Not only are pandemic profiteers setting 50 states and the federal government bidding against each other in a process that is costing billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives—they’re doing it openly. This isn’t secret. This isn’t idiots in a truck, scouring a state for hand sanitizer. This is major suppliers, including manufacturers, raking in profits and shipping away the products that health care workers need to do their jobs. These are actions that the federal government could stop … but hasn’t.
On Monday, Forbes reported on an extended look at the market for masks and other protective gear, and that report could not be more infuriating. Because the shortage of protective gear doesn’t exist. There are millions of medical-grade N95 masks available in the United States. Those masks, and other needed supplies, aren’t the product of last-minute enterprise; they’ve been out there all along. It’s just that the market is being driven by … the market.
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It’s a system that isn’t providing a lifeline to states or to citizens, but a massive gift to those who are sitting on top of the market. Using the Defense Production Act isn’t a rare thing. It’s been invoked literally hundreds of thousands of times to secure the most routine needs. But now Trump is refusing to use it to secure the most vital needs in the biggest crisis of our lifetimes. It’s not just puzzling, not just frustrating—it’s deliberate cruelty. And it’s the ultimate expression of a system designed to generate dollars rather than save lives.
David Begnaud listened to a colleague ask an important question at a White House coronavirus briefing and summarized:
This is so important for everyone to understand. This explains why Governors say: I'm not getting the supplies I need - yet @POTUS says we are sending tons of supplies: It's going from the federal govt to commercial distributors who then deliver to the highest bidder: states!Because somebody needed to make a profit.
Basically, this is not going directly to the states. It's going to the middleman and then the state has to be the highest bidder in order to get what the middleman has in its inventory. And if there's leftovers, then the next state in line gets it.
Roland Paris, who is Canadian, responded:
In a system that makes personal medical care conditional on having money, should we be surprised that vital supplies are being auctioned off to the richest bidders? The perversity is consistent.
In another post Mark Sumner reports several incidents world wide where medical equipment is diverted. French officials were about to load a pallet of masks, but unnamed Americans pulled out a wad of cash, so the masks didn’t go to France. Masks bound for Germany were “confiscated” as they passed through Bangkok. Three million masks purchased by Massachusetts were seized by an unnamed federal agency. The nasty guy declares the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” Sumner hasn’t found out who is buying, where the purchases are being stashed, and what is going on.
I wrote yesterday about the difficulties of the Postal Service and how the GOP might use this as a chance to make the USPS disappear as calls for vote by mail increase. Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections has more details.
Also yesterday I commented that the pandemic prince had declared the national stockpile of medical equipment was “ours.” Social Distancing Veteran explains:
The national stockpile supplies are “theirs” because they represent *power* to allocate as they see fit, not to hold in trust for the people.
It epitomizes their entire view of “governing”, and it baffles me people still view him as a bad president rather than a mob boss.
Sarah Kendzior has said that the nasty guy is using incompetence to hide malice. She expands that in a tweet:
People need to stop asking "Are they incompetent?" and ask "Incompetent at what?" Doing a bureaucratic public service job? Sure. Theft, threats, spin, power grabs, legal manipulation, and murder? No, they're actually very competent at that. And well-organized at this point too.M. Kei added:
People need to stop fantasizing that they're here to run the government. No. They're here to loot the American people and entrench themselves in power so that they can continue looting it with impunity.
Back in September 2018 Sarah Kendzior tweeted:
If you want a passport, get it now. Usually I don't give out advice on personal things like this for people I don't know (like when people ask me "should I flee?", etc). But yes this is a growing problem, it will get worse, and I recommend getting passports now.
Mar Hicks tweeted yesterday:
Today the US govt used the coronavirus as an excuse to stop issuing new passports—indefinitely.
This is scary—not issuing new passports won’t have much effect on covid19 but it is an aggressive gesture towards constraining freedom of movement. What comes next? Sealing borders of states the feds are withholding PPE from? Nothing seems out of bounds.
Greg Dworkin of Kos tweeted on his own account a collection of ways to create your own face mask. He also links to a Science Mag article that says the evidence for using such a mask is spotty.
Bill Grueskin, a journalist and professor, proposed: “What’s the first sentence of the best novel that will be written about this epidemic?” He got a long list of responses, a few that were more than one sentence, several that are quite clever or touching. Here are some of them:
Sherrilyn Ifill: “Many wondered, even in their final moments, how we came to be here. But the seeds had been planted and sown and watered over decades of failures, of stubborn refusals to uproot the tares and bury the wages of the nation’s original sin.”
Alex Leo: “Her tests results came on the day of her funeral. It was a bleak affair even as funerals go with the priest acting as the only speaker and AV specialist in charge of Zoom-grieving. As he welcomed her relatives, he wondered how many of them were actually wearing pants.”
Ellie Maruska: “At first the absence was welcome, a strange return to that paradise the old ones believed had once been but after a week the silence lost its wonder & among the gulls worried whispers began: where had the french fry makers gone?”
Rob Anderson: “First, you have to know about the emails.”
Norman Ornstein: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of presidents.”
Carrie Fitzgerald: “He walked into the hospital wearing a mask his grandmother had sewn for him before she died.”
The Book of Republiconians: “‘And in those days it was revealed that the only plan existeth within the bestest brain of the Orange One. It was known that it was indeed the best brain in the land (many experts sayeth it is so).’ - Republiconians, 4:14”
Jody Lanard: “Fifty years ago today: He cut math class to sneak a smoke, thinking: ‘I’m never gonna have to know about exponential growth and doubling times.’”
AFH: “On February 29, 2020 the first coronavirus death was reported in Washington state. A month later, the Pentagon received an order for 100,000 body bags.”
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