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Shady dealings happening in the US:

The Trump administration paid a bankrupt company with zero employees $55 million for N95 masks, which it's never manufactured

Apr 16, 2020, 12:43 PM

The coronavirus pandemic has created a desperate clamber for vital medical supplies, like N95 masks, that has led the federal government to award massive contracts to third-party vendors to help fill the gaps.

In this chaotic effort to obtain supplies, the Trump administration awarded a $55 million contract to Panthera Worldwide LLC, a company with no expertise in the world of medical equipment, for N95 masks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

Panthera's parent company filed for bankruptcy protection last fall, and one of its owners last year said it'd had no employees since May 2018, The Post reported, citing sworn testimony. It's no longer listed as an LLC in Virginia, where its main office is, after fees went unpaid, the newspaper said.

Panthera, which describes itself as a tactical training company for the US military and other government agencies, has no record of producing medical supplies or equipment, The Post said.

www.businessinsider.com

FEMA cancels controversial $55 million contract to company for N95 masks

FEMA told Insider it "does not enter into contracts unless it has reason to believe they will be successfully executed."
www.businessinsider.com
 
I'm just going to leave this here.
Screen Shot 2020-04-17 at 2.05.56 PM.jpg
 
A sudden rise in coronavirus cases is hitting rural states without stay-at-home orders

From link.

The test results came back on Easter Sunday. Tammy had been feeling "kind of crappy" when she went to her doctor in rural southeastern Oklahoma last week. A sign of possible pneumonia prompted her to get a coronavirus test later that day at the McCurtain County Health Department in Idabel.

When it came back positive, Tammy, who spoke on the condition that CNN not use her last name to protect her privacy, had already quarantined herself. Isolated, she decided to write her governor, Kevin Stitt, the first-term Republican and one of just 8 governors in the US to resist issuing a statewide stay-at-home-order. Tammy had voted for Stitt but she didn't agree with his decision.

Her message to him was simple: "Shut this mess down."

Just as cases are starting to plateau in some big cities and along the coasts, the coronavirus is catching fire in rural states across the American heartland, where there has been a small but significant spike this week in cases. Playing out amid these outbreaks is a clash between a frontier culture that values individual freedom and personal responsibility, and the onerous but necessary restrictions to contain a novel biological threat.

The bump in coronavirus cases is most pronounced in states without stay at home orders. Oklahoma saw a 53% increase in cases over the past week, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Over same time, cases jumped 60% in Arkansas, 74% in Nebraska, and 82% in Iowa. South Dakota saw a whopping 205% spike.

The remaining states, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming each saw an increase in cases, but more in line with other places that have stay-at-home orders. And all of those numbers may very well undercount the total cases, given a persistent lack of testing across the US.
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This trend undermines the notion perpetuated by President Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies that the restrictive social-distancing measures aren't necessary in rural America -- and that these states even offer a model for reopening the country.

"If you look at Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota -- that's a lot different than New York, it's a lot different than New Jersey," Trump said at Thursday's coronavirus task force briefing, adding that 29 states are "in that ballgame" of being ready to be reopened first.

"We have large sections of the country right now that can start thinking about opening," Trump added.
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A 'mythic story' of rural-urban divide

Laura Bellis, a progressive activist in Tulsa who has been a leading voice urging Oklahoma to adopt and enforce a stay-at-home policy, said she believes the resistance to such orders is grounded in a false view of an urban-rural divide.

"There's a mythic story that they have really different needs, when we're much more inextricably linked than that," Bellis told CNN.

The governors of the holdout states frequently invoke middle-American, conservative values when defending their decisions not to issue stay-at-home orders. South Dakota's Republican governor Kristi Noem has said her office has "trusted South Dakotans to exercise personal responsibility." And Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska defended his call for voluntary social distancing as opposed to a stay-at-home order.

"This is a program that depends on people exercising personal responsibility and their civic duty," Ricketts told Politico Wednesday. "This is about making that decision, not the heavy hand of government taking away your freedoms."

In a Wednesday press conference, Stitt said he is making decisions about public-health guidelines "based on what's happening in Oklahoma, not what's going on in a different state or different city." And in early April, Noem suggested her state did not need such tough restrictions because South Dakota is "not New York City."

But while the American heartland is far less dense than New York and other cities and states on the coasts, it is home to much of the country's agricultural and manufacturing base. The threat coronavirus poses to those sectors of the economy has begun to arrive.

In Iowa, for instance, two separate Tysons food processing plants have also closed due to outbreaks that have so far caused the deaths of two workers.

And in South Dakota a large pork processing plant owned by Smithfield Foods has been closed after experiencing a massive outbreak among workers there that has contributed to the explosion of coronavirus cases in Sioux Falls. (Noem has insisted a stay-at-home order "would NOT have prevented Smithfield from happening.")

With the real potential for higher prices and even food shortages, insufficient action by Republican governors in the heartland could continue to ripple across the country in ways that would adversely affect the lives of Americans everywhere.

The governors in each of these states continue to insist that their own approach, short of a stay-at-home order, is the best way to combat the virus for their individual states -- for the time being, at least.

"If we need to do more, we will do more," Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas told CNN's Jake Tapper Sunday on "State of the Union." "So that's always an option on the table if we have to shelter in place. But right now, what we're doing proves to be successful, this targeted approach."
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Everybody should be very, very wary of doing anything with Donald Trump.

A brief history of Trump's small-time swindles

See link.

President Trump has long claimed to be a fierce defender of the "forgotten" American. In his unsettlingly dark inauguration address, for example, Trump declared: "The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. ... And I will fight for you with every breath in my body, and I will never, ever let you down."

But Trump has long made a career of letting down just these sorts of Americans.

Despite his fiery rally rhetoric and over-the-top working-class bluster, Trump's hypocrisy on this score has always been gobsmackingly obvious, since in his former life as a real estate tycoon he left a long trail of small businesses and independent contractors feeling bilked or burned.

Granted, fights between developers and contractors over payments are not uncommon in the construction and real estate business. But consultants and lawyers in the industry say that Trump's tactics — like using last-minute excuses to either refuse payment or renegotiate terms — were especially cutthroat and petty.

Let's take a brief (and hardly comprehensive) tour of some of the Americans left burned by the president...
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1. Trump's personal driver

This is the latest entry in Trump's ledger: Noel Cintron, 59, says he worked as a chauffeur for Trump and his family for 25 years. On top of a mammoth unpaid overtime bill — 3,300 hours in the last six years — Cintron says he only got a raise twice after 2003: to $68,000 in 2006, and then to $75,000 in 2010. The second bump came with a requirement that Cintron give up his health benefits. All told, Cintron is suing Trump for at least $350,000 in damages.
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2. A Philadelphia cabinet maker

Edward Friel Jr. owned a family business that harked back to the 1940s. During the Atlantic City boom four decades later, he landed a $400,000 contract to make slot machines, bars, desks, and other furniture for Harrah's at Trump Plaza. But Trump refused to pay the final bill of around $84,000. Friel's son suspected that Trump also used his clout in the industry to block the company from getting other Atlantic City contracts. Friel had to file for bankruptcy a few years later.
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3. A paint seller and event workers in Florida

After putting in long hours for a special event at Trump National Doral, a Miami resort, 48 servers had to sue for unpaid overtime. The settlements averaged around $800 per worker, but went as high as $3,000 in one case. On top of that, a paint shop owner named Juan Carlos Enriquez also sued Trump's business, claiming he never got the final payment for a paint shipment to the same resort. In 2017, after a three-year legal fight, a court found in Enriquez's favor, and ordered Trump's company to pay the final $32,000, plus $300,000 in legal fees.
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...
 
Governors: Trump making ‘delusional’ comments on testing and restrictions

State leaders say the cannot embark on Trump’s three-phase program to ease stay-at-home orders without widespread testing

Sun 19 Apr 2020 20.02 BST

US governors have accused Donald Trump of making “delusional” and “dangerous” statements amid mounting tensions between the president and state leaders over coronavirus testing and pressure to roll back stay-at-home measures.

The United States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 730,000 infections and over 39,600 deaths.

Many state leaders have said they cannot embark on Trump’s recommended three-phrase programme to ease stay-at-home restrictions without a robust and widespread system of testing in place.

Researchers at Harvard University have suggested the US should conduct more than three times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the course of the next month, the New York Times reported.

www.theguardian.com

Governors: Trump making ‘delusional’ comments on testing and restrictions

State leaders say they cannot embark on Trump’s three-phase program to ease stay-at-home orders without widespread testing
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
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