April 22, 2020

Farmer says his 61,000 chickens were euthanized as demand for eggs during pandemic drops

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/494027-farmer-says-his-61000-chickens-were-euthanized-as-demand-for?fbclid=IwAR37nsp3m2tcd4QuF6qHNbzlSa6o-C4r3meWQR-W8tyX7Vd-B3Aiiu0_O2k


Farmer says his 61,000 chickens were euthanized as demand for eggs during pandemic drops
By Zack Budryk - 04/21/20 08:36 PM EDT


A Minnesota contract egg farmer said 61,000 of his chickens were euthanized amid falling demand for eggs.

Closures of schools, restaurants and caterers has trickled down to farming, affecting egg producers as well as demand for milk and ripe lettuce. Kerry Mergen, who works near Albany Minn., told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that Daybreak Foods, which owned and paid to feed the chickens, made the decision after a fluid egg plant in Big Lake temporarily shut down last week and laid off 300 workers.

Mergen told the Star-Tribune a crew of about 15 workers arrived in the early hours of April 9 with carbon dioxide to euthanize the birds.

snip//

"It is important to note that food-service orders have not stopped, but with the decline in food-service orders, Cargill and its egg suppliers are working diligently to rebalance supply to match these consumer and customer shifts," Cargill said in a statement, according to the newspaper.

Mergen said four other egg farms saw chickens euthanized in the state in recent weeks, saying the other four were larger than his. An official at the state Board of Animal Health told the newspaper livestock producers are not required to report euthanizing animals in large numbers.

Mergen’s wife Barb, a food service worker in St. Cloud, said the income represented by the chickens would hurt more than the killings.



The Hill has reached out to Daybreak for comment.

April 22, 2020

New York City announces $20 million fund to assist undocumented workers blocked from relief

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/21/1939178/-New-York-City-announces-20-million-fund-to-assist-undocumented-workers-blocked-from-relief

New York City announces $20 million fund to assist undocumented workers blocked from relief
Gabe Ortiz
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday April 21, 2020 · 2:14 PM EDT


New York City’s mayor and the Open Society Foundations have announced a $20 million program that will assist thousands of undocumented workers in the area who have been affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic. The New York City COVID-19 Immigrant Emergency Relief program makes the city, along with California, among the first localities in the nation to offer financial relief to undocumented workers who’ve been shut out of federal pandemic relief.



The Open Society Foundations said its $20 million donation, “to be managed by the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City in partnership with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, will work with on-the-ground community organizations to provide direct, one-time emergency relief payments to up to 20,000 immigrant New York City families who are hardest hit financially by the crisis, yet excluded from the reach of the federal relief program—including undocumented workers who play a vital role in the city’s economy.”

The organization “will also provide $2 million to support domestic workers across the United States, through the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s Coronavirus Care Fund, as the organization seeks to support tens of thousands of low-paid home workers—the vast majority of whom are women—whose often informal jobs have disappeared due to the crisis.” That fund has assisted domestic workers like Melissa, a home health aide in Florida. “Every day I wake up and worry about what will happen the next day, the next week. I don’t know how I will make it through,” she recently said in The New York Times. “For now, I am living day to day.”

New York’s immigrant workers and their advocates have been pushing Gov. Andrew Cuomo to follow California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lead and provide urgent relief to families, but he’s so far refused to commit to a plan. “When you are broke, it would be irresponsible to do these things,” Cuomo told an advocate according to Democracy Now. “I do hope and believe the federal government should have a more inclusive policy.” He later told the advocate: “Well, we’re looking at it, but we have real financial problems right now.”

Local organizations like Make the Road New York have been helping undocumented families in the state through a relief fund. Reyna told BuzzFeed News that the group helped her with a $100 gift card to purchase rice, vegetables, and other staples for her family. “I am very grateful for the money I received,” she told BuzzFeed News, but she also said she’s not alone. “There are many families that don’t have any food. This is not just something that is happening to me but to many people around me.”

This is why more must be done, locally and federally, to help families regardless of immigration status all over the U.S. “This emergency funding is a first step,” Open Society Foundations president Patrick Gaspard said. “It is part of what will be a broad and ongoing effort by the Foundations in the months ahead to respond to the economic, social, and political impact of the pandemic. Our response will be shaped by our mission to support those who find themselves pushed to the precarious margins of society even in the best of times.”

April 21, 2020

Chef's organization to pay for hundreds of small restaurants to safely reopen and help feed familie

RESPECT!

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/21/1938923/-Chef-s-organization-to-pay-for-hundreds-of-small-restaurants-to-safely-reopen-and-help-feed-families

Chef's organization to pay for hundreds of small restaurants to safely reopen and help feed families
Gabe Ortiz
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday April 21, 2020 · 10:58 AM EDT


Chef and World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés tells The Washington Post that his organization is launching a new initiative that will pay as many as 400 small restaurants across the U.S. to partially and safely reopen and prepare up to one million meals for families in need. ”WCK’s program hopes not only to provide jobs to some of the unemployed hospitality workers,” The Post reports, “but also to feed those people who have lost their paychecks or who are otherwise vulnerable during the pandemic.”

“This is only a drop in the water,” the chef said according to the report, but that’s him downplaying the recent work he’s done on novel coronavirus relief alone. In fact, WCK’s program could make all the difference for many businesses, “With news that the Small Business Administration’s $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program is already tapped out,” the report continued.

“Andrés’ rapidly expanding charity, World Central Kitchen, is as prepared as anyone for this moment of unprecedented global crisis,” TIME magazine reported last month. “The nonprofit stands up field kitchens to feed thousands of people fresh, nourishing, often hot meals as soon as possible at the scene of a hurricane, earthquake, tornado or flood”—and now as an astounding 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance (and many others remain without a safety net at all).

According to The Post, WCK plans to pay small restaurants to prepare hundreds of meals daily over a period of time, which could allow them to resume at least some of their operations and stay afloat. ”The restaurateurs will know exactly how much money to expect and can use the funds to rehire staff, order the ingredients and prepare the meals. WCK will handle all other logistics.” A statement from WCK notes workers must of course be brought back safely. “WCK will then deliver those meals with partners to families, seniors, frontline healthcare workers & more,” it continued.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1252016675098169346
This has been just the latest expansion in the chef’s relief response, after turning some of his shuttered restaurants into to-go community kitchens, and traveling to San Francisco to help feed people aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship. According to WCK, the organization has expanded to 475 distribution centers across 65 cities—so far. “WCK will keep reaching more communities who need it most, feeding families, frontline healthcare workers, and first responders keeping us safe,” the organization said.

WCK said in the statement that the organization has now distributed over two million meals as it launches the initiative. “Restaurants are the nation’s second largest employer, accounting for more than 15 million jobs in the United States. With many across the country closed completely or operating with just a fraction of their staff, the industry has been devastated. It is WCK’s intention that by working directly with restaurants and providing the demand for the restaurant business, we can get meals to those who need them most while also uplifting an industry that needs all of our help to keep their doors open.”

April 21, 2020

David Corn: Here We Go: Trump Has Started Accusing the Dems of Stealing the 2020 Election

4 hours ago
Here We Go: Trump Has Started Accusing the Dems of Stealing the 2020 Election
And his campaign is shamelessly fundraising off this lie.
David Corn
Washington, DC, Bureau ChiefBio | Follow


In the middle of a horrific crisis claiming the lives of thousands of Americans a day, President Donald Trump decided it was a fine time to undermine democracy.

Last week, as the coronavirus continued to burn through the United States, Trump’s campaign sent out an email from him soliciting contributions for his reelection effort and made a dangerous accusation: the 2020 election cannot be trusted. The first line of the email—which likely was sent to hundreds of thousands, if not more, people on Republican and conservative email lists—reads, “It’s no secret that the Democrats are trying to steal the Election out from under me.” The letter asserts that Democrats have “been plotting against me from the very beginning” and are deploying “fraud” to “rig the game” because “they know they can’t beat me at the ballot box.”

Less than seven months from Election Day, Trump was trying to undermine the process and cast doubt on its legitimacy. Without spelling out the matter at hand, he was responding to recent calls for an expansion in voting-by-mail as a way to hold elections safely during a pandemic. His letter referred to possible “chaos” from “ballot harvesting”—a term for volunteers or political operatives collecting absentee or mail-in ballots. But there has been no proof that such activity leads to significant fraud. Seventeen states already have some form of mail-in elections, and many others allow for absentee voting through the mail. (Remember, Trump falsely insisted after the 2016 election that there had been “millions” of fraudulent votes cast against him.)

So as the country struggles with how to hold elections during a pandemic—look at the mess that occurred recently in Wisconsin when Republicans successfully fought to hold an election that the governor wanted to postpone—Trump is telling his supporters that he (and they) are victims of a dark plot to rig the election. This echoes his demagogic rhetoric from the 2016 campaign trail. He repeatedly insisted then that he could only lose due to shenanigans, contending that rampant fraud was being mounted to swipe that election from him. He devised a nonsensical paradigm: if he won, the election was honest; if he lost, the election was crooked.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/donald-trump-has-already-begun-accusing-the-dems-of-stealing-the-2020-election/?fbclid=IwAR0v1CelxLVlIXPheWSrCqIDQBIeMJuGNNOdcr__33JhrW009ZaWQB9klHs

April 21, 2020

Kushner Squeezes Tenants While Lining Up for Bailout Money

This is from March 30 but no less disgusting.


Kushner Squeezes Tenants While Lining Up for Bailout Money
Despite eviction bans in New York, the real-estate firm owned by the president’s son-in-law is telling tenants to pay up.
by Alexander Sammon
March 30, 2020

snip//

New York has locked down, operating under a shelter-in-place order for over a week. Numerous businesses and restaurants have shuttered, resulting in scores of layoffs. The Jacob Javits Convention Center has been transformed into a massive makeshift hospital. With untold thousands of people out of work, and the first of the month approaching, that sets up an impending crisis for a city of nearly ten million people where roughly two-thirds are renters: What happens if they can’t make rent?

That question is also on the minds of the city’s landlords, who are facing down the possibility of losing the monthly rent checks they’d otherwise expect to receive. Some landlords have offered rent forbearance to their tenants amid the escalating economic crisis. But others, like official White House son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose Kushner Companies owns over 30 buildings just in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, are not feeling so generous.

According to reporting from Mother Jones, verified by the Prospect, Westminster Management, a subsidiary of Kushner Companies that is responsible for more than 20,000 apartments across six states, has spent the past handful of days sending residents in New York City’s East Village neighborhood new notices about rent collection. The flyer, which featured no mention of the rapidly evolving coronavirus crisis, encourages them to use a new online platform to pay their impending rent check, rather than delivering payments in person. That new portal accepts e-check or money order, as well as credit or debit card payments, for a fee. “There has been no forbearance mentioned to them,” said Brandon Kielbasa, director of organizing and policy at the Cooper Square Committee, a local tenants’ rights group. “Many are concerned about how they will afford their rent.”

But the absence of an offer of forbearance goes beyond stinginess. Because of an executive order from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, all tenants, both residential and commercial, are protected under a state eviction moratorium that is in effect until at least June 20. Meanwhile, New York Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks announced a suspension on court eviction proceedings, which, despite some early confusion, means that no new eviction cases are being brought before the courts until at least late April.

That means that Kushner Companies has no grounds or recourse to evict its tenants, whether or not they pay rent on April 1. Instead, the company is using repeated notices (tenants were sent multiple alerts over the past few days) in an attempt to badger low-information renters, those unaware of the state’s ban on evictions, into paying them in full.

more...

https://prospect.org/coronavirus/kushner-squeezes-tenants-while-lining-up-for-bailout-money/?fbclid=IwAR2ee1S6BqH8fiuNT4zQBbOIouZTwQoq2vpeqwO1zxL4aI4SUb4H3rqjKlE#.Xp34W0s2qAw.facebook

April 21, 2020

How Health Care Investors Are Helping Run Jared Kushner's Shadow Coronavirus Task Force

How Health Care Investors Are Helping Run Jared Kushner’s Shadow Coronavirus Task Force
Companies in their portfolios have a clear financial stake in how Trump handles the crisis.
Pema Levy


Last year, private equity firms spent tens of millions to to defeat bipartisan legislation reining in surprise medical bills that can send unsuspecting patients into debt. In December, Congress buckled to the industry’s pressure and failed to limit predatory billing practices of many institutional health care investors—especially private equity firms, which have aggressively moved into the health care space over the last decade.

Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe—one such private equity firm that has generated big investor returns by following the industry playbook of buying up health care practices, loading them with debt, and charging patients more—controls companies that spent hundreds of thousands lobbying against the bill and helped fund a coalition of private equity-backed medical groups that spent $4 million to block the legislation. And last month, one of the firm’s top executives joined a shadow task force convened by Jared Kushner to help run the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

He’s in good company. When Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, assembled the group, he did not turn to experts in crisis management or public health. Instead, he enlisted people with experience in the business of health care—not necessarily medical experts, but particularly those who worked on finance side and were adept at making money off the health care industry. Some who were invited to join from inside the government’s ranks were former investors and entrepreneurs in the health space, including a former roommate of Kushner’s. But members of the shadow working group who come from outside government work at or run companies that have a clear financial stake in how the government handles the crisis and doles out contracts, spending, and bailout funding.

Because of the way the group has been assembled and run, the outsiders, unlike government employees, have not had to disclose any such potential conflicts, submit to ethics determinations about recusals, nor to divest from any financial arrangements that could influence their decisions. Moreover, because Kushner’s group is operating on private phones and email accounts without regard for federal transparency requirements governing advisory committees, there’s less insight into whether or not they are using their positions to make money for themselves or their companies.



The secrecy and clear conflicts of interest are in line with the group’s overall operations. The first report of its existence, published by the Washington Post in mid March, revealed that members were working out of offices at the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters, including representatives from UPS and FedEx. Kushner’s team has significant influence inside the official coronavirus task force run by Vice President Mike Pence, including a subgroup working on supply chain issues. According to NBC News, FedEx has been chartered, possibly at twice the cost that taxpayers would incur using military planes, to move supplies needed in the response. Reports show that Kushner’s team has sowed confusion at HHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by pushing aside bureaucrats and existing procedures in favor of their preexisting personal and business contacts. “Jared and his friends decided they were going to do their thing,” a senior government official involved in the pandemic response told NBC. “It cost weeks.”


more...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/jared-kushner-nat-turner-coronavirus-conflicts-of-interest/

April 21, 2020

Richard Stengel: Why Trump's Coronavirus Optimism Isn't Working

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/why-trump-coronavirus-optimism-isnt-working

Coronavirus
Why Trump’s Coronavirus Optimism Isn’t Working
When FDR projected optimism in the depths of the Great Depression, it was based on candor and competence. Trump is trying to mimic it, but his own lies undermine him.
By Richard Stengel
April 20, 2020


On a blustery March morning, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood behind a podium on the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to give his inaugural address, America was in the depths of the Great Depression. Most banks were shuttered, millions had lost their life savings, and about a quarter of Americans were unemployed. It was a dark moment. FDR sought to project optimism, but it was optimism seasoned with candor. Though the best known line in that speech occurs in the fifth sentence of the opening paragraph, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the second sentence declares, “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth.” In that brief opening paragraph of 153 words, he mentions not only “truth,” but “candor,” and “frankness.”

The projection of optimism is a hallmark of great leaders, and FDR might have been our greatest model of that presidential virtue. But from the first he was clear that in times of crisis, optimism also required realism—realism in the form of honesty about the nature of the challenge itself. He understood that to engage a whole nation, he could not sugarcoat the task ahead. Optimism had to be earned. In President Donald Trump’s efforts to project optimism, he has been anything but candid and honest. To simply say, “We see light at the end of the tunnel,” without facts or data to back it up, is not optimism but dissembling. Optimism unaccompanied by realism is hollow. Trump’s optimism is more like that of the classic American species, “the confidence man,” the swindler who sells you a bill of goods and then moves on to the next sucker. Moreover, his optimism always seems self-serving, as though it is more about people rewarding him for being upbeat than how he is grappling with the crisis itself. As FDR said in the third paragraph of his inaugural address, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

FDR’s projection of optimism was also rooted in morality and ethics. This is true of almost all American presidents. In his inaugural he criticizes greed (“the falsity of material wealth”), saying that American restoration depends on the extent to which “we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” This is contrasted with Trump’s complete lack of a moral or ethical call to duty, and his repeated declaration that we must “reopen the economy,” without citing any moral value to that other than an increase in the GDP or the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It is more about his obvious disappointment that “the greatest economy in the history of our country” (a ridiculously false claim, by the way) is under siege by a virus.

snip//

FDR also projected optimism by being unruffled in the face of crisis. With his cigarette holder pointed upward like the trajectory of a rising graph, his V-for-victory salute, his jaunty smile, he projected a never-let-them-see-you-sweat confidence. FDR wore pounds of steel braces to give a speech or get in or out of a car, but would never ever project self-pity. Eleanor Roosevelt said of her husband that even after he had been struck with polio, “I never heard him complain.” Trump, on the other hand, seems to make himself the primary victim of the pandemic, as though it was aimed directly at him. No matter the crisis, he is always the first casualty. Instead of talking about the real victims—those who are ill and those who have died—he spends much of his daily press conferences blaming and accusing others for failures that are attributable to him. FDR had his own grievances with the press, and once complained that he thought 85% of the press was against him. But he would never let the public see him wounded by the press or publicly label them “the enemy of the people.”

Part of the reason presidents attempt to project optimism is so Americans will feel confident in their government. Roosevelt was also intent on changing the perception of government from a distant and indifferent bystander to a direct means of support for people in trouble. Roosevelt said the public welfare was the great duty of the state, and he attempted to give people confidence in the federal government. That has been difficult for Trump to do. From his boasting that avoiding taxes was the “smart” thing to do to his offhand remark last month that the federal government was “not a shipping clerk,” his disdain for the idea that government has a role in the public welfare has been painfully obvious. Trump is a manifestation of three decades of Republicans running against government. His understanding of federalism is minimal, and he tasks the states with jobs that should be carried out by the administration. Now, when he wants people to trust government to do the right thing, he has a hard time making that argument. You can project cheap optimism and unsupported confidence as much as you want, but reality is a stubborn thing. Ultimately—and particularly in a crisis—confidence in a leader comes from one thing: competence.

April 21, 2020

"He Wouldn't Call Up Obama, Clinton, or Even Bush During This Crisis"...

From the Magazine
May 2020
“He Wouldn’t Call Up Obama, Clinton, or Even Bush During This Crisis”: Trump’s Cold War With the Former Presidents
In an exclusive excerpt from her new book, Team of Five, Kate Andersen Brower reveals why Donald Trump will be left out of the world’s most elite fraternity.
By Kate Andersen Brower

Illustration by Mike Tofanelli
April 21, 2020

snip//

Former presidents used to help each other in times of crisis. Trump has made that impossible. He has not spoken with Obama or Clinton since his inauguration more than three years ago (aside from a brief hello and goodbye to Obama during George H.W. Bush’s funeral in December 2018). In fact, the only substantive conversation he and Obama have had was during the customary visit Trump made to the Oval Office two days after he won the 2016 election. He has been criticizing him ever since. “I didn’t like the job that he and Biden did,” Trump said at a Fox News Town Hall in March. “I didn’t like the position they put us in.” Seeking to justify his administration’s bungled response to the novel-coronavirus outbreak in America, he attacked Obama, tweeting that his handling of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu was “a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem…” Contrast that with John F. Kennedy, who called on all three of his living predecessors to ask for their help during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A year and a half earlier, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had reached out to the man he’d just defeated, Richard Nixon, and to his Republican predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He knew he could not afford to be too proud to ask for help. “No one knows how rough this job is until after he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy confessed to Eisenhower.

Ronald Reagan sent Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Carter to Anwar Sadat’s 1981 Cairo funeral during a sensitive global moment that could have precipitated more violence. And then there’s the way the former presidents supported George W. Bush after 9/11, and how George H.W. Bush and Clinton traveled the world together, seeking help after the tsunami in Asia, and in their leadership roles raising money after Hurricane Katrina. They became near-constant companions, doing interviews together and even traveling with George W. as part of the American delegation to Pope John Paul II’s 2005 funeral in Rome. “Come on,” Bush senior implored Clinton. “It will be better with you along.” Nicknamed “the A-team” in the press, they became like father and son. Time made them Partners of the Year in its 2005 Person of the Year issue. After seeing how powerful the Clinton-Bush team was, President Obama dispatched George W. Bush and Clinton to Haiti to raise awareness and funds after the devastating 2010 earthquake. This kind of teamwork and camaraderie now seems unthinkable and almost quaint.

Former presidents typically don’t initiate calls to the sitting president to offer their help because it could come across as meddling. But two people close to George W. Bush say that Bush is open to a call from Trump, even though there is no love lost between the two men. They haven’t spoken at any length since two phone calls during the confirmation of controversial Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who had worked in the Bush White House. One former top Trump official who knows both men well said that if Trump were to call on Bush for help during this pandemic, Bush would “swallow hard, and he would help however he can for the good of the nation. That’s the kind of person he is.” But Trump’s doing that is nearly inconceivable. “His ego and his dismissal of the former presidents are all part of his mindset,” this person said on the condition of anonymity. “Early on I was shocked by some of the things he said about the former presidents. It’s not pretty. In my lifetime I haven’t seen a president so self-centered,” adding, “It is ironic that Trump doesn’t hesitate to call up strongmen autocrats like Putin and Erdoğan—who are not our friends—but he wouldn’t call up Obama, Clinton, or even Bush during this crisis.”

Given all of this, it is hard to imagine that, whenever he does leave the White House, Trump will receive a warm welcome into the club. He has accused his immediate predecessor of wiretapping his office ahead of the 2016 election and called his most recent Republican predecessor’s foreign policy the worst in history. He perpetually notes that his relationships with other world leaders are better than those of former presidents. But have the years he’s spent in that awe-inspiring office given him empathy for what his predecessors went through? “No,” he replies flatly. Unlike most of the men who came before him, who aged prematurely and struggled with insomnia while in office, often pacing the halls of the White House in the dead of the night, overwhelmed by the gravity of the position, Trump said he has no trouble sleeping.

more...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trumps-cold-war-with-the-former-presidents

April 20, 2020

Sorry, Trump. You can't fire the GAO, and it's investigating what you do with COVID-19 money

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/20/1938843/-Sorry-Trump-You-can-t-fire-the-GAO-and-they-re-investigating-what-you-do-with-COVID-19-money

Sorry, Trump. You can't fire the GAO, and it's investigating what you do with COVID-19 money
Joan McCarter
Daily Kos Staff
Monday April 20, 2020 · 11:17 AM EDT


Impeached president Donald Trump has rampaged through the ranks of inspectors general attempting to provide some kind of check on his corruption. Thankfully for the nation, there's one watchdog agency outside of his reach, and it’s already on the job of auditing what his administration is doing with the $2 trillion Congress handed it in the coronavirus emergency CARES Act.

The General Accountability Office (GAO) is an arm of Congress, and thus Trump can't touch it. "We're moving forward very quickly," Angela Nicole Clowers, chief of the GAO’s healthcare unit, told Politico. "We're an existing institution and have a lot of institutional knowledge about all these programs. It gives us sort of a leg up." All these programs being those that have been given big chunks of money to spend. By the end of this month, senior investigators say, it will have opened at least 30 CARES Act investigations.

Audits and reviews will include the Trump administration's "handling of coronavirus testing" and "distribution of medical equipment." So that should prove interesting. It will also review the administration's response to food supply problems, nursing home infections, and how the various emergency loans and cash distribution has been handled. Here's the good part: "The office is required under the new law to brief Congress every month and issue a bimonthly public report on its findings."

That's not to say that Trump will try to obstruct the GAO, but it does come into this with an additional $20 million from the CARES Act to conduct its oversight of the administration. "Within GAO, we have everyone from policy analysts or public policy people like myself," Clowers said, "we have nurses, we have scientists, we have engineers, we have lawyers. You sort of name an occupation, we have 'em."

It’s already begun, insuring into a tip that a coronavirus cash payment went to an account of someone who died in 2019. "Thankfully, that family was nice enough to return the fund," Howard Arp, the office's fraud unit chief said. "That then causes us to start asking questions. How could that happen? What control was missed? That is already starting." That could happen because the IRS is sending checks to accounts of people who filed taxes in 2018 or 2019—it's not going to automatically know who's dead if the account hasn't been closed out. More of those checks to dead people are going to happen, and it would likely take some kind of intervention from the Treasury department to force banks to act.

The main obstacle they see, Arp and Clowers said, is that the GAO won't be able to be onsite to investigate. Normally, "we go observe, we touch, we feel, we see," Clowers told Politico. "Right now, we're not able to do that, […] but we're leveraging technology to the extent we can."

April 20, 2020

Democrats' momentum puts Senate majority in play

Democrats’ momentum puts Senate majority in play

Republicans are still favorites to keep the chamber, but Democrats' possible path to flipping the Senate is clearer now.
By JAMES ARKIN
04/20/2020 04:30 AM EDT


Republicans started this election cycle as heavy favorites to keep their Senate majority, with a lineup of elections mostly in red-tinted states and GOP incumbents favored over a slate of relatively unknown and untested challengers.

Now, nearly six months out from the election, Democrats are making them sweat.

Republicans are still more likely than not to maintain control, but Democrats strengthened their hand with a slate of challengers raising massive sums of money in races that represent the heart of the battle for the majority, putting control of the Senate within reach. Republicans remain modest favorites to keep the Senate, with incumbents holding cash advantages in most competitive races and several offensive targets potentially cushioning their majority.

But GOP leaders are bracing for a slog. Steven Law, president of the super PAC Senate Leadership Fund and a top ally to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said in a recent interview there is a sense among donors and allies that it could be a “challenging election from top to bottom.”



more...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/20/democrats-momentum-senate-majority-in-play-194415