Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

The case for vaccinating everybody.

Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon.

Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated.

The miracle that wasn’t

Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was nuts.

Well, here we are. We literally have the means to end this pandemic, and we’re choosing not to do it. And mind you, this criticism goes beyond the reluctance of my fellow Americans to take the jab. There’s a whole world out there begging for these shots. It is well within our means to manufacture and distribute enough shots to save millions of lives in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. It is also well within the scope of what can reasonably be defined as our “national interest” to do so. But we’re not. What. The. Fuck.

The hard problem

Our COVID vaccine standoff reminds me of the politics around climate change. The right keeps working to force the issue into a cultural context. In their view, your position on the salient question becomes a marker for the type of American you are. So if you encourage people to get the COVID shot – literally, to save the nation from this plague – you’re a “woke” liberal forcing your views on others and squelching their freedom of speech/expression/choice.

The same dynamic is at work with climate change. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there may be of already-occurring global warming. Right-wingers despise the idea of doing anything about it because that’s what the other side wants. Even if the policy would help people on the right, it’s more important to them to “own the libs” than to flourish or even survive.

One way out

I tend to be an optimist. My feeling, generally, is that losing hope is basically surrendering to hopelessness. The only thing we have in our favor is that there are more of us than there are of them. Our only chance is to act boldly, take the initiative, and move forward, even if we have to drag them along with us, kicking and screaming.

With respect to COVID, that means requiring vaccines (or a legitimate exemption) to gain access to a wide range of services (short of essentials like nutrition, housing, etc.). It also means making the necessary investments to quickly implement a robust global vaccination program, so that we can not only save millions of lives but head off these variants.

If people are truly tired of masks and social distancing, that’s what we have to do – get at least 85% fully vaccinated. You can have the thing you want, but you need to do this first. Pretty simple, right? DO IT!

Cuba revisited

Just a brief call back to last week’s column. After posting that piece and its Strange Sound podcast companion episode, I commented on some vaguely related Tweet by Code Pink and incurred the dubious wrath of what I call the Mas Canosa chorus. A crowd of right-wingers from the Cuban exile community basically called me a hater of freedom, etc., because I dared criticize some of their number for yelling “Fuck You” at Code Pink.

I typically don’t engage in pissing wars on Twitter, but I looked into this a bit and it seems that the Cuban exile community has invested in some Twitter bots. Were my digital accusers non-human? Hard to say, though their grade-school level virtue signalling could well have been the product of automation. “If you side with the brutal Cuban dictatorship over the people of Cuba, yearning only for the right to speak freely, then you cannot claim to stand against the powerful,” I was told by someone who supports strangling the Cuban people to death with sanctions. Sure sounds like a bot to me.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Pirates (or landlords) of the Caribbean .

Did I mention that the Biden Administration’s foreign policy is abysmal? I thought so. It’s always worth repeating, and the last couple of weeks have borne it out entirely.

On July 12, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a statement to the press regarding recent demonstrations in Cuba. Among some other boilerplate nonsense about our supposed commitment to human rights, Blinken told the press that the protesters “criticized Cuba’s authoritarian regime for failing to meet people’s most basic needs, including food and medicine,” chiding Cuba’s leaders that “peaceful protesters are not criminals”.

Okay, a couple of things. First, Cuba has been under sanction by the United States my entire life – sixty years – with the most punishing restrictions having been added during the Trump years. I’m not sure how well most Americans understand what these sanctions mean for a poor country like Cuba. They can’t do business with us, the regional hegemon, and other countries are threatened with retaliation if they trade with Cuba.

What this means, of course, is that food, medicine, and other goods are scarce. Now, I’m not claiming that the Cuban government is a model of efficiency, but I would say that any government that can maintain a standard of living exceeding that of its regional neighbors while under siege is doing something right.

Comparing like with like

I hate to keep bringing up Morning Joe, but when the protests began in Havana, the very next morning Joe Scarborough was sniping at the Cubans’ socialist “workers paradise”. “How’s that going?” snarked the former Florida congress member. Meanwhile in Colombia, massive protests against this capitalist banker’s paradise propped up by billions in U.S. aid were in their seventieth (and now eighty-fifth) day. That story didn’t make it onto the Morning Joe couch.

I know hypocrisy is kind of an impotent charge in this day and age, but honestly, the record of capitalist failure in Latin America is broad and deep. There is no lack of examples, no paucity of dumpster fires. I believe the Morning Joe crew commented on the “chaos” in Haiti the same day they cat-called Cuba, but of course when capitalist experiments fail abysmally, it’s always the fault of the populace.

Where’s the change?

What angers me most about this policy is that it doesn’t even reach the low standard of the Obama administration. Biden is literally leaving Trump’s extremist Cuba sanctions in place. He was in the government that decided at the eleventh hour to lessen tensions with Havana, and yet now he’s content with observing the new/old status quo.

Let’s face it – we have no standing to criticize Cuba on human rights, none at all. We support plenty of governments that abuse human rights on a far more horrific scale, including Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt … the list goes on and freaking on. Did I expect better from them? No, of course not. But that’s no reason not to be pissed off.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

That’s one small step for money.

The increasingly crusty-looking billionaire owner of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson took a sub-orbital flight aboard a rocket plane last week. News outlets like MSNBC spent nearly an entire day’s worth of air time covering this monumental achievement and the presser/victory rally that followed. So, just to be clear – a self-obsessed billionaire essentially did what Yuri Gagarin did sixty years ago, and somehow it’s news.

Of course, there’s more to this than space flight. On one level, it’s a childish pissing match between three billionaires – Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk – all of whom want to CONQUER SPACE. More than that even, it’s a marketing effort, helped along by drooling press coverage by everyone from CNBC to the New York Times.

Ticket to nowhere

The Times article made note of the fact that the cost of a ticket on one of Branson’s rocket-planes rose from $200K to $250K since they first went on sale, perhaps dampened somewhat by a crash in 2014. “For the vast majority of Americans,” the Times correspondent observes, “the cost of such a trip is out of reach.” Can’t get anything past these people.

Not that the vast majority of Americans will be missing anything. After all, Virgin is offering a trip to space, not a trip from one place to another. It’s basically a carnival ride for the uber wealthy. And believe me, those people have no shortage of carnival rides as it is.

A modest proposal

Now, people might justly accuse me of being hostile, even abusive with respect to the uber rich. Fair enough. Mea culpa! But at the risk of providing even more fuel for this accusation, I have a modest suggestion to make. Now that Branson has banked all this free advertising from MSNBC, CNBC, and various print media outlets, there are ways that his little space enterprise might actually do humanity some good.

If this media carnival around the flight of the VSS Unity has its desired effect, billionaires might buy tickets like hotcakes. Hopefully, that will prompt Branson and his various competitors to start offering excursions to the Moon, Mars, and other reachable planets. With Earth currently on fire as a product of their collective greed, our Billionaires may be tempted to spend longer and longer periods of time on other planets. If that happens, all we need to do is bar re-entry. That would take care of our billionaire problem, full stop.

Or, we could do the more practical thing and just tax the living piss out of them. That solution doesn’t make for great television, but it has the virtue of eliminating unaccountable power in a very practical and do-able way. All it takes is the will to do it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.