What The Hell?
Would somebody please tell me how this is different from war profiteering?
By the end of the day, roughly 280 million masks from warehouses around the U.S. had been purchased by foreign buyers and were earmarked to leave the country, according to the broker — and that was in one day.
Do you think Harry Truman, FDR, or even Elizabeth Warren (yeah, I’m bitter) would put up with this kind of crap? Nationalize the damn medical supply companies and let them sue me later. From jail. They can sue me from jail for profiteering.
The whole article is an interesting read and will get your blood to boiling.
Thanks to Art for the heads up.
I’m most impressed by where this was published: Forbes, no less. Will even die-hard Rethugs be disgusted by this? One can only hope.
1Can only say just one thing – this smells like ot leads to the WH.
2What did you expect from a leader that’s put his needs and those of his minions ahead of the country he’s supposed to lead?
Oh, and did I mention the incompetence thing…
3With Alex Azur, preying menace Pence, and Jughead Kushner in charge of the COVID-19 response, what else but graft and corruption aka as war profiteering? Credit Covidiot* 45 for knowing how to set up a division of labor. With Mnunchin doing the helicopter drop of $trillions for cronies over at Treasury, what more could Republicons want?
4I’m glad Nancy Pelosi has given her blessing to the Congress to start investigating the administration for what the #$&* was going on in the lead up to this catastrophe!
5thanks for the story, and the ht.
6I agree this story is outrageous. On the one hand you’ve got. doctors, nurses, first responders, and others all risking their lives for the benefit of everyone , and on the other you have private sellers of much needed N95 masks, and who knows what else, selling out domestically warehoused inventory to the highest bidder,& often offshore. Trump could put a stop to this unnecessary supply drain by issuing an executive temporary moratorium on all such sales, but will he? I think some smart Democratic POTUS candidate could really hold trump and the Republicans feet to the fire on this until they do? Jmho
They are hiding their corruption behind their incompetence. You can be sure that Jared is standing right in the middle of every revenue stream associated with this catastrophe and siphoning his and trump’s share into their own accounts.
7in the Internal Revenue Code, there is a thing called “The War Profits Tax”, which came about during WWII (and was also in effect for the Korean War). it’s purpose was to disabuse companies of taking advantage of national emergencies, to arbitrarily raise prices on essential goods, increasing their profits artificially. perhaps it’s time that was enforced again.
granted, it isn’t the easiest issue to pursue, but the onus is on the company to prove that any rise in price is due to normal business activities, and not simply taking advantage of an emergency.
8This administration’s response to COVID-19 has been an utter, absolute, clusterTrump. They’re not doing ANYTHING right. A good many governors are doing the best they can, under the circumstances.
9How about going after the insulin producers next?
10Yes, if Trump insists this is a “War” situation, then these companies and individuals should be charged with war profiteering!
11Harry Truman in specific since his oversight of war profittering, as a Senator, during WW II was a large part of why he came to notice of power brokers that put him forward as VP for FDR in 1944 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Committee
12I’m sure Trump is following Putin’s plan to destroy this nation’s wealth (resources, people, representative government, rule of law) with every single thing he does. I used to argue with a very annoying science fiction writer on another venue, who kept boasting that *he* always assumed the bad things people did were just mistakes or ignorance or at worst stupidity and not malice. I don’t agree, based on myself. I have said, and done, bad things in my life that I knew perfectly well were bad at the time, but I was fed up and didn’t care. (Still working on that.) So I know people *can* behave badly out of malice, and conspire with others to do it.
Trump’s history as a bully, a thief, a cheat strongly suggests that his behavior is not simply incompetence and ignorance, but part of his lifelong habit of trying to get rich by cheating and bullying everyone else…and that correlates with the psychiatric diagnoses he has received from mental health professionals observing his behavior. He may not understand the details, but his behavior cannot be explained simply by ignorance.
Since he’s not a genius or well-educated (whatever he did in college, it wasn’t acquire a broadly based education), his ignorance does allow him to be manipulated by others because he will not insist on hard data. Hence, Putin’s influence and the influence of the extreme right wing. (And this is what makes the “Never Trump” Republicans who have tried hard to rebuild a centrist GOP such tragic figures. They’re as blind as Trump in a different direction…they’re so afraid of “socialism” that they can’t see they’re trying to make a winning team out of a fraction of a fraction of a team…like prying running backs off another football team and reassigning them. They don’t want any moderates in their group…just other people as right-wing as Trump, but not Trump.)
Truman has been a very underrated political figure for a long time…I agree totally with K.
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