Die For Me by Nancy OhanianIn 1969 I bought a VW van in Wiesbaden, Germany and drove to India. When I drove back to Europe a couple of years later, I was sick and penniless and stranded. I made my way to Amsterdam and lived in my van and ate rice and vegetables everyday for a dollar at a macrobiotic restaurant in the city's meditation center, the Kosmos. Eventually the chef there liked me and told me she could cure what was wrong with me-- without the operation doctors said I needed. She gave name a job washing dishes, taught me how to work in a restaurant and how to cook. And cured me. I had some good years there and wound up as the manager but my favorite days were always the days I cooked; there were several of who took turns.In January, when I caught on to Chris Martsenon's warnings about what the pandemic was bringing to America, I went out and started stocking up on the kinds of beans, grains and root vegetables I used to cook with in Holland-- common ones like carrots, onions, cabbage, potatoes and less common ones like daikon, turnips, rutabaga, celery roots... I hadn't been cooking regularly for decades. But it's like riding a bike; you don't forget, especially microbiotic cooking, which is also very reasonable and based on simple principles and techniques. So every day-- except Sundays when I fast, a hold-over from my Kosmos days-- I make healthy, delicious food for Roland and I.I've also been able to buy perishables easily-- fresh fruits and vegetables. Today I noticed for the first time there were no roma tomatoes , no string beans and no leeks at the organic store. Maybe they'll have them tomorrow. Or, maybe not, I thought, after speaking with a friend in New York, where the shelves are far emptier than in California and after reading the latest piece from David Cay Johnston at the DCReport.org, Another Trump Screw-Up: Food May 'Rot In The Fields'. Johnston's point? Trump's obsessive "anti-Mexican racism is barring legal workers from picking fruits and vegetables; food production, distribution system could collapse."
Early signs show that the systems that get fresh fruit and vegetables to American homes is strained and may experience major failures. The Trump administration is only making matters worse, allowing his racism against Mexicans to inflict damage on American farms that depend on legal labor from south of the border....“Nearly all of our fruits and vegetables are not automated and you need a strong labor force to handpick those crops,” John Walt Boatright of the Florida Farm Bureau Federation told the Palm Beach Post. “We are hearing a lot of concerns from the blueberry industry and other labor-intensive crops, and working to find a solution.”U.S. farmers depend on more than 200,000 Mexicans who get visas each year to pick apples, pears and other crops.Yet Mother Jones magazine reports that the American consulate in Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city, and other consulates have closed. That means most Mexican farmworkers have no way to get annual work visas. Unless the visas are issued much of this year’s American fruit and vegetable crops will not be harvested, barring some other unexpected development.Each year as president, Donald Trump has gotten such visas for Mar-a-Lago while assiduously avoiding the many qualified workers in Palm Beach County, many of whom are African American. Federal law allows such visas for chambermaids, cooks and waitstaff only when no Americans are available....Representative Austin Scott (R-GA) says that delays in issuing visas to farm laborers are a serious threat to vegetable and fruit growers who, unlike grain farmers, don’t have federal crop insurance. “If delays continue” in issuing visas to Mexican farmworkers “we’re going to see crops rotting in the field,” Scott said.The number of these Mexican farm labor visas has grown more than six-fold since 2000, a revealing indicator of how much America depends on Mexican labor to supply fresh fruits and vegetables in grocery stores.Of course, Trump is hostile to all Mexicans and his administration has shown no signs it wants to resume the issuance of visas for Mexican farm laborers who take most of their money home with them. Trump thinks like a 16th Century mercantilist, believing any dollar that leaves us makes America worse off. It’s discredited and downright crazy economic thinking that hurts America more than Mexico, not that Trump understands this.A lack of imported farm labor means not just the loss of those foodstuffs, but of income for farmers and those in the related packing, processing and shopping businesses, worsening the cascade of economic damage.Labor intensive crops such as strawberries and crops that require placing beehives for pollination will be most affected by a shortage of labor.Tree fruits require intensive labor not just to harvest, but also to cut away diseased limbs and plant replacement trees. Not minding the trees each year means reduced production in future years... Trump’s de facto policy: Crops be dammed, just keep Mexicans out.
You can always count on Trump to make everything and anything worse. As Jennifer Rubin noted in yesterday's Washington Post, "No one could make up a character as narcissistic and lacking in human empathy as President Trump... More than 2,400 Americans had died by Sunday. Governors around the country are screaming for more assistance from the federal government. Trump? He obsesses over ratings. It is hard to comprehend how indifferent he is to human suffering."
Increasingly, the country seems to operate on two tracks. On one, groveling courtiers flatter Trump, try to soften his impulsive pronouncements and scramble to catch up after months of delay. As they cater to the president, exploring patently absurd ideas, they have less attention to devote to real issues that only the federal government can address. On the other track, governors have no time for bowing and scraping; they are dealing hands-on with hundreds of logistical challenges, made worse by the absence of coordinated purchasing and by lack of a comprehensive testing program. Thank goodness governors are actually doing their jobs, which increasingly entail navigating around Trump.
Then there's the way grocery chains-- lookin' at you, Whole Foods-- treat their workers. In fact Whole Foods workers are going out on strike today nationwide to protest unsafe work conditions. They plan to "call in sick to demand paid leave for all workers who stay home or self-quarantine during the crisis, free coronavirus testing for all employees, and hazard pay of double the current hourly wage for employees who show up to work during the pandemic. 'COVID-19 is a very real threat to the safety of our workforce and customers,' Whole Worker, the national worker group that is organizing the 'sick out' wrote in a statement. 'We cannot wait for politicians, institutions, or our own management to step in to protect us.' The sick-out follows reports that Whole Foods workers at numerous stores across the country, including locations in New York City, Chicago, Louisiana, and California have tested positive for Covid-19. In each of these locations, the stores have remained open, leading some employees to charge that Whole Foods has failed to prioritize their safety during a period of record sales for the company."While Trump was accusing NYC hospitals of illegally selling masks and respirators "out the back door"-- an excruciating and typical Trump lie-- the city's health care providers have been getting infected and dying. Many people question if Trump is human. "The coronavirus pandemic," wrote Michael Schwirtz, "which has infected more than 30,000 people in New York City, is beginning to take a toll on those who are most needed to combat it: the doctors, nurses and other workers at hospitals and clinics. In emergency rooms and intensive care units, typically dispassionate medical professionals are feeling panicked as increasing numbers of colleagues get sick... Medical workers are still showing up day after day to face overflowing emergency rooms, earning them praise as heroes. Thousands of volunteers have signed up to join their colleagues. But doctors and nurses said they can look overseas for a dark glimpse of the risk they are facing, especially when protective gear has been in short supply. In China, more than 3,000 doctors were infected, nearly half of them in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, according to Chinese government statistics."And it isn't only Americans' physical health he's threatening. Americans' fiscal well-being is in great jeopardy because of his mental debilities, incompetence and self-absorption. Wall Street on Parade noted yesterday that in 2015 Carl Icahn called BlackRock "an extremely dangerous company." And the Fed picked them to manage their corporate bond bailout programs.
Icahn was specifically talking about BlackRock’s packaging of junk bonds into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and calling them “High Yield,” which the average American doesn’t understand is a junk-rated bond. The ETFs trade during market hours on the New York Stock Exchange, giving them the aura of liquidity when one needs it. Icahn said: “I used to laugh with some of these guys…I used to say, you know, the mafia has a better code of ethics than you guys. You know you’re selling this crap.” Icahn warned that “if and when there’s a real problem in the economy, there’s going to be a rush for the exits like in a movie theatre, and people want to sell those bonds, and think they can sell them, there is no market for them.”BlackRock not only sells junk-rated bond ETFs under the brand name iShares, but it has some of the largest investment grade corporate bond ETFs, including one that trades under the stock symbol LQD, which was experiencing serious losses and seeing major outflows of money until the Federal Reserve announced recently that it was creating three facilities to buy investment grade corporate debt from the primary and secondary markets, as well as investment grade corporate bond ETFs, along with agency commercial mortgage-backed securities.And just who is going to be running these facilities for the Federal Reserve? None other than BlackRock-- posing an enormous conflict of interest which was readily observable in the market as BlackRock’s investment grade ETFs rallied dramatically on the news....Picking a highly conflicted Wall Street firm to manage a taxpayer-subsidized bailout of the highly reckless and irresponsible securitization practices of Wall Street is nothing new for the Federal Reserve and its unlimited money spigot, the New York Fed. The Fed did the same thing during the financial crisis of 2008. (See The New York Fed Has Contracted JPMorgan to Hold Over $1.7 Trillion of its QE Bonds Despite Two Felony Counts and Serial Charges of Crimes.)