An ugly little sidebar to President Trump’s coronavirus press conference last Thursday highlighted the abject cruelty at the heart of his on-going (non) response to the ever-expanding pandemic.
His slumlord son-in-law, Jared Kushner showed up to tout what he has accomplished these past three weeks, since shoehorning himself into FEMA’s efforts to gather and deliver medical supplies to hot spots around the U.S.
At the top of his brag sheet was the recent touchdown in New York of six military cargo planes carrying the first of 200,000 N95 masks purchased elsewhere and destined for local use, with the rest to be ferried in by air and sealift over the next month.
The head of FEMA’s supply chain, Rear Adm. John Polowczyk joined Kushner in crowing about the project.
The government, he told reporters, is “scouring the globe and finding pockets of personal protective equipment that might not otherwise be in the U.S. hospital supply chain.”
Kushner hyped his own role, claiming to have networked with Polowczyk, the President and New York officials get the masks to where they are needed.
“We’ve done things that the federal government has never done before, quicker than they’ve ever done it before,” he boasted, sounding very much like his father-in-law. “I am confident that bringing innovative solutions to these hard problems, we will make progress.”
Vice President Pence, who was also at the podium, jumped in to remind everybody that these masks are bound for “the public health hospitals.”
If you were watching Admiral Polowczyk closely, you would have seen him deflate a little. Gently he corrected Pence by clarifying that these first deliveries were headed for “the public health warehouse” in New York City
That jolted a CBS reporter into asking what percentage of the masks are going to private middlemen.
“The product we are moving,” the Admiral explained, “is primarily commercial product that will enter the commercial system and be distributed through financial business transactions between the hospitals and these distributers.”
The reporter kept pushing: “Just to clarify, that explains why states say they are bidding like they are on E-Bay, because supplies are going to the private sector, and then they [state authorities] have to go there to get the supplies.”
“That’s normally how things work,” the Admiral replied uneasily. I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain.”
He then tried to put the best face on things by announcing there are actually six middlemen in this operation, all with the capacity to hasten product to desperate medical staff.
“These six distributors have 600 to 700 warehouses,” he volunteered. “They have trucks to go the hospital doors every day.”
So there you have it, folks, a snake oil pitch gone totally bust, the scamsters stumbling all over themselves to anoint their actions with the scent of magnanimity, only to have to admit that filthy lucre moved the dial.
Astonishingly, few news outlets picked up on this revealing byplay. Maureen Dowd mentioned it in a New York Times column, and Politico paraphrased Polowczyk as saying “the government is delivering those products to medical supply companies, rather than delivering them directly to the facilities in need.”
Laurence O’Donnell ran a partial clip on MSNBC and pinged it by echoing the CBS reporter. “Those masks,” he said, “are being distributed to commercial distributors, profit makers, who will then sell them to the highest bidder, including bidders in foreign countries.”
Elsewhere in the press conference Kushner declared unctuously that the national stockpile of medical supplies is “ours,” not the states’, to dispense. Since guardians of the stockpile can join in bidding for rare medical resources – and since FEMA doesn’t have to publicize what it pays for them – the Federal government can secretly jack up bids on masks, ventilators and other life-saving items to game the market on its own behalf, keep favored middlemen fat and happy, and leave Trump’s enemies empty handed.
It’s a prospect that gives sinister new meaning to what Kushner recently described as his “entrepreneurial approach” to remedying supply shortfalls.
New York’s Governor Cuomo has complained obsessively about the inflationary effect of competitive buying on the open market as various states duke it out for vanishing inventories. A recent investigation by Pro Publica uncovered vicious price gouging by unnamed vendors, with masks and other protective items selling for fifteen or twenty times the normal price. And MSNBC’s O’Donnell worries that MAGA-minded governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis “will get whatever they want” and have already been “rewarded by the Trump supply chain” for the “homicidal recklessness” of allowing citizens to infect each other through zero social distancing.
A non-profit called the Public Interest Research Group recently implored the administration to appoint a single “medical equipment czar” to assure the smooth and equitable flow of supplies to every needy supplicant.
But don’t count on Kushner being swayed. He told reporters at the Thursday presser that his entrepreneurial approach is the wave of the future. “We’ll be doing similar things with all the different public hospitals that are in the hot spot zones,” he promised, “and making sure that we’re constantly in communications with the local communities.”
My advice to all potential beneficiaries: Hold onto your wallets and pray for a vaccine.