March 23rd 2020

By Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash

A joke floating around on the Internet says, “How do you know if you have coronavirus? Just cough in a rich person‘s face and wait for the results to come back.“ The joke highlights the fact that rich and powerful people all across the country are easily and quickly getting themselves tested, but people who may have been exposed – and in most of the country who may even have symptoms but not severe symptoms – can’t get tested.

The United States and South Korea diagnosed their first cases on the same day back toward the end of January. South Korea activated their pandemic response teams, had a test approved and deployed within a week, and have now tested over 300,000. They have this thing under control, and their hospitals are not melting down.

Trump, instead, chose not to put back into place the pandemic response teams that he had fired back two years ago, and gave responsibility for the coronavirus to Jared and Pence. Jared had his brother-in-law ask for advice on Facebook, producing a computer print out page of suggestions for people that Trump passed out last week. Mike Pence chose to basically do nothing. And so the world is watching as American hospitals are begging people to sew masks and protective clothing in their homes and donate them to the hospitals.

Over at the Senate, Mitch McConnell is trying to come up with a $500 billion slush fund that “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin can give to anyone he wants with absolutely no oversight, no accountability, and no ability for the public to ever know how the money was used.

And now the media is reporting the Trump is getting “tired of social distancing.“ He’s refused to even model it in his press conferences, demanding that his people cluster close to him, while Axios is reporting that Trump wants to encourage Americans to forget about the quarantine and go back to work so the market will go back up and he’ll get reelected. And he wants his hotels bailed out as soon as possible.

Trump is willing to let Americans die and to let this virus rage out of control, as long as there’s a bail out for his own businesses and the Fed can get the stock market back up.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.