Proof there is no limit to what Trump’s GOP toadies will allow.

Evidence that the GOP will do anything to turn a blind eye to the disaster caused by the most crooked, incompetent President in U.S. history. As America dies, the GOP is complicit:

Trump fired America’s pandemic response team and other ways he ‘sabotaged’ our coronavirus response

1. Trump fired the pandemic response team

In 2018, the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command was let go.

Trump shut down the global health security unit within the NSC, and the DHS epidemic team was also pushed out. No one was ever replaced.

Why did Trump decide the pandemic response team was dispensable? Simple. It was another part of Obama’s legacy that he felt the need to destroy.

2. The CDC is getting its budget slashed

Trump’s budget request for 2021 cuts the budges for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC by nearly 16%. The CDC is responsible for disease prevention and control in the United States.

But Trump isn’t worried about cutting funds to the entity that stops disease prevention because “it will all work out well.”

In addition to the cuts being made to the CDC, Trump is also proposing a cut to the global health fund, lowering it from $571 million to $532 million.

3. Emergency funds are drying up

Along with the missing response team, there is also the lack of a budget to contend with.

The Department of Health and Human Services has already notified Congress that it may need to transfer up to $136 million in funds to help combat the fast-moving epidemic.

This is partially because the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has already gone through the $105 million that was set aside for emergency public-health responses for infectious disease outbreaks.

4. Trump spreads misinformation

President Trump isn’t worried about the coronavirus because “the heat” will deal it, apparently.

Trump keeps repeating a false claim that Americans don’t have to worry because the Coronavirus will be defeated by warm weather.

There’s one big problem with this: scientists say the opposite.

5. The administration doesn’t heed warnings

Experts have been warning the administration, but those concerns have gone completely unheeded.

Ron Klain, for one, has been telling the Trump administration for two years that the United States was not capable of handling a pandemic. Klain served as Chief of Staff for two U.S. Vice Presidents and was also the Ebola response coordinator in 2014.

Even Bill Gates, the philanthropic billionaire, repeatedly met with John Bolton about the issue. Bill Gates warned that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would make the United States vulnerable to “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.”

The Trump Administration didn’t listen to the words of Klain or Gates. The CDC’s global health section has been cut so drastically that staff members have been laid off in droves. The section used to work in 49 different countries, but now they have a presence in just 10.

And:

Trump Fires Watchdog Overseeing $2 Trillion in Coronavirus Stimulus Funds

One of Democrats’ most critical hang-ups in passing Senate Republicans’ draft of the coronavirus stimulus package was that the president and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin would oversee a $500 billion slush fund for businesses, leading to concerns that Trump would dip into the money to bail out his own struggling resorts and hotels.

During the process, Trump assured Americans that he could handle the task responsibly: “I’ll be the oversight,” he told reporters in one of his coronavirus press conferences.

Despite efforts to hold him accountable, he has kept that vow, treating it as something between a promise and a threat.

He fired the inspector general leading the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Glenn Fine, the acting Pentagon watchdog who had served under both Obama and Bush, was appointed by a panel of inspectors general to ensure accountability for the $2 trillion stimulus.

And:

Trump retweeted a threat to fire Fauci after he said the US’s slow response to COVID-19 has cost lives

On Sunday, President Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci to his 76.8 million followers.

Earlier in the day, Fauci had told CNN that “no one is going to deny” that lives could’ve been saved if the US had implemented containment measures earlier in the novel coronavirus outbreak.

A week ago, at a White House briefing, Trump stopped Fauci from weighing in on using hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, for people with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.

And:

Fact check: Trump wrongly declares some states don’t have ‘any problem’ with coronavirus

President Donald Trump inaccurately declared at Thursday’s White House coronavirus briefing that some states do not have “any problem” with the virus’s outbreak, minimizing the situation even in the least-affected states.

Trump also repeated his incorrect suggestion that he has the power to decide when governors lift their pandemic-related restrictions. And he argued that “people should have told us” about the virus, omitting the fact that he continued to downplay the virus for weeks after public warnings.

And:

‘They’re killing us,’ Texas residents say of Trump rollbacks

Danielle Nelson’s best monitor for the emissions billowing out of the oil refineries and chemical plants surrounding her home: The heaving chest of her 9-year-old asthmatic son.

On some nights, the boy’s chest shudders as he fights for breath in his sleep. Nelson suspects the towering plants and refineries are to blame, rising like a lit-up city at night around her squat brick apartment building in the rugged Texas Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur.

Ask Nelson what protection the federal government and plant operators provide her African American community, and her answer is blunt. “They’re basically killing us,” says the 37-year-old, who herself has been diagnosed with respiratory problems since moving to the community after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

“We don’t even know what we’re breathing,” she says.

Under President Donald Trump, federal regulatory changes are slashing requirements on industry to monitor, report and reduce toxic pollutants, heavy metals and climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions, and to work transparently with communities to prevent plant disasters — such as the half-dozen major chemical fires and explosions that have killed workers and disrupted life along the Texas Gulf Coast over the past year alone.

And that plunge in public health enforcement may be about to get even more dramatic. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist before Trump appointed him to the agency, announced enforcement waivers for industries on monitoring, reporting and quickly fixing hazardous releases, in cases the EPA deems staffing problems related to the coronavirus pandemic made compliance difficult.

And:

US high court rejects Trump pro-pollution view of Clean Water Act 
By Mark Sherman Associated Press

Rejecting the Trump administration’s views, the Supreme Court held by a 6-3 vote that the discharge of polluted water into the ground, rather than directly into nearby waterways, does not relieve an industry of complying with the Clean Water Act.

“We hold that the statute requires a permit when there is a direct discharge from a point source into navigable waters or when there is the functional equivalent of a direct discharge,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court.

The decision came in a closely watched case from Hawaii about whether a sewage treatment plant needs a federal permit when it sends wastewater deep underground, instead of discharging the treated flow directly into the Pacific Ocean.

Studies have found the wastewater soon reaches the ocean and has damaged a coral reef near a Maui beach.

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump reversed the agency’s position that Breyer noted has appeared to work well for more than 30 years.

Right-wing Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented. “Based on the statutory text and structure, I would hold that a permit is required only when a point source discharges pollutants directly into navigable waters,” Thomas wrote, ignoring the fundamental purpose of the Clean Water Act.

And:

Trump calls fired IG who sparked impeachment a ‘disgrace’ and says someone should ‘sue his ass off’

Trump fired Michael Atkinson Friday night over the whistleblower complaint against him and urged someone to take legal action against the former official.

Atkinson was the first to tell Congress about a whistleblower complaint last year that described Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son.

The president said “he did a terrible job, absolutely terrible,” at a White House briefing Saturday. “He took a whistleblower report, which turned out to be fake, and he took it to Congress,” Trump said.

He said Atkinson didn’t request to meet with him before sharing the “fraudulent” report. Trump claimed again the conversation he had with the Ukrainian president was “perfect.”

“They give this whistleblower a status he doesn’t deserve,” he raged. “He’s a fake whistleblower and frankly, somebody ought to sue his ass.” Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a statement of support for Atkinson.

He praised the IG’s “integrity, professionalism, and commitment to the rule of law” Saturday.

“That includes his actions in handling the Ukraine whistleblower complaint, which the then Acting Director of National Intelligence stated in congressional testimony was done ‘by the book,'” Horowitz wrote.

And:

Trump Administration Nixed Key CDC Job in China Months Before the Coronavirus Outbreak

Ever since the coronavirus outbreak began, the Trump administration has complained that China was not as forthcoming as it could have been with information in the initial weeks.

But the United States could have had someone from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the ground who may very well have been able to detect hints of the coronavirus outbreak earlier. If the White House hadn’t eliminated the position that is.

The Trump administration nixed the position of the medical epidemiologist who was embedded in China’s disease control agency months before COVID-19 began spreading, reports Reuters.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Bao-Ping Zhu, who served in the role between 2007 and 2011. “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”

And:

Head of vaccine development alleges ‘cronyism’ after being removed from post

The head of the federal agency charged with overseeing the rapid production of a vaccine to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic said Wednesday he was removed from his post after trying to push back against what he called “cronyism” infecting the federal effort.

Dr. Rick Bright said he was transferred “in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.”

“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Bright said in a statement that came less than 24 hours after the Department of Health and Human Services circulated an internal memo, reviewed by ABC News, saying he had been promoted to a position in another agency. “Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis.”

And the dumb idea winner is:

Doctors condemn Trump idea of treating COVID-19 with disinfectant injections
After a Homeland Security official explained that sunlight and bleach can kill the coronavirus on surfaces, President Trump suggested treating COVID-19 patients by hitting their lungs with ultraviolet or “very powerful light,” or injecting them with disinfectant.

“Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” Trump said during the daily White House coronavirus briefing Thursday.

Doctors said that injecting or ingesting cleaning products was a terrible, potentially deadly idea. “It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves,” said Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and NBC News contributor.

Dara Kass, associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, said a U.S. emergency room will “probably get a bleach ingestion because of this.” [NBC News, The Washington Post]

Had any Democrat President made just one of the awful suggestions and decisions Trump has made, the GOP would be screaming. But now, they sit by, like dogs begging for a tidbit from their crazed, incompetent leader.

And America pays the price for the GOP neglect of duty.

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

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THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

1. Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
2. 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. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to 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