The strange line from Trump through Taiwan to Gaetz

Trump was both an American creation and an ongoing disaster for America and for the world.

America’s “religious” right voted for Trump despite his being perhaps the least religious, the least moral person ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk.

Seventy million Americans voted for Trump despite his global warming denial that is destroying life on this planet.

Increased heat makes some geography unlivable, even for humans.

Rising ocean levels, greater storm intensity, and the combination of floods and droughts impact us all, including the very people who support Trump.

His abrupt exit from a solemn pact has led Iran to accelerate efforts to build the bomb and the ballistic missiles to carry it.

Trump’s actions have taught the world not to trust agreements with America.

Trump encouraged an attempted coup in the halls of Congress, yet the self-proclaimed uber-patriotic, flag-waving GOP — Graham, Cruz, Gaetz, Nunes, Desantis, Collins et al — to slavishly adore him.

So, as a warning to future generations, I would love to document all of Trump’s deranged incompetence.

Sadly, I have neither the energy nor the years ahead of me to engage in such a gargantuan task.

Here are just hints of what could be a very lengthy tome.

Trump appointees blocked EPA from probing local polluters, By Michael Hawthorne Chicago Tribune

Political appointees in the Trump administration blocked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from investigating ethylene oxide polluters and prevented career staff from warning thousands of Americans who live near sources of the cancer-causing gas, according to a scathing new report from the agency’s inspector general.

On multiple occasions, the inspector general found that, Trump political appointees in Washington ordered staff in the EPA’s Chicago office to dramatically scale back efforts to understand the dangers of ethylene oxide.

“They prevented the agency from protecting these communities,” said Nicole Cantello, president of American Federation of Government Employees.

More than a half-million Americans exposed to toxic air pollution face unacceptable cancer risks, according to EPA data.

Ethylene oxide is the chief chemical of concern.

The EPA’s top representative, Bill Wehrum repeatedly promised the Trump administration was moving aggressively to protect the community. But, behind the scenes, Wehrum banned staff in the agency’s regional office from inspecting other ethylene oxide polluters unless asked to do so by state officials.

The inspector general also found that Wehrum and other senior political aides ordered the EPA’s regional office to take down a website outlining health risks from ethylene oxide.

State Sen. John Curran, a Downers Grove Republican. “The U.S. EPA … failed at every turn, and instead placed thousands of area residents in danger.”

Trump has a history of appointing agency heads who not only are incompetent and even criminal, but who oppose the ostensible mission of the agency.

Just one example: The head of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was the notorious, anti-environmentalist Scott Pruitt, exactly the person you don’t want protecting your children and grandchildren.

And when Pruitt was forced out in disgrace, who did Trump hire to protect our air and water but the coal lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler.

And then there was: Trump vs. Taiwan vs. COVID-19

How Taiwan Beat COVID-19 – New Study Reveals Clues to its Success

Posted on April 18, 2021 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield By Patricia Fitzpatrick, Full Professor of Epidemiology & Biomedical Statistics, University College Dublin, Originally published at The Conversation.

Taiwan has been widely applauded for its management of the pandemic, with one of the lowest per capita COVID-19 rates in the world and life on the island largely returning to normal.

Taiwan’s population is 23.3 million. The U.S. under Trump had a massively higher, per capita COVID-19 rate, and life is nowhere near returning to normal.

Just 11 people have died from COVID-19 in Taiwan since the pandemic began, an impressive feat for a country that never went into lockdown.

Trump repeatedly denied COVID-19 even was a problem. Who could forget, “Like magic, it will just go away”?

At the start of the pandemic, Taiwan was considered a high-risk country for COVID-19 due to its proximity to China and the frequent travel that takes place between the two countries.

The Taiwanese government acted quickly to close its borders.

It set up a Central Epidemic Command Centre on January 20 2020 to coordinate cooperation across different government ministries and agencies, and between government and businesses.

By contrast, Trump threw away all the pandemic plans Obama left for him, and didn’t create new ones.

And for months, he kept denying it was even a pandemic.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association has examined further just why Taiwan did so well at conquering COVID-19.

The study compared the estimated effectiveness of two types of COVID-19 policy in the early months of the pandemic: case-based and population-based measures.

Case-based measures include the detection of infected people through testing, isolation of positive cases, contact tracing and 14-day quarantining of close contacts.

By contrast, Trump ran super-spreader parties.

The population-based measures included face mask policies, and social distancing.

Trump discouraged face masks and social distancing.

Even to this day, despite all available evidence, America’s Trump followers consider face masks and social distancing to be an affront to their “freedom” and evidence of disloyalty to Trump.

The effects of these policies were quantified by estimating the effective reproduction number (R number).

The R number is a way of rating an infectious disease’s ability to spread – it represents the average number of people that one infected person will pass a virus onto.

An R number of greater than 1 means the virus will continue to spread and outbreaks will continue.

An R number below 1 means that case numbers will start to reduce.

A study found that the case-based policies alone, like contact tracing and quarantining, could lower the R number from 2.5 to 1.53.

Quarantine contributed the most to lowering the R number. Population-based policies like social distancing and face masks, meanwhile, reduced the R number from 2.5 to 1.3.

Trump claimed face masks, social distancing, and quarantining were violations of “freedom.” So his follower became really free: They died, the ultimate freedom.

The authors concluded that it was the combination of case-based and population-based policies, along with widespread adherence, that led to Taiwan’s success in containing COVID.

What did Trump do to fight COVID? He insulted the doctors who told the nation that hydroxychloroquine and bleach were not the answers.

Then, after disclaiming the seriousness of the pandemic, Trump falsely claimed he had been responsible for the development of vaccines, while repeatedly ran and encouraged maskless, superspreader events, that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.

No other traitor in American history has been responsible for as many American deaths as has Donald Trump.

That said, the political news is not all bad. The GOP now has discovered sex trafficking and conjugating with hookers is outrageous — not for Trump, of course; nothing is bad for him — but for Matt Gaetz.

In defense of Gaetz, he didn’t kill half a million Americans with his incompetence, and he didn’t lead an attempted insurrection at Congress.

This is the defense Gaetz’s lawyers should present to the judge and jury: “He only did what Trump did, and nowhere near as bad.”

If the jury is packed with Trump’s followers, they might just go along with that.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

[ Monetary Sovereignty, Twitter: @rodgermitchell, Search: #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell ]

THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE. The most important problems in economics involve:

• Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
• Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics. 

Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps: Ten Steps To Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care — for everyone
3. Social Security for all
4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
5. Salary for attending school
6. Eliminate federal taxes on business
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually.
8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%”) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.
9. Federal ownership of all banks
10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9% 

The Ten Steps will grow the economy and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY