thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-22--Nancy Pelosi Postpones Vote On Lawmaking From Afar

House members will not be voting on whether to adopt a proxy voting system this week when the chamber convenes to vote on the COVID-19 relief bill that the Senate passed , the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi ( D-Calif. ) announced on Wednesday .
Pelosi signed off on a plan last Thursday developed by House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern ( D-Mass . )
that would have temporarily enabled members reluctant to travel to Washington , D.C. , during the pandemic to empower another member capable of appearing in person to vote on legislation on their behalf .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Steny Hoyer ( D-Md . )
, told House Democrats on Monday that they could expect to vote on a rule change enabling proxy voting when they assemble in person to vote on the new relief bill .
He advised members to plan to be present for those votes on Thursday .
But Pelosi revealed Wednesday that in lieu of a vote this week , she would convene a special bipartisan committee run by Majority Whip Jim Clyburn ( D-S.C. ) to review the proxy voting system .
The House will vote this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ committee .
Pelosi ’ s decision not to hold a vote on proxy voting this week indefinitely postpones the adoption of a system that would permit Congress to function even somewhat normally during the coronavirus crisis .
Until then , the House ― Democrats ’ sole bastion of power in Washington ― is severely limited in its ability to shape the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic havoc it has wrought .
The House has not assembled in person since late March , when Rep. Thomas Massie , a libertarian-minded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voice vote on an economic stimulus and corporate bailout bill that Pelosi was otherwise prepared to pass unanimously .
The House ’ s inactivity prior to the vote ― coupled with the absence of a system to pass its own bill from afar ― effectively allowed the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Senate to dictate terms of that bill .
“ Speaker Pelosi should have figured this out months ago , ” said Daniel Schuman , policy director of Demand Progress , a leading proponent of remote voting .
“ Pushing forward on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and a task force that will require the House to reconvene to implement its recommendations is a recipe for continued delays in getting the House , and its committees , back to work.
” The postponed vote is the latest in a series of decisions Pelosi has made that have prompted public criticism from a host of progressive activists and groups that would normally be reluctant to speak up against her .
After the March relief bill , which created a $ 500-billion corporate bailout fund under the purview of Treasury Secretary Steve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Democratic leaders assured activists that the next bill would be far better for ordinary workers and their families .
Now the House is poised to vote on legislation the Senate passed that expands small business aid and allots money for testing , but excludes new aid for distressed city and state governments , more food aid for struggling households , the passage of universal voting by mail , rules barring creditors from confiscating relief checks , or a bailout for the Postal Service .
Ocasio-Cortez , who represents neighborhoods in the New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the highest COVID-19 fatality rates in the country , said Monday that she planned to vote against the bill pending major changes .
“ It is insulting to think that we can pass such a small amount of money in the context of not knowing when Congress is even going to reconvene ― and pass such a small amount of money , pat ourselves on the back , and then leave town again , ” she declared .
Pelosi picked Shalala , an Education and Labor Committee member with little financial policymaking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ D-Calif. ) , a consumer rights attorney and disciple of Sen. Elizabeth Warren ( D-Mass . )
who actively sought a post on the panel .
Porter , a freshman member on the Financial Services Committee , has made a name for herself with her interrogation of financial executives and Trump administration officials .

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House members will not be voting on whether to adopt a proxy voting system this week when the chamber convenes to vote on the COVID-19 relief bill that the Senate passed, the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced on Wednesday.
Pelosi signed off on a plan last Thursday developed by House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) that would have temporarily enabled members reluctant to travel to Washington, D.C., during the pandemic to empower another member capable of appearing in person to vote on legislation on their behalf.
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And Pelosi’s second-in-command, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), told House Democrats on Monday that they could expect to vote on a rule change enabling proxy voting when they assemble in person to vote on the new relief bill. He advised members to plan to be present for those votes on Thursday.
But Pelosi revealed Wednesday that in lieu of a vote this week, she would convene a bipartisan task force to review the proxy voting system.
A senior aide to House Democratic leadership told HuffPost that Pelosi made the decision after consulting with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
“Bottom line here is that the speaker wants a bipartisan solution,” the senior aide said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has also drawn scrutiny for naming scandal-clouded Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) to a board overseeing corporate bailout money. SAUL LOEB/Getty Images
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Pelosi’s decision not to hold a vote on proxy voting this week indefinitely postpones the adoption of a system that would permit Congress to function even somewhat normally during the coronavirus crisis. Until then, the House ― Democrats’ sole bastion of power in Washington ― is severely limited in its ability to shape the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic havoc it has wrought.
The House has not assembled in person since late March, when Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-minded Republican from Kentucky, forced an in-person voice vote on an economic stimulus and corporate bailout bill that Pelosi was otherwise prepared to pass unanimously. The House’s inactivity prior to the vote ― coupled with the absence of a system to pass its own bill from afar ― effectively allowed the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Senate to dictate terms of that bill.
The additional delay in proxy voting sparked criticism from proponents of congressional reform who already considered proxy voting inferior to direct remote voting through electronic means, as well as the creation of a digital framework for debate and committee deliberation.
What’s more, McGovern’s staff already published a lengthy examination of proxy voting in a late March report, making additional study unnecessary, those critics argue.
“Speaker Pelosi should have figured this out months ago.” - Daniel Schuman, Demand Progress
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“Speaker Pelosi should have figured this out months ago,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director of Demand Progress, a leading proponent of remote voting. “Pushing forward on a select committee that cannot meet and a task force that will require the House to reconvene to implement its recommendations is a recipe for continued delays in getting the House, and its committees, back to work.”
A spokesperson for the Congressional Progressive Caucus did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Pelosi’s decision to delay consideration of proxy voting. A spokesperson for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a CPC member who frequently bucks party leadership, declined to comment.
The postponed vote is the latest in a series of decisions Pelosi has made that have prompted public criticism from a host of progressive activists and groups that would normally be reluctant to speak up against her.
After the March relief bill, which created a $500-billion corporate bailout fund under the purview of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a former hedge fund manager, Democratic leaders assured activists that the next bill would be far better for ordinary workers and their families.
Now the House is poised to vote on legislation the Senate passed that expands small business aid and allots money for testing, but excludes new aid for distressed city and state governments, more food aid for struggling households, the passage of universal voting by mail, rules barring creditors from confiscating relief checks, or a bailout for the Postal Service. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents neighborhoods in the New York City borough of Queens with some of the highest COVID-19 fatality rates in the country, said Monday that she planned to vote against the bill pending major changes.
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“It is insulting to think that we can pass such a small amount of money in the context of not knowing when Congress is even going to reconvene ― and pass such a small amount of money, pat ourselves on the back, and then leave town again,” she declared.
A coalition of heads of major progressive organizations and thinks tanks, including the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the National Women’s Law Center and the Center for Popular Democracy, released a joint statement on Wednesday condemning the Senate bill.
“The legislation that just passed the Senate is a small, but wholly insufficient, step in the right direction,” they said. “As a result, many people, families, and communities will remain in dire straits.”
Even Bob Greenstein, the president of the center-left Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which rarely breaks with Democratic leadership, said the bill “falls short even as an interim measure.”
Pelosi also rankled some progressives with her announcement Wednesday that she would stick with her selection of Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) to serve on an oversight panel of the corporate bailout money.
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Pelosi picked Shalala, an Education and Labor Committee member with little financial policymaking experience, over Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), a consumer rights attorney and disciple of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who actively sought a post on the panel. Porter, a freshman member on the Financial Services Committee, has made a name for herself with her interrogation of financial executives and Trump administration officials.
Days later, it emerged that Shalala, who owns millions of dollars in corporate stocks, violated the law when she failed to disclose her sale of some stocks after assuming office in 2018.
Drew Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman, said Shalala’s apology for her actions had sufficed.
“Congresswoman Shalala has the speaker’s complete confidence,” he said.
Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Revolving Door Project, which monitors executive branch corruption, believes the week’s events have done irrevocable damage to Pelosi’s reputation as a shrewd tactician. (The Revolving Door Project and Demand Progress had called on Pelosi to encourage Shalala to withdraw.)
“For a long time, Pelosi has received the benefit of the doubt from rank-and-file progressives who don’t follow the ins and outs of D.C. and believe that she is genuinely as calculating and knife fighting as portrayed by Kate McKinnon on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” he said. “I think that myth ends this week with a set of defeats too big to overcome by tearing up paper.”


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Jake Tapper Slaps Trump With A Coronavirus-Era 'Sharpie' Barb

Jake Tapper compared President Donald Trump ’ s attempts to bend scientific evidence in his favor during the coronavirus pandemic to his famously altered Hurricane Dorian weather map on Wednesday .
“ The idea of politics and the president ’ s personal ego being placed above science reminds me of President Trump with the hurricane , ” the CNN anchor said during a discussion about a top vaccine official who was removed from his post for allegedly questioning hydroxychloroquine ― the unproven anti-malarial treatment pushed by Trump as a COVID-19 treatment .
Tapper was referring to an incident during Hurricane @ @ @ @ @ @ @ map of the storm ’ s trajectory that was altered with a black marker so that it would include Alabama after he was criticized for mistakenly identifying the state as being on the storm path .
Months later , emails released from top weather officials revealed the bedlam that ensued in the midst of a weather crisis as scientists scrambled to respond to the political debacle .
Tapper made the reference in light of news that Dr. Rick Bright , who led the Department of Health and Human Services ’ Biomedical Advanced Research @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this week for allegedly refusing to comply with “ efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.
” In a statement provided to The New York Times Wednesday , Bright said he had pushed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine and called for “ scientifically vetted solutions ” instead of drugs , vaccines and technologies that “ lack scientific merit , ” then was subsequently shuffled to a narrower role at the National Institutes of Health .
He also accused the administration of putting “ politics and cronyism ahead of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a coronavirus treatment for weeks , despite numerous experts , including those on his own task force , sounding the alarm that it was not proven to be effective or safe .
However , the president ’ s enthusiasm appeared to cool this week in light of new findings from a small U.S. study which indicated the drug provided no benefit to patients and caused more deaths than in cases receiving standard care .
When asked at his daily briefing about Bright ’ s ouster , Trump said , “ Maybe he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; I don ’ t know who he is.
” Tapper noted that Bright ’ s account was “ quite believable ” given the president ’ s “ long record of not believing in science and official medicine .
”

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Jake Tapper compared President Donald Trump’s attempts to bend scientific evidence in his favor during the coronavirus pandemic to his famously altered Hurricane Dorian weather map on Wednesday.
“The idea of politics and the president’s personal ego being placed above science reminds me of President Trump with the hurricane,” the CNN anchor said during a discussion about a top vaccine official who was removed from his post for allegedly questioning hydroxychloroquine ― the unproven anti-malarial treatment pushed by Trump as a COVID-19 treatment.
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“But you can’t Sharpie a drug into acceptability and scientific acceptance... It doesn’t work that way,” Tapper added.
Tapper was referring to an incident during Hurricane Dorian last year when Trump used a map of the storm’s trajectory that was altered with a black marker so that it would include Alabama after he was criticized for mistakenly identifying the state as being on the storm path. Months later, emails released from top weather officials revealed the bedlam that ensued in the midst of a weather crisis as scientists scrambled to respond to the political debacle.
Tapper made the reference in light of news that Dr. Rick Bright, who led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, was abruptly dismissed this week for allegedly refusing to comply with “efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.”
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In a statement provided to The New York Times Wednesday, Bright said he had pushed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine and called for “scientifically vetted solutions” instead of drugs, vaccines and technologies that “lack scientific merit,” then was subsequently shuffled to a narrower role at the National Institutes of Health. He also accused the administration of putting “politics and cronyism ahead of science.”
Trump had been endorsing hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment for weeks, despite numerous experts, including those on his own task force, sounding the alarm that it was not proven to be effective or safe. However, the president’s enthusiasm appeared to cool this week in light of new findings from a small U.S. study which indicated the drug provided no benefit to patients and caused more deaths than in cases receiving standard care.
When asked at his daily briefing about Bright’s ouster, Trump said, “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t; I don’t know who he is.”


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Anthony Fauci Offers Tooth Fairy 'Guarantee' To 7-Year-Old Worried About Coronavirus

Dr. Anthony Fauci had a reassuring response to a 7-year-old girl ’ s concerns about the Tooth Fairy amid the @ @ @ @ @ Ava asked the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases if the @ @ @ @ @ during the public health crisis , and if the fairy was at risk of contracting @ @ @ @ @ latest edition of actor Will Smith ’ s “ Will From Home ” series on @ @ @ @ @ ta tell you Ava , I don ’ t think you need to worry about @ @ @ @ @ Fauci responded .
“ So when you get your tooth fall out , you stick @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ll guarantee you that that Tooth Fairy is not going to get infected @ @ @ @ @ get sick.
” Jacinda Ardern , the prime minister of New Zealand , offered similar @ @ @ @ @ she confirmed during a coronavirus briefing that both the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny @ @ @ @ @

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Dr. Anthony Fauci had a reassuring response to a 7-year-old’s concern that the tooth fairy might be thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic.
A Los Angeles girl named Ava asked the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases if the tooth fairy would still come during the public health crisis, and whether the fairy was at risk of contracting the virus, in the latest edition of actor Will Smith’s “Will From Home” series on Snap.
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“I gotta tell you Ava, I don’t think you need to worry about the tooth fairy,” Fauci responded. “So, when you get your tooth falls out, you stick it under the pillow and I’ll guarantee you that that tooth fairy is not going to get infected and is not going to get sick.”
Check out the sweet clip here:
Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, offered similar reassurance earlier this month. She confirmed during a coronavirus briefing that both the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny are considered essential workers.
Check out that clip here:


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Rachel Maddow Rips Trump, Fox News After Drug Flunks Coronavirus Study

Rachel Maddow ripped into both President Donald Trump and Fox News after a drug heavily promoted by both as a coronavirus treatment failed in a new study .
The two “ incessantly ” promoted malaria drug hydroxychloroquine “ on a daily , sometimes hourly basis , as what they were quite sure was a miracle cure for coronavirus , ” Maddow said .
According to the progressive group Media Matters , the drug had nearly 300 on-air mentions between March 23 and April 6 , and Trump repeatedly talked it up at news conferences .
On Wednesday , Maddow played @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Laura Ingraham , Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson , praising the drug , along with some of the president ’ s own comments .
“ What do you have to lose ?
” Trump asked at one appearance as he suggested patients with the infection try the medication .
“ Take it.
” “ They just stopped bringing it up , ” Maddow said .
“ And we don ’ t know why that is , but yesterday we did get the results of a new study.
” That study , which has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drug did not help either on its own or in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin , and there were more deaths among the patients given the treatment .
“ It is one thing to not have leadership at the federal level in response to this crisis .
It is actually a whole ’ nother thing to have the president putting American lives at risk every time he blurts something made up or that he thought he understood from TV into the microphone at the White House briefing room.
” “ I won ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or the other about the president and how he should be treated , ” she added .
“ But as a general matter , I think we should all agree that perhaps there should be a more concerted effort to stop the spread of misinformation about this disease , particularly if it is potentially deadly misinformation.
” Then , she warned viewers : “ Don ’ t listen to people who are lying to you about this disease .
”

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Rachel Maddow ripped into both President Donald Trump and Fox News after a drug heavily promoted by both as a coronavirus treatment failed in a new study.
The two “incessantly” promoted malaria drug hydroxychloroquine “on a daily, sometimes hourly basis, as what they were quite sure was a miracle cure for coronavirus,” Maddow said. According to the progressive group Media Matters, the drug had nearly 300 on-air mentions between March 23 and April 6, and Trump repeatedly talked it up at news conferences.
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On Wednesday, Maddow played a supercut of Fox personalities, including Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, praising the drug, along with some of the president’s own comments.
“What do you have to lose?” Trump asked at one appearance as he suggested patients with the infection try the medication. “Take it.”
But last week, there was a sudden change.
“They just stopped bringing it up,” Maddow said. “And we don’t know why that is, but yesterday we did get the results of a new study.”
That study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found the drug did not help either on its own or in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin, and there were more deaths among the patients given the treatment.
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Maddow said:
“It is one thing to not have leadership at the federal level in response to this crisis. It is actually a whole ’nother thing to have the president putting American lives at risk every time he blurts something made up or that he thought he understood from TV into the microphone at the White House briefing room.”
“I won’t tell you my opinion one way or the other about the president and how he should be treated,” she added. “But as a general matter, I think we should all agree that perhaps there should be a more concerted effort to stop the spread of misinformation about this disease, particularly if it is potentially deadly misinformation.”
Then, she warned viewers: “Don’t listen to people who are lying to you about this disease.”


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Something Big Is Getting Lost In The Debate Over Stay-At-Home Orders

Polling also shows Americans trust their governors a lot more than they do the president , and that may help explain the recent pushback .
Now that the public health crisis has also become an economic one , Trump and his allies may be trying to shift blame onto the governors .
Given the polarization in the electorate , it may be only a matter of time before the 30 % to 40 % of the country that supports Trump decides that he is right about this , too .
The Thinking Behind The Orders The Debate Over The Restrictions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can help in other ways , however , by providing for people ’ s needs until the national emergency is over and , separately , by developing enough testing and tracing capacity to isolate outbreaks .
Experts say that capacity is an essential prerequisite for reopening because , without it , new outbreaks could lead to new surges .
State officials like Whitmer have a big role to play in these efforts , whether by recruiting workers to track down possible exposures or setting up facilities to isolate the sick .
On Wednesday @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on precisely those sorts of tasks .

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DETROIT ― The patient surge from COVID-19 was just beginning when Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, issued her first stay-at-home order on March 23. Pulmonologist Mahmoud Al-Hadidi, who called me a few days after that, understood better than most why it was necessary.
At his hospital in the northern Detroit suburbs, the caseload of patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, had gone from one to 15 in a week. Workers didn’t have enough protective gear, the ventilator supply was iffy and patients were deteriorating right in front of his eyes.
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“Unless you’ve been there, you can’t understand what it’s like,” he said.
And things only got worse from there. At one point, about 70 patients were on ventilators. Even young people were dying, including a 37-year-old medical resident with a wife and three children whom Al-Hadidi knew. He called after that happened, to give another update. “It’s just devastating,” he said.
Then, last weekend, Al-Hadidi texted with a very different sort of message: “Would you like to hear some good news?” The number of patients on ventilators had fallen to just 22. “It’s looking a lot better. And this is what I am hearing from my friends across the state.”
The numbers back that up. COVID-19 has taken a severe toll on Michigan, with more than 2,800 fatalities, but hospitals are now reporting more COVID discharges than admissions, and the number of daily fatalities has been declining. Experts like Joshua Petrie, a University of Michigan epidemiologist, thinks the stay-at-home orders have a lot to do with that.
“Hospitals in southeast Michigan filled close to capacity very quickly, so I think acting quickly and decisively with the stay-at-home order was absolutely necessary,” Petrie, who is part of a team producing predictive models for the governor, told HuffPost on Monday. Frontline health care workers have echoed those sentiments.
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But lately, social distancing orders have been a source of controversy. Last week, an estimated 4,000 protesters drove their cars to Lansing, the state capital, clogging streets and demanding that Whitmer dial back the restrictions. Similar demonstrations have since taken place in other states, part of a broader pushback against aggressive social distancing orders.
Protests against Michigan's stay-at-home orders last week had a distinctly Trumpian flavor. Elaine Cromie via Getty Images
The campaign has support from conservative financiers, prominent media figures on the right and leaders in the Republican Party ― including, sometimes, President Donald Trump, who for weeks has been agitating to ease social distancing and open up businesses again.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a radio interview on Tuesday that some state orders look “disturbingly close to house arrest” and threatened legal action against governors who go “too far.” Meanwhile, governors in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas have said they are rolling back stay-at-home orders or allowing them to expire before the end of May ― although Georgia’s decision to open businesses like gyms and nail salons on Friday went too far even for Trump, who said on Wednesday that such moves come “too soon.”
The impetus to reopen states quickly flies in the face of advice from most public health experts. It’s also out of sync with public opinion, despite all the hardships that the shutdown has imposed. Only 15% of Americans think coronavirus-related restrictions are excessive, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey. Those findings are consistent with other surveys showing the public worries more about opening up too soon than too late.
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Polling also shows Americans trust their governors a lot more than they do the president, and that may help explain the recent pushback. Now that the public health crisis has also become an economic one, Trump and his allies may be trying to shift blame onto the governors. Given the polarization in the electorate, it may be only a matter of time before the 30% to 40% of the country that supports Trump decides that he is right about this, too.
But whatever the implications for politics, the story about policy seems clear enough. The very real pain Americans feel likely has a lot more to do with failures at the federal level than anything happening in state capitals. And these failures are taking place in real time, in ways that could extend the nation’s suffering.
The Thinking Behind The Orders
The main grievance against governors like Whitmer is that they have put livelihoods at risk when it wasn’t necessary to save lives. In Michigan, critics have focused their rhetoric on several features of an April 9 order that extended her original directive while adding new restrictions ― including supposed prohibitions on sales of seeds and American flags, but not medical marijuana, as well as a ban on the use of motorboats and travel to vacation homes.
“Today in Michigan, residents can buy marijuana, but they can’t get flowers,” Republican Mike Shirkey, majority leader in the state Senate, wrote in an op-ed for The Bridge. “The list of absurdities in the governor’s order is long, and unlike our gardens, it’s growing.” It was a pretty good riff, though not entirely accurate ― which, perhaps, isn’t so surprising coming from a legislator who, in a speech last year to students at a conservative Christian college, said Whitmer was “on the batshit crazy spectrum.”
Whitmer has not actually banned the sale of seeds or, for that matter, American flags. Rather, she closed nonessential businesses and required that large home improvement outlets, like the Midwest chain Menard’s, cordon off departments like gardening in order to discourage extra foot traffic. “If you’re not buying food or medicine or other essential items, you should not be going to the store,” Whitmer said.
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As for the prohibition on motorboating and visiting second residences, a key objective was to prevent interactions that could spread the disease from southeast Michigan to the other parts of the state. As Lisa Peacock, chief health officer at the Northwest Michigan health department, noted in a press briefing on Tuesday, rural hospitals don’t have the capacity to handle a large influx of patients. “Our hospitals operate based on the population that they normally see,” she said.
Whitmer has stood by her aggressive restrictions on activity, saying they were necessary to save lives. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Reasonable people can question the details of specific restrictions, given their utility and tradeoffs. But Whitmer has said many times that every decision has been difficult ― and that, especially during the weeks when Detroit’s hospitals were at the brink, her priority has been halting the outbreak’s explosive growth.
That has meant paying attention to the scientists, and she’s got a lot of them around her these days. In addition to Chief Medical Officer Joneigh Khaldun and the state’s epidemiologists, as well as those researchers from the University of Michigan, Whitmer has been consulting with four high-profile experts from around the country: Ezekiel Emanuel from the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Gottlieb from the American Enterprise Institute, Ashish Jha from Harvard and Joshua Sharfstein from Johns Hopkins University.
Gottlieb is a conservative, having run the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Trump for two years. He has also supported aggressive social distancing, as have some Republican governors ― notable among them, Mike DeWine of Ohio, whose actions look a lot like Whitmer’s. Unlike his Michigan counterpart, whom Trump has called “that woman governor” and “half-Whitmer,” DeWine hasn’t incurred the president’s wrath. Perhaps that is because DeWine belongs to the same party as the president.
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But DeWine hasn’t escaped the ire of protesters. It was an Ohio demonstration that produced what is now the iconic image of the pushback: A snapshot of some activists standing side-by-side, right up against the Statehouse doors, mouths wide open in mid-shout and nary a protective mask in sight. Conspicuous in the photo, taken by Columbus Dispatch photographer Joshua Bickel, was a red “Trump” hat on one of the men protesting.
The Debate Over The Restrictions
The rhetoric is familiar, too, with organizers of the Lansing protests and the activists trying to play up the same divisions between urban and rural populations that Trump does at his rallies. When Vox interviewed Rosanne Ponkowski, president of the Michigan Conservative Coalition, and mentioned the effect of COVID-19 on the Detroit area, Ponkowski said, “Let’s talk about people that live north of Lansing.”
But those people north of Lansing are by no means immune to the virus. Just ask officials in Ostego County, which includes the small city of Gaylord and straddles the state’s main north-south interstate. As of Wednesday, it had 80 confirmed cases, 37 more probable cases and six deaths. Among those who have become ill are at least six paramedics, two of whom were on ventilators as of last week.
Ostego is one of the counties under the jurisdiction of Peacock’s health department, and, during Tuesday’s update for reporters, she stressed the importance of social distancing and the need to maintain it.
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Mackinaw City depends on tourist dollars, but the executive director of its Chamber of Commerce told the Detroit Free Press that shop owners are worried about lifting restrictions too quickly because they're afraid the virus will spread in their city. Jeff Greenberg via Getty Images
“The science is clear that keeping our physical distance is the best tool we have to slow the spread of COVID-19 and to ensure our health care system has the capacity to care for those who need it,” she said. “This is precisely why the actions our residents have taken are so important. And we’re asking people to continue making the sacrifice.”
Shop owners in Mackinaw City may be willing to do that. Mackinaw City is on the northernmost tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula, about 60 miles past Gaylord on the interstate. Business depends on tourists stopping on their way to nearby Mackinac Island or to the Upper Peninsula, so merchants stand to lose plenty of money as the weather warms. But they also have a lot to lose when a virus is on the loose ― and they know it, according to Jamie Westfall, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce.
“We’re afraid when these restrictions are lifted and people are going to come up here,” Westfall told the Detroit Free Press. “What about our employees who live in dorm-style housing? What if our hospitals are overwhelmed? Our No. 1 priority is health. We’re scared.”
The Case For More Government Action
The economic suffering of Michiganders, like the economic suffering of Americans, is real. A million residents in the state were out of work as of last week ― a number that is at once staggering and heartbreaking given the long, difficult recovery after the last downturn, in 2009. Trump has pointed out, correctly, that mental and physical health problems rise during times of economic distress, so that it’s not simply a matter of dollars and cents.
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But recovery from this downturn is likely to take time, no matter what decisions Whitmer and other governors make about allowing businesses to reopen. People are unlikely to shop, see movies or attend sports events in large numbers until they are confident they can do so without infecting themselves and others. That cannot happen without a vaccine, effective therapeutics or some kind of herd immunity. In other words, the obstacles are more scientific than political.
Government can help in other ways, however, by providing for people’s needs until the national emergency is over and, separately, by developing enough testing and tracing capacity to isolate outbreaks. Experts say that capacity is an essential prerequisite for reopening because, without it, new outbreaks could lead to new surges. State officials like Whitmer have a big role to play in these efforts, whether by recruiting workers to track down possible exposures or setting up facilities to isolate the sick. On Wednesday, she said her administration was working on precisely those sorts of tasks.
But addressing these needs ultimately requires federal action and, so far, the response from Washington has been lackluster. The Trump administration was slow to take charge of supply lines and, even now, the shambolic distribution of key goods, such as protective gear, has governors arranging secretive shipments on their own. Testing, meanwhile, isn’t nearly at the scale that public health experts say is necessary.
Economic relief also needs to come from Washington because the federal government, unlike states, can borrow at will. Some funds are on the way already. The new COVID-19 bill about to get Trump’s signature will bring the total federal aid in this crisis to something like $3 trillion.
But it’s an open question whether the millions of unemployed Americans and small businesses who are supposed to get aid actually will. Cities and states, whom Democrats proposed to assist, got nothing in that package. Without an infusion, they will be laying off workers rather than hiring the ones they need to manage the crisis better.
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And it’s not like they had enough in the first place. The legacy of the decades-long conservative project to “starve the beast” of government are agencies that lack either the personnel or information technology to do their jobs ― which is why state unemployment agencies can’t handle the flood of jobless claims and why state health departments are struggling to compile accurate data.
”We’ve underinvested in public health forever,” said Marianne Udow-Phillips, founding executive director of the Center for Health Research Transformation and Michigan’s former director of health and human services. “It’s going to be a big challenge.”
One other obvious way for the federal government to help would be shoring up the safety net, especially when it comes to providing health insurance while so many people lose job-based benefits. But Trump and his allies have rejected every proposal to make existing government programs more available or to start new ones. It is simply not something they have been willing to contemplate because it violates their core beliefs about the role of government.
The Meaning Of ‘War’
Whitmer’s current order expires on April 30, and she announced Wednesday that she will seek a “short-term” extension. But she has opened the door to easing some restrictions, given the encouraging, if tentative, news that the Detroit area’s patient surge is subsiding. She has also pledged to work with state Republican leaders as she crafts the longer-term plans for reopening state businesses.
But Whitmer has been steadfast in her statements that the threat of the virus remains serious and that saving lives remains her priority. On Monday, Whitmer started her briefing by paying tribute to Skylar Herbert, the 5-year-old daughter of first responders in Detroit who died of a rare COVID-19 complication. “I try to pause to reflect on the lives that have been lost,” she said. “But today’s was especially hard.”
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A bit later, after acknowledging the struggles Michiganders face and the rights of protesters to speak out, Whitmer talked about World War II ― how people put up with rationing and served their country in the defense industries. She conjured images of Michigan’s glory days, when it was supplying the arsenal of democracy, then cited the one person who might hold sway with the demonstrators.
“President Trump called this a war ― and it is exactly that,” Whitmer said. “So let’s act like it.”


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Trump Spent Years Undermining Global Charities Now Crucial To Fighting Coronavirus

Expanding The Gag Rule ― And Limiting Vital Help President Ronald Reagan first imposed the global gag rule on abortion .
Also known as the Mexico City Policy , it has since been revoked by every Democratic president and reinstated by every Republican president .
Until Trump , however , the policy was only applied to the portion of U.S. aid that went to family planning services .
The Trump administration first broadened it to a restriction on all global health funding , not just money for reproductive care , and then expanded it further in 2019 to cut support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that mention abortion .
A group called Family Health Options Kenya used to run three to four outreach clinics each month in various parts of Kibera .
But Trump ’ s policy meant it lost $ 1.5 million in aid .
The organization can no longer afford to operate the clinics in Kibera ― removing one of the few health services available to residents in an area that is expected to get hit especially hard by the coronavirus because of how difficult it is to socially distance in such cramped living conditions .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ rule will have especially dire effects on rural and other hard-to-reach communities as the coronavirus crisis hits them .
“ You ’ ve really hamstrung any ability to respond in that timely and holistic fashion , ” he said .
“ The U.S. is going to be expected to provide a lot of support to these countries that are not going to have the providers to work with .
You have communities without care .
You have undermined your mobile outreach to hardest-to-reach populations.
” Cutting Funds To The Most Vulnerable That kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consequences in an emergency situation like the current pandemic .
Almost half of UNRWA ’ s clients are over 60 years old and 23 % are older than 70 .
Many of them also have diabetes , one of the existing health conditions that increase people ’ s vulnerability to COVID-19 .
As one response to the coronavirus , the agency has been giving clients two months of insulin instead of one to reduce their travel to its clinics , Seita said .
But that strains its already diminished stocks .

LOADING ERROR LOADING
Millions of the world’s most vulnerable people are facing the coronavirus pandemic with worse health care than they had just a few years ago because of the choices of one man: President Donald Trump.
Trump’s changes to U.S. foreign aid ― a tiny portion of the American government’s budget but traditionally the largest source of funding for many international charities ― forced some clinics to close and reduced supplies for others. His policies left key medical teams understaffed in countries where the highly contagious coronavirus is expected to spread rapidly. And now, as the pandemic extends its reach, he’s doing even more to block global health aid.
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Last week, Trump dealt his latest blow to the global health system: suspending U.S. funding for the World Health Organization. He accused the body of “mismanagement” in addressing the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But his own pre-coronavirus policies are likely making the pandemic worse than it would otherwise have been ― more deadly, more damaging to societies worldwide, and slower to wind down.
In 2017, Trump enacted an expanded version of the “global gag rule,” a policy tying U.S. aid to a promise from recipients not to perform or promote abortion. That move cut off more than $150 million in funding for medical charities over the following year, according to the Government Accountability Office. Months later, he ended support for a United Nations agency providing reproductive health care globally. Trump further weakened the U.N. health system in 2018 by cutting U.S. aid to the agency responsible for Palestinian refugees’ primary health care.
The president used executive authority to make those moves without the approval of Congress, where lawmakers, including Republicans, have rejected his sweeping proposals to further reduce foreign aid. If Congress hadn’t prevented other Trump efforts to slash international assistance, the situation would be even worse.
Still, the damage he’s done is clear, global health experts say, and has disproportionately reduced medical assistance to people who were already disadvantaged: refugees, women and girls, men who have sex with men. Health care professionals argue that the consequences of Trump’s decisions made their work harder even before they were asked to confront the challenge of COVID-19.
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“We are all witnessing that the absence of U.S. leadership in the way that we’re used to seeing is having real implications,” said Sheba Crocker, a former State Department official now with the charity CARE USA, which addresses health care among other needs of the global poor.
Expanding The Gag Rule ― And Limiting Vital Help
President Ronald Reagan first imposed the global gag rule on abortion. Also known as the Mexico City Policy, it has since been revoked by every Democratic president and reinstated by every Republican president. Until Trump, however, the policy was only applied to the portion of U.S. aid that went to family planning services. The Trump administration first broadened it to a restriction on all global health funding, not just money for reproductive care, and then expanded it further in 2019 to cut support for groups simply for donating to organizations that mention abortion.
The wide-ranging results of Trump’s version of the rule are visible in places like Kibera, a slum in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi that is home to at least 170,000 people.
A group called Family Health Options Kenya used to run three to four outreach clinics each month in various parts of Kibera. But Trump’s policy meant it lost $1.5 million in aid. The organization can no longer afford to operate the clinics in Kibera ― removing one of the few health services available to residents in an area that is expected to get hit especially hard by the coronavirus because of how difficult it is to socially distance in such cramped living conditions.
For some of the world’s poorest communities, sexual health organizations are essential for more than family planning services. In some areas, they provide the only affordable medical care, covering not just essential reproductive services like abortions and testing for sexually transmitted infections, but also immunizations, nutritional care, tuberculosis treatment, HIV services, maternal-child health care, and clean water and hygiene resources.
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So when funding is cut off from these organizations, it’s not just reproductive health care that’s lost. The “policy is undermining the entire health system,” said Jonathan Rucks, senior director of policy and advocacy at PAI, an international group that promotes reproductive health care.
Rucks told HuffPost that the global gag rule will have especially dire effects on rural and other hard-to-reach communities as the coronavirus crisis hits them. “You’ve really hamstrung any ability to respond in that timely and holistic fashion,” he said. “The U.S. is going to be expected to provide a lot of support to these countries that are not going to have the providers to work with. You have communities without care. You have undermined your mobile outreach to hardest-to-reach populations.”
“All of this is going to make the impacts of COVID-19 so much worse because there are communities quite literally without providers,” he continued.
Meanwhile, global family planning services that were already weakened under Trump are at risk of receiving even fewer resources as funds are shifted to battle the pandemic, which could put millions of vulnerable women and girls at even greater risk.
“The expanded global gag rule has harmed many trusted health care providers worldwide, weakening health care systems and disrupting access to services for communities who rely on them,” Monica Kerrigan, executive director of Planned Parenthood Global, told HuffPost. “These very providers are now fighting to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to provide essential services with inadequate resources.”
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Activists from the Population Connection Action Fund project a protest message onto the Trump International Hotel in Washington on Jan. 23, 2019. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The Zimbabwe branch of Marie Stopes International, a British reproductive health nonprofit, had already lost 70% of its funding after Trump reinstituted the gag rule. It went from serving 1,200 villages and communities in rural areas to 500.
Although the organization offers a wide range of services ― from HIV/AIDS treatment to maternal and child health care ― the majority of its work is post-abortion care. Abortion is illegal in Zimbabwe, but that doesn’t stop women from needing the procedure. Around 60,000 to 70,000 unsafe abortions are performed every year in that country, and Marie Stopes Zimbabwe is one of the few resources available to women and girls who have undergone botched procedures.
The group now expects to lose even more funding and resources as COVID-19 reaches Africa, director Abebe Shibru told HuffPost. Shibru worries that the remainder of Marie Stopes Zimbabwe’s funding, which currently comes from the British and Swedish governments, will be diverted to COVID-19 prevention and treatment ― leaving a “huge gap” in lifesaving services for Zimbabwean women and girls, he said.
“COVID-19 prevention shouldn’t be at the expense of women’s health,” said Shibru.
The global gag rule has been harming people for years. At the very least, it should be put on hold now amid the current crisis, Rucks said.
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“Why would the U.S. want to limit its ability to support countries that need care and get ahead of the COVID-19 response in a way that we didn’t in the U.S.?” Rucks said. “There is no ethical, logical reason to cut out providers who are willing, ready and able to respond at this moment in time.”
Cutting Funds To The Most Vulnerable
Trump’s foreign policy has been defined by his disdain for international cooperation and his efforts to mold that policy to domestic political interests. His approach has been especially damaging for two important global health care providers associated with the United Nations: the U.N. Population Fund and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Trump blocked $32 million in aid to the U.N. Population Fund soon after taking office. It was a gift to conservative activists, who have long argued that the organization supports coercive abortion through its cooperation with the Chinese government. Like previous U.S. officials who have also ended support for the family planning agency, the Trump administration had to admit it had no evidence for that notion.
The U.N. Population Fund provides vital services worldwide, including in difficult settings like warzones and refugee camps. The year before Trump’s blow, U.S. support saved more than 2,300 women from dying during pregnancy and childbirth and stopped nearly 300,000 unsafe abortions, said Sarah Craven, the director of the agency’s Washington office.
The agency’s work ranges from training midwives to providing reproductive health medicines. Since losing U.S. aid, the U.N. Population Fund has had to downsize some programs because of insufficient replacement funding or worsening conditions that have increased its costs, thereby depriving people of their medical lifelines.
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Yemen is a stark example. Since the start of a U.S.-backed military intervention there in 2015, half the health care facilities in the country of 30 million have stopped functioning ― and only 35% of maternal health facilities are operational. The U.N. Population Fund is key to Yemeni reproductive health services and is responsible for distributing U.N. food and hygiene supplies to people who are hard to reach, Craven said.
The agency had only 35% of the funding required for its work in that wartorn country in 2019 and expected that it would need $100 million for 2020 ― “before COVID-19,” Craven noted. The virus officially reached the country earlier this month. Days earlier, Trump had suspended another part of U.S. aid to Yemen.
Because of its reduced funding, the agency has had to close 100 medical facilities in the country even as the civil war has continued with American involvement, U.N. Population Fund director Natalia Kanem told Politico in March.
“We really lament the posture of the current U.S. administration,” Kanem said.
Washington’s withdrawal hits programs like the U.N. Population Fund particularly hard because securing funds for women’s concerns is a notoriously tough part of the already difficult campaign to raise money for critical international needs, and such spending is consistently too low, said Crocker, the CARE USA official and former diplomat.
“When you face a situation where a donor like the U.S. pulls back, women are going to suffer,” she added.
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Risking Health To Apply Political Pressure
Trump cut off funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the summer of 2018, during his campaign to pressure Palestinians to soften their position on a future settlement of their conflict with Israel. The U.S. had previously been the biggest donor to UNRWA, providing a quarter of its budget ― money that went to education, food assistance and a network of 144 health facilities serving more than 5 million refugees across five different jurisdictions.
Other nations increased their contributions, and UNRWA officials prioritized keeping medical centers open. But the funding shortfall persisted and the ramifications of Trump’s moves are still being felt, Akihiro Seita, UNRWA’s director of health, told HuffPost.
His team has reduced its holdings of medicine, keeping less “safe stock” ― the amount purchased in case of problems in the supply chain, a perennial possibility in a tense region. The agency is now buying only 12 months’ worth of needed drugs at a time and so no longer has the backup supply it used to have on hand.
Palestinian employees at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees prepare food aid rations that will be delivered to people's homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
That kind of seemingly minor change can have major consequences in an emergency situation like the current pandemic. Almost half of UNRWA’s clients are over 60 years old and 23% are older than 70. Many of them also have diabetes, one of the existing health conditions that increase people’s vulnerability to COVID-19. As one response to the coronavirus, the agency has been giving clients two months of insulin instead of one to reduce their travel to its clinics, Seita said. But that strains its already diminished stocks.
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UNRWA is also nervous about its access to personal protective equipment amid rising prices worldwide, Seita said. And it knows that the communities it serves might become viral hotspots because of their congested conditions and that they will almost certainly become poorer because of the economic impact of the pandemic lockdowns.
The agency has launched a $14 million emergency appeal to help it deal with COVID-19.
Congress has pressed Trump about UNRWA’s plight and related problems in Palestine, most recently in a March letter from eight senators noting both the president’s offers of coronavirus aid to U.S. adversaries like Iran and North Korea and lawmakers’ approval last year of $75 million in aid to Palestinians that the Trump administration has not yet spent.
“President Trump’s decision to withhold financial support to UNRWA has weakened already fragile public health systems in the West Bank and Gaza, putting Palestinians’ health at further risk as a result of the coronavirus pandemic,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who led her fellow senators’ latest push for action, said in an email to HuffPost.
It’s signs like those that the U.S. might change course that aid officials worldwide keep a close eye on, for the immediate benefit of the people they serve and with the hope of being better prepared before the next global crisis.
“We consider the leadership position of the United States to be irreplaceable both from a funding perspective but also generally from a diplomatic leadership perspective,” said Crocker of CARE USA.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Falling Oil Prices Breathe New Life Into An Old Idea: Nationalize The Industry

He identified three reasons why a government would normally nationalize the oil companies in its borders .
A government might believe that the private company drilling its oil is cheating on its taxes or withholding information , a conflict inflected by the meddling of imperial powers from the West , as in Iran in 1951 , Syria in 1968 and Algeria in 1969 .
A government might want to pillage its country ’ s oil producers in a bid to stay in power , as Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi did in 1973 .
A government could also just want what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ability to control oil output at will , as was the case when Saudi Arabia cobbled together the world ’ s biggest oil company in the mid-1970s or when Argentina renationalized its state energy giant YPF in 2012 .
The Texas Railroad Commission ― which , despite its name , is the state agency that regulates oil output ― can set maximum levels of production , which it is now considering in response to the price drop .
But those regulators “ don ’ t have bite the same way as if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you could just tell them , ‘ Look , this is the level of production for next month and that ’ s how it ’ s going to be , ’ ” said Mahdavi .
The most straightforward pathway to nationalization would be for the Treasury Department to make public ownership a condition of receiving federal bailout money amid the pandemic , the report suggests .
But companies would be unlikely to accept the money .
If the companies then went bankrupt , the government could seize control , as it did when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2009 .
But doing so would provide little aid to the workers laid off in the meantime .
Another clear , if unlikely , path would be for Congress to pass legislation banning the private ownership of fossil fuel companies and establishing a process to transfer ownership to the government .
What Happens After ?

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Oil prices entered a stunning free-fall this week as the industry ran low on places to store the petroleum it can’t sell but keeps pumping amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The value of oil slated for delivery next month is at $30 below zero per barrel ― the first time in history the price of crude dipped into negative territory. The downturn has wiped billions from the balance sheets of industry titans like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. The “financial bloodbath” analysts predicted last month overflowed as hundreds of U.S. oil producers limped toward bankruptcy and the industry laid off more than 6,000 workers in a single day.
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Yet the chaos made a bullish investor out of a mortal enemy: climate activists. The world’s rapidly destabilizing climate, made worse by the industry’s decadeslong propaganda war, has made the oil companies prime targets for hostile takeovers, as they struggle to provide the good-paying jobs and economic stability they insisted was the necessary trade-off for trashing the atmosphere.
While history is littered with dozens of examples of governments taking command of oil production, particularly during times of turmoil, none have attempted what environmentalists now propose in the United States: Take over the oil industry to euthanize it.
The Sunrise Movement, the youth campaigners behind the Green New Deal movement, declared the price drop “our chance to publicly own oil & gas companies.” Genevieve Guenther, director of the project End Climate Silence and a ubiquitous Twitter gadfly, heralded a “once in a lifetime opportunity to nationalize the oil companies and administer their transformation and decline,” adding that it “literally feels like a nightmare that this opportunity is going to waste.” New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America joked that naysayers could no longer question whether the federal government had the budget for a fire-sale buyout.
Putting the government in charge of oil production is hardly the domain of tin-pot despots. State-owned oil companies control the majority of the world’s known oil reserves. And the U.S. has a rich history of nationalizing industries during times of global upheaval, particularly in the lead-up to the world wars.
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But of the nearly five-dozen examples of government takeovers of oil production in the past century, none were carried out with the explicit goal of permanently sunsetting the industry. Skeptics warn that even if a nationalization effort were to survive legal challenges, federal watchdogs are unprepared to guard against the high risk of abuse and corruption in a state-run oil company, and that the incentives to curtail oil production are not as clear-cut as advocates imagine.
Why To Nationalize
Calls to nationalize the fossil fuel industry started mounting soon after President Donald Trump took office and began rolling back the emissions regulations enacted during Barack Obama’s two terms in the White House. At first, it came across as a provocative thought exercise, meant to illustrate the length to which the government ought to go to stave off climate disaster ― and how relatively conservative the Obama administration’s market-tweaking regulatory approach was in comparison.
Nationalize it? Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Then United Nations scientists published a 2018 report that projected the only hope of keeping warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, roughly half a degree hotter than average temperatures today, was in slashing global emissions in half by 2030. The finding jolted the global debate over climate policy and put in plain terms the unprecedented economic changes required to avert catastrophic warming, including reducing the percentage of global energy coming from oil by 37% by the end of this decade, and 87% by 2050.
The U.S. oil industry went the opposite direction. In 2019, production increased 11% to a record 12.2 million barrels per day, according to U.S. Energy Information Agency data. Analysts at the oil giant BP pegged the number even higher, at a record 15.3 million barrels per day, in its yearly review of global energy statistics, published last November. By that measure, the U.S. accounted for 98% of all global growth in oil production between 2018 and 2019, analyst Robert Rapier wrote in Forbes.
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Oil companies, meanwhile, battled nearly every major state or federal effort to gradually scale back demand for petroleum. In 2018, the industry spent a record $31 million on an ad blitz opposing a carbon tax proposal in Washington state. Even as the pandemic raged, the industry’s backdoor lobbying bore fruit as the Trump administration advanced a plan to gut fuel-mileage standards for new cars, ensuring a future for gas guzzlers.
All that makes the concept of nationalizing oil producers “a very useful and constructive idea to put on the table,” said Alexandra Gillies, an adviser at the nonpartisan Natural Resource Governance Institute and author of the new book “Crude Intentions: How Oil Corruption Contaminates the World.”
It’s a time tested strategy. Governments nationalized, or renationalized, oil production nearly 60 times over the past century or so, said Paasha Mahdavi, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the new book “Power Grab,” a political history of public takeovers of the energy industry.
He identified three reasons why a government would normally nationalize the oil companies in its borders. A government might believe that the private company drilling its oil is cheating on its taxes or withholding information, a conflict inflected by the meddling of imperial powers from the West, as in Iran in 1951, Syria in 1968 and Algeria in 1969. A government might want to pillage its country’s oil producers in a bid to stay in power, as Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi did in 1973. A government could also just want what Mahdavi calls “production elasticity,” the ability to control oil output at will, as was the case when Saudi Arabia cobbled together the world’s biggest oil company in the mid-1970s or when Argentina renationalized its state energy giant YPF in 2012.
What activists are currently proposing would best fit in the third category, as “we right now just don’t have the tools needed to tell firms what to do because it’s a private market,” Mahdavi said.
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The Texas Railroad Commission ― which, despite its name, is the state agency that regulates oil output ― can set maximum levels of production, which it is now considering in response to the price drop. But those regulators “don’t have bite the same way as if you had a nationalized oil company and you could just tell them, ‘Look, this is the level of production for next month and that’s how it’s going to be,’” said Mahdavi.
“The idea is to nationalize to ultimately get production down to zero, but doing it on your own timeline,” he said. “Part of the worry today is the price collapsed, it’s negative, and it’s not clear what the strategy is. What is going to happen to millions of workers?”
No moneymaking industry orchestrates its own obsolescence, and oil is no different. Royal Dutch Shell joined BP and Spanish oil major Repsol earlier this month in announcing goals to produce net-zero emissions by 2050, though the pledges aim to primarily offset emissions and wouldn’t significantly scale back the drilling or burning of oil. Occidental Petroleum, one of the U.S. companies hardest hit by the price plunge, invested heavily in technology to capture carbon emissions, but uses the waste product primarily as a tool to extract hard-to-get oil.
Exxon Mobil, by contrast, has touted its research in algae-based fuels, but has doubled down more than almost any other oil major in new drilling, including an enormous new project off Guyana, a poor country on South America’s northern coast.
Stable employment is a key benefit of national oil companies. In India, for example, the state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp. serves as a repository for recent graduates who can’t find work elsewhere, going on regular hiring sprees.
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A chart from the Democracy Collaborative shows the long history of the U.S. nationalizing private companies in times of crisis. Democracy Collaborative
The industry “was in a lot of trouble before the COVID-19 pandemic had a massive effect on the economy,” said Johanna Bozuwa, a researcher at the Cleveland-based Democracy Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank behind some of the most recent proposals to nationalize U.S. fossil fuel producers. Oil companies, particularly smaller producers, were already dealing with mounting debt and expanding portfolios of assets whose value would virtually evaporate overnight once countries adopt serious policies to curb climate-changing emissions, she said.
If these companies simply go bankrupt, “they’re going to shed their commitments to workers and communities first” and “come back on shorter and thinner margins and with fewer environmental and worker protections,” Bozuwa said.
Nationalizing oil producers, in theory, allows democratically accountable leaders to prioritize societal needs ― from staving off widespread unemployment to dialing back greenhouse gas emissions ― over dividends to investors.
“This is first a way for us to make sure these community protections aren’t given up, but instead, by putting them in public ownership, we can say these are things we’re seeking to save,” Bozuwa said. “In the longer term, we can ensure that an industry that absolutely needs to be wound down can be done in a way that centers workers and centers staying within our climate limits.”
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How To Nationalize
Bozuwa outlined five policy levers the federal government could pull to take ownership of oil producers in a white paper published this month as the Trump administration vowed to help companies financially decimated by last month’s fall in crude prices.
The most straightforward pathway to nationalization would be for the Treasury Department to make public ownership a condition of receiving federal bailout money amid the pandemic, the report suggests. But companies would be unlikely to accept the money. If the companies then went bankrupt, the government could seize control, as it did when automaker General Motors filed for Chapter 11 in 2009. But doing so would provide little aid to the workers laid off in the meantime. Another clear, if unlikely, path would be for Congress to pass legislation banning the private ownership of fossil fuel companies and establishing a process to transfer ownership to the government.
“The simplest argument is that it’s a one-time buyout of the political capital of the fossil fuel industry. What if we could neutralize that power in one fell swoop?” - Mark Paul, Roosevelt Institute
But the two remaining ideas could be the most forceful. Citing its authority to regulate systemic risk by buying and selling financial assets, the Federal Reserve could simply purchase controlling stakes in publicly traded oil companies. Then, to net the privately held portion of the industry, federal regulators could use eminent domain, first offering to buy the companies outright and, if rebuffed, letting courts decide what fair compensation would be.
“It’s probably going to take a combination of these strategies,” Bozuwa said.
The legal challenges would be formidable.
The oil and gas industry developed a sprawling influence-peddling network over the past century, funding libertarian think tanks, dark-money political action committees and corporate lobbies with a long record of successfully recasting modest efforts to limit climate pollution as assaults on personal liberty. Some of the groups were behind the protests against lockdown measures to contain the deadly pandemic this month in states like Michigan and Colorado. Demonstrators brandished assault rifles and signs that demanded the re-opening of golf courses and equated social-distancing rules with Stalin-era Soviet tyranny.
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It’s easy to envision the backlash against what would likely be cast as federal land grabs. Unlike most countries, owners of surface property in many U.S. states also own the rights to any minerals or fuel below, and it’s common for landowners in oil- or gas-rich rural areas to make money off leases to drilling companies. Lawsuits from both individuals in states that have already shown a willingness to marshal extensive government resources to litigate on behalf of fossil fuel companies would likely pose significant hurdles to carrying out a nationalization scheme.
That’s an argument for taking a piecemeal approach to nationalization, completing a takeover of oil leasing on federal- and state-owned lands and leaving wells on private land as a last step, giving federal officials ample time to “devise a policy that would allow for just compensation before getting into conflict,” Mahdavi siad.
International courts are another murky issue. Investor-state dispute settlement, a system of investor courts set up under international trade agreements, have historically favored companies in disputes over public ownership. In 2013, for example, courts ruled that Argentina owed Repsol $5 billion after the South American country’s Congress voted overwhelmingly to bring YPF back under public control.
Things could play out differently for the U.S., whose military and financial hegemony has historically imbued international institutions with a pro-corporate bent.
“If the U.S. were on the side of nationalizing, playing the dominant role it does in international courts, you could see a norm shift,” Mahdavi said.
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What Happens After?
Public control of oil production is no guarantee it will wind down, Gillies said.
“If the government isn’t going to prioritize the kind of just transition we need to see, then they’re not going to pursue that agenda through the ownership of these companies,” she said. “On top of that, the companies will continue to have an internal desire to preserve their relevance.”
Corruption at state-owned oil enterprises in countries like Angola or Syria, where civil-society groups are significantly weaker, is common. But Gillies pointed to the sweeping corruption scandal at Brazil’s state-owned oil giant Petrobras. Despite considerable oversight, including disclosures required for the company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, federal prosecutors in Brazil indicted more than 400 officials for bribing Petrobras executives to award inflated contracts to politically connected construction firms.
“The Brazil example is instructive because you had a middle-income country, democratic, had very sophisticated corporate governance structures, and still was susceptible to one of the biggest corruption schemes the world has ever seen,” Gillies said. “And Petrobras was not even the worst-case scenario when it comes to national oil companies.”
If the U.S. nationalized its oil production, the job of rooting out that corruption at those operations would fall on the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mahdavi said. Those agencies, in their present form, look unprepared for that task.
The SEC proposed new rules just last month that critics say undermine the spirit of a 2010 law requiring oil companies to disclose payments to governments at home and around the world. The statute was meant to increase the transparency of state-owned oil companies, limiting their ability to bribe officials. But the proposed rules would make the disclosures so general it would be difficult to decipher anything meaningful, much less information that could be used for enforcement. The Justice Department, meanwhile, dramatically scaled back enforcement of anti-pollution laws since Trump took office in 2017.
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Advocates say a painful shift away from oil is coming either way, so the question is not whether to nationalize, but how much misery will be tolerable in the process.
“Markets aren’t good at large-scale transitions ― for that, you need government planning,” said Mark Paul, an economist at the progressive Roosevelt Institute.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Laura Ingraham's Fox News Guest Cracks Jokes About CNN Anchors With Coronavirus

Laura , the self-referential emoting is what is so daunting .
People are dying and losing their livelihoods .
Chances @ @ @ @ @ anchors will not succumb to the disease .
And to keep this narrative going every @ @ @ @ @ personal , it is disturbing .
Because you lose all perspective .
It is great @ @ @ @ @ to become the story is a big problem here .
And CNN really should tamp @ @ @ @ @

Laura, the self-referential emoting is what is so daunting. People are dying and losing their livelihoods. Chances are, young and healthy anchors will not succumb to the disease. And to keep this narrative going every night that’s so personal, it is disturbing. Because you lose all perspective. It is great to have perspective, but to become the story is a big problem here. And CNN really should tamp down their personal stories.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--The Coronavirus Bailout Should Not Be A License To Steal

That sounds like a lot of money because it is .
But the economy is collapsing , and even this amount will likely prove insufficient to right the ship .
The Fed issued $ 9 trillion in emergency loans during the Great Recession , and U.S. unemployment has already eclipsed its peak from the prior crisis in just a few short weeks .
Nobody at the Fed or Congress has placed meaningful restrictions on how the largest corporations can use their bailout money .
They can funnel it to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks or dividends .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bonuses for Wall Street traders , buy up smaller competitors ― all while laying off workers , slashing salaries , offshoring jobs or otherwise running amok as corporate citizens .
We have every reason to believe that companies can and will do these things because that ’ s exactly what they did the last time the Fed and Congress came together to funnel trillions of dollars to giant corporations .
The Fed began emergency lending operations in December 2007 , but buybacks and dividends from large banks did not halt until 2009 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ its shareholders after the company was effectively nationalized by the Fed in the most aggressive use of its emergency powers during the crisis .
The insurance giant then proceeded to pay $ 450 million in bonuses to its “ top performers ” after the public had bailed AIG out .
What ’ s worse , the anything-goes mentality at the Fed , Congress and the Bush and Obama White Houses effectively transformed the culture of American high finance into that of a criminal syndicate .
JPMorgan Chase agreed to no fewer than 52 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and federal officials over the decade following the crisis ― for everything from bribing Chinese government officials to violating economic sanctions against Iran , Cuba and Sudan to rigging interest rates , manipulating energy markets , ripping off or bribing local governments , retaliating against a whistleblower and deceiving regulators about trading data .
The 2008-09 bailouts were restricted to banks and the occasional enormous conglomerate that had carved out a niche for itself in the financial sector .
This time around , the Fed is being more creative , enabling just about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for assistance from the central bank .
What rules Congress did put in place with a 96-0 vote in the Senate amount to legislative deception ― terms intended to persuade the public that Congress was serious about preventing abuse , when in fact it had no intention of doing anything of substance .
Companies are prohibited from offshoring any jobs for two years after they ’ ve paid back their bailout ― but only if they employ fewer than 10,000 workers .
The megafirms that will demand the most attention from the Fed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ provides cursory prohibitions on stock buybacks , dividends and executive pay , but Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin can simply waive them ― for any reason or none at all .
The net result is that the largest and most powerful institutions in our economy not only will be kept alive during the crisis , but will be authorized to loot the livelihoods of workers in order to pad their own profits and stock portfolios .
It is not a prescription for tackling unemployment but a recipe for deeper inequality , social unrest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that must guide the economy out of the current calamity .
But lawmakers and their constituents should be demanding much more from the Fed .
The central bank has the power not only to disclose what it ’ s doing but to stop abusive behavior outright .
It could , for instance , order banks to forgive monthly payments on mortgages for homeowners or small businesses ― whether those banks take a bailout or not .
It could adjust capital charges for different loans to encourage banks to issue more of them ― @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Congress never should have ceded so much governing responsibility to the Fed , but now that it has , Powell and his top allies must act to protect American families and businesses .
The scope and shape of the downturn and recovery have become policy variables for the central bank to control .
Liberals have an unfortunate tendency to write off top-level corporate abuse as a sideshow to the issues that animate them most .
Corporate bad guys are always up to some kind of mischief , the thinking goes , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ criminal justice reform , environmental protection , health care and other social welfare benefits .
What the Fed does over the next few months will reshape the American economy for years , if not decades , to come .
Powell and other top Fed officials can not pretend that what happens is out of their hands .
They have a responsibility to act , and Americans living in a democracy must demand it from them .

The coronavirus rescue package that Congress approved in late March authorized the Federal Reserve to issue up to $4.5 trillion in emergency lending to help stabilize the economy.
That sounds like a lot of money because it is. But the economy is collapsing, and even this amount will likely prove insufficient to right the ship. The Fed issued $9 trillion in emergency loans during the Great Recession, and U.S. unemployment has already eclipsed its peak from the prior crisis in just a few short weeks.
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The problem is not the amount of money the Fed has been authorized to spend ― it’s that the emergency lending programs the Fed has unveiled to date are not a rescue, but a license to steal.
Nobody at the Fed or Congress has placed meaningful restrictions on how the largest corporations can use their bailout money. They can funnel it to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks or dividends. They can raise executive pay, approve massive bonuses for Wall Street traders, buy up smaller competitors ― all while laying off workers, slashing salaries, offshoring jobs or otherwise running amok as corporate citizens.
We have every reason to believe that companies can and will do these things because that’s exactly what they did the last time the Fed and Congress came together to funnel trillions of dollars to giant corporations. The Fed began emergency lending operations in December 2007, but buybacks and dividends from large banks did not halt until 2009.
AIG paid out a massive dividend to its shareholders after the company was effectively nationalized by the Fed in the most aggressive use of its emergency powers during the crisis. The insurance giant then proceeded to pay $450 million in bonuses to its “top performers” after the public had bailed AIG out.
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As big banks funneled huge sums to their top ranks, the tellers, processors and other less-glamorous employees got pink slips.
What’s worse, the anything-goes mentality at the Fed, Congress and the Bush and Obama White Houses effectively transformed the culture of American high finance into that of a criminal syndicate. JPMorgan Chase agreed to no fewer than 52 settlements totaling $28.8 billion with state and federal officials over the decade following the crisis ― for everything from bribing Chinese government officials to violating economic sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Sudan to rigging interest rates, manipulating energy markets, ripping off or bribing local governments, retaliating against a whistleblower and deceiving regulators about trading data.
And JPMorgan wasn’t even the worst of the bunch. You may have heard of a bank called Wells Fargo. Imagine every corporation in America, but Wells Fargo. It’s easy if you try.
The 2008-09 bailouts were restricted to banks and the occasional enormous conglomerate that had carved out a niche for itself in the financial sector. This time around, the Fed is being more creative, enabling just about anybody with a business license to apply for assistance from the central bank.
What rules Congress did put in place with a 96-0 vote in the Senate amount to legislative deception ― terms intended to persuade the public that Congress was serious about preventing abuse, when in fact it had no intention of doing anything of substance.
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Companies are prohibited from offshoring any jobs for two years after they’ve paid back their bailout ― but only if they employ fewer than 10,000 workers. The megafirms that will demand the most attention from the Fed face no such limitation. The legislation provides cursory prohibitions on stock buybacks, dividends and executive pay, but Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin can simply waive them ― for any reason or none at all.
The net result is that the largest and most powerful institutions in our economy not only will be kept alive during the crisis, but will be authorized to loot the livelihoods of workers in order to pad their own profits and stock portfolios. It is not a prescription for tackling unemployment but a recipe for deeper inequality, social unrest and public distrust of the very institutions that must guide the economy out of the current calamity.
The good news is that on Thursday afternoon, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell agreed to disclose monthly transaction data regarding who gets the money and when, after a request from Bharat Ramamurti, a Democratic appointee to the oversight panel Congress created for the bailouts.
But lawmakers and their constituents should be demanding much more from the Fed. The central bank has the power not only to disclose what it’s doing but to stop abusive behavior outright. It could, for instance, order banks to forgive monthly payments on mortgages for homeowners or small businesses ― whether those banks take a bailout or not. It could adjust capital charges for different loans to encourage banks to issue more of them ― or fewer, as the recovery demands.
Congress never should have ceded so much governing responsibility to the Fed, but now that it has, Powell and his top allies must act to protect American families and businesses. The scope and shape of the downturn and recovery have become policy variables for the central bank to control.
Advertisement
Liberals have an unfortunate tendency to write off top-level corporate abuse as a sideshow to the issues that animate them most. Corporate bad guys are always up to some kind of mischief, the thinking goes, and what matters is getting the funding for criminal justice reform, environmental protection, health care and other social welfare benefits.
But if working people lose sight of the raid on public wealth taking place in the C-suite, they will always be fighting for scraps while the rich and powerful grow richer and more powerful at their expense.
What the Fed does over the next few months will reshape the American economy for years, if not decades, to come. Powell and other top Fed officials cannot pretend that what happens is out of their hands. They have a responsibility to act, and Americans living in a democracy must demand it from them.
Zach Carter is the author of “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes,” available for pre-order from Random House.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-04-23--Elizabeth Warren's Oldest Brother, Don Reed Herring, Dies Of Coronavirus

“ I ’ m grateful to the nurses and frontline staff who took care of him , but it ’ s hard to know that there was no family to hold his hand or to say ‘ I love you ’ one more time ― and no funeral for those of us who loved him to hold each other close , ” Warren wrote in a tweet .
“ I ’ ll miss you dearly my brother.
” The former presidential candidate had not previously revealed that a member of her family was dealing with the illness caused by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ what made him extra special was his smile ― quick and crooked , it always seemed to generate its own light , one that lit up everyone around him , ” Warren said .
The senator made frequent reference on the campaign trail to him and her two other brothers ― John Herring and David Herring , all military veterans ― to illustrate her connection to her conservative background .
She regularly joked that only one of them is a Democrat , adding , “ Do the math !
” My oldest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus on Tuesday evening .
He joined the Air Force at 19 and spent his career in the military , including five and a half years off and on in combat in Vietnam .
He was charming and funny , a natural leader .
https : //t.co/b8m0xKzAmM — Elizabeth Warren ( @ ewarren ) April 23 , 2020 I ’ m grateful to the nurses and frontline staff who took care of him , but it ’ s hard to know that there was no family to hold his hand or to say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time—and no funeral for those of us who loved him to hold each other close .
I 'll miss you dearly my brother .
pic.twitter.com/oOG6HArEL6 — Elizabeth Warren ( @ ewarren ) April 23 , 2020 For Warren , her brothers showed how Americans may not be as sharply divided as many believe .
In a January New York Times interview , she said that she and her siblings “ and tens of millions of people around this country get furious over the fact that Amazon reports $ 11 billion in profits last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I would vote for her , of course , because I know her , ” David said in the ad after saying he was a registered Republican .
Don Reed was a quieter presence in the spot , laughing with his siblings on a sofa as they reminisced over family photos and memories .
In a 2019 interview with The Boston Globe , Warren said that her brothers largely steered clear of the political spotlight , instead choosing to stand in mostly silent support behind their sister .
“ They just feel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Warren told the outlet .
“ I ’ ve invited them to be more active in it , and none of the three of them wants that .
They love me , and they care about me .
But they recognize that — they don ’ t want to be part of it.
” Warren has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump ’ s response to the pandemic .
In February , she slammed the administration for “ bungling ” the nation ’ s response and released her own plan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ testing and called on American manufacturers to produce necessary equipment .
Trump waited until April to invoke the Defense Production Act and is still struggling to ramp up testing .

Don Reed Herring, the oldest brother of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), died Tuesday night of complications of COVID-19, the lawmaker confirmed on Thursday.
Herring, 86, was an Air Force veteran who flew combat missions in Vietnam.
“I’m grateful to the nurses and frontline staff who took care of him, but it’s hard to know that there was no family to hold his hand or to say ‘I love you’ one more time ― and no funeral for those of us who loved him to hold each other close,” Warren wrote in a tweet. “I’ll miss you dearly my brother.”
The former presidential candidate had not previously revealed that a member of her family was dealing with the illness caused by the coronavirus.
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Herring lived in Norman, Oklahoma, a state already planning to reopen nonessential businesses despite coronavirus cases continuing to climb there.
“He was charming and funny, a natural leader,” wrote Warren, 70, whose family is from Oklahoma.
Known as Don Reed, “what made him extra special was his smile ― quick and crooked, it always seemed to generate its own light, one that lit up everyone around him,” Warren said.
The senator made frequent reference on the campaign trail to him and her two other brothers ― John Herring and David Herring, all military veterans ― to illustrate her connection to her conservative background. She regularly joked that only one of them is a Democrat, adding, “Do the math!”
My oldest brother, Don Reed, died from coronavirus on Tuesday evening. He joined the Air Force at 19 and spent his career in the military, including five and a half years off and on in combat in Vietnam. He was charming and funny, a natural leader. https://t.co/b8m0xKzAmM — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 23, 2020
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What made him extra special was his smile—quick and crooked, it always seemed to generate its own light, one that lit up everyone around him. pic.twitter.com/SFMOaBVCN3 — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 23, 2020
I’m grateful to the nurses and frontline staff who took care of him, but it’s hard to know that there was no family to hold his hand or to say “I love you” one more time—and no funeral for those of us who loved him to hold each other close. I'll miss you dearly my brother. pic.twitter.com/oOG6HArEL6 — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 23, 2020
For Warren, her brothers showed how Americans may not be as sharply divided as many believe. In a January New York Times interview, she said that she and her siblings “and tens of millions of people around this country get furious over the fact that Amazon reports $11 billion in profits last year and paid zero in taxes.”
Warren’s brothers even appeared in a campaign ad during her presidential run.
“I would vote for her, of course, because I know her,” David said in the ad after saying he was a registered Republican. Don Reed was a quieter presence in the spot, laughing with his siblings on a sofa as they reminisced over family photos and memories.
In a 2019 interview with The Boston Globe, Warren said that her brothers largely steered clear of the political spotlight, instead choosing to stand in mostly silent support behind their sister.
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“They just feel like this is not their world,” Warren told the outlet. “I’ve invited them to be more active in it, and none of the three of them wants that. They love me, and they care about me. But they recognize that — they don’t want to be part of it.”
Warren has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic. In February, she slammed the administration for “bungling” the nation’s response and released her own plan for dealing with the crisis that emphasized testing and called on American manufacturers to produce necessary equipment. Trump waited until April to invoke the Defense Production Act and is still struggling to ramp up testing.