Why the Coronavirus Pandemic Poses Fundamental Challenges to All Societies

Prabir Purkayastha

The COVID-19 pandemic is now moving at a speed that the world had not anticipated a few weeks back. It reached its first 100,000 infected in 67 days, then doubled to 200,000 within the next 11 days, and now it has doubled again, reaching 400,000 by March 24. Europe, particularly the core European Union countries—Italy, Spain, France, and Germany—is the new epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic. China, followed by South Korea, managed to contain their outbreaks; the European countries did not.

The USA is rapidly joining the ranks of the European countries. As its testing scope increases, a sharp increase in numbers is already visible. Only the Trump administration’s lack of testing—either intentional or due to incompetence—kept the real numbers lower.

Addressing a press conference on March 16, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “We have a simple message to all countries—test, test, test… All countries should be able to test all suspected cases. They cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded.” For countries that are in the community spread phase, extensive testing, followed by isolating those infected and rigorous contact tracing, is the only way to slow down further infections.

The problem is to identify the tipping point when a country moves from containment phase to community spread. So testing of those coming from high-risk countries, the contacts of those already infected, have to be supplemented by random testing in urban areas that already show a certain number of infections, testing cases of pneumonia in the hospitals, as well those who show COVID-19 like symptoms. It is only by casting a wide net that we can identify when a country, or a region, is moving from the containment stage to a community stage. In the community stage, the testing has to be far more extensive.

For countries such as India, the numbers are still small and could be thought of as in the containment stage. Though here again, the real numbers could be much higher, as testing has been confined to only a small section of the population. According to India’s premier medical body Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) guidelines, the only people who can be tested right now are those who are coming in from high-risk, COVID-19 affected countries, or those in direct contact with somebody who has already tested positive. Originally, ICMR had a pitiful number of test kits—only 100,000—though it is trying to ramp up testing capacity rapidly, importing test kits and licensing Indian manufacturers. Right now, given its existing capacity and its huge population, India’s tests per million rate is one of the lowest in the world.

In the containment phase, WHO recommends identifying and isolating the infected as early as possible. People should also impose social distancing: reduce the number of person-to-person contacts, maintain a certain distance from each other, and take other precautions such as hand washing. In this phase, we test for those coming from high-risk regions or in contact with those who have been confirmed as infected.

If containment fails, we enter the community phase, in which we do not know who is infecting whom. Then we need lockdowns and social isolation, coupled with extensive testing. This is the stage where a number of European countries, Iran and the U.S., are at now. If the number of infections cannot be controlled in this phase, they will overwhelm the health infrastructure. The consequence will be a large number of deaths, particularly among the old and those who have underlying risk factors such as asthma, heart disease and diabetes. They will need intensive care doctors, nurses, equipment for oxygen support, ventilators and machines that can oxygenate blood outside the body, and protective gear for medical personnel, which a hospital may no longer be able to provide. This is the reason for the lockdown—to slow down the spread or flatten the curve, reduce the peak, and distribute the load on the hospital systems over a longer period of time instead of overloading them all at once.

That is why a number of countries including India have entered into a period of lockdowns. Recognizing they do not have the ability to test extensively, they have decided to try to snap the transmission links. This will significantly drop the number of new infections, and give the governments and the health systems some breathing time. If they have spent the time wisely, building the capacity to test extensively, they can screen the population, identify contacts, and separate them from the general population. This is what China did in Wuhan along with lockdown, and South Korea did with extensive testing and with less-stringent lockdown to control their epidemics.

Unfortunately, once the numbers are high, simple lockdown does not work. New research co-authored by Xihong Lin, professor of biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, along with Chinese colleagues in Wuhan has reported that it was lockdown along with centralized quarantine—separating into two groups those who were infected and those who were in contact with the infected—from the general population that brought down the infection rate. Those who tested positive were put in temporary hospitals, and those suspected were housed in dorms, hotels and other facilities, and tested regularly. This is what finally controlled the epidemic, bringing the numbers down dramatically.

If the hospitals are overwhelmed by the number of patients, as they were in Wuhan and now in Italy, the mortality rates will be much higher. In Wuhan, the case fatality ratio—the number of deaths to infected cases—was initially estimated (based largely on Wuhan figures) by WHO to be nearly 3.4 percent; it is now thought to be much lower. A recent study in Nature Medicine says that the number of people who did not show symptoms but were infected means that the case fatality ratio was closer to 1.4 percent there. The number of fatalities was significantly higher among the old, and those with other medical complications.

In Italy, Lombardy and nearby regions are seeing even worse figures. Italy’s death rates are higher perhaps because Italy has a significantly older population with more than 23 percent of its people above the age of 65. The median age of India’s population is about 27, against Italy’s 47. This may lead to a lower death rate from COVID-19 in India and other countries with younger populations. But given India’s poor health care system and a huge proportion of its working population on daily wages, loss of employment and earnings can also take a devastating toll.

Why did the U.S. and Western media decide on China-bashing about a disease that could create a global pandemic? It appears that they saw COVID-19 as simply another day in office, a continuation of the cold war against China. Rather than invoking a sense of global solidarity, a virulent campaign of racist propaganda was unleashed: COVID-19 has been called a “Chinese disease”; the Chinese are said to eat bats and snakes; and everyone else can keep COVID-19 away simply by isolating China, according to this line of misinformation.

China not only bought the world time, but also showed us how the disease can be fought. By imposing early lockdown and travel bans, they kept the community spread of the disease virtually localized in Hubei province, something that Italy and other EU countries failed to do. China also taught us early isolation of suspected cases in fever clinics for testing, rigorous contact testing, separating those mildly infected into makeshift care centers like gymnasiums, warehouses and stadiums, and putting those seriously sick into hospitals where much more support could be provided. They mobilized more than 40,000 doctors and nurses from other regions of China to come to Hubei and Wuhan to shore the crisis of medical personnel there.

U.S. action has been in sharp contrast. At the time China sent medical personnel to Iraq, the U.S. decided to bomb the country! And tried to grab a German company developing a COVID-19 vaccine, so that it can try to create an American monopoly over the vaccine. China is sending health teams, medical supplies and equipment to many countries including Italy and Iran. It has even sent masks to the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. is continuing its sanctions on Iran and Venezuela even though that is making it much more difficult for them to ship in medicines, medical equipment, and protective gear.

It is difficult to predict the likely course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a completely new virus. In the midst of the worst pandemic we have seen in the last hundred years, we are scrambling to make up our answers on the fly along with dealing with the pandemic itself. But certain questions need to be addressed, and at least provisional answers provided.

Are there medicines that can provide a cure for COVID-19?

At the moment, we have a set of drugs that seem to be working on some patients. A combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, used to treat AIDS, may work against COVID-19 in the early stage of the infection. Interferon alpha 2B, a product of Cuba’s strong biotech institutions, has also been used in China and now in Italy for a similar purpose. The drugs that have done well in China and now in France are the anti-malarial drugs chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine, which also have anti-viral properties. Both are cheap and widely available in generic form, but require further testing. Remdesivir, an experimental drug that failed against Ebola, has shown some promise against COVID-19, pushing up the share price of Gilead Sciences, its patent holder, in a steeply falling share market.

WHO has launched a major trial named Solidarity to test what it perceives as promising candidates to fight the epidemic. They are chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine; remdesivir; a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir; and the last, adding interferon beta to the lopinavir-ritonavir combination.

Is there a vaccine that will soon be available?

A number of institutions and companies are developing vaccines, using an array of approaches and technologies. Chinese, European and American firms are all in the fray. According to WHO, two vaccines are already under clinical trials, and another 42 are under pre-clinical evaluation.

The Ebola vaccine took five years to develop and receive approval for its use. This time, we may be able to shrink the time—from development to having 1 million doses ready for use—in 12-18 months. This would be the fastest development of a vaccine ever.

After a candidate vaccine is developed, it needs a series of tests. The first step is performing cell culture and animal tests to see if antibodies develop with the vaccine. Next, human trials are conducted on a small group of people to test the vaccine for safety. Given the emergency, the two sets of trials are currently being run in parallel. If the results are positive, the trials will then be repeated with a larger group size to test for safety, estimating the degree of immunity, immunization schedule and dose size of the vaccine. Only after this stage, are widespread trials carried out involving a large number of human subjects.

There is a limit to how much we can speed this process. The major speeding up that has occurred is developing genetically engineered vaccines that can be developed much faster than using conventional vaccine development processes.

What was UK PM Boris Johnson’s “herd immunity” hypothesis to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic?

This is the “theory” (which Johnson has since come to his senses and renounced) that if 60 percent of the people are infected, they will develop immunity that will stop or slow down the epidemic. This means that at least 60 percent of the UK’s roughly 60 million population—or 36 million—would have to fall sick before the UK becomes “COVID-19 hardened” against an epidemic. Calculations show that with hospitals being overwhelmed as they have been in Italy, death rates would be anything between 1 percent to 5 percent, or 360,000 to 1.8 million. As various people have pointed out, the world did not eradicate smallpox, polio, whooping cough, etc., through disease-based herd immunity, but only after the development of vaccines. This is why the UK now has changed tack after a modeling exercise showed these possible numbers, giving up its pseudo-scientific herd immunity strategy.

Will seasonality—meaning warm weather—slow down the virus?

The jury is out on that one. Most viruses show seasonality, as does the flu virus. It is possible that high temperature and/or high humidity can slow down the rate of transmission, but we have to ride out one season to find out. There have been two different studies, both of which have come to diametrically opposite conclusions. One is based on modeling infections and temperature. As this map shows, most of the countries currently in the throes of the epidemic are along a narrow east-west corridor, roughly along the latitude 30-50 degrees north, with average temperatures of 5-11 degrees Celsius, along with low humidity. However, another paper using Chinese data says that there is no evidence that temperature has any effect on COVID-19 transmission. It is quite possible that we will see the outbreak spread to other countries outside the band mentioned above, and the temperature-humidity hypothesis will not hold. But even if it does, we are postponing the outbreak to a future date.

How did the Chinese break the back of the COVID-19 spread?

A lot has been written about the “authoritarian” Chinese lockdowns and quarantines. Now that other countries are moving in the same direction, it is worthwhile to know what China actually did and not what the media said it did. WHO’s assistant director-general, Dr. Bruce Aylward, provides the answer in his interview to New Scientist:

Question (NS): Does that mean China has taken the model approach? Were those lockdowns that seemed so extreme at the beginning the right way to go?

Dr. Bruce Aylward: Everyone always starts at the wrong end of the China response. The first thing they did was to try to prevent the spread as much as they could, and make sure people knew about the disease and how to get tested.

To actually stop the virus, they had to do rapid testing of any suspect case, immediate isolation of anyone who was a confirmed or suspected case, and then quarantine the close contacts for 14 days so that they could figure out if any of them were infected. Those were the measures that stopped transmission in China, not the big travel restrictions and lockdowns.

When I spoke to Italy the other day, they said: “We’ve got these lockdowns in place.” I said: “Great, you’ve done the hard part, now you have to do the really hard part, and that is making sure the cases are effectively isolated.”

The key to stopping the epidemic in Wuhan was not simply the lockdowns; it was also the combination of quickly testing suspected patients, and then taking the necessary steps of isolation and treatment of those found positive. This is, as Dr. Aylward says, the really hard part that all of us have to implement when—and not if—COVID-19 takes an epidemic form in our countries.

Countries like India have a weak public health infrastructure, and an economy in which a huge number of people will have no earnings if lockdowns are imposed. How they craft a policy that works for most people while keeping the epidemic at bay is the challenge. Can divisive governments—currently focused on attacking their critics, alienating the minorities, and bailing out big capital—switch to building solidarity, extending public health and uniting all sections of the people? Or will Modi, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and others follow Big Brother Trump, believing ultra-nationalism, coupled with hyper-capitalism, will solve all their problems?

The Only Oxygen Cylinder Factory in Europe is Shut down and Macron Refuses to Nationalize It

Jérôme Duval

Although no information is circulating about the stock of oxygen cylinders in France, which are very useful in these times of acute health crisis and which Italy cruelly lacks, the only factory capable of producing them in Europe remains closed. The employees of Luxfer’s oxygen cylinder factory in Gerzat (a town located in the northern suburbs of Clermont-Ferrand in France) are calling for the “total and definitive” nationalization of the factory and the immediate restart of production in order to deal with the current health crisis and to be able to alleviate the demands in France and other countries. After years of neoliberal decadence that mistreated the public hospital, resulting in the exhaustion of staff, reduced budgets, a decrease in the number of hospital beds, a decrease in the stock of masks and, ultimately, catastrophic management of the current crisis, will the French government persist in not intervening to regain control of this factory, which is essential for curing patients suffering from covid19?

On 26 November 2018, in front of 136 employees gathered in the factory canteen, a manager from the British group Luxfer Holding PLC, owned by funds such as Fidelity or BlackRock, coldly announced the defenitive closure of the site acquired in 2001. Production will stop in May 2019. The factory, although profitable and with an important order book, will close in June and all employees will be dismissed. With a turnover of 22 million euros and a profit of one million euros in 2018, 55% more than the previous year, this closure is still difficult for employees to understand. However, they will discover the strategy of the group, which has a quasi monopoly: according to the delegate of the French trade union CGT, Axel Peronczyk, it would be a matter of replacing the very high quality products manufactured at Gerzat with lower quality products manufactured outside France, with lower manufacturing costs and sales prices increased by 12%.

In early January 2020, the company management had the loading baskets destroyed, but when the excavators arrived a few days later to destroy everything, the employees were occupying the factory. The occupation prevented the management from destroying the machines and lasted until March 19, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. In order to respect the confinement decreed by the government, the employees in struggle decide to leave the site and place it under the responsibility of the Prefecture.

Luxfer de Gerzat, which produced some 220,000 bottles a year, almost 950 bottles per working day, supplied not only Europe and Russia, but also East Asia, North Africa, South Africa, Australia, Japan… Half of this production was for medical oxygen, 40% for equipping firefighters with self-contained breathing apparatus and 10% for industry. These high-pressure gas cylinders are used in particular to relieve the symptoms of respiratory distress in patients with covid19. They are used at home, in hospitals when connections to large oxygen tanks are no longer available, in field hospitals established to relieve overcrowded hospitals, as is currently the case in Mulhouse (France), or during patient transfers.

The workers in struggle literally understand President Macron’s March 12 speech, who said, “What this pandemic reveals is that there are goods and services that must be placed outside the laws of the market,” to demand a total and definitive nationalization of the Gerzat plant with an immediate restart of activity to avoid shortages and save lives.

In response to the president of French employers’ organisation Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, who said on 23 March that “there should be no taboos in this matter”, when it comes to nationalizing companies in times of crisis, Luxfer probably does not need a nationalization to then be privatized again once the crisis has passed, but rather to put a precious asset back in the hands of the public domain once and for all.

What Trump is Doing in the Middle East While You are Distracted by COVID-19

Robert Fisk

And still the virus shrouds Donald Trump’s mischief in the Middle East.

First it was his sly retreat from Iraq; now it’s his cosy military exercises with the United Arab Emirates – famous in song and legend as a former Saudi ally in the bloody Yemen war – and his cut of $1bn in aid to Afghanistan because its presidential feuding may hamper another deal with his newly established chums in the Taliban. And then there’s Iran…

So let’s look for a moment at the extraordinary mock city built in the Emirates – complete with multi-storey buildings, hotels, apartment complexes, an airport control tower, oil refineries and a central mosque – which Emirati troops and US Marines have been assaulting with much clamour in a joint military exercise. According to the Associated Press reporter who watched this Hollywood-style epic, Emirati soldiers rappelled from helicopters while Marines “searched narrow streets on the Persian Gulf for mock-enemy forces”.

But who were these “forces”? Iranian, perhaps? In which case, the mock-mosque was presumably Shia, the oil refineries presumably in southern Iran, and the old streets in one of Iran’s ancient cities. Surely not Shiraz. Surely not Isfahan.

Brigadier General Thomas Savage of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force didn’t seem to think the Iranians might find all this a bit suspicious. The exercise – Operation Native Fury, the name of which seemed to carry its own colonial message – is held every two years. “Provocative?” asked the aforesaid Savage. “I don’t know. We’re about stability in the region. So if they view it as provocative, well, that’s up to them. This is just a normal training exercise for us.”

I’m not at all sure that it’s “normal” for American armed forces to stage make-believe attacks on scale-model Muslim cities complete with mosque and narrow streets in order to create “stability in the region”. Surely this particular mock-up was not intended to stand in for Yemeni cities, around which Emirati troops had been fighting for four years against pro-Iranian Houthi fighters before turning against their Saudi allies in the same conflict and doing a quick bunk. The 4,000 US troops had been sent into the Emirates from Diego Garcia and Kuwait, where they might have recently arrived from the three newly abandoned American bases in Iraq. General Savage said none of his men had tested positive for the coronavirus and have “had little contact with the outside world” since shipping out for the exercise.

In a different context, Trump, who also has little contact with the outside world – the real one, that is – has been back to blackmailing his allies “in the region”. While much of that world continues to obsess about imminent pestilential death, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has suddenly – and with very little publicity — cut $1bn in aid to Afghanistan and threatened further reductions in cooperation. This is a bitter blow for a nation also facing Covid-19 (we can probably dismiss the handful of declared cases and two deaths there as an absurd underestimation), but America comes first!

Trump and Pompeo, you see, are very, very angry that both Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah both claim to have been elected president in the recent elections – thus endangering the agreement between Washington and the Taliban to withdraw all US forces in return for the Taliban’s promise to fight Isis, al-Qaeda and all other jihadis wandering around Afghanistan. The signed understanding between the US and what I suppose we must call “Talibanistan” also includes a mutual exchange of prisoners (5,000 of the Taliban for 1,000 government troops) to which both of the rival presidents object.

Abdullah and Ghani, who was once described by his old university in Beirut as a “global thinker”, appear to have forgotten the words of the Persian medieval poet Saadi: that while 10 poor people could sleep on a carpet, two kings could not fit into a single kingdom.

You can see why Pompeo is upset. Not since rival popes – and, I suppose, earlier rival Roman emperors – simultaneously announced their supremacy have we witnessed such a pairing of panjandrums. If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, it is also the font of hubris for its local masters – who, with their palaces, villas, bodyguards and 4x4s will not be affected by the cut in aid. If the two men were to reach a resolution to their dispute, Pompeo has announced, the US sanctions will be “revisited” – proving that this is indeed a spot of blackmail by Trump.

But US sanctions are clearly not going to be “revisited” in relation to Iran, which claims – not without some justice – that the ban on imports is hindering its own struggle against Covid-19.

The UN has called for such sanctions to be “urgently re-evaluated”, pointing out that human-rights reports have already described the malign effect of sanctions on Iran’s access to respirators and protective clothes for healthcare workers. The Iranians, with the declared number of cases above 27,000 and more than 2,000 confirmed deaths, may have covered up many more victims – and this, remember, is a regime that couldn’t tell the difference between a Ukrainian airliner and an American cruise missile (and lied about it for two days). They clearly need help. American sanctions, however, matter more than the coronavirus in the Middle East.

So, alas, does Iranian amour propre. With truly Trumpian fantasy – for the US president still calls the virus “Chinese” – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, inspired it seems by a Chinese official’s comments, has suggested that Covid-19 was man-made in America and that US medicine “is a way to spread the virus more”. This sort of claptrap is on a level with former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who claimed that a halo shone over his head at the UN and that his listeners didn’t blink for half an hour while he spoke. “You [Americans] might send people as doctors and therapists; maybe they would want to come here and see the effect of the poison they have produced in person,” announced the 80-year-old divine.

After this nonsense, Imran Khan, the Pakistani prime minister, was perhaps the only regional leader who could still appeal to the US to lift the sanctions on “humanitarian grounds” until the virus has receded. Needless to say, he was wasting his time.

And finally, a US Marine Osprey V-22 helicopter took off from the US embassy compound in Beirut last week, carrying aboard Amer Fakhoury, a former member of Israel’s proxy South Lebanon Army militia. Fakhoury, now a US citizen, had returned to Lebanon last September to visit his family – he was met at Beirut airport by a senior army officer – but was recognised by former prisoners as an ex-warden at Israel’s notorious Khiam jail. He was immediately accused by the Lebanese authorities of torturing inmates and brought before a military tribunal.

Fakhoury denied, and still denies, all the charges against him. He was subsequently released when a judge said the crimes leveled against him occurred more than 10 years ago. Fakhoury, who entered hospital in Beirut suffering from stage 4 lymphoma, had fled across the border after Israel’s retreat from Lebanon in 2000. An appeal was lodged against his release by a military judge, but Fakhoury was nonetheless flown out of Lebanon. “We’ve been working very hard to get him freed,” Trump said, which is true: a US embassy official insisted on attending the military court last year when Fakhoury made his first appearance.

Khiam prison was infamous for the torture and mistreatment of Shia Muslim prisoners – both male and female. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published numerous and detailed reports of torture at the jail, and The Independent also published eyewitness accounts of torture. Fakhoury’s release prompted an outburst of fury from Lebanese parties who believed that their government had acted under threat of economic sanctions from Washington.

There were even claims that the Hezbollah militia, paid and armed by Iran, had been involved in discussions over Fakhoury’s release with a representative of the Trump administration. Its leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, in a rare burst of anger, denied such a conspiracy.

Of course, scarcely anyone saw the departure of Lebanon’s most famous prisoner. For as the American helicopter lifted him to freedom over the Mediterranean, Beirut’s inhabitants were hiding in their homes to avoid catching Covid-19.

God’s Vengeance: the Christian Right and the Coronavirus

David Rosen

Steven Andrew is pastor of the USA Christian Church in San Jose (CA) who warns, “Obeying God protects the USA from diseases, such as the coronavirus.” He goes on, Bible thumping, “Our safety is at stake since national disobedience of God’s laws brings danger and diseases, such as coronavirus, but obeying God brings covenant protection. … God protects the USA from danger as the country repents of LGBT, false gods, abortion and other sins.”

Andrew is not alone in decrying the coronavirus as god’s curse. Rick Wiles, a Florida minister and founder of the media outlet TruNews, said the virus is a “plague” sent by god. “My spirit bears witness that this is a genuine plague that is coming upon the earth, and God is about to purge a lot of sin off this planet,” he ranted. He stressed that such a plague is part of the “end times,” a period of tribulations that precedes the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Both Andrew and Wiles share a belief that the coronavirus plague is due to widespread immorality, especially involving abortion, homosexuality and gender nonconformity.

Andrew declared March to be “Repent of LGBT Sin Month.” He claims, “God’s love shows it is urgent to repent, because the Bible teaches homosexuals lose their souls and God destroys LGBT societies.” He calls himself the leader of the American Christian Denomination, an association “made up of Christians of all denominations who believe like our founding fathers.” He’s gone so far as to declare 2020 as “Jesus Is King Year – a year of liberty and blessings.” His press release notes that “he has monthly revival events. These outreaches cost $350,000 for the year. Those wanting to help share the Gospel can donate at USA Christian Church.”

Wiles rants, “Look at the spiritual rebellion that is in this country, the hatred of God, the hatred of the Bible, the hatred of righteousness.” He goes on, “Just vile, disgusting people in this country now, transgendering little children, perverting them. Look at the rapes and the sexual immorality and the filth on our TVs and our movies.”

For postmodern secularists, the opinions of Andrew and Wiles may seem absurd if not ridiculous, easily dismissed. Their moralistic judgements seem more appropriate to the 19^th – if not 17^th – centuries then to 21^st century America. Sadly, their religious fundamentalist beliefs appear to be shared by millions of Americans who helped elect Donald Trump. Most worrisome, they embody a moralistic authoritarianism that has congealed into a powerful political movement threatening the nation’s very democratic being.

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“The rise of the religious right should be cause for alarm among all who care about the future of democracy in America,” warns Katherine Stewart in her new book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-power-worshippers-9781635573459/

Stewart’s invaluable study is a detailed investigation into how, over the last quarter century, the culture wars morphed into a political campaign. The book documents how as this movement failed to gain popular support for its moralistic agenda, it turned to politics to impose its Christian fundamentalist values on American society.

When Trump and other top administration officials took office, they pledged to fulfill the 2016 Republican Party’s platform that asserted:

Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law.

Trump’s election occurred as Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress and, once in office, he appointed two conservatives to the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—consolidating the religious right’s control of the nation’s legal authority. Compounding this situation, numerous members of Trump’s inner circle are drawn from the religious right, including Vice Pres. Mike Pence; William Barr, Attorney General; Jay Sekulow, the president’s counsel; and Education Sec. Betsy DeVos.

The hardcore Christian nationalist movement played a key role in Trump’s 2016 victory and will likely do so again in 2020. “The Christian nationalist movement,” Stewart notes, “is far more organized and better funded than most people realize.” And then she warns, “It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals.”

Stewart details how the Christian right effectively employs a network of think tanks, advocacy groups, pastoral organizations and the fortunes of the very, very rich to achieve its power.  She is a journalist who anchors each chapter in a compelling story of a distinct facet of the Christian nationalist movement. In one chapter she visits Unionville (NC) to attend a seminar sponsored by Watchmen on the Wall considering how to end the Johnson Amendment restrictions on religious organizations endorsing political parties or candidates.

Stewart introduces the cabal of key leaders of the movement, including: Ralph Drollinger (who offers weekly Bible study groups for White House of officials); Paul Weyrich (who led the antiabortion movement); Jim Domen (an ex-gay anti-gay activist who leads Church United, a voter-outreach group); David Barton (of Project Blitz that seeks to end separation of church and state); and R. J. Rushdoony (who she calls “an unacknowledged leader of the movement”). She also explores the role of the religious right in the rise of the homeschooling movement and how calls for “free speech” led to the erosion of the traditional wall separating church and state.

As Stewart warns, Christian nationalism is a movement that aims “to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity . . . that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders.”

***

The Puritans landed in New England four centuries ago, in 1620. During the first quarter-century of settlement, occasional accusations of witchcraft were raised, but no one was executed. However, during the following half-century, 1647–1693, over 200 people were accused of witchcraft and about 30 were executed. Most of these alleged witches were women who came from more than 30 communities in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including Easthampton, Long Island, now part of New York. Following the notorious Salem trials of 1692–1693, convictions and executions for witchcraft essentially ended

Few remember just how troubled the lives of the early Puritans was. Their settlement was inspired by the desire to civilize the New World, to wrest from the devil both the natural world and the aboriginal people, and thus create New Jerusalem. Yet, they found themselves confronted at every turn by formidable threats, in constant fear of nature’s uncertainties and in dread of innumerable battles with hostile Native tribes. The New World was a troubled environment in which to create heaven on earth.

Making matters worse, their attempt to establish New Jerusalem was hampered most by the very fragile humans who were expected to accomplish this religiously inspired mission. Humans were imperfect creatures, scarred for all eternity by original sin yet, given the predetermination that directed all of god’s actions, capable of being saved and achieving a state of grace. These troubled beings were subject to a nearly inexhaustible list of sins that fell into two broad categories, sins of character and sins of the flesh.

Among the former were pride, anger, envy, malice, lying, discontent, dissatisfaction and self-assertion. Among the latter were seduction, lust, bestiality, masturbation, fornication, adultery, incest, polygamy, sodomy and temptations like carnality, drunkenness and licentiousness. Almost anything could be a sin.

The Puritans fought mightily against the overpowering threats that were as much external as internal, especially sexual threats. They fashioned, in the words of historian Richard Godbeer, “a culture of sexual surveillance and regulation to strictly oversee and control interpersonal relations.” First and foremost, this surveillance was intended to prevent premarital sex and pregnancy or what was known as “bridal pregnancy.” It was not uncommon for neighbors to carefully observe interpersonal encounters taking place in homes or in fields, on roadways or in the woods.

https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/sexual-revolution-early-america

For Puritans, no place was considered private, beyond the bounds of community monitoring. This control was only intensified given the close physical proximity under which Puritan settlements existed. The personal information garnered through surveillance provided the basis for many of the reported scandals involving alleged witchcraft.

Puritans distinguished between a sinner, even one convicted of a sexual offense, and a witch. According to historian Elizabeth Reis, “a witch [was] the most egregious of sinners.” She insists: “Those who admitted signing [the devil’s pact] crossed the forbidden line between sinner and witch.” This act, signing the devil’s book with one’s own blood, marked forsaking God and aligning with Satan. Equally critical, it was a voluntary act, a personal decision, motivated neither by seduction nor temptation.

https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/82/1/15/736368?redirectedFrom=PDF

The sinner and the witch could engage in the same sexual act, but the meaning for each was fundamentally different. For the sinner, sin was a survivable offense and offered a chance for redemption. This was especially true for male as opposed to female sinners. For the witch, however, there was only hanging and eternal damnation. In addition to fornication, women accused of witchcraft could also be charged with other sex offenses, including adultery, illegitimacy and, the worst, sex with the devil.

As judgment for a sinner’s bad conduct or warning to one so tempted, the Puritans drew upon a wide assortment of punishments to enforce social control. They ranged from excommunication, disenfranchisement and banishment, to public shaming and whippings, to selling a convicted person’s children into bondage, to branding, cutting off body parts (e.g., an ear) and body mutilation (e.g., disfiguring the nose), and, when all else failed, to hanging and even being pressed under rocks until death. Unfortunately, these threats and punishments did not work.

***

It’s now 2020 and old-world Puritanism survives as postmodern Christian nationalism. It is, as Stewart argues, a complex phenomenon. On one level, it is a populist, nonviolent movement, “a militant minority.” She estimates that it consists of “26 percent of the voting age population” who supported electoral candidates in 2016. That year, the voting age population (VAP) was 250 million people, so it would seem that 65 million Americans might be part of the Christian nationalist movement.

However, given the sizable population that Stewart suggests as composing the Christian nationalist movement, it also operates on still other levels. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified within it’s a host of segments the broad religious right — Christian Identity groups, neo-Confederate groups, Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads and other sharing white supremacist beliefs. In a recent report, “The Year in Hate and Extremism, 2019,” it found that the number of white nationalist groups was up slightly to 155 from 148 in 2018. It notes that since 2017, there has been a 55 percent increase in the number of these groups, some of which are calling for bloodshed and a race war. “Most notably,” it found, “some are advocating violence and encouraging their foot soldiers to prepare for (and precipitate) a race war.”

https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/yih_2020_final.pdf

The SPLC notes that “the movement’s followers are breaking into two major strategic camps,” between “mainstreamers” and “accelerationists.” The “mainstreamers” are often referred to as or the “dissident right” faction “who are attempting, with a degree of success, to bend the mainstream political right toward white nationalist ideas.” The “accelerationists” “wholeheartedly embrace violence as a political tool” and, as the SPLC warns, “much of the movement’s energy lies in the growing accelerationist wing, which, for the most part, is organized in informal online communities rather than formal groups.”

One factor that might have contributed to the increased militancy of some aspects of the religious right is the significant decline among those who self-identity as Christians. Pew Research finds that in the decade between 2009 and 2019, there was a 12 percent decline among such people, from 77 percent down to 65 percent. Perhaps more revealing, those who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” now stands at 26 percent, up from 17 percent in 2009.

The worldwide spread – and unraveling global crisis – caused by coronavirus pandemic seems like a perfect historical moment for religious fundamentalist – and other racial identity nationalists – to invoke the Puritan past to persecute alleged offenders, nonbelievers. For some religious ranters, when moral suasion fails, it’s time to invoke the power of the state to impose order.

As Christian nationalists secure ever-greater influence, if not control, of the American political system — at the federal and state levels – they will exploit of the power of state authority to impose their values as law and enforcement. For these religious reactionaries, the 2020 election is not about Trump but about power – their power to control America and increasing aspects of the lives of all of us.

The End of the Parasite Paradigm

Kathleen Wallace

Politicians like Lindsey Graham have been worried that some individuals might get a few cents extra during this crisis if the relief bills are too “generous”. The concern does not extend to corporations that bloat and have essentially no stipulations put upon them from the trough of taxpayer largess. This is the clearest indication that our present-day system is nothing but a false social construct in place simply to ensure a modern- day feudalism. It’s never been about any kind of fiscal responsibility; it’s about making sure there are those who are desperate and scared –so they will keep offering themselves up to a system that chews them up daily (even before COVID19). This, all to ensure those at the top don’t even have to do one honest day of work. It’s also the societal normalization of a lack of empathy.

The fact that people are being called upon to continue making rent and mortgage payments while they are being told to stay home clearly shows the societal rules in place for 99% of us. Rent is due April 1^st. There is no relief at this time. Maybe some bread crumbs (taxed of course) distributed in May? Unemployment payments don’t happen quickly (let alone when 3 million plus claims land on them at once) and those who were already unemployed—well, I guess they are screwed even more. How do you look for a job under a lock down order?  Not to mention the whole point of the lock downs are to keep our healthcare system from imploding with too much contact and virus sharing. Shelter/Starve in place, please or go apply at the Amazon germatoriums.

There are people hungry right now. The understanding is that citizens do their part in a society and the federal government provides something in return. How is that reciprocity going now? Looks more like parasitism to me.

The set up was never equitable, but this pandemic has truly laid it all bare. The lack of healthcare for many– so clearly exhibited by the only known case of a teen dying from COVID19 in California shows all of this. They are arguing about his case being “complicated” but the facts are……. this kid got sick with a vicious respiratory ailment, was turned away at Urgent Care for lack of insurance—had to present to a most likely already overloaded ER, and died within just a few days. All the while how much spread of the virus occurred in his community in between being turned away for that initial care? He was positive for COVID19. This is not the workings of a system in place that cares for the little guy. The bills will be enormous for those who present and obtain this shattered healthcare. And make no mistake, it’s just testing the waters to talk about killing off the oldsters, in reality everyone who is not in their wealth class is expendable and always has been, like this poor kid. They want to keep enough workers around to serve them, but anything extra is just not really necessary. We’ve all just been too genteel to speak of it much. It’s been obvious to all that testing has been available for the athletes, the no-symptom Hollywood elites….but try being sick and poor during this time. Many will simply die at home alone. Some deaths are avoidable with a caring system in place. This is a dark and lethal free-for-all.

They knew this was coming our way and nothing was done to mitigate the spread in the form of adequate testing supply distribution, PPE centralized distribution, none of it was done………..

And it’s not about a lack of funds.

The money is there for the corporations. Hell, the Federal Reserve imagines it into being and charges us for the privilege of having it exist. This creature from Jekyll Island (fantastic book) clearly describes why the Fed was  put together on the sly in an out of way place largely in secrecy. It was a heist. Created to “protect” against the volatility and panics of the 1800s—the Fed truly is in place to protect the wealth of the few. Our entire system is held together by willful blindness, economic coercion, and the assumed belief that some are entitled to wealth and parasitism over the rest of us. A Dracula Economy.

Multiple stories are running about the bravery of those on the front lines, that is to say those manning our grocery stores and such. Empty platitudes and minimum wages for the masses. It’s clear these are the people keeping everyone fed yet their importance has never been given a living wage. And now they are expected to get sick and possibly die for the privilege. The right (and liberal left) will say that one should get more training to get out of these jobs–go to college, go in debt, join the military. So many fantastic options!  That is just another way the elite can indicate that the people who do these jobs do not deserve to make enough in wages to have a safe and fulfilling life. They need to be at risk all the time and this is why they don’t have a fucking rainy day savings account. They live on the edge by design and our leaders know this. It’s on purpose because this keeps a compliant workforce in place. These corporate enabler Democrats truly meet the minds of the reactionary right Republicans on these issues. One group simply puts a shine on the social darwinism, but the poor know the corporate Democrats are not their friends, opening up the confusion of some in this group backing the illogical and hateful message from Trump Republicans. They are swirling in confusion, and it’s a ripe situation for scapegoating others like Mexicans and whoever else Donald J. Trump can come up with. He’s a sociopath, and if I were of a religious slant, I’d say the Anti-Christ. He brings out the very worst in everything and everyone he touches. But he’s the product of our system, not the sole cause of this misery. He’s a festering boil on an unclean ass. This is why there’s no toilet paper around.

It’s never been about not being able to pay for it. Any of it.

Never forget that clear and undeniable fact.

Other nations are doing things like guaranteeing larger fund distribution and doing moratoriums on certain types of payments. This is at least a band aid that might catch some blood. The US is simply trying to ensure the workers stay hungry but alive (some of them) so they can keep serving the masters.

The gross incompetence of our leaders may be their undoing. Their greed is unsustainable at this point.

The planet is ill– the human population is ill–what more is needed to show that this current state is in its death throes? It will be one crisis to another because we are at the end of this line.

Parasites can only go on so long before they destroy their host. One way or another, it will be the end of this system.

A viral climate of fear

Andrew Glikson

Where the virus may potentially claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, global heating above 4oC is bound to claim the lives of billions, yet most governments hardly listen to the science

By the 25 March 2020 more than 4% of Covid-19 patients, nearly 19,000 people, tragically died worldwide, with more to come, and each death its own heartbreaking story.  Many governments are listening to medical science, implementing essential measures to combat the plague, instigating social isolation and economic support systems in order to avoid a potential demise of hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives.

Climate change is already causing deaths, according to a new report global warming would cause an additional 250,000 deaths per-year from heat and extreme weather events, yet most authorities continue to ignore the scientific evidence of climate disruption that threatens to exceed +2 degrees Celsius and toward 4 degrees Celsius. Potentially this is leading to a demise of billions of lives and many species through extreme weather events.

Between 1998 and 2017, 526,000 people across the world died due to extreme weather events caused by climate change.

Health protection measures to restrict the effects of COVID-19 are essential, but the looming social and economic collapse is something else. It is not entirely clear why, in the majority cases, populations cannot continue to operate at safe distances using protective gear?

There has been no social and economic collapse in the west when:

• The estimated number of malaria deaths stood at 405 000 in 2018
• Seasonal flu kills 291,000 to 646,000 people worldwide each year,
• Each year there are 1.3 million to 4.0 million cases of cholera, and 21 000 to 143 000 deaths worldwide due to cholera.

Nor have societies and economies collapsed in the western world during genocidal atrocities such as in Korea, Viet Nam, Rwanda, Myanmar, the Middle East and Yemen, which killed millions, namely:

• When 6 million people were bombed in Vietnam
• When millions were killed in Rwanda and the Congo
• When millions of people were killed and fled the Middle East
• When half a million refugees had to escape Mien-Mar

Media reports depend on the profile of the victims. The effects on the share market are elevated above the health issue. Poor and dark-skinned people receive less attention. Memories are short and most people worry about one problem at a time. Nowadays the fatal consequences of a deliberate or accidental nuclear war and of global warming toward four degrees Celsius, as real as those of the pandemic, are hardly mentioned.

The Real Pandemic Danger Is Social Collapse

Branko Milanovic

As the Global Economy Comes Apart, Societies May, Too

As of March 2020, the entire world is affected by an evil with which it is incapable of dealing effectively and regarding whose duration no one can make any serious predictions.

The economic repercussions of the novel coronavirus pandemic must not be understood as an ordinary problem that macroeconomics can solve or alleviate. Rather, the world could be witnessing a fundamental shift in the very nature of the global economy.

The immediate crisis is one of both supply and demand.

Supply is falling because companies are closing down or reducing their workloads to protect workers from contracting COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Lower interest rates can’t make up the shortfall from workers who are not going to work—just as, if a factory were bombed in a war, a lower interest rate would not conjure up lost supply the following day, week, or month.

The supply shock is exacerbated by a decrease in demand due to the fact that people are locked in, and many of the goods and services they used to consume are no longer available. If you shut countries off and stop air traffic, no amount of demand and price management will make people fly. If people are afraid or forbidden to go to restaurants or public events because of the likelihood of getting infected, demand management might at most have a very tiny effect—and not necessarily the most desirable one, from the point of view of public health.

The world faces the prospect of a profound shift: a return to natural—which is to say, self-sufficient—economy. That shift is the very opposite of globalization.

While globalization entails a division of labor among disparate economies, a return to natural economy means that nations would move toward self-sufficiency.

That movement is not inevitable. If national governments can control or overcome the current crisis within the next six months or a year, the world would likely return to the path of globalization, even if some of the assumptions that under-girded it (for example, very taut production chains with just-in-time deliveries) might have to be revised.

But if the crisis continues, globalization could unravel. The longer the crisis lasts, and the longer obstacles to the free flow of people, goods, and capital are in place, the more that state of affairs will come to seem normal. Special interests will form to sustain it, and the continuing fear of another epidemic may motivate calls for national self-sufficiency. In this sense, economic interests and legitimate health worries could dovetail. Even a seemingly small requirement—for instance, that everyone who enters a country needs to present, in addition to a passport and a visa, a health certificate—would constitute an obstacle to the return to the old globalized way, given how many millions of people would normally travel.

That process of unraveling might be, in its essence, similar to the unraveling of the global ecumene that happened with the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire into a multitude of self-sufficient demesnes between the fourth and the sixth centuries. In the resulting economy, trade was used simply to exchange surplus goods for other types of surplus produced by other demesnes, rather than to spur specialized production for an unknown buyer. As F. W. Walbank wrote in The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, “Over the whole [disintegrating] Empire there was a gradual reversion to small-scale, hand-to-mouth craftsmanship, producing for the local market and for specific orders in the vicinity.”

In the current crisis, people who have not become fully specialized enjoy an advantage. If you can produce your own food, if you do not depend on publicly provided electricity or water, you are not only safe from disruptions that may arise in food supply chains or the provision of electricity and water; you are also safer from getting infected, because you do not depend on food prepared by somebody else who may be infected, nor do you need repair people, who may also be infected, to come fix anything at your home. The less you need others, the safer and better off you are. Everything that used to be an advantage in a heavily specialized economy now becomes a disadvantage, and the reverse.

The movement to natural economy would be driven not by ordinary economic pressures but by much more fundamental concerns, namely, epidemic disease and the fear of death. Therefore, standard economic measures can only be palliative in nature: they can (and should) provide protection to people who lose their jobs and have nothing to fall back on and who frequently lack even health insurance. As such people become unable to pay their bills, they will create cascading shocks, from housing evictions to banking crises.

Even so, the human toll of the disease will be the most important cost and the one that could lead to societal disintegration.

Those who are left hopeless, jobless, and without assets could easily turn against those who are better off.

Already, some 30 percent of Americans have zero or negative wealth. If more people emerge from the current crisis with neither money, nor jobs, nor access to health care, and if these people become desperate and angry, such scenes as the recent escape of prisoners in Italy or the looting that followed Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 might become commonplace.

If governments have to resort to using paramilitary or military forces to quell, for example, riots or attacks on property, societies could begin to disintegrate.

Thus the main (perhaps even the sole) objective of economic policy today should be to prevent social breakdown. Advanced societies must not allow economics, particularly the fortunes of financial markets, to blind them to the fact that the most important role economic policy can play now is to keep social bonds strong under this extraordinary pressure.