If you’re not outraged yet by the systematic crippling of public health and science by Donald Trump now that we have the Corona Virus serial killer on the loose — ironically, an orange blob of a virus according to electron miscroscopic images from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases — than you’d better check your pulse. You may already be dead.

Trump’s vicious, inhumane and vile ideas while in office have already torn families apart, and inspired right wing fanatics to shoot Jews, gays, immigrants, and people of color. Now, as this new global health threat explodes around the world, his incompetence and malfeasance in office will kill even more people.

The dangerous science and fact-denialist came into office with a vendetta against scientists and any expert whose mind he could not bully into submission. He directed his Agriculture Secretary to eliminate the jobs of some of the most world-renowned scientists; left vacant hundreds of critical public health positions at the Centers for Disease Control, the single most important US Infectious Disease agency, whose leaders Trump is now trying to muzzle.

Trump dismantled the National Security Counsel’s office which concentrated on Pandemics and how to deal with them. He fired scientists and long-serving career professionals from key positions across the entire US Government because he saw them as part of the “Deep State.” Their only crime was doing their jobs to protect the American people, and telling Trump the truth, on issues as diverse as diseases, food contamination, airline safety and climate change.

But don’t take my word for it. Just Google “Trump’s War on Science.” Some 53 million articles and videos are at your fingertips. His attacks on reason and facts, and especially on scientists, medical health professionals or military experts who understand grave international dangers, go back to the very beginning of his Know-Nothing campaign for President, when the Orange Blob from the High Tower first began calling Climate Science a hoax.

As of this week, the Corona Virus has infected 83,000 people around the world and killed 3,000. Financial markets have tanked, with many worried about the extraordinary economic disruptions caused by quarantines, flight cancellations, and the postponement of large events — like Venice, Italy’s Mardi Gras’ festival. All schools in Japan have been closed for the entire month of March. Stock markets in the US, where a few hundred possible cases of Corona Virus have been reported, dropped more than 3,000 points in one week — the biggest losses since the Great Recession of 2008.

With the first new confirmed case of an American testing positive for the virus in Northern California — in a town less than 30 minutes from where I live — the actual virus is beginning to replicate itself faster than Trump’s 16,000 lies can travel virally on social media. Most frightening about this California case in the Solano County town of Vacaville, is that while no one yet knows how it was contracted, evidence is emerging — through a whistleblower’s report — that points to Trump’s own Administration spreading it through their abject stupidity and negligence.

In keeping with their pattern of covering-up all truth, Trump and his HHS henchmen are trying to crush a career professional with decades of experience in public health — the whistleblower — at Health & Human Services, who told of how the agency’s political appointees put the lives of more than a dozen of their own health workers at risk. Without training their own front-line employees to take any basic health precautions, HHS hastily send them to Travis Air Force Base in neighboring Solano Country, California, to process the first American travelers returning home from China, who were exposed to the Corona Virus. Within one week, after the unprotected federal workers came in contact with the possibly-infected passengers, one member of the community in Vacaville — who never travelled to China — became infected with the highly contagious virus, went to a local community hospital, where she was initially refused testing for the disease, and may have exposed others. Sent to the University of California Medical Center in Davis for further examination, she tested positive.

The Trump Administration’s response to the whistleblower’s vital information was to abruptly transfer the career public health specialist, threaten termination, and, of course, deny all of her well-documented allegations. The action perfectly reflects the war against science and the facts going on in all critical agencies of the federal government under Trump’s Torquemada like terror-tactics toward the truth.

Two years ago, obsessed with anything Obama, Trump cut the Obama-era health security programs, dismantled the global health security team, and eliminated the highest government office specifically focused on pandemics, located within the NSC. Later the same year, the CDC was forced to cut its’ own highly effective preventative efforts against global disease outbreaks by 80%. In an effort to manage the drastic cuts, the Agency scaled back on its work by no longer focusing on China, according to an article in Fortunemagazine. Trump had killed the very agencies designed to prevent us from being killed by out-of-control diseases.

Fortune also reported that another $30 million from an emergency response pool of money was cut from the Complex Crisis Fund of the State Department (a fund set up by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State), used to deploy infectious disease experts around the world. By the end of 2018 Trump called for the gutting of $15 billion of the global disease-fighting budgets of the CDC, National Security Council (NSC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Health and Human Services (HHS) in the process.

So now, with the Trump administration facing a murderous, viral orange monster, and desperate for the funding it eliminated for fighting epidemics and global diseases, a global crisis of enormous proportions is literally in our backyard. This real, not imagined, threat to human life wasn’t brought into this country by an illegal immigrant or a terrorist — but by Donald Trump, and his willful ignorance about science and the real world we live in — not the hermetically sealed bubble in which he dwells.

Tragically, we are now all suffering the consequences of Trump’s incapacity to grasp anything but the distant memories of his childhood — still stuck in the back seat of his mother’s rose-colored Rolls Royce, looking out the vehicle’s tinted windows, watching the world he never wanted to come into contact with whirl by, passing through the dirty streets of Queens, NY, and the only Corona he ever knew. Until now

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Amateur hour is over.

If the chaos of the Iowa Caucuses and Trump’s vicious “victory” lap and illegal, revenge-porn firing of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman proved anything, it’s that it’s time for the novelty candidates and the ideologues to get out of the way. Nothing is more important than removing the sociopath from the White House. Nothing.

It’s why as a progressive Democrat with 50 years and about as many left-wing candidates under my belt as bonafides, I’m backing Mike Bloomberg and working hard for him to do well in the California Democratic Primary on March 3, with it’s motherlode of 495 Delegates, or 25% of the total needed to secure the Presidential nomination.

As a political activist who came of age in the ‘60’s in the anti-Vietnam War movement and lived on the urgency of issues and ideology in each election, in this election there is only one imperative: Beating Trump. Ideology is irrelevant in this death struggle for Democracy. Beating Trump is all that matters. Everything else is distraction.

In 1969, I was one of a nucleus of former Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy supporters who overcame our seemingly insurmountable differences in the aftermath of the election of the noxious Richard Nixon in 1968, and formed the New Democratic Coalition. We were Reformers, and our express purpose was pushing the Democratic party to the left, on issues that ranged from expanding Medicare for all, to ending the War in Vietnam, to enacting strict gun controls in the year following the assassinations by gun violence of RFK and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some of my early colleagues in the NDC (which Mario Cuomo, who was not a member, affectionately named, “November Don’t Count” because of our ideological insistence) included Bella Abzug, Paul O’Dwyer, Congressman Jerry Nadler, Ed Koch (when he was still a liberal), and many of the leaders of the Women’s Strike for Peace, like Cora Weiss and Sarah Kovner. We worked with progressives of passion and hope, who rewrote American history like Allard Lowenstein, Senator Barbara Mikulski, US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Senator Paul Wellstone, and the first, and only, African-American Mayor in NYC’s history, David Dinkins.

We campaigned for every progressive Presidential candidate from George McGovern to Mo Udall; from Fred Harris to Teddy Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson to Barack Obama. We fought for more sweeping Voting Rights and Registration Laws, tough gun control legislation, compassionate welfare reform, more funding for public education, collective bargaining rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights and affirmative action programs. We won, and lost, many policy battles, and elections. We always got up the next day, picked ourselves up, dusted off our bruises, and started anew — never giving up nor giving in; never surrendering. We had purpose and decency on our side, and, the nobility of our causes was what propelled us.

A few years later we learned to meld our progressive ideals with pragmatism. I worked with Mario Cuomo for nearly a decade when he was Governor of New York, and we fearlessly — and successfully — took on Ronald Reagan in the battle over State & Local Tax deductions (SALT), and waged a seismic struggle to shut down the unsafe Shoreham Nuclear Power plant. With tenacity and political savvy, we won both battles against overwhelming odds and enormous political and financial power. We had learned how to mesh our progressive beliefs with Cuomo’s pragmatic, respect-for-the-law, high-integrity approach to governing and we uplifted millions of lives in the process. I saw a similar strain of progressive pragmatism in Bloomberg.

I was living in New York when Mike was first elected Mayor of NYC in the awful aftermath of the 9–11 attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed nearly 3,000 of my fellow New Yorkers, and left the rest of us with varying degrees of traumatic stress. Undaunted and upbeat, Bloomberg took control of a City still reeling from the unimaginable, with many of us unable to get past the hundreds of “missing” photos of mostly bright young people, pinned to the mournful walls of St. Vincent’s Hospital. Mayor Mike carried our suffering City on his strong shoulders for months, while Donald Trump, slinking toward insufferability, bragged that his building at 40 Wall Street was now, not only, the tallest in New York (with the World Trade Center in cinders) but also eligible for $150,000 of special federal financial assistance from a 9/11 relief fund. Trump was shameless and soulless then, too, in our nation’s darkest hour.

It was Bloomberg, who, living around the corner from me, took the subway to work instead of a limo, buoying our spirits each day, and lifting 8,000,000 New Yorkers out of the darkness of post-9/11 despair, with his indefatigable attitude that anything was still possible for a resilient City and its people. It was Bloomberg who regularly met with Black community leaders and civil rights organizations after they had been deliberately excluded from New York’s City Hall for the entire eight ugly years of intentional racial division during Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty. And it was Bloomberg, who, while still a Republican, opposed President George W. Bush’s nomination of John Roberts as Chief Justice, believing that Roberts was not committed to upholding Roe v. Wade.

The biggest knock against Mike Bloomberg by many Democratic Presidential candidates this year is that the billionaire is buying the nomination with his money. It’s an odd charge, since not one of my fellow Democrats complained when Bloomberg spent $110 million of his own money in 2018 to help elect 21 Democratic candidates, flipping the House of Representatives from red to blue and making Nancy Pelosi Speaker. No one, except the NRA, had anything negative to say when Bloomberg contributed over $200 million to highly effective gun-control and gun-safety efforts around the country.

Not one Democratic Presidential candidate has criticized Mike’s motivation to spend hundreds of millions of dollars — perhaps billions, to not only Hold the House and Flip the Senate in 2020 — but to build grassroots organizations and keep 500 paid staff members in place around the country between now and November 3, to elect ANY Democrat over Donald Trump.

I don’t hear my fellow Progressives complaining that Bloomberg is drawing from his vast expertise in technology and spending whatever it takes to build an on-line presence to wipe out the advantage that Trump, his Russian operatives, and Right Wing trolls have over us on Facebook, Twitter and all social media.

I don’t buy the lament by some of my fellow Lefties that “no one becomes a billionaire without exploiting workers.” This is not the 1890’s or the 1930’s. We aren’t talking about fortunes being made on the backs of railroad workers as the Vanderbilt’s did, or, like the Rockefellers, off the sweat of oil-field workers, at the expense of the environment. We’re not even mentioning the fake, mini-fortune made by Fred Trump and Son by shaking down middle-income renters, and playing three-card monty with taxpayer money from federal, state or City housing programs.

The high-tech fortunes of Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg fall into an entirely different sphere, delivering far more value to society than they extract from it. I doubt if anyone would seriously argue that Gates shouldn’t contribute billions of dollars to fighting HIV/AIDS and malnutrition around the world, because his money came from some undefined “exploitation,” or that Bloomberg is wrong to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Johns Hopkins’ School of Public Health or to fighting gun violence.

Over the past several years, I’ve donated money to moderate and progressive Presidential candidates including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as to Democratic Senate candidates in key states I believe we can win in 2020. My contributions have always reflected my ideals and fundamental beliefs in justice, equality and the Rule of Law.

Those ideals, and not ideology, are more urgent to follow in this election, than ever before. Hair-splitting purity of political belief needs to be set aside for the immediate and practical reality of preserving our Democracy. There is one unifying imperative this year: Beating Donald Trump.

The best candidate to do that is Mike Bloomberg, and if he wants to spend half of his $60 billion fortune to do that, and bring along a Democratic Senate, God bless him.

 

Whether or not her beloved San Francisco 49ers’ win the 2020 Super Bowl, Nancy Pelosi has already proven herself to be the political Super Bowl Champion of the year. She won the championship this time by running such a sophisticated play against the mysogynist Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP that they still can’t figure out what hit them, and probably won’t until they get hammered at the polls in November.

The first female Speaker of the House of Representatives in American History has, time and time again, demonstrated not only her strategic savvy and tenacity, but her intuitive genius of grabbing powerful men by their egos, and shoving it down their throats.

Pelosi has masterfully performed her magic on both the House Impeachment-for-Life of Donald Trump, and the Senate’s self-immolating vote to shut out witnesses and documents from the Senate Trial, which, as Nancy knew it would, became a nationally-televised, continuing cover-up of the crimes of the Trump Criminal Enterprise, with Mitch McConnell and his water boys of the GOP Senate showing that they were all in the loop.

Nothing else could have, on a play-by-play basis, exposed the utter corruption and complicity of McConnell and his mendacious members in the GOP as completely in cahoots with the most corrupt and lawless President in US History, than the fight over a fair trial, which, as Pelosi predicted, the rich old, White men’s Cover-Up Club running the Senate, would resist with all it’s deviousness.

Her masterstroke was withholding the Articles of Impeachment until educated the public about the need for “impartial justice” and a fair trial with witnesses and documents in the Senate. Nancy knew that by goading the gout-looking McConnell over how all Americans deserved a fair trial in the Senate, the teetering terrapin would puff up his multi-layered neck with too much air to try to scare her away, and never agree do what she was requesting. With one Phineas T. Bluster-like bellowing of “she can’t tell us how to run our house,” McConnell and the overmatched, quivering co-conspirators he led, were trapped by their own bellicosity.

Of course they whined for weeks about how Pelosi’s power play of holding up the Articles of Impeachment would ricochet back to hurt her, without realizing that their own words — especially Lamar Alexander’s — would be used to hammer them. They were strong, smug shrewd Reptiles of Raw Power, who would never waffle on witnesses or vote for a fair trial because that woman from next door told them to do it, and they could do whatever they damn well wanted.

“Harrummph,” McConnell indignantly harrumped, expanding the girth of his Galapagos-sized goiter. That uppity female would never tell them what do to — even if it meant their own extinction!

So, on the Friday before Super Bowl weekend, McConnell led his troop of Trump-terrified turtles, off of their slippery rocks where they were basking in kleiglights, down deep into the murky waters of the Senate swamp, until they disappeared from sight. They covered themselves so completely with mud, money and corruption, that no witnesses nor documents could ever find them, and they would be protected from tomorrow’s twitter tantrums of the Trump Child.

It’s why Cory Gardner of Colorado, being pounded by John Hickenlooper in early polls, caved in quickly. He knew we was going down, and was betting everything on the Impeached-for-Life-Trump winning re-election and giving him some sycophant’s job. Martha McSally of Arizona, who lost one Senate election two-years ago, was preparing to lose another, this time to the natural Democratic heir to John McCain, former Astronaut Mark Kelly. She, too, would need a new job next January, only now, the GOP Governor of Arizona couldn’t hand her a Senate seat.

In eight other states, from Maine to Texas, Iowa to North Carolina, Georgia to Montana and even McConnell’s own Kentucky and Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina, an outstanding crop of strong Democratic candidates — which includes four Veterans, an Astronaut and at least 6 women — are within striking distance of winning. Only three Senate seats need to be flipped to create a 50–50 tie, which a newly-elected Democratic Vice-President can break, sending Moscow Mitch to political Siberia.

The prescient Pelosi knew that the terrified terrapins couldn’t hide from their constituents forever, especially when some 75 % of the people who give them their air to breathe, were demanding a fair trial in the best American tradition, with first-hand witnesses called to testify to crimes committed right in front of their eyes. The slimy, mud-covered GOP Senators chose a cover-up over the call for fairness from their fellow citizens, refusing to believe that when their dark swamp gets drained in November, they’ll be naked before the world, hands cuffed together in the criminal loop they formed.