Month: April 2020

Briefings

Background Briefing: April 22, 2020

On By gram

 

Why Trump’s Protesters Risk Their Lives Choosing Beliefs Over Facts

We begin with an analysis of why Trump’s shock troops of white nationalists and nativists sporting assault rifles and waving Confederate flags demonstrating against lockdowns by Democratic governors, are putting their lives in danger in choosing beliefs over facts. Joining us is Jonathan Metzl, professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and Director of its Center for Medicine, Health, and Society whose new book is Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. We will examine the sad fact that these protesters, backed by right wing plutocrats like the DeVos family, are risking their lives in the service of a demagogue only interested in himself and his reelection. But as irresponsible as they are, governors in Red States like the two dimwitted Trumpsters in Georgia and Florida who are opening up their states before the pandemic peaks, are even more culpable for the sick and dying that will follow. And while for months we have seen the deadly consequences of Trump’s war on science, today it got worse with the president forcing the head of the CDC to revise his prediction that there will be another possibly more deadly surge of the coronavirus in the winter so that Trump can go ahead in May to open up the country to more infections.

 

Jared’s Invitation to Profiteer From Desperately-needed Medical Supplies

Then we investigate the invitation to profiteering underway from Jared Kushner’s secretive Project Airbridge which is providing subsidies to the biggest medical supply companies to fly in PPE from abroad on FedEx and UPS planes for which the taxpayer foots the bill allowing the big hospital suppliers McKesson, Cardinal Health and Henry Schein Inc. to save money while not requiring them to sell the PPE at a discount but rather the opposite, they can charge anything the market will bear. Igor Derysh, a staff writer at Salon where he has an article “States smuggle COVID-19 medical supplies to avoid federal seizures as House probes Jared Kushner”, joins us to discuss how, while Jared’s recent appearance at the White House briefing did not go well, he is still active behind the scenes in control of the supply chain forcing governors to hide imports of desperately-needed supplies from Kushner and his frat boys otherwise FEMA would seize them.

On Earth Day How to Stop Trump’s Roll Back of 50 Years of Environmental Progress

Then finally, on this Earth Day, we speak with Dr. Elizabeth Southerland, a member of the Environmental Protection Network who served as Director of the Office of Science and Technology in the EPA Office of Water from 1984 to 2017 about her article at The Guardian “We can’t let Trump roll back 50 years of environmental progress“.