The silent Trump supporters who are no longer that silent

In the May 11, 2020 issue of the New Yorker, in an article titled How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump, Evan Osnos profiles the wealthy country-club Republicans who live in this enclave in Greenwich, Connecticut, home of the elitist Bush family and their friends, who originally thought of Donald Trump as nouveau riche and utterly gauche and beneath them. They have now been completely converted to him because of how much wealthier he has made them and because he says the racist and misogynist and xenophobic things that they always thought but felt that they could not say out loud because it would reveal to others that their publicly professed socially enlightened values were all a sham.
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How big name companies aid and abet global corruption

The fascinating Netflix series Dirty Money explores the world of high-level corruption. I discussed in an earlier post an episode of season 2 of the show about how Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is a slumlord who preys on poor and vulnerable people. The show also examines how drug cartels launder their money. When it comes to laundering drug money the problem is always how to convert large amounts of cash in small currency bills collected on the streets into deposits in bank accounts without the authorities being alerted, where the money can be more easily transferred around the globe.
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The long-lasting effects of institutionalized racism

That excellent radio program This American Life just recently won the first-ever Pulitzer prize for excellence in journalism awarded to a radio program. It is well deserved because it is a truly outstanding program. The show they won the prize for dealt with the terrible plight of the migrants who have been turned away at the US-Mexico border because of the cruelty of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. They rebroadcast that program last week after winning the prize and you can listen to it here. Back in 2005, I wrote to the program offering to nominate them for a prize for their coverage of the terrible treatment meted out to poor people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit. You can listen to that program here.
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The Biden problem

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have never been a fan of former senator, vice-president, and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. I strongly favored Bernie Sanders and Biden was way down the list of the many people who sought the nomination. Biden has always seemed to me to be shallow, lacking a central core of convictions, and thus easily swayed by pressure groups, lobbyists, and those whom he considers more powerful than him. He has been, like the Democratic party establishment, a loyal servant of the business class, especially those in the financial sector. His home state of Delaware is the choice of tax-evading and money-laundering companies because of its very loose regulatory structure.
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Building slack into systems

What the covid-19 pandemic has revealed, at least as far as the US is concerned, is how delicately balanced the supply and distribution systems are. As long as things are normal, everything appears to run smoothly. But given a large enough disruption, the system can not only not cope, it cannot reconfigure itself quickly enough to meet the challenge. In this case, we have discovered that the supply of goods and services is highly dependent on a just-in-time supply chains for each item that are finely tuned for maximum efficiency and eliminate the need for costly stockpiling of supplies. But the sudden change in the way people live and work has resulted in shortages in some areas along with gluts in others, with no means for quickly redistributing the resources to reach a new equilibrium.
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Another inspector general replaced by a crony

Trump has fired another government watchdog, this time the inspector general who was investigating transportation secretary Elaine Chao for taking actions that benefit her husband Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell who has been fiercely shielding Trump from facing any consequences of his corruption and venality. It is a circle of corruption and cover up. The replacement is, of course, a loyalist.
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Everything is now part of the culture wars

Trump’s policies on dealing with the pandemic have been disastrous from the start. After not recognizing the need to take action for about a month early on, a delay that is estimated to have resulted in about 36,000 additional deaths. He has also not provided funding for widespread testing, apparently fearing that would increase the numbers and make him look bad, touted bizarre and even dangerous treatments for covid-19, promised unrealistically quick discoveries of a vaccine, and urged the reopening the country earlier than health experts recommend.
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The other shoe drops in the Armaud Arbery killing

In the killing of the black jogger by two white men Gregory McMichael and his son Travis that was captured on video, the role of he videographer William Bryan, Jr. was always suspicious. Clearly he was not a mere passerby who happened to have filmed it with a dashcam. He seemed to be following Arbery. He then said he had given the video to the police and local prosecutors who, despite the damning nature of the killing shown on it, did not charge the two men with the murder and indeed did nothing for two months, until the video was leaked to a local media outlet, apparently by Bryan. Bryan was reported to live in the same area and the McMichaels and they knew each other. It was all very murky but highly suspicious
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