The US was sick long before coronavirus

Al Jazeera English

At the end of March, as coronavirus deaths in the United States began to spiral out of control, President Donald Trump broadcast some important news on Twitter.

Displaying his signature pathological attachment to unnecessary capitalisation, the president boasted that - according to the New York Times - the "Ratings" of his "News Conferences etc" were so off the charts as to rival "Monday Night Football" and the finale of "The Bachelor".

Granted, car accidents also get a lot of views - which does not mean they are good.

As if things were not bad enough, Trump's coronavirus performance quickly became an even more horrifying spectacle with the ascension of Jared Kushner - first son-in-law and preferred presidential adviser - to the position of de facto commander of the US response to the pandemic.

And how are Kushner's own "ratings"? Well, at least he is keeping viewers on their toes.

After initially reportedly assuring Trump that coronavirus was no big deal, Kushner was naturally deemed to be the best person to attend to the ensuing disaster - despite his own role in fuelling it and his utter lack of qualifications in any relevant field. (Judging from Kushner's numerous other assignments resolving everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the opioid crisis, "qualifications" are perhaps no longer a thing.)

He is now heading up a "shadow" coronavirus taskforce, not to be confused with the official coronavirus taskforce headed by Vice President Mike Pence. Kushner's force involves his own former roommate - current US foreign investment tsar Adam Boehler - as well as a bevy of private-sector executives.

By all lucid accounts, the Kushner group's manoeuvrings have simply bumped an already chaotic government response up to obscene new levels of confusion.

Kushner is furthermore "essentially operating without accountability", as Jordan Libowitz - communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - pointed out in an April 6 article for NBC News. The shadow taskforce is being run "off the books, with closed-door meetings and private email accounts" - which, Libowitz suggests, could potentially be a good way to "steer emergency government funds into your family's bank account without people finding out".

After all, there is no better time than a global pandemic to make the rich richer. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A California prison or an Istanbul mosque? Why the media links coronavirus to Muslims

Middle East Eye

On 14 April, US President Donald Trump announced he was halting funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on account of the group’s “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus”. This, from a man who has severely mismanaged and covered up the spread of coronavirus himself.

For its coverage of this announcement, the BBC website used an image of a group of medical personnel - the majority of them Muslim women in niqabs - looking at a monitor. The logic behind the selection was not evident; it seems a photo of Trump would have worked just fine.

But for the average, moderately xenophobic western news consumer, the takeaway from the display was likely that coronavirus and/or the WHO are somehow inextricably linked to Muslims - who, thanks to dutiful political and media fear-mongering over the years, are already widely regarded as the enemy.

The BBC is not the only outlet guilty of deploying irrelevant Islam-related images in the context of coronavirus.

In March, the New York Times reported Trump’s suspension of travel from Europe to the US with the help of a photo of a mosque in Turkey, complete with a Turkish flag in the foreground. Given that Turkey was not included in the travel suspension - and is not generally permitted in the category “Europe” in the first place - it was anyone’s guess as to the rationale.

Again, though, the implication is that coronavirus is tied up with Islam, that perennial plague from the East.

Even more ludicrously, CNN ran a photograph of a worker disinfecting the interior of an Istanbul mosque to accompany news of the announcement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that prisons in the American state were prohibiting visits due to coronavirus.

CNN subsequently amended the image on Twitter (although the incredulous responses to the original remain) to a photo of an airport scene with flight screens and passengers wearing face masks. It is not clear whether this was an intentional effort on the part of editors to say: “See? It’s not Islamophobia. We just don't care if the photo has anything to do with the article!” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The Plague of Jared Kushner

Jacobin

Back in January, Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri penned an article titled “I have just read 25 books and am here to perform your open-heart surgery.” The piece was inspired by Jared Kushner’s recent claim that, because he had read exactly twenty-five (unspecified) books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he was best qualified to resolve the whole seven-plus-decades-long mess (by definitively screwing the Palestinians, of course).

“To be very clear: Medicine is not my profession,” Petri, channeling Kushner, wrote. “I would describe it as more of a ‘recent hobby.’ In fact, I have a lot more important responsibilities, and I’m a little resentful, frankly, that this has also been put on my plate! But someone has to do it.”

As luck would have it, Trump’s son-in-law and prized adviser has now managed to catapult himself into the medical realm in real life, as coronavirus has provided yet another cool opportunity for egregious nepotism — alongside the other activities on Kushner’s plate, from solving immigration to WhatsApping with homicidal Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Kushner is currently presiding over a “shadow task force” to deal with the pandemic, adding yet more confusion and chaos to the United States’ already schizophrenic response. Politico reports that Kushner’s vast private sector–based operation, which entails a “kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants,” has enabled him to take “charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government” — clearly a logical leadership position for the man who initially assured Trump that coronavirus wasn’t a big deal and is thus more than slightly responsible for the lethal delay in addressing the outbreak in the first place.

Politico goes on to note that there is “limited vetting of private companies’ and executives’ financial interests, raising questions about the motivations and potential conflicts inherent” in the Kushnerian coronavirus enterprise, while the various projects it encompasses are “so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner.” As if anyone ever doubted private-sector efficiency.

Kushner has, it seems, also made every effort to render his shadow task force as shadowy as possible. Communications are being conducted using personal rather than government emails, and there’s no public record of what precisely the group is up to. In addition to being apparently illegal, such behavior does not inspire much confidence in the possibility that the primary goal of the operation is to benefit public health rather than the Kushner family bank account. This is particularly the case following the revelation that a health-insurance company linked to Kushner and his brother was busy designing a government coronavirus website. (The undertaking was abandoned at the last minute.)

The New York Times, meanwhile, quotes a senior US administration official’s description of the Kushner team as a “‘frat party’ that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government” — thereby providing one of the most articulate depictions of the presidential son-in-law-cum-alien-frat-boy in contemporary circulation. Less impressively, a Times op-ed originally titled “Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed” was subsequently downgraded to “Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness.”

And yet he’s already complicit in an untold number of deaths, beyond those caused by discouraging Trump from getting his ass in gear. According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, Kushner shot down New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s claim that his state — a coronavirus epicenter — was short thirty thousand ventilators: “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Naturally, Trump immediately parroted it.)

Sounds like the old “25 books” approach. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Cuba Under Media Attack for Sending Doctors, Not Bombs, to Help Covid-19 Victims

FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING

As coronavirus ravages the world, Cuba has exhibited disproportionate heroism, deploying medical personnel to at least 14 countries thus far to battle the pandemic—including to Italy, which has been particularly devastated. The response is in keeping with Cuba’s decades-long tradition of “doctors, not bombs,” which has seen the tiny island nation dispatch tens of thousands of medics across the globe to combat everything from Ebola to more mundane diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. The Cuban approach stands in marked contrast to the modus operandi of the global superpower and Cuba’s primary antagonist, the United States, a country with an established predilection for bombing rather than saving people.

Cuba’s coronavirus performance is a welcome bit of uplifting news in an otherwise mostly dismal international panorama. Lest anyone start feeling too inspired by the idea of humanity, however, sectors of the US corporate media are dutifully standing by to burst the bubble.

A March Bloomberg opinion article (3/23/20) headlined “Coronavirus Could Give Cuba’s Flying Doctors New Wings,” for example, came equipped with the following caveat in the subheadline: “But allowing Havana to exploit the virus for hard currency will just empower repression at home.” The text of the article, by Mac Margolis, contained few easily detectable illustrations of domestic “repression,” aside from allegedly insufficient Cuban government efforts on behalf of a “consumer economy” and “emerging private sector”—which certainly sounds less repressive than, I don’t know, the US police habit of fatally shooting black people.

Margolis also stressed that, in Cuba, Covid-19 is “anything but an equal opportunity affliction,” and that “compañeros with connections or access to dollars have a far better shot at securing medication and loading up on groceries during a lockdown.” Never mind that Cuban compañeros would have better access to basic necessities in general had the island not been at the mercy of a sadistic US embargo for the past 60 years, or that severe socioeconomic inequality is overall a defining hallmark of US capitalism—as illustrated by reports that low-income communities of color in the States are being hardest hit by the coronavirus.

The Bloomberg article is accompanied by a photograph of Cuban doctors wielding Cuban flags, with the caption: “Nice flags, but how about a bigger paycheck?” And while bigger paychecks are obviously less imperative in societies—like Cuba’s—where the essentials of survival are provided free of charge, a more pertinent question in the time of global pandemic might be how the US spends trillions of dollars on wars and still generates news reports like “Uninsured Americans Could Be Facing Nearly $75,000 in Medical Bills if Hospitalized for Coronavirus” (CNBC, 4/1/20). READ MORE AT FAIR.

War games in the time of coronavirus

Middle East Eye

Years ago in Venezuela, a friend and I visited some of the numerous free health clinics established by then-President Hugo Chavez. We weren’t suffering from any particular ailment; we were simply intrigued by the novelty of healthcare as a human right, rather than as a super-expensive commodity, as was the case back home in the United States.

At one clinic, we were attended to by a female Cuban doctor - from none other than the province of Guantanamo - who stressed that Cuban medics would never deny treatment to citizens of the imperial power that had for decades subjected her island nation to a crippling embargo.

She went on to observe that, like the US military, Cuban doctors also operated in many global conflict zones - but to save lives.

Now, as Cuba dispatches medical teams to fight coronavirus and save lives across the world, the US and its buddies appear as committed as ever to ending them - and not just via President Donald Trump’s criminally negligent response to the virus itself.

For one thing, any hopes that the proliferation of coronavirus among the US armed forces might at least result in a full military lockdown were effectively dashed to shreds with the New York Times headline of 26 March: “U.S. Army Halts Training Over Coronavirus but Then Changes Its Mind”. No doubt, inhabitants of countries on the receiving end of US military killing sprees will be heartened by the news. 

The article specified that the army was, however, going through with its decision to shift recruitment methods away from face-to-face interviews, “as the military, like the rest of the country, is rapidly adjusting to the coronavirus’s dramatic upheaval of daily routines”.

But as far as US-inflicted mass murder goes, it seems that business will continue as usual.

Take the case of Iran - the preferred nemesis of the Trump administration - where the health ministry recently announced that one person was dying of coronavirus every 10 minutes. The US, to be sure, is more than slightly complicit in the vast loss of Iranian life, on account of its devastating sanctions regime, which severely complicates the import of medical equipment and other necessary materials into the country.

And yet, instead of suspending sanctions in the interest of, you know, continued human existence, the US has used the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to expand them. Call it biological warfare of sorts. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Israel Has Already Made Gaza Unlivable. Now the Coronavirus Is Coming.

Jacobin

Back in 2012, the United Nations predicted that the Gaza Strip would be “unlivable” by 2020 — not, of course, that it had been particularly livable at any point in recent history. Now under Israeli occupation for more than five decades — forget the withdrawal-that-wasn’t in 2005 — the tiny, severely overcrowded Palestinian coastal enclave has also endured a crippling blockade since 2007.

Unemployment and food insecurity are rampant, and 97 percent of Gaza’s drinking water is considered unsafe. Power cuts are continuous. Health care equipment and medicine are in short supply, and Palestinians requiring medical treatment outside Gaza are regularly denied permission to travel by Israeli authorities — who, it bears mentioning, are often directly responsible for the conditions necessitating treatment in the first place, as when the Israeli military maimed Palestinian protesters en masse in 2018–19. Nor is the dismal health care situation ameliorated by Israel’s habit of bombing hospitals and killing medical personnel.

What happens, then, when you add coronavirus to the whole mix? It seems we’re about to find out.

On March 22, Gaza confirmed its first two cases of COVID-19, prompting the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem to warn that the spread of the virus in the Strip “will be a massive disaster, resulting entirely from the unique conditions created by more than a decade of Israeli blockade.” Given that Gaza’s health care system is “already on the brink of collapse,” the group foresees a “nightmare scenario” — one that Israel “created and made no effort to prevent.”

The two initial coronavirus cases were Palestinians returning to Gaza from Pakistan. Seven more cases were subsequently reported among security guards stationed at the quarantine facility where the returnees were being held, and one additional case has now been confirmed.

Al Jazeera writes that Gaza’s two million residents have been “urged to take precautionary measures and to practice social distancing by staying home in a bid to halt the spread of the virus.” But how, pray tell, are people supposed to social distance in a space so jam-packed that there’s barely room to breathe? And what sort of psychological trauma will ensue when an already traumatized population is forced to self-imprison in the “world’s largest open-air prison”? READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Sanctions Against Iran at a Time of Global Pandemic Are Criminal

Jacobin

In January, Donald Trump took to Twitter to address the “brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I’ve stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you.”

He went on: “The noble people of Iran — who love America — deserve a government that’s more interested in helping them achieve their dreams than killing them for demanding respect.”

Trump certainly has an interesting way of showing his solidarity — particularly in the era of coronavirus, when he’s been even more complicit in killing the Iranians he’s allegedly helping.

As of Tuesday, the country had roughly 25,000 confirmed cases and nearly 2,000 deaths. The Iranian health ministry reports that one person is dying of coronavirus every ten minutes. And yet the Trump administration has found the moment opportune to ramp up its economic assault on Iran, where years of US sanctions have already devastated the Iranian health care system.

As Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted last October, sanctions had “drastically constrained the ability of the country to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines, causing serious hardships for ordinary Iranians and threatening their right to health.” Among those especially affected were patients with leukemia, epilepsy, and eye injuries owing to “exposure to chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war” of 1980–88 (another period of mass suffering in which the United States was more than slightly culpable, including, as it happens, on the chemical weapons front).

But, hey, so what if the shortage of medicine and equipment prevents Iran from effectively fighting coronavirus? It’s not like global pandemics affect the whole world.

The United States insists that humanitarian assistance to Iran is not prohibited by sanctions. But as HRW found, supposed humanitarian exemptions “have failed to offset the strong reluctance of US and European companies and banks to risk incurring sanctions and legal action by exporting or financing exempted humanitarian goods.”

If that wasn’t enough evidence, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s admission that the United States is engaged in straight-up collective punishment in Iran — in order to “lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime” — would seem to indicate that humanitarianism is not at all the name of the game. War crimes, more like it. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Forty years on, El Salvador's war is still not over

Al Jazeera English

Forty years ago, on March 24, 1980, iconic Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by a sniper while saying mass. 

The assassination, which was orchestrated in part by notorious right-wing extremist and death squad leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, helped definitively plunge El Salvador into a 12-year civil war that killed more than 75,000 people. 

A post-war United Nations truth commission attributed the blame for approximately 85 percent of serious acts of violence committed during this war to "agents of the State" and allied paramilitary groups and death squads.

But the blame hardly stops there.

Shortly before his death, Romero - who had become a champion of the poor and a staunch critic of capitalism, arguing that "the root of all violence is institutional violence" - penned a letter to then-US President Jimmy Carter. In it, he urged Carter to withhold military aid to the Salvadoran junta in light of the rampant killings, forced disappearances, and other atrocities that were already taking place in the country.

And yet, despite all of Carter's purported concern for "human rights", the aid went through - as it would during the subsequent administrations of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, ultimately adding up to billions of dollars worth of lethal encouragement for a maniacally trigger-happy right-wing.

But, hey, this was the Cold War, and the very future of capitalist tyranny - pardon, freedom and democracy - was at stake. 

As it so happens, Romero was not the only one to have given Carter a heads-up about the lay of the land in El Salvador.

In his book Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War, former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner notes that, just days before Romero's assassination, Carter's very own ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, wrote in a classified cable: "The daily total of dead, many among them teenagers bearing marks of brutal torture, result from right-wing terrorism."

White's analysis did not succumb to the anti-communist hysteria that was so in vogue in Washington either. In El Salvador, "the rich and powerful have systematically defrauded the poor and denied eighty percent of the people any voice in the affairs of their country," the diplomat explained, adding that the incipient conflict was not the fault of the good old communist menace but rather of "decades of oppression and a studied refusal on the part of the elite to make any concessions to the masses." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Coronavirus: World cannot afford to continue ignoring Yemen

Middle East Eye

Time for a pop quiz: What, according to the United Nations, is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis - one that has killed more than 100,000 people over the past five years and wrought all manner of other torment?

Hint: It’s not coronavirus. 

Rather, it’s the war in Yemen, which - despite the extensive complicity of the United States and Britain - consistently eludes Western attention and concern.

Much of the blame for the deadly state of affairs lies with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, preferred psychopath of the Trump administration, who as defence minister in March 2015 commenced giddily bombing Yemen, with the help of the United Arab Emirates and other allies.

As New York Times Beirut bureau chief Ben Hubbard notes in his new book, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman, the war constituted a departure from business-as-usual for the Saudi military, which had traditionally abstained from action and simply “served to employ large numbers of Saudi men and enabled princes to sign massive weapons contracts with the United States and other Western countries to underpin alliances and enrich networks of middlemen”.

Of course, massive weapons contracts come in handy in battle, too, and - comfortably backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in US weapons sales and other assistance - the Saudi-led coalition has succeeded in slaughtering thousands of Yemeni civilians.

Among the more publicised manifestations of the gruesome partnership was the 2018 coalition massacre of some 40 Yemeni children on a school bus by a US-supplied bomb.

When a journalist asked then-US Defence Secretary James Mattis whether the fact that such strikes were carried out with “US training, US targeting information, US weapons” was causing him “to rethink the US role in that coalition”, Mattis coherently replied: “There, I would tell you that we do help them plan what we call - what kind of targeting? I’m trying to trying of the right word.” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

San Salvador and Beirut: A Tale of Two Postwar Spaces—and an Ongoing War on Public Space

El Faro English

When I arrived to San Salvador in December for a three-month stay, I asked a neighbor for recommendations on where to go jogging. It was his preference, he said, to avoid leaving the house whenever possible, but I could try the parking lot of the soccer stadium, which—like so many places in the Salvadoran capital—came equipped with a bevy of armed security guards.

To be sure, for the average Salvadoran, the obstacles to maneuvering in public cannot be overstated. In a city that consistently ranks among the most violent and homicidal in the world, the innumerable invisible borders delineating territory controlled by rival gangs means that an act as simple as crossing the street can literally be a death sentence.

On a recent excursion to San Salvador’s historic center—site of the Metropolitan Cathedral—I spoke with a man in his late forties who requested anonymity before remarking that, despite the government’s much vaunted “rehabilitation” of the area, “one block west of the cathedral is one gang and one block north of the cathedral is another gang.” For him, he said, navigating the boundaries was not as much of an issue as it was for his 19-year-old son, who, on account of his age, was automatically presumed by gang members to be from an opposing gang.

Moreover, because his son resides in a San Salvador neighborhood presided over by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)—and because his place of residence is specified on the national ID Salvadorans are required to carry—encounters with members of the Barrio 18 gang can be particularly perilous. But it’s not only the gangs, the man was careful to emphasize; there’s also a “criminalization of youth” by Salvadoran security forces, who are well known for their habit of antagonizing young men—thereby further cramping the freedom of public movement for that demographic. Then, of course, there’s the habit of extrajudicially assassinating people and passing off the carnage as gang-related shootouts. READ MORE AT EL FARO ENGLISH.