'All About the Grift': Trump Reportedly Raises Over $150 Million for Non-Existent 'Election Defense Fund'

"Small donors who give to Trump thinking they are financing an 'official election defense fund' are in fact helping pay down the Trump campaign's debt or funding his post-presidential political operation."


Jake Johnson, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/12/01/all-about-grift-trump-reportedly-raises-over-150-million-non-existent-election




After bombarding supporters daily with emails blaring lies about the election and soliciting donations to overcome virtually non-existent voter fraud, President Donald Trump's political operation has reportedly raised more than $150 million since November 3, a staggering windfall that is being funneled into a Republican joint fundraising committee and a Trump PAC established to fuel his post-White House activities.

While the Trump team's aggressive emails—sometimes as many as 15 per day—purport to be raising money for an "Official Election Defense Fund" set up to finance the president's flailing legal effort to overturn the election, the fund does not exist.


Observers said the post-election fundraising initiative has all the markings of a shameless grift, with much of the money likely going toward paying off the Trump campaign's debts, financing events at the president's properties, and other purposes. The Post noted that "there are very few limitations on how money going to" the Trump leadership PAC can be spent."There is no such account," the Washington Post reported late Monday. "The fundraising requests are being made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee that raises money for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. As of November 18, that committee also shares its funds with Save America, a new leadership PAC that Trump set up in early November and which he can use to fund his post-presidency activities."

Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), told the Post that "small donors who give to Trump thinking they are financing an 'Official Election Defense Fund' are in fact helping pay down the Trump campaign's debt or funding his post-presidential political operation."

"The average donor who gives in response to Trump's appeal for funds to 'stop the fraud' likely doesn't realize that their money is actually retiring Trump's debt or funding his leadership PAC," Fischer said, pointing out that "only bigger donors who've maxed-out to Trump's campaign or the RNC will see any portion of their contribution go to dedicated recount or legal funds."


Buried in the fine print of the early barrage of Trump's post-election fundraising emails, as Common Dreams reported last month, was language informing those who read far enough that a percentage of donations would go toward "general election debt retirement."

"According to the fine print in the latest fundraising appeals," the Post reported, "75% of each contribution to the joint fundraising committee would first go toward the Save America leadership PAC and the rest would be shared with the party committee, to help with the party's operating expenses. This effectively means that the vast majority of low-dollar donations under the current agreement would go toward financing the president’s new leadership PAC, instead of efforts to support the party or to finance voting lawsuits."

News of the Trump operation's massive fundraising haul came shortly after two additional battleground states, Wisconsin and Arizona, certified President-elect Joe Biden's victories there and dealt yet another blow to the president's disastrous court fight.

In a tweet late Monday, Rob Flaherty, digital director for the Biden campaign, called Trump's "election defense" fundraising ploy a "plain and simple grift."

'Looking at You, Senate Majority Leader': 87 Million Could Lose Paid Leave Without Urgent Action From Congress

"It's very America for us to finally require paid sick leave and family leave during the pandemic only to let it lapse before the pandemic is over."


Jake Johnson, staff writer










https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/30/looking-you-senate-majority-leader-87-million-could-lose-paid-leave-without-urgent














Without legislative action from a divided lame-duck Congress before the end of the year, nearly 90 million public and private-sector workers in the U.S. could soon lose federal paid sick and family leave benefits that have helped prevent tens of thousands of coronavirus infections.

The federal paid leave benefits mandated under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) are set to expire at the end of December without an extension from Congress, which—thanks in large part to obstruction by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—has made little progress toward another relief package in recent months despite spiking Covid-19 cases and a worsening economic crisis.

As Politico explained on Sunday:


Families First, a relief package enacted in March, required many employers to provide workers with two weeks of coronavirus-related sick leave at full pay and up to 12 weeks of family and medical leave to care for family members at two-thirds pay. Researchers estimate this covered half the U.S. workforce.

But those provisions—which cost about $105 billion—are slated to expire at the end of the year... meaning that as many as 87 million public and private-sector workers could be deprived of the benefit.

"It's very America for us to finally require paid sick leave and family leave during the pandemic only to let it lapse before the pandemic is over," quipped Vox's Dylan Scott.

Even the limited paid sick leave mandated under the FFCRA—which denied benefits to workers at companies with more than 500 employees—prevented an estimated 400 coronavirus cases each day per state in the U.S., according to research published last month in the journal Health Affairs.




Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), whose attempt to amend the FFCRA to provide paid sick and family leave to all U.S. employees and independent contractors was blocked by Senate Republicans, warned of "disaster" if Congress lets the benefits expire at the end of the year.

"If you do not have paid sick leave, if you cannot take work off, you go to work when you're sick," Murray told HuffPost in a phone interview last week. "One of the things we know people need to do is to isolate themselves if they're exposed. That's how you stop the spread. But if you do not have any paid sick leave, you're going to go to work. You need to put food on the table. You need to pay your rent."

In a tweet late Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) echoed Murray, declaring, "No worker should have to make the unacceptable choice of going to work sick or losing a paycheck."

The HEROES Act, passed by the Democrat-controlled House in May but blocked by McConnell, would extend the paid sick and family leave benefits through December of next year and expand the programs to cover workers left out by the FFCRA.


In addition to the expiration of paid sick and family leave, around 12 million Americans are set to lose unemployment insurance the day after Christmas if Congress doesn't extend the crucial lifeline, according to a report by The Century Foundation.

"Many struggling Americans will lose access to aid at the end of December," Accountable.US, a government watchdog group, tweeted Monday. "The Senate is past due on spending measures and more stimulus to help those hit hardest by the pandemic... looking at you, Senate majority leader."

If Israel goes to elections, it’ll be over the wrong problem

You could almost hear the collective groan this past week when Knesset members advanced a bill to dissolve the parliament and initiate Israel’s fourth election in two years. The decision is only in its preliminary stages, and the key dispute that ostensibly caused it — the government’s internal wrangling over next year’s state budget — may yet be resolved. Nonetheless, the move is very telling of the deep dysfunction at the heart of Israeli politics.

Expectations were not high when Blue and White leader Benny Gantz broke his campaign promises — and his own party — by allying with Benjamin Netanyahu in March. Despite claiming he had no illusions about the prime minister, it is clear that the former army chief was out of his element: Netanyahu manipulated and bypassed Gantz at every turn, from pursuing the normalization agreements with the UAE and Bahrain to stalling the proceedings over his corruption charges. The man hailed as the harbinger of Netanyahu’s ouster instead became his rival’s accomplice.

As the country’s Jewish parties rush to realign their political partnerships, the Joint List, an alliance of Arab parties in Israel, finds itself in a severe crisis. The insistence of Mansour Abbas, who heads the Islamist Ra’am party, to cooperate with Netanyahu as a way of pursuing policy actions on behalf of Palestinian citizens, has riled the other factions. Lacking a coherent strategy and reeling from disputes on everything from LGBTQ rights to the recommendation of Gantz as prime minister, the once-inspiring political slate may be facing its demise.

Caught on the brink of another election, the political scene in Israel is now characterized by precariousness across the board. That, however, can hardly be said of the issue politicians ought to be most concerned about yet is completely absent from the current arguments: Israel’s control over all the land and people between the river and the sea.

For most Palestinians, the bickering in the halls of a parliament that they cannot vote for, yet which governs every aspect of their life, is irrelevant. For them, apartheid existed regardless of whether the Israeli government was left or right wing. Until outside pressure forces the Palestinians back onto the agendas of Israeli politicians, that unjust regime will continue to thrive, no matter who wins the next election.







(LINKS TO ARTICLES BELOW)





Why are Palestinians being forced to prove their humanity?



‘I can’t fall asleep’: The trauma of Israeli raids on Palestinian homes





How crime became a cover for Israel to control its Palestinian citizens



Biden warned of annexation 50 years ago. Will he finally stop it?

Rudy Giuliani HOSPITALIZED for COVID; Trump Announces on Twitter

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEyS8tviKpg&ab_channel=ChristoAivalis

Kelly Loeffler Robotically Repeats "Radical Liberal Raphael Warnock" in PATHETIC Georgia Debate

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yw3KU7rlas&ab_channel=ChristoAivalis

Always Money For WAR -- Congress Won't Help People, But Passes War Budget.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuajdaP-vgE&ab_channel=TheJimmyDoreShow

The U.S. Has Passed the Hospital Breaking Point

A new statistic shows that health-care workers are running out of space to treat COVID-19 patients.




December 6, 2020 Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal THE ATLANTIC




https://portside.org/2020-12-06/us-has-passed-hospital-breaking-point




Since the beginning of the pandemic, public-health experts have warned of one particular nightmare. It is possible, they said, for the number of coronavirus patients to exceed the capacity of hospitals in a state or city to take care of them. Faced with a surge of severely ill people, doctors and nurses will have to put beds in hallways, spend less time with patients, and become more strict about whom they admit into the hospital at all. The quality of care will fall; Americans who need hospital beds for any other reason—a heart attack, a broken leg—will struggle to find space. Many people will unnecessarily suffer and die.

“If, in fact, there’s a scenario that’s very severe, it is conceivable that will happen,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, said in mid-March. “We’re doing everything we can to not allow that worst-case scenario to happen.”

Fear of this scenario drove many of the most stringent stay-at-home orders in the spring. “There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed,” Liz Cheney, a leading House Republican, said a week and a half later.

Yet that worst-case scenario never came to pass at a national level. At the springtime peak, even as northeastern hospitals faced a deluge, 60,000 people were hospitalized nationwide. When the Sun Belt frothed with cases this summer, hospitalizations again reached the 60,000 mark before they started to fall.

A month ago, in early November, hospitalizations passed 60,000—and kept climbing, quickly. On Wednesday, the country tore past a nauseating virus record. For the first time since the pandemic began, more than 100,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States, nearly double the record highs seen during the spring and summer surges.

The pandemic nightmare scenario—the buckling of hospital and health-care systems nationwide—has arrived. Several lines of evidence are now sending us the same message: Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, causing them to restrict whom they admit and leading more Americans to die needlessly.

The current rise in hospitalizations began in late September, and for weeks now hospitals have faced unprecedented demand for medical care. The number of hospitalized patients has increased nearly every day: Since November 1, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has doubled; since October 1, it has tripled.

Throughout that time, health-care workers have worried that hospitals would soon be overwhelmed. “The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question,” an infectious-disease doctor told our colleague Ed Yong early last month. The following week, a critical-care doctor in Nebraska warned, “The assumption we will always have a hospital bed for [you] is a false one.”

These catastrophes seem to be coming to pass—not just in Iowa and Nebraska, but all across the country. A national breakdown in hospital care is now starkly apparent in the coronavirus data.

It is clearest in a single simple statistic, recently observed by Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. For weeks, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 had been about 3.5 percent of the number of cases reported a week earlier. But, he noticed, that relationship has broken down. A smaller and smaller proportion of cases is appearing in hospitalization totals.

“This is a real thing. It’s not an artifact. It’s not data problems,” Jha told us.

Why would this number change? As hospitals run out of beds, they could be forced to alter the standards for what kinds of patients are admitted with COVID-19. The average American admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 today is probably more acutely ill than someone admitted with COVID-19 in the late summer. This isn’t because doctors or nurses are acting out of cruelty or malice, but simply because they are running out of hospital beds and must tighten the criteria on who can be admitted.

Many states have reported that their hospitals are running out of room and restricting which patients can be admitted. In South Dakota, a network of 37 hospitals reported sending more than 150 people home with oxygen tanks to keep beds open for even sicker patients. A hospital in Amarillo, Texas, reported that COVID-19 patients are waiting in the emergency room for beds to become available. Some patients in Laredo, Texas, were sent to hospitals in San Antonio—until that city stopped accepting transfers. Elsewhere in Texas, patients were sent to Oklahoma, but hospitals there have also tightened their admission criteria.

The COVID Tracking Project has found the same phenomenon by looking at a different variable in the data produced by the Department of Health and Human Services: the number of people admitted to the hospital every week. (Jha was analyzing the number of people currently hospitalized.)

In August and September, about 9.5 percent of COVID-19 cases were admitted to hospitals nationwide, according to federal data. As October began, this case-hospitalization proportion held for about a week. But then cases began to explode, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains, and hospitals suffered strain. In the last week of October, the average number of new COVID-19 cases surged past its all-time high of 66,000 new cases a day. Less than 8 percent of those cases made it into the hospital, a 16 percent drop in the proportion of sick people admitted versus September.



As the pandemic intensified, the fall continued. On November 10, the U.S. recorded more virus hospitalizations than ever before, passing the previous high set during the spring and summer surges. More than 100,000 Americans were diagnosed with the virus every day last month, on average, and more than ever were hospitalized as well. But as facilities ran short on bed space, the fraction of admitted cases fell. Ultimately, only 7.4 percent of COVID-19 cases were hospitalized in November—the lowest percentage yet.

This change may not seem ominous at first. You might expect to see such a divergence, for instance, if testing rapidly increased, so that states were suddenly detecting many more mild cases of COVID-19. But the data don’t show any evidence of this kind of “casedemic”—if anything, they show the opposite. Last month, the number of total COVID-19 tests increased by about a third compared with October, but the number of total cases discovered more than doubled. More people are getting sick.

At the same time, the virus seems to be killing a slightly higher fraction of people diagnosed with it. Using a method that accounts for clinical- and data-reporting lags between cases and deaths, for most of October and November, about 1.7 percent of cases resulted in death. But in the middle of November, that number lurched to more than 1.8 percent. While this change may seem small, it represents hundreds of deaths, because many more people are getting sick every day.

In other words, we’re observing exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from a rash of mild cases in the data. The virus seems to be killing more people. And that makes sense: As Yong and our colleague Sarah Zhang have both written, many of our medical triumphs over the virus have come from more attentive and knowledgeable hospital care for COVID-19 patients. (Very few, if any, people outside of a clinical trial have received the cocktail of antibody drugs that President Donald Trump claims is a “cure” for the disease.) Yet a smaller fraction of people are now receiving that expert and conscientious care.



Since March, most of our writing about the pandemic has focused on the near-term future. We’ve described data as worrying or ominous, words implying that the worst is soon to arrive. There’s a good reason for this forward-looking approach: It gives people a sense of what’s coming, and it helps people make decisions to protect themselves or their family.

But ominous no longer fits what we’re observing in the data, because calamity is no longer imminent; it is here. The bulk of evidence now suggests that one of the worst fears of the pandemic—that hospitals would become overwhelmed, leading to needless deaths—is happening now. Americans are dying of COVID-19 who, had they gotten sick a month earlier, would have lived. This is such a searingly ugly idea that it is worth repeating: Americans are likely dying of COVID-19 now who would have survived had they gotten September’s level of medical care.

The first doses of vaccine will almost certainly go out by Christmas. Tens of millions of Americans could have protective immunity within eight weeks. As the days lengthen and the weather warms, the vaccine will become easier to get; more than 100 million Americans may have immunity by the end of February. Many indicators suggest that next summer will be happy and prosperous, and we will gather indoors and outdoors and grin at one another like children in June. But the world will be reduced, and not as wise, because tens of thousands of Americans will be dead when they should be alive.