Hungarian parliament gives its Prime Minister rule-by-decree powers which of course will end once the pandemic is over yeah sure. Our President is looking to give someone a high-five! This would be another good time to remind you that while we're not there yet, we could get there pretty easily -- particularly since fear of dying from a pandemic will likely depress turnout on Election Day.
Not long after General Electric announces it'll lay off 10 percent of its aviation workers in America, GE workers protest, pointing out that all the idle factories could be repurposed to manufacture ventilators for coronavirus patients. "If GE trusts us to build, maintain, and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?" says one worker. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason is because they're trying to use the pandemic to destroy their unions.
In a related note, big corporation takes taxpayer money to build a ventilator, only sells that ventilator overseas -- and then enters talks with current Administration to build a more complex and more expensive ventilator! Socialize the risk, privatize the profit, as they say. And as one observer reminds us, "(t)he market is not going to give priority to a relatively no-frills but dependable ventilator that’s not expensive." In other words, big corporations have decided there's no money in saving people from a pandemic; we'll see how they feel when there are far fewer of us around to buy their stuff, amirite? And remember when they give you that nobody could have predicted crap that our government has actually been trying to fund inexpensive ventilators since at least 2005.
I wonder whether Fox News (sic) really has to worry very much about legal action after they swore up and down that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax. Yes, the Murdoch clan was apparently taking steps to protect themselves from the pandemic while their punditoids were calling it a big fat lie, but questions of who-knew-what-when may be more difficult to nail down than we think, and maybe the courts will take the difference between "news" and "opinion" more seriously than they should. I say "more seriously than they should" because media outlets actually don't have an obligation to broadcast every single conceivable opinion under the sun, and if they're pushing denialists to the forefront and people die because they believe them, we should hold them accountable, just as (trigger warning: I'm about to invoke Dean Baker's best-ever analogy again) we hold publishing houses accountable when they hurt people with what they publish.
Finally, because it had to happen sooner or later, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) suggests that our President didn't do so well heading off this pandemic because he was so busy defending himself from impeachment. Well, maybe he shouldn't have tried to bribe the Ukrainian President, then! I was going to add "it's not like every single worker in an Administration has to concentrate on the most important thing happening at any moment" -- particularly just because our media isn't covering anything else, a particularly awful the-map-is-exactly-the-territory argument from Mr. McConnell -- but then I remembered that this President has hardly anyone actually working for him in this Administration. Which is, yes, another reason we should never have elected him.
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