Post #5 — Trump is Killing Us to Save a Buck

Five hours of sleep last night, interrupted by a check of the Times and the Post. Today, the Times published one of those core articles (here's another about how political conservatism is the driving force behind many of the administration's choices, well, that and racism and having a psychopath in charge), that drill down to what is driving this crisis. The story is about masks, and it's instructive because the report gets to the central issues behind the desperate shortage of masks and other protective equipment. Here's another.

It doesn't quite say this, but if we take the facts unearthed by the reporters and add in a few that are well-known about Trump, we understand why I and so many I know are at serious risk of losing our lives if not in the first wave, in the second or third.

Think about it, when Trump was elected in 2016, some many of us thought the results would be disastrous, but did any of us say, "He could actually kill me?"

Well he can, and the problem starts with Trump and the driving force behind his refusal to have the federal government buy up masks and other equipment, which it can do immediately. What's behind it? It's simple: he doesn't like to pay for anything. In New Jersey, he was famous for stiffing his workers. As  a narcissist, he sees the federal government as an extension of himself. They are "my numbers," in his words, "I alone can fix it." Well, they aren't *his* numbers and *he alone* can't fix it, but when it comes to the masks that will save lives now, he isn't paying for them and nothing will change his mind.

So we are left with this, Pence and Trump try to cover up for what they are doing by going in front of the camera and saying, "We have ordered them" and "they are coming." They lie. They haven't "ordered" anything. They have encouraged companies to make them, and the companies will sell them to the states at greatly inflated prices so they can make enormous profits from them. Remember when Trump said, "this is the way of life," in response to a question about why asympotmatic elites were getting tested and the proles weren't? Well, that's the way it is in capitalism during wartime. The best example is what the Nye Committee (where Alger Hiss served as counsel) uncovered about how companies made enormous profits during World War I.

The perfect example of such empty promises is that according to the story, the government is negotiatiing with Hanes to make masks. As it has been in the past, you can be sure that a big part of negotiations is ending of liability. Hanes knows that they can get a favorable deal from Pence who wants to make sure no one can be sued for putting out bad shit, as long as they can say it's out there (when reports come in about faulty equipment, it will be attributed to bad reporting) and here's the kicker: everyone who has ever worn any underwear made by Hanes, know that the stuff stretches out five minutes after you put them on. With no liability, you can bet that Hanes masks will be hanging down from the faces of doctors and nurses as quickly as my underwear does from my crotch when I first take them out of the package.

So while every day Pence and Trump say "they've ordered" this and that, they'll come too late and people will die as a result -- many people. It's important to remember they could have begun production back in January or before when the first Crimson Contagion models were run last yer or when the Washington Post first warned about the virus early in January. But they didn't because Trump didn't want to spook the stock market which in turn would damage his reelection chances (and going back to his history, he wasn't going to buy them), so he kept it quiet, and now we're faced with a shortage of necessary items that hospitals and doctors need to keep their patients (and patience, I'm sure) alive.

It's legalized murder, nothing else.