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The White House Has Erected A Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/hospitals-face-a-white-house-blockade-for-coronavirus-ppe.htmlWhenever you start to think that the federal government under Donald Trump has hit a moral bottom, it finds a new way to shock and horrify.
Over the last few weeks, it has started to appear as though, in addition to abandoning the states to their own devices in a time of national emergency, the federal government has effectively erected a blockade — like that which the Union used to choke off the supply chains of the Confederacy during the Civil War — to prevent delivery of critical medical equipment to states desperately in need. At the very least, federal authorities have made governors and hospital executives all around the country operate in fear that shipments of necessary supplies will be seized along the way. In a time of pandemic, having evacuated federal responsibility, the White House is functionally waging a war against state leadership and the initiative of local hospitals to secure what they need to provide sufficient treatment.
(snip)
You could call this piracy. You could call it sanctions. The federal government is choking supply chains to states like it chokes supply chains to Iran and North Korea. These blockades aren’t as complete as those surrounding sanctioned regimes, of course, and some amount of the disruption may be honest confusion in a time of crisis. But the disruption is being brought about by federal interference, and unlike the kind of disruptions you’d want to engineer against antagonistic states, the purpose seems completely unclear — indeed the policy is inexplicable and indefensible.
Which may be one reason why no explanation has been given. We don’t know where these supplies are going. We don’t know on what grounds they are being seized, or threatened with seizure. What business do the DHS and FEMA have with ventilators and PPE purchases by governors and local hospitals? “This is like a story out of the last days of the Soviet Union,” David Frum wrote on Twitter, of the NEJM letter. “This is what it means to be a failed state,” wrote the essayist Umair Haque, echoing him. In the absence of an explanation, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than that this is simply mafia government, exerting control for the sake of control, not in spite of but because of the crisis-led demand, and squeezing the American people, as they die in hospital beds and attend — with inadequate protection — to the sick and scared.
(end snip)
"...a story out of the last days of the Soviet Union."
This is NOT FAILURE. This is DELIBERATE.
36 replies
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What’s scary and confusing is that we don’t know what the objectives of this policy are. We don’t even know what the policy IS. It’s completely obscured, and this is the Federal Government of the United States. Something is very wrong, here.
-Laelth
But that’s far from comforting. Honestly, I have no clue what the federal seizures of medical supplies to states and individual hospitals is about. It’s rare for the federal government to be this murky and arbitrary without any stated goal.
-Laelth
Perhaps, but it looks to me that there’s no plan beyond “seize everything.” I don’t think that they have a plan for distributing “their” stockpile.
-Laelth
