Power, no accountability

[struggle4progress]

May 7, 2020, 4:16 PM EDT
By Jonathan Allen


... the White House coronavirus task force's goals were to consolidate Trump's power and limit his accountability, and to thereby try to position him for re-election in the midst of a public health and economic emergency that has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people in the U.S. so far.

... as more people die, he'll try to pin shortcomings in the response to the crisis on 50 scapegoats — the nation's governors. He will still have full control over the scarce goods those governors need to protect their residents, restricting their ability to attack him or even point out publicly any failure of the federal government to supply them.

... those weren't the priorities of many of the federal health and emergency-response experts who worked on the task force or were familiar with its operations. Nor were they the first concern of many governors, mayors, lawmakers, hospital administrators, suppliers, distributors and front-line workers who believed that protecting the public from the pandemic should be Trump's focus ...

... One of Project Airbridge's most-heralded deals involved the government paying Federal Express to fly Tyvek, a synthetic material produced in Virginia by DuPont, to Vietnam, where it was sewn into protective coveralls and sold to W.W. Grainger at a cost of $4 per suit. Grainger then took ownership of the coveralls and sold them to the federal government at a price roughly twice that amount. Finally, the feds paid FedEx to fly back the first shipment of what could end up being an order of 4.5 million suits and Trump announced the deal — without mention of Grainger as the middleman — in early April ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/all-power-no-accountability-s-trump-s-covid-success-n1202316

[struggle4progress]

1. Giving you death and calling it liberty

By JAMIL SMITH

... Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH epidemiologist working alongside the White House, asked an essential question on CNN Monday night. “How many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be, some form of normality, sooner rather than later?” Judging by the demand for exponentially more human sacrifice from Trump and many in the Republican Party of late, the number seems unquantifiable. They actually seem to have actually stopped trying to fight it with the required urgency. Releasing a triumphant and militaristic campaign ad Tuesday that paints his virus response as unfailingly effective, Trump all but declared victory over the ongoing pandemic. He clearly wants to look like a wartime president, and a winning one. He is neither.

In less than three months, COVID-19 has killed more than 62,000 people inside the the United States. The White House expects the disease will kill up to 3,000 people in the U.S. daily by June 1. That’s more than a 9/11, every single day. The model projects that more than 134,000 total will die, per a New York Times report on Monday. Less than three months after the first fatality, we have seen macabre reports of bodies stacked in U-Hauls and warehouses and cities burying unclaimed dead in local parks. But despite the federal government itself buying 100,000 body bags last week, White House advisers like Steven Moore appear more concerned about dead companies.

Speaking about businesses closed due to stay-at-home protocols throughout the United States Moore, a member of Trump’s council on “reopening” the country, told Politico on Monday that “if they stay closed for another month, month and a half, you’re gonna have body bags of businesses that will never recover.” Quite the word choice.

The nation has no business opening up right now and most Americans are deeply wary of it, but several of Trump’s fellow Republicans have now relaxed or ended public safety protections in their states. Governors from Georgia to Missouri to Texas abandoned or declined to extend shelter-in-place orders, allowing both local customers and COVID-19 to enter their businesses. Sure enough, sharp spikes in infection rates accompanied ...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/coronavirus-reopen-states-death-liberty-trump-994421/

[struggle4progress]

2. White House ramps up internal coronavirus measures

By
John Wagner,
Marisa Iati,
Mark Berman,
Felicia Sonmez,
Adam Taylor,
Candace Buckner,
Kareem Copeland,
Keith McMillan,
Antonia Noori Farzan and
Teo Armus
May 7, 2020 at 11:58 p.m. EDT

The White House rapidly increased testing for those around President Trump Thursday after a staffer whose job potentially put him in close daily contact with the president had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. It’s the president’s closest known contact with an infected person since the early days of the U.S. response to the pandemic ...

President Trump in recent weeks has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy ...

Blood clots in covid-19 patients have been leading to some terrible outcomes, including strokes in people who were young and otherwise healthy. A new study finds that blood thinners can be an effective treatment and boost the chance for survival ...

The rollout of remdesivir, the first and only treatment for covid-19, is being criticized by doctors across the country as confusing, unfair and marred by incomplete medical information ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/07/coronavirus-update-us/

[struggle4progress]

3. Senate GOP breaks with message

By Manu Raju, CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent
Updated 10:28 PM ET, Thu May 7, 2020

President Donald Trump likes to boast about how well testing for Covid-19 is going in the United States ...

A wide range of GOP senators on Thursday had a far different message: Much more needs to be done to ramp up testing before the country can safely reopen.

"We ought to step it up," Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, a Republican of Alabama, told CNN. "We ought to make the test as quickly as we can, accelerate it and do it. I think it's key to getting people back to give them confidence and also ascertaining who is carrying the virus."

Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican up for reelection this year, said, "We just really want to ramp up testing. We need more tests produced ... because I think consumer confidence would certainly be better if we could be testing out there, get the economy up and going" ...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/07/politics/republican-reaction-trump-covid-testing/index.html

[struggle4progress]

4. Covid-19 reckoning only the beginning

By Jeet Heer MAY 4, 2020

... “The hard truth is that it didn’t have to be this bad,” Biden tweeted. “The lack of preparation, the slow response on testing, the failure to administer the relief in the CARES Act appropriately—all of it stems from Donald Trump’s failures as president.”

While Trump’s presidency has been marked by scandal and corruption, everything to date pales in significance to the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s handling of the pandemic will almost certainly be the major issue of the election, the decisive question in determining whether Trump will be a one-term president ...

Among the failures of the period were Trump’s reliance on ridiculously optimistic models about low casualties, notably one offered by Kevin Hasset, described by the newspaper as “a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases.” Economists like Hasset repeatedly clashed with scientific advisers like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who offered competing models projecting a far more dire scenario if there was no mitigation of the pandemic. As one Trump adviser complained about this group, “They’re all about science, science, science, which is good, but sometimes there’s a little bit less of a consideration of politics when maybe there should be.”

Another failure was relying on information from Fox News hosts to elevate an unproven medicine, hydroxychloroquine, as a promising wonder drug ...

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-coronavirus-failure-reckoning/

[struggle4progress]

5. Covid-19 inaction killed Americans

By Eugene Jarecki
May 6, 2020 at 8:55 a.m. EDT

... This suffering cannot be forgotten. As of today, tens of thousands of Americans have lost their lives as a consequence of the administration’s failure to act sooner, so it’s no wonder the president excoriates reporters who ask him why he waited so long to implement the guidelines. Trump’s fallback when he is under scrutiny is to deflect, attack, and distract. But will this work when his decisions have led to a loss of American lives? How will the President be held responsible?

It’s all in the branding, that stuff Trump himself does so well when he applies derisive nicknames to his rivals or attaches the name of a foreign power to a global pandemic. Accountability needs a brand, and the National Debt Clock is a helpful precedent. It demonstrates how to plant a symbolic flag in the numbers — one that can’t be knocked over by bluster or misleading campaign videos. This pandemic is ongoing, and the lives already unnecessarily lost demand we seek more responsible crisis leadership. Just as the names of fallen soldiers are etched on memorials to remind us of the cost of war, quantifying the lives lost to the president’s delayed coronavirus response would serve a vital public function ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/06/trump-covid-death-counter/

[rampartc]

6. i wish each of your points in this thread was an op so i could rec them all

the current situation is somewhere between "declare victory and send the peons back to the salt mine" and unconditional surrender to the spread of the disease as they transfer the nation's wealth to their insiders.