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solarbirdI have no idea why I'm bothering to do this anymore.
The biggest news - the most critical news - of this presidency is that, according to Vanity Fair...
Jared Kushner and the Trump administration specifically scrapped a national coronavirus testing strategy, one that Kushner's task force had put together, and which, according to Vanity Fair was basically competent...
...because Democratic states were the ones being hit hard, and so, it would be politically useful to let the pandemic rage on, killing more people in blue states, so they could blame the governors of Democratic states for the deaths.
This is mass murder for political purposes, targeted against a politically-aligned populace. It is definitionally genocide. Okay? That's what this is.
(It's the second time in my life me and mine have been targeted for death by a Republican-controlled Federal government. The first one was AIDS. The second one is this.)
Genocide, comma, attempted.
And yet, absolutely no one is reacting.
Nobody seems to be giving a single. flying. fuck. If they are, I'm not seeing it.
Not even the people targeted. Apparently.
I literally do not understand why the White House isn't burning at this moment. I literally do not understand why this isn't an active shooting civil war because it sure as fuck is an active civil war right the fuck now whether you want to admit it or not.
There is no worse political news than this short of street assassinations. There is no worse news than this short of new, larger concentration camps, this time for Democrats - which is what a decent number of Trump supporters want.
But by then, it's well and fucking firmly too late.
And here I am on Facebook, and Twitter, and other places, screaming my head off as always, and I am literally the only person that I see talking about this.
And I no longer see any reason to keep at it.
You see, I started doing news and intel/opposition research work decades ago because it was something I was pretty good at doing. And for a while, it was effective. I helped shatter a couple of fundamentalist activist groups pushing gay-criminalisation initiatives across multiple states, because at that point, when people found out what was going on, they'd react. A lot of them would go "yeah it's not really true" or "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" or some other variant and do nothing, sure. But others - enough - would go "holy shit this is bad we've got to tell EVERYONE this" and people would, you know...
...react. And I'd give them tools. I'd build the weapons - the information weapons - they could use, and targets would fall.
Now, here, we have this.
Tens of thousands - soon to be hundreds of thousands - of deaths, mostly preventable, entirely necessary, because...
...the fascist Republicans in power thought it would mostly kill Democrats, and that was just good politics as far as they were concerned.
Democrats? Blue states?
Fuck 'em. Let 'em die. In fact, make it worse. Then blame 'em for it.
According to Vanity Fair, that was the plan. They supposedly have paper to back this up.
And yet nothing. is. happening.
Trump, Kushner, and almost certainly Pence should be under arrest at this very moment. Everyone involved in this, if it happened, also should be under arrest at this very moment. We should be swearing in President Pelosi to head a caretaker government until the November elections. Those implicated should be tried, and, if found guilty, executed.
Barring that, the White House should most certainly be on fire.
And yet...
Even this isn't enough.
And now I know literally nothing is.
I've been trying to figure out how to get people to organise some sort of general strike if (when) Trump tries to override or ignore the election results. Christ knows I can't do it, I'm not capable of putting together a following. I don't trigger the empathy reaction in general, which makes me the worst possible candidate for political leadership positions, so it can't be me. But I've been able to get the data, get the information, weaponise it, get to people who are competent to do it and can stir people to action.
In the past, at least.
But not anymore. Nothing will do it. If Trump voids the election, if Trump delays the election, whatever, he'll get away with it, because people will do
fucking
nothing
about it.
So I guess at this point all I'm doing is wanking in a void.
Time to figure out something else to do, I guess.
And now, the only news that matters.
----- 1 -----
Jared Kushner scrapped national coronavirus strategy in political move to blame governors of Democrat states hit hardest, report claims
'It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision-maker as to what [plan] was going to come out', public health expert says
Justin Vallejo
30 July 2020
Vanity Fair
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jared-kushner-coronavirus-strategy-democrat-governors-a9648831.html
A national coronavirus strategy developed by a second taskforce led by Jared Kushner was shelved to score political points against Democrat governors, according to new reports in Vanity Fair.
In March, Mr Kushner was appointed to the taskforce, separate from the White House's official group led by Mike Pence, to develop a nationwide testing and supply plan.
Quoting an unnamed public-health expert in frequent contact with the taskforce, Vanity Fair reported that a member of Mr Kushner's team suggested a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically because the virus had hit blue states hardest.
Download the new Independent Premium app
Sharing the full story, not just the headlines
"The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," the expert said.
"It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision-maker as to what [plan] was going to come out."
The national plan to accelerate testing and supply, which Vanity Fair says it has a copy of, was never used.
Instead, Donald Trump announced a plan that would see the federal government act as a facilitator while state governments led operations for supplying and conducting testing efforts.
[As always, story continues at link]
----- 2 -----
How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
This spring, a team working under the president's son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?
By Katherine Eban
July 30, 2020
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air
On March 31, three weeks after the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, a DHL truck rattled up to the gray stone embassy of the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., delivering precious cargo: 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests for COVID-19, ordered at the behest of the Trump administration.
Normally, federal government purchases come with detailed contracts, replete with acronyms and identifying codes. They require sign-off from an authorized contract officer and are typically made public in a U.S. government procurement database, under a system intended as a hedge against waste, fraud, and abuse.
This purchase did not appear in any government database. Nor was there any contract officer involved. Instead, it was documented in an invoice obtained by Vanity Fair, from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions (its own name misspelled as “Tecnology” on the bill), which noted a total order of 3.5 million tests for an amount owed of $52 million. The “client name” simply noted “WH.”
Over the next three months, the tests’ mysterious provenance would spark confusion and finger-pointing. An Abu Dhabi–based artificial intelligence company, Group 42, with close ties to the UAE’s ruling family, identified itself as the seller of 3.5 million tests and demanded payment. Its requests were routed through various divisions within Health and Human Services, whose lawyers sought in vain for a bona fide contracting officer.
...
TEAM JARED
The secret, and legally dubious, acquisition of those test kits was the work of a task force at the White House, where Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, has assumed a sprawling role in the pandemic response. That explains the “WH” on the invoice. While it’s unclear whether Kushner himself played a role in the acquisition, improper procurement of supplies “is a serious deal,” said a former White House staffer. “That is appropriations 101. That would be not good.”
Though Kushner’s outsized role has been widely reported, the procurement of Chinese-made test kits is being disclosed here for the first time. So is an even more extraordinary effort that Kushner oversaw: a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level.
Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control.
Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group—working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp—emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.
Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.
The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science—or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”
...
AN ABORTED PLAN
Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article.
Kushner’s brain trust included Adam Boehler, his summer college roommate who now serves as chief executive officer of the newly created U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government development bank that makes loans overseas. Other group members included Nat Turner, the cofounder and CEO of Flatiron Health, which works to improve cancer treatment and research.
A Morgan Stanley banker with no notable health care experience, Jason Yeung took a leave of absence to join the task force. Along the way, the group reached out for advice to billionaires, such as Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.
The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace.
...
But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.
In her statement, McEnany said, “The article is completely incorrect in its assertion that any plan was stopped for political or other reasons. Our testing strategy has one goal in mind—delivering for the American people—and is being executed and modified daily to incorporate new facts on the ground.”
[As always, story continues at link]
The biggest news - the most critical news - of this presidency is that, according to Vanity Fair...
Jared Kushner and the Trump administration specifically scrapped a national coronavirus testing strategy, one that Kushner's task force had put together, and which, according to Vanity Fair was basically competent...
...because Democratic states were the ones being hit hard, and so, it would be politically useful to let the pandemic rage on, killing more people in blue states, so they could blame the governors of Democratic states for the deaths.
This is mass murder for political purposes, targeted against a politically-aligned populace. It is definitionally genocide. Okay? That's what this is.
(It's the second time in my life me and mine have been targeted for death by a Republican-controlled Federal government. The first one was AIDS. The second one is this.)
Genocide, comma, attempted.
And yet, absolutely no one is reacting.
Nobody seems to be giving a single. flying. fuck. If they are, I'm not seeing it.
Not even the people targeted. Apparently.
I literally do not understand why the White House isn't burning at this moment. I literally do not understand why this isn't an active shooting civil war because it sure as fuck is an active civil war right the fuck now whether you want to admit it or not.
There is no worse political news than this short of street assassinations. There is no worse news than this short of new, larger concentration camps, this time for Democrats - which is what a decent number of Trump supporters want.
But by then, it's well and fucking firmly too late.
And here I am on Facebook, and Twitter, and other places, screaming my head off as always, and I am literally the only person that I see talking about this.
And I no longer see any reason to keep at it.
You see, I started doing news and intel/opposition research work decades ago because it was something I was pretty good at doing. And for a while, it was effective. I helped shatter a couple of fundamentalist activist groups pushing gay-criminalisation initiatives across multiple states, because at that point, when people found out what was going on, they'd react. A lot of them would go "yeah it's not really true" or "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" or some other variant and do nothing, sure. But others - enough - would go "holy shit this is bad we've got to tell EVERYONE this" and people would, you know...
...react. And I'd give them tools. I'd build the weapons - the information weapons - they could use, and targets would fall.
Now, here, we have this.
Tens of thousands - soon to be hundreds of thousands - of deaths, mostly preventable, entirely necessary, because...
...the fascist Republicans in power thought it would mostly kill Democrats, and that was just good politics as far as they were concerned.
Democrats? Blue states?
Fuck 'em. Let 'em die. In fact, make it worse. Then blame 'em for it.
According to Vanity Fair, that was the plan. They supposedly have paper to back this up.
And yet nothing. is. happening.
Trump, Kushner, and almost certainly Pence should be under arrest at this very moment. Everyone involved in this, if it happened, also should be under arrest at this very moment. We should be swearing in President Pelosi to head a caretaker government until the November elections. Those implicated should be tried, and, if found guilty, executed.
Barring that, the White House should most certainly be on fire.
And yet...
Even this isn't enough.
And now I know literally nothing is.
I've been trying to figure out how to get people to organise some sort of general strike if (when) Trump tries to override or ignore the election results. Christ knows I can't do it, I'm not capable of putting together a following. I don't trigger the empathy reaction in general, which makes me the worst possible candidate for political leadership positions, so it can't be me. But I've been able to get the data, get the information, weaponise it, get to people who are competent to do it and can stir people to action.
In the past, at least.
But not anymore. Nothing will do it. If Trump voids the election, if Trump delays the election, whatever, he'll get away with it, because people will do
fucking
nothing
about it.
So I guess at this point all I'm doing is wanking in a void.
Time to figure out something else to do, I guess.
And now, the only news that matters.
- Jared Kushner scrapped national coronavirus strategy in political move to blame governors of Democrat states hit hardest, report claims
- How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
----- 1 -----
Jared Kushner scrapped national coronavirus strategy in political move to blame governors of Democrat states hit hardest, report claims
'It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision-maker as to what [plan] was going to come out', public health expert says
Justin Vallejo
30 July 2020
Vanity Fair
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jared-kushner-coronavirus-strategy-democrat-governors-a9648831.html
A national coronavirus strategy developed by a second taskforce led by Jared Kushner was shelved to score political points against Democrat governors, according to new reports in Vanity Fair.
In March, Mr Kushner was appointed to the taskforce, separate from the White House's official group led by Mike Pence, to develop a nationwide testing and supply plan.
Quoting an unnamed public-health expert in frequent contact with the taskforce, Vanity Fair reported that a member of Mr Kushner's team suggested a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically because the virus had hit blue states hardest.
Download the new Independent Premium app
Sharing the full story, not just the headlines
"The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," the expert said.
"It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision-maker as to what [plan] was going to come out."
The national plan to accelerate testing and supply, which Vanity Fair says it has a copy of, was never used.
Instead, Donald Trump announced a plan that would see the federal government act as a facilitator while state governments led operations for supplying and conducting testing efforts.
[As always, story continues at link]
----- 2 -----
How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
This spring, a team working under the president's son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?
By Katherine Eban
July 30, 2020
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air
On March 31, three weeks after the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, a DHL truck rattled up to the gray stone embassy of the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., delivering precious cargo: 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests for COVID-19, ordered at the behest of the Trump administration.
Normally, federal government purchases come with detailed contracts, replete with acronyms and identifying codes. They require sign-off from an authorized contract officer and are typically made public in a U.S. government procurement database, under a system intended as a hedge against waste, fraud, and abuse.
This purchase did not appear in any government database. Nor was there any contract officer involved. Instead, it was documented in an invoice obtained by Vanity Fair, from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions (its own name misspelled as “Tecnology” on the bill), which noted a total order of 3.5 million tests for an amount owed of $52 million. The “client name” simply noted “WH.”
Over the next three months, the tests’ mysterious provenance would spark confusion and finger-pointing. An Abu Dhabi–based artificial intelligence company, Group 42, with close ties to the UAE’s ruling family, identified itself as the seller of 3.5 million tests and demanded payment. Its requests were routed through various divisions within Health and Human Services, whose lawyers sought in vain for a bona fide contracting officer.
...
TEAM JARED
The secret, and legally dubious, acquisition of those test kits was the work of a task force at the White House, where Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, has assumed a sprawling role in the pandemic response. That explains the “WH” on the invoice. While it’s unclear whether Kushner himself played a role in the acquisition, improper procurement of supplies “is a serious deal,” said a former White House staffer. “That is appropriations 101. That would be not good.”
Though Kushner’s outsized role has been widely reported, the procurement of Chinese-made test kits is being disclosed here for the first time. So is an even more extraordinary effort that Kushner oversaw: a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level.
Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control.
Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group—working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp—emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.
Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.
The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science—or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”
...
AN ABORTED PLAN
Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article.
Kushner’s brain trust included Adam Boehler, his summer college roommate who now serves as chief executive officer of the newly created U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government development bank that makes loans overseas. Other group members included Nat Turner, the cofounder and CEO of Flatiron Health, which works to improve cancer treatment and research.
A Morgan Stanley banker with no notable health care experience, Jason Yeung took a leave of absence to join the task force. Along the way, the group reached out for advice to billionaires, such as Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.
The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace.
...
But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.
In her statement, McEnany said, “The article is completely incorrect in its assertion that any plan was stopped for political or other reasons. Our testing strategy has one goal in mind—delivering for the American people—and is being executed and modified daily to incorporate new facts on the ground.”
[As always, story continues at link]
no subject
Date: 2020-08-01 10:43 pm (UTC)So it's not news to me.
I don't see much what to do about it, though. Most people are still assuming that no one would do that, that's unthinkable! to the point where they write us off as paranoid and crazy if we try to tell them the conclusion. And even smart people I know tend not to have the attention span or emotional stamina to be led step by step to the conclusion.
So I'm with you, but I don't know what we can do.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-01 11:01 pm (UTC)Thank you for doing this.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-02 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-02 05:49 pm (UTC)Our current most pressing scandal in Canada involved no illegal activity, no cost to the taxpayer, and no deaths. And technically wasn't even unethical.
The problem the US has is that of a cow equidistant between an infinite number of piles of hay, starving because it cannot choose which one to move towards first. The sheer volume of incidents overwhelms the public, leading to paralysis.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-02 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-05 07:12 pm (UTC)Disgusting. Predictable (given an administration with absolute lack of empathy). Making us all look ahead at what actions can be taken now and in the months to come.