July 2nd 2020

By Thom Hartmann

This morning on CNN a physician in Texas talked about having 10 young people with COVID-19 who needed immediate hospitalization and only having three beds left. He had to decide who is going to get treatment and who was going to be turned away from the hospital.

Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has killed over a hundred thousand Americans, and has thrown this country into a multilevel disaster, both medical, economic, political, and personal for Americans all across the country.

Yesterday the European Union, with over 400 million citizens, had fewer new coronavirus cases than the US state of Arizona. They had fewer than 4000, while we had, nationwide, over 50,000 new cases.

The world is rapidly bifurcating. It used to be that the world was made up of wealthy democracies on the one side, and poor communist and autocratic governments on the other.

The new definitions of first world and third world, for all practical purposes, are going to be those countries that have the virus under control and those countries that don’t.

The countries that do have the virus under control are already returning life and their economies to something that resembles normal, albeit with people wearing facemasks and modifications to school and business to mitigate the effects of any new, local, small outbreaks.

But not America.

If the billionaire oligarchs, both in America and overseas, who put Trump into office hired him specifically to destroy this country and weaken democracy around the world, their money was well spent.

Their efforts, culminating 40 years of Reaganism specifically designed to transfer wealth and democratic power from the American working class to the oligarchs, have been largely successful.

Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump laugh at the idea of democracy, while the American working class lays shattered on the ground.

The question now is: “Can America and democracy recover? And, if so, how long will it take and where should we begin to rebuild our country? Or do the right wing billionaires intend to continue their war against democracy and the American working class?“

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.