The pandemic has been good to Jeff Bezos.

The Amazon CEO and entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos, has grown his vast fortune by a further $24bn so far during the coronavirus pandemic, a roughly 20% increase over the last four months to $138b.

Amazon is getting a lot of business of course because real world shopping is either closed down or restricted.

But the increased demand comes amid growing controversy over the retailer’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

Workers have reported severe strains on warehouse teams. Many are on the frontlines packing and shipping items at warehouses where Covid-19 can easily spread.

Meanwhile Amazon is running tv ads showing the workers grinning broadly as they skip and dance around the warehouse doing their fun easy healthful jobs. I know this because I’ve seen one.

Amazon reported its first warehouse worker death on Tuesday. The man, an operations manager who worked at the company’s Hawthorne, California, warehouse, died on 31 March.

So for two weeks Amazon did not report that death.

Several workers have organized strikes and walkouts in protest at lack of worker protections. Chris Smalls, a former manager assistant, was fired by the retailer after leading workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, on a walkout.

Employees demanded Amazon temporarily shut down the facility for cleaning after multiple employees tested positive for Covid-19. Memos leaked by Vice News revealed company executives suggested coordinating an attempt to smear Smalls as “not smart or articulate” in response to the backlash over his firing.

Capitalism at its finest.

Several Amazon workers have since alleged retaliation for organizing. In an op-Ed for the Guardian, Smalls urged Bezos to spend more time on protecting his workers instead of stifling dissent.

And running perky tv ads saying we’re all in this together and look how joyous the workers are.

There are protests and then there are protests.

Thousands of demonstrators descended on the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on Wednesday to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s restrictive stay-at-home order, clogging the streets with their cars while scores ignored organizers’ pleas to stay inside their vehicles.

Not staying inside their anything is the whole point. Mommy can’t tell ME what to do.

The protest — dubbed “Operation Gridlock” — was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund, a DeVos family-linked conservative group. Protesters were encouraged to show up and cause traffic jams, honk and bring signs to display from their cars. Organizers wrote on Facebook: “Do not park and walk — stay in your vehicles!”

Many ignored the demand. Demonstrators, on foot, were seen waving American, “Don’t Tread on Me” and Trump campaign flags. At least two Confederate flags were spotted.

Protesters could be heard chanting “Open up Michigan!” At one point, there was a “lock her up” chant in reference to Whitmer.

It’s all the same thing, isn’t it – liberalism, virology, public health, women in top jobs, women taking our guns away – it’s all connected.

But then Michigan has one of the highest rates of infection, so maybe there’s a reason Whitmer signed a particularly restrictive order?

More than 27,000 cases have been confirmed in the state with at least 1,700 deaths. In Wayne County, home to Detroit, 820 people have died, per a Johns Hopkins University tracker. Wayne County has more deaths than any county in the U.S. outside of New York state.

Hmm Detroit, what’s Detroit known for? Besides cars? Those car factories made it a top destination for the Great Migration, so it has a large African American population. As we’ve seen, the virus is disproportionately infecting brown people. This “protest” has more than a whiff of the Charlottesville “protest” – more than a whiff of white supremacy.

See what I mean?

Social distancing at the BBC:

Well this is a hell of a thing. It’s local news, but it’s one of those big hit to a major city items of local news. A bridge that connects West Seattle to Seattle has turned out to be cracking, and it’s closed at best until 2022 and at worst forever. A major chunk of the city that has been sprouting high rises like crazy over the past decade or so is suddenly cut off from the rest of the city. It’s a bit like Hurricane Sandy…a reminder that big cities are far from invulnerable.

The key points: The high-rise West Seattle Bridge, closed for safety concerns 23 days ago, may not be fixable – SDOT “does not yet know” if it is feasible “technically or financially.” If they can fix it, it might last another 10 years, but that still means replacement would be needed a lot sooner than the original 75-year projection. Even if it’s fixable, it won’t be back in use any sooner than 2022.

Some bridges are just one of many. New York has several between Manhattan and Brooklyn/Queens, London has many across the Thames, Paris has many across the Seine. This isn’t that. It’s the only way to get from there to here. It doesn’t just cross a river, it also climbs a steep hill, so there’s only the one.

It’s kind of beautiful, at least from a distance. We can see it from here on top of this hill. I find it slightly nerve-racking to drive, but the views are spectacular.

It’s just, like the pandemic, another one of those “oh this life we’ve been living isn’t actually normal or eternal, it depends on all kinds of systems and situations that can break or end” reminders.

Trump’s threat to adjourn Congress isn’t going down hugely well.

More coup-threatening:

Fact check: Trump says he will execute constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress so he can make recess appointments to fill vacancies.

“If the House will not agree to that adjournment, I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress,” Trump said.

No president has ever used that authority.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in NLRB v. Noel Canning that the president cannot use his or her authority under the Recess Appointment Clause of the Constitution to appoint public officials unless the Senate is in recess and not able to transact Senate business. The Senate is in recess until May 4.

Trump was asked for details, and responded with his usual clarity and elegance.

Very simple. If they don’t act on getting these people approved that we need – we need them anyway, but we especially need them now because of the pandemic – we are going to do something that will be … something I’d prefer not doing, but which I should do and I will do if have to.

He’s joking about the prefer not doing, of course. He loves breaking all the rules and pushing everyone around.

The BBC checks the evil pinhead’s assertions about the WHO:

US President Donald Trump has accused the World Health Organization (WHO) of mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus after it emerged in China.

Because that’s what he did, so he needs to accuse the WHO of doing it, because that’s what runaway narcissists do.

He added he would halt WHO funding while his administration reviewed its actions.

Because that’s what evil pinheads do.

People who are not evil pinheads are not impressed.

US President Donald Trump has been heavily criticised for halting funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) amid the global coronavirus pandemic.

Philanthropist Bill Gates, a major funder of the WHO, said it was “as dangerous as it sounds”.

… UN Secretary General António Guterres said it was “not the time” to cut funds to the WHO, which “is absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war against Covid-19”.

But the evil pinhead doesn’t care about that, he cares only about the fortunes of the evil pinhead.

A protest:

Hundreds of Michigan residents descended on the state capitol in Lansing on Wednesday in their cars and trucks for a vehicle demonstration labeled #OperationGridlock to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s strict stay-at-home orders. 

Because what kind of totalitarian fiend wants to prevent mass deaths from a novel virus pandemic?

The order, one of the nation’s most stringent, included closing parts of big-box stores that sell gardening and home-improvement goods, limiting the use of motorboats, closing public golf courses, and curbing interstate travel, barring residents from fleeing the most heavily afflicted parts of the state to their cabins in rural Michigan.

I think maybe public golf courses should remain open for walking and exercise (not for golf), provided people can maintain distance, but the rest of it seems reasonable. Rural Michigan naturally has far less in the way of hospitals and medical workers, so people shouldn’t be going there from the cities.

So how’s it going?

But hey. This woman has GREY HAIR SHOWING. Getting that fixed is worth any number of lives, right?

The Post reports:

The Treasury Department has ordered President Trump’s name printed on stimulus checks the Internal Revenue Service is rushing to send to tens of millions of Americans, a process that could slow their delivery by a few days, senior IRS officials said.

Also a process that coddles and encourages Trump’s disgusting vanity and egomania.

It will be the first time a president’s name appears on an IRS disbursement, whether a routine refund or one of the handful of checks the government has issued to taxpayers in recent decades either to stimulate a down economy or share the dividends of a strong one.

Because normal presidents, even the very empty-headed ones like Bush and Reagan, understand that they don’t cause everything.

Trump had privately suggested to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who oversees the IRS, that he allow the president to formally sign the checks, according to three administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

“Steve, can I sign them? Can I? Let me sign them, Steve. I hafta sign them. I’m the great and powerful Oz, and I need to sign the checks. Let me do it, Steve.”

But the president is not an authorized signer for legal disbursements by the U.S. Treasury. It is standard practice for a civil servant to sign checks issued by the Treasury Department to ensure that government payments are nonpartisan.

Huh? Whut? I don unnerstan, use shorter wurdz.

News from South Dakota:

Gov. Kristi Noem reiterated Tuesday that she won’t be ordering South Dakota residents to stay home amid the coronavirus pandemic, as another 121 confirmed cases were reported in the state. The majority of South Dakota’s 988 total cases – 768 – are in Minnehaha County, which includes the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, the site of one of the largest known clusters of COVID-19 cases in the country. 

That’s ok. The people who work there are mostly immigrants, so nobody cares what happens to them. The virus won’t spread from the plant to the world outside the plant because Donald Trump would never let that happen.

CBS affiliate KELO-TV reports Noem said 70% of the county’s cases could be traced to the plant: 438 employees and an additional 107 people who had contact with employees have tested positive for the coronavirus.

According to a New York Times analysis, as of Tuesday, the 545 cases made the Smithfield Plant the second largest hotspot in the country, surpassing Chicago’s Cook County Jail and trailing only under the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

Well there’s your answer – just lock the doors of the plant with the workers inside.

Despite the numbers, Noem said she would not issue a stay-at-home order for Minnehaha and nearby Lincoln Counties, as Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken requested. Noem said a stay-at-home order wouldn’t have made a difference in Sioux Falls because the plant would have remained open as part of a critical infrastructure business.

…

“This plant here is incredibly important, not just to Sioux Falls, not just to South Dakota, but to our nation. It provides our food for us,” Noem said.

Not true, actually. The plant produces bacon, which is a treat rather than a staple, and the sales of bacon have tanked because of all the restaurant and fast food joint closures.

Smithfield’s CEO, Kenneth Sullivan, issued a statement that sounded like a protest.

“We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19,” he wrote, warning that closing such plants “is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.”

Several industry analysts, however, disputed Sullivan’s dire predictions of meat shortages.

…

In fact, the pork industry is currently dealing with a glut of its product due to a collapse of demand from chain restaurants and food service companies that supply corporate cafeterias and schools.

And bacon is mostly fat and salt anyway; it’s a lousy source of protein.

That other captain is also reminiscent of our current pumpkin head.

The old classics are the best.

Who knew Trump was a fan of mutiny?

So is he identifying with Captain Bligh or Fletcher Christian?

But lots of people are remarking that he’s more like Captain Queeg.

Bligh was actually not the demon the later stories portrayed him as. The mutiny was more about Christian’s reluctance to leave Tahiti than any special brutality of Bligh’s, and several of the mutineers were more forced into it than enthusiastic allies.

Won’t someone please think of the people who need to go to Whole Foods EVERY DAY??

WOW, just imagine, she and her husband are not free to ignore the rules during a pandemic, WHERE IS OUR PRECIOUS LIBERTY?

Especially when the total deaths are 69 and will never go any higher because that’s how this works.

Of course she is asking WHY, she cares about our precious freedom to infect each other, MAKEAMERICAGREATAGAIN

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on This racially disproportionate rate of death.

One of the most disgusting responses to the virus I saw was – The View accusing Bernie Sanders of politicizing the crisis by pushing medicare for all.

Joe Biden sounding very much like he’d veto medicare for all if it ever actually passed the lower houses.

Biden had previously said medicare for all wouldn’t help – just look at how Italy’s healthcare service was over-run.

Well, if you go to Vox and look at their story from two days ago that included charts of infection rates, what you can see from their linear graph is that Italy has handled the virus significantly better than the US, despite both countries having failed to lock down early enough.

The US is handling this crisis uniquely badly, and a big chunk of that is that the US’ healthcare policy is highly fragmented. Because the US is entirely reliant on private healthcare, some insurers are waiving costs for treatment, others are not.

And it required bringing in new legislation to make the tests free, which meant delays on getting sufficient testing done.

So you’ve got a crisis which requires federal action to deal with. Leaving it up to the states means you get stupid shit like giving religious exemption to lockdowns despite the fact that religious gatherings are pretty good at spreading the disease.

It also means that you have big gaps in who has adequate and inadequate medical infrastructure.

And yes, the virus is in rural America.

There is a real risk of creating reservoirs of the virus that reinfect places that took sensible measures, because the handling of it is so fragmented.

So essentially it is fine to politicize the pandemic in order to prevent any action that might conceivably help solve the crisis and mitigate future pandemics, that’s exactly what Joe Biden did with regards to Italy.

But to suggest letting people get free-at-the-point-of-service healthcare under a unified federal system is bad form. There is a disgusting and frankly odious hypocrisy in that.

Now you’ll note I’m hitting the Democratic Party in this. This is because right now the Democrats need to start showing some spine.

If they cannot argue for a more unified approach on public healthcare now, then when can they?

The argument from high costs is identical to the argument against dealing with climate change, and suffers the same problems. The fact is that you’re already paying for the status quo, and you’ve got no guarantees of treatment under the status quo.

Much like climate change, the cost of doing nothing may well be more than the cost of action.

What medicare for all does is essentially migrate how you pay for healthcare to doing it through your taxes. If healthcare costs are destined to balloon over the next decade, they’ll still do that if you’re doing it through the private sector. Doctors will still need to be paid, medicines will still need to be made, if you get sick, you will still need treatment.

Where the savings predicted in medicare for all come in are through economies of scale, you need less administration for one healthcare system versus a whole load of insurance companies, and through savings on drugs due to the fact that a single payer has more negotiation power.

You also have better preventative care, and earlier detection of health problems, reducing the costs of dealing with those problems as a whole.

The US pays more for medication than any other country in the world, and that medication is developed into a commercial product by drug companies, but are actually often discovered by publicly funded universities.

So the argument that the private sector is the driver for new drug discoveries is in fact dodgy.

This is the case that should be being made by what is supposed to be the leftist party in America, yet they are too timid to make it even as the current sitting president is confiscating medical supplies from hospitals.

When Zimbabwe suffered through its economic collapse, one of the things Zanu-PF did was ensure that their supporters got food aid, while the opposition did not.

The fact that you cannot trust the current president not to do the same thing in this crisis means now is not the time to be nice.

There comes a time in which a party has to be able to fight. To stand up and suggest solutions and not back down for fear of getting criticized.

A politician’s job is to politicize things, to suggest political solutions to problems, to debate what action the body politic should be taking, and for far too long and on far too many issues, this has become taboo because that taboo supports the kind of people who buy patents for diabetic medications and hike the prices.

If you’re hiring somebody for a job, you don’t want somebody who is too cowardly to do the job. The Democratic Party needs to do better here, or risk losing to a man who belongs in jail, not the Oval Office.

God’s eye is not on the sparrow.

Pastor Gerald O. Glenn, founder and bishop of the New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Virginia, died on Saturday evening after contracting the novel coronavirus, his church announced on Facebook.

Why it matters: Glenn snubbed social distancing guidelines and warnings about the danger of religious gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, even after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam issued a stay-at-home order on March 30.

Glenn’s wife has tested positive for the virus.

Ashley Parker has a useful summary of that nightmare press briefing yesterday.

President Trump stepped to the lectern Monday on a day when the coronavirus death toll in the United States ticked up past 23,000. He addressed the nation at a time when unemployment claims have shot past 15 million and lines at food banks stretch toward the horizon.

In other words several weeks into the worst catastrophe most of us have ever experienced. Even the war wasn’t a catastrophe for us on this side of the Atlantic the way this one is – in fact for a lot of people it brought jobs that paid a decent wage after more than a decade of high unemployment and basement-level wages. But this thing is disease and unemployment and immiseration. It’s made life for the non-rich, which is most of us, hellish.

So what is Trump focused on? Himself, of course.

Yet in the middle of this deadly pandemic that shows no obvious signs of abating, the president made clear that the paramount concern for Trump is Trump — his self-image, his media coverage, his supplicants and his opponents, both real and imagined.

Not parents of young children who live paycheck to paycheck and have to figure out how to keep their children safe with no schools open. Not people gasping for air in crowded hospitals. Not medical workers sweating and exhausted under masks and visors and gowns working desperately to save the people gasping for air. Not family and friends of people gasping for air, or no longer gasping because they’re dead. Not bus drivers and grocery store workers and people who work for the postal service and UPS and Amazon. Not people who used to work in restaurants and bars who can’t pay their rent. Just him.

“Everything we did was right,” Trump said, during a sometimes hostile 2½ -hour news conference in which he offered a live version of an enemies list, brooking no criticism and repeatedly snapping at reporters who dared to challenge his version of events.

…

At one point — after praising himself for implementing travel restrictions on China at the end of January and griping about being “brutalized” by the press — Trump paused to boast with a half-smirk, “But I guess I’m doing okay because, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the president of the United States, despite the things that are said.”

No, see, that’s just it. The fact that he’s president does not mean he’s doing okay. It means we’re a broken catastrophe of a country.

First Trump made Fauci get up and say he’d misspoken on CNN when he acknowledged that Trump sat on his ass all through February when he should have been taking steps. (Not an exact paraphrase of what Fauci said.)

Next, Trump played a propaganda-style video that he said had been pulled together by White House aides earlier in the day. In a short hagiography more in line with a political event than a presidential news conference, clips critical of the media were interspersed with footage of loyalists praising the president.

One could write a book on what is so disgusting about that.

Shortly after Trump played the video, CBS’s Paula Reid pressed him on how his administration had not used the month of February to ready itself for the coming virus, after sharply limiting travel from China.

“You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals, you didn’t use it to ramp up testing,” Reid said, before Trump cut her off, calling her “disgraceful.”

Which of the two is really the disgraceful one here?

At another moment, seemingly eager to assert his dominance over the nation’s governors, Trump declared incorrectly, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.”

No there’s no reason to assume it’s just that he’s eager to assert his dominance over the nation’s governors. It’s all too obvious that he’s determined to assert his dominance over all of us – all of us in the US and all of us out of it, too, because we’re The Big Cop.

Later, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins followed up: “You said when someone is president of the United States, their authority is total. That is not true. Who told you that?”

I like “who told you that?” It’s so contemptuous. It’s not something you say to an adult, it’s something you say to a child. It conjures up a vision of Pence or Barr or any of Trump’s abject goons Telling Him That while kissing his ass from a kneeling position.

The whole thing was a horror. It was worse than Psycho.

OMG Trump is trending.

Unbelievable.

That is terrifying on so many levels.