Is Covid-19 telling us to end mass incarceration?

America’s criminal justice system is a worldwide disgrace. The ‘Land of the Free’ is anything but, with 2.3 million souls locked up; 22.1% of the world’s prisoners. This in a country with a measly 4.2% of the world population.

But America is suddenly releasing many non-violent, aging, unable to post bond folks and other less dangerous prisoners. Why? To prevent densely overcrowded jails from becoming Clovid-19 ‘hot spots’ of infection. That is not a fear; it’s a reality. Cook County Jail already has 38 infected prisoners and 9 guards. New York City tops Chicago with 103 prisoner Clovid cases. Chicago judges, under orders to release any prisoners not deemed to be a public threat, released 400 this week alone. That’s needless criminal justice expenditures that can redirected to staggering Clovid-19 containment expenses.

Alas, the Feds have not been so enlightened. US judges are denying requests for compassionate release from Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), sighting the lack of an outbreak there. John Murphy, Executive Director of the Federal Public Defender Project for Illinois’ Northern District calls that approach “deeply short-sighted.” Just a couple hours later two MCC staff were diagnosed with Clovid-19. According to Murphy, “It’s already in the prisoner population…just not diagnosed.”

Many aspects of life in America are undergoing a sea change in behavior from the virus. When the crisis has passed let’s hope our obsession with incarceration and knee jerk response to ‘lock ‘em up’ will be one of the casualties. Let’s work for a time when the US, in terms of world leading number and percentage of prisoners, is no longer No. 1.

Let’s make perpetual war a Clovid-19 victim

The US has just printed $2.2 trillion in borrowed money to smother the Clovid-19 virus and save the economy. This would be an excellent time for the US to retire its trillion dollar a year in printed money to wage perpetual war in the Middle East and Africa. Like Clovid-19, US perpetual war is killing thousands of people with no end in sight. But instead of being the silent, invisible killer Clovid-19, America is a noisy, visible killer dropping thousands of bombs on folks we claim are bad guys in a dozen or so countries and slaughtering every unsuspecting innocent civilian within range. We continue to defile the Middle East and Africa with 50,000 soldiers causing untold mayhem and provoking blowback of roadside bombings and rocket attacks getting a number killed and injured.

If bombs and soldiers weren’t enough, we’re imposing economic sanctions designed to make life for the citizenry in our targeted countries so miserable, they rise up to overthrow their rulers we despise. But these sanctions never change the regime, just cause thousands to die and millions to suffer needlessly. Iran has the sixth most Clovid-19 cases and the fourth most deaths in the world; exacerbated by crippling US sanctions preventing delivery of critically needed medical supplies. Since Clovid-19 arose Uncle Sam has added three new rounds of sanctions on Iran as our ghoulish response to Iran’s pleas for sanctions relief.

Clovid-19 has claimed 1,304 victims in the US. Let’s use it to make perpetual war number 1,305.

Rainy day was a pandemic

There is a good reason to never borrow a trillion dollars, as Trump did in 2017, to lavish the greedy rich with a tax cut. We may have needed to borrow that trillion, or maybe two, for a rainy day. That rainy day arrived just three years later. It was a pandemic.

Trump is the other existential crisis facing America

The coronavirus represents an existential threat to public health and public wealth. Drastic measures to contain the health crisis are leading to a wealth crisis, a situation unique in US; indeed world history.

But President Trump only sees the wealth crisis which affects both his business and political futures. He squandered many weeks at the start denying the health crisis to maintain the skyrocketing stock market fueling both his monetary and political fortunes. He pitched coronavirus as a hoax at his hate filled political rallies, likely the only public events at which he truly feels alive. He encouraged a slew of his talk show sycophants to peddle the hoax story, linking it solely to his political opposition.

Trump enabler Tucker Carlson, sensing the backlash, conducted an intervention with Trump on March 7, advising him the time was right to pivot and feign concern for the approaching avalanche of infections and death. In the three weeks since, we’re now subjected to Trump’s daily new public rallies masquerading as a coronavirus briefing. Trump handles the rally portion, spewing lies and half-truths about the cascade of non-existent ventilators, masks and cures at hand, while esteemed allergy and infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci hovers behind Trump to correct him when he mis-speaks. Fauci’s absence at one such rally caused public shock. Trump unloads on hated members of the press, expresses sarcastic pleasure that his Republican rival Sen. Mitt Romney tested positive for coronavirus, and focuses almost exclusively on pushing up the return to work and a thriving economy, the upward curve of infections and death be damned. Trump’s delusion on the health crisis is exemplified by his hallucinatory comment that more Americans will commit suicide from the economic collapse than succumb to the virus.

Every hoax-pushing talking head in the media should be fired. They have put untold millions in peril. Alas, Trump should be the first to go, but a power obsessed Republican Party has ensured he is impeachment proof.

One existential crisis at a time is all we can handle. Trump is an existential crisis too far.

We’re all in that bathtub drowning the Commons

It’s been 40 years since conservatives under Ronald Reagan began their campaign to cut government services to the Commons, including health, education, social security, infrastructure. The aim was to reduce taxes on the wealthy while maintaining unlimited expenditures on defense, the Commons be damned. It was pitched as ‘starving the beast’. Tax cut fanatic Grover Norquist authored the Taxpayer Protection Pledge in 1986 in which over 1,600 state and federal lawmakers pledged to never increase taxes under any circumstances. Norquist was blunt: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Now we’re faced with a pandemic exacerbated by a cruel administration which has made reducing health care to tens of millions a signature policy. At the end of his daily political rally masquerading as a coronavirus update, Trump was asked if the pandemic would cause him to pause his demand to abolish ‘Obamacare’. Trump punted, claiming the effort was not his but a state initiative. But he immediately reverted to his four year long campaign to abolish Obamacare without offering a lifesaving replacement.

In a pandemic in which every uninsured citizen likely to skip medical care puts us all at risk, we need to realize we’re all in that bathtub drowning the Commons along with Grover Norquist.