Posts Tagged ‘THE DISCOURSES’
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on January 25, 2022 at 12:24 am
The United States is now two years into a deadly plague. More than 71.7 million Americans have become infected with COVID-19 and at least 868,000 have died.
Wearing a mask and “social distancing”—keeping at least six feet between yourself and others while in public—have been the Golden Rules urged by public health officials from the pandemic’s start.
And yet vast numbers of Americans still refuse to do either. Just as they refuse to get vaccinated, despite three vaccines now widely available.
Surgical mask
In the early weeks and months of the pandemic, cloth face masks weren’t universally endorsed, even by public health experts.
“One, we didn’t know whether they were actually helpful, and two, there was a lot of concern that if people were using medical masks then people like myself, were not going to have access to them,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.
No less an authority than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, said in March, 2020, that “people should not be walking around with masks.”
Only in early June, 2020, did the World Health Organization (WHO) urge non-healthcare workers to mask up. The WHO advised people to don masks when social distancing was not possible, such as when visiting stores and using public transportation.
According to Dr. Jeremy Faust, the change in attitudes toward masks should be seen as the nature of science, and not as a flaw.
“That is what experts, in fact, do. They don’t just have an opinion and stick to it,” said Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts. “They actually let their opinions develop and evolve as better information becomes available.”
Only in January, 2022, did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urge Americans to wear N95 masks—the most effective ones available.
In 2020, the CDC had urged Americans to not use N95s. The reason: They feared this would create a shortage of these masks for doctors, nurses and paramedics working closely with COVID patients.
N95 mask
Scientists have learned, for example, that COVID-19 can be spread by those who show no symptom of the disease. And mounting evidence has proven that masks are essential for protecting people from the virus.
Coronavirus is spread by respiratory droplets when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks—especially if large numbers of people are packed indoors. The danger goes up if the talker is shouting or singing loudly.
If not blocked by a face covering, the droplets can travel six to 13 feet, and can remain airborne for hours in some cases.
Researchers at Florida Atlantic University found that some masks were more effective than others. One study showed that well-fitted homemade masks with multiple layers of fabric, as well as off-the-shelf cone style masks, were the most effective in reducing droplet dispersal.
Bandannas turned out to be the least effective in reducing transmission.
Coronavirus
So why do so many Americans refuse to wear a mask?
Start at the top: With Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.
From the outset, Trump refused to wear a mask in public.
A colossal egotist, Trump is orange-skinned, morbidly obese and lacking a neck. Yet he still thinks of himself as dangerously handsome. And he fears that covering his face would diminish his power and appeal.
“Appearing to play it safe contradicts a core principle of masculinity: show no weakness,” wrote social sciences professor Peter Glick at Scientific American magazine. “Defying experts’ warnings about personal danger signals ‘I’m a tough guy, bring it on.’”
On May 21, 2020, Trump refused to wear a face mask as he toured a Ford facility in Michigan that was manufacturing ventilators and personal protective equipment. This violated the policies of the facility, the governor’s executive order and warnings from the state’s attorney general.
After a three-month nationwide “lockdown,” states began “reopening.” So Trump scheduled his first 2020 re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It was held on June 20 at the BOK Center. Scientists had learned that Coronavirus is more likely to be transmitted indoors than outdoors, when masses of people are packed together, and when people are loudly talking—or, worse, shouting.
Masks were available for those who wanted them. But Trump made it clear that his supporters shouldn’t wear masks, as a sign of support for him. Photos of the rally show men and women densely packed together, with none of them wearing masks.
A Trump rally
The Tulsa event was followed by another indoor rally in Phoenix on June 23. “Students for Trump” featured a packed crowd, with almost no one wearing masks.
After staging COVID-spreading rallies at Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Phoenix, Arizona, Trump scheduled another one for July 3 at Mount Rushmore, in Keystone, South Dakota.
Such rallies had been put on hold since March, due to the issuing of stay-at-home orders across the country by states’ mayors and governors.
Health experts expressed fears about a large gathering during the Coronavirus pandemic. But South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said people would “not be social distancing” during the celebration—nor required to wear masks.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on January 13, 2022 at 12:15 am
Mylan Pharmaceuticals CEO Heather Manchin-Bresch is on a roll.
- The daughter of United States Senator Joe Manchin (R-West Virginia), she has, since 2004, hiked the price of a life-saving EpiPen from $50 to $600 to $700 for a package of two.
- Her own salary has steadily risen more than 600% to $18,509,300 a year.
- The device now accounts for 40% of Mylan’s profits.
But in playing greed-based games with the lives of millions of Americans, Manchin-Bresch, 52, may have put her company—and even herself—in jeopardy.
Heather Manchin-Bresch
EpiPens have been mandatory for public schools in at least 11 states since Congress passed the 2013 School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act. This occurred after Mylan spent $4 million lobbying Congress.
When the lives of their children are threatened, adults who can stoically accept the inevitability of their own deaths can become dangerously emotional about the fates of their sons or daughters.
As national news media spread the word of Mylan’s unconscionable price increases, American consumers are making their rage increasingly known.
There are three ways this could be expressed: Political, Legal, and Illegal.
Political: Minnesota U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar has called for an official investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into the price hikes:
Senator Amy Klobuchar
“I write to request the Federal Trade Commission investigate whether Mylan Pharmaceuticals has violated the antitrust laws regarding the sale of its epinephrine auto-injector, EpiPen. Many Americans, including my own daughter, rely on this life-saving product to treat severe allergic reactions.
“Although the antitrust laws do not prohibit price gouging, regardless of how unseemly it may be, they do prohibit the use of unreasonable restraints of trade to facilitate or protect a price increase.”
Other Senators who have called for hearings include Iowa’s Charles Grassley, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and former Democratic presidential contender Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
“I have heard from one father in Iowa who recently purchased a refill of his daughter’s EpiPen prescription. He reported that to fill the prescription, he had to pay over $500 for one EpiPen,” wrote Grassley to Manchin-Bresch. “The high cost has also caused some first responders to consider making their own kits with epinephrine vials and syringes.”
Senator Charles Grassley
“There’s no reason an EpiPen, which costs Mylan just a few dollars to make, should cost families more than $600,” tweeted Sanders on Twitter.
A second expression of political fallout could ultimately be the adoption of a single-payer healthcare system. Under this, a “single-payer” fund, rather than private insurers, pays for healthcare costs. The healthcare delivery system can be private, public or a combination of the two.
Legal: Individual Americans—and/or the U.S. Department of Justice—could file civil lawsuits against Mylan Pharmaceuticals under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Passed by Congress in 1970 to combat the Mafia, its provisions include punishments for extortion. This is defined as “a criminal offense which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion.” 
It could be argued that, by holding a near-monopoly over a product that millions of Americans depend on for survival, and raising its price beyond the ability of most Americans to afford it, Mylan has engaged in extortionate practices.
It would not be the first time a David-vs.-Goliath lawsuit prevailed against dismal expectations.
In 1994, amid great pessimism, Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore filed a lawsuit against the tobacco industry. But other states soon followed, ultimately growing to 46.
Their goal: To seek monetary, equitable and injunctive relief under various consumer-protection and anti-trust laws.
The theory underlying these lawsuits: Cigarettes produced by the tobacco industry created health problems among the population, which badly strained the states’ public healthcare systems.
In 1998, the states settled their Medicaid lawsuits against the tobacco industry for recovery of their tobacco-related, health-care costs—amounting to millions of dollars. In return, they exempted the companies from private lawsuits for tobacco-related injuries.
Illegal: At one time, business titans like John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford lived apart from “the common herd.” Americans read about them in newspapers or heard about them on the radio, but had no way of contacting them directly.
If you wanted to “dig up dirt” on any of them, you had to be wealthy enough to hire private detectives–who were probably employed by the same people you wanted to investigate.
But the rise of the Internet—and especially the advent of “people-finder” websites like Instant Checkmate, Intellius and Veromi—has drastically changed all that.
Type “Heather Manchin-Bresch” into the Intellius “Confidential People Finder” subject line, and—for a $20 month’s subscription—you can obtain “some or all of the following”:
- Full Name
- Age and Date of Birth
- Address
- Address History
- Phone Numbers
- Aliases
- Relatives
- Neighbors
- Email Address(es)
- Social Networks
- Property Records
- Marriages & Divorces
- Criminal Records
- Bankruptcies
- Liens
- Judgments
- Lawsuits
It doesn’t take a genius to see how the parent of an allergy-suffering child—desperate to save his son or daughter and enraged at what he believes to be the extortionately high price of EpiPens—might put such information to use.
What is truly astonishing is that, in our publicity-saturated culture, greedy, self-destructive “celebrities” like Heather Manchin-Bresch don’t realize this.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on January 12, 2022 at 12:12 am
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern politics, delivered this sage advice in his political masterwork, The Discourses:
All those who have written upon civil institutions demonstrate…that whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.
If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself. But time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Unfortunately, it’s advice that members of the United States Congress have blissfully chosen to ignore. By doing so, they have condemned millions of Americans to suffering and death at the hands of greed-based, predatory corporations.
One of these corporations is Mylan Pharmaceuticals.
In 2007, Mylan acquired the patent for the EpiPen, a lifesaving device for anyone allergic to common foods like peanuts, shellfish and eggs. Millions of people with life-threatening allergies depend on the EpiPen for survival.
During an allergy attack, the EpiPen injects an emergency dosage of epinephrine to the user, preventing a possibly fatal reaction, known as anaphylaxis, from occurring.
Between 2007 and 2015, the wholesale price of an EpiPen skyrocketed from $56.64 to $300 to $645 for an EpiPen 2-Pak—an increase of 461%.
It costs about $8 to make such a pack.
According to NBC News, compensation for Mylan CEO Heather Bresch similarly skyrocketed during the same period: From $2,453,456 in 2007 to $18,931,068 in 2015—a 671% raise in eight years.
Bresch is the daughter of West Virginia United States Senator Joe Manchin—who recently killed the chance for passage of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill. Among its benefits:
- Universal preschool
- Free community college
- Lower prescription drug costs
- Expanded Medicare and Medicaid services
- Requiring utility companies to phase in renewable energy to replace fossil fuels.
Manchin—who owns a yacht and drives a Maserati—suggested that parents would use Child Tax Credits to buy drugs.
Manchin-Bresch wasn’t the only one to profit at the expense of the most vulnerable.
Between 2007 and 2015, Mylan’s stock price tripled, going from $13.29 per share in 2007 to a high of $47.59 in 2016. By late August, 2016, Mylan’s stock was hovering around $45.68 per share on the NASDAQ index.
Bloomberg states that the EpiPen now accounts for about 40% of Mylan’s profits.
Ironically, Sheldon Kaplan, the man who invented the now-famous device, never made a dime off it, and died in obscurity.
After working at NASA, Kaplan worked for Survival Technology, Inc., in Bethesda, Maryland.
In 1973, the Defense Department asked him to design a device that could quickly inject an antidote for nerve gas.
Kaplan’s design perfectly fitted this need: When a victim plunged a needle into his thigh, a spring-loaded mechanism shot a needle containing life-saving medicine into his bloodstream.
Kaplan’s invention became known as the ComboPen, and was initially used by the Pentagon before becoming available for use by the general public several years later as the EpiPen.
Kaplan left Survival Technology shortly after creating the ComboPen to become a biochemical engineer. He didn’t follow the success of his invention—and didn’t reap any of the huge financial rewards that it has produced.
That has certainly not been true for Mylan Pharmaceuticals.
After cornering the patent on the EpiPen in 2007, the company has made billions on the life-saving device.
According to Bloomberg, a package of two EpiPens costs $415 in the United States after insurance discounts. The same package in France–which has price controls under socialized medicine–costs $85.
The chief beneficiary of this legalized price-gouging has been Mylan’s CEO, Heather Manchini-Bresch.
Heather Manchin-Bresch
She joined Mylan in 1992 and held various positions within the company. Among these: Its chief lobbyist before Congress.
It was in that capacity that she persuaded Congress to enact a bill requiring all public schools to carry EpiPens for students with food allergies. It was signed into law by President Barack Obama in November, 2013.
Over the next three years, schools nationwide bought EpiPens by the truckload. And Mylan jacked up its prices for the EpiPen every other quarter.
On January 1, 2012, Heather Manchin-Bresch became Mylan’s CEO.
But it wasn’t enough to have a monopoly on a device millions of men, women and children desperately needed. In 2014, true to its “profits-at-any-price” philosophy, Mylan reincorporated in the Netherlands to lower its effective tax rate.
It did so through a corporate accounting trick known as a tax inversion, and thus claiming the status of a foreign-owned corporation although its headquarters remained in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.
Even her own father, U..S. Senator Joseph Manchin, condemned Mylan’s use of the inversion scheme and said it should be illegal.
But Manchin-Bresch fiercely defended it in an interview with the New York Times: “You can’t maintain competitiveness by staying at a competitive disadvantage. I mean you just can’t.”
No doubt, with her CEO salary of $18,509,300 a year and moneyed ties to high-powered attorneys and influential members of Congress, Bresch thinks herself invulnerable.
But all that could quickly change—if even a small number of her victims become angry enough.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on December 21, 2021 at 12:11 am
The gap between rich and poor in the United States has never been greater.
A May 1, 2018 article in Forbes—which bills itself as “The Capitalist Tool”—vividly documents this truth.
“In the 1950s, a typical CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. Last year, [2017] CEO pay at an S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times more than the average rank-and-file worker, or pay of $13,940,000 a year, according to an AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch news release today.”
The average CEO pay climbed six percent in 2017—while the average production worker earned just $38,613, according to Executive Paywatch.
The average wage—adjusted for inflation—has stagnated for more than 50 years. Meanwhile, CEOs’ average pay since the 1950s has risen by 1000%.
This would not have been news to Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science. In his masterwork, The Discourses, he observed the human condition as that of constant struggle:
Niccolo Machiavelli
“It was a saying of ancient writers, that men afflict themselves in evil, and become weary of the good, and that both these dispositions produce the same effects.
“For when men are no longer obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition, which passion is so powerful in the hearts of men that it never leaves them, no matter to what height they may rise.
“The reason for this is that nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it. Desire being thus always greater than the faculty of acquiring, discontent with what they have and dissatisfaction with themselves result from it.
“This causes the changes in their fortunes—for as some men desire to have more, while others fear to lose what they have, enmities and war are the consequences. And this brings about the ruin of one province and the elevation of another.”
Author Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University, has also given this subject a great deal of thought. And, like Machiavelli, he has reached some highly disturbing conclusions.
Walter Scheidel
World Economic Forum [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D
Scheidel gave voice to these in his 2017 book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. His thesis: Only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout history.
According to the book’s jacket blurb: “Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes.
“Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return.
“The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
“Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality.
“The ‘Four Horsemen’ of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich….
“Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.”
Revolutionaries have known the truth of Scheidel’s findings from the gladiators’ revolt of Spartacus (73 – 71 B.C.) to the French Revolution (1789 – 1799) to the overthrow of the Czarist Romanov dynasty (1917).
But American politicians serenely ignore that truth. They depend on the mega-rich for millions of dollars in “campaign contributions”—which pay for self-glorifying ads on TV.
Thus, in 2016, American voters had a “choice” between two “love-the-rich” Presidential candidates: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The result was that millions stayed home or voted in protest for third-party candidates who had no chance of winning.
In his 1975 book, The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Modern-day America, British historian Robert Payne warned that the predatory rich would not change their behavior: “Nor is there any likelihood that the rich will plow back their money into services to ensure the general good.
“They have rarely demonstrated social responsibility, and they are much more likely to hold on to their wealth at all costs than to renounce any part of it.
“Like the tyrant who lives in a world wholly remote from the world of the people, shielded and protected from all possible influences, the rich are usually the last to observe the social pressures rising from below, and when these social pressures reach flashpoint, it is too late to call in the police or the army.
“The tyrant dies; the police and the army go over to the revolutionaries; and the new government dispossesses the rich by decree. A single authoritative sentence suffices to expunge all private wealth and restore it to the service of the nation.”
For millions of struggling, impoverished Americans, that day cannot come soon enough.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on December 20, 2021 at 12:19 am
Americans are used to Presidential candidates telling lies (euphemistically known as “campaign promises”) to get elected.
But when a candidate actually (and usually accidentally) tells the truth, the results can be electrifying.
On June 18, 2019, Democratic Presidential candidate (and momentary front-runner) Joseph Biden addressed a roomful of donors in New York.
The former Vice President believed that his message would comfort his well-heeled audience of billionaires: Don’t worry, if I’m elected, your standard of living won’t change.
Addressing the 100 or so guests at a fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, Biden said that he had taken heat from “some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side” because he had said that rich people were “just as patriotic as poor people.
Joe Biden
“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” he said.
And he added: “I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.
“When we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. Not a joke. Not a joke … It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the ‘other’….
“You’re not the other. I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down. I promise you. I have a bad reputation, I always say what I mean. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.”
Biden has talked about decreasing income inequality and promoting workers’ rights. But he’s taken a moderate stance when it comes to taxation.
United States Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), on the other hand, has attacked the ultra-rich as responsible for the ever-widening gap between themselves and the poor.
“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” Biden said in March, 2019.
Instead, he proposes expanding tax credits for the poor and middle class, and making the tax code less friendly to rich investors.
Robert Payne, the distinguished British historian, took a different—and darker—view of the rich.
Payne authored more than 110 books. Among his subjects were Adolf Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, William Shakespeare and Leon Trotsky.
In 1975, he published The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America. It proved a summary of many of his previous works.
Among the epochs it covered: The civilizations of ancient Greece, Rome and China; Nazi Germany; the Soviet Union; and Watergate-era America. And the massive corruption each of those epochs had spawned.
Robert Payne
In his chapter, “A View of the Uncorrupted Society,” Payne warned: Power and wealth are the main sources of corruption.
“The rich, simply by being rich, are infected with corruption. Their overwhelming desire is to grow richer, but they can do this only at the expense of those who are poorer than themselves.
”Their interests conflict with those of the overall society. They live sheltered from the constant anxieties of the poor, and thus cannot understand them. Nor do they try to.
They see the poor as alien from themselves, and thus come to fear and despise them. And their wealth and influence enables them to buy politicians—who, in turn, write legislation that protects the rich from the poor.
But Payne foresaw an even greater danger from the rich and powerful than their mere isolation from the rest of society: “The mere presence of the rich is corrupting. Their habits, their moral codes, their delight in conspicuous consumption are permanent affronts to the rest of humanity. Vast inequalities of wealth are intolerable in any decent society.”
Writing in 1975, Payne noted that a third of the private wealth was possessed by less than five percent of the population—while about a fifth of the populace lived at the poverty level. By 2000, he predicted, about five percent of the population would possess two-thirds of America’s wealth. And more than half the population would be near or below the starvation level.
The result could only be catastrophe. The only way to halt this this increasing concentration of wealth by fewer people would be through law or violent revolution.
Payne has proven to be an uncanny prophet.
On December 8, 2017, the Seattle Times noted that the wealthiest one percent of Americans owned 40% of the country’s wealth. They owned more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
From 2013, the share of wealth owned by the one percent increased by nearly three percentage points. Wealth owned by the bottom 90%, meanwhile, fell over the same period.
But this situation need not remain permanent.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on December 17, 2021 at 12:35 am
As climate change heats up the world, more mass migrations will occur. Millions of people will retreat from undeveloped countries and try to enter—legally and illegally—the United States and Europe.
This is entirely predictable.
What is also entirely predictable is this: Those who have a decent life will want to hold onto it—and not be overwhelmed by millions who don’t share their same race, values, education and religion.
In the 1975 classic, Three Days of the Condor, Higgins, the deputy director of the CIA’s New York Division, confronts Joe Turner, an idealistic CIA employee on the realities of espionage.
Higgins (played by Cliff Robertson): “It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In 10 or 15 years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?”
Joe Turner (played by Robert Redford): “Ask them.”
Higgins: “Not now—then! Ask ’em when they’re running out. Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em!”
That day has come for millions of desperate people in Central and Latin America. And it is coming for all of us in the foreseeable future.
On October 13, 2018, a caravan of at least 5,000 men, women and children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras set out for the United States. Many of them claimed they had been threatened by street gangs such as MS-13 or by government officials.
On October 18, President Donald Trump threatened to deploy the United States military and close the U.S.-Mexico border to keep the caravan from entering the country.
And then Trump did just that.
By November 19, migrants had begun piling up in Tijuana, which borders San Diego.
In August, 2021, the Supreme Court upheld the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which had been challenged by the Biden administration. Asylum seekers must wait in Mexico while they await hearings on their requests for entry to the United States.
And that’s when Tijuana residents began carrying signs reading “No illegals,” “No to the invasion” and “Mexico First.” And marching in the streets wearing Mexico’s red, white and green national soccer jersey and vigorously waving Mexican flags.
“We want the caravan to go; they are invading us,” said Patricia Reyes, a 62-year-old protester. “They should have come into Mexico correctly, legally, but they came in like animals.”
And the situation will only worsen in the months ahead.
Trump has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to draft new rules to limit the number of asylum-seekers.
As increasing numbers of migrants pour into Tijuana, access to housing, schools, hospitals and other social services will become increasingly strained. Violent clashes between Tijuana’s 1.6 million residents and its thousands of uninvited arrivals have been the result.
Tijuana’s mayor, Juan Manuel Gastélum, said the city couldn’t afford to continue supporting the migrants. He requested support from Mexico’s federal authorities.
For decades, the Mexican Government didn’t try to stop millions of its own citizens from routinely violating America’s immigration laws.
The reason: Mexicans still remember the bloody upheaval known as the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) which slaughtered one to two million men, women and children. Massacres were common on all sides, with men shot by the hundreds in bullrings or hung by the dozen on trees.
A Mexican “fruit tree”
As a result, every successive Mexican government has lived in the shadow of another such wholesale bloodletting. These officials have thus quietly turned the United States border into a safety valve.
If potential revolutionaries leave Mexico to find a better life in the United States, the Government doesn’t have to fear the rise of another Francisco “Pancho” Villa.
Suddenly, with the escape route to “El Norte” shut off, Mexicans have discovered that “illegal alien” is no longer a dirty phrase.
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli outlined the reason for such conflicts. In The Discourses, his masterwork on preserving liberty within a republic, he writes:
Niccolo Machiavelli
It was a saying of ancient writers, that men afflict themselves in evil, and become weary of the good, and that both these dispositions produce the same effects.
For when men are no longer obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition, which passion is so powerful in the hearts of men that it never leaves them, no matter to what height they may rise.
The reason for this is that nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it. Desire being thus always greater than the faculty of acquiring, discontent with what they have and dissatisfaction with themselves result from it.
This causes the changes in their fortunes—for as some men desire to have more, while others fear to lose what they have, enmities and war are the consequences. And this brings about the ruin of one province and the elevation of another.
Those who want the United States to allow unchecked immigration are ignorant of such truths—or deliberately ignore them.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on December 10, 2021 at 12:19 am
…A truly great man is ever the same under all circumstances. And if his fortune varies, exalting him at one moment and oppressing him at another, he himself never varies, but always preserves a firm courage, which is so closely interwoven with his character that everyone can readily see that the fickleness of fortune has no power over him.
The conduct of weak men is very different. Made vain and intoxicated by good fortune, they attribute their success to merits which they do not possess. And this makes them odious and insupportable to all around them. And when they have afterwards to meet a reverse of fortune, they quickly fall into the other extreme, and become abject and vile.
—Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses
Niccolo Machiavelli
Donald Trump—as a businessman and President—has relied on bribes and intimidation to attain his ends.
But when he’s been confronted by men and women who can’t be bribed or intimidated, he has reacted with rage and frustration.
- Trump boasted that he “never” settled cases out of court. But New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman pressed fraud claims against the real estate mogul’s counterfeit Trump University—and Trump settled the case out of court for $25 million rather than take the stand.
- On May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller to investigate links between Russian Intelligence agents and the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign.
- Upon learning of his appointment, Trump wailed: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”
- “How could you let this happen, Jeff?” Trump demanded of Jeff Sessions, his Attorney General. “You were supposed to protect me. Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels, it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
- Throughout Mueller’s probe, Trump hurled repeated insults at him via Twitter and press conferences. He also called on his shills within Fox News and the Republican party to attack Mueller’s integrity and investigative methods.
- But aides convinced him that firing Mueller would be rightly seen as obstruction of justice—and thus grounds for impeachment. So he never dared go that far.
Robert Mueller
Perhaps the key to Trump’s innermost fear can be found in a work of fiction—in this case, the 1996 historical novel, The Friends of Pancho Villa, by James Carlos Blake.
The book depicts the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and its most famous revolutionary, Francisco “Pancho” Villa. it’s told from the viewpoint of Rodolfo Fierro, Villa’s most feared executioner. In one day, for example, Fierro—using two revolvers—executed 300 captured Federale soldiers.
As in history, Blake’s Fierro presides over the execution of David Berlanga, a journalist who had dared criticize the often loutish behavior of Villa’s men in a restaurant.
On Villa’s command, Fierro approaches Berlanga in a Mexico City restaurant and orders: “Come with me.”
Standing against a barracks wall, Berlanga lights a cigar and requests permission to finish it. He then proceeds to smoke it with such a steady hand that its unbroken ash extends almost four inches.
The cigar finished, the ash still unbroken, Berlanga drops the butt to the ground and says calmly: “I’m ready.”
Then the assembled firing squad does its work.
Later, Fierro is so shaken by Berlanga’s sheer fearlessness that he seeks an explanation for it. Sitting in a cantina, he lights a cigar and tries to duplicate Berlanga’s four-inch length.
But his hand shakes—and the best he can do is less than three inches. He concludes that Berlanga used a trick—but he can’t figure it out.
Rodolfo Fierro
It had to be a trick, Fierro insists, because, if it wasn’t, there were only two other explanations for such a calm demeanor in the face of impending death.
The first was insanity. But Fierro had studied Berlanga’s eyes and found no madness there.
That leaves only one other explanation: Sheer courage.
And Fierro can’t accept this, either—because it’s disturbing:
“The power of men like me does not come solely from our ability to kill….No, the true source of our power is so obvious it sometimes goes unnoticed for what it is: our power comes from other men’s lack of courage.
“There is even less courage in this world than there is talent for killing. Men like me rule because most men are faint of heart in the shadow of death.
“But a man brave enough to control his fear of being killed, control it so well that no tremor reaches his fingers and no sign shows in his eyes…well. Such a man cannot be ruled, he can only be killed.”
Throughout his life, Trump has relied on bribery and intimidation. He well understands the power of greed and fear over most people.
What he doesn’t understand—and truly fears—is that some people cannot be bought or frightened.
People like Elliot Ness. Like Robert Mueller. And like New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is now investigating the Trump Organization for both civil and criminal violations of the law.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on December 9, 2021 at 12:24 am
On July 14, 2019, then-President Donald Trump unleashed a brutal Twitter attack on four Democratic members of the House of Representatives who had harshly criticized his anti-immigration policies:
“So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly……
“….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….
“….it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
Donald Trump
The Democrats—all female, and all non-white—were:
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York;
- Rashida Tlaib of Michigan;
- Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and
- Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
Of the Congresswomen that Trump singled out:
- Cortez was born in New York City.
- Tlaib was born in Detroit, Michigan.
- Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Only Omar was born outside the United States—in Somalia. And she became an American citizen in 2000 when she was 17 years old.
Critics have assailed Trump as racist for implying that these women were not United States citizens.
Moreover, as members of Congress, they had a legal right to declare “how our government is to be run.” Republicans in the House and Senate vigorously—and often viciously—asserted that right during the Presidency of Barack Obama.
Ocasio-Cortez quickly struck back on Twitter on the same day: “You are angry because you don’t believe in an America where I represent New York 14, where the good people of Minnesota elected , where fights for Michigan families, where champions little girls in Boston.
“You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us. You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.
“You won’t accept a nation that sees healthcare as a right or education as a #1 priority, especially where we’re the ones fighting for it. Yet here we are.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
But then followed the most significant part of Cortez’ reply:
“But you know what’s the rub of it all, Mr. President? On top of not accepting an America that elected us, you cannot accept that we don’t fear you, either.
“You can’t accept that we will call your bluff & offer a positive vision for this country. And that’s what makes you seethe.”
“You cannot accept that we don’t fear you, either.”
For all his adult life, Donald Trump—as a businessman, Presidential candidate and President—has trafficked in bribery and coercion.
Or, as they say in Mexico: “Pan o palo”—“Bread or the stick.”
First bribery:
- Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump around the same time her office deliberated joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates.
- After Bondi dropped the Trump University case, he wrote her a $25,000 check for her re-election campaign. The money came from the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
- Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to muzzle a former state regulator who says he was ordered in 2010 to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University for political reasons.
- Paxton’s office issued a cease and desist letter to former Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owens after he made public copies of a 14-page internal summary of the state’s case against Donald Trump for scamming millions from students of his now-defunct real estate seminar.
- After the Texas case was dropped, Trump cut a $35,000 check to the gubernatorial campaign of then-attorney general and now Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Now coercion:
- Throughout his career as a businessman, Trump forced his employees to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements, threatening them with lawsuits if they revealed secrets of his greed and/or criminality.
- In 2016. USA Today found that Trump was involved in over 3,500 lawsuits during the previous 30 years: “At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings” were from contractors claiming they got stiffed.
- On March 16, 2016, as a Republican Presidential candidate, Trump warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen, I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
- An NBC reporter summed it up as: “The message to Republicans was clear: ‘Nice convention you got there. Shame if something happened to it.'”
- Speaking with Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post investigative reporter, Trump confessed: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”
- During his Presidential campaign he encouraged Right-wing thugs to attack dissenters at his rallies, even claiming he would pay their legal expenses.
But when he has confronted men and women who can’t be bribed or intimidated, Trump has reacted with rage and desperation.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on December 8, 2021 at 12:10 am
Two stories—one fictitious, the other historical.
Story #1: In the 1961 historical epic, “El Cid,” Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as “The Lord,” besieges the Spanish city of Valencia, which has been captured by the Moors.
Months have passed. The city’s population is starving and without hope.
Then, one day, El Cid (Charlton Heston) calls out over the city’s walls: “Soldiers and citizens of Valencia We are not your enemy! Ben Yusof [the powerful emir who plans to conquer Spain with an invading army] is your enemy!
“Join us! We bring you peace! We bring you freedom! We bring you bread!”
Suddenly El Cid’s Spanish catapults spring into action—loaded not with stones but loaves of bread. The loaves land in the city’s streets, where starving citizens and soldiers greedily devour them.
Then those citizens attack the bodyguards of the emir ruling Valencia—and throw the emir himself from a high wall.
The army of El Cid marches peacefully into the city.
Story #2: In Book Three, Chapter 22 of his classic masterwork, The Discourses, Niccolo Machiavelli offers the following: “An Act of Humanity Prevailed More With the Falacians Than All the Power of Rome.”
Marcus Furius Camillus, a Roman general, was besieging the city of the Faliscians, and had surrounded it. A teacher charged with the education of the children of some of the noblest families of that city decided to ingratiate himself with Camillus by leading those children into the Roman camp.
Presenting them to Camillus the teacher said to him, “By means of these children as hostages, you will be able to compel the city to surrender.”
Camillus not only declined the offer but went one step further. He ordered the teacher stripped and his hands tied behind his back. Then Camillus had a rod put into the hands of each of the children and directed them to whip the teacher all the way back to the city.
Upon learning this, the citizens of Faliscia were so much touched by the humanity and integrity of Camillus, that they surrendered the place to him without any further defense.
Summing up the meaning of this, Machiavelli writes: “This example shows that an act of humanity and benevolence will at all times have more influence over the minds of men than violence and ferocity. It also proves that provinces and cities which no armies…could conquer, have yielded to an act of humanity, benevolence, chastity or generosity.
“…History also shows us how much the people desire to find such virtues in great men, and how much they are extolled by historians and biographers of princes….Amongst these, Xenophon takes great pains to show how many victories, how much honor and fame, Cyrus gained by his humanity and affability, and by his not having exhibited a single instance of pride, cruelty or luxuriousness, nor of any of the other vices that are apt to stain the lives of men.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
These stories—the first the product of a movie screenwriter’s imagination, the second recorded by a master political scientist and historian—remain highly relevant today.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a black unemployed restaurant security guard, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer. While Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on a city street during an arrest, Chauvin kept his knee on the right side of Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
Cities across the United States erupted in mass protests over Floyd’s death—and police killings of black victims generally. Most of these demonstrations proved peaceful.
But cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City saw stores looted, vandalized and/or burned. In response, President Donald Trump called for harsh policing, telling governors in a nationwide conference call that they must “dominate” protesters or be seen as “weak.”
To drive home his point, Trump ordered police and National Guard troops to violently remove peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, which borders St. John’s Church near the White House.
The purpose of the removal: To allow Trump to have a photo opportunity outside the church.
“I imposed a curfew at 7pm,” tweeted Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. “A full 25 minutes before the curfew & w/o provocation, federal police used munitions on peaceful protestors in front of the White House, an act that will make the job of @DCPoliceDept officers more difficult. Shameful!”
Contrast that with the example of Sheriff Christopher Swanson of Genesee County, Michigan.
Sheriff Christopher Swanson
Confronting a mass of aroused demonstrators in Flint Township on May 30, Swanson responded: “We want to be with you all for real.”
So Swanson took his helmet off. His deputies laid their batons down.
“I want to make this a parade, not a protest. So, you tell us what you need to do.”
“Walk with us!” the protesters shouted.
“Let’s walk, let’s walk,” said Swanson.
Cheering and applause resounded.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Swanson said as he and the cheering crowd proceeded. “Where do you want to walk? We’ll walk all night.”
And Swanson and his fellow officers walked in sympathy with the protesters.
No rioting followed.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 21, 2021 at 12:05 am
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman, authored The Discourses on Livy, a work of political history and philosophy. In it, he outlined how citizens of a republic can maintain their freedoms.
One of the longest chapters—Book Three, Chapter Six—covers “Of Conspiracies.” In it, those who wish to conspire against a ruler will find highly useful advice.
And so will those who wish to foil such a conspiracy.
For conspirators, there are three ways their efforts can be foiled.
- Discovery through denunciation;
- Discovery through incautiousness;
- Discovery through writings.
The first has already been covered. Now for the second and third.
Discovery through Writings: You may talk freely with anyone man about everything, for unless you have committed yourself in writing, the “Yes” of one man is worth as much as the “No” of another.
Thus, you should guard most carefully against writing, as against a dangerous rock, for nothing will convict you quicker than your own handwriting.
You may escape, then, from the accusation of a single individual, unless you are convicted by some writing or other pledge, which you should be careful never to give.
If you are denounced, there are means of escaping punishment:
- By denying the accusation and claiming that the person making it hates you; or
- Claiming that your accuser was tortured or coerced into giving false testimony against you.
But the most prudent course is to not tell your intentions to anyone, and to carry out the attempt yourself.
Even if you’re not discovered before you carry out your attack, there are still two dangers facing a conspirator:
Dangers in Execution: These result from:
- An unexpected change in the routine of the intended target;
- The lack of courage among the conspirators; or
- An error on their part, such as leaving some of those alive whom the conspirators intended to kill.
Adolf Hitler, who claimed to have a sixth-sense for danger, was famous for changing his routine at the last minute.
On November 9, 1939, this instinct saved his life. He had been scheduled to give a long speech at a Munich beer hall before the “Old Fighters” of his storm troopers.
But that evening he cut short his speech and left the beer hall. Forty-five minutes later, a bomb exploded inside a pillar—before which Hitler had been speaking.
Conspirators can also be doomed by their good intentions.
In 44 B.C., Gaius Cassius, Marcus Brutus and other Roman senators decided to assassinate Julius Caesar, whose dictatorial ambitions they feared.
Cassius also intended to murder Mark Anthony, Caesar’s strongest ally. But Brutus objected, fearing the plotters would look like butchers, not saviors. Even worse, he allowed Anthony to deliver a eulogy at Caesar’s funeral.
This proved so inflammatory that the mourners rioted, driving the conspirators out of Rome. Soon afterward, they were defeated in a battle with the legions of Anthony and Octavian Caesar—and forced to commit suicide to avoid capture and execution.
Machiavelli closes his chapter “Of Conspiracies” with advice to rulers on how they should act when they find a conspiracy has been formed against them.
If they discover that a conspiracy exists against them, they must, before punishing its authors, strive to learn its nature and extent. And they must measure the danger posed by the conspirators against their own strength.
And if they find it powerful and alarming, they must not expose it until they have amassed sufficient force to crush it. Otherwise, they will only speed their own destruction. They should try to pretend ignorance of it. If the conspirators find themselves discovered, they will be forced by necessity to act without consideration.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The foregoing was taken from Book Three, Chapter Six, of Machiavelli’s masterwork, The Discourses on Livy, which was published posthumously in 1531. But elsewhere in this volume, he notes how important it is for rulers to make themselves loved—or at least respected—by their fellow citizens:
Note how much more praise those Emperors merited who, after Rome became an empire, conformed to her laws like good princes, than those who took the opposite course.
Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Auelius did not require the Praetorians nor the multitudinous legions to defend them, because they were protected by their own good conduct, the good will of the people, and by the love of the Senate.
On the other hand, neither the Eastern nor the Western armies saved Caligula, Nero, Vitellius and so many other wicked Emperors from the enemies which their bad conduct and evil lives had raised up against them.
In his better-known work, The Prince, he warns rulers who—like Donald Trump–are inclined to rule by fear:
A prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred: for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together.
Donald Trump
By Machiavelli’s standards, Trump has made himself the perfect target for a conspiracy.
“When a prince becomes universally hated, it is likely that he’s harmed some individuals—who thus seek revenge. This desire is increased by seeing that the prince is widely loathed.”
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WHY SOME PEOPLE WON’T WEAR MASKS: PART ONE (OF THREE)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on January 25, 2022 at 12:24 amThe United States is now two years into a deadly plague. More than 71.7 million Americans have become infected with COVID-19 and at least 868,000 have died.
Wearing a mask and “social distancing”—keeping at least six feet between yourself and others while in public—have been the Golden Rules urged by public health officials from the pandemic’s start.
And yet vast numbers of Americans still refuse to do either. Just as they refuse to get vaccinated, despite three vaccines now widely available.
Surgical mask
In the early weeks and months of the pandemic, cloth face masks weren’t universally endorsed, even by public health experts.
“One, we didn’t know whether they were actually helpful, and two, there was a lot of concern that if people were using medical masks then people like myself, were not going to have access to them,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.
No less an authority than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, said in March, 2020, that “people should not be walking around with masks.”
Only in early June, 2020, did the World Health Organization (WHO) urge non-healthcare workers to mask up. The WHO advised people to don masks when social distancing was not possible, such as when visiting stores and using public transportation.
According to Dr. Jeremy Faust, the change in attitudes toward masks should be seen as the nature of science, and not as a flaw.
“That is what experts, in fact, do. They don’t just have an opinion and stick to it,” said Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts. “They actually let their opinions develop and evolve as better information becomes available.”
Only in January, 2022, did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urge Americans to wear N95 masks—the most effective ones available.
In 2020, the CDC had urged Americans to not use N95s. The reason: They feared this would create a shortage of these masks for doctors, nurses and paramedics working closely with COVID patients.
N95 mask
Scientists have learned, for example, that COVID-19 can be spread by those who show no symptom of the disease. And mounting evidence has proven that masks are essential for protecting people from the virus.
Coronavirus is spread by respiratory droplets when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks—especially if large numbers of people are packed indoors. The danger goes up if the talker is shouting or singing loudly.
If not blocked by a face covering, the droplets can travel six to 13 feet, and can remain airborne for hours in some cases.
Researchers at Florida Atlantic University found that some masks were more effective than others. One study showed that well-fitted homemade masks with multiple layers of fabric, as well as off-the-shelf cone style masks, were the most effective in reducing droplet dispersal.
Bandannas turned out to be the least effective in reducing transmission.
Coronavirus
So why do so many Americans refuse to wear a mask?
Start at the top: With Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.
From the outset, Trump refused to wear a mask in public.
A colossal egotist, Trump is orange-skinned, morbidly obese and lacking a neck. Yet he still thinks of himself as dangerously handsome. And he fears that covering his face would diminish his power and appeal.
“Appearing to play it safe contradicts a core principle of masculinity: show no weakness,” wrote social sciences professor Peter Glick at Scientific American magazine. “Defying experts’ warnings about personal danger signals ‘I’m a tough guy, bring it on.’”
On May 21, 2020, Trump refused to wear a face mask as he toured a Ford facility in Michigan that was manufacturing ventilators and personal protective equipment. This violated the policies of the facility, the governor’s executive order and warnings from the state’s attorney general.
After a three-month nationwide “lockdown,” states began “reopening.” So Trump scheduled his first 2020 re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It was held on June 20 at the BOK Center. Scientists had learned that Coronavirus is more likely to be transmitted indoors than outdoors, when masses of people are packed together, and when people are loudly talking—or, worse, shouting.
Masks were available for those who wanted them. But Trump made it clear that his supporters shouldn’t wear masks, as a sign of support for him. Photos of the rally show men and women densely packed together, with none of them wearing masks.
A Trump rally
The Tulsa event was followed by another indoor rally in Phoenix on June 23. “Students for Trump” featured a packed crowd, with almost no one wearing masks.
After staging COVID-spreading rallies at Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Phoenix, Arizona, Trump scheduled another one for July 3 at Mount Rushmore, in Keystone, South Dakota.
Such rallies had been put on hold since March, due to the issuing of stay-at-home orders across the country by states’ mayors and governors.
Health experts expressed fears about a large gathering during the Coronavirus pandemic. But South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said people would “not be social distancing” during the celebration—nor required to wear masks.
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