Kindred spirits Trump, Bolsonaro: terror twins of pandemic

US president Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro both lie prodigiously about the pandemic ravaging their countries. The pandemic statistics don’t. The US and Brazil rank first and second in worldwide infections. American leads all 195 countries with 1,655,000 infections. Brazil just passed Russia for second place in the pandemic derby with 340,000. Their country’s infection rates are disproportionate to population. The US, with 4.2 % of world population, has 30.9 % of the world’s total. Brazil’s percentages are 2.7% and 6.2% respectively. This dubious distinction for both leaders is not coincidence. Both pooh-poohed pandemic from the get go. For Trump early on it was 15 cases that would magically go down to one. Bolsonaro fired his health minister who didn’t play pandemic happy talk with him, replacing him with a successor who quit a month later. Both pushed the dangerous, unproven treatment hydroxychloroquine. Trump claims he’s taken it. Bolsonaro said it’s “working in all places”.

Trump and Bolsonaro are both cut from the same cloth of hyper nationalism and xenophobia. Both are incredibly inept at governing. That is unacceptable in normal times; a catastrophe in time of pandemic. Trump gloried in Bolsonaro’s election as Brazilian president two years after himself. He called Bolsonaro the ‘Trump of the Tropics’, honored that Bolsonaro modeled his campaign after his. Alas, Bolsonaro has now modeled his pandemic response after Trump’s as well.

WW I, not Spanish Flu shortened baseball in 1918

With baseball beaned by the bug in 2020, many note that the 1918 season was also shorted by a pandemic, the Spanish Flu that claimed 675,000 Americans among its 50 million deaths worldwide.

Not true. Baseball biggies agreed to a shortened 140 game schedule for 1918 (from 154) to accommodate the massive US buildup for WW I. But in July, War Secretary Newton Baker issued a ‘work or fight’ edict which spelled doom for men playing a kids game for money. After negotiations between the League and Baker, the season finally ended a month early on September 2, with teams having played between 125 and 128 games. The World Series made its earliest start ever on September 5. The Red Sox, led by ace pitcher Babe Ruth, downed the Cubbies 4 games to 2. To accommodate players returning from France, the 1919 season was also trimmed to 140 games, which proceeded as scheduled.

The Spanish Flu did shorten the lives of a number of 1918 players, sports writers and an umpire including former White Sox outfielder Larry Chappell.

Pandemic wise, 2020 is unique. 

Now we know

When Trump campaigned on the pledge to 'Drain the swamp', many low information voters, suspicious of all government, voted him in to do just that. Now, after firing 5 inspector generals since March, we've learned that meant draining the swamp...of the swamp drainers.

Arbrey shooting recalls childhood housing inspections

The senseless February 23rd shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, brought me back seven decades to a fond childhood memory: inspecting nearby housing construction sites. Watching Arbery on tape popping in a home construction site, innocently looking around and then resuming his neighborhood jog, I recalled the long buried memory how my friends and I did the same thing in Chicago’s Garfield Ridge neighborhood back in the 50’s. Before the porch was up we’d carefully traverse the long six inch board that allowed our entrance to the wonder of an emerging home. We’d rummage around trying to visualize how the house differed from our own. I may have picked up that curiosity from my father who told me he became knowledgeable about household repairs by inspecting homes under construction. Once a man drove up to a site we were inspecting and politely cautioned we had no business in his future home. We quickly skedaddled. He didn’t pull out a shotgun and pump three bullets at us, causing bleed out. Didn’t know it at the time…but that was white privilege.

Adroit and inconspicuous’ indeed

“Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

- Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Mallory) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Rubottom)1 Washington, April 6, 1960

Last month marked 60 years since the US State Department let the cruelty cat out of the bag regarding US sanctions against Cuba. Make life so hard and horrible for the Cuban people, they will overthrow the hated Cuban communist regime. And 60 years on those sanctions continue, making proper food, medicine and medical supplies difficult to obtain. But Cuba preserved, establishing a level of health care for every Cuban that far exceeds collective US health care that sentences millions to bankruptcy, degraded health, even needless death from arguably the worst health care system in the industrialized world.

Providing health care to countries in need is Cuba’s greatest export, sending tens of thousands of doctors and health care workers to over a hundred countries in return for desperately needed supplies denied by Uncle Sam. When covid-19 hit, Cuba’s resilience to America’s mendacity steeled them to respond collectively and properly. Infections per million Cubans are 165 to 4,600 in the US. Deaths per million? Seven in Cuba, 272 in the richest country in the world. Eighteen countries have requested pandemic medical assistance from Cuba, including much richer countries Italy and Spain.

US sanctions are not just adroit and inconspicuous. They are inhumane and criminal.