It’s Time to Shut the Country Down — and Pay People to Stay Home

There are many layers as to why America is #1 in the world regarding coronavirus cases and deaths. There are reasons why there has been no coordinated national plan to address this pandemic and why even the wearing of masks has been politicized. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are faced with working and risking illness and death or losing their housing and more. It is insane that anyone is being confronted with lack of healthcare and not being able to meet even their most basic needs. The choice between saving the economy and saving lives is not only a false choice, but a profoundly immoral, unjust, heartless and brutal one. That this is what we here in America are being asked to choose between also illuminates the shadow side of our country — the pervasive greed and cruelty that is at the core of the patriarchal neoliberal predatory capitalist system and its ideology of domination. The whole system needs to be dismantled in order that a radically different one can be created, one which holds life with reverence and protection rather than ensuring its destruction. — Molly

A health care worker gives another a shoulder rub before they go back into the the COVID-19 Unit at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas, July 2, 2020.

By William Rivers Pitt

The school districts for the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, San Francisco and Atlanta have announced that all fall classes will be held online because of the current eruption of new COVID-19 cases across the South and West. Last night, however, Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp issued an order nullifying all locally declared mask mandates in the state, including in Atlanta.

A Utah County Commission meeting was held Wednesday night to discuss the use of masks in schools, if and when the schools should open. The conversation never got started, because the room was flooded with maskless, MAGA-hatted “anti-mask protesters” whose defiance of public health guidelines brought the meeting to an abrupt halt. “This mandate for the children to wear masks is baloney,” one protester told the Salt Lake Tribune.

Also on Wednesday, Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt announced he has been infected with COVID and is quarantining. Stitt embraced Donald Trump’s debacle of a Tulsa rally last month, which local health experts believe led to a spike in COVID cases in that city, and may have even been responsible for Stitt’s own infection.

Governor Stitt was quick to state that, despite his own present experience with COVID, he will not even consider a mask mandate to protect public health. “We’re not going to mandate [masks] in the state of Oklahoma,” he told the Tulsa World, “and we’re not going to be mask-shamers either.”

Back in Washington, D.C., reality remains on an eerily similar hiatus at the White House.

“As Trump’s re-election campaign has struggled to tear down former Vice President Joe Biden with less than four months until Election Day, the president’s staff have devoted considerable resources to finding novel ways to make him feel better about the crumbling world around him,” reports The Daily Beast. “They tell him tales of his sagging poll numbers being fake. They’ve concocted ways of convincing him that the adoring crowds he loves on the campaign trail are still there and ready. They’ve pledged that the social, racial, and economic crises ravaging the nation are ephemeral. And they’ve carried his water as he seeks to reassert his authority over situations falling beyond his control.”     

That water-carrying apparently led Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro to pen an astonishingly vicious and ill-timed editorial broadside against Anthony Fauci, the government’s top COVID expert and the deeply popular face of the fight against the pandemic in the United States. Trump and the White House distanced themselves from Navarro’s attack, but at least one White House source claims Navarro had Trump’s express permission to lob the brick. “Not only was he authorized by Trump, he was encouraged,” the unnamed official said.

A day in the life of Pandemic America, one which saw more than 66,000 new COVID infections nationally, and which was the 37th consecutive day those numbers have risen. The death toll, also rising again, stands at more than 137,000 souls.

The cognitive dissonance on display across the country, and especially in regions currently being harshly affected by COVID, is as remarkable a phenomenon as this nation has ever seen. This self-destructive Trump-inspired defiance of basic safety measures, from leaders as well as voters, has few peers in the annals of our history. There were anti-mask protesters during the 1918 influenza pandemic, too. That calamity lasted years and killed half a million people. 

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