There’s a lot of confusion as the country struggles to meet overwhelming demand for N95 masks and other much-needed pieces of protective medical gear.
An aside, but I can’t get over how much these kinds of masks look like Melita-style mini coffee filters, making me wonder if some of them aren’t actually coffee filters with straps and metal strips tacked on being sold as masks. It’s actually what I would use if I didn’t have actual masks, but that’s not the point.
I’ll admit I get a little angry and my relationship with capitalism gets a little more shaky every time I hear that states are “paying a premium” for medical supplies. I get supply and demand. It doesn’t work well in this situation.
Corporations have recognized that gov’ts made a massive mistake in neglecting a national or state level stock of emergency supplies. These corporations also understand the politics of the situation. These politicians are desperate to save their behinds by coming up with the necessary supplies on short notice. Price is of no concern.
In fact, trump has encouraged this feeding frenzy by telling the states to get their own supplies. These states compete against each other and the feds. And these companies laugh and set the “price that the market will bear!” This is stupid. There should be a central staging point, a national distribution strategy based on need, not politics. The price gets set. Regulated. Strictly. Clutch whatever pearls need to be clutched, but too damn bad. Gouging during a pandemic is vile.
The guy is detrimental to the the health and wellbeing of citizens of the United States.
Shhh!
Trump is indeed a threat to the health & well being of not just the people of the United States, but the people of the entire world.
“What’s ours is ours. What’s yours is ours.”
— Jared “Full Metal Jackass” Kushner
With any other administration, there would be little reason to be concerned about redistribution by the feds. But we know priority Has been will continue to be given to red and purple states.
All that allocating based on need would have been great 3-4 weeks ago.
Was it Asa Hutchinson that mocked Cuomo about sending NYC AR’s ventilators, and Cuoma promising to send then on to the next hot spot?
And yet all these Republican governors wouldn’t dare have a state stock pile of equipment that they might need in a pandemic because it’s anathema to them to spend money on the public’s health and welfare. I wonder if any Republicans in state where their legislature was still in session tried to pass a tax cut to businesses at the beginning of the outbreak?
As a low and suspicious type, I’m thinking that all these confiscations are going directly to the federal, er, Kushner’s personal shit, stockpile. I’ve not seen anything in the news that would suggest that the feds are redistributing anything based on need.
The disease is a failure to prepare and seizing medical equipment after the fact is just a symptom of it. We can argue the right or wrong of the seizures but no one can say they would be be necessary if the US Government took it’s role as a servant of its people seriously. That fact is yes we could have predicted a world wide contagion. If not where did the story behind “Outbreak”, “Contagion” and “the Walking Dead” come from? The concept, although in fiction until this, was out there. It was imaginable.
Seizing private property is UNAMERICAN. Unacceptable, Tyrannical.
A lot of things are un-American but they happen in America every day. America has never been American. That’s its problem.
Is there a good opportunity to launder money in a scheme like this? Like, bill a company for a million dollars worth of masks, get it seized by the feds who then have to pay for it? 1000 dollars per mask.
Follow the money. You will find conservative Robert Hyde, Iwanker and Cuck Kushner siphoning the trillion dollar bailout to their personal account and the Trump Organization. Why do you think Iwanker and then her pet jackass Cuck Kushner were brought in to oversee the pandemic, why do you think the Inspector General was fired? There is enough in the trillions for all the pigs and vultures on the planet to gorge on, but the skanky Trumps want it all.
Well, since no one is doing oversight, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Trump ordered the interdiction so he could make money off of it.
There hasn’t been a grift invented that he doesn’t know about.
Just making sure we’re all well-grounded and don’t have to endure the drip, drip, drip of this brewing crisis. No half and half measures here.
Legally speaking can the Federal government seize said products, then prioritize and sell them at a premium? If so, is the federal government in the business of making money off of a disaster? If so, where is that in the US constitution? What cases have been brought in the past that represents the pseudo landscape we find ourselves in? Teapot dome scandal? Is it any surprise that the Trump family and private business would have a stake in the company that sells this “miracle” malaria drug? Who get’s blamed for the run on the medicine, its obvious price gouging, and then the secondary effects on the patients who already were on the drug for medical reasons? Does this administration and it’s congressional allies have no sense of responsibility? Does the 35% voting citizens of America openly support this type of corruption in their lives?
In a pandemic where people are dying and frontline folk from MD’s to janitors cannot get whgat they need…if the feds seize a shipment then it is incumbent on them to get the supplies where the fuck they need to be for free. They should not be given to middle men so hospitals can be price gouged. If the feds are complicit in price gouging then somebody needs to be in fucking jail.
Health care workers are calling Covid-19 The Beast.
It may be impossible to uncouple The Beast from The Orange Beast, the one who squats in our White House and exudes his corruption, bile and sewage day after day after day.
I pray there is an end to The Beast, Covid-19.
I hope we are delivered from the evil of The Orange Beast.