The depravity of the "sacrifice the seniors" to Mammon, the Dow Jones, etc. is most obvious on FOX and among Republican office holders but it is just beneath the surface among even many of those who can button their lips as they vote in ways that have a similar effect. I think that it is endemic to the Republican mindset that there are expendable populations who they don't mind dying. The disabled, anyone who couldn't get medical treatment was expendable to all but the tiniest handful of Republicans as they voted in Congress to destroy the ACA. I can assure you that that handful would have voted to kill it if they thought they could get away with it. I suspect John McCain, feeling the weight of mortality on him, may have considered the moral consequences. Collins, Murkowksi, not so much. And they, as conservatives everywhere are always fine with the impoverishment and destruction of the poor, minorities, and whose permanent status in destitution, poverty, working-poverty experience as a perpetual form of violence.
By the way, the idea that young people are not at danger from Covid-19 is disproved as the number of even once healthy younger victims who die from it will climb. And lots of younger people have risk factors. I would not be surprised if smoking and, perhaps, vaping is a voluntary risk factor for making an infection worse, though there are other forms of respiratory deficiency that is already a known risk factor. I have a middle-aged niece who has MS who I'm very worried about.
What the merely stupid and futile play-left has been a problem for Democrats, in Republican terms turns into the stupid and far more dangerously effective amoral depravity of those who came to total power under Trump-McConnell. It is the danger to us that is able to gain power in exactly the opposite way that the play-left never will be able to,*
What we are seeing in the Covid-19 pandemic is the full amorality of the Republican party on full display. And their stupidity. If everyone went back to work, if everyone started gathering in large groups it would cause a far more catastrophic pandemic that would force the re-closing and re-isolation of the population that the most responsible governors and mayors have already taken.
I haven't heard anyone speculate on it but one question I have is if people gather in large concentrations during an active pandemic if that might not ENCOURAGE mutations of the virus that are even more capable of spreading to establish themselves in the population, sparking the emergence of a worse pandemic, a strain of the virus that kills more and may damage survivors even more than this one. I don't know that but I'd bet on that being possible far more than that the Republican-fascist billionaire-millionaire promoted insanity getting it right.
There is no guarantee that this is not going to happen again. I would guess that this virus is here to stay in some form or other and that, like the influenza, it is going to recur cyclically. And there is no guarantee that it might not return in a form that will mimic, not the 1918-19 infuenza but the black death in its decrease of the population and economic effects. I doubt that the human population is likely to take the protective measure of becoming vegetarians and stop the industrial concentration of animals kept for slaughter and consumption that is the source of other such viruses. As I've mentioned, it's only by chance that such a virus has not come from the mass chicken or pig raising operations in Iowa or Maine or North Carolina or anywhere that's done in the United States.
The reported conditions in the infamous DeCoster egg factories in Maine and elsewhere produced outbreaks of infection,* and employed virtual slave workers who were terrorized into working under the most dangerous of conditions, indeed, there were deaths. And the entire time they were protected by Republican politicians, foremost among them the cousin of the convicted Jack and Peter DeCoster, the "moderate" Republican Olympia Snowe. Someone I know who worked at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection told me that files about the DeCoster operation were removed and destroyed from State records under her influence. I wouldn't doubt that that's true.
At one time prior to 2010, the DeCoster family’s Quality Egg LLC through various silent and secret ownerships may have been the nation’s largest egg producer. Two of its companies in Iowa in 2010, Wright County and Hillandale, were blamed for a nationwide Salmonella outbreak that caused the DeCosters to recall more than one half billion shell or table eggs.
The outbreak, however, reached 1,939 confirmed cases, and disease modeling by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated as many as 56,000 people might have been sickened in the Salmonella outbreak, a fairly common bacteria.
Quality Egg came under scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Justice when the Food and Drug Administration found the company was shipping eggs that had tested positive for the bacteria.
It is notable that it was not in Maine, where the DeCosters held enormous influence and power through their connection to Republican politicians but in Iowa where he was finally brought to a tiny bit of justice. Even then they were treated with velvet gloves.
It is not unreasonable to conclude that such domestic industrial animal concentration with people working in filthy conditions is the perfect means of spreading bacterial infection and viral infection which is certainly much more dangerous, as the cycles of influenza and, now, the Covid-19 virus prove. And they aren't the only ones that have come from the meat and egg industries. I think the earlier ones of the 1990s and 2000s are a warning of what you get when you do that and when the politicians and judges allow it to continue. Even the "moderates" among them.
* I will be writing more about why the play-left is a far bigger problem for the Democratic Party than the most depraved of amoral fascists are not for Republicans.
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