Today’s press conference was even more useless than usual.  Trump has decided to launch some kind of drug war in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis.  I sat and looked into the eyes of the men behind him, men who were uniformly congratulating him, complimenting him, carrying out his will.  Every one of them is dangerous and every one of them needs to be in jail.

And, the press conference was no different from the past ones in that it reinforced the notion that:

-government is there to conduct a prolonged ad for big corporations;

-government has no role in helping people during a crisis;

-science is a hoax;

-the role of the government is to propagandize people into doing things against their self-interest.

Additional Notes from Today:

1. Lt. Gen. Honore maintained in an interview this week that we have models, models which show from Day 1 what to do in this type of crisis.  I don’t, he said, know why we are not using them.
2. The EPA is rolling back emissions standards put in place during the Obama Administration.  The federal government, in the middle of a pandemic has time to do the bidding of corporations and lobbyists to make it possible for them to poison us and make more money.
3. Honore was cautioning in the interview he did with Craig Melvin of MSNBC, that we needed to keep our minds on the inevitable corruption that is going to come along with this crisis.  He noted that pollution affects people of color and poor people more than others.
4. Reuters (3/31/20) is reporting that this change in efficiency standards will “save automakers upwards of $100 billion in compliance costs.”
5. This Coronavirus crisis is a Bonfire of the Vanities for corporate interests.
6. It will be a disaster for the rest of us if we don’t stand up and make them stop.

But, as Sen. Cassidy (and the rest of the Repubican Party) maintain: Capitalism will handle it.