Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”
Bloomberg.com
There is little proof that can be presented that would support the observation that California isn’t both a nation and a state. For example; is France a nation or a state, part of the EU? Yes. It is both things. So is California both a nation, with its own government, business and economics; and a state, a part of the United States. Nation-State is what you call that kind of entity.
It is about time that the various states flexed their muscles. If the president in D.C. Won’t lead, then the state governors have to lead. Power exists that Donald Trump can’t or won’t exercise, and the state governors have to step in and manage this crisis if the president won’t do it. When I talked about the United States ceasing to be the United States back in 2016 when Trump won the presidency, this was one of the ways that I saw that coming to pass.
No, I’m not saying that I saw SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) looming on the horizon. I thought that a rebellion over Donald Trump’s hateful immigration policies would be the most likely instigator of the crisis. I was wrong there. But I did envision a lack of leadership in a moment like this allowing the room for governors to step forward and assume a leadership role in defiance of the federal government.
California lead the way several years ago when they legalized Marijuana and the federal government was powerless to stop them from doing that. Several states have followed suit since, laying out the groundwork for an effective rebellion if one ever had to be utilized in a time of crisis. That time could be now.
Trump will have to suppress California with force if it comes to that. Trump has proven that he hasn’t got the murderous instinct in him (thankfully) and who is willing to take bets on federal forces being willing to follow his orders when it comes to occupying one of our own states? One of our own states that is rightfully seeking redress of a problem that Washington has failed to remedy even though they knew that this pandemic was on it’s way three months ago?
This is a crisis moment the likes of which we haven’t seen since the last great war. Yet it is different than war as we have seen it previously. We don’t have an army that is trained to fight this war, and neither does any other nation have that army. The leader that can manage this crisis will be the one that the people will follow, because even bad leadership is better than no leadership.
The hacking of our democratic processes that gave us Caudito Trump as president was also a war. We didn’t have an army trained to fight that war either, and Trump hasn’t been inclined to tool-up to fight the enemy that, after all, put him into power. He has instead been willing to dissipate himself and the money-lenders on Wall Street with wealth handouts and relaxed regulations. Letting the greedy pile more millions onto their already disgustingly enormous piles of cash. He fiddled like Nero through crisis after crisis, most of them of his own making, until he ran into the harsh biological reality of this pandemic.
Now we can all see just how naked the emperor really is. He can order his Stormtrumpers to be cruel to immigrant children and their fathers and mothers. He can brag endlessly about being a wartime president as the country burns with fever around him. The camps that his immigration policies have created will be hotbeds for SARS-CoV-2. But it will also tear through cities and towns across this country, and everyone of us will have known someone who has died from this virus, before this pandemic is over.
He cannot stop the virus because the virus doesn’t notice his bluster and bullshit. It doesn’t respect law, or wealth, or property. It simply does its biological job, and in the process of doing that job it proves that Donald J. Trump is a coward incapable of making the hard decisions that a real leader is required to make in times like these. Maybe Gavin Newsom is the kind of leader who can. Gavin Newsom for president?
