Saturday, April 18, 2020
As US deaths soar, bipartisan back-to-work drive guarantees the explosive spread of pandemic
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/18/viru-a18.html
By Benjamin Mateus
18 April 2020
In one week, almost 18,000 Americans succumbed to the ravages of the COVID-19 infection doubling the toll to 35,500 fatalities in the United States. On just April 14, Worldometer logged 6,185 new deaths in the United States. Most of these were COVID-19 related deaths from hospitals, nursing homes, and residents in New York City that had not been accounted for because they had not been tested.
Gruesome news also broke this week that 17 bodies had been found stuffed in a small morgue in Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center in New Jersey. On Wednesday, 45 of the 351 people that died with COVID-19 in the state were residents of such facilities. Health authorities revealed that they had accounted for at least 6,815 infected residents in such facilities. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that throughout the country, more than 5,500 residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died. In epidemiological terms, these residents account for 0.4 percent of the population but 22.5 percent of the COVID-19 related fatalities.
As it concludes its deadliest week, at least 316 million people across 42 states, the District of Columbia and the territory of Puerto Rico have been in some form of “shelter in place” for three to four weeks. Estimates suggest that over 90 percent of the population are affected by these measures that have only recently seen the number of new cases approach a steady state with an astounding 30,000 cases per day. In just one month, the United States has seen 700,000 cases with over 200,000 cases in this last week. Presently, the only effective means of mitigating the pandemic remains social distancing measures that are in place.
However, the market’s response to the ongoing health crisis and visible tragedy can only be characterized as psychopathic. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed more than 705 points yesterday on news that the country will be “reopening the economy again” under guidelines that are fundamentally improvisational recommendations. Boeing stocks spiked as it announced plans to resume production by recalling 27,000 employees back to work starting this Monday in Washington state.
The euphoria in the markets also came on some vaguely positive reports on the drug Remdesivir. This antiviral medication is known to block the virus’s RNA chain in vivo, in laboratory cells infected with the virus. The timing of the report must be considered circumspect as it coincides, hand in glove, with President Trump’s introduction of “guidelines to reopen America again.”
New England Journal of Medicine published a week ago results of a small trial of 53 patients receiving Remdesivir—22 in the US, 22 in Europe or Canada, and 9 in Japan—of which 30 were on ventilators and 4 on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The paper noted that mortality was 18 percent among those receiving invasive ventilation and 5 percent among those not receiving invasive ventilation. The authors concluded that 68 percent had clinical improvements. However, the study lacked a control arm making these results speculative at best. Gilead has numerous trials in progress, and results are anxiously being awaited by the medical community and, more so, by the markets.
After Trump claimed absolute authority to enforce a back-to-work order earlier in the week, he backed off his position, ceding this authority to the governors. On Thursday, in a choreographed brief, he unveiled a set of guidelines that would proceed in a phased approach to see the country back to work. His protégé, Dr. Deborah Birx, provided a fantastical framework for this public health strategy, lacking as much in real substance as the optimistic tones that ring hollow.
The contagion is deeply enmeshed in the country across a vast network of integrated communities. However, only 1 percent of the population has been tested, while testing capacity has seemingly hit a plateau of around 150,000 tests per day. Meanwhile, the number of daily cases has not been substantially declining to give any public health expert a sense of assurance. According to Dr. Ashish Jha of Harvard Global Health Institute, “The number one issue in my mind about when to reopen is really about how do we reopen in a way that lets us stay open. We could reopen tomorrow. But if we did, we’d have to shut down again very, very quickly. So, what we need to see are substantially declining case rates.”
The other grave concern is that hospitals remain at perilously full capacity. Without an extensive infrastructure that can handle a new surge in cases, any attempt to open the country will have disastrous consequences for the fragile health system that is barely keeping pace under the most difficult of conditions. Specifically, ICU care, ventilators, N95 masks and PPEs need to be well stocked. A network of health facilities requires coordinating across the nation. And, most critically, a need exists for large numbers of health workers who are mobilized and capable of treating patients while well rested so that they can do their work without risking themselves and creating in their health facilities a new vector for the virus.
Yet, the most concerning factor that workers should bear in mind is that the “essential” workers throughout the US are becoming infected at an alarming rate. Nearly 900 US postal service workers have tested positive for COVID-19, and thousands have been presumptively infected. As well, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union said in a release earlier this week that over 3,000 workers had called in sick with possible coronavirus related symptoms. Thirty supermarket employees have died. In a survey of 5,000 grocery workers, 85 percent said that customers are not practicing social distancing. These concerns are being raised in every sector of the workforce, including among Amazon workers, truck drivers, automotive workers, etc.
Most worrisome, over 9,300 health care workers in the US have been infected with the virus, a conservative estimate at best. At least 27 percent of them have died. CDC officials said that based on data provided by states, health care workers might account for about 11 percent of all infections or, in absolute terms, close to 75,000.
Under these circumstances, if these “essential” workers are continuing to be at risk for infections and no significant effort is in place to protect them, it stands in the face of reason that the plan to open the country is merely a plan to enforce herd immunity on the population.
The reopening of the country and call to return to work has had bipartisan support. Democratic governors are clamoring to get their states back to work despite concerns that have been raised by scientists and epidemiologists. Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut has picked CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, as an economic adviser, who said, “We are not looking for a big bang approach … [and] considering incremental approaches to give people hope the economy is coming back.” The state, however, saw over 1,000 new cases yesterday and over 100 deaths. It begs the question how an economic adviser will assist in public health concerns.
Similarly, California Governor Gavin Newsom outlined his “framework” to get the state back to work eventually. The pandemic has also ravaged Michigan, which trails only New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts in the number of new cases. However, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has indicated she will loosen restrictions on May 1.
The shift by the Trump administration to allow the states to open their economies is a calculated tactical maneuver to redirect the blame of a massive second wave on to the governors. This will further encourage him to amass further dictatorial powers. The states will need tremendous support from the federal government to accomplish the necessary tasks to stem the virus while working with depleted financial means. Trump will leverage these to force governors to expedite the back-to-work diktat.
Trump tweets support for far-right protests against social distancing orders
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/18/trum-a18.html
By Barry Grey
18 April 2020
President Donald Trump on Friday posted a series of tweets promoting far-right groups that are holding demonstrations in state capitals against mainly Democratic governors to demand the immediate lifting of stay-at-home orders. In separate postings, he tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege.”
The incitement of such protests, carried out in violation of state stay-at-home orders and federal guidelines that extend until the end of April, coincides with the government's stepped-up push for a rapid return to work, under conditions of record infection and death rates and an absence of any centrally organized, large-scale testing program.
Having announced on Thursday his plan for the state-by-state reopening of the economy, in the face of ongoing strikes and protests by workers against being forced back to work without health safeguards, Trump is seeking to mobilize his far-right base to press for a rapid lifting of barriers to corporate profit-making.
Trump's tweets followed demonstrations Wednesday in Lansing, Michigan; Frankfurt, Kentucky and Raleigh, North Carolina, and protests Thursday in Richmond, Virginia and Austin, Texas. They coincided with demonstrations on Friday in St. Paul, Minnesota and Boise, Idaho.
A protest is scheduled for today in Olympia, Washington, and others are expected in the coming days in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other states. Many of these states are considered to be swing states that could decide the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The biggest demonstration thus far, still relatively small with some 1,000 participants, took place Wednesday in Lansing. Along with a car caravan that clogged the streets in front of the Capitol building, scores of demonstrators rallied in the open on the Capitol grounds. Defying orders to wear masks and observe social distancing, they chanted “Lock her up,” referring to Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who last week extended state stay-at-home orders until May 4.
Most wore pro-Trump garb and some carried assault rifles. Some displayed Nazi insignia and carried Confederate flags. Dubbed “Operation Gridlock,” the event was sponsored by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, an ultra-right group of Trump loyalists. It was promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, an outfit financed by the billionaire DeVos family. Betsy DeVos, the wife of former Amway CEO Dick DeVos, is Trump’s secretary of education.
Also involved were fascistic organizations such as the Michigan Proud Boys, the Michigan Liberty Militia, religious fundamentalists, anti-vaccination groups and other elements of the extreme right.
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, who is from Michigan, tweeted greetings “from the police state of Michigan,” while denouncing the lockdown as “authoritarian” and a “power grab.”
The demonstration on Friday in Boise, Idaho against Republican Governor Brad Little was backed by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is funded by the Koch brothers and the fortune of the right-wing beer mogul Adolph Coors. Ammon Bundy, the leader of the militia occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge in 2016, which became a rallying point for the fascistic right in the US, publicly promoted the event.
The corporate media have given lavish and generally sympathetic coverage to the Lansing protest, using it to present a distorted narrative of a popular drumbeat to end anti-pandemic restrictions and reopen business activity. The networks and cable news channels—which have downplayed waves of wildcat strikes and protests by hospital workers, transit workers, Amazon workers, meat packing workers, grocery and Instacart workers, and others—have concealed the far-right and fascistic groups behind the Lansing protest as well as the other “reopen America” demonstrations.
Fox News is openly promoting the events, and no doubt has had a hand, along with the White House and right-wing corporate groups, in staging them. Laura Ingraham tweeted on Friday: “How many of those who urged our govt to help liberate the Iraqis, Syrians, Kurds, Afghanis, etc. are as committed now to liberating Virginia, Minnesota, California, etc?”
The Democratic governors, whatever their tactical differences with the Trump administration, have fallen into line with the back-to-work drive. Just hours after the pro-Trump rally at the governor's mansion in St. Paul on Friday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued an executive order reopening businesses such as golf courses and driving ranges, bait shops, marina services, outdoor shooting ranges and game farms, as well as public and private parks and trails.
The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, announced a “framework” for reopening his state, as did Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Florida Governor Ron De Santis gave the green light for the reopening of beaches, and Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry promptly opened up the beaches in his city.
At his daily coronavirus press conference on Friday, Trump hailed the day’s 704-point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, concluding the blue-chip index’s best two-week performance since the 1930s. The euphoria on Wall Street in the midst of an economic collapse without precedent since the Great Depression, including the loss of 22 million jobs over the past four weeks, is in response to the allocation of trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out and further enrich the corporate-financial aristocracy. The misnamed CARES Act, which provides more than $6 trillion to cover the bad debts and losses of the banks, corporations and hedge funds, was passed at the end of March with the near-unanimous support of the Democrats.
The stock market “is not far below its all-time high,” Trump boasted.
Trump and his far-right allies are seeking to exploit genuine anger and anxiety among workers and small business people over the catastrophic loss of jobs and income resulting from the ruling class’s refusal to mount a serious response to the pandemic, and the wholly inadequate assistance being offered to workers and shop keepers, even as trillions are handed over to the corporate-financial elite.
But the mass of workers opposes being forced back to work only to face infection and possible death from the virus, and the prospect of infecting their coworkers, families and friends. The protests being organized by the Republican right are attracting few workers and are dominated by backward, disoriented and ultra-reactionary forces.
In contrast to the media narrative of a groundswell of support for lifting social distancing measures, a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday showed that 66 percent of Americans are concerned that state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly, more than double the 32 percent who believe the states are not moving quickly enough.
This includes more than half of Republicans, 51 percent, as compared to 46 percent who worry that restrictions will be lifted too slowly.
The poll also showed that 65 percent believe Trump was too slow to address the threat of the pandemic in the US, as opposed to 34 percent who say he moved too quickly.
The poll indicated that 73 percent of Americans believe the worst is still to come in the pandemic.
Within the framework of the capitalist system and its two-party political monopoly, there is no humane and rational way forward in the fight against the mass death and disease caused by the pandemic. But the alternative being presented of risk death on the job or face homelessness and starvation is a false alternative.
The real alternative for the working class, the vast majority of the population, is the mobilization of workers to expropriate the financial oligarchy and utilize the immense wealth of society to provide the medical care and testing needed to halt the pandemic, while insuring that workers suffer no loss in employment or income for the duration of the health crisis.
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BRAZIL’S JAIR BOLSONARO, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL CORONAVIRUS DENIER, JUST FIRED THE HEALTH MINISTER WHO DISAGREED WITH HIM
Andrew Fishman
April 16 2020, 4:08 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/16/bolsonaro-fires-health-minister-brazil-coronavirus/
BRAZILIANS “DON’T KNOW if they should listen to the health minister or if they should listen to the president,” said Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta in an interview with TV Globo on Sunday, referring to far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, one of the world’s leading coronavirus deniers.
Mandetta had repeatedly advocated a science-based approach that includes social-distancing measures and quarantines, as well as shutting down much of Brazil. The positions weren’t in accord with Bolsonaro’s. On the same day Mandetta said that the worst is yet to come and that the coronavirus peak should hit in May and June, Bolsonaro told religious leaders, “It seems like this issue of the virus is starting to go away.”
Bolsonaro has gone out of his way to make highly publicized visits to supermarkets and bakeries, shaking hands and taking selfies without gloves or a mask. “Due to my history as an athlete, if I was infected by the virus, I wouldn’t have to worry,” said the 65-year-old Bolsonaro in a nationally televised address late last month. He has repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as “a little cold.”
Bolsonaro’s health minister has become the most prominent public voice to contradict the president’s full-throated denialism, but Mandetta speaks for an overwhelming majority of governors and health experts, as well as the public. In a recent survey, 76 percent of respondents approved of the health minister’s handling of the crisis, compared to 39 percent for Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro, however, found a tidy solution to this problem: Fire the health minister. Bolsonaro chafed at having to share the spotlight with a subordinate who openly disagreed with his statements and had repeatedly threatened to remove the minister from his role. On Thursday, Mandetta was out.
It’s not clear that Bolsonaro’s new health minister will be any better for the far-right president. On Thursday afternoon, Bolsonaro replaced Mandetta with Nelson Teich, an oncologist and health care executive who apparently also does not share the president’s vision of how to handle the crisis. In recently published articles, Teich has endorsed wide-scale social isolation measures and lamented the polarized nature of the debate. Teich wrote, “It is as if there is a group focused on people and health and another on the market, companies and money, but this divided, antagonistic and perhaps radical approach is not the one that will most help society to get through this problem.”
Teich, however, also knows that the way to Bolsonaro’s heart is flattery, and the incoming health minister has not come up short in this regard. In an essay published on April 2, Teich wrote, “Fortunately, despite all the problems, the handling [of the coronavirus crisis] has been perfect so far.”
Quarantine and Health Systems Breaking Down
With Bolsonaro burrowing his head deeper into the sand, facts on the ground continue to grow more dire. According to official statistics, 30,425 Brazilians have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and 1,924 have died from the disease, but those numbers grossly underrepresent the true likely tolls. Rio Health Secretary Edmar Santos has said that for every case reported, there are likely another 50 to 100 infected people who have not been tested. Mandetta has also acknowledged that the official statistics undercount total deaths from the disease.
Tests have been in woefully short supply and even those who are lucky enough to get tested face long waits for results, as the laboratory backlogs pile up. The Health Ministry does not know how many tests have been administered nationwide.
In São Paulo, the wealthiest and largest metropolis in the country, 62 percent of public health workers did not have access to personal protective equipment, known as PPE, according to a study reviewed exclusively by The Intercept.
Other regions are even worse off. Half of Amazonas state’s 4 million people live in the capital city of Manaus, a blip of concrete and asphalt in the middle of the endless Amazon rainforest. In a state nearly as big as Alaska, where most long-distance travel is by boat, every single one of the 293 intensive care unit beds is located in the capital; 95 percent of them were already full as of last Monday. As of Wednesday, the state had 1,554 confirmed cases and 106 confirmed deaths, including on isolated Indigenous reserves.
This March, Brazil registered 2,239 more deaths due to respiratory failure and pneumonia than in the year before, many of which, specialists believe, are likely unconfirmed Covid-19 victims. More than 41,000 Brazilians were hospitalized as of Tuesday for Covid-19 or suspected or undetermined SARS cases, only 15 percent of which were diagnosed as Covid-19. A recent study projected that Brazil’s universal public health service needs more than 40,000 additional ICU beds to deal with the crisis, a 273 percent increase over its current capacity.
The crisis is also reaching high into Brazil’s power structures. The governors of Rio de Janeiro and Pará, a northern state that borders Amazonas, both announced on Tuesday that they have tested positive for Covid-19. Almost two dozen people who traveled with Bolsonaro to the United States last month, included top aides, contracted the disease as well. The president claimed he tested negative but would not publish his results.
Despite these terrifying indicators of a growing health crisis, quarantine measures have not been strictly adhered to across the nation of 211 million. Cellphone data showed that 41 percent of São Paulo’s population did not isolate at home over the Easter holiday weekend.
Rene Silva
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Bom dia, favela...
#COVID19nasFavelas
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In every major city studied, researchers found that only 53 percent of people nationwide had stayed at home in the first days of April, a 2 to 3 percent decrease compared to mid- to late-March, when social-distancing measures were first put in place in most areas.
The Bolsonaro Effect
Bolsonaro has repeatedly attempted to undermine quarantine efforts. He tried to invalidate parts of various governors’ quarantine orders, but was blocked by federal judges. He has found other ways to influence the public, for instance, using the bully pulpit of his office.
On March 24, Bolsonaro gave a nationally televised address attacking social distancing as “scorched earth” tactics; hyping chloroquine as a promising treatment; blaming the press for creating “hysteria”; and insisting that Brazil “should go back to normal.” The Intercept’s Bruno Sousa wrote about the impact that the address had on his working-class Rio de Janeiro neighborhood the following morning, describing scenes where some people began to go about their lives as normal following the remarks; many nonessential businesses even opened back up. “Everyone talked about coronavirus and the president’s speech. Until yesterday, few stores opened here,” Sousa wrote.
The day after his speech, Bolsonaro doubled down: “What they are doing in Brazil, a few governors and a few mayors, is a crime. They are breaking up with Brazil, they are destroying jobs. And those guys who say, ‘Oh, the economy is less important than life.'”
Small street protests by Bolsonaro supporters who oppose the quarantine have broken out in multiple cities and, in some cases, have been shut down by state police and the courts.
William De Lucca
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Hoje, em São Paulo, capital do estado que tem 588 mortes confirmadas pelo coronavírus
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Paulo Guedes, the Minister of Austerity
The World Bank estimates that Brazil’s economy will retract by 5 percent this year, according to new estimates released on Sunday, putting South America’s largest economy behind Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina on the list of countries in the region that are expected to be the hardest hit. “To help the vulnerable face the loss of earnings from the lockdown, existing social protection and social assistance programs should be rapidly scaled up and their coverage extended,” the World Bank argued.
Yet Bolsonaro’s Economic Minister Paulo Guedes has resisted such measures and instead wants to continue his agenda of neoliberal reforms, which have gutted social services, labor protections, and pension benefits since the administration took office last year. “The best response to the crisis is the reforms,” Guedes told reporters last week, referring to pending proposals to privatize state-owned companies, reduce government spending, restructure the tax code, and incentivize private business.
It’s not that Congress isn’t trying. The legislature quickly passed a much-celebrated plan to provide low-wage informal sector workers with between $114 and $228 per month for three months. But the bill sat on the president’s desk for three days until it was finally signed and enacted. Guedes had initially proposed only a third of the amount and fought the measure, but publicly backed it after it became clear that the bill would pass. The administration blamed the delay on “bureaucratic issues,” but in the meantime, Guedes was attempting to hold back the president’s signature to negotiate other legislation from his list of reforms.
After the emergency relief package was finally approved, The Intercept reported that Caixa, a large, government-owned bank, planned to keep the federal relief payments of account holders with debts or negative account balances. Government officials said that an agreement had been reached with banks to avoid this outcome, but could not produce any evidence to corroborate the deal.
Guedes then went on to fight against a federal aid package to state and local governments, a plan that was approved by the lower house on Monday. The government has signaled that it would veto the final bill.
Of the $227.7 billion in coronavirus-related economic relief measures projected by the government, only $40 billion is new spending, which is roughly 3 percent of national gross domestic product. By comparison, the $2 trillion U.S. stimulus package represents 10 percent of GDP.
“The central issue is that the entire economic team is in conflict,” Antonio Corrêa de Lacerda, president of Brazil’s Federal Economic Counsel, told the Valor Econômico newspaper. “They have always preached austerity as an instrument to restore confidence that would take us out of the crisis. Now that the most relevant countries have adopted policies of strong state intervention, they are forced to do so. Although in a timid, late, and wavering way.”
The public, however, along with some of the president’s allies, are increasingly losing faith in Bolsonaro’s leadership. The shifts are not because of his timidity or tardiness, but largely because Bolsonaro’s response to the crisis lacks any coherent rhyme or reason. For example, Bolsonaro has emphasized the importance of the economy, and yet his sons and education minister have launched repeated — and sometimes racist — attacks on China, the country’s largest trading partner and principal source for essential medical supplies.
The Intercept Brasil
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For weeks, at 8:30 p.m. nearly every night, neighborhoods across Brazil come alive to the sounds of pots and pans banging, punctuated by shouts of “Bolsonaro out!” peppered with an increasingly creative array of epithets. Another round of cacophonous protest rang out across Brazil as Bolsonaro announced Mandetta’s firing.
WALL STREET TITANS FINANCE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY CHALLENGER TO REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
Lee Fang
April 15 2020, 5:19 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/15/aoc-primary-challenger-cabruso-cabrera-wall-street/
WALL STREET TITANS are financing a direct challenge to firebrand progressive lawmaker Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the New York primary on June 23.
Disclosures show that over four dozen finance industry professionals, including several prominent private equity executives and investment bankers, made early donations to Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC contributor who is challenging Ocasio-Cortez. Caruso-Cabrera was a registered Republican until a few years ago and authored a 2010 book advocating for several conservative positions, including an end to Medicare and Social Security, which she called “pyramid schemes.”
The donors include Glenn Hutchins, the billionaire co-founder of Silver Lake Partners; James Passin of Firebird Capital; Bruce Schnitzer of Wand Partners; Jeffrey Rosen of Lazard; and Bradley Seaman, managing partner of Parallel49 Equity. The chief executives of Goldman Sachs, PNC Bank, and Virtu Financial, are also among the Caruso-Cabera donors.
“I met Michelle when she was a business reporter and she is bright and understands the financial markets well,” said Doug Cifu, the chief executive of Virtu Financial, one of the donors who gave $2,800 to Caruso-Cabrera. “Her opponent,” Cifu added, “does not in my view.”
The Caruso-Cabrera campaign announced last week that it had collected nearly $1 million in fundraising over the first quarter of this year. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by anonymous corporate donations and has spent tens of millions of dollars electing congressional Republicans, also said recently that it would mobilize business interests in support of Caruso-Cabrera.
In her first year in office, Ocasio-Cortez has used her perch in Congress to eviscerate leading figures on Wall Street. During congressional hearings last April, she pushed JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon over whether bankers should have been criminally prosecuted over the 2008 financial crisis.
“I wasn’t sent here to safeguard and protect profit, I was sent here to safeguard and protect people,” said Ocasio-Cortez in November during a hearing over the conduct of the private equity industry and its role in downsizing companies.
Ocasio-Cortez has served as a lightning rod in the Democratic Party, attracting criticism from more business-friendly elements of the establishment over her outspoken support for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and her advocacy for policies such as Medicare for All.
The lurch towards that left has provoked some traditionally Republican interests, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to use the New York primary this summer as an opportunity to push back on the ideological shift represented by Ocasio-Cortez.
Kenneth Langone, a billionaire investor and major donor to GOP causes, donated the legal maximum to Caurso-Cabrera.
Steve Holzman, the head of the hedge fund Vantis Capital and a previous donor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, donated to Caruso-Cabrera. Lobbyist Ron Christie, a former aide to Dick Cheney, also gave to the challenger’s campaign.
Other donors include Facundo Bacardi, an heir to the Bacardi fortune; Thaddeus Arroyo, a leading executive at AT&T; and Jeff Kwatinetz, an entertainment industry promoter who has represented Korn and Limp Bizkit in the past.
Ocasio-Cortez released her fundraising numbers, showing that she has brought in over $8 million this election cycle, with $3.5 million in cash on hand.
Caruso-Cabrera does not have a policy page outlining her beliefs or positions on her campaign website. In recent radio interviews, she has positioned herself as a stalwart of the moderate faction of the Democratic Party, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Joe Biden. “I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-same sex marriage, I’m very pro-immigrant, I am centrist for sure,” Caruso-Cabrera said on New York’s AM 970.
But the candidate’s beliefs are explained in detail in a book she authored in 2010 titled, “You Know I’m Right: More Prosperity, Less Government,” which included a forward by Larry Kudlow, who now serves as President Donald Trump’s director of the National Economic Council.
In the book, Caruso-Cabrera calls Medicare and Social Security “the country’s biggest pyramid schemes,” and wrote that she would end both programs in favor of a privatized voucher system. Medicare, Caruso-Cabrera wrote, “is another pay-as-you-go Ponzi scheme” that should be replaced with a health savings account that gives “seniors $1,000 or $2,000 a year to start.” Social Security, she notes, should be replaced with a private account system, in which Americans are incentivized to invest in the stock market.
Caruso-Cabrera devotes an entire chapter to the many policy successes of the Reagan administration, and writes that she favors tax cuts and deregulation, including eliminating entire federal agencies such as the Labor Department.
Some of the most strident language in the book is reserved for the Obama administration’s attempts to crack down on wealthy individuals who had taken advantage of offshore tax havens. The push to force Switzerland to hand over the names of U.S. nationals using secret bank accounts to dodge taxes, she wrote, put America on a “dangerous path” that would enable foreign dictatorships to similarly seize wealth kept abroad.
“Freedom and democracy are best secured when banking secrecy and tax havens exist,” Caruso-Cabrera wrote.
Update: April 15, 2020, 8:50 p.m.
The Caruso-Cabrera campaign sent a statement following publication. “MCC has said from the very beginning she got into this race to bring jobs and opportunity back to the working people of the Bronx and Queens. When she’s elected, her office will be ‘open for business.’ Now, more than ever we need jobs,” said spokesperson Katy Delgado.
Update: April 16, 2020
This story has been updated to reflect new financial disclosures by the Caruso-Cabrera and Ocasio-Cortez campaigns.
ESO telescope sees star dance around supermassive black hole, proves Einstein right
April 16, 2020:
ESO
Observations have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity. This long-sought-after result was made possible by increasingly precise measurements over nearly 30 years.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200416072638.htm
Observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity. This long-sought-after result was made possible by increasingly precise measurements over nearly 30 years, which have enabled scientists to unlock the mysteries of the behemoth lurking at the heart of our galaxy.
"Einstein's General Relativity predicts that bound orbits of one object around another are not closed, as in Newtonian Gravity, but precess forwards in the plane of motion. This famous effect -- first seen in the orbit of the planet Mercury around the Sun -- was the first evidence in favour of General Relativity. One hundred years later we have now detected the same effect in the motion of a star orbiting the compact radio source Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way. This observational breakthrough strengthens the evidence that Sagittarius A* must be a supermassive black hole of 4 million times the mass of the Sun," says Reinhard Genzel, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany and the architect of the 30-year-long programme that led to this result.
Located 26,000 light-years from the Sun, Sagittarius A* and the dense cluster of stars around it provide a unique laboratory for testing physics in an otherwise unexplored and extreme regime of gravity. One of these stars, S2, sweeps in towards the supermassive black hole to a closest distance less than 20 billion kilometres (one hundred and twenty times the distance between the Sun and Earth), making it one of the closest stars ever found in orbit around the massive giant. At its closest approach to the black hole, S2 is hurtling through space at almost three percent of the speed of light, completing an orbit once every 16 years. "After following the star in its orbit for over two and a half decades, our exquisite measurements robustly detect S2's Schwarzschild precession in its path around Sagittarius A*," says Stefan Gillessen of the MPE, who led the analysis of the measurements published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Most stars and planets have a non-circular orbit and therefore move closer to and further away from the object they are rotating around. S2's orbit precesses, meaning that the location of its closest point to the supermassive black hole changes with each turn, such that the next orbit is rotated with regard to the previous one, creating a rosette shape. General Relativity provides a precise prediction of how much its orbit changes and the latest measurements from this research exactly match the theory. This effect, known as Schwarzschild precession, had never before been measured for a star around a supermassive black hole.
The study with ESO's VLT also helps scientists learn more about the vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. "Because the S2 measurements follow General Relativity so well, we can set stringent limits on how much invisible material, such as distributed dark matter or possible smaller black holes, is present around Sagittarius A*. This is of great interest for understanding the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes," say Guy Perrin and Karine Perraut, the French lead scientists of the project.
This result is the culmination of 27 years of observations of the S2 star using, for the best part of this time, a fleet of instruments at ESO's VLT, located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The number of data points marking the star's position and velocity attests to the thoroughness and accuracy of the new research: the team made over 330 measurements in total, using the GRAVITY, SINFONI and NACO instruments. Because S2 takes years to orbit the supermassive black hole, it was crucial to follow the star for close to three decades, to unravel the intricacies of its orbital movement.
The research was conducted by an international team led by Frank Eisenhauer of the MPE with collaborators from France, Portugal, Germany and ESO. The team make up the GRAVITY collaboration, named after the instrument they developed for the VLT Interferometer, which combines the light of all four 8-metre VLT telescopes into a super-telescope (with a resolution equivalent to that of a telescope 130 metres in diameter). The[ same team reported in 2018] -- another effect predicted by General Relativity: they saw the light received from S2 being stretched to longer wavelengths as the star passed close to Sagittarius A*. "Our previous result has shown that the light emitted from the star experiences General Relativity. Now we have shown that the star itself senses the effects of General Relativity," says Paulo Garcia, a researcher at Portugal's Centre for Astrophysics and Gravitation and one of the lead scientists of the GRAVITY project.
With ESO's upcoming Extremely Large Telescope, the team believes that they would be able to see much fainter stars orbiting even closer to the supermassive black hole. "If we are lucky, we might capture stars close enough that they actually feel the rotation, the spin, of the black hole," says Andreas Eckart from Cologne University, another of the lead scientists of the project. This would mean astronomers would be able to measure the two quantities, spin and mass, that characterise Sagittarius A* and define space and time around it. "That would be again a completely different level of testing relativity," says Eckart.
Story Source:
Materials provided by ESO. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Related Multimedia:
Artist's impression of Schwarzschild precession; orbits of stars around black hole at the heart of the Milky Way; and more images
Journal Reference:
GRAVITY Collaboration. Detection of the Schwarzschild precession in the orbit of the star S2 near the Galactic centre massive black hole. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2020 DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202037813
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