Monthly Archives: May 2020

Little Richard (1932-2020)

Music

One of the last remaining pioneers of rock and roll, Little Richard, has died of cancer at the age of 87. Richard Penniman was born in Macon, GA on December 5, 1932. After an unhappy childhood, he began performing as a cross dresser in the Atlanta area at the age of 16. His singing and performing style was heavily influenced by gay Georgia rhythm and blues artists Billy Wright and Esquirita.

His recording career began with eight songs for RCA Victor in 1951. He also laid down eight tracks, backed by the Johnny Otis band, for the Peacock label in 1953. However, his career took off after he traveled to Cosimo Matissa’s J&M Studio in New Orleans in September 1955. There he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti,” for Specialty Records, accompanied by the same local musicians who typically backed artists such as Fats Domino and Lloyd Price. Other hits followed, including “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Send Me Some Lovin’,” and “Keep a-Knockin’.” Richard was one of the first R&B artists to cross over to the pop music charts. He, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry all had their first pop hits in 1955.

In 1957, at the height of his career, he announced that he was quitting show business to become a minister and would record only gospel music. For the next several decades, he vacillated between religion and rock and roll. Richard was known for his flamboyant, bizarre and exotic live performances. Calling himself, “the king of rock and roll—and the queen as well,” he variously described himself as gay, bisexual and “omnisexual.” He was a survivor of alcohol and cocaine abuse.

Of his later recordings, I recommend two albums he made for Reprise Records, The Rill Thing (1970) and The King of Rock and Roll (1971). Richard was a member of the inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Hame and was also inducted in the Blues Hall of Fame.

Below are two back-to-back clips of his first two hits, “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti,” from the 1956 film Don’t Knock the Rock. Unfortunately, they are lip syncs of the records, but they show what a typical live performance during his early years looked like. He is introduced by another member of that first Hall of Fame class, disc jockey Alan Freed.

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Chuck Berry (1926-2017)

Antoine “Fats” Domino (1928-2017)

Testing, Testing, Testing

Health, Social policy

If we’re not willing to remain sheltered in place indefinitely, and if we’re not willing to lose up to a million lives to the coronavirus, the alternative is massive testing followed by contact tracing. Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Paul Romer of NYU claims to have done the math to determine how much testing we must do to bring the virus under control and keep it there. He is interviewed by Dr. Aaron Carroll for his weekly podcast, Healthcare Triage.

In the interview, they refer to R0 (“R zero”), which refers to the rate of transmission of the disease. If R0 equals 1, each person with the virus infects exactly one other person. If R0 is greater than 1, the disease spreads exponentially. If R0 is less than 1, the disease eventually dies out. Romer believes he has determined how much testing we need to do to keep R0 below 1.

You may have noticed that in my last post, I referred to the possibility of losing up to 2 million lives in order to achieve herd immunity.  This was assuming a mortality rate of 1%.  Romer assumes a mortality rate of .5%; hence he arrives at a figure of 1 million deaths.  Of course, the true mortality rate is unknown.

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“There’ll Be More Death”

“There’ll Be More Death”

Health, Politics,

The American oligarchy has spoken. For wealthy Americans, the cure is worse than the disease. We will restart the economy, regardless of how many lives are lost. Donald Trump is deliberately implementing a policy that he knows will result in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.

From President Trump:

There’ll be more death. The virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass and we’re going to be back to normal.

We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country. . . . Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open.

I used to say 65 thousand, and now I’m saying 80 or 90. And it goes up, and it goes up rapidly.

And look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people.

From Governor Greg Abbott, as he announced the reopening of Texas businesses:

Listen, the fact of the matter is pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that when you have a reopening—whether you want to call it a reopening of businesses or just a reopening of the economy—in the aftermath of something like this, it will actually lead to an increase and spread.

From former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

The American people have gone through significant death before [in World Wars I and II] . . . and we’ve survived it. We sacrificed those lives.

Christie added that the sacrifice was necessary “to stand up for the American way of life.” When asked whether the American people would be willing to tolerate this many deaths, he replied, “They’re gonna have to.”

Drawing on a military analogy, Trump and Christie have referred to those who are about to die as “warriors,” hoping we will see them as having sacrificed their lives for their country. In fact, Trump is not making war on the coronavirus but surrendering to it in order to achieve herd immunity. As Vox columnist David Roberts noted, rather than referring to workers, the elderly and the sick as “warriors,” a more appropriate term might be “cannon fodder.”

How many Americans will die? On May 4, the New York Times leaked a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicting that, if we reopen the economy, we will have 200,000 new cases and 3000 deaths per day by June 1. This is up from the current 25,000 cases and 1700 deaths per day. Epidemiologists predict that, assuming a mortality rate of 1%, allowing deaths to continue until we achieve herd immunity will result in about 2 million American deaths.

As usual, as Trump and his surrogates were making these grim announcements, the corporate media were obediently obscuring their importance by distracting us with trivial “issues” such Trump’s decision to tour a face mask manufacturing facility without wearing a face mask.

Letting the virus run its course conveniently coincides with Trump’s reelection strategy of hoping that a majority of Americans care more about their pocketbooks than the lives of their fellow citizens. Despite unanimous recommendations from experts that we need more COVID-19 testing, Trump rejected their advice, saying that “by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”  Does “ourselves” refer to the American people, or just the Trump administration?

It’s easy to dismiss Trump as an obvious sociopath, but he speaks for the American financial and political oligarchy that is quietly but ruthlessly taking pages out of the class warfare playbook. They began by passing trillions of dollars in bailouts, and ensuring that the majority of the funds would go to those corporations and individuals who are least in need of the money. (For details, see this article.) Needless to say, these bipartisan corporate welfare bills passed Congress almost unanimously.

However, in order to restart the economy, the corporate class still faces two problems. First, in order to reopen businesses, they must persuade workers (and sometimes consumers) to risk their lives and those of their families. This is to be accomplished through economic blackmail. Although figures are hard to come by, a high percentage—perhaps a majority—of working Americans are either ineligible for unemployment, or have not received it yet due to a bureaucratic system designed primarily to prevent fraud. Many of these same people have lost their health insurance. These workers will have to choose between risking death from COVID-19 and starvation.  (The weakest link in Trump’s plan may be the fact that consumers will usually not have to make this choice.)

Trump issued an executive order directing meat packing plants to remain open during the pandemic in spite of unsafe conditions. Republican governors of three states, Iowa, Oklahoma and Texas, have announced that workers who refuse to return to work when their workplace reopens will be ineligible for unemployment benefits. Denying benefits to people who have turned down a job is apparently legal and is likely to spread.

A second possible problem for corporations is that, should they fail to provide safe working conditions, they might be held legally responsible for the deaths or illnesses of their workers. Senator Mitch McConnell has announced that one of his conditions for approving any future coronavirus relief is that Congress grant employers immunity against any lawsuits from employees or their survivors.  Trump’s Justice Department has stated that they intend to take the side of meat-packing companies should they be sued by their workers for not providing a safe environment.

Whenever we turn on TV, we are bombarded by insipid messages from corporate America claiming “we’re all in this together” (and presumably all equally in need of the sponsor’s product). This message becomes a form of black humor in a country where not everyone has been rescued by the government and not everyone will be protected from harm.

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Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?