Month: May 2020

A cascade of corruption:

It was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong.

Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs.

“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen wrote that day in an email to top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.”

But communications over several days with senior agency officials — including Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and emergency response — left Bowen with the clear impression that there was little immediate interest in his offer.

“I don’t believe we as an government are anywhere near answering those questions for you yet,” Laura Wolf, director of the agency’s Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection, responded that same day.

Bowen persisted.

“We are the last major domestic mask company,” he wrote on Jan. 23. “My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’ government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman second.”

In the end, the government did not take Bowen up on his offer. Even today, production lines that could be making more than 7 million masks a month sit dormant.

The story goes on to outline a Keystone Kops tale of ineptitude on a scale you simply couldn’t have imagined happening in the United States — ever.

Oh, and if you think this was a one-off, check this out:

The offer to the Federal Emergency Management Agency sounded promising: A Silicon Valley engineer said that he could deliver thousands of ventilators from manufacturers across China to help hospitals treat coronavirus patients.

The engineer was asked for more details. Within 12 hours, he responded with a 28-page digital catalog of medical supplies at his disposal, including protective masks and goggles.

But there were also a series of caveats: Interested buyers had to sign a contract within four hours of receiving a quote and pay the entirety of the order upfront. “Nonnegotiable,” the catalog said. And the engineer, Yaron Oren-Pines, had no apparent background in procuring medical equipment.

Federal officials passed on the vendor’s information to senior officials in New York and, within days, the state struck a deal to buy 1,450 ventilators from Mr. Oren-Pines for $86 million, one of the largest contracts for medical supplies since the outbreak.

The deal, however, began to unravel as quickly as it had come together.

In a matter of days, a bank had frozen funds that the state had wired to Mr. Oren-Pines because it found a transaction from his account suspicious. State officials were then warned by Mr. Oren-Pines and his business partners of possible shipping complications and were told that the ventilators might have to be routed through Israel, where they said they had connections.

Before long, Mr. Oren-Pines and his partners began accusing the state of breach of contract. State officials later tried to send inspectors to confirm the stockpile in China; that effort was unsuccessful, and the contract was terminated.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said that the contract was canceled because the state’s hospitalization rate fell far short of projections, and New York’s need for ventilators lessened, diminishing the urgency to proceed with a contract mired in complications.

But interviews with state and federal officials, as well as emails obtained by The New York Times, underscore how the challenges of a pandemic may have clouded a decision that placed millions of taxpayer dollars at risk.

The voided contract illustrated the desperate measures New York took at the height of the pandemic to procure precious medical equipment, as officials scrambled to find as many of the 40,000 ventilators that the state believed it needed to stave off a catastrophe. As the state scoured the globe for supplies, it eschewed competitive bidding protocols to expedite acquisitions and resorted to vendors that had never done business with the state.

You know there are dozens if not hundreds of such examples. I know it’s hard to avoid wasting money in these situations. But the Trump administration was already corrupt to the core and you can imagine con-men and crooked dealers knowing kindred spirits when they see one. They were primed to take advantage.

It wasn’t up there with telling doctors he wanted them to investigate the possibility of injecting bleach to clean the lungs, but it was really something.

When asked about whether he should have worn a mask when meeting with the 90+ year olds who were at the ceremony celebrating the 75th anniversary of victory in Europe in WWII , this is what Trump said:

“I would have loved to have gone up and hugged them because they are great. I had a conversation with every one, but we were very far away. You saw. Plus the wind was blowing so hard in such a direction that if the plague ever reached them, I’d be very surprised.

It could have reached me, too. You didn’t worry about me, you only worried about them…

and that’s OK because I think they’re so pure, it will never happen. Alright? They’ve lived a great life. 

But no, the wind was howling. And I didn’t see anybody with masks, I don’t know, maybe there were. But they were great.”

He actually whined that the press worried about the 90 year old veterans he potentially exposed rather than him.

And then he engaged in the most daft magical thinking anyone’s ever seen, saying these elderly veterans are too “pure” to get the disease. And anyway, they’ve lived a great life (or maybe they can’t get the virus because they’ve lived a great life?) Whatever the case, the fact that no one at the ceremony wore masks on the day we found out that the virus is spreading through the White House like wildfire … well, that’s why we are going to end up having the worst response to the virus on the planet.

This is crazy talk. And I think his brain will explode if he gets it. He clearly believes that he’s immune because he’s … him. It’s nuts.

Here’s a little update:

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 42.9 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 52.4 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -9.5 points). At this time last week, 43.4 percent approved and 52.6 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -9.2 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 45.8 percent and a disapproval rating of 49.7 percent, for a net approval rating of -3.9 points.

But don’t get too excited. The state by state battleground polls are close:

This data highlights a few things. First, at least at the moment, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are very close to the national tipping point — so they’re likely to be among the more determinative states this November. Second, the former vice president’s lead nationally is big enough to carry these states. This is important — if Biden wins all of the states Hillary Clinton won in 2016 plus any combination of three of these four, he would be elected president.

But crucially, Biden’s margins in these states are slightly smaller than his advantage in national polls. It’s worth thinking about the race at the state level in these relative terms because there’s still so much time for things to shift. If Biden’s lead nationally narrowed to 2 to 3 percentage points, these states would likely be much closer, if not lean toward Trump. Also, as The New York Times’ Nate Cohn wrote recently, Trump is likely to look stronger when pollsters start limiting their results to “likely voters.” Most of the April surveys in these four states were conducted among registered voters or all adults, two groups that include some people who may not vote in November.⁴

In other words, this data suggests Trump may have an Electoral College advantage again — he could lose the popular vote and win the election. Of course, this data also suggests that if Biden is winning overall by a margin similar to his advantage now, Trump’s potential Electoral College edge really won’t matter.

And here’s a look at just the states that polled in April. Who knows how meaningful any of that is:

Just remember. If it’s close they’ll steal it in the electoral college. They’ve squeaked through twice in the last 20 years that way . Don’t think for a moment they won’t do it. So, the Democrats and the Biden campaign cannot sleep on any of this.

This New York Times report about the whistleblower complaint by vaccine expert Dr. Bright is just … unbelievable:

The call in early February from the White House Situation Room came as a surprise to Rick Bright: Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, wanted him to come present his ideas for fighting the coronavirus, alone.

Dr. Bright, whose tiny federal research agency was pursuing a coronavirus vaccine, had long been at odds with his boss at the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Kadlec. His White House visits, twice in a single weekend, only exacerbated those tensions. “Weekend at Peter’s,” Dr. Kadlec quipped in the subject line of an email that expressed his displeasure.

The hostility between these two key officials in the government’s response to a pandemic that has claimed more than 75,000 American lives burst into public view Tuesday when Dr. Bright — who was abruptly dismissed last month as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — filed a formal whistle-blower complaint. The document accuses Dr. Kadlec and other top administration officials of “cronyism” and putting politics ahead of science.

Whether or not the charges are ultimately proven, the 89-page complaint along with other documents and interviews expose troubling infighting at the Health and Human Services Department, the sprawling agency that includes BARDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and other arms of government, as officials there struggled to combat the worst public health crisis in a century.

“BARDA is the front edge of the global response, in terms of organizing the financing, laying down the bets on what’s coming forward as the options on vaccines and therapies,” said J. Stephen Morrison, a global health expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adding that the infighting had consequences. “They need to move with incredible skill and judgment and speed.”

The internal clashes extend beyond Drs. Bright and Kadlec. Fierce battles have erupted between Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, and Seema Verma, the Medicare and Medicaid administrator. Mr. Azar has also clashed with a senior White House policymaker, Joe Grogan.

But the consequences of such clashes were vividly brought to life by Dr. Bright’s complaint. Email messages show that, as early as January, when President Trump was saying the outbreak was “totally under control,” Dr. Bright was pressing for the government to stock up on masks and drugs and to commence a “Manhattan Project” effort to develop a vaccine.

But Dr. Bright was largely sidelined by personal disputes with Mr. Kadlec and his aides, some of which long predated the coronavirus, the documents suggest. By the time the pandemic arrived in force, the relationship between them had become toxic, with Dr. Bright increasingly left out of key decisions. His ideas about battling the threat “were met with skepticism,” the complaint says, “and were clearly not welcome.”

[…]

Dr. Bright’s allies say he was viewed with suspicion in the Trump administration as an “Obama holdover.” One of his earliest clashes with Dr. Kadlec centered on a long-running contract BARDA had with a small biotechnology company and a consultant who, Dr. Bright said, invoked Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, in an apparent effort to salvage that contract.

The company, Aeolus Pharmaceuticals, was developing a drug to treat the effects of radiation from a potential nuclear attack when BARDA employees decided not to extend the contract in early 2017.

John L. McManus, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview that the decision was based on a flawed process, and appealed it directly to Dr. Bright. In August 2017, Dr. Bright’s complaint says, John M. Clerici, a consultant and Aeolus board member who is close to Dr. Kadlec, pleaded the company’s case to Dr. Bright over coffee and emphasized that Mr. McManus was “friends with Jared” and “has Hollywood connections.”

The article goes on to report several instances, going back before COVID, of corrupt practices, specifically trying to promote Jared’s buddies. Currying favor with the Prince is obviously one of the paths to promotion in the Trump White House.

Let’s just say that science and public health and even fiscal responsibility weren’t criteria that the brown-nosing Trump sycophants took into consideration before awarding massive sums to friends of Jared.

The relationship between Dr. Bright and Dr. Kadlec broke last month when Dr. Bright objected to the widespread use of a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, that Mr. Trump had promoted as a treatment for Covid-19, and then leaked emails on the subject to a Reuters journalist.

Dr. Bright began sounding alarms on coronavirus within weeks of its emergence in January, expressing a sense of urgency that he felt his superiors and the president did not share. On Jan. 18, the complaint said, he pushed Dr. Kadlec to convene high-level meetings about the virus, but Dr. Kadlec “initially rejected” the request.

Dr. Bright had been in contact with Mike Bowen, an executive at Prestige Ameritech, a mask manufacturer, who had been warning for years that the United States was too dependent on China for its mask supply.

Mr. Bowen, who in an interview called Dr. Bright a “great public servant who didn’t have the authority to do anything,” told Dr. Bright on Feb. 5 that a “Trump insider” had heard his pleas.

“Please ask your associates to convey the gravity of this national security issue to the White House,” Mr. Bowen wrote, two days before Mr. Navarro invited Dr. Bright to meet with him at the White House. “I’m pretty sure you’ll get the chance.”

It’s the combination of ineptitude and corruption that’s killing us.

Timothy Egan in the New York Times:

“The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times. And he asked: “Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode?”

Before we take up O’Toole’s question, let’s look at where we rank in the worst global crisis since World War II. In Trump’s assessment, his government has done a “spectacular job” with the Covid-19 pandemic.

“And I’ll tell you, the whole world is excited watching us because we’re leading the world,” he said, in an updated pat on the back this week.

He’s right about the leading part: Every 49 seconds or so, throughout the first week in May, an American has been dying of this disease. With 1.3 million reported cases, the United States, just five percent of the world’s population, has nearly 33 percent of the sick. With more than 75,000 deaths, we’re at the front of the pack as well. No country comes close on all three measures.

Globally, the average death rate is 34 people per million residents. In the United States, it’s more than six times higher — 232 per million.

South Korea and the United States both reported their first cases of Covid-19 at the same time, in the third week of January. South Korea immediately started testing on a mass scale and socially isolating. The United States denied, dithered and did next to nothing for more than two months.

By the end of April, new cases in South Korea were down to less than 10 a day. In the United States at that time, the pandemic raged at a daily rate of more than 25,000 newly sick. New Zealand, which also quickly went into lockdown, reported no new cases earlier this week for the first time since mid-March.

“The United States reacted like Pakistan or Belarus, like a country with a shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” That’s the indictment of The Atlantic’s George Packer, calling the United States a failed state.

He’s half right. As scientists note, you can’t stop an outbreak from happening, but you can stop it from becoming a catastrophe that brings down a society. The United States spends more on health care, per capita, than any other rich nation. And yet, here we are: a full-blown disaster, in lockdown with a narcissist for a president.

A country that turned out eight combat aircraft every hour at the peak of World War II could not even produce enough 75-cent masks or simple cotton nasal swabs for testing in this pandemic.

A country that showed the world how to defeat polio now promotes quack remedies involving household disinfectants from the presidential podium.

A country that rescued postwar Europe with the Marshall Plan didn’t even bother to show up this week at the teleconference of global leaders pledging contributions for a coronavirus vaccine.

A country that sent George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower to crush the Nazis now fights a war against a viral killer with Jared Kushner, a feckless failed real estate speculator who holds power by virtue of his marriage to the president’s daughter.

Let’s not put too much of the blame on Kushner. After all, he’s also got Middle East peace, the border wall, the opioid crisis and reinventing the government on his plate. “Who’s in charge of it?” Trump said recently, about the “Warp Speed” vaccine development program. “Honestly? I am. I’ll tell you, I’m really in charge of it.”

Well, then: Where is the test and trace program needed to safely reopen the country? Where is the national plan even to consider such an effort? Trump has surrendered. He never looked smaller or more pathetic than when sitting last Sunday on his little chair in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

America has a failed federal government, laughed at and pitied the world over. But America is not a failed state. It will be saved by its scientists and doctors, its hospitals and universities, its nimble and creative companies, and leaders in the statehouses who act more decisively than the family of frauds in the White House.

Perhaps it is best to let the coronavirus task force die a miserable death. It’s mostly show and ego projection.

As to the Irishman’s question: Will American prestige ever recover? Not for some time. Our image abroad took a real hit after Trump’s election, and it has continued to fall. Most of the world now has no confidence in the president’s leadership.

But then, the same is true with most Americans. Welcome to our nightmare.

The pandemic has laid bare the moral chaos at the heart of modern conservative politics. They depend, always, on the existence and/or the creation of what epidemiologists call “subject populations.” Except, in this case, the subject populations always are considered in many ways expendable. It’s about ignoring all the right people. Immiserating all the right people. And now, again, as was the case in the 1980s, when AIDS was burning through the subject populations, killing all the right people. — Charlie Pierce, ESQ Politics

Readers once helped track the origins of this expression. There are several variations, but at its pithiest it goes, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” — investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis, circa 1906. Sometimes it’s only three, or four, or just two.

Or in our case, perhaps it is just one president who creates anarchy to avoid punishment for his actions/inactions. 

There are clearly those who think of anarchy as a paradise of freedom. But not freedom from anything or to do anything productive, just freedom.  Freedom as an idol. Freedom as an empty worship word. So much so that they’d spend hundreds of their hard-earned dollars on an inert AT4 rocket launcher or a wooden prop .50-caliber machine gun just so they can walk the streets, look badass, and pretend freedom means the potential to mow down “subject populations” if it strikes their fancy. Hell, yeah!

Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” must be inspirational in such circles, if they read. Or Lord of the Flies (the color version, of course) if they don’t.

Clearly, a fraction of our populace adhere’s to the “x meals between mankind and anarchy” vision of humanity. After all, many of them are raised from childhood on Sunday school lessons of their fellows as creatures of corruption, sons of iniquity (sans leather motorcycle jackets). This bleak vision of mankind, thankfully, does not hold up in the light of science.

As we’ve seen before:

Using simple puppet plays, researchers find that babies and toddlers exhibit a sense of fairness, and a preference for “helping” characters. They avoid “hindering” ones.

Unfortunately, these impulses are strongest among members of one’s own family or in-group. Still, in studying Turkana Boy, paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey concluded:

Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.

Which is what we see in the doctors and nurses risking their lives daily to save strangers infected with COVID-19.

Rutger Bregman provides a real “Lord of the Flies” tale that better reflects human nature than Golding’s work of fiction. Six shipwrecked Tongan boys rescued in 1966 by Captain Peter Warner after 15 months on a remote Pacific island did not revert to behaving as animals. They retained their humanity. Indeed, they deepened it:

These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

Go, and do thou likewise, Jesus said.

Bregman concludes:

It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

Update: Brigman has more in this tweet thread.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Trump has a problem with a vital part of his base:

The coronavirus crisis and the administration’s halting response to it have cost President Trump support from one of his most crucial constituencies: America’s seniors.

For years, Republicans and Mr. Trump have relied on older Americans, the country’s largest voting bloc, to offset a huge advantage Democrats enjoy with younger voters. In critical states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, all of which have large older populations, Mr. Trump’s advantage with older voters has been essential to his political success; in 2016, he won voters over the age of 65 by seven percentage points, according to national exit poll data.

But seniors are also the most vulnerable to the global pandemic, and the campaign’s internal polls, people familiar with the numbers said, show Mr. Trump’s support among voters over the age of 65 softening to a concerning degree, as he pushes to reopen the country’s economy at the expense of stopping a virus that puts them at the greatest risk.

A recent Morning Consult poll found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating on the handling of the coronavirus was lower with seniors than with any other group other than young voters. And Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, in recent polls held a 10-point advantage over Mr. Trump among voters who are 65 and older. A poll commissioned by the campaign showed a similar double-digit gap.

The falloff in support comes as Mr. Trump has grown increasingly anxious about his re-election prospects, with a series of national surveys, as well as internal polling, showing him trailing in key states. The president has all but moved on from a focus on controlling the pandemic and is now pushing his agenda to restore the country, and the economy, to a place that will lift his campaign.

“Trump has suffered a double whammy with seniors from the coronavirus crisis, both in terms of a dislike for his personal demeanor and disapproval of his policy priorities,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist. “If there’s a durable change with older voters, it could well cost Trump the election.”

The demographic shift is fairly new, and officials said they attributed it at least in part to Mr. Trump’s coronavirus briefings, at which he often dispensed conflicting, misleading and sometimes dangerous information that caused alarm among a vulnerable population. At the same point in the race four years ago, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, trailed Mr. Trump by five points with the same group.

Among the aides who have warned the president of a softening with older voters is Kellyanne Conway, his 2016 campaign manager and a senior adviser, people familiar with the discussions said. White House officials aware of the problem have started to stage events and initiatives designed to highlight work the administration has done that will appeal to seniors.

Standing in the ornate East Room at the White House earlier this month, for instance, Mr. Trump surrounded himself with health officials as he signed a proclamation declaring May to be “Older Americans Month.”

Yeah, I don’t think that smarmy, paternalistic crapola is going to help. All of his “we must protect our precious elders over 60” is pretty much telling them they’ll have to imprison themselves for years — possibly their whole lives — and I’d guess a lot of them aren’t particularly impressed. At least a few apparently don’t have the minds of children. They tend to be very hooked into the medical system and their real doctors, as opposed to Doctor Trump and his team of epidemiologists Dr Oz, Dr Hannity and Dr Ingraham, are no doubt telling them the real facts.

I can’t answer for why any of them supported him in the first place. It’s beyond me. But now that their lives are at stake a few seem to have sobered up. They’d like to be able to leave their houses again before they die. And it’s pretty clear that Trump’s ignorance and incompetence has made that less likely. He’s made it very, very clear that he values his “great economy” more than he values their lives.

I guess owning the libs isn’t always what its cracked up to be.

Oh, and by the way. He’s killing his own voters as well:

An academic journal projects that deaths of 65-and-older Republican voters in several swing states will far exceed those of Democrats.

You may have heard that Donald Trump Jr. is part of an investments group that’s in negotiations to buy an interest in One American News Network, the cable channel touted by Trump as the best source of non-fake news. The story has been disputed but there’s been a lot of chatter about this ever since 2016 when it was erroneously assumed that Trump would lose the election and immediately launch a new media empire.

OAN serves as the most bizarre, Orwellian media outlet in the country,second only to Alex Jones and Infowars. But they are totally devoted to Trump and have received White House access and a re promoted regularly by the president.

Check this out:

Some examples of Trump promoting these loons:

You will notice one outlier there …

That’s right. It’s the mos technologically advance country in the world — the country that sent humans to the moon and brought them back 40 years ago.

We are now incapable of doing anything right.