Wednesday, April 8, 2020
AMID CRITICAL SUPPLY SHORTAGE, FEMA IS SPENDING MILLIONS TO PROTECT TRUMP PROPERTIES
Alex Emmons
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/04/coronavirus-fema-trump-properties/
THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY has provided less than 10 percent of the N95 masks requested by officials in five states and the District of Columbia, according to documents released Thursday by the House Oversight Committee. FEMA also told the committee that the Strategic National Stockpile had only 9,500 remaining ventilators — far short of what will likely be needed to treat a growing number of coronavirus patients.
Although federal officials have known of the shortages for months, they have not been remedied. Yet every year since 2017, Congress has directed FEMA to set aside $41 million of its budget to offset the extraordinary costs of providing security for President Donald Trump’s properties. The “Presidential Residence Assistant Protection Grants” were most recently funded by Congress in an appropriations package in December.
According to memos posted on its website, FEMA has previously identified Trump properties in New York, New Jersey, and Florida as “qualifying residences” and paid out millions of dollars to the New York Police Department and Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, among others. The grant program is limited to reimbursing “operational overtime and backfill overtime” for law enforcement and cannot be used to underwrite salaries or purchase police equipment.
The grant program does not make up a huge part of FEMA’s annual budget or its disaster relief fund, which just received a $45 billion infusion from last month’s stimulus bill. But at a time when every federal dollar counts, some question whether the payout to secure Trump properties is a good use of government resources.
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Tyson Slocum, a program director with the advocacy group Public Citizen, told The Intercept by phone that the program “doesn’t seem to be in line with FEMA’s core objectives” and that he had “a financial conflict of interest concern” about it. Public Citizen recently used public records requests to show how much the Secret Service paid to rent rooms at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
“It’s been well established that President Trump spends an inordinate amount of time at his properties, that he routinely advertises his properties as part of his official duties, and that having this sort of special fund to help offset local security costs is an indirect benefit to the president,” Slocum said. “Allowing reimbursements to those local law enforcement costs could be relieving the Trump businesses of having to provide extra security.”
A former FEMA official who declined to be named for fear of professional reprisal, told The Intercept that the $41 million grant program was created in 2017 to help cover the huge costs of security at Trump’s residences, though it is unclear who in Congress shepherded the language to passage then and in each year since.
The former official pointed out that previous presidents have spent time in private residences — like the vacation home Barack Obama rented on Martha’s Vineyard in 2013, or the private ranch used by George W. Bush while in office — but that neither burdened local law enforcement agencies the way that Trump’s trips to his properties have.
In 2017, for example, a letter from the NYPD to Congress estimated that it had cost the department $24 million to provide security to Trump Tower, the Manhattan property that served as Trump’s headquarters during the transition period between Election Day and his inauguration.
Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus CrisisA FEMA spokesperson told The Intercept by email that the money earmarked for security at Trump properties could not be repurposed due to language in the appropriations bills, which requires that the money be used “exclusively” for “protection activities … directly and demonstrably associated with any residence of the President that is designated or identified to be secured by the US Secret Service.”
FEMA is “evaluating changes in the application processes and grant requirements” as a result of the government’s Covid-19 response efforts, the spokesperson said.
Since 2017, the Trump administration’s budget requests have proposed steep cuts to FEMA’s disaster preparedness grants, drawing condemnation from some experts who claim that they are necessary to prepare for future disasters. Last year, the Trump administration also took more than $150 million from FEMA’s disaster relief fund to pay for immigration enforcement along the southern border.
The Democratic Party Must Harness the Legitimate Rage of Americans. Otherwise, the Right Will Use It With Horrifying Results.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/05/coronavirus-american-politics-democratic-party-biden-sanders/
THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITIES of this moment are different than anything we have ever experienced. We possess a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the United States a more humane country. But if we fail to seize it, we will face mortal danger from the right.
That’s not hyperbole. The anger of Americans, once they figure out what’s being done to them right now, is going to be volcanic. The fallout from 9/11 and the great recession of 2007-2010 will be imperceptible in comparison.
Not long from now, almost everyone will have a family member or friend who died of Covid-19, many of them suffocating in isolation wards with insufficient treatment, perhaps deprived of a ventilator that would have saved their lives. Huge swaths of the country are plummeting into desperate penury, even as they witness large corporations unlock the U.S. Treasury and help themselves to everything inside.
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John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath” describes a similar moment during the Great Depression, when people starved even as orchards of fruit were burned to make the food that remained more profitable: “Men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. … There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. … In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
We’re about to live this again, in more sophisticated ways. Then it was fruit being incinerated so no one could eat it. Now it’s cheap ventilators that were never built because a company called Covidien worried they would compete with their more expensive models. It’s N95 masks that were not available because President Donald Trump delayed invoking the Defense Production Act in order to protect corporate power. It’s tens of thousands of hospital beds being eliminated in New York and New Jersey because the surplus capacity cost money; some of those hospitals were turned into luxury condos. Now, as it was 85 years ago, human beings are being offered as a blood sacrifice to profit. Now as then, the resulting wrath will be towering.
What we know from history is that someone always shows up to harvest this level of ambient rage — but it can go in two directions. If people can be made “angry at the crime,” as Steinbeck wrote, there can be huge positive political changes. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt and unions organized the anger and used it to create the New Deal and the largest middle class in history. In unluckier countries, like Germany, Italy and Japan, the political left failed. The fury was organized by fascists, and directed at innocents.
Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus CrisisIt’s tough to be optimistic that today’s liberals can replicate Roosevelt’s success. The corporate-managerial-legal class that operates the Democratic Party fears anger and sees it as illegitimate as the basis for action. Having beaten back the threat of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presidential candidacies, both fueled by strong populist emotion, they dream of a technocratic politics purified of messy, fickle human feelings.
But the American right specializes in the politics of anger. If the Democrats refuse to harness the legitimate rage of Americans and direct it at those responsible for our predicament, the right will make this anger its own and will win.
To understand the stakes, briefly imagine two possible versions of America one year from today, with two different uses of anger. Let’s start with the anger we need, the kind that clarifies and motivates, and underlies all effective politics.
Blue 2021
The Democratic candidate — likely Joe Biden, but we know anything can happen in U.S. politics — beat Donald Trump going away.
The winning Democrat’s slogan was “Fighting Mad.” And that was the core of his or her campaign — both the unabashedly mad part and the demonstrated willingness to fight based on that anger.
The Democrat began the convention address — either in Milwaukee or from his or her basement with no one within 6 feet — by saying: “I’m running for president because I’m angry. And if you’re angry too, there’s nothing wrong with that. ‘Anger’ comes from an Old Norse word that means ‘sorrow.’ Every single one of us has known sorrow because of the thieves and incompetents who’ve been running this country. If you’re angry, then join me and together we’ll take that trash out to the curb.”
The Democrat told the truth without truckling about who exactly was to blame for what had befallen them. The overall Democratic story could be understood by regular people because it included what every story needs: villains to be angry at, and heroes to root for. And unlike the right’s stories, this story was true.
“We’re all in this together,” the Democrat declared. “And what that means is that the people who’re out for themselves are going to pay the price. When I’m president, we’re going to put all the president’s daily briefs online so everybody can see exactly how Trump screwed us. Politicians who made money off inside information on the coronavirus and profiteers who hoarded medical supplies are going to spend the rest of their lives in jail.”
Mobilized anger at the healthcare industry terrified Congress into passing Medicare for All.
Mobilized anger at the country’s poisoning by Fox News led to a congressional investigation of whether the network had knowingly misled Americans about the dangers of Covid-19. The documentation uncovered became the basis for lawsuits that bankrupted and neutered Fox.
Mobilized anger created a sea change in U.S. culture. The taboo against being honest about the anguish and failure all humans experience was shattered. Suddenly Americans realized they were surrounded by suffering just like their own, and much of it was the fault of political choices, rather than them individually being losers.
The example from the top made an entire young, tragedy-stricken generation see that being a liberal politician can mean being a normal, angry human being instead of a technocrat built in a Stanford lab. Suddenly new potential candidates were showing up from unions and grassroots activists rather than elite law schools.
More than anything else, the liberal embrace of anger in 2021 transformed progressive politics into a movement that was serious about power. If there were no people who were truly dangerous, who were hurting us and rightfully deserved our fury, why bother getting out of bed to get power in the first place? And why wield it to vanquish your foes if we’re all on the same team in the end? Anger finally unlocked a liberal capacity to tell the truth.
Red 2021
Donald Trump was reelected. What stunned the Democrats, CNN, and the New York Times even more than Trump’s victory is that he ran on the slogan “Healing America” — even as voluminous, exquisitely researched media output demonstrated that his catastrophic mismanagement helped the coronavirus kill a million surplus Americans.
Yet it somehow didn’t matter. Trump and the GOP’s mighty Wurlitzer settled on a suite of hazy stories, all of which the party’s base fervently believed even though they were mutually contradictory.
Such as, there had been mass deaths but they were the fault of Hunter Biden’s friends in China. Simultaneously, they argued that barely anyone had died and the numbers had been wildly exaggerated by the media to hurt Trump. The suffocation of the country’s small businesses could be blamed on Nancy Pelosi’s bailout of big business and Wall Street. Big business and Wall Street had valiantly kept us alive despite the Democratic hate for free enterprise. At the bottom of the right’s food chain, there were constant whispers that brown people from New York had streamed out of their warrens to purposefully infect the heartland.
What the stories had in common was that they featured someone to blame, someone who could be the target of valid but misplaced rage. By contrast, the stories told by the Democratic candidate and the corporate press were accurate but had no villains and no heroes, and hence were not stories in the normal sense at all, just a complicated conglomeration of facts that looked good on a blackboard but had no heart.
The Democratic candidate’s quiet campaign refused to get exercised about much of anything. When the candidate was asked whether he or she would investigate Trump’s dilatory response to the coronavirus at the beginning of 2020, the Democrat said no, because “I know Donald loves this country and even out of office we’ll need his shoulder at the wheel to beat this thing.” What about prosecuting senators for insider trading? No, the candidate explained, because “when I’m president the country will all pull together.”
With a terrifying resurgence of Covid-19 in the fall, and the Democrats failing to secure universal vote by mail, that November saw the lowest turnout ever in a presidential election. The Democratic base — confused, demoralized, and frightened — didn’t show up. Trump declared his modest win to be “the greatest landslide in history.”
The Republican base became even more rage-filled and vindictive in victory. “The Washington Post is trying to destroy America,” Sean Hannity began to declare each week. “Someone’s got to shut it down.” Two days later, a gunman infiltrated Post headquarters and was stopped just before he could open fire.
Trump was now free of all restraints, and he commenced an enormous bombing campaign against Iran. Protests were outlawed for public safety. Large numbers of Americans continued to die from the coronavirus, although no one was sure exactly how many because the government no longer released statistics on it. Fox began quietly, and then more and more loudly, claiming that opponents of the war were importing “biological bombers” from Iran to spread the disease. The stage was set for the classic collapse into authoritarianism, with the official outside enemies purportedly collaborating with the enemies on the inside.
No one knows today which path the U.S. will take. But it’s going to be one or the other: The right or the left will emerge as the champion of the coming American rage. All we can do now is try to make the anger and its consequences rational, based on an accurate understanding of the world and the unnecessary sorrow we experience. We need to make people angry at the crime.
A LITTLE-KNOWN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR IS BREAKING OUT IN KENTUCKY
Ryan Grim
April 5 2020, 12:51 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/05/andy-beshear-governor-kentucky-coronavirus/
IN THE ABSENCE of federal leadership, governors have become the public face of the effort to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Some of them, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, have risen to the media status of national hero, certainly in comparison to the deadly, daily clown show on display at the White House. Others have exposed themselves as unfit for office — such as Georgia’s Brian Kemp, who this week expressed shock after learning a basic fact about the disease, namely that asymptomatic carriers can spread it.
Lost between the coasts, meanwhile, is the remarkable story of Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, whose handling of the coronavirus crisis looks especially strong next to neighboring Tennessee. The two states are like a life-and-death experiment, showing the difference between governing and not governing in the face of a pandemic.
The 42-year-old son of former Gov. Steve Beshear, he won a contested Democratic primary against a more progressive opponent, and then went on to face the extraordinarily unpopular Matt Bevin in the general election in the fall. The Libertarian Party, which Bevin had tussled with, decided to field a candidate simply to undermine him. The libertarian pulled 28,000 votes, enough to swing the election; Beshear beat Bevin by just 5,000 votes.
Share Your Coronavirus StoryClick here to learn about contacting a reporter securely, or email us at coronavirus@theintercept.comRepublicans in the state legislature immediately began calling the result illegitimate, with Republican Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers saying it was “appropriate” of Bevin not to concede and that the GOP-controlled legislature might end up choosing the victor. He specifically cited the libertarian vote, claiming the results weren’t a genuine reflection of support for the Republican incumbent. It felt like a dry run of the 2020 presidential election, which skeptics have warned Donald Trump may not concede even if he loses.
But instead of the quivering response the public has come to expect from Democrats — a threat of a lawsuit, complaints about norms to the media — Beshear plowed forward, talking and acting like the rightful winner of the election. He began naming cabinet members and setting up his government, and in the face of his show of force, the media recognized him as the winner of the election and the GOP crumpled.
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Beshear was sworn in as governor on December 10, 2019, and immediately began wielding power. That day, he signed an order restoring voting rights to more than 100,000 felons. On December 16, he killed Bevin’s Medicaid overhaul, which had been designed to throw people off the rolls. Another key issue in the election had been anger from teachers at Bevin over a slew of assaults, chief among them his attempt to undercut their pensions. Bevin had been concealing a 65-page official analysis of that plan showing its cost to public workers and its ineffectiveness in the long term. Beshear spiked the plan, and, on December 20, publicly released the assessment, in all its gory details.
In February, Beshear, a deacon at his local church, became the first governor to appear at the Fairness Rally, an anti-discrimination event organized each year by LGBTQ leaders.
A photo he took with a group of drag queens launched a local scandal, and one Republican lawmaker lashed out at him for defiling the state Capitol. Beshear again fought back, calling the lawmaker’s attack “homophobic” and demanding he apologize personally to everybody in the photo. Beshear’s aides, and the state party, called on the man to resign, transforming the scandal into one about Republicans and their backward views on social issues.
Days later, on March 6, Beshear became one of the first governors in the country to treat the coronavirus pandemic with the seriousness it deserves, declaring a state of emergency when he announced the state’s first confirmed case — a day before New York state.
Trump was still laughing the pandemic off as no worse than the common flu. That same day, March 6, Trump toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, declaring himself a natural expert. “Anybody that wants a test can get a test,” Trump lied from the CDC. “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus CrisisTrump’s expertise had led him to conclude, on March 2, the pandemic would be less of a problem than the flu. “We’re talking about a much smaller range” of deaths, he said. Two days later, he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, “It’s very mild. The day after Beshear had declared a state of emergency, Trump said, at a dinner with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his entourage (who all went home with the virus) at Mar-a-Lago, “I’m not concerned at all.” On March 10, he was still full of bliss. “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away,” he said.
Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee followed Trump’s lead, telling his state’s residents no emergency declaration was necessary, even though Tennessee has more large urban centers than neighboring Kentucky. He finally switched course nearly a week later and declared an emergency, citing new information.
By that point, Beshear had already ratcheted up his warnings, urging Kentuckians to take the crisis seriously and to avoid large gatherings. By March 11, he announced the coming closure of schools. Beshear began 5 p.m. daily press briefings that have become appointment TV for a nervous public, even as Kentucky has one of the lowest spreads of the virus — producing endless memes celebrating the governor’s empathy and authoritative style.
Less than two weeks later, Beshear began warning Kentuckians not to travel to Tennessee, where cases were exploding. “Here in Kentucky, we have taken very aggressive steps to try to stop or limit the spread of the coronavirus to try to protect our people,” he said. “We have made major sacrifices such as shutting down bars and restaurants, nail salons, all these forward-facing businesses. But our neighbors from the south in many cases have not.” On Sunday, the U.S. Army restricted travel to Nashville from nearby Fort Campbell in Kentucky, as well.
Tennessee’s mistakes couldn’t be allowed to harm Kentuckians, he warned. “I cannot control that Tennessee has not taken the steps that we have,” Beshear said. “I need you to be strong in your pride in this state, and I need you to make sure that you don’t take someone else’s lack of action and ultimately bring it back to Kentucky to harm us.”
Stephanie Jolly@StephanieJolly
1/Some people are asking "What is the point of this graph?" if the data is preliminary or incomplete; if we don't have the full scope of negative tests; if we don't know the full extent of the spread; if the testing regimens of each state aren't perfectly aligned. Here's my take:
73
8:38 PM - Mar 22, 2020
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Beshear, by choosing to govern, has gradually risen to his own hero status, and, like Cuomo, become an unlikely sex symbol. A Reddit thread titled “Govern me, daddy,” became a Salon headline — and a T-shirt.
KentuckyForKentucky@KYforKY
@wordsbynat said it best in a recent @salon article "Govern me, daddy": Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear a clean-cut sex symbol for the coronavirus age” written by @eekshecried. Now at http://KyforKy.com 
#teamkentucky #kentuckykicksass
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11:29 AM - Mar 22, 2020
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