The United States Strategic National Stockpile of essential medical supplies maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seems unable to respond to the present COVID-19 crisis. There is much discussion in today’s news about who is responsible for the shortcomings. Did Trump find the shelves empty or full when he took office after President Obama?
Our doctors and nurses are being thoroughly mobilized and worked to limit… Many cases receive no attention at all.
— Acting Governor Calvin Coolidge, Massachusetts, 9/25/1918
Responsibility for pandemic preparation was privatized under the Obama and Trump administrations. It’s time to face down the national security…
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While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near Baghdad on March 11, the U.S.
“I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” current Democratic Presidential candidate, Joe Biden, said in April 2007, soon before he was chosen to be Barack Obama’s running mate in the 2008 elections.
Biden wins key state of Michigan and the Democrat Party establishment can barely contain its joy. I am happy also but for a different reason. No matter what happens with this twisted Democrat Party nomination drama, I welcome this period as a period of absolute political clarity. Why? Because for the internal debate and struggles among Black people, the lines of political and ideological demarcation between the interests of the Black neoliberal political class and the masses of Black workers and the poor have never been clearer.
I will provide some points to support this claim.
Yes, Putin’s hackers would love to see Trump reelected. And it’s also true that unknown to us there may be a new Giuliani-led team of huckster guerrillas sealing dirty deals behind the scenes in order to bring the Democratic Party (DP) down.
But no matter how true these things are, responsibility for the party’s current predicament — i.e., that it’s doing a lousy job of preparing for the November showdown with Trump — lies in its own hands.
As people march off to the polls today to pick their favorite political actor of the year, I hear precious few voices openly asking what seem to me to be obvious questions, like WHO produced the movie that is their candidacy? Who directed it? Who wrote the script? Who are the investors that will be expecting to see returns on their investment, if their movie and their best actor should somehow win? And how far do the networks of wealth, influence and control extend beyond those public faces inside the campaign?
It is this author’s analysis that the effect of the Donald Trump presidency has been, somewhat paradoxically, to put wind in the sails of a kind of patriotic liberalism, reaffirming confidence in the forms and functions of US governance. Since Trump’s election, the calling words have been “not my president,” “not my country,” “this isn’t the America I know”–and the protagonists in the valiant anti-Trump struggle has been Robert Mueller, the FBI, Nancy Pelosi, the CIA, and NATO.
