It Appears As Though Trump Wants To Kill As Many Americans As He Can Before He's Forced Out Of The White House

 

The scope of the disaster of the pandemic in the U.S. is the most blatant indictment of Trump's "leadership" so far.

The kind of actions-- by government and populace-- needed to defeat the pandemic went quickly into effect in east Asian countries-- from China, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea to Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. And it worked. The pandemic may have started in east Asia, but no one complained that wearing a mask or social distancing was an unacceptable infringement on their freedoms-- and the pandemic is pretty much under control across the region, certainly in comparison to the U.S. or Europe.

Over the weekend, 697,396 new cases were reported. 99,174 of those cases were reported in the U.S. It was a very different story in mask-wearing, social distancing east Asia. These were reported new cases for Saturday and Sunday:

• Japan +1,225
• South Korea +164
• China +26
• Hong Kong +21
• Thailand +17
• Vietnam +11
• Singapore +10
• Taiwan- 0

The combined population of these 8 countries is 1,821,626,954. The population of the U.S. is 331,584,544. The U.S. has 25,296 cases per million residents. Japan has 733 cases per million residents. South Korea has 491 cases per million residents. China has 60 cases per million residents. Thailand has 53; Taiwan 22; Vietnam 12.

The data-driven Financial Times report on the pandemic crisis on Sunday noted that "by late February new cases in China were in decline, and attention had shifted to two new areas of concern, one a regional neighbour and the other further afield. Alarms were raised in South Korea in mid-February after a single super-spreader sparked more than 1,000 cases in the city of Daegu in a matter of days. Between February 17 and 25, the country’s confirmed case count rose from 31 to 1,146-- a 37-fold increase in just eight days, with cases doubling every day and a half. Meanwhile, in Europe, all eyes were on Italy as a cluster of infections began spreading through the northern region of Lombardy. Both trajectories looked bleak, but the countries’ fortunes quickly diverged. South Korea acted quickly, taking advantage of legislation passed in response to the 2012 Mers crisis that allows for extensive surveillance of its citizens during an infectious disease outbreak. A comprehensive contact-tracing operation was put in place, partnered with a rapid expansion of testing. On March 20, South Korea was carrying out 100 tests for every positive one that came back, the same day it recorded its 100th death. It took Italy three more months and 34,000 deaths to reach the same testing levels."

The US entered the crisis already particularly vulnerable among western nations due to many residents being without health insurance and a lack of paid sick leave in many areas. Moreover, in Donald Trump, it had a president who consistently downplayed the severity of the disease that he would eventually contract.

In the absence of a co-ordinated federal response, state and local governments introduced their own measures to contain the virus. Loosening of restrictions has been similarly fragmented, and in some cases started before evidence suggested local outbreaks were under control.

The complex patchwork of often contradictory state-level measures can be visualised using an index developed by political scientists at Oxford university’s Blavatnik School of Government to summarise the overall stringency of responses to the pandemic.

When the virus claimed thousands of victims in the spring, the centre of the crisis was New York City, its suburbs and similar cities in the north-east; vast swaths of the country were largely unaffected. As the year wore on, startlingly different geographical patterns emerged. Once confined to the most densely populated cities, the virus seeped out into small-town and rural America, with places such as Hancock county, Georgia, (population: 8,457) registering among the highest death rates in the country. By early October, the overall death rate was highest in counties classified as the small towns and rural areas-- and lowest in large urban counties.

Another invaluable data provider is CovidExitStrategy.org and this map the published yesterday shows each state's progress towards a new normal. Two states are in decent shape: Maine and Vermont. California, Oregon, New York and New Hampshire don't look good but the the rest of the country looks terrible and most of it is in an "uncontrolled spread." If you want all the numbers, study the website. This map gives you can idea of the horror-show we're facing thanks to Trump's version of "leadership."

Trump's version of leadership has always been highlighted by infighting and chaos. It's how lesser men control situations in business and politics. It doesn't work for anyone but the leader. It's a disaster in a national challenge-- like the pandemic. Philip Rucker took it on yesterday with a Washington Post deep dive focusing on the catastrophic response to the pandemic: Trump’s den of dissent: Inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges. "Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing," he began. "He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials. Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable. Atlas’s ascendancy was apparent during a recent Oval Office meeting. After Trump left the room, Atlas startled other aides by walking behind the Resolute Desk and occupying the president’s personal space to keep the meeting going, according to one senior administration official."

Discord on the coronavirus task force has worsened since the arrival in late summer of Atlas, whom colleagues said they regard as ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest. As the White House coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx is tasked with collecting and analyzing infection data and compiling charts detailing upticks and other trends. But Atlas routinely has challenged Birx’s analysis and those of other doctors, including Anthony S. Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, with what the other doctors considered junk science, according to three senior administration officials.

Birx recently confronted Vice President Pence, who chairs the task force, about the acrimony, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Birx, whose profile and influence has eroded considerably since Atlas’s arrival, told Pence’s office that she does not trust Atlas, does not believe he is giving Trump sound advice and wants him removed from the task force, the two people said.

Pence did not take sides, but rather told Atlas and Birx to bring data bolstering their perspectives to the task force and to work out their disagreements themselves, according to two senior administration officials.

The result has been a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end.

...On Saturday, Atlas wrote on Twitter that masks do not work, prompting the social media site to remove the tweet for violating its safety rules for spreading misinformation. Several medical and public health experts flagged the tweet as dangerous misinformation coming from a primary adviser to the president.

“Masks work? NO,” Atlas wrote in the tweet, followed by other misrepresentations about the science behind masks. He linked to an article from the American Institute for Economic Research-- a libertarian think tank behind the Barrington effort-- that argued against masks and dismissed the threat of the virus as overblown.

Trump and many of his advisers have come to believe that the key to a revived economy and a return to normality is a vaccine.

“They’ve given up on everything else,” said a senior administration official involved in the pandemic response. “It’s too hard of a slog.”

Infectious-disease and other public health experts said the friction inside the White House has impaired the government’s response.

“It seems to me this is policy-based evidence-making rather than evidence-based policymaking,” said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “In other words, if your goal is to do nothing, then you create a situation in which it looks okay to do nothing [and] you find some experts to make it complicated.”

These days, the task force is dormant relative to its robust activity earlier in the pandemic. Fauci, Birx, Surgeon General Jerome Adams and other members have confided in others that they are dispirited.

Birx and Fauci have advocated dramatically increasing the nation’s testing capacity, especially as experts anticipate a devastating increase in cases this winter. They have urged the government to use unspent money Congress allocated for testing-- which amounts to $9 billion, according to a Democratic Senate appropriations aide-- so that anyone who needs to can get a test with results returned quickly.

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

But Atlas, who is opposed to surveillance testing, has repeatedly quashed these proposals. He has argued that young and healthy people do not need to get tested and that testing resources should be allocated to nursing homes and other vulnerable places, such as prisons and meatpacking plants.

...The president gave voice to this mind-set during an NBC News town hall Thursday night, when he declined to answer whether he supported herd immunity. “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself,” Trump told host Savannah Guthrie.

But medical experts disagreed, saying it is dangerous for government leaders to advocate herd immunity or oppose interventions.

“We’d be foolish to reenter a situation where we know what to do and we’re not doing it,” said Rochelle Walensky, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “This thing can take off. All you need to do is look at what’s happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over the last two weeks to see that this thing is way faster than we’re giving it credit for.”

...Trump’s notion of a vaccine as a cure-all for the pandemic is similarly miraculous, according to medical experts.

“The vaccines, although they’re wonderful, are not going to make the virus magically disappear,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who is president of Resolve to Save Lives. “There’s no fairy-tale ending to this pandemic. We’re going to be dealing with it at least through 2021, and it’s likely to have implications for how we do everything from work to school, even with vaccines.”

Frieden added: “Remember, we have vaccines against the flu, and we still have flu.”

Still, Trump has ratcheted up his push for vaccines over the past several months, intensifying the pressure on government scientists, federal regulators and pharmaceutical executives. He has had one end date in mind: Nov. 3, which is Election Day.

Trump has envisioned a greenlit vaccine as the kind of breakthrough that could persuade voters to see his management of the pandemic as successful and thus upend a race in which virtually all public polls show him trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

...The relationships between FDA officials and White House staffers have grown more acrimonious since September, when details of stricter FDA vaccine guidance were reported by The Post. Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows-- who has involved himself in the work of health agencies to a degree other officials consider inappropriate-- have repeatedly challenged Hahn over his agency’s proposals and rules, much to the FDA commissioner’s frustration.

Trump is asserting control over the messaging campaign around a vaccine. His politically minded aides in the White House have taken over the government’s communications effort, as opposed to health or scientific communicators at the relevant agencies.

For example, White House aides have sought to persuade Moncef Slaoui, head of “Operation Warp Speed,” the government’s initiative to mass-distribute an eventual vaccine, to speak more positively about the vaccine, and sometimes he has pushed back on their talking points, two officials said.

Trump routinely has told his political advisers that a vaccine would be ready by the time he stands for reelection. And he has plotted with his team on a pre-election promotional campaign to try to convince voters a vaccine is safe, approved and ready for mass distribution-- even if none of that is true yet.

These are some of the ingredients of a public health disaster, experts say.

“The one thing you can’t do-- and it’s what everybody fears, it’s what the pharmaceutical companies fear, it’s what everybody on the inside fears-- is that the government would, because of political purposes or because other countries put a vaccine out before us, truncate the normal process you’d accept for a safe and effective vaccine,” said Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory council.

Trump’s view of the FDA has darkened considerably in recent weeks. The president now believes-- despite the absence of any such evidence-- that officials there are working against him to slow-walk vaccine approval as “some sort of ‘deep state’ push to keep him from winning reelection,” according to an administration official. Trump has said as much himself.

“New FDA Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day. Just another political hit job! @SteveFDA,” the president wrote in an Oct. 6 tweet, tagging Hahn’s Twitter handle.

Trump’s conspiratorial view of the FDA is shaped in part by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and others in the president’s orbit, both inside and outside the government. Saad B. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said the atmosphere of pressure and recrimination, nurtured by the president, is “very concerning.”

“These are people who have dedicated their lives to working in public health and medicine and research,” he said. “To think that in the biggest public health event of their lives they would sleep an extra hour or slow-walk this for any reason is absurd.”

He added, “It’s like how an ambulance drives faster than a regular car because it’s an emergency, but even an ambulance driver is not foolhardy. They don’t want to drive over the bridge.”

'A lot of political pressure'

The distrust in Washington has trickled down to the states, where friction has increased between several governors and the administration over the vaccine process.

Some governors and officials close to them privately have expressed alarm about Trump and his aides laying the groundwork for a rushed vaccine announcement. The president has delegated much of the state outreach to Pence, who in regular calls with governors has come across as a smooth salesman for Trump’s speedy approach. The vice president has encouraged governors to help build confidence for eventual vaccines among their constituents.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), whose state is the site for vaccine trials, said in an interview, “I certainly fear there is a lot of political pressure being applied.” He said his state is preparing for a vaccine rollout, but would carefully evaluate the integrity of any announcement emanating from the White House.

“Nobody has told me that it’ll be ready by November 2nd or anytime before the election,” Pritzker said. “But [Trump] will no doubt claim such a thing because of the cocktail of drugs that he seems to be on now. He’s liable to say anything that isn’t true.”

The concerns are not limited to Democrats. One Republican state official who works with the Trump administration and spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve that relationship, said, “It’s what I would call soft power. Pence comes on these calls and sounds normal and upbeat, and basically says, ‘Stand with us.’”

The official added, “We all want a vaccine, right? We obviously want it. We’ll take it. But we don’t really know if they’ll do this right.”

The politicization of the process has damaged public credibility in an eventual vaccine. A Gallup poll released this month found that 50 percent of Americans said they would be willing to take a coronavirus vaccine approved by the FDA “right now at no cost.” That is a sharp decline from 61 percent in August and 66 percent in July.

During a virtual task force meeting led by Pence on Sept. 21, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said, “There is a substantial concern,” according to an audio recording of the meeting. “A significant part of that problem is the president’s continued anti-science statements that are contradictory to his medical advisers in so many different ways.”

Inslee asked Pence directly, “Have you discussed with the president how he’s been eroding public confidence in our efforts, including the vaccine approval? Have you discussed that with him? Have you urged him to stop this behavior?”

Pence did not directly answer the question. Rather, he replied, “We think you and all the governors on this call have a great responsibility to make sure the public knows while we’re moving rapidly and while there may be differences in opinion about various events, we just don’t want any undermining of confidence in the vaccine.”

The vice president added, “I can assure you the president will continue to speak clearly about that process.”

Inslee later said in an interview that Pence was anything but assuring.

“There is a pressure campaign,” Inslee said. “We need to follow science and not this distortion campaign... The people are on to [Trump]. They know he is trying to turn this into an electoral issue.”

...Trump has used Atlas to back up his own rejection of medical expertise. At Thursday’s NBC News town hall, a Florida voter asked the president whether after contracting covid-19 he now believed in the importance of mask-wearing.

“I’ve heard many different stories on masks,” he said.

When Guthrie challenged him by noting that all of his health officials were united in advocating masks, Trump countered by invoking Atlas.

“Scott Adkins,” Trump said, mispronouncing the doctor’s name. “If you look at Scott, Dr. Scott, he’s from-- great guy-- from Stanford, he will tell you.”

“He’s not an infectious-disease expert,” Guthrie said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Trump replied. “Look, he’s an expert. He’s one of the experts of the world.”

Back to Gov. Pritzker for a moment. Illinois is in a catastrophic situation right now-- full-fledged pandemic crisis back after a long summer lull. Sunday, Illinois reported the most new cases of any state-- 4,245, bringing the statewide total to 347,635-- 27,434 cases per million residents. What made everything turn south again? Pritzker blames Trump and his allies. He was on CNN's State of the Union Sunday and told Jake Tapper that "People are not following the mitigations, because the modeling is so bad at the leadership level, the federal level. We are trying to get the word out and you're trying to continue to convince people to do the right thing but it is the president's allies in our state, all across the state, who are simply saying to people don't pay any attention to the mitigations, don't follow the rules."

Pritzker told the viewers that Trump is "modeling bad behavior. He doesn’t wear a mask in public. He has rallies where they don’t encourage people to wear masks in public. Truly, this is now rhetoric that people understand, particularly in rural areas in my state, 'Well, the president doesn’t wear a mask; we don’t need to wear a mask. It’s not that dangerous.' The truth of the matter is that it is very dangerous."

U.S. Covid-19 Deaths Will Pass 100,000 Before the End of May

The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., built to honor the 58,000 Americans killed in that war (Getty Images)

by Thomas Neuburger

It's appropriate to remember, as the end of May approaches, the nation's honored dead. It's also appropriate to remember its forgotten dead, those whose sacrifices are and will be ignored.

The number of Americans killed in-theater in Vietnam was more than 58,000, and we, to honor them, erected the moving memorial shown above in the heart of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The number of Americans killed in World War I passed 116,000. The U.S. has done a just-adequate job of memorializing the dead in that war, but still, memorials exist. In Washington, D.C., there's this modest affair, here being advertised as a place to get married.

A more striking WWI monument is soon to come to Washington, though true to these neoliberal times, it will be built entirely with private money, and the "Founding Sponsor" is a foundation established by the Pritzkers, a troubling Chicago real estate family whose members were major financiers of Barack Obama's political career. (The Chicago Sun Times recently noted that "there would not have been an Obama presidency if not for Penny Pritzker’s fundraising abilities. ... The money she raised for his first quarter report was an impressive enough haul to make Obama a viable [2008] presidential candidate.")

The Pritzkers didn't get naming rights for the memorial, at least not yet, but I'm sure their branding will be easy to spot — a tasteful sign, something like "Brought to you by the Pritzkers, because we're the billionaires who care."

The number of Americans killed by Covid-19 will reach 100,000 by the time the May dead are counted. And at 1,500 deaths per day — our average these days — Covid-19 deaths will surpass WWI deaths by the the end of the following week.

What will the nation's Covid-19 Memorial look like when it finally gets built? Like this perhaps?

How many will have died to make Wall Street great again? As one longtime investment banker put it, "'people with no stake in the economy' are talking about keeping it closed." Shame on them.

So maybe this memorial is appropriate. It's not quite a golden calf, but close enough. Perhaps an inscription, "To the unknown Uber driver" could be etched on its side, a stand-in for the 100,000 (and counting) who gave their lives so the billionaire economy could live.
 

America's Looming COVID-Civil War

Opening up

Illinois' entire northern border-- 6 counties-- is right up against Wisconsin, whose own governor, Tony Evers, described it as the "wild west" and chaotic in regard to confronting the pandemic. He said it is a "freighting place to be." Evers has been trying to have his state follow the White House guidelines but the Republican-controlled legislature and Supreme Court-- and a vocal extremist fringe of confirmed idiots-- are determined to kill as many cheeseheads as possible. Wisconsin's caseload has been spiking dangerously. On Sunday the state's steadily increasing confirmed caseload was 2,154 per million. Today it is 2,179 per million.

Illinois is in much worse shape-- 7,614 cases per million, but, unlike the Wild West to the north, Illinois is serious about confronting the pandemic and beating it back. Unfortunately for Lake, McHenry, Boone, Winnebago, Stephenson and Jo Daviess counties, their proximity to Wisconsin makes that pretty much impossible. They face 6 Wisconsin counties along that state's southern tier: Kenosha, Walworth, Rock, Green, Lafayette and Grant.

These are the northern Illinois suburban and rural counties that border on Wisconsin with the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19:

• Lake- 6,489
• McHenry- 1,179
• Boone- 290
• Winnebago- 1,490
• Stephenson- 150
• Jo Daviess- 18

On Sunday, the NY Times reported that Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker, has enacted an order that would see owners of restaurants, bars gyms, barbershops and other establishments in his state who open too early charged with a Class A misdemeanor. On Friday Pritzker filed an emergency rule "intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as a growing number of businesses defy stay-at-home orders across the country." A Class A misdemeanor carries a punishment of up to a year in jail and up to a $2,500 fine.

Conservative legislators are barking already. As The Times reported, state Senator Dan McConchie (R) tweeted that the governor's new rule to protect the citizens of the state "an affront to the separation of powers. Legislatures make laws. Governors enforce them. Period."

In Texas this month, a salon owner in Dallas was jailed for defying state and county orders for nonessential establishments to remain closed. The state Supreme Court ordered her release two days later. And last Sunday in Colorado, a restaurant that reopened for sit-down dining on Mother’s Day was shut down and had its license suspended.

The pain of the coronavirus shutdown, in terms of wrecked economies and shattered lives, has been unmistakable. Now, governors across the country are contemplating the risks of reopening, particularly if it produces a surge of new cases and deaths.

“This is really the most crucial time, and the most dangerous time,” Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said on the CNN program State of the Union on Sunday. “All of this is a work in progress. We thought it was a huge risk not to open. But we also know it’s a huge risk in opening.”

...[G]overnors also acknowledged concerns about a fresh resurgence of the coronavirus, and they are haunted by images of restaurants and stores packed with patrons with uncovered faces.

“This is a virus we’re still learning a lot about,” Mr. DeWine said.

These are cases per million in the states mentioned in this post:

• Illinois- 7,614 per million
• Colorado- 3,855 per million
• Ohio- 2,437 per million
• Wisconsin- 2,179 per million
• Texas- 1,713 per million
• Idaho- 1,374 per million

McGeachin is certifiably insane and needs psychiatric treatment... badly

Idaho's numbers look relatively decent, but maybe not for long. The state's governor, Brad Little (R), hasn't done a bad job. Too bad he's burdened with a sociopath as his Lt. Governor, Janice McGeachin, who has now gone rogue. Cynthia Sewell reported last week that while Little was following the science and issuing statewide orders to curb the spread of the pandemic in Idaho, McGeachin, a bona fide crackpot extremist (note the belt-buckle-- has defied Little and his administration throughout the pandemic.

She left the Legislature’s 2020 session early-- the lieutenant governor presides over the Senate-- to attend to her family business, a restaurant and pub in Idaho Falls. She has attended or supported rallies opposing Little’s stay-home order and has been urging him to let businesses re-open. She defied his state order earlier this month to attend an event at a North Idaho brewery that re-opened despite Little’s order. 
This week she wrote a guest opinion challenging Little’s decisions.

Her opening salvo served to remind Little how powerful she is: “As lieutenant governor, I am one heartbeat away from the governor’s chair,” McGeachin wrote.

“I lose sleep at night because the heavy hand of our government is hurting so many Idahoans,” she continued. “The effects of the executive branch’s unilateral decisions will impact us for years.”

The governor campaigned on a promise of imposing the “lightest hand of government” on Idahoans, she wrote.

“To me, this means getting out of the way and letting Idahoans get back to work,” McGeachin concluded in her tome sent to media organizations around the state.

She and the governor haven't spoken in at least 3 weeks.





Trump-- Incompetent And Unfit By Nature

How many times have you seen columns called The Worst President Ever? A conservative historian, Max Boot did a good one yesterday, noting that he's been reluctant to label Señor Trumpanzee the worst president in U.S. history. "Some presidents who seemed awful to contemporaries (Harry S. Truman) or simply lackluster (Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush) look much better in retrospect," he wrote. "Others, such as Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, don’t look as good as they once did. So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president in modern times-- not of all time. That left open the possibility that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding or some other nonentity would be judged more harshly. But in the past month, we have seen enough to take away the qualifier 'in modern times.' With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history."

The Trump Regime has managed to screw up the massive $2 trillion bailout bill Congress passed last month. Americans without savings and small businesses are in hot water. Jeff Stein wrote Sunday that "Small-business owners have reported delays in getting approved for loans without which they will close their doors, while others say they have been denied altogether by their lenders and do not understand why. The law’s provision to boost unemployment benefits has become tangled in dated and overwhelmed state bureaucracies, as an unprecedented avalanche of jobless Americans seeks aid." Republicans ideologically hate government. Expecting them to be able to handle an emergency in unrealistic, especially when jobs are filled based on ideology and personal loyalty to the leader-- and never based on competence.

Stein continued that "Officials at the Internal Revenue Service have warned that $1,200 relief checks may not reach many Americans until August or September if they haven’t already given their direct-deposit information to the government. Taxpayers in need of answers from the IRS amid a rapidly changing job market are encountering dysfunctional government websites and unresponsive call centers that have become understaffed as federal workers stay home."

Dan Balz also focused on Trumpist incompetence and dysfunction and their inability to adequaltely respond to the pandemic. He pointed out that Trump "downplayed the coronavirus threat, was slow to move and has delivered mixed messages to the nation. The federal bureaucracy bungled rapid production of tests for the virus. Stockpiles of crucial medical materials were limited and supply lines cumbersome. States and hospitals were plunged into life-and-death competition with one another. When the public looked to government for help, government sometimes looked helpless or frozen or contradictory-- and not for the first time." Republicans, as I said, are incapable of making government work. They hate government and have put all their efforts into... drowning it in a bathtub.

Drown Him In A Bathtub by Chip Proser

The country and its [Republican] leaders were caught off guard when terrorists on hijacked airplanes attacked the homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. The financial crisis of 2008, which turned into a deep recession, forced drastic, unprecedented action by a government struggling to keep pace with the economic wreckage. The devastation from Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 exposed serious gaps in the government’s disaster response and emergency management systems.

“We always wait for the crisis to happen,” said Leon Panetta, who served in government as secretary of defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the House. “I know the human failings we’re dealing with, but the responsibility of people elected to these jobs is to make sure we are not caught unawares.”

...Repeated crises have shown that government is rarely, if ever, fully prepared. Nor is government as flexible as it needs to be to respond as quickly or creatively as conditions often demand. Many factors contribute to what appear to be chronic weaknesses that can compound problems and reduce public confidence. Lessons learned after the fact solve past problems without necessarily anticipating future ones.

Leadership is important, and President Trump will have on his record what he did and didn’t do in the early stages of this particular crisis. But the problems go far broader and deeper than what a president does. Lack of planning and preparation contribute, but so too does bureaucratic inertia as well as fear among career officials of taking risks. Turnover in personnel robs government of historical knowledge and expertise. The process of policymaking-on-the-fly is less robust than it once was. Politics, too, gets in the way.

Mike Pence, Coronavirus Czar by Nancy Ohanian

Long ago, this was far less the case, a time when the United States projected competence and confidence around the globe, said Philip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia who served in five administrations and was executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

“America had the reputation of being non-ideological, super pragmatic, problem solvers, par excellence,” he said. “This image of the United States was an earned image, of people seeing America do almost a wondrous series of things... We became known as the can-do country. If you contrast that with the image of the U.S. today, it’s kind of depressing.”

Government officials have worried about the threat of a pandemic like the coronavirus for many years. In the fall of 2005, President George W. Bush tasked Fran Townsend, his homeland security adviser, to develop a national pandemic strategy. What prompted the directive was not an imminent threat to which he had been alerted by advisers; it was because he had read John Barry’s book, The Great Influenza, about the flu pandemic of 1918.

Townsend recalled that when she convened an interagency meeting to launch the project, she met significant resistance from Cabinet officials who said they had far more urgent problems to deal with. Only with prodding and presidential insistence did the pandemic strategy get put together, and it was part of the Bush team’s handoff to the administration of Barack Obama during that transition.

The Obama administration ended up dealing with a series of virus threats, and that experience shaped the transition handoff to the Trump administration three years ago.

On Jan. 13, 2017, Lisa Monaco, who was White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser in the Obama administration, convened a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The session brought together the members of the outgoing Obama Cabinet with the Cabinet designees in the incoming Trump administration.

Attendees included the outgoing and incoming secretaries of homeland security, Jeh Johnson and John Kelly, who later became White House chief of staff. Tom Bossert, who was to be Monaco’s successor as White House homeland security adviser and who has since left the Trump administration, acted as co-chair.

The session dealt with terrorism and cyber and various other threats, but because the Obama administration had been through H1N1, the Ebola crisis and the Zika virus, Monaco included a discussion of what she regarded as the nightmare scenario: a new strain of flu that was a respiratory illness for which there was no vaccine and that because of globalization and travel patterns would be nearly impossible to contain.

“I don’t want to give an impression that we bestowed the answer key for dealing with such a challenging and unprecedented crisis,” Monaco said. “But the idea was to identify issues that would say these are the kinds of things you need to be planning for and thinking about now.”

What does it mean for the federal government to be prepared? “Oftentimes, the gauge is no mistakes, no criticism, just complete smooth sailing,” Monaco said. “That to me is not the definition of what it means to be prepared.”

She argued that preparation means planning ahead of a crisis, and having structures and organizations that can move quickly and principles that guide decision-making. “I think it’s about trying as best to minimize the chaos, particularly at the beginning,” she said.

Almost by definition, a crisis is something no one has or can prepare for fully. As Zelikow put it, what government is least prepared for is to do things “different from what it did yesterday.” Then the question becomes whether government is agile enough to figure out what to do next. On that measure, the record is not encouraging either.

Joshua Bolten, who served as White House chief of staff in the administration of George W. Bush, said, “It’s especially hard for government to be prepared for the unexpected or the unpredicted. That was certainly true in 9/11. When you think back to 2001, if you had said that, while it looks like there’s enhanced risk of terrorist activity in the United States, I don’t know that you necessarily would have checked on who was enrolling in flight schools.”

It isn’t that government doesn’t do planning. The Pentagon has contingency plans for wars, conflicts and disasters-- “for anything everywhere... for everything,” as Panetta put it. But federal domestic agencies don’t have the same culture as the Pentagon.

“The Pentagon bureaucracy has the resources to do that. There’s a deputy secretary for everything,” said Johnson, who served as general counsel at the Pentagon before going to DHS. “Homeland security is a relatively new concept. The headquarters bureaucracy at DHS is still a work in progress.”

But plans by themselves are not a measure of preparedness. When Stephen Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was deputy mayor of New York, his portfolio included emergency management. When he would ask about potential disasters, “They’d take out a black three-ring notebook and they’d say, ‘We have a three-ring notebook for that.’ ” That was only partially reassuring, he added, “because the chances of something happening not in a three-ring notebook is really high.”

Goldsmith assesses the situation this way: “I think we’ve gotten relatively good as a country-- local, state and federal government-- at the professional performance of routines. Our ability to accomplish the important routines of government on a daily basis is very high.”

But there are limitations, he said. “One is, are they conducive to imagination? Second, do they value the exercise of discretion throughout the system? And third, are they good at calculating the risk across agencies? What are the trade-offs of closing a country?”

The culture of plans on shelves can carry government officials only so far when disaster strikes. What then becomes more important are the systems in place that allow for quick action, improvisation and the rapid creation of systems to deal with the unexpected.

...Lack of integration-- public health with emergency management with economic assistance-- across the government creates other obstacles. So too does turnover in personnel or vacancies in key positions, which has been a continuing problem particularly in this administration.

“If you do not have people who do not remember the lessons learned and you don’t have people who have navigated these enough to have relationships across the government, you can be hampered,” said Mark Harvey, former senior director for resilience policy at the National Security Council. “You never want to be exchanging business cards at a disaster scene.”

...The Trump administration has been particularly weak in that regard, with scores of long-standing vacancies in critical positions, hostility toward career officials who are vitally important in times like these and with an indifference to the importance of selecting competent political appointees, rather than presidential favorites, that began during the transition and has plagued the government ever since.

Success goes beyond a president’s capacity to engage and move the bureaucracy. A top-down system inhibits quick action when needed. Experts in disaster management suggest that a functional system empowers officials farther down in the government to act without having been ordered to do so. Coordination must be at higher levels of government; response should be at a much lower level.

...Zelikow pointed to an earlier era when the world looked at the United States as being capable of almost anything. He cited the Marshall Plan that helped save Europe after World War II and creation of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 when the Soviet Union shut off ground access to Berlin, which threatened the well-being of residents there. In that case, improvisation quickly turned into a system that eventually forced the Soviets to relent and reopen the city.





...The Obama administration earned generally good marks for the way officials dealt with the Ebola crisis in 2014, consolidating decision-making under one person, Ron Klain, who had previously served as vice presidential chief of staff. He later recommended that he be the last disease-specific czar, that government needed a permanent expertise within the White House.

Improvisation in the midst of a crisis requires one set of skills, both in terms of leadership and the capacity for creative policymaking. “It’s really hard for government to understand every different collateral consequence that will occur until you start to experience it,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose state was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

...The absence of capacity for real planning could be especially damaging in the context of a threat farther out on the horizon. Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, looks at what has happened with the coronavirus pandemic to speculate about how the government might deal with threats from climate change.

“In the United States, as you know, we had a solid two months’ warning and did nothing. And even now, in terms of getting testing and masks set up and the like, there are incredible delays,” he said. “So we might finally overcome those problems. But, you know, with climate change, you need a 20-to-30-year ramping up for it to work.”

Cowen said it’s inexplicable why the federal government, given all the warnings and evidence from China of a spreading pandemic, did not move more rapidly.

“You know, Trump was terrible, but you can’t just pin it on him. It’s far more systemic than that. The NBA [which suspended its season on March 11] really gets so much credit. I would put the NBA in charge of fighting climate change at this point.”

“The question for me is, does government retain a certain baseline level of preparedness... and then whether government is nimble and agile enough to take a baseline and put it on steroids when something occurs,” said Janet Napolitano, former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

The performance by the Trump administration and the government as a whole in responding to the coronavirus pandemic will be thoroughly examined. The president’s handling already is a focus of criticism, and his reelection could hinge on how the public assesses his leadership next November. A national commission similar to that which was created after 9/11 could follow with a thorough exploration of what has happened.

Lessons will be learned and changes will be made, as they have after other disasters. Anyone looking for a few simple fixes-- a fuller stockpile of material, more funding for public health, a designated agency to deal with the next new virus-- will quickly find themselves disappointed. Those changes alone, however needed, will not have solved the underlying problems of a governing and political culture that, for all the good they can do when called upon, have limits, especially when officials are caught unawares and forced to act in new and unfamiliar ways.

“I’ve often wondered if democracy writ large is designed to be responsive rather than preemptive,” said Tom Ridge, the nation’s first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “One of the lessons perhaps as a result of this is we’ll be a little more inclined to be preemptive. With election cycles every two years, there is not a lot of credence given to people who take a longer view.”

Die For Me by Nancy Ohanian

Instead we get a severely sick narcissist. Yesterday he decided to spend his time on the national stage attacking Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for "allegedly 'complaining all the time' during Sunday's coronavirus White House press briefing, adding that he "hasn't performed well" amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 'There is a governor, I hear him complaining all the time, Pritzker. He is always complaining,' Trump said during Sunday's White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing. 'I just said, Give me a list of a couple of the things we've done in Illinois. We're building a 2,500-bed hospital in McCormick Place, that's a big convention center in Chicago. We're helping to staff it and probably will end up staffing it because he's not able to do what he's supposed to be able to do as the governor. He has not performed well,' the president added."

Free Education Is A Good Investment For Any Society That Wants To Stay Vibrant

I was a little disappointed yesterday. One of the guys from the Progressive Caucus called and we went over the new progressive budget proposal. They have a good idea built into their budget... but it only goes halfway to where we need it to go. If Republicans and conservative Democrats don't team up to kill the proposal-- which they do every two years like clockwork-- it would reduce the cost of current loans while creating a system for debt-free higher education for college students. The piece that was missing-- the Bernie piece-- is free public universities and community colleges... like free high schools.

As much as Hillary tries to mislead primary voters into thinking that Bernie's proposal is to have the taxpayers pay for Trump's children's college educations-- Eric Trump went to Georgetown University, Donald, Jr. went to Marymount Manhattan College, Ivanka went to Wharton and Tiffany Trump is a student at University of Pennsylvania, all private colleges-- but she knows that Bernie's proposal is about state schools, not private schools. It's just another example of how she lies as a matter of course. You speak English? She speaks Lie.

Matty Yglesias was one of the commentators who didn't seem to understand what Bernie was proposing and why it's a bigger piece of the pie than Hillary's overly complicated proposal that is filled with pitfalls for things to go wrong every step of the way (like Obamacare vs Medicare-for-all). In a column at Vox yesterday, Yglesias wrote that he's come around to Bernie's way of thinking and realizes his plan is the way to go. "If the government is going to be in the business of encouraging people to go to college and spending money on making it affordable," he wrote, "the right way to do that is to make it free... [W]e don't charge tuition at public high schools and then provide grants and loans to make it affordable to families in need. We make it free, and to the extent that we need to consider families' differential ability to pay we do that through the tax code. One reason is that even though in a narrow fiscal sense it benefits cities that so many of their affluent families send their kids to private school, paying taxes without using the service, in a more holistic sense it's quite bad for public education in the city."

The most decisive reason to like Sanders's goal of free college, however, didn't become clear until the campaign itself began. The great thing about free college is that people know what it means and some people are excited about it.

Clinton's college affordability plan, a much more complicated compact aimed at the goal of allowing students to graduate debt-free, utterly fails on this score. It is true that her plan is more fiscally progressive-- delivering more help to poor students and less to non-poor ones. It is also true that I have never met a person who is excited about this plan, even among people who are excited about Clinton in general.

Sanders's plan, by contrast, is a huge applause line at his rallies and something that Sanders's supporters frequently cite as a key reason they are backing him.

...Clinton's plan seems like it was written by higher education wonks for an audience of higher education wonks. Some of my best friends are higher education wonks, and obviously you need some wonks to seal the deal on any kind of workable legislation. But it's useful to start with some kind of clear big-picture goal that means something to normal people.

The greatest legislative success of the Obama years-- the Affordable Care Act-- suffers greatly in its political sustainability from the fact that people have such a poor grasp of what it encompasses, how it works, and whom it is supposed to be helping.

The contrast with a program like Social Security, which is worse targeted but much better understood, is stark and instructive. The narrow-targeting way is designed to minimize opposition to new initiatives by reducing their headline costs. But there's something to be said for taking the opposite approach and trying to maximize support by framing your objectives in a way that ensures the people to whom your policy is supposed to appeal actually understand what it is.

Free college financed by higher taxes is clean, simple, and easy to understand, and makes for a totally coherent goal to organize around over a period of years or even decades. If Democrats want to expend more public funds to make college cheaper, which it seems like they do, they ought to focus their efforts around Sanders's banner.

As we've mentioned before, Chicago's criminal billionaire Pritzker family is very much part of the Clinton Team-- shoveling over a million dollars into her campaign and working to help her buy votes in key states like Michigan-- where it almost worked-- and, of course, pushing their anti-union and their corporate ideas for privatizing education. But is Clinton's involvement with the Pritzkers corruption in a legalistic sense. Of course not... politicians define what bribery is and what constitutes corruption, and they exempt their own behavior patterns.

So what do you think the odds are that Clinton will fight for a living wage? Yes, if pigs fly and Congress presents her with one on its own accord, she will probably sign it (though I wouldn’t put it past her to water it down). But she’s not going to lead on this issue. If she pushes for a minimum wage increase, it’s not going to be a living wage.

Now, this isn’t corruption. The Pritzkers aren’t buying Clinton shiny new things. But just as Clinton bashes Sanders for his gun control stance (which is a legitimate thing to do), and then allows one of her top fundraisers to be the lobbyists who shot down the very same gun control legislation in 2013, this is a textbook case of clientelism. Here’s what I mean by clientelism:

And here’s the point I want to introduce to the discussion:

While not guilty of corruption in the explicit sense of quid pro quo, Clinton not only participates in, but actively cultivates patron-client relationships with Wall Street. In the clientelism that Clinton embraces and defends, she claims the American public to be the sole beneficiary via her representation, but she refuses to acknowledge how Wall St. benefits. And yet, in a patron-client system, both the patron and the client always benefit. Always. That is how it works. In this case: Clinton gets resources to run for office, while Wall Street gets the guarantee that the candidate they gave so much money in one place (e.g., a speech) will tacitly if not explicitly support their views of economic reality in another place (e.g., The White House). It is a long term strategy for both.

...Clinton... has built a career on the belief that she can control these patron-client relationships to benefit the powerless. Yet, she has done so by entering into reciprocal relationships with the powerful–who gain no advantage by legislation that helps the powerless…

But the problem that must be overcome in the Democratic Party for progressive goals to advance is clientelism–a patron-client system whereby elected Democrats and big money cultivate each other for mutual benefit.

And if ever there was a Presidential candidate who represented that system of clientism-- it’s the current front runner of the Democratic Party. As hard as it is to see and to name this, whatever good she has achieved on various fronts–and she has achieved a great deal–it is all tainted at this point by her investment for so long in big money clientelism.

This isn’t pragmatism, taking headcounts and realizing you don’t have the numbers. This is co-optation. Once again, the ‘economic left‘, which is to say, the poor, lower-middle class and middle class, won’t have a seat at the Democratic Party high table. If we’re lucky, we’ll get some scraps tossed under the table.

Penny For Your Thoughts

Over the weekend, we took a look at Obama's most vile nominee to date, shady billionairess Penny Pritzker. It's hard to imagine an already obstructionist Republican caucus in the Senate is going to let this one through, but who knows... maybe their admiration for his record of criminal endeavor will outweigh their loathing for Obama! Yesterday, Chicago-based historian, Rick Perlstein, took to the pages of The Nation to explain what's so wrong with Pritzker... and Obama's decision to give her a Cabinet position. Like all progressives, Perlstein is fed up with Obama's corporatist decisions to push through Republican proposals that harm the most fundamental progressive achievements in history, like the Chained CPI proposal to help wreck Social Security. He sees Obama's choice of Pritzker as part of an emerging picture of an Obama "unfettered from the constraints of reelection."

In December of 2008, Obama's choice for Secretary of Commerce, Chicago-based business tycoon Penny Pritzker, withdrew her name from consideration in the face of a triple-barreled onslaught. First, there was her position on the board of Superior Bank, which her family bought with the help of $645 million in tax credits for the federal government. In 2001, Superior collapsed, after pioneering the bottom-feeding trade in subprime mortgages. In In These Times, David Moberg called it a "mini-Enron scandal"; 1,406 uninsured depositors lost their savings. Here was what one of the victims had to say: "The Pritzkers are crooks. They don't care anything about people who spent their whole lives trying to save." And here is how Penny responded: "We had seven years of clean audits and then the auditors said, 'Well, maybe we'll change the way we calculate.'" Exquisite humanity, that. The family coughed up $435 million in settlement money in exchange for not having to admit any wrongdoing. But why, Penny was asked, would they pay half a billion dollars to clean up a mess she said was none of their fault? Because, she answered, "My family is not going to litigate with the federal government at a time like this"-- a reference to the September 11 attacks; classy.

Here was the second concern which kept her from the Commerce Department in 2008: "Whether she could disentangle herself," as the Washington Post put it, from her family's "vast financial holdings"-- many of which they would prefer not to see scrutinized in public. How vast? Well, way back in 1973, the New York Times reported of "The Very Private Pritzkers," "The family law firm, Pritzker & Prizker, hasn't accepted an outside client for thirty years because of the potential conflict of interest with the Pritzker enterprises, which are too numerous for any one member of the family to recall at any given moment." In 1982, when the list became public for the very first time-- more on why later-- the holdings included at least 216 separate corporate entities, from mining to motels. One current holding is TransUnion-- Penny is chairman of the board-- which is one of three companies controlling the creepy trade in credit reports. “After widespread consumer complaints about shoddy service in the credit checking industry," Bloomberg reported back in 2008, "the U.S. Congress passed legislation in 2003 that allowed people to obtain free copies of credit reports so they could check for mistakes and block information obtained from identity theft. That same year, a jury awarded Judy Thomas of Klamath Falls, Oregon, $5.3 million after she claimed TransUnion took six years to correct a mistake in her credit report." Penny's reaction? Public-spirited as ever: "the company has always encouraged consumers to monitor their reports, Pritzker says."

The third reason Obama chose not to risk political capital on a Penny Pritzker nomination fight is that unions despise her. Among the reasons: the Hyatt hotel chain, which the Pritzkers built practically from nothing, is infamous for just about the worst treatment of their staff in the business. (Here's a moving first-hand account.)

Rahm, Volcker, Pritzker

Since that near-nomination, Chicago's new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, chose Penny Pritzker to join the mayor-appointed school board-- a body, as I've been documenting here, that has fanatically devoted to breaking the Chicago Teachers Union, and turning over the system to charter school operators. Their excuse has been the school system's alleged $500 million deficit. Which is where Penny comes in. For while the city's budget for schools is alleged to be bare, the city's tax increment financing (TIF) fund, a slush pile for rich developers, carries a surplus of at least $500 million. What does this have to do with Penny Pritzker? Well, as it happens, on my very street, she is building a Hyatt financed with $5.2 million in TIF funds. As the Chicago Teachers Union points out, the TIF fund is controlled personally by the mayor; members of the school board (from which Pritzker recently resigned ahead of her Commerce appointment), overwhelmingly his rich campaign backers, are personally appointed by the mayor; and nothing's keeping them from leaning on the mayor to tap the TIF surplus to plug the school deficit-- except the fact that this very deficit is the rhetorical foundation for all the things they're doing to weaken the union. All in all, Penny Pritzker's relationship with labor has become exponentially worse since her near-nomination in 2008.

So how has second-term Obama responded? By re-nominating her.

It should make for some interesting confirmation hearings. This family is famously secretive. In 2003 two family scions, siblings Liesel and Matthew Pritzker, sued their father Robert Pritzker for $6 billion, claiming he had looted their trust fund. In 2004, a judge gave them access to sealed financial reports. Explained investigating reporter Gus Russo, "that unearthed a secret family deal cut after Liesel's uncle Jay Pritzker's death in 1999, a plan that would have broken up the fortune into eleven shares valued at $1.4 billion each. In early 2005, rather than expose the complicated Pritzker offshore shelters to the light of day, the Pritzker family put the final touches on a private settlement agreement" giving Liesel and Matthew Pritzker upwards of $500 million each to drop the case.

...If Republican senators have any strategic sense, they'll be asking in open hearings about this sort of stuff: how the Pritzkers came by all those billions in the first place, how they've kept it from the view of the public and the taxman both, and what it is they've been so eager to hide. I'll have more to say about that tomorrow. To put it lightly: It's not the kind of thing Barack Obama needs America to hear about one of his cabinet appointees.

All too often the last defense Democrats can make about supporting one of their wretched, corrupt, cowardly candidates is that at least he's better than a Republican and that at least the Democratic Party is better than the Republican Party. If the GOP weren't on an extremist binge, Obama's most marked accomplishment of his first 5 years would have been to level that playing field.

UPDATE: Oy... The Mafia too?

Perlstein isn't looking for any invitations to the White House Easter Egg Hunt. Today The Nation published Part 2 of his Pritzker exposé... and, to put it mildly, it's really damning.

Did you know that in the early 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service investigated the Pritzker family, whose scion Penny Pritzker has just been tapped by President Obama to become Secretary of Commerce, because their Hyatt Corporation was paying no taxes? And that in the course of the inquiry, an IRS statement quoted an informant with access to the records of the offshore bank where they hid their assets that the family, “through their Hyatt Corporation, received their initial backing from organized crime”?

Washington, DC Needs Women... But Not Women Like Penny Pritzker

This week, EMILY'S List launched a program, Madam President, to elect a woman president. The idea is GREAT. America is overdue and really needs a woman president. EMILY'S List, though, is the wrong organization to lead the effort, not much better than if the GOP launched the effort to push Michele Bachmann, Virginia Foxx or Kelly Ayotte. We've seen many times before that EMILY'S List's modus operandi is to viciously and baselessly attack progressive men with sterling records on women's issues, in order to push forward their own hackish candidates-- like Nikki Tinker-- who happen to be females, regardless of the damage those candidates' conservative agendas are likely to cause. What America needs is a strong, progressive woman president.

That's also what America needs in the House, the Senate, in state legislatures, in the Cabinet and across government. I was surprised-- though why I don't know-- to read this morning that although women are 51% of the nation, they make up just 8% of House Republicans. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side, which isn't something to be that proud of either.) And only 20% of the current senators are women. Obama's nominated 15 of his 16 Cabinet members-- and just 4 are women, Kathleen Sibelius, Janet Napolitano, Sally Jewell and now Penny Pritzker.

And that fact that she's a woman shouldn't make Pritzker any more palatable for a progressive. That's really scraping the bottom on the barrel and I'd love to see the Republican obstructionists in the Senate do soemthing worthwhile with their filibuster regime for a change. Pritzker is a real Greg Palast nightmare. "You made fun of me," he wrote, "when I suggested that President Barack Obama would nominate a confessed bank scammer, a loan-sharking mortgage predator, to his cabinet. But thar she blows! Today, Obama has named Penny Pritzker Secretary of Commerce. As the President says, It's a milestone: the first female fraudster to hold that post. No longer will criminal bankers have to lobby the administration-- because now they'll have one of their own in the Cabinet. Obama goes way back with Pritzker in Chicago Democratic politics.

Pritzker's net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust-- at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior's depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama's South Side district lost their homes.

Penny did not like paying $460 million. No, not one bit. What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She hoped someone would change the banking regulators and the Commerce Department so she could get away with this crap.

Pritzker introduced Obama, the neophyte state senator, to the Ladies Who Lunch (that's really what they call themselves) on Chicago's Gold Coast. Obama got lunch, gold and better-- an introduction to Robert Rubin. Rubin is a former Secretary of the Treasury, former chairman of Goldman Sachs and former co-chairman of Citibank. Even atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.

Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.

So what did Citibank's Rubin get for showering Obama with gold? Obama agreed to take care of Rubin's poodles, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. They became Obama's first cabinet picks: Summers as Economics Czar and Geithner as his czarina, Secretary of the Treasury.

Geithner and Summers were the gents who, under Treasury Secretary Rubin, designed the deregulation of banking. In effect, they had decriminalized the kind of financial flim-flammery that brought the planet to its knees while bringing Rubin, Pritzker and the banksters loads of lucre.

...In return, in 2008, Obama decided to make his patron Penny the Secretary of Commerce. But then, in November 2008, just as Obama was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of Pritzker's victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted bank, but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes that her family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama slammed the door on Penny pronto.

The Pritzker family made its billions mostly from Hyatt Hotels and Hyatt nursing homes. Penny, on the Hyatt board of directors, is an infamously combative anti-union apostle. UNITE HERE, the union that represents Hyatt workers, has called for an international boycott of Hyatt hotels. In 2012, UNITE HERE and its parent, the AFL-CIO, were crucial to Obama's winning Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, in this last campaign, Obama had to keep his billionairess heiress on the down-low.

Obama appeared to keep the door shut on Pritzker throughout the 2012 campaign, reducing her to hosting an election fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time and last time anyone used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.

But today, with the unions' money and votes already pocketed and counted, Obama can give working folks The Finger and give Penny her pound of flesh: the Commerce post.

The New York Times says that, "At Commerce, Ms. Pritzker could provide the president with a new way to reach out to the business community." The last time Pritzker reached out to the business community was to sell them sub-prime mortgage securities, worthless bags of financial feces manufactured by Superior Bank.

By giving Penny, the Piggy Banker, Commerce, we have to change Obama's rating to sub-prime. I do note that some woman's organizations are applauding the appointment of the first female to the Commerce post.  But I prefer to honor the victims of the Chicago femme fatale. Most of Penny's victims, busted bank borrowers and underpaid health care workers, are women, too. But, unlike those wounded and destroyed by Pritzker, she worked hard for her money: it was not easy inheriting her first billion from her daddy.

Obama mislead the public when he introduced this sack of crap to the public. “Penny is one of our country’s most distinguished business leaders. She’s got more than 25 years of management experience in industries including real estate, finance and hospitality. She’s built companies from the ground up.” He left out the part about her being vehemently anti-union, both on the Chicago School Board and on the board of Hyatt. And he neglected to mention that FDIC action against her bank and her role in pioneering the re-packaging of subprime loans.

We want more women in government-- but not women like Michele Bachmann and not women like Penny Pritzker. And, by the way, when will ordinary working women-- rather than multimillionairesses and billionairesses-- get some representation. They sure need some-- on every level. But, of course, EMILY'S List has no interest in working class women either.