THE ENEMY LIVES ON WALL STREET - AS GENERAL MOTORS SCREWS THEIR WORKERS AMERICAN SURVIVES WITH VENTILATOR SHORTAGES THREATENING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES - HOW MUCH OF THE BAILOUT DOES G.M. GET?

Donald Trump Orders General Motors to Supply Ventilators Under Defense Production Act

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Tim Cooper / Unsplash

CHARLIE SPIERING

27 Mar 20201,350

1:40

President Donald Trump signed a directive Friday ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to order General Motors to construct ventilators, utilizing the Defense Production Act.

The president announced his decision in a statement sent to reporters, ordering “General Motors to accept, perform, and prioritize Federal contracts for ventilators.”

Trump said that negotiations with General Motors were productive but that the company was “wasting time.”

“Today’s action will help ensure the quick production of ventilators that will save American lives,” he wrote.

The order directs Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to use the authority under the Defense Production Act to require General Motors to move quickly to construct the ventilators.

“We’ll work in partnership with the private sector but where emergency exists and it’s very important we get to the bottom line and quickly, we’ll do what we have to do,” Trump said at a press conference afterward.

Earlier in the day, President Trump expressed his frustration with General Motors CEO Mary Barra.

“As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday morning.

The president noted that General Motors would construct 40,000 ventilators “very quickly” but cited reports that they had lowered their production number to 6,000.

“Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar,” Trump wrote. “Always a mess with Mary B[arra]. 

 Watch–Trump to GM: Reopen Lordstown to Manufacture Ventilators

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White House

Volume 90%

JOHN BINDER

27 Mar 2020159

3:17

President Donald Trump is telling General Motors (GM) CEO Mary Barra to reopen the automaker’s idled Lordstown, Ohio, plant to make ventilators for Americans in the midst of the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

During a press briefing on Friday, Trump blasted GM for decades of offshoring American jobs to foreign countries and idling its Lordstown plant last year that immediately left 1,600 GM workers laid off and thousands more in supporting industries.

Trump called on GM’s Mary Barra to reopen its Lordstown plant — which was sold in November 2019 to Workhorse Group Inc. — to make ventilators for American hospitals and patients. GM has been rumored to be opening a Lordstown plant to manufacture electric cars.

Trump said:

I wasn’t happy where General Motors built plants in other locations over the years. Not so much during my term, but they built a lot of plants in other countries. I won’t name the countries, but you can imagine, so I didn’t go into it with a very favorable view. I was extremely unhappy with Lordstown, Ohio, where they left Lordstown, Ohio, in the middle of an auto boom because we had 17 car companies coming in and then they were leaving one plant in Ohio. [Emphasis added]

I love Ohio, and what happens? That became the story — not that all these plants are moving in, but that you had one plant and they were leaving. And frankly, I think [Lordstown] would be a good place to build the ventilators, but we’ll see. We’ll see how that all works out. I wasn’t too thrilled. I thought we had a deal for 40,000 ventilators, and all of a sudden it became [6,000] and price became a big object. [Emphasis added]

Trump’s blasting of GM for failing to immediately ramp up production of ventilators comes as he invoked the Defense Production Act to mandate multinational corporations with plants in the U.S. to produce and manufacture needed medical supplies and equipment.

“We’re engaged in the most central mobilization since World War II,” trade adviser Peter Navarro said. “We have a wartime president fighting an invisible enemy.”

“All around this country, as this virus bears down, the ventilators are the most important thing for patients who become seriously ill. They are literally the lifeline for people,” Navarro said.

As part of an effort to close more American manufacturing plants, GM’s Mary Barra closed the Lordstown plant last year and began shuttering the Warren Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, as well as laying off about 800 American workers at its Detroit Hamtramck Assembly plant.

American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy as every one manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries. Decades of free trade, with deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have eliminated nearly five million manufacturing jobs from the American economy and resulted in the closure of about 50,000 manufacturing plants.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

As General Motors demands profits, ventilator shortage in US threatens tens of thousands of lives

28 March 2020

In cities throughout the United States, hospitals are approaching capacity as the number of people infected with COVID-19 doubles every two days. On Friday, the number of cases topped 100,000, after nearly 20,000 new cases were reported. More than 250 people died, bringing the total number of deaths to over 1,500.

Meanwhile doctors and nurses are faced with a nationwide shortage of protective gear and health-care equipment.

Nurses at Mount Sinai West in garbage bags. (Photo: Facebook, Diana Torres)

The shortage of lifesaving ventilators is rapidly emerging as a central factor that will vastly increase the death toll from the coronavirus.

In Metro Detroit, which is rapidly emerging as a center of the pandemic in the US, Henry Ford Health System warned patients that “because of shortages,” those who are “extremely sick” may be “ineligible for ICU or ventilator care.” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan (a former health-care executive) praised the letter yesterday, declaring, “what they put out is honest.”

Other health-care systems are preparing even more horrific measures. The states of Washington and Alabama are activating statutes that would allow them to deny lifesaving care to the mentally disabled.

A lawsuit filed by the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program noted that the state’s emergency plan for ventilator rationing “specifically singles out and excludes certain people with intellectual disabilities from access to ventilators in the event of rationing… Hospitals are ordered to ‘not offer mechanical ventilator support for patients’ with ‘severe or profound mental retardation,’… This policy also applies to children.”

Within days, medical professionals will be living their worst nightmare, forced to determine who lives and who dies.

Trump’s claim that “nobody in their wildest dreams would have ever thought that we’d need tens of thousands of ventilators” is an outright lie. In fact, innumerable reports and articles from epidemiologists, health-care professionals and even government agencies have made precisely such warnings.

A 2003 report from the Government Accountability Office warned that “few hospitals have adequate medical equipment, such as ventilators that are often needed for respiratory infections.” In 2005, the Department of Health and Human Services published a Pandemic Influenza Plan noting that “in a severe pandemic it is possible that shortages, for example of mechanical ventilators, will occur…”

In June 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report from epidemiologists, “Stockpiling Ventilators for Influenza Pandemics,” that stated: “Substantial concern exists that intensive care units (ICUs) might have insufficient resources to treat all persons requiring ventilator support. Prior studies argue that current capacities are insufficient to handle even moderately severe pandemics…”

However, the federal government, under both Democrats and Republicans, did nothing. The amount spent on the military every year over the past two decades is more than 50 times what it would have cost to build a national stockpile of one million ventilators. To produce such a stockpile would have cost about $15 billion, a minuscule fraction of what was used to bail out the banks.

Now, in the face of a critical ventilator shortage, major corporations see the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to generate enormous profits through price gouging and profiteering.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that plans by General Motors to produce ventilators fell through because the Trump administration balked at the price demanded by the company.

The move “came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors.” GM reported profits of $6.5 billion last year.

The Times added, “The $1.5 billion price tag comes to around $18,000 a ventilator. And the overall cost, by comparison, is roughly equal to buying 18 F-35s, the Pentagon’s most advanced fighter jet.”

GM subsequently announced that it would go ahead with producing the ventilators, in partnership with medical device company Ventec.

For its part, the Trump administration refrained for weeks from invoking the Defense Production Act to enforce the production of ventilators and other equipment because it did not want to impose any demands on the corporations. On Friday, Trump announced that he would utilize the act to “compel” GM to do something it had already pledged to do.

With parts in short supply, almost none of the ventilators will be available for the massive expansion of demand expected in the next two months. The Times noted that “the overall boost will not have a major effect until early summer, industry executives said—perhaps in time for a ‘second wave’ of infections.”

As the Trump administration and the auto giant haggle over how much will be paid and how much GM will profit, people are dying.

The Socialist Equality Party fights for the conversion of all major corporations, including the gigantic health-care and manufacturing companies, into public utilities, under democratic control. All resources must be made available not for bailing out the corporations and buying up the assets of Wall Street investors, but to an emergency program to produce ventilators and other equipment and build hospitals.

To the extent that private property gets in the way of saving lives, it must be swept aside. The vast technological and scientific advances and the enormous productive forces of humanity must be freed from the constraints placed on them by the profit motive and the nation-state system.

Every serious effort to deal with this coronavirus crisis, and to prepare for it, has been sabotaged by private ownership of the means of production. This is the basic issue: whether economic life is directed by the ruling elite on the basis of profit and the accumulation of wealth, or whether it is directed by the working class on the basis of social need. Capitalism or socialism.