On Capitalism, Racism, Trump, and Pandemo-Fascism

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

BY PAUL STREET-DECEMBER 18, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic as it has played out in its favorite country the United States (home to a fifth of the world’s Covid-19 deaths but just over a twentieth of the world’s population) is a tragedy that will soon have claimed the lives of 1 in every 1000 Americans. It is also a fascism-tinged crime rooted in this nation’s multiple, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing structures, institutions, policies, and ideologies of inequality and oppression. It reflects the failed state spiritual death and fascism that Dr. Martin Luther King, J. said would befall this nation if it did not move off what King called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: capitalism, racism, and imperialism.

It is a crime of capitalism, the rapacious and parasitic system that digs up zoonotic viruses on its ever-expanding geographic frontier and then spreads those infections around the world in the flash of an historical eye.

Capitalism in its extreme U.S. form compels millions of vulnerable Americans to spend most of their waking hours renting out their commodified (and exploited) labor power in inadequately protected workplaces – or else go without the money income required to purchase basic life necessities distributed in commodity form.

It is a system that denies tens of millions of Americans adequate health care.

It is a system that dis-incentivized and otherwise prevented the provision of the medical supplies and personnel required to properly meet a pandemic that medical science and public health experts had been warning about for many years. A system obsessed with, and addicted to, short term investor class profit does not produce sufficient reserves of public health capacity for addressing a crisis on the scale of COVID-19.

Capitalism is an anarchic and competitive system that absurdly complicates medical production and distribution.

Capitalism saddles masses Americans with deadly co-morbidities, making them vulnerable to terrible COVID-19 outcomes by poisoning their environment and bodies with toxic food and chemicals.

Capitalism can’t hit pause to meet a public health crisis without causing panic for investors and mass poverty and trauma for millions thrown out of work and off health insurance.

And that’s just for starters.

COVID-19 19’s U.S. rampage is also a crime of American racism, which forces tens of millions of non-white Americans to live in over-crowded residences without decent access to healthy food, medical care, and green space. Virulent American racism (as old as the republic’s colonial origins) concentrates masses of Black, LatinX, and Indigenous people in jails, prisons, detention centers, reservations, and concentration camps that have proved to be COVID-19 breeding grounds.

Racism concentrates non-white employees in poorly paid production positions (e.g., the killing floors and processing departments of Midwestern meatpacking plants) and “essential worker” service jobs (nurses’ assistants and retail clerks) that are especially vulnerable to infection. It also makes non-white urban residents especially dependent on public transportation, where infection risks are higher than in personal automobiles.

COVID-19’s American storm is also a crime of American imperialism, the armed force behind the globalization that churns up and disseminates pandemics. The giant U.S. Pentagon System steals from existing and potential public health systems. Like a vast suction tube of death, it takes money, skills, personnel, and technology that should be invested in healing and social uplift at home and abroad and pours it all instead into a massive war-industrial complex that accounts for 40% of the world’s military spending.

And COVID-19 American-style is also and at the same time a senseless outcome of Trumpism-fascism. Here I’m not going to go into the many ways in which the Trump regime thwarted a decent and humane response to the pandemic. The WHAT of that scandalous history is well known and documented. I’m concerned mainly with the WHY of that criminal, mass-murderous “incompetence,” which turned the U.S. into a Sanctuary Country for the worst pandemic in more than a century.

The mainstream common-sense explanation is that Trump didn’t want to do or say anything that might undercut the economic growth he expected to ride to re-election. That’s the main storyline I expected to go into the liberal American History textbooks that roll off the printing presses next year.

The problem with the convention explanation isn’t that it’s wrong. It isn’t. But my sense is that the real story is much worse. When the full history is written, those of us willing to look are going to see that Trump’s criminal COVID-19 conduct wasn’t only about his malignant narcissism, selfishness, and electoral calculations but was also about Trump and Trumpism’s malignant fascism. We’ll learn that his epic public health “mismanagement” was bound up with the following 13 fascistic characteristics of the Trump regime and its Republifascist allies within and beyond Washington DC:

+1. An eliminationist anti-urban/anti-cosmopolitan “heartland” allegiance that was content to let majority nonwhite and liberal cities (above all the early Covid-19 hot spot New York City) experience mass sickness and fatalities.

+2. An eliminationist and neo-McCarthyite desire to paint out the other major capitalist party’s efforts to control the spread of the disease as proof that the Democrat are a totalitarian socialist enemy of personal freedom and of America’s supposedly glorious capitalism.

+3. White-supremacist and eliminationist satisfaction with a virus that was disproportionately killing off people of color.

+4. A Social Darwinian and eliminationist comfort with COVID-19’s devastating impact on the aged and infirm – on old and sick “useless eaters” fascists have long wished to exterminate.

+5 An initial politically eliminationist calculation that the virus would mainly target parts of the country controlled by the other major party.

+6. A sexist, hyper-masculinist sense that masks and social distancing are unmanly signs of effeminate weakness and fear.

+7. Hostility to science and expertise, seen on the climate issue as well, particularly pronounced in American fascism because of the special strength of evangelical Christianity and anti-intellectualism on the American right.

+8. Extreme conspiratorialism, seen in such absurd claims as the charges that the virus was a Chinese hoax, that it was manufactured and released from a Chinese lab (to cripple America), and that doctors inflated the number of COVID-19 deaths to garner higher insurance company payments.

+9. The bad science recommendation of herd immunity, accepted by Trump and his top coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas, a right-wing radiologist, according which the way forward was to actively advance the infection of “infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions” (to use the recently exposed words of former Trump administration science adviser Paul Alexander).

+9. Extreme nationalism, seen in the pretense that Trump was mounting a reasonable response with travel bans and border walls.

+10. A personality cult built up around Dear Leader Trump and a related sense that the “Stable Genius’s” special and powerful instincts and Will trumped any competing claims to authority on the part of mere scientists and public health professionals.

+11. An unshakable attachment to large-scale in-person hate rallies and other mass gatherings (e.g., the infamous White House gathering celebrating the confirmation of the evangelical Christian cult Supreme Court justice Amy Coney-Barrett).

+12. A drive to purge the disloyal, a category that included public health officials who dared to privilege their commitment to medical science and public health requirements over allegiance to the “Chosen One.”

+13. A continuing, fascism-intensified war not on the state per se but on what Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state” – the parts of government that serve the poor, the working-class majority and common good.

Let us never forget the top five pandemo-fascist Trump moments of 2020 beyond his mask-less campaign rallies and his Handmaid ceremony:

+1. The ordering of predominantly LatinX workers back into COVID-19-infected meatpacking plants out of trumped-up claim that the nation would run out of food if the nation’s bloody animal killing floors weren’t running at full capacity.

#2. The frothing July 4th speech he gave before unmasked white “heartland” fans not practicing social distancing amid openly fascist esthetics in the holy Fatherland setting of South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore. (In badly delivered prose penned by the his top political adviser, the fascist Stephen Miller, with the righteous George Floyd rebellion in mind, Trump proclaimed that “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children… Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities…They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive.  But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country, and all of its values, history, and culture, to be taken from them.”)

+3. Trump refusing to wear a mask while his team loudly and tellingly played the song “Live and Let Die” as he visited a mask factory.

+4. Trump’s insanely bright-orange-brushed and unmasked face as he posed like Mussolini, looking like a bad comic book villain while trying to seem strong and manly in the wake of his brief stay in a special presidential COVID-19 suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. (Trump then used his own recovery, enabled by his access to treatments and drugs not available to most COVID-19 patients, to downplay the virus’s deadly impact).

+5. The Twitter encouragement he offered to far-right militia members opposing common sense public health measures in Michigan: “Liberate Michigan” (an inspiration for fascists who were found to have been plotting Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s kidnapping and murder).

It is true that, as I have heard many fellow activists and writers say, Trump might well have won a second term, his fascistic record aside, “but for COVID-19.” It’s chilling realization, supported by exit-polling data. But COVID-19 did not hit Trump’s re-election like some chance contingency out of the sky. He and his administration blew American infection and death rates through the roof. Properly handled, the pandemic should not have killed more than 35,000 Americans by now. Trump owns the remaining 270,000 fatalities. He killed them. And this mass murder he perpetrated was all about the fascism and of course the capitalism, the racism, and the imperialism and the sexism, none of which are (to say the least) inconsistent with the fascism.

 Pompeo confirms Russia WAS behind cyber attack on US that one Congressman compared to PEARL HARBOR - as experts say infected networks must be 'burned to the ground' and Senator calls it 'act of war'

• Mike Pompeo on Friday became first official to attribute breach to Russia 
• Colorado congressman compares SUNBURST attack to 'cyber Pearl Harbor'
• Microsoft president says the attack is a 'moment of reckoning' for America
• Suspected Russian hackers breached key government agencies and companies 
• Officials warn that hackers had ample opportunity to set up secret backdoors
• Breach went undetected for nine months giving hackers free reign in systems
• Experts say infected networks may need to be 'burned to the ground' and rebuilt 
• Hackers conducted a 'dry run' of the attack more than a year ago 
• Apparent espionage campaign has been called the largest breach in US history

By KEITH GRIFFITH -18 December 2020 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has become the first U.S. official to publicly attribute a massive hacking campaign to Russia, after broad swathes of the federal government and private sector were revealed to be compromised.  

'This was a very significant effort, and I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,' Pompeo told The Mark Levin Show on Friday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman has denied Kremlin involvement, and the Russian embassy said in a statement that the country 'does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain.'  

The sprawling attack, which went undetected for nearly nine months, compromised the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, State and Energy, as well as a growing list of companies and local governments across the country. 

Officials with the nation's cybersecurity agency warn that the breach could be difficult to undo, saying the hackers 'demonstrated sophistication and complex tradecraft' and that it was likely that they had built additional secret backdoors while active inside the compromised networks. 

Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to properly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked, and warn infected networks may have to be 'burned to the ground' and rebuilt from scratch. 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has become the first U.S. official to publicly attribute a massive hacking campaign to Russia. He is seen above with Putin in 2019

Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, said: 'It's pretty hard to distinguish this from an act of aggression that rises to the level of an attack that qualifies as war'

The Pentagon was among the thousands of users of the infected network software. Teams are now hunting DoD networks for hidden backdoors and signs of the attackers

Democrats in Congress have spoken out about the cyber attack in strong terms, demanding a harsh response and blasting President Donald Trump, who has not spoken about the attack or appeared in public for the past five days.

'The situation is developing, but the more I learn this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,' said Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, in a tweet on Friday.

'Our nation is under assault. This cyberattack could be the largest in our history,' he added, before slamming Trump for his lack of public response to the cyber attack.

Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, told MSNBC: 'It's pretty hard to distinguish this from an act of aggression that rises to the level of an attack that qualifies as war.' 

Coons, 57, called the attack 'as destructive and broad scale an engagement with our military systems, our intelligence systems as has happened in my lifetime.'

Trump has not yet said anything publicly about the intrusion. He was being briefed 'as needed,' White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern told reporters on Friday. 

National security adviser Robert O'Brien was leading interagency meetings daily, if not more often, he said.

'They're working very hard on mitigation and making sure that our country is secure. We will not get into too many details because we're just not going to tell our adversaries what we do to combat these things,' Morgenstern said.

'The situation is developing, but the more I learn this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,' said Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat

 

'Cozy Bear': The Russian hacker cell suspected in attack 

Russia denies involvement in the SUNBURST attack, but US officials say the nation is behind the 'Advanced Persistent Threat' (APT) that carried out the audacious breach.

Sources say that one top suspect is APT29, the Kremlin-linked group also known as Cozy Bear. 

Cozy Bear is best known as the group said to be responsible for the 2016 breach of the Democratic National Committee's servers.

Experts believe that Cozy Bear operates as part of one of Russia's intelligence agencies. 

Some doubt the attribution of SUNBURST to Cozy Bear, through, noting that the tools used in the attack have never been seen before.  

The Democratic chairs of four House committees given classified briefings on the hack by the Trump administration issued a statement complaining that they "were left with more questions than answers."

"Administration officials were unwilling to share the full scope of the breach and identities of the victims," they said.

Morgenstern said earlier that disclosing such details only helps U.S. adversaries.

The long-term planning of the attack became clear on Friday, as officials said that the hackers appeared to have conducted a dry run over a year ago, testing their ability to insert malicious code into network management software from SolarWinds Corp, which was later delivered to some 18,000 of the company's customers.  

Private security companies say that the breach bears the hallmarks of a Kremlin operation. Some have pointed at the Russian hacking cell dubbed 'Cozy Bear' -- though other experts argue that the tools and methods used in the new attack are different from any past breach, making attribution tricky.

'At the moment, there are no technical links with previous attacks, so it may be an entirely new actor,' security firm Kaspersy said in a blog post. 

FireEye, the cybersecurity company that discovered the intrusion into U.S. agencies and was among the victims, has already tallied dozens of casualties. It's racing to identify more.

'We have a serious problem. We don't know what networks they are in, how deep they are, what access they have, what tools they left,' said Bruce Schneier, a prominent security expert and Harvard fellow.

The only way to be sure a network is clean is 'to burn it down to the ground and rebuild it,' Schneier said.

He compared the situation to learning that a serial killer has been inside your house, with his own key. 'You don't know if he's gone. How do you get work done? You kind of just hope for the best,' he said.

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin denied Russia was behind the attack

Trump has not made any remarks addressing the attack and has not appeared in public for five days, but posted this Christmas card photo on Friday with First Lady Melania

Many federal workers - and others in the private sector - now must presume that unclassified networks are teeming with spies. 

Agencies will be more inclined to conduct sensitive government business on Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted smartphone apps.

'We should buckle up. This will be a long ride,' said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and former chief technical officer of the leading cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. 'Cleanup is just phase one.  

Meanwhile, Microsoft President Brad Smith called the attack a 'moment of reckoning' that 'illuminates the ways the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve and become even more dangerous.' 

Microsoft, one of the thousands of companies to receive the malicious update, said it had notified more than 40 customers around the world whose networks were infiltrated by the hackers. 

The list of victims includes not only government agencies, but security and other technology firms as well as think tanks and government contractors. 

'The attack unfortunately represents a broad and successful espionage-based assault on both the confidential information of the U.S. Government and the tech tools used by firms to protect them,' Smith wrote in a blog post.

'The coming months will present a critical test, not only for the United States but for other leading democracies and technology companies,' he added.

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