable that our social and legal systems aren't adequate to counter such evil?
While I agree if we are going to hold presidents accountable for intentional mass murder than Obama and Biden should be convicted as well eg Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somolia and Pakistan to name a few. Both Trump and Biden have used "the science" as a convenience blowing in the political winds. So Trump was aggressively ignorant and Biden's ignorance is more benign. Take a look at the statistics and see that we ignore that hundreds per day are still dying of COVID and your fearless leader declared that the pamdemic was "over" months ago. If Trump had said that I wonder what morally relativistic liberals would be saying now.
Last I checked the Biden administration is still urging people to get the boosters . . . conducting wars are official acts for which a president has immunity, acts of national policy . . . NIXON V. FITZGERALD (1982) the Supreme Court held that the president has absolute immunity for (a) official (b) legal acts, no immunity for (c) unofficial and / or (d) illegal acts.
Trump's lawyers would have to argue that he decision to do nothing and declare that the virus would soon "just disappear like magic" was an official act, even if it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and was not a crime, even though it obviously meets the (simple) test for negligent homicide.
I wish I was in a position to prosecute Trump on this, but I'm not in the DOJ, it would be a slam dunker, he has no defenses. You're the doc, I'm the lawyer.
Biden saying that "the pandemic is over" in 2023 is 100% irrelevant to Trump's gross negligence in 2020. I could make a good case for first degree murder on Trump, since he refused to lift a finger to even try to protect Americans from the virus and he knew from CDC and NIH briefing that his failure to act would kill people, a lot of people, this establishes (a) ani intent to kill, with (b) pre-meditation and deliberation.
It would be tons of fun to watch his defense lawyers try to spin that.
Second degree murder would be even easier, since it doesn't require specific intent to kill, only doing an act (or failing to act) with conscious and reckless disregard of the safety of another, or others, resulting in the death of another.
Maybe you should stick to medicine.
"Conservatism" is not a coherent idea, not a coherent political philosophy, psychological it's little or nothing but a fear of change, a phobia of change, a phobia of the other, the different, the new, a phobia of progress. Conservatives are stuck in the mud, endlessly trying to "conserve" the past as if the past were something that can be conserved like jam in a jar.
All progress by definition is always made by progressives, liberals, always has been, always will be, I used to be a very conservative Republican, time, life, experience, education, opened my eyes to the intellectual vacuity of what passes for "conservative philosophy." Even the seminal book sparked the "conservative movement" in the 1950s - THE CONSERVATIVE MIND: FROM BURKE TO ELLIOT, by Russell Kirk - nutshell, is little but "our great grandfathers knew best and we need to conserve their legacy and obstruct change and progress as much was we can," the past is good,, the new is bad, change is bad, new ideas are scary.
The problem with this is that all the problems we have now didn't get fixed, or solved, by what we've done in the past, to fix anything we must do what we haven't done before, which means that conservative Republicans can't fix anything 'cuz they're allergic to doing anything but whatever failed to fix it last year, or fifty years ago.
I remember when the Republican party was howling about new laws requiring seat belts in cars and motorcycle helmets, an assault on their "freedom" to die in motor vehicle accidents, since then seat belts and helmets have saved many thousands of lives and prevented millions of much more serious injuries and many billions of dollars (trillions?) in medical expenses and the costs of disability and death . . . not the brightest rocks in the box.
I am only concerned with the public health policy and the outcomes, not parsing the degree of negligence or political expediency. Of course it is easy to say that Trump's handling of the pandemic or immigration was "worse" than Biden's, but due to the extreme degree of Trump's ignorance that relativism is irrelevant. Biden can be bad and Trump can be awful, it is not a binary choice of one "good" and one "evil." Unless of course your vested interests are enmeshed with those of the defense industry, Wall Street, the health care conglomerates or the Democratic Party. And what the leader of the free world says does indeed have consequences: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/19/biden-says-covid-pandemic-is-over-despite-us-daily-death-toll-in-the-hundreds
My understanding of Covid deaths does not have the U.S. with the largest amount. I believe that India had the most deaths, estimated at over 4 million. China has not revealed their death rate, and it is probably much more than they admitted to, publicly.
So? US deaths are OK? The article describes malicious political manipulation intended to facilitate more deaths, with knowledge that those deaths would occur in certain demographics,
actually resulting in reasonably deduced excess deaths in the hundreds of thousands, and you're quibbling about whether we're on top of the top 3 international raw count ???
Trump makes decisions like the psychopath he is. No doubt the strategy that is in this Report came from more than him ( think Miller, Bannon, Stone), and he loved it. Once he went with it, he would never back down. Changing his mind to do the right thing or adjust for new scientific statistics is something he would perceive as weak. What followed tracks with holocaust situations where the perpetrators become even more committed to destroying the "others". People of color AND blue states---it's a twofer.
At the core of it all is greed. The power over life and death must be intoxicating for a bunch of psychos, but nothing "trumps" holding onto the power to have all the tax breaks and corrupt deals they ever wanted.
Great revisit of this 'political systemic racism' at the top level of our government. Also, I recall with some irony that the pork plants were owned by Chinese companies (which are always controlled by the Chinese govt.). The output of the plants was primarily slotted for China. The irony being that at the same time as complaining this was the China virus, TFG was assisting their racist company.
I have given up trying to get any member of Congress, Biden, Kamala Harris, or the DOJ, to take this seriously.
Involuntary manslaughter / negligent homicide, an act (or failure to act, if you have a duty to act) of "more than ordinary negligence" that results in the death of another.
Trump SHOULD BE prosecuted for 100,000 counts of negligent homicide, a very simple case to try and prove with statistical medical evidence, all the facts needed to convict Trump have been public knowledge since 2020 . . . he is literally getting away with mass murder.
5 years per count for 100,000 counts of involuntary manslaughter, 500,000 years to life.
Trump should also be prosecuted for fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, for defrauding millions of his fans out of hundreds of millions of dollars by lying to them about the "stolen election." Another very simple case to prove, all the evidence is public, Trump's own words, speeches, Tweets and "Truth Social" posts.
Fraud, to make a false or misleading statement of fact, for the purpose of obtaining something of value from another (money, votes).
Legally, every time a politician lies to get money or votes he (or she) commits fraud, in all other contexts fraud is a felony, but we give our politicians a blanket license to commit as much fraud as they want, this is insane. They have a first amendment right to say anything, but they should not have the DE FACTO IMMUNITY we let them have for fraud in public.
This is why Mike Pompeo calls him one of the most dangerous men on earth; not the terrorists, because most of them are simply following the directives of those who call the shots. And in spite of all his criminal acts, he strolls freely about Mar-a-Lago, why? because as one of America's "rich celebrities", he's on a different level of "justice" than ordinary folk like you and I.
Unfortunately, there will never be the will among officials to classify the gross negligence and malfeasance as a genocide based on bias and racial discrimination or animosity, even though those were clearly front and center. However, the number of collateral deaths of whites, including children, medical personnel, seniors (like me), and people of all ages and from all levels of the social strata should be enough of an outrage to motivate some serious condemnation for the history books. And, the reality is, that before anyone made the racial connection, we know that Trump had already failed to take any action to stop the pandemic before it became a pandemic in this country, as he easily could have done and was done elsewhere by moving quickly to contain the virus and to protect everyone.
Sadly, you are right: because T didn't actually declare a military "police action" or command "brownshirt" gangs to go out and kill blacks and hispanics, most people will never connect the horrific Plan to the excess deaths. Are you too cynical, that only white deaths will get historical attention? As the old saying goes, it depends on who writes the history. When T did command his gangs to invade the Capitol of The United States of America, within days many people in power were already trying to erase that from history, so there you go.
Sorry for the delayed response. The good news is that there will be a wide variety of historians recording the events that are taking place unless the reactionaries and fascists do manage to take over completely and actually control what gets printed and documented on tape or digitally. The truth is likely to survive and be told eventually, regardless of the feeble attempts to suppress it. That may or may not prevent the crazies from destroying democracy and our way of life for generations. It will be up to the voting and protesting public and things aren't looking so good right now because ignorance is the goal of much of our schooling thanks to corporate and state influence which discourages inquiry and critical thinking.
Just so you know, there were nearly double the COVID deaths under the Biden administration for the same period as under Trump. This is not excusing Trump's insanity, but it is Biden who proclaimed the pandemic to be "over." It is Biden who 6 months ago said masking and other protective measures were a "personal responsibility," just like the Trump administration. It is Biden who has removed mask mandates for health care facilities. This is disastrous public health policy, or it is actually a mockery of it, so we should be cautious in our divisive rhetoric and desire to clickbait certain demographics for our own personal gain.
You know, you ought to be cautious about accusing Thom Hartmann of producing the fact-based, rationally interpreted explications such as above for the sake of divisive rhetoric and out of his desire to clickbait certain demographics (proud to plead guilty, for one!) for his own personal gain.
I appreciate Thom's wisdom that's why I have been listening to him and subscribe to his report. But in the past 7 years Thom's facts have become selective and are presented in a biased fashion that does not help solve problems or mobilize people into action. His obsession with (obvious) Republican malfeasance and propping of of Trump by constantly giving him airtime is what he has to do to maintain the liberal audience. This is not the Thom Hartmann of 20 years ago, as erudite as his writings may be. He has called Nancy Pelosi a progressive, Hillary Clinton was a "brilliant" Secretary of State and was an "identical" candidate to Bernie Sanders. These and so many other false assertions lead to a complacency among the liberal base and Americans in general that they accept the crumbs thrown to them by neoliberal Democrats and a foreign policy based on escalation of war and interventional war steeped in a nationalism that Thom himself is stoking. His show has become a form of state-run media, existing almost exclusively to protect the Democratic Party which precludes the critical thinking vital to sustain the "democracy" he claims to be protecting.
Over the last several months I have asked a number of Republican friends to list 10 good conservative Republican ideas about how to make America better for everyone . . . the Republicans have no good ideas. If they do they must be classified top secret and nobody has clearance.
Just so youy know, TRUMP had a short window of opportunity to act fast to contain the virus before it spread and became uncontainable . . . in January, February, maybe March, 2020, long before Biden became president a year later . . . Trump sat on his hands for a year . . . and hundreds of thousands of people died.
He needs to be prosecuted and convicted for hundreds of thousands of counts of negligent homicide, involuntary manslaughter. See my post above.
Thom calls it the Trump "genocide," and cites the reasons why. The reversal of policy to the day the reporting came out that the virus was supposedly a smart, selective virus killing Democrats. Of course, I remember when the cruise ship was denied disembarcation in San Francisco because Trump said, out loud and up front, that he didn't want more positive cases counted to make him look bad. After that , its a litany of monstrous, calculated manipulations to lead more Americans to die. I can't believe that the Post Office is still cursed with DeJoy, who clearly vandalized the nation's infrastructure hoping to lessen the vote count of virus-leery Democrats, while Trump nursed the delusion of his own voters that it was "just the flu." In a way, is it understandable that our social and legal systems aren't adequate to counter such evil?
While I agree if we are going to hold presidents accountable for intentional mass murder than Obama and Biden should be convicted as well eg Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somolia and Pakistan to name a few. Both Trump and Biden have used "the science" as a convenience blowing in the political winds. So Trump was aggressively ignorant and Biden's ignorance is more benign. Take a look at the statistics and see that we ignore that hundreds per day are still dying of COVID and your fearless leader declared that the pamdemic was "over" months ago. If Trump had said that I wonder what morally relativistic liberals would be saying now.
Last I checked the Biden administration is still urging people to get the boosters . . . conducting wars are official acts for which a president has immunity, acts of national policy . . . NIXON V. FITZGERALD (1982) the Supreme Court held that the president has absolute immunity for (a) official (b) legal acts, no immunity for (c) unofficial and / or (d) illegal acts.
Trump's lawyers would have to argue that he decision to do nothing and declare that the virus would soon "just disappear like magic" was an official act, even if it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and was not a crime, even though it obviously meets the (simple) test for negligent homicide.
I wish I was in a position to prosecute Trump on this, but I'm not in the DOJ, it would be a slam dunker, he has no defenses. You're the doc, I'm the lawyer.
Biden saying that "the pandemic is over" in 2023 is 100% irrelevant to Trump's gross negligence in 2020. I could make a good case for first degree murder on Trump, since he refused to lift a finger to even try to protect Americans from the virus and he knew from CDC and NIH briefing that his failure to act would kill people, a lot of people, this establishes (a) ani intent to kill, with (b) pre-meditation and deliberation.
It would be tons of fun to watch his defense lawyers try to spin that.
Second degree murder would be even easier, since it doesn't require specific intent to kill, only doing an act (or failing to act) with conscious and reckless disregard of the safety of another, or others, resulting in the death of another.
Maybe you should stick to medicine.
"Conservatism" is not a coherent idea, not a coherent political philosophy, psychological it's little or nothing but a fear of change, a phobia of change, a phobia of the other, the different, the new, a phobia of progress. Conservatives are stuck in the mud, endlessly trying to "conserve" the past as if the past were something that can be conserved like jam in a jar.
All progress by definition is always made by progressives, liberals, always has been, always will be, I used to be a very conservative Republican, time, life, experience, education, opened my eyes to the intellectual vacuity of what passes for "conservative philosophy." Even the seminal book sparked the "conservative movement" in the 1950s - THE CONSERVATIVE MIND: FROM BURKE TO ELLIOT, by Russell Kirk - nutshell, is little but "our great grandfathers knew best and we need to conserve their legacy and obstruct change and progress as much was we can," the past is good,, the new is bad, change is bad, new ideas are scary.
The problem with this is that all the problems we have now didn't get fixed, or solved, by what we've done in the past, to fix anything we must do what we haven't done before, which means that conservative Republicans can't fix anything 'cuz they're allergic to doing anything but whatever failed to fix it last year, or fifty years ago.
I remember when the Republican party was howling about new laws requiring seat belts in cars and motorcycle helmets, an assault on their "freedom" to die in motor vehicle accidents, since then seat belts and helmets have saved many thousands of lives and prevented millions of much more serious injuries and many billions of dollars (trillions?) in medical expenses and the costs of disability and death . . . not the brightest rocks in the box.
I am only concerned with the public health policy and the outcomes, not parsing the degree of negligence or political expediency. Of course it is easy to say that Trump's handling of the pandemic or immigration was "worse" than Biden's, but due to the extreme degree of Trump's ignorance that relativism is irrelevant. Biden can be bad and Trump can be awful, it is not a binary choice of one "good" and one "evil." Unless of course your vested interests are enmeshed with those of the defense industry, Wall Street, the health care conglomerates or the Democratic Party. And what the leader of the free world says does indeed have consequences: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/19/biden-says-covid-pandemic-is-over-despite-us-daily-death-toll-in-the-hundreds
What should Biden do to reduce Covid harm now? You tell us.
My understanding of Covid deaths does not have the U.S. with the largest amount. I believe that India had the most deaths, estimated at over 4 million. China has not revealed their death rate, and it is probably much more than they admitted to, publicly.
So? US deaths are OK? The article describes malicious political manipulation intended to facilitate more deaths, with knowledge that those deaths would occur in certain demographics,
actually resulting in reasonably deduced excess deaths in the hundreds of thousands, and you're quibbling about whether we're on top of the top 3 international raw count ???
Trump makes decisions like the psychopath he is. No doubt the strategy that is in this Report came from more than him ( think Miller, Bannon, Stone), and he loved it. Once he went with it, he would never back down. Changing his mind to do the right thing or adjust for new scientific statistics is something he would perceive as weak. What followed tracks with holocaust situations where the perpetrators become even more committed to destroying the "others". People of color AND blue states---it's a twofer.
At the core of it all is greed. The power over life and death must be intoxicating for a bunch of psychos, but nothing "trumps" holding onto the power to have all the tax breaks and corrupt deals they ever wanted.
How many times can I say horrific, horrible, horrifying?
Great revisit of this 'political systemic racism' at the top level of our government. Also, I recall with some irony that the pork plants were owned by Chinese companies (which are always controlled by the Chinese govt.). The output of the plants was primarily slotted for China. The irony being that at the same time as complaining this was the China virus, TFG was assisting their racist company.
Could you cite the sources of your data??
http://www.wh-group.com/html/about.php
https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/WH-GROUP-LIMITED-17083222/company/
and a complex history of acquisition intertwined as 'local state owned' businesses:
https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2014/0805/a3550/ewhgroup-20140722-16.pdf
I have given up trying to get any member of Congress, Biden, Kamala Harris, or the DOJ, to take this seriously.
Involuntary manslaughter / negligent homicide, an act (or failure to act, if you have a duty to act) of "more than ordinary negligence" that results in the death of another.
Trump SHOULD BE prosecuted for 100,000 counts of negligent homicide, a very simple case to try and prove with statistical medical evidence, all the facts needed to convict Trump have been public knowledge since 2020 . . . he is literally getting away with mass murder.
5 years per count for 100,000 counts of involuntary manslaughter, 500,000 years to life.
Trump should also be prosecuted for fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, for defrauding millions of his fans out of hundreds of millions of dollars by lying to them about the "stolen election." Another very simple case to prove, all the evidence is public, Trump's own words, speeches, Tweets and "Truth Social" posts.
Fraud, to make a false or misleading statement of fact, for the purpose of obtaining something of value from another (money, votes).
Legally, every time a politician lies to get money or votes he (or she) commits fraud, in all other contexts fraud is a felony, but we give our politicians a blanket license to commit as much fraud as they want, this is insane. They have a first amendment right to say anything, but they should not have the DE FACTO IMMUNITY we let them have for fraud in public.
Thxs for spelling it out so clearly...