What Do Evil And Plague Look Like?

Let's start with Evil.  I first learned Alex Gibney's name when Taxi To The Dark Side played at the 2006 Anchorage International Film Festival.  The story of the Afghan taxi driver who ends up tortured and dying in Baghram Air Force Base.  It was powerful and my favorite doc that year and probably my favorite film overall.  And it went on to win an Oscar for best feature documentary.  Gibney has made a lot of films since then.

Netflix has Slumloard Millionaire up now, a look at Jared Kushner's real estate world.  One section of the film looks at how Kushner bought rent controlled apartment buildings in NYC and then practiced all sorts of harassment techniques to get renters out - ceilings fall in from floods above, jackhammers all night, nothing repaired, toxic materials, etc.

Then there's the story of 666 Fifth Avenue which Kushner bought when prices were sky-high, just before the 2008 crash.  And how he then had to scramble to find money to pay his debts.  Among the schemes was squeezing low income tenants in his various buildings - and the film particularly focuses on the Baltimore area.  There are late fees, tacked onto rent that get deducted so that the renter hasn't paid the full rent which allows for more fees the next month.  Meanwhile the renter doesn't know any of this is happening and just keeps paying the regular rent and falling further behind. While this nickle-and-diming can't raise what Kushner needs, over thousands of tenants it adds up.  A reporter walks the neighborhood and shows us all the doors with shaming notices prominently taped onto people's door.  Then there's the lady who has complained about the lack of repairs in her apartment and gotten a signed waiver to leave her lease.  Three years later she starts getting notices from JKSomethingLLC.  She has no idea who that is.  They are demanding $3000 for cutting out on her lease three years ago. She no longer has the waiver, she never thought she'd still need it.  Fortunately, an investigative reporter finds her and writes about her.  That gets her an attorney who locates the housing records that prove her allegation she left legally.  And JK suddenly and magnanimously agrees to drop the bill.

This is just evil.  And this is one of the key people advising the president.   Some even say he's running a shadow coronavirus task force made up of business leaders.  But we don't get daily reports from them.  The behavior highlighted in the movie is fair warning for Kushner's task force is to help him and business campaign supporters figure out how to siphon off as much of the money earmarked to fight Coronavirus as possible.  helps himself and his father-in-law to every spare dollar they can get off the government.    Trump even referred to the head of Carnival Cruises today as his friend Micky who is offering cruise ships for non-COVID-19 hospitals.  I'm sure 'offering' as in I'll only charge twice what I would make if all my ships weren't sitting idle now.  (I'd note that Carnival owns Princess Lines.)


Now let's switch to Plague.  Here's a paragraph from an article by Jennifer Cooke, a plague expert.  She wrote her dissertation on the Bubonic Plague and then converted it to a book.  She writes about how she hadn't expected to experience one.

"What can I tell you about contagious epidemics? What will happen to us? Soon, we will see people scared of one another. Soon, a celebrity with COVID-19 will die. Soon, infected houses will display a sign warning delivery drivers and neighbours. Or non-infected houses will, attempting to reassure. Soon, there will be pets without owners, newly made strays fending for themselves. The most vulnerable will suffer even more. Domestic violence rates will sky-rocket. We will see armed forces patrol the streets. We will tell each other incredible stories we have heard of cruelty, of misery, but also of heroism, of generosity. There will be social unrest. There will be cult weirdos and strange beliefs, doomsters baying about the end of times. There will be exploiters, quacks, and fraudsters. But there will also be simple kindnesses, more phone calls between family members, between friends. We will all work less, if at all. There will be absurdity. And there will be incredible community support, for the people by the people. There will be ingenious new forms of entertainment and the revival of older forms that we have forgotten or stashed at the back of the cupboard. There will be incredible boredom and a lot of cleaning. This is what my knowledge tells me."

There's lots more there.  She also gets into Daniel Defoe's book on the plague, which ADN write Michael Carey also wrote about today.   There's also a link to the original Journal of The Plague Year for people who want a preview of what's coming.  (Times are different.  Science plays a bigger role now, but we still have many religious charlatans who use calamity to their advantage.  (As I recall, every natural disaster during he Obama years was a sign from God.  I don't see that so much not that the charlatan in chief is in office.)