April 3, 2020: More than Nine Million Americans Have Lost Jobs

 

4/3/20: March goes out, not like a lion or lamb, but roadkill. The coronavirus continues to spread. As of Friday morning, 6,098 Americans are dead, another 5,421 in serious or critical condition. Before the day is out those numbers will rise even higher. 

As of noon today, the U.S. has 257,773 confirmed cases – just a shade under a quarter of all cases in the world.

 

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TO COMPOUND THE MISERY, a stunning 6.6 million people filed for unemployment in the last full week in March. That’s on top of 3.3 million who filed the week before. To put it another way, as many jobs were vaporized in fourteen days as were added to the U.S. economy in all the months since President Trump took office (7,065,000) – and all the jobs President Obama added in 2016 (2,341,000) – and all the jobs added in November and December 2015 (510,000). 

These are almost Great Depression numbers, a catastrophe for millions of individuals and families. 

Hundreds of thousands of businesses may fail. 

State and federal treasuries will soon be strained to the breaking point. The federal treasury was almost empty even before this virus exploded, because Trump cut taxes and promised his cuts would pay for themselves.

 

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“We have $21 trillion in debt. When this [tax cut] really kicks in we’ll start paying off that debt like water.”  

President Trump, July 26, 2018

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Because official numbers lag, preliminary reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a loss of “only” 701,000 jobs last month. Once the figures are adjusted in April the damage is almost sure to be ten times as bad. 

So ends a streak of job growth, started in October 2010, continuing for the last 76 months Mr. Obama was in office. The streak continued for 37 additional months under Mr. Trump – although fewer jobs were added monthly during his portion of the streak. There’s nothing complex about the math. If you look at the chart below, you can see which president “inherited a mess.” The facts show it wasn’t Donald J. Trump, as he has so often complained.

 

Now, should he be re-elected, he can say he inherited a mess, one he had a major hand in creating himself.

 

  

Officially, the unemployment rose last month to 4.4%, still slightly lower than the 4.7% level in January 2017. 

The percentage of Americans in the work force dropped to 62.7%, lower than the level (62.8%) on the day Trump sat down as president. 

And Trump can’t win the fictitious “War on Coal.” That’s after his E.P.A. (led by a former coal and gas industry lobbyist) has trashed most of the regulations meant to protect clean air and clean water. There were 50,900 men and women mining coal for a living the day Trump took over. 

As of April 1, there were 49,800.

 

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TO BE FAIR, not all of this damage is the fault of President Trump. As a good liberal, with his wits about him, this blogger would admit that no president could have avoided all the damage. 

Unfortunately, the president we have is an idiot as far as science is concerned. And the flatterers around him don’t dare brook him, no matter what idiocies spew from his lips. The failure of the Trump administration to act quickly, or to take the science seriously, ensured that the country would be hit harder than needs be. It was going to be hit very hard – even if Trump had done everything right; but governors took the lead. The State of Washington, hit hardest from the first, issued a quick “stay-at-home” order and slowed the spread. The president got mad and called the governor “a snake,” and kept insisting his administration had the virus under control. 

The Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine looked at what was happening on the Pacific coast and took quick action to put his state under lockdown. On March 29, Ohio had 1,653 confirmed cases. As of today (with the state updating later this afternoon), that number has grown to 2,902.

 

On that same day, March 29, the situation in Florida was getting out of hand. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a huge fan of President Trump, refused to take strong action, except to warn people from New York and New Jersey not to visit his state. Florida had 4,246 cases at that point. 

Then the explosion came. Currently, Florida has 9,585 cases – and I think you could argue that Ohio should keep any cars with Florida license plates from crossing the Brent Spence Bridge. 

Georgia, led by another big fan of President Trump, was also slow to shut down, issuing a stay-at-home order only on Thursday. Now the state has 5,831 confirmed cases of its own.

 

The president has finally said he may consider a nationwide stay-at-home order. But he’s been slow to the party. People in thirty-eight states are already under stay-at-home rules. Seven more states have orders covering parts of their populations. Only five, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas have avoided stay-at-home edicts. Nationally, nine out of every ten adults are under orders to stay home and somewhere close to 100% of K-12 students have been or will soon be told to remain away from class. If we take just those five states open for business, all five have closed schools. Ten states have ended school for the rest of the year. California and Nebraska are making a similar recommendation. 

Any good news? Not much, save for the fact that doctors, nurses and first responders are showing up for work despite grave risks. Robert Craft, owner of the New England Patriots, flew one of his jets to China and picked up more than a million critically needed N95 protective masks. 

 

FUN FACT – NITWITS: At today’s press conference, the President of the United States said he hoped to come in below projected death-toll models for the coronavirus.

Since the topic is death, he decides to add a joke, as even Fox News must report. “The models show hundreds of thousands of people are going to die,” he says. “I want to come way under the models. The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model. But – at least this kind of a model.” 

Fox points out, making the best of his nitwitted aside, that Melania Trump was a model. They don’t bring up the Playboy model Don was banging while married to his third wife, or his previous claim he once dated super model Carla Brunei. 

(Brunei scoffed at that claim and seemed aghast that anyone would think she had such poor taste in men.)

 

FUN FACT – DUMBELLS: Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia admits today he did not know COVID-19 could be spread by asymptomatic persons. “This is a game changer for us,” he says, cluelessly.

April 7, 2020: Trump Says No One Knew a Pandemic Was Coming

 

4/7/20: The bad news piled up all day Monday and started piling up again today, even before the blogger awoke. U.S. healthcare experts have known for weeks that the COVID-19 virus can rage almost unchecked in clusters. The first cluster was a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, where 129 residents and staff contracted the virus. Another cluster erupted after a biotech conference in Boston. Cook County Jail, in Chicago, has at least 300 cases. 

U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt.

 

Captain Crozier’s letter would anger the president. 

We know at least 155 members sailors on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt have fallen ill. That includes the former captain, Brent Crozier.

 

Crozier was removed from command last week, in large part because the fat shadow of Donald J. Trump looms over the U.S. Navy. After Crozier wrote a letter, demanding that his crew be allowed to leave the ship and go into quarantine, Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly (who replaced Richard V. Spencer, who described working for Trump as “chaos”) made it clear. He knew Captain Crozier’s letter would anger the president. He knew there would be pressure from the White House if he didn’t act and act quickly.

 

The Acting Secretary spoke with a reporter from the Washington Post about the matter and the “Fake News” folks decided, “Hey, let’s quote him.”

 

Modly explained that his predecessor, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, “lost his job because the Navy Department got crossways with the president [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]” in the Gallagher case. “I didn’t want that to happen again.” The acting secretary reiterated the point later in the conversation: “I put myself in the president’s shoes. I considered how the president felt like he needed to get involved in Navy decisions [in the Gallagher case and the Spencer firing]. I didn’t want that to happen again.”

 

Spencer laid out his own response later, in an op-ed in the Post, one of Trump’s least favorite newspapers in all the land. “This was a shocking and unprecedented intervention in a low-level review,” Spencer said of the president’s interference. “It was also a reminder that the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”

 

Yesterday, we learned that Secretary Modly had made an announcement to the crew of the Theodore Roosevelt.

 

Someone recorded it and leaked it to the press, and the “Enemies of the People” picked up the story again.

 

That is: They held people in authority accountable.

 

In his speech, Modly called the captain “stupid” and “naïve” for sending the letter. He claimed he removed the captain because his letter “created a panic on the ship.” The letter “unnecessarily raised alarms with the families of our sailors and Marines with no plan to address those concerns.”

 

Yes! The letter caused unnecessary alarm! Not the fact that dozens of sailors were coming down sick, with a potentially deadly virus.

 

A storm of criticism – of Modly – began brewing up Monday. At first, he insisted he stood by “every word” of his speech.

 

Even the reported profanity.

 

Then he, and we assume Trump, realized he looked like an ass, and Trump realized he himself looked like an ass, because he backed Modly.

 

On Saturday, the president said he fully supported Sec. Modly’s decision, although he hedged, as he often does, to avoid getting pinned down as the man who bears responsibility. “I didn’t make the decision,” the president pointed out. Or: the buck doesn’t stop here. 

But the “letter was a five-page letter from a captain, and the letter was all over the place. That’s not appropriate.” 

“I thought it was terrible, what he did, to write a letter,” the president added. “I mean, this isn’t a class on literature. This is a captain of a massive ship that’s nuclear powered. And he shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.”

 

Now, a new day had dawned and Modly had to tack hard as the winds in Washington D.C. blew him off course. He apologized in a statement:

 

I want to apologize to the Navy for my recent comments to the crew of the TR. Let me be clear, I do not think Captain Brett Crozier is naïve nor stupid. I think, and always believed him to be the opposite.

 

I believe, precisely because he is not naive and stupid, that he sent his alarming email with the intention of getting it into the public domain in an effort to draw public attention to the situation on his ship. I apologize for any confusion this choice of words may have caused. I also want to apologize directly to Captain Crozier, his family, and the entire crew of the Theodore Roosevelt for any pain my remarks may have caused.

 

Even Trump seemed to realize it wasn’t a good look to fire a captain who was trying to keep a crew of 5,000, crammed aboard the tight spaces of a warship at sea, safe from an easily transmitted virus. “I’m going to get involved and see exactly what’s going on there,” Trump told reporters at his Monday press conference. “Because I don’t want to destroy somebody for having a bad day.”

 

Which is almost exactly the opposite of what he said on Saturday.

 

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WE ALSO LEARNED that Trump might have to eat a few more words, even though, whenever the president has to eat words, he chews with his mouth open, spits crumbs while he talks, and always blames someone else.

 

It turns out Trump might have to quit making excuses for his administration’s failure, in late January, through February, and into early March, to take the threat of the COVID-19 virus seriously.

 

Remember those happy days, when the president told us the virus would disappear in April; and besides, it was really nothing more serious than the flu?

 

Trump has insisted repeatedly that no one could see this pandemic coming. The free press, this time in the form of The New York Times, another one of the president’s least favorite newspapers, has acquired an email from a top White House economic adviser, Peter Navarro. Dated January 29, it reads in part:

 

The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.

 

Navarro was hopeful that the virus would be no worse than the flu and economic damage would be slight. But one worst-case scenario he laid out warned that as many as half-a-million Americans could die.

 

But yeah. Who could have seen this coming?

 

Not Donald J. Trump. (See: 6/21/20.)

 

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MEANWHILE, the president insisted yesterday that anyone who needed a test for the coronavirus could get one.

 

The testing the U.S. was doing, with him in charge, was the envy of the world, he said. Every other nation on earth wanted to have tests like us. The best tests. Fantastic tests. Now that you mention it, he would give himself a “10” again for leadership. He was doing a terrific job.

 

That is why, adjusted for population, at least two dozen other countries were testing at higher rates than the U.S.

 

That is why, with all the wonderful testing Trump was doing – it was almost like he was doing it himself, heroically risking his orange self – the U.S. now led the world in confirmed cases of COVID-19.

 

Because our testing was the greatest.

 

As of Tuesday afternoon, Worldometers reports that the U.S. has 380,744 confirmed cases and 11,907 have died.

 

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FORMER FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRWOMAN Janis Yellen warned Monday that the U.S. economy will almost certainly shrink by 30% in the second quarter.  Unemployment, she added, has likely already reached 12 or 13%, and “moving higher.”

 

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IN OTHER NEWS: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has told her members that a second package of spending increases, necessary to save the groaning U.S. economy, could “easily” cost upwards of $1 trillion.

 

 

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LOCAL AND STATE OFFICIALS in Georgia are also fighting, after Governor Brian Kemp said he was going to reopen the state’s beaches. Kemp, of course, became “famous” recently after admitting that he didn’t realize COVID-19 could be spread by individuals who were asymptomatic.

 

Who knew!

 

Besides every nurse and doctor and health department official, and even every fan of medical dramas on TV.

 

Mayors in several beach towns are unhappy, with one labeling Kemp’s new order “crazy.” The mayor of Tybee Island, for one, warned, “The health of our residents, staff and visitors are being put at risk and we will pursue legal avenues to overturn his reckless mandate.”

 

“We are in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, and while we are closing schools we are reopening beaches,” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson told NBC on Sunday. “In my mind, that does not compute.”

 

(Thirteen states have now closed schools for the rest of the year. Others are likely to follow.)

 

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: When analyzing the motives of President Trump, one should always keep in mind what a narcissistic dick he is.

 

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“It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so.”

 

Inspector General Michael Atkinson

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While most of us have been busy trying to keep at least six feet away from other human beings, another Inspector General made the news. This time, the IG in question was Michael Atkinson, a Trump choice for the job, and a man in charge of keeping the intelligence community of the United States from breaking the rules. Atkinson had the misfortune, as it were, to have done his job to the best of his abilities.

 

When a whistleblower complaint landed on his desk, involving President Trump’s questionable call to the leader of Ukraine, Atkinson determined that the complaint was valid.

 

As per the law, he sent it on to Congress.

 

Fired on Friday, he said in a statement, “It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so.”

 

Trump defended the firing this past Saturday when a reporter asked. Atkinson, he said, was a “disgrace.”

 

And, by the way, you know who really hates whistleblowers and likes to silence them in any way they can? Chinese communist rulers.

 

Yeah. Those guys.

 

It is now believed that China might have been able to limit the worldwide spread of COVID by 95%, if authorities hadn’t been so anxious to muzzle everyone who tried to blow a whistle.

 

Last year, China sent 48 reporters to jail.

 

 

NOT-SO-MUCH-FUN FACT: Pastor Landon Spradlin, of Gretna, Virginia dies from COVID-19. Even as he battled the virus, he posted on social media about the “mass hysteria” surrounding the disease. He said the media was pumping up the danger in order to make President Trump look bad.

 

“It will come and it will go,” he predicted.

 

Now he’s gone.

 

The story I read makes Pastor Spradlin sound like a good man, with loving children who  will miss him. A sad and unnecessary waste.