U.S. Blows Through Peak Daily Coronavirus Deaths With 4,591. Trump Responds By Lifting Shutdown.

Link here at the Wall Street Journal.  Also reported by the Washington Post.   Are these numbers accurate? I would certainly hope so.  Regardless, this isn’t anywhere near under control as Trump said it was.  In fact, it is now coming to light that a lot of countries are undercounting deaths. That includes the U.S.  It’s understandable given the chaos.  Apparently, New York was finding thousands of people died at home and that was not being counted.  And, there are thousands of nursing homes infected across the country that are being kept out of the press. I believe I read that at ProPublica from memory.  A story came to light a few days ago where a nursing home had piled seventeen bodies in a room that had died from an outbreak. No authorities were alerted. This was found out via anonymous tip. You can’t make this stuff up.  For-profit nursing homes that oft times pay its workers slave wages are sickening inventions of the “free” market. They exploit the elderly and workers.  Many conspiracy theorists in the U.S. are taking just the opposite tact.  The U.S. is inflating numbers because aliens are taking over the world.  Or, the United States is about to vaccinate people to create a mass killing.  Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me that elites would like us all to die.  But, then who would pick their food, tend to their children, mow their lawns, do their laundry, fight their wars, build their castles, build their endless acquisitive consumption, care for them when they are sick and the like.  Okay, forget about that.  They won’t kill all of us.  They need someone to prey on to maintain their entitlement. 

If this WSJ number is accurate, that means 50% more people yesterday than died on 9/11.  If this keeps up, a cumulative total from today until little more than another week will be more Americans than died in Vietnam.  We conservatively spent $3 trillion to avenge the deaths of less than 3,000 people on 9/11.  That’s $25,000 per family.  Yet, we get more than that dying in a single day from this pandemic and 20 million people unemployed (at least one hundred million who have been chronically underemployed or are not even seeking employment) and what do we spend to avenge their deaths or suffering?  Let’s see.  Some of them will get $600 or $1200 of their own money.  In other words, the government took it from them and lent it back to them with interest.  The pathological Treasury Secretary noted this will last citizens 10 weeks. $1200?  I didn’t know he was a comedian.  I did know he’s a crook.  That guy should be in jail for his 2008 financial crisis dealings.  Since this dynamic of marginalization has been building for decades, it’s hard to draw any other conclusion than the system is fine with most of us dying.  They need to get more death bang for the buck for the $8 trillion and counting that they have spent on this crisis.  Estimates have it they killed more than a million people, including women and children, after 9/11.  Although they didn’t do that to avenge 3,000 deaths.  In actuality, they did that to protect corporate empire.  We have a long way to go before the aristocracy is satisfied with their deaths per expenditure.

Trump’s announcement of a plan to reopen the economy is a comedy. Not only does he not have the constitutional authority, he also has no plan. What he presented yesterday is something two children would outline on the back of a napkin at Starbucks when talking about abstractions. There is zero detail, zero testing plans, zero protective gear for people to use and on and on.  (Homemade face masks using underwear do not work. Most N95 masks are not made in this country even though American scientists, American workers, American taxpayers and democracy allowed the development of that technology.)  Not only that, but I just recently found out that Trump cut FDA regulations for testing so companies didn’t actually have to prove their tests work.  And, many came from China. It appears many of these tests are junk and provide inaccurate results.  Another Trump unintended consequence.  More profitable corporate fraud enabled by buffoonery.  We’ve been unable to scale our testing to this day. Unfortunately, in a faux paus during yesterday’s briefing, Dr. Birx let it slip that companies can’t make a profit on testing so it’s not getting done. This is my surprised face. It’s likely a major reason why the data Trump is looking at shows we have peaked.  We’ve peaked because testing has peaked.

This points out a very interesting dynamic in our society.  And, an insidious one at that. This is exactly how large corporations, especially those that use government bribery and anti-competitive practices, operate.  That is, leadership is always incompetent.  Grossly so.  ALWAYS.  I’ve seen it time and again in my business dealings.  Incompetence runs the company and competence at the worker or mid-management level is suppressed.  Workers and underlings always has to sycophantically bend the knee to their corporate leaders and keep their mouths shut or be fired.   Most do this willingly and ignorantly.  This is exactly what Dr. Birx is doing with Trump.  She’s unable to call his incompetence out or she’d lose her job or career.  So, she sells her soul through silence to maintain her status and entitled privilege.  (No different than the Soviet Union either.)  No hierarchical institution wants to hire a leader.  As Hemingway noted, “The world first kills those with courage.”.  That’s because courage points out the systemic incompetence and corruption of institutional hierarchies.  Instead, our masters want “yes” men and women and most are willing to sell themselves for peanuts to do just that.  We see this daily with Trump who fires people on a whim.  This is what he did in his business dealings to people who weren’t loyal.   Who were willing to stand to account and tell the truth.  This is how corporate capitalism operates.  How often have YOU walked into the CEO’s office and told him his leadership team doesn’t know what they are doing or he needs to amend his strategy because policies are causing harm to people or the planet or whatnot?  Never, because we are all yes men and women who have sold our souls.  Corporations are cults. And we are all the conformist worshippers.  Corporate capitalism operates on forced conformity and feeds the loss of individuality, authentic community and democratic principles.  Most importantly, it’s forced conformity hides the truth in plain site.   The Borg.  There are no constitutional freedoms in corporations.  They are a fukcing social virus far more dangerous than the coronavirus.

Here’s something refreshing on that note.  And, this is good news whether it sounds like it or not.  The federal government is a feeble, incompetent bureaucracy whose authority comes not from the consent of the governed but through force and violence. (Just like corporations.)   This is not lost on many people.  It’s lost on the mainstream pathology that mints money and power by developing a political following;  left and right wing TV news journalists who bathe their followers in cult-like identity politics, political celebrity and the like.  As noted, Trump has zero constitutional authority to lift any shutdown. Zero. Governors don’t report to the federal government as the 10th Amendment reminds us. And, citizens are sovereign although our Constitution is dead.  Trump’s claims of dictatorship have dissolved as he once again oversteps his authority.  Nancy Pelosi remarked this week that Trump was weak. Actually, Nancy Pelosi is as weak or weaker. That’s why she ceded her constitutional responsibilities to Trump. We are a republic. Not a monarchy. The power of our federal government lies with the Congress except in times of declared war. Pelosi, McConnell and Trump should all resign. Pelosi, McConnell and Trump should all be impeached. The Georgia and Florida governors should be impeached and resign for their anti-scientific, profit-driven, inhumane management of this crisis.  Frankly, Cuomo was bludgeoning public health before this crisis happened.  He should resign too.   If private citizens were so incompetent in this socially-Darwinian cult society of ours, we’d be dead.  But instead in hierarchical institutions such as corporations and political parties, those parasites instead enrich themselves regardless of incompetence. The minions pay the price for that incompetence.  Or, in the case of politics, the citizens.   Oftentimes through death.

And, to be honest, a post-mortem investigation needs to be done at the CDC. Because they aren’t looking so hot either. I don’t doubt they have medical expertise but operational errors appear everywhere.  It makes me wonder how much Clinton-created CDC Foundation, a corporation, has destroyed the CDC with the comingling of corporate influence and money.  I’d like to see this investigated too. 

The feebleness and lack of legitimate consent of the governed of federal politicians has very serious implications. I mean very serious. It threatens our existing repressive federal government’s power grabs over the last 150 years, it threatens dollar hegemony as countries around the world see this type of craven, incompetent power of U.S. empire and may decide to stop following it, or may be forced to by their citizens who vote in leaders who will challenge the existing global order  and it threatens the entire global order that the U.S. has dominated for the better part of a century. 

It’s good to be the king.  Unfortunately, the world now sees the emperor has no clothes. The implications will almost certainly be wildly profound.