By Bob Schildgen
Why Donald Trump has not been accused of murder remains a mystery. The medical journal Lancet estimated that his delays and denials of the severity of COVID killed 140,000 people. (A summary of these findings appears in Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/analysis-trump-covid-19-response-40-percent-us-deaths-avoidable-2021-2)
The many examples of his negligence include his casual attitude about the disease; his phony underestimates of the number of victims; and his announcement of a seless “cure ” hydroxlchloroquinin and even his refusal to wear a mask, are all precisely detailed in a timeline in Vox hhttps:/www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/14/21177509/coronavirus-trump-covid-19-pandemic-responseQ
Trump’s level of negligence and his denial of the severity of the disease as revealed in these publications is truly staggering, and is now amplified by his present attempts to destroy or weaken so many federal agencies, especially those that support health and nutrition. It is quite clear that a number of children and adults will be killed because they will not be able to benefit from programs designed to make their lives safer. It will take some time to calculate the exact numbers of these murders, but journalists and medical authorities should begin immediately to attempt to estimate the possible number of murders that will result from Trump’s diminishing or closing of various sources of nutrition and health.
So far Elon Musk’s team of “experts” has been allowed to probe a dozen federal agencies, including the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services. the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Federal Aeronautics Administration, Federal EmergencyManagement Association, InternalRevenue Service, Medicare, National INstitutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Treasury, aad the U.S. Agency of International Development.
Meanwhile,it will be useful to examine questions about how Trump’s cuts might affect, for example, Robert Kennedy’s pledge to improve our suicidal appproach to nutrition and health in the United States. Clearly a badly needed upgrade in our eating habits will need strong support from some of the very agencies Trump is now undermining. Will the National Institutes of Health or Medicare even be able to play a role, or will thousands of people be ignored and left to die? And on the international level, how many people will suffer, or die, because of the closure of the US Aid to International development? How many will be killed in a plane crash after his dismissal of Federal Aeronautics Administration workers? Who will drown or have their homes destroyed if the Federal Emergency Management Act is debilitated? All rather frightening questions.
Of course there are agencies where there is waste and inefficiency, and these problems should be addressed. But the wholesale layoffs of personnel even before assessments are made seems, well, deranged. How can we know if personnel were efficient or not if they are no longer on the job? It is clear that snuffing jobs at this point means nothing other than plans to snuffi entire agencies. What’s missing in all this is any reference to how the massive cuts might affect families, especially those who are already scraping by. In fact, there has been no discussion about improving the lot of the 80% of the population that struggles to survive. Is there some secret proposal for a massive, collective pay raise to make it possible for them to thrive economically? When you look at the proposals to cut taxes for the wealthy, you have to wonder exactly how all these immense government savings are going to be distributed to a hundred million ordinary people now trapped in low-wage jobs. You also have to wonder what will happen to the projected 2 million federal employees Trump wants to lay off. Will they replace all the immigrants that conservatives claim are ruining the country? These are just a few of the many questions that Trump and his disciples have yet to address.
