In Nevada, Governor Steve Sisolak declared a 30-day shutdown of non-essential businesses – including bars and casinos – effective March 18. My roommate, who was working conventions in Las Vegas, has been laid off for at least 90 days. My sister, who is handling the mortgage on my house, has been laid off from her casino job. I find myself in the unusual position of being the most financially stable member of the household.
Since Donald Trump has been made aware that taking the coronavirus seriously would do less damage to his polls than standing with his thumb up his ass and blaming the Chinese and Democrats for a “hoax,” the Trump Organization has been floating some initiatives to provide relief for people who have been made unemployed by the crisis. One plan pushed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is to provide each American adult with at least one $1000 check.
So as an anti-tax, anti-deficit libertarian, am I gonna take that thousand-dollar check? FUCK YEAH! Why? Well for one thing, let’s not be too quick to assume that Trump is gonna keep the government’s promise on that. I’m still waiting for him to lock Hillary up.
Second, liberals always tell me that “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” Well, as far as I’m concerned, we need a money-back guarantee. That’s how I think of this check. The government has failed to provide a civilized society, so I want my fuckin’ money back.
And if anybody’s got a problem with spending so much money, then maybe somebody shouldn’t have voted for a reality TV star and his short bus full of sycophants because “owning” was more important to them than qualifications. See, there’s being a capitalist and there’s being just plain greedy, and if you wonder how capitalism got such a bad name, it’s because so many declared fans of capitalism can’t seem to tell the difference. Y’all didn’t care that your boy was pissing on the Constitution and putting migrants in (non-socially isolated) cages, because “sure, Trump has problems, but the economy is great!” Well, now this week, YOUR president has had the stock market go under 20,000 and virtually wiped out the gains made by the Dow Jones since Trump was inaugurated, now that Las Vegas, and New York, “the city that never sleeps” have been put into forced hibernation. If it makes you feel better Trumpniks, at least now your 401Ks know what the rest of us have felt like for three years.
So yeah, gimme that government money. Cause it’s government‘s fault that able-bodied people who would otherwise have jobs can’t work. They need to pay us, because we are their victims.
Lest that last line seem like hyperbole, I refer to the other scandal that hit the news in the past two days.
Richard Burr (BR.-North Carolina) is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and NPR reported that on February 27 – when Donald Trump was saying “One day, it’s like a miracle. It will disappear” – Burr told a social club meeting, “(The virus) is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
The article says, “Meanwhile, ProPublica released a report Thursday evening showing that Burr had unloaded a substantial amount of stocks in mid-February, before the recent market volatility.
Burr sold personal stocks worth between $628,000 and $1.72 million in 33 separate transactions on a single day, February 13th, according to public disclosures. It was, according to ProPublica, the most stock he’s sold in a single day in 14 months.
“Asked by NPR for a comment on the senator’s stock sales, Burr spokesperson (Caitlin) Carroll replied, “lol.”
It turned out that Burr was not the only Senator who sold stock after hearing briefings on the coronavirus. Others included fill-in Senator Kelly Loeffler (BR.-Georgia), Jim Inhofe (BR.-Oklahoma) and allegedly, Ron Johnson (Br.-Wisconsin).
And yes, Fox News, I am perfectly aware that Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) was one of the Senators who sold off stock, but frankly that is the sort of thing people have come to expect from Dianne Feinstein. The fact that whataboutism sometimes has substance is half the reason people are still voting for Republicans.
The problem is, tu quoque works both ways. If “everybody does it”, then everybody does it, and what reason do you have to prefer one party to another? It’s almost like BOTH parties are crooks, isn’t it? And if you suspect one party would screw up the response to coronavirus, but you know the ruling party HAS screwed up the response to coronavirus, why support them?
Look, I have no problem blaming the virus outbreak on Communist China. Why? Cause not only did the virus start in Wuhan (Hubei province), the one-party state, rather than getting expert advice to contain the spread, they censored at least one doctor who tried to inform the public, who later died of the disease himself. Why? Because they didn’t want the government to look bad.
In Iran, the disease may have taken out even more of the population than it has in Italy, but we may never know because of their government censorship. We do know that various officials in the government, and 8% of all Members of Parliament, have been infected, because no one wanted to announce special precautions until now. Why? Because no one wanted to make the government look bad.
And in the US, the government had access to World Health Organization tests, that they refused to use, there were Senators who were informed about the threat, and not only did they not tell the public, they took advantage to sell stock before the crash. As this opinion article puts it, “Imagine the situation we might be in — even without the Pandemic team that Trump disbanded — if he’d just taken the threat seriously 2 months ago and ordered some f**king masks, gloves, swabs, and tests. Trump could have saved the economy trillions of dollars in losses in exchange for half a billion in supplies.”
This is a global pandemic. It would have crashed the economy regardless, because even if Trump had instituted his xenophobic travel bans to Europe and China in advance, we still would have been cut off from Europe and China. That would have cut off business ventures right there. But the spread of the disease would have been largely contained, and the drastic measures that state governments are announcing would not have been necessary. The government would not need to be spending billions to support able-bodied Americans because we wouldn’t have had to stop going to work. All of this could have been avoided if we had known weeks ago. And we didn’t. Why? Because no one wanted to make the government – specifically, Trump – look bad.
So, to all of you Facebook socialists who say that all of this would have been addressed if we’d had a socialist government, remember that this started in a Communist country because it’s a one-party state where the people closest to government get helped first and everyone else is expendable. Remember that Italy has a social-democrat welfare state, and look where they are. If you want a socialist state, I strongly suggest you vote Republican in November, because they’re doing more to bring that condition about in America than the Democrats. And if you’re a conservative who knows that socialism fails because it protects a political elite at the expense of the rest of the population, I strongly suggest you stop voting Republican. Assuming, of course, that socialism isn’t what you wanted all along.